The Surprising Challenge of Small Protests: Jordan’s 2019 Unemployment Marches

• In Event: 2019: Year of Revolutionary Potential

Abstract

Large-scale protests tend to garner the greatest international attention, particularly mass mobilizations that seem to threaten the incumbent regime. These kinds of protests tend to be viewed through a social movements “life-cycle” approach, in which that particular wave of protests becomes the object of analysis, and questions about “success” and “outcomes” are front and center. These questions are certainly worthy of theorization. But when protests are anchored in longer-term temporalities, other insights come into view. This paper will examine how the protests in Jordan in 2019 are connected to larger patterns of protest while also introducing surprising innovations. Those innovations are largely spatial, marking ways in which small numbers of protesters can pose an outsized threat to the regime. Unemployement marches, in particular, saw members of the regime’s traditional East Bank support base walk to the capital to demand jobs while camping out near the Royal Court in the capital. The analysis weaves together spatial and temporal analyses to advance our understanding of seemingly minor protests of only a dozen or more participants. The paper is part of a larger project aimed at analysing protests as worthy of theorization in their own right, and not only as “events” that social movements or other actors stage.

Author

• Jillian M. Schwedler, Hunter College