Go local, go global: Studying popular protests in the MENA post-2011

ABSTRACT

The Arab Uprisings led to an increased interest in studying protests in the MENA region. The article examines this literature, provides suggestions for further research and reflects how the study of MENA protests can contribute to a cross-regional research agenda. It looks at rationalist-structuralist approaches, on studies in the framework of social movement theory, and political economy approaches. The article suggests combining the latter with SMT in broader concepts such as the ‘incorporation crisis’, originally developed for Latin America, allowing for more cross-regional comparisons. Finally, it discusses the latest methodological developments for collecting data on protests in the MENA post-2011.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movement studies
• contentious politics
• democratization
• authoritarianism
• Arab uprisings

Introduction

One of the most clear-cut results of protest research in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region ten years after the Arab Uprisings is its sheer explosion. Before 2011, scholars either studied contention, focusing on specific social movements such as labour (Beinin, 2001) or on contentious actions originating from subaltern groups (Bayat, 2010; Beinin & Vairel, 2013 [2011]). Broader literature on social movements was discussed in the context of Islamist movements (with very little relevance placed on protests) and the Iranian revolution of 1979 – the last uprising in the region until 2010 that had led to the toppling of an authoritarian regime (Kurzman, 2004; Wiktorowicz, 2004). Yet, the Arab Uprisings suddenly moved the MENA region into the limelight of global debates about (mass) mobilization and the latter’s role for political change, becoming a valuable case for cross- and inter-regional comparisons (Bank, 2018; Schwedler, 2015). This is also reflected when we look at two leading academic journals in the field of protest and social movement research, Mobilization and Social Movement Studies (SMS). I compared the number of articles with original research on the MENA region published between 2002 (when SMS was established) and 2010 with the time period from 2011–2020 (summer). Whereas in the first period, there were only three MENA-related articles in SMS, the second period saw eighteen. A similar observation can be made for Mobilization: 17 articles with MENA case studies were published between 2011–2020 compared to 7 between 2002 and 2010 (of which four dealt with transnational terrorist organizations and are therefore, strictly speaking, beyond the scope of interest of this article that looks into unarmed forms of contention). It is, however, important to note that these numbers fail to tell us whether the MENA scholars did not work on protests,¹ did not wish to publish in the context of social movement scholarship or simply did not pass the desk or the peer review processes for these journals. But they do clearly indicate that, during the last decade, MENA protest research has become part of a global discussion on mobilization. As such, I reflect on scholarship about protests in the MENA region since 2011, consider the main theoretical approaches and methodological innovations, and analyse to what extent and how the knowledge produced can contribute to cross-regional comparisons.

I identify three main research trends, two of them engaged in an intense competition about the authoritative reading of the 2011 uprisings. The first looks at the outcomes of the mass uprisings themselves, understood based on a dichotomy of the success or failure of democratization. Here I mainly find rationalist, structuralist accounts that correlate regime change after mass uprisings with pre-existing macro-structures, be they political, economic, social or technological in nature. This take on protests was very influential in shaping the general discourse about the mass uprisings, as can be seen in the still widespread use of the term ‘Arab spring’ – just to be followed by an ‘Arab winter’ and alike (see Bank & Busse in this special issue). At the same time, this perspective was heavily criticized by most scholars studying protests in the MENA within the framework of social movements that I discuss as the second major research trend emerging after 2011. Arguing against methodological nationalism, short-term temporalities and the idea of fixed outcomes of protests, this approach instead closely examines protest dynamics at the micro-level from a relational, constructivist perspective. Studies in the second strand produced sophisticated knowledge for general Social Movement Studies, mainly disaggregating actors and actions. Yet, in order to move beyond both the analysis of mobilization in itself and the regime dichotomy as the only relevant outcome to study, the question emerges of how micro-level interactions could be integrated into cross-country and cross-regional comparisons, thereby making broader theoretical contributions to a phenomenon – protests – that is global in itself.

My suggestion is to bring in political economy approaches more strongly, a third trend I sketch out, and combine them with sophisticated Social Movement Theory (SMT) as an analytical framework to systematically re-construct protest dynamics. The advantage is to combine a structuralist account that includes the regime context but does not solely focus on it, with the actor-centred perspective of today’s SMT. As an example of this fruitful combination, I use the ‘incorporation crisis’, a concept developed by Latin American scholars, and applied to Egypt and Tunisia by Weipert-Fenner and Wolff (2020). It looks at socio-economic and politico-institutional inclusion of social actors and helps us move forward in generating knowledge on the interplay of mobilization and political transformation in the MENA and beyond. The argument also reveals the relevance to overcome the separation of protest analysis in the Global South along the lines of isolated Area Studies as most protest studies do not show any regional exceptionalism.

In the last part, I ask how the need for in-depth knowledge about protests can currently be met given the predominance of authoritarianism and violent conflicts in the MENA as raised in the SI’s introduction. I discuss different ways of data collection, through fieldwork, protest event datasets based on press analysis and social media. Most progress has been achieved regarding the latter two that are particularly important when field access is limited or blocked (not only but also during times of a global pandemic), yet challenges, of course, remain.

Democratization versus authoritarian persistence: How to understand the outcome of mass mobilization

Ten years after the Arab Uprisings, and with the subsequent experiences of civil wars and authoritarian rollbacks in mind, the risk exists of forgetting that the mass mobilizations of 2011 were truly earth-shattering events; for a few years, ‘it … [was] accepted as conventional wisdom that the politics of the region, both in the short and the long term, has [had] changed for good’ (Rivetti, 2015, p. 1). These mass mobilizations were initially seen by many as an expression of as well as the final blow to allegedly unsustainable authoritarian regimes and the form of crony capitalism that had evolved since the early 2000s. The socioeconomic situation that had become unbearable for many, paired with a decrease in socioeconomic benefits distributed by the state and a lack of political rights and liberties, were seen as the reason for the erosion and subsequent breakdown of the so-called authoritarian bargain or social contract (Diwan, 2013; Galal & Selim, 2014; Gause III, 2011; Sika, 2014; more in section 2 and 3). Whereas these accounts were based on economic and social structures, other scholars have argued that the spread of new communication technologies, mainly social media, played a pivotal role in undermining autocracy and enabling the uprisings (Castells, 2015; Howard & Hussain, 2013, see also section 4). Yet, as the euphoria surrounding this wave of protests came to an end, structuralist accounts also emerged to explain the failure of democratization by pointing at security apparatuses that were too strong (including surveillance possibilities offered by new communication technologies; see also Josua and Edel’s SI contribution on repression), rentier states too powerful and civil society organizations too weak, with hereditary succession seen to be a successful means of altering rulers (most prominently Brownlee et al., 2015). In the end, only Tunisia managed to achieve a tenuous transition towards democracy – this was declared to be an exceptional case explained by a pre-existing robust civil society.² As El Issawi and Cavatorta sum up: ‘(T)here has been a plethora of studies looking at specific aspects of the trajectories taken by the different countries and actors involved, with a specific focus on what worked–Tunisia–and what did not: everywhere else’ (El Issawi & Cavatorta, 2020, p. 5).

Yet, these accounts faced empirical challenges. 2019 saw anti-regime uprisings in Algeria, leading to the resignation of President Bouteflika, and, in Sudan, protests toppled the long-standing ruler Omar al-Bashir, initiating a transition process. Mass mobilization also occurred in Lebanon and Iraq, rallying against the political and socioeconomic situation as well as against the political regimes as such. Yet again, ‘the Arab Uprisings 2.0’ and labels alike appeared – with the assumption that now, finally, the people were rising up, sweeping away corrupt, undemocratic regimes. This clearly shows how quickly the paradigms can change. As Morten Valbjørn (2015) has argued, the 1990s were dominated by democracy spotters and the 2000s by the authoritarian resilience paradigm. The 2011 uprisings brought about a short-lived revival of the ‘demo-crazy’ perspectives, just to be quickly replaced again by another wave of pessimistic ‘here-to-stay’ attitudes towards authoritarianism. This ‘back and forth’ assessment of protest outcomes from ‘a change of everything’ to ‘a change of (almost) nothing’ has accelerated, revealing two theoretical problems: first, the role of temporality in the study of protests and, second, the challenge of conceptualizing the outcome of protests within a broader understanding of political change beyond the dichotomy of success and failure.

In order to see how these problems are intertwined, we may look at the similar patterns found in the scholarly debate on revolutions from which the Arab Uprisings were quickly excluded. Jamie Allinson explains this exclusion:

“The reasoning behind lies in the classic definition of social revolution derived from Theda Skocpol: ‘rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures […] accompanied by and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below’, uniting ‘societal structural change with class upheaval’ and political with social transformation. [Skocpol, 1979, 4][…] The revolts in 2011, having apparently produced for the most part neither structural social nor political transformation, could not therefore be considered revolutions” (Allinson, 2019, pp. 143-44).

The rationalist, structuralist approach – generally considered to be the third generation of revolution theory – understood revolutions as requiring a fixed outcome that had to be achieved relatively quickly. Yet, this view has long been challenged by a fourth generation that ‘emphasized the inherent uniqueness of events, often due to agency and contingency’ (Beck, 2018, p. 137).³ At the same time, scholars of revolutions have long discussed that different understandings of revolutions may exist and that revolutions might very well change over time.⁴ A final consent about the characteristics of today’s revolution, however, is still missing (Allinson, 2019). And while revolutionary theory is moving beyond the fourth towards a fifth generation (Lawson, 2019), it is clear by now that the idea of a quick and complete transformation as the necessary revolutionary outcome has been overcome. Therefore, MENA scholars should no longer build their research upon this kind of outcome question. Instead, I suggest following Donatella Della Porta who argues for the importance of looking at processes rather than events:

[T]he effects of contentious waves are complex, never fully meeting the aspirations of those who protest, but rarely leaving things unchanged. In addition, while effects can happen at the policy level, they often develop first in terms of culture, evolving in the long term, with jumps and reversals. This is all the more relevant when looking at democratization - an extended process that in other epochs required many steps in a long process, but today is often expected to happen in a few short weeks. (Della Porta, 2016, p. 3)

Jillian Schwedler also criticizes the focus on protest cycles and outcomes, calling it beholden to a medium-term perspective that excludes the possibility of protest events unfurling their transformative power in the long term. Moreover, she argues that declaring the failure of numerous protest movements that do not immediately result in democratization is akin to supporting the authoritarian regimes’ attempts to uphold the status quo – as if nothing had changed (Schwedler, 2020). One thereby interferes in the different temporalities at work in the respective country: for instance, in the interplay of protesters and regimes. There is no return to the old routine, even if a ‘new normal’ seems to have been established: mass protests will always remain part of the collective memory. Legacies of collective resistance will ‘shape attitudes towards power, the performance of power and indeed the future repertoire of resistance itself’, as Charles Tripp put it (Tripp, 2013, 16; see also Rivetti, 2015; Volpi & Clark, 2019, p. 5). Different temporalities might also prevail during episodes of contention when coalition partners disagree over long- and short-term goals (Berriane & Duboc, 2019, p. 410).

All these critical voices are part of the second major trend in protest research that focused on the explanations for mobilization dynamics in and of themselves. Instead of looking for explanations for quick and linear processes of democratization, or the lack thereof, one can find fine-grained analysis of protests within the framework of SMT.

Social movement theory and the study of protest dynamics

A large body of literature on protests in the MENA post-2011 directly engaged with scholarship on social movements and contentious politics. Many picked up where, right before the Arab Uprisings, Joel Beinin and Frédéric Vairel had left off in their summary of the state of the art of SMT in the context of MENA scholarship. They argued that SMT was first used in the analysis of Islamist movements but merely to demonstrate that Islamists were also ordinary rational actors to which the SMT conceptualizations and methods could be applied. Instead, MENA scholars should actively contribute to theory-building by critically engaging with the literature, particularly considering its origins in the Western, democratic context (Beinin & Vairel 2013, 3 [2011]).

It is worth noting that the apologetic use of SMT in the MENA context shared similarities with the first impetus of social movement scholars in Europe and the US who argued against the widespread opinion that public contention was the expression of the irrationality of the masses. As protest actors had good reasons to go to the streets research about grievances eventually developed, most notably in the relative deprivation theory of Ted Gurr (1970). The rationality of protest actors was also expressed in the analysis of resources they needed to mobilize (McCarthy & Zald, 1977) and in political opportunity structures (McAdam et al., 1996). Criticizing these approaches for being too structuralist, two different ways of studying social movements developed: first, an actor-centred focus that took into account identity, frames (Benford & Snow, 2000) and emotions (Goodwin et al., 2001) and, second, a relational approach, initially developed in the political process model and later the ‘Dynamics of Contention’ perspective (McAdam et al., 2001) that understood movements in their interaction with the state and other social actors. Goodwin and Jasper (2011) and Duyvendak and Jasper (2015) further distanced themselves from the structuralist origins set forth by McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, instead introducing interactionist approaches of players and arenas in which ‘the overall trend […] has been away from vague macro-level structures that are posited by the observer but are otherwise invisible, toward concrete micro-level phenomena that are commonsensical and visible to anyone’ (Jasper & Volpi 2018, 17).

This short overview of the development of SMT scholarship shows how broad the academic field is and that it would be misleading to think of SMT as one specific theory (and whether this theory could be applied to the MENA at all given its Western origins, as I discuss later). It is therefore interesting to consider which aspects of SMT were actually used and how they were developed in protest research in the MENA since 2011.

One important building block of SMT that was also crucial in the research on the Arab uprisings was the debate about grievances. One encounters structuralist accounts that looked at grievances and assumed that the worse-off segments of society constituted the actual driving force behind the uprising: the youth, due to high levels of youth unemployment, particularly among university graduates; the poor who suffered from capitalism that had led to the withdrawal of the state from its welfare functions over decades and were hit hard by price increase for basic goods in the years before the uprisings; the workers who had suffered from deteriorating working conditions and salaries in the course of neoliberal reforms; or the middle class who had profited most from education and jobs provided by the state in the 1950s and 1960s and felt increasingly excluded in an ever less equal and corrupt system (cf. Cammett & Salti, 2018, pp. 71–73). Such positions generalize grievances and the primary protest actors on the basis of just one country or even an entire region. The latter assumption was criticized by Cammett and Salti (2018) who identified the primary grievances among different age groups and classes and found mixed patterns across countries in the region. Going a step further, also Jillian Schwedler’s critique of the ‘methodological nationalism’ (Schwedler, 2018, 71, 2015) applies here for turning a blind eye to massive inequalities within one country that help explain subnational variation in protest quantities and qualities.

From the perspective of SMT, these accounts are per se problematic as grievances do not automatically cause mobilization. SMT was premised on explaining when and how grievances translate into collective action. Excellent research provided much more nuanced and ambivalent analysis of the aforementioned protest actors while stressing the importance of agency.⁵ At the same time, renewed interest in grievances can be found in SMT from a constructivist perspective. Simmons (2016) argued for the need to understand the social meaning of grievances, in her case based on subsistence conflicts in Latin America. For the MENA region, it proved enlightening to explore the social meaning of bread such as Martinez has done for the case of Jordan (Martínez, 2018, pp. 175–76), or of employment particularly in the public sector (Weipert-Fenner, 2020). I would generally argue that more attention is needed to reconstruct the protest actors’ worldviews, their explicit goals and implicit norms, not only to explain mobilization but also to understand protests as part of broader struggles over the political, economic and social order (see also section 3).

Another important area of protest research has been the classic nexus in the contentious politics literature linking (de-)mobilization with possible state responses to protests, repression, concession and ignoring. The general trend here has been to disaggregate actors and effects, meticulously reconstructing interactions at the micro-level and looking more closely at the qualities of protest instead of their quantity, with particular attention placed on emotions. Detailed analyses of the interactions between security forces and Islamists were, for instance, conducted by al-Anani (2019) and Grimm and Harders (2017), and with workers by Dina Bishara (2015). A reconstruction of interaction of protest actors and police forces during the 18 days of the Egyptian revolution can be found in the work of Neil Ketchley (2017). Another topic was the role of social networks. Originally developed in the context of resource mobilization theory to explain recruitment processes, the overtly structuralist perspective has been turned into the study of ‘a combination of longer-term ongoing relationships that structure the interactions of the members and interactions that shape the more immediate activities and agendas of these actors’ (Volpi & Clark, 2019, p. 2). Volpi and Clark argue that ‘micro-level interactions in times of crisis produce specific logics and dynamics inside networks and shape what the networks achieve […] By starting with descriptions of interactions at grassroots level, we seek to explain by aggregation and repetition the more macro level [sic] dynamics between networks and other players (including the state)’ (Volpi & Clark, 2019, p. 3), although the complete reconstruction of interactions is impossible (as, e.g., interactions within the security apparatus are never fully accessible). Along similar lines, Paola Rivetti argues for the ‘’methodological encounter’ between the micro-analysis of processes and policies on the one hand, and the historicity of the uprisings on the other’ (Rivetti, 2015, p. 8).

Another novel branch of protest research focused on their spatial aspects that also built on the reconstruction of micro-level interactions. Many studies have been conducted on the squares where protests were held, how protests moved, and how protest actors gained back public spaces, including through art and cultural practices (see the SI by Kraidy & Krikorian, 2017). Some studies have also investigated the ways in which security forces hit back, starting from graffiti art themselves to the physical changes to public spaces in order to prohibit or easier control protests. Looking at the spatial dimension, mobilization dynamics of diffusion become important; these are most often rooted locally, though they can also be spread across a country, making subnational data ever more important. Transnational diffusion remained rather limited to the mass upheavals of 2011 (Patel et al., 2014).

All of the aforementioned research foci are based on the study of tangible micro-level interactions in a specific local context. Yet, does this mean that protest research on the MENA region remains limited to its geographical scope or can it contribute to general social science debates? Beinin and Vairel (2013) explicitly addressed the problem in 2011 and suggested that the MENA region was specific in three dimensions, thereby differing from Europe and the US: the importance of context, (informal) networks and practices. In contrast, Volpi and Clark stress that there is no need for MENA-specific concepts to explain mobilization, arguing that concepts that were actually developed on the basis of Arab and Muslim countries such as Asef Bayat’s social non-movements are not limited to the regional context but rather ‘indicative instead of a closed authoritarian political system’ (Volpi & Clark, 2019, p. 5).

What has been underrepresented in this variant of the Area Studies Controversy (for more, see Bank & Busse in this SI) is the fact that the MENA is not the only Global South region to which SMT has been applied. Yet, this confirms Engels and Müller who conclude: ‘Social science debates on phenomena in the Global South are to a significant part located in the field of area studies (African Studies, Latin American Studies, etc.), and they usually occur more or less separately from or parallel to one another’ (Engels & Müller, 2019, p. 73). There has been a very recent trend to look at social movements in the Global South from a comparative perspective as important context variables for collective contentious actions are fairly similar in regard to state-society relations, historical experiences of imperialism and independence struggles, dictatorship and democratization, socioeconomic challenges as well as identity politics and intersectionalities (Fadaee, 2015, 9–10; Shigetomi & Makino, 2009). Yet, there is still a lot of potential in engaging the expertise of different Area Studies. One can build on existing critical reflections of the usefulness of SMT beyond the North-West and on concepts built on similar contexts. The literature on social movements in Latin America is particularly rich in these regards (for an example see section 4). Furthermore, from an inter-regional comparative perspective, one can also learn about power structures in knowledge production on social movements from the perspective of the Global South. In Sub-Saharan Africa for instance, mobilization for religious or ethnic reasons was long excluded from a broader SMT research agenda for not fitting into the ‘modern’ idea of civil society (Engels & Müller, 2019, p. 73). This is strikingly similar to the struggle of MENA scholars who fought to prove that Islamists were ‘normal’ actors to which social movement theory could be applied. In order to engage more easily in these debates, however, scholars should try to use terms and concepts that can travel when analysing a specific phenomenon. For instance, studying the effect of Sunni-Shi’i cleavages on mobilization in the MENA could be described as ‘sectarianism’ or ‘identity politics’ (see Valbjørn in this SI); the latter would make it easier to link the findings with other world regions and explore more thoroughly the relation between different (socioeconomic, religious, ethnic) cleavages and protests.

Finally, I would argue that the comparative protest research agenda needs to better incorporate insights from other regions in the Global South, both empirically and theoretically, in order to be ‘well equipped’ for comparisons with the Global North which also faces massive mobilization. In 2019, there were protests raging all over the world. Back in 2011, we already had seen a global wave of protests from Chile to the USA, Egypt to Israel, Malawi all the way to Russia. As Richard Youngs states, ‘[w]hat some analysts refer to as a new contentious politics has taken root. […] Such is their ubiquity that these [large-scale] protests have become a defining feature of modern politics’ (Youngs, 2017, p. 4). If this is true, we need to compare micro-level interactions at a global scale. In order to help us do so systematically, SMT can offer analytical frameworks that have been developed by MENA scholars in recent years. More specifically, I suggest to integrate more strongly and systematically political economy approaches with their macro and long-term perspectives on protests in the MENA region.

3. Protests and political economy approaches: Marx, Gramsci and beyond

A number of authors explain protests by looking at the current form of capitalism from a neo-Marxist point of view. Gilbert Achcar, for instance, deems protests in the MENA region as a ‘blockage specifically linked to particular capitalist modalities’ (Achcar, 2013, p. 37), understood as ‘a mix of patrimonialism, nepotism, and crony capitalism, pillaging of public property, swollen bureaucracies, and generalized corruption, against a background of great socio-political instability and the impotence or even nonexistence of the rule of law’ (Achcar, 2013, p. 74). This means that the different countries in the region share similar characteristics. In contrast, Adam Hanieh (2013) situates his interpretation of the uprisings within the context of the regional political economy of the MENA, marked by the special role of the Gulf countries as the regional defenders of authoritarianism and neoliberalism. Revolutions and counterrevolutions must therefore be understood in the regional context.

Although these neo-Marxist accounts raise important points, they do not go into depth in their study of protests and the role of agency. Among the few exceptions, John Chalcraft (2016) combines precise, historic protest analysis with Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony based on the idea that the dominant bloc always relies on both coercion and consent. The consent is based on a balance between the hegemonic and the subaltern classes, yet when the balance is lost, collective contention arises. These contentious actions can take very different forms and directions. Over 200 years of protest history in the MENA, Chalcraft looks at specific episodes of violent as well as non-violent actions that involve different ideologies and identities. He finds mobilizing projects with a wide span of possible goals: escaping the state or replacing it, defensive protests that demand the state’s return to a status quo ante or demanding more representation in the state itself (Chalcraft, 2016, p. 393). Protests can have different short- and long-term consequences, including unintended ones, from triggering imperial interventions, pushing for independence and a welfare state, to stabilizing or undermining authoritarian regimes (Chalcraft, 2016, pp. 533–536).

The idea that protests are a symptom of a shrinking consent with the dominant class can also be found in the idea of the authoritarian social contract, or authoritarian bargain. According to this narrative, in the 1950s and 1960s, many authoritarian regimes in the MENA relied on a developmental state model that provided the populace with jobs, infrastructure, health and educational services. In exchange for the welfare package, the people were expected to remain loyal or at least apolitical. As the state withdrew from these welfare services in the wake of neoliberal reforms, many fields were left unregulated, creating the possibility for people to make a living informally, e.g., an informal labour market or informal housing (Harders, 2003). With worsening living conditions, this pact became increasingly challenged by protests, such as the strikes in Egypt since 2004 (Abdelrahman, 2014) or the ones in Gafsa, Tunisia of 2008 (Allal, 2013). In this reading, 2011 thus marked the final breakdown of the authoritarian social pact (Guazzone & Pioppi, 2009). Yet, there are a number of problems with the contract, pact or bargain concepts as an explanation for protest. First, society is not a monolithic bloc. Some social groups might still enjoy the benefits of the authoritarian contract while others are already excluded. More generally speaking, state-society relations can have very different forms and be more dynamic than what the concept – as a metaphor for a general, fundamental consensus about state-society relations – can provide.⁶ Finally, it is closely attached to the regime type: authoritarianism. Analysing socioeconomic protests in democratic Tunisia post-2011, however, one can find very similar patterns of protest characteristics compared to Egypt under authoritarian rule (Weipert-Fenner & Wolff, 2020).

Considering this critique, Jonas Wolff and I suggested another political economy approach to explain protests, one that is neither grounded in economic nor political essentialism: the ‘incorporation crisis’ argument (Weipert-Fenner & Wolff, 2020). Originally developed by Collier and Collier for the incorporation of labour unions into the political sphere in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century (Collier & Collier, 2002 [1991]), the concept is used today more broadly to understand the interest mediation between the lower strata of society and the state. Neoliberal reforms of the 1980s were thus interpreted as the disincorporation of different urban and rural popular sectors, with the left turn of the 2000s consequently was seen as their re-incorporation (Rossi, 2015; Rossi & Silva, 2018). The most important feature of the concept is to understand incorporation in its dual nature: It entails a substantial side, looking at the responsiveness of governments to societal demands regarding social policies, and it has a politico-institutional side that looks at the relation of popular sectors to the political arena, ranging from complete exclusion, informal and or ad-hoc integration, corporatism up to political offices for popular sector members. One can relate the micro-interaction of protests with these larger structures and study what activists demand as well as what kind of state responses they receive regarding the two dimensions.

On this basis, we hold that the main argument, that disincorporation leads to mobilization, can be supported by looking at protests in the MENA region today as one can find a similar pattern of very low material and institutional incorporation of the lower strata of society (Weipert-Fenner & Wolff, 2020). At the same time, MENA countries offer a number of research questions that could enrich the debate about incorporation elsewhere. For example, one could bring back the regime as an important context variable. Although the original Collier/Collier concept is not limited to democracies, its recent application mainly was, as neoliberal reforms happened to be introduced mainly after successful democratization (with the exception of Chile). One could thus explore the differences of authoritarian and democratic incorporation crises in a neoliberal age. Another interesting research question could be to study the dual nature of the incorporation crisis in a global comparison of mass protests, including the Global North, in which specific political or socioeconomic triggers of mass mobilization quickly evolved into broader uprisings that called for reforms or revolution in regard of the two sides: social justice and democracy.

In this sense, political economy approaches combined with a profound analysis of protest dynamics can provide a fresh understanding of protests as they interact with the political and economic order and specific policies that they seek to change, without any deterministic understanding of regime types or the effects of capitalism.

4. Doing research on protests in the MENA region

While the theoretical debates between rationalist, structuralist accounts and actor-centred, constructivist positions have repercussions for all types of methodological questions, in the following, I focus on how to collect data about protests in the MENA region post-2011. As sections two and three have shown, it is crucial to find out as much as possible about protest actors, their allies, adversaries, bystanders, political actors from government and opposition, state representatives, and the broader social milieus. Quite evidently, in-depth knowledge of and access to the field are of utmost importance. More recently, however, it is widely recognized that conducting research about protests on the ground has become increasingly difficult given the context of authoritarianism or war in large parts of the region.

The fact that varying degrees of access have an impact on knowledge production about protests in the MENA is not a novel development. While the relatively liberal Egyptian autocracy of the 2000s used to be well-researched, today, harsh repression makes it almost impossible to study contentious actions (as sporadically as they occur). In contrast, much less research has been conducted on the relatively illiberal dictatorship of Ben Ali whereas protests in Tunisia today are among the most well-studied across the region. It is important to keep these biases in mind when assessing the opportunities for field research today: Lebanon offers ample opportunities for access and almost no restrictions for scholars. The liberalized authoritarian monarchies of Morocco and Jordan are examples of countries that allow varying degrees of access to protest movements. Fascinating insights from protest movements in Algeria and Iraq (e.g., Belakhdar, 2015; Robin-D’Cruz, 2019) have shown that, even in these relatively difficult contexts, protest research is possible. One should not be naïve about the threatening circumstances in many of the aforementioned countries. Considering this, the recent tendency towards openly reflecting on the challenges associated with doing research in authoritarian contexts, along with possible solutions, has therefore become vital (Clark & Cavatorta, 2018; Grimm et al., 2020). These challenges are, however, not specific to protest research and, ultimately, they do not impede it.

The question of access is different for scholars from the MENA region, particularly when they are based in the country they study (which, in most cases, happens to be their country of origin). At first glance, switching the country of study to an easier case would seem to be a solution – in line with the abovementioned shift in knowledge production in relation to access. But this rarely happens, and it is time to reflect on the material and immaterial boundaries that keep MENA scholars from studying countries other than their own. Again, all of these questions could be productively discussed with scholars from the Global South who also struggle with authoritarianism and violent conflicts and academic power asymmetries in postcolonial settings.

Protest and conflict event databases based on media reporting are increasingly used for protest analysis. These datasets can provide specific as well as comparable data on a number of countries, regions, regime types or even on the global scale and also offer information about protest actors, demands, forms and places of protest as well as state responses. However, the existing datasets also exhibit a number of general shortcomings (be they hand and/or automatically coded) that render them a supplementary source, at best. Issues range from the completeness of coverage, the feasibility of data collection, transparency and the possibility of controlling for reliability (see Weidmann & Rød, 2019, pp. 42–45). One problem for protest researchers – including those working on the US and Europe – is the dominant reliance on traditional news channels such as newspapers and news agencies. This generally generates ‘significant biases associated with event size and proximity to media sources’ (Fisher et al., 2019, p. 2), possibly leading to a focus on the capital and an underrepresentation of the countryside. This is even more of a pity considering that most of todays’ databases offer a spatial disaggregation of protest data that could provide an opportunity for studying the local and regional dynamics of contention. One needs to be particularly careful with cross-national databases that rely on international news media. Hellmeier et al. offer a comprehensive overview of the factors that have an influence on whether a protest event is covered by international media, most of them falling into the categories of ‘event characteristics, political context, and media routines’ (Hellmeier et al., 2018, pp. 589–590). The authors add sequential attention effects in the context of highly salient events that can explain the under or over-reporting of protests in international media.

These shortcomings have led researchers to increasingly use local media, some collected in large datasets, such as the Armed Conflict Location Events Dataset (ACLED, Raleigh et al., 2010), but most in a number of single country protest event datasets. The results do, however, differ greatly, as the example of Egypt illustrates. Killian Clarke’s reconstruction of protests as part of the Egyptian counter-revolution in 2013 (1 January 2012 to 3 July 2013), based on the Egyptian Arabic-language newspaper al-Masry al-Youm, identified 7,500 protest events,⁷ compared to ACLED which identified just over 1,000 protests (including riots) for the same time period. For other time periods (January 2011 to January 2012, June 2013 to December 2013), Neil Ketchley counted 7,500 protest events during phases of massive mobilization, using four local Arabic-language newspapers; and, again, the discrepancy between ACLED and his data is significant: 4,917 (Ketchley, 2017) compared to 1,310 (ACLED) for the period January 2011 to January 2012 and 3,484 versus 1,494 for the period June 2013 to December 2013. More problematically, the numbers do not only vary in absolute terms but the protests identified by each also follow different trajectories. Looking at ACLED’s selection of media sources, questions arise as to the identification of relevant local news outlets. None of the newspapers used by Clarke and Ketchley are found in this selection (which I would personally also refer to when investigating protest coverage in Egypt for the discussed time period), relying instead on national newspapers that (also) have an English-language webpage, begging the question of whether Arabic sources were systematically used.⁸

A number of similar datasets have been established over the last years, each covering one or maximum two countries (see, for instance, the work by Chantal Berman,⁹ Rima Majed (2020) and Kevin Mazur (2019)). They provide hand-coded event data based on in-depth insights about the quality of the media, including partisan affiliation, pro-/anti regime stance, and change of these qualities over time. Censorship in autocratic regimes has a particular impact on media reporting about protests to varying degrees (Göbel & Steinhardt, 2019, pp. 1–6). As Josua and Edel argue in this SI, repression is manifold and dynamic – and so are the ‘red lines’ within media discourse. Advanced insight about a country is needed to know whether protests in general make it into the newspapers or whether certain protests are ignored and others particularly stressed – such as those in favour of the regime or against external actors. As such, any protest event dataset needs to look for ways to cross-check media reporting using additional sources, be they official data, as in the case of Rima Majed’s work on Lebanon (Majed, 2020), or NGO reports. Video footage and photographs can also be used to verify media reports, as Neil Ketchley (2017) did in his analysis of protests in Egypt between 2011 and 2013.

In sum, local news archives provide much more nuanced insights into protest activities than do datasets based on international media and, at least until now, than those that include some local media outlets. At the same time, due to the high amount of manual labour involved, these sources have remained limited to one or two countries. The challenge lies in figuring out how to create solid datasets for a larger number of countries and a longer time period in order to provide a basis for comparative studies within and across regions. One way forward could be to further develop quantitative text analyses for Arabic media, a method that is increasingly being used but that has not been applied to Arabic media for protest event data – to the best of my knowledge. While a number of technical challenges still exist, it is certainly just a matter of time until these issues are resolved (for an overview see Alrababa’h, 2019)

Another way forward that has more recently been suggested is to use social media as a source. At least for the case of China, Göbel and Steinhardt recently identified social media as the best source for assessing protest quantities, proving to be superior to international or local media coverage (Göbel & Steinhardt, 2019). Although they relied on a collection of social media posts produced by activists (until they were imprisoned), this is an interesting approach that could be tested for the MENA region, too – though a great deal of online activism has shifted to closed groups and encrypted messenger services, particularly in authoritarian contexts, making activism on social media increasingly difficult to access for researchers (Siegel, 2019, p. 36). This also raises the question to what extent social media can be seen as an objective source about protests, i.e., as a point of ‘access to real-time networked data [that] facilitates analysis of microdynamics of conflict and mass-elite interaction’ (Siegel, 2019, p. 34). When are social media really a simple mirror of offline activism and when are they rather a variable that influences offline activism? And in which cases do they reflect a phenomenon of their own, i.e., online activism? It is important to start a research project by either clarifying the role of social media for specific protests using additional resources beforehand or investigating this question directly. Furthermore, we must remember that protest coverage in social media also entails biases produced by self-censorship in repressive authoritarian contexts as well as by the varying availability of cell-phone coverage, resulting in underrepresentation in rural areas (Göbel & Steinhardt, 2019; Weidmann, 2016).

A number of studies employed various kinds of SMT currents to investigate in greater detail how social media can influence mobilization – from Resource Mobilization Theory (regarding transaction costs) and opportunity structures to emotions and motivational frameworks (e.g., Boulianne, 2015; Breuer et al., 2015; Jost et al., 2018). Weidmann and Rød analysed the complex relation between digital and offline mobilization as well as the interplay between digital and offline repression in autocracies (2019). Zayani (2015) explored the connection between everyday politics and protests in Tunisia in online and offline worlds. Thomas Poell and colleagues add yet another dimension: they opt to take a ‘relational perspective on social materialities and protest’ and suggest analysing the relationship along ‘three axes of spatiality, temporality, and platformization’ (Neumayer et al., 2019, p. 5).¹⁰ This requires the researcher ‘to trace how changing activist practices and evolving techno-commercial platform strategies mutually articulate each other’ and ‘to take the specific political cultural settings of the protests they [the researchers] are studying into account as well’ (Poell & Van Dijck, 2018, p. 558).

All of the studies mentioned here illustrate that social media and protests reflect and contribute to major research areas of SMT, as discussed in section 2; at the same time, they also once again highlight the need for precise local knowledge in order to scale up and undertake comparisons at a broader level of abstraction. Certainly, ‘[t]hese are early days […] online data sources and new web-based data collection schemes are generating an explosion of observations that will be enormously useful in understanding the causes and consequences of political behavior’ (Jost et al., 2018, p. 112); but, as the authors argue, Social Science today can be compared to system biologists twenty years ago, facing a massive amount of data yet lacking the tools to process it. I would argue that, for contemporary protest research, this implies systematically linking big-data analyses based on social media to in-depth case studies that include countries of the Global South. This should be done without only applying methods developed for the Global North but, instead, teasing out possible differences between world regions early on, such as in regard to activism by a digital elite as compared to broader segments of the populace.

Conclusions

After the mass uprisings of 2011, protest research in the MENA flourished and led to a struggle over the interpretation of protests along the major conflict lines in the Social Science: between rationalist, structuralist and constructivist, actor-centred approaches. Far from being an ivory tower debate, the perspectives influence the interpretation of what the mass protests actually meant for the political development of the region in and after 2011. Instead of interpreting their outcome either as linear democratization or authoritarian persistence – perspectives that still shape the public and political discourse in Europe and the US – a third, more complex view on non-linear, ambivalent transformation processes became predominant among the majority of protest researchers. As a result, fine-grained analyses of contentious politics in the MENA evolved. First, I built on and combined these approaches with political economy perspectives. Second, I reflected upon the existing separation of SMT in the Global South within the respective Area Studies fields. Instead, theoretical and methodological advances from different Area Studies should be brought into conversation with each other as well as with insights into general power structures in academic knowledge production. Thirdly, I extended the plea for more intra-Global South exchange also to the discussion on methods of data collection, be it in regard to fieldwork, protest event datasets or the usage of social media.

A final note: The need for in-depth knowledge on single protests and movements in specific contexts requires expertise including language skills that is most often found among Area Studies scholars. This does not necessarily mean that protests in a specific world region share certain characteristics and that those are per se different from other world regions. What is similar and different in regard to protests within a region, between different regions of the Global South and across regions should be left to empirical studies. This means that, particularly given the recurrent waves of contention worldwide, it is the time for scholars of contentious politics in the MENA to go local as well as global.

Acknowledgments

Research for this paper has been generously supported by a grant of the Volkswagen Foundation in the context of the research project Struggles over Socioeconomic Reforms: Political Conflict and Social Contention in Egypt and Tunisia post 2011 in Interregional Comparison. I would like to thank the editors of this special issue, the participants of the authors’ workshop held at the GIGA in Hamburg on 30 and 31 January 2020 as well as Jonas Wolff for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. I am also indebted to two anonymous reviewers who provided excellent and constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation [93325] and the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA) (funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) [01DL20003]).

Notes

1. Howard and Walters argued that MENA scholars did not study protests sufficiently prior to 2011, Bellin, Lust and Lynch rebuke this accusation. These contributions also give a good and more comprehensive overview over the literature on MENA protests before 2011 than I could give in the framework of this article. Reflections Symposium, Perspective on Politics, 2014 12(2).

2. The exceptionality is usually explained by the Tunisian Trade Union Federation that during dictatorship managed to remain relatively autonomous particularly on the local level and served as an umbrella for different kinds of opposition forces. Yet, the national and parts of the regional level were firmly co-opted by the regime, pointing to the ambivalent role labour can play for the stability of authoritarian regimes. For more see chapters 1, 4 and 10 in Weipert-Fenner and Wolff (2020).

3. For a closer review of the third generation see Goldstone (1980) and of the fourth generation see Lawson (2016).

4. In addition, there are also different concepts of revolution in different places as well as discourses in languages other than English as the semantics of revolution in Arabic show (for more, see Bank and Busse in this SI).

5. For an overview of publications about workers, see Meijer 2016; for the ambivalence of youth activism, see for instance, Sika 2017, marginalized groups such as informal workers and unemployed people see part II in Weipert-Fenner and Wolff (2020).

6. For a novel, much more fine-grained conceptualization of the social contract, see Loewe et al. 2020.

7. See Killian Clarke’s personal webpage: https://www.killianclarke.com/book.

8. I made a similar observation for Tunisia before 2018. I only found Arabic-language articles for 2018 and 2019, raising the question of comparability of the data when sources are switched in the same dataset.

9. Chantal Berman compared protests in Morocco and Tunisia 2006–2016, http://www.chantalberman.com/bookproject.

10. Thinking in terms of ‘platformization’ urges the scholar to move beyond the study of single platforms (most prominently Twitter) and to analyse the process of how platforms come about, how they shape ‘activists tactics, identities, and networking strategies’ and how they are challenged shaped by activists (Neumayer et al. 2019, 10).