In any political setting, a few people will defy political authority. The main challenge for theories of rebellion is to explain when and why others join en masse. Scholarship on social movements ...typically develops answers to this puzzle on the basis of either of two microfoundations. Explanations that conceptualize individuals as utility-maximizers contend that they protest as a means to other ends. Explanations that see individuals as driven by values and beliefs suggest that people protest for the inherent benefit of voicing dissent. Both perspectives generate compelling explanations. Yet how do purposeful individuals act when utilitarian calculations and cherished values recommend contrary courses of action? Why might an actor prioritize one or the other at different points in time? Taking on these questions, I argue for an approach to microfoundations that focuses on emotions. Emotions such as fear, sadness, and shame promote pessimistic assessments, risk aversion, and a low sense of control. Such dispiriting emotions encourage individuals to prioritize security and resign to political circumstances, even when they contradict values of dignity. By contrast, anger, joy, and pride promote optimistic assessments, risk acceptance, and feelings of personal efficacy. Such emboldening emotions encourage prioritization of dignity and increase willingness to engage in resistance, even when it jeopardizes security. When instrumentality and values offer different answers to the question of whether to resign or rebel, therefore, emotions can shift individuals toward one or the other. I ground this argument in findings from the neurosciences and illustrate it with evidence from the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and the absence of an uprising in Algeria.
Why do some national movements use violent protest and others nonviolent protest? Wendy Pearlman shows that much of the answer lies inside movements themselves. Nonviolent protest requires ...coordination and restraint, which only a cohesive movement can provide. When, by contrast, a movement is fragmented, factional competition generates new incentives for violence and authority structures are too weak to constrain escalation. Pearlman reveals these patterns across one hundred years in the Palestinian national movement, with comparisons to South Africa and Northern Ireland. To those who ask why there is no Palestinian Gandhi, Pearlman demonstrates that nonviolence is not simply a matter of leadership. Nor is violence attributable only to religion, emotions or stark instrumentality. Instead, a movement's organizational structure mediates the strategies that it employs. By taking readers on a journey from civil disobedience to suicide bombings, this book offers fresh insight into the dynamics of conflict and mobilization.
Actors turn to negotiating or spoiling as a means of contesting not only what a proposed peace settlement entails but also who has the power to decide the terms. Conflicts are more likely to witness ...negotiating and spoiling for purposes of internal contestation to the degree that one or both of the warring parties lack an institutionalized system of legitimate representation. Whether internal contestation leads a group to act as a peace maker or as a peace breaker is conditioned by its position in the internal balance of power. Two eras in the Palestinian national movement--the Palestine Liberation Organization's bid to join the Geneva peace conference in 1973-74 and its en gagement in the Oslo peace process from 1993 to 2000--illustrate these propositions. Leaders of national movements and rebel groups, no less than leaders of states, are systematically influenced by domestic politics. As such, sponsors of peace processes should expect spoiler problems unless a movement heals rifts within its ranks.
Core social movement research argues that large-scale challenges to authority build upon preexisting organization and civil society resources. How do dissenters mobilize masses in repressive settings ...where, given curtailment of civil society, autonomous associations scarcely exist and norms discourage trust more than encourage it? Testimonials from the Syrian uprising illustrate how protest can become widespread under such conditions, yet occurs through processes different from what dominant theory expects. Activists get demonstrations off the ground by planning around awareness of their organizational deficits. Once in motion, contention propels both organization and increasing organizational sophistication. To be effective, mobilization sometimes evades or obscures established social relationships, even as it produces new forms of sociability. Bridging literatures on mass and clandestine mobilization, this research reconsiders the assumed sequential logic of movement development from organization to protest, rather than vice versa. It also shifts attention from movement antecedents toward the resourcefulness and strategy that enable mobilizing both from scratch and at grave risk.
Narratives of Fear in Syria Pearlman, Wendy
Perspectives on politics,
03/2016, Volume:
14, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Scholarship on Syria has traditionally been limited by researchers' difficulty in accessing the reflections of ordinary citizens due to their reluctance to speak about politics. The 2011 revolt ...opened exciting opportunities by producing an outpouring of new forms of self-expression, as well as encouraging millions to tell their stories for the first time. I explore what we can learn from greater attention to such data, based on thick descriptive analysis of original interviews with 200 Syrian refugees. I find that individuals' narratives coalesce into a collective narrative emphasizing shifts in political fear. Before the uprising, fear was a pillar of the state's coercive authority. Popular demonstrations generated a new experience of fear as a personal barrier to be surmounted. As rebellion militarized into war, fear became a semi-normalized way of life. Finally, protracted violence has produced nebulous fears of an uncertain future. Study of these testimonials aids understanding of Syria and other cases of destabilized authoritarianism by elucidating lived experiences obscured during a repressive past, providing a fresh window into the construction and evolution of national identity, and demonstrating how the act of narration is an exercise in meaning making within a revolution and itself a revolutionary practice.
Studies of refugee belonging, as a key facet of integration, primarily focus on post-flight processes. Adopting an approach to integration that is temporally and spatially broader, this article ...argues that refugees’ varied experiences of belonging or estrangement in origin countries fundamentally condition their subsequent experiences of belonging or estrangement in settlement countries. To explore this argument, the article develops a framework that distinguishes between the psychosocial and locational aspects of home, identifying five distinct categories of experience: home in the homeland, exile in the homeland, exile outside the homeland, home outside the homeland, or overlaps of exile and home across borders. The article illustrates these categories in the Syrian case, using original interviews with displaced Syrians and a range of texts by Syrian writers. In doing so, it demonstrates how knowing whether or how refugees found belonging inside their homelands before displacement enriches understandings of who refugees are, what they seek, and what home or exile means to them. While these pre-flight experiences cannot precisely predict integration outcomes, they shape the frame of reference that refugees carry into homemaking in refuge and, thus, the experiences of belonging that they develop there.
In the post-Cold War era, states increasingly find themselves in conflicts with nonstate actors. Finding it difficult to fight these opponents directly, many governments instead target states that ...harbor or aid nonstate actors, using threats and punishment to coerce host states into stopping those groups.Wendy Pearlman and Boaz Atzili investigate this strategy, which they termtriadic coercion. They explain why states pursue triadic coercion, evaluate the conditions under which it succeeds, and demonstrate their arguments across seventy years of Israeli history. This rich analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict, supplemented with insights from India and Turkey, yields surprising findings. Traditional discussions of interstate conflict assume that the greater a state's power compared to its opponent, the more successful its coercion. Turning that logic on its head, Pearlman and Atzili show that this strategy can be more effective against a strong host state than a weak one because host regimes need internal cohesion and institutional capacity to move against nonstate actors. If triadic coercion is thus likely to fail against weak regimes, why do states nevertheless employ it against them? Pearlman and Atzili's investigation of Israeli decision-making points to the role of strategic culture. A state's system of beliefs, values, and institutionalized practices can encourage coercion as a necessary response, even when that policy is prone to backfire.A significant contribution to scholarship on deterrence, asymmetric conflict, and strategic culture,Triadic Coercionilluminates an evolving feature of the international security landscape and interrogates assumptions that distort strategic thinking.
Refugees' preflight class interacts with host state policies to shape refugees' postdisplacement class trajectories. This interaction affects whether refugees of different backgrounds experience ...mobility over time and how refugees of various backgrounds disperse over space. "Selective
engagement" hosts that leave refugees to self-settle accentuate stratification insofar as refugees with capital can attain entrepreneurial success, poor refugees lack protection from further impoverishment, and middle-class professionals have both the means and motivation to try to migrate
elsewhere. "Interventionist engagement" hosts lessen the gap between rich and poor both by attracting middle-class refugees and by imposing integration programs that further compress all refugees toward the middle. Demonstrating these arguments, analysis of Syrian refugees in Turkey and Germany
illustrates a diaspora's class-remaking in ways not attributable to displacement alone.
PDF
