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Social Movement Theory and the Onset of the Popular Uprising in Syria
Abstract
This article takes stock of my attempt to scrutinize the onset of the Syrian uprising with the help of some key analytical concepts derived from social movement theory, including “opportunity” and “threat,” “social networks,” “repertoires of contention,” “framing,” and “diffusion.” These tools allow me to identify and disentangle the mechanisms of early mobilization and the uprising and explain why they commenced in relatively peripheral areas. Social networks and framing processes are argued to have been key in mobilization, by transmitting opportunities derived from the “Arab Spring,” by mediating the nexus between repression and mobilization, by creating and feeding a rich new repertoire of defiant protest acts and claims-making, and by aiding the diffusion or agglomeration of mobilization throughout the country.
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Notes
All examples and empirical data in the current article are documented and annotated in these previous works unless stated otherwise.
Yet see the proposals, informed by and contingent on case studies, by Hafez and Wiktorowicz (2004) and Goodwin (2001).
See, for instance, Laba (1990) on the veneration of martyrs by the Polish Solidaridad movement.
Social scientists rarely reflect on the difficulties of data collection in the region's prohibitive authoritarian contexts altogether. Yet see Clark (2006), Suleiman and Anderson (2007), Malekzadeh (2011) and Ahram (2011) for a discussion.
According to a staff member of the BBC's User Generated Content Unit (UGCU), a team especially created to verify and double-check digital media sources for news reporting purposes, examples include YouTube footage supposedly originating from Syria and showing police and security forces' brutality against protestors actually having been filmed elsewhere (such as in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon), patching together disconnected footage of protests and security forces using forceful means, and dubbing the footage with shouting and the sound of gunfire, and repeatedly uploading footage of protests to claim they reoccurred (Author's interview, October 6, 2011). Security forces and the military are even said to have staged their own (faked) atrocities in order to sell their footage to international television channels (Author's interview with Rami Abdul-Rahman, Syrian human rights activist, October 7, 2011).
On this point see also Kurzman (1996) and his analysis of the Iranian revolution in 1979.