Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970. By Doug McAdam. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. viii + 304 pp. Map, charts, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $25.00.)

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov New York: Public Affairs, 2011 409 pages $16.99 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In January 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a highly touted speech on Internet freedom in which she stated, "The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly, only in cyberspace. It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully cooperate. Once you're on the Internet, you don't need to be a tycoon or a rock star to have a huge impact on society." Evgeny Morozov, in his book The Net Delusion, takes great issue with the implication, however, that the so-called "Arab Spring" and "Twitter Revolution" were caused by unfettered access to the Internet. Instead, Morozov, a research academic, provides a cautionary tale about what he argues is any attempt to establish a monocausal relationship to meaningful political change (especially when that single focus is information technology). The book opens with a discussion of cyber-utopianism and Internet-centrism--mind-sets that focus on the positive "emancipatory" aspects of Internet communication while ignoring the downsides. The argument throughout centers on nation-state policy, or lack thereof, that attacks the "wicked" problem of authoritarianism by, as a colleague of mine has dubbed it, "wiring the world." Morozov, expectantly, but importantly, cites the hedonistic world portrayed by Huxley and the "Big Brother" world of Orwell to consider both the proactive and reactive approaches to Internet freedom by authoritarian regimes. Interestingly, he notes that there is often a mix of both. Such regimes certainly use the anonymity and openness of the Internet to spy on their people and shutdown undesirable sites. But there is also a subtle approach that belies the jackboot on the keyboard methodology. While China may be known more for suppressing the Internet and for employing the masses to counter antiregime rhetoric, Russia imposes no formal Internet censorship. It relies on entertainment (porn is specifically cited) to soothe the masses, assuming that given options for political discourse and anything else, most opt for "anything else." Hitler would understand. And in nations where freedom is not widely understood from a western perspective, any bit of additional mindless diversion may be viewed as liberty by the populace. Perhaps most importantly, Morozov rails against social media determinism as driving the end of authoritarianism, labeling it "an intellectually impoverished, lazy way to study the past, understand the present, and predict the future." He does not dismiss the value of Facebook and Twitter to quickly mobilize like-minded individuals. He notes as well that the development of that very like-mindedness is complex and potentially can be manipulated by authoritarian governments using the same Internet freedom. …

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives.

Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India.

Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism and Political Change in Egypt. By Carrie Rosefsky Wickham. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 300p. $49.50 cloth, $22.50 paper

*† How do reform-oriented social movements in authoritarian states get off the ground? I argue that authoritarian regimes can actually facilitate social movement mobilization by making it easier for movement leaders to form opposition coalitions. When authoritarian states experience a political opening, certain structural aspects of these regimes will ease the process of coalition formation. I describe three ways in which these states facilitate mobilization: (1) they offer a straightforward set of least-common-denominator goals; (2) they establish incentives for existing organizations to get involved; and (3) they enhance the role of protest events in building cohesion. To make my case, I analyze the Egyptian Kefaya movement, a social movement whose diverse members had never meaningfully worked together before and whose nine months of sustained street protests defied expectations that it would collapse under regime repression.

Saying "enough": authoritarianism and egypt's kefaya movement

This article discusses three recent books that analyze patterns of political conflict and regime change in postcolonial Asia and Africa using a social forces approach to political analysis The social forces tradition, originally pioneered by Barrington Moore, studies the social origins and political consequences of struggles between social groups whose members hold shared identities and interests The works under review examine, respectively, the varied regime trajectories of Southeast Asia's states, divergent regime outcomes in India and Pakistan, and the institutional origins of social cleavages and political conflict in sub-Saharan Africa Although historically the social forces paradigm has focused on conflict between class actors, the author argues that these three works fruitfully extend the social forces approach to encompass struggles between nonclass social groups, including those defined along the lines of ethnicity, religion, nationality, region, and family This pluralized version of the social forces approach is better suited to studying patterns of regime change in Asia and Africa, where the paradigm has been less frequently applied than it has been to cases in Europe and Latin America

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/5E3EF514E6BE139D59167F4059C02ACD/S0043887117000119a.pdf/div-class-title-social-forces-and-regime-change-div.pdf

Social Forces and Regime Change: Beyond Class Analysis

Refugees are often considered to be among the world’s most powerless groups; they face significant structural barriers to political mobilization, often including extreme poverty and exposure to repression. Yet despite these odds refugee groups do occasionally mobilize to demand better services and greater rights. In this paper I examine varying levels of mobilization among Syrian refugees living in camps and informal settlements in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan in order to explain how marginalized and dispossessed groups manage to develop autonomous political strength. I explain the surprisingly high levels of mobilization in Jordan’s Za’atari Camp compared to the relative quiescence of refugees in Turkish camps and Lebanese informal settlements as the product of a set of strong informal leadership networks. These networks emerged due to two unique facets of the refugee management regime in Jordan: the concentration of refugees in the camp, and a fragmented governance system. In Turkey and Lebanon, where these two conditions were absent, refugees did not develop the strong leadership networks necessary to support mobilization. I develop this argument through structured comparison of three cases and within-case process tracing, using primary source documents from humanitarian agencies, contentious event data, and 87 original interviews conducted in the summer of 2015.

/pdf/when-do-the-dispossessed-protest-informal-leadership-and-45guf58qfu.pdf

When Do the Dispossessed Protest? Informal Leadership and Mobilization in Syrian Refugee Camps

Since the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions many scholars of the Middle East have built and analyzed locally-sourced protest event datasets, which have been hailed for providing superior coverage to var...

Which protests count? Coverage bias in Middle East event datasets

One of the principal chants that was raised during the Egyptian uprising of 2011 was aish, huriyya, karama insaniyya, or ‘bread, freedom, human dignity’. This slogan encapsulated the three primary collective action frames that activists employed during the uprising. I argue that these frames were drawn from, and engaged with, three broad themes in Egypt's political discourse that had been developed over the previous decade: poor economic conditions, lack of democracy, and police abuse.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Feps.2012.41.pdf

Aish, Huriyya, Karama Insaniyya : Framing and the 2011 Egyptian Uprising

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