From that first rush to surround the soon-to-be-broken- down APC, we find a fraternization performance that amounts to a ritualized trespassing.
In Egypt, military space is usually strictly guarded and "separated" from the public. By climbing onto tanks (trespassing), protestors symbolically broke the army's "right of separateness" and forced the soldiers into personal, face to face interactions that made it harder for them to fire on the crowd.
Fraternization is an intuitively familiar idiom of contentious street politics that dates back to at least the eighteenth century.
Ketchley puts the Egyptian protests in a historical relation (citing the 1848 French Revolution) where protestors use physical proximity to break down the military’s discipline and force soldiers to choose a side.
The consistency is also impressive given the fact that when the causal arrow is reversed and one considers research that investigates the influence of repressive behavior on dissent (exploring one of the core aspects of collective action theory regarding the importance of costs), the results are highly inconsistent.
This is the part that confuses researchers. We know that dissent causes repression, but we don't know if repression actually stops dissent. Sometimes people get scared and go home (negative impact), but other times it just makes them angrier and leads to more protests (positive impact). It’s a puzzle because the government keeps using repression even though they aren't totally sure it works.
"When challenges to the status quo take place, authorities generally employ some form of repressive action to counter or eliminate the behavioral threat; in short, there appears to be a “Law of Coercive""
If people start protesting or challenging the way things are (the status quo), the government almost always hits back with force to make them stop. Political scientists call it a "Law" because it happens so consistently across almost every country they’ve studied
ocial movements are a distinct social process, consisting ofthe mechanisms through which actors engaged in collective action:• are involved in conflictual relations with dearly identified opponents;• are linked by dense informal networks;• share a distinct collective identity
If a group doesn't have an opponent, a network, AND a shared identity, it’s not technically a "social movement" according to Diani. This is a great checklist for analyzing any case study.
ontrary, social movements, protest actions,and, more generally; political organizations unaligned with major political partiesor trade unions have become a permanent component of Western democracies.It is no longer possible to describe protest politics, grassroots participation, andsymbolic challenges as "unconventional" Instead, references to a "movement
This is the "new normal" argument. Basically, movements aren't just occasional outbursts anymore; they are a permanent part of how politics works now. If you're writing about why we should care about activism today, use this to show it's "conventional" rather than "fringe."