Abstract
The 2019 uprisings in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, and Iraq, often framed as a ‘Second Wave’ of the Arab uprisings, present a critical puzzle: why did mass mobilization re-emerge nearly a decade after the 2011 revolutions, despite their mixed outcomes? This article argues that the post-conflict trajectories of these countries are central to understanding these movements. By integrating post-conflict studies and social movement theory, we conceptualize post-conflict as an analytical category that shapes mobilization dynamics through the reconstruction of citizenship regimes, collective memory, and governance mechanisms. These regimes, designed to consolidate state power and enforce security, delimit acceptable forms of political participation and identity. The 2019 uprisings revealed both the fragility of these post-conflict arrangements and the transformative potential of mobilization, highlighting the dual dynamic of boundary-pushing and self-imposed limits as activists navigated internalized ‘red lines’ shaped by conflict memory and state repression. This framework offers new insights into the relationship between post-conflict governance, citizenship reconstruction, and social movement mobilization, emphasizing the need for further comparative research on the conditions under which marginalized groups successfully contest exclusionary political orders.
The mass popular uprisings in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, and Iraq in 2018 and 2019 were billed as the ‘Second Wave’ of the Arab Spring. The use of the same frames for calls to collective action, and protestors’ efforts to inscribe their actions in the precedent of 2011, lends credence to the idea of social movement diffusion. Yet, these uprisings took place almost a decade later, despite the outcomes of the 2011 revolutionary episodes. Why is that the case? While a few studies considering the 2019 uprisings as a collective exist, 1 they have focused on the continuities with 2011 and learning processes between revolutionary waves. Yet this reading takes a somewhat ahistorical perspective that fails to consider longer political trajectories. In considering the 2019 revolutionary episodes as a distinct phenomenon, this Special Issue seeks to place centrally the broader social and political legacies of conflict/post-conflict and how these legacies informed mobilization.
Our central theoretical contention is that the post-conflict political trajectories of the four countries in the 2019 wave are not incidental but rather fundamental to assessing the uprisings. Explicitly bringing together post-conflict studies and social movement theory, we conceptualize the context of post-conflict as an analytical category itself. Additionally, we theorize the role of post-conflict political orders and collective memory of conflict in informing organizational, ideational, and strategic mobilization dynamics. While the interconnections among post-conflict governance, state reconstruction, modalities of citizenship, and subject formation have been extensively documented in the existing literature, the specific ways in which these dimensions intersect with micro-mobilization processes during revolutionary episodes remain significantly underexplored. Our key conjecture is that post-conflict governance, including how post-conflict citizenship is constructed and enforced for the express purpose of consolidating the state and controlling citizens, shapes decisions to participate in protest movements and influences the contours (institutional, relational, discursive) of a movement itself. In reconceiving ‘post-conflict’ in analytical terms, our approach opens specific lines of inquiry that this collection of articles seeks to address. How do citizenship agendas and governance mechanisms shape political norms and behaviors in relation to mobilization and participation in contestation movements? How does collective memory of conflict inform modes of collective action and the meanings ascribed therein? And how might the emergence of new political subjectivities via the praxis of collective action lead to ruptures in the legitimacy of post-conflict political order and the governance of citizens? In seeking to understand the 2019 Arab uprisings by placing them within longer and country-specific trajectories, our theoretical ambition proposes a new framework for investigating the relationship between post-conflict governance (conceived here as the mechanisms of ordering citizens, their relationship to the state, and the delimiting of acceptable/unacceptable modes and identities of citizenship), post-conflict periodization, and social movement dynamics.
The six articles gathered in this special issue focus on women and youth mobilization in the 2019 uprisings in Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Sudan, reflecting our own theoretical assumptions that women and youth represent specific locations of post-conflict governance, citizenship, and collective memory. Drawing on fieldwork conducted during the mass uprisings, what emerges from these studies is an activism that we describe as ‘on the edge.’ The mobilization of women and youth pushed the boundaries of acceptable modes of contention and engagement, challenging the parameters of ‘womanhood’ and ‘youthhood’ imposed by the post-conflict state, while maintaining internalized invisible boundaries between controllable contestation and uncontrollable civil strife. These findings thus deepen our collective understanding of what constitutes the ‘revolutionary’ in the 2019 Arab uprisings.
About the author: Rola El-Husseini