Civil Society in Transition: Contentious Politics in Digitally Transforming Dictatorships
Comparative Politics
Contentious Politics
Political Participation
Social Movements
Qualitative Comparative Analysis
Mobilisation
Abstract
A large body of literature is concerned with how contemporary authoritarian regimes have been learning and transforming their autocratic tools with the rise of digital technologies, fine-tuning existing physical repression tactics and yielding even more control over the populace (Tucker et al., 2017; Frantz et al., 2020; Feldstein, 2021; Schlumberger et al., 2023). As digitization increases spatial and informational ambiguity, and further blurs the lines of perceived risk, it can be argued that state-society relations are also being transformed in different ways. Researchers are still debating the influence of digital technologies on state-society relations and on the power balance between the two. While some researchers argued that – like regimes – societies also upgrade and learn, finding new ways to maneuver and resist (Hobbs and Roberts, 2018; Hassanpour, 2014), others argued that these digital tools have further deepened the power asymmetry between societies and dictators and have a “protest-reducing effect” (Schlumberger et al., 2023; Frantz et al., 2020). Building on the existing literature, I argue that transformations of contentious politics under digital autocracies remain conceptually understudied and lack systematic empirical research. Therefore, my research tackles the following questions: How are contentious politics, particularly social movements, transforming under digital dictatorships? And how can that help us better understand the nuanced effects of digital repression on social movements? Answering these questions requires, I argue, a shift from studying structural factors of digital repression to analyzing the dynamic process (McAdam et al, 2001) of the interaction of political dissent/dissidents with these structural factors at the micro level.
This study posits that a micro-level interdisciplinary (ethnographic /political) analysis is needed to make sense of the contradictory findings of the macro-level analysis of social movements in digital autocracies. Building on the existing micro-level literature on political participation and social movements, I adopt James Jasper’s concept of “Strategic Agency”(2004, 2012) to provide a better insight into how the strategic choice of individuals takes place under a highly digitized autocracy, in alternative, newly reinvented, and sometimes, hybrid (online-offline) civic spaces, and investigate how and when these different interactions either sustain or deter protests. I started my investigation by gathering Macro-level data from Feldstein’s dataset on digital repression, and I will conduct a small-n study using the Most Different Systems Design (MDSD) with two or three selected autocratic regimes from the MENA region. I will employ both qualitative and quantitative analyses drawing on a combination of political participation data and in-depth narrative interviews. Shifting the focus to the agency of civil society, the study not only aims to link the micro to the macro in understanding patterns of participation but also to my research aims to (1) move instead towards the dynamics of interaction between dissidents and authoritarian digital tools as an explanatory variable and (2) investigate how some integral elements of social movements are transforming/being reconfigured in digital dictatorships such as space, duration, organizational structure, access to resources, identity formation, social networks, etc, and what impact these transformations/reconfigurations have on social movements.