Dynamics of conflict and revolution in Iraq and Tunisia

This thesis is formed of three articles. Stand-alone pieces in their own right, they are nonetheless united by an interest in the endogenous dynamics of conflict and mass mobi- lization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The first article investigates identity dynamics in the face of conflict threat using a natural experiment in Iraq after the fall of Mosul to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Relying on a theoretical synthesis of propositions from both social psychology and political sociology, I show that war can be generative of common intergroup identities when organizational structures exist to enable interethnic cooperation. The second two papers investigate mobilization dynamics during the 2011 Tunisian Revolution. The first article proceeds from the claim that current approaches to the study of democratic mobilization suffer from a basic conceptual problem. Revolution often does not begin as revolutionary—demands are generated in the context of contention as new constituencies are incorporated into a developing protest wave. As a result, cross-sectional analysis is too blunt an instrument to understand what are fundamentally time-dependent dynamics. Using original event data as well as survey data from Tunisia, I show that the correlates of both protest occurrence and participation shift dramatically over the twenty-nine day period of the Revolution. This processual character, I go on to detail, is shared by multiple historical instances of mass mobilization. Against this backdrop, I argue for a reconceptualization of revolution as process. This reconceptualization entails respecifying the object of explanation. Here, coalition formation during episodes of mass contention becomes a key explanandum. I conclude by advancing one analytically tractable mechanism that inheres in this process—brokerage—and propose that this lay behind some of the association between organizational density and democratic transition. In the third paper, I again use event data from the twenty-nine days of the Tunisian Revolution. I couple these data with social media data from Twitter, and am able to leverage information on the medium of protest reportage (Facebook versus non-Facebook) to gain insights into the effect of online information exposure on protest diffusion. I find that, despite the translocal affordances of new information and communications technologies (ICTs), protest has an overlooked parochial dimension. Online information exposure leads to protest diffusion, but the strength of the signal diminishes significantly with distance. Further, I find little evidence of online platforms being used for coordination. I bolster this finding with evidence from a qualitative coding of some 10,000 tweets as well as field interviews. I find that “attributions of similarity” and physical copresence remain crucial both to how information online is interpreted and to how signals of willingness are communicated.