Acts, Arenas and Actors

This chapter considers the debates about authoritarianism and democratization, and political stability and change, in an “exceptional” Middle East. It outlines how accounts of Middle East politics presented stalled transition processes and authoritarian “upgrading” as structural features of regional stability. The chapter then introduces the notion of mobilization in relation to the construction of protest events, arenas and actors. A distinction is drawn between political causality and causal explanations during periods of rapid de-institutionalization, and during periods of routine (authoritarian) governance. Institutional and extra-institutional changes are presented in terms of the (re)production of specific set of social interactions. The chapter uses interactionist perspectives in social movement theory to counter-balance the more structural and rational-choice accounts of protests and revolutions. The framework proposed departs from conventional notions of political opportunity structures by proposing an explanatory narrative of protest episodes grounded on the interactions between acts, arenas, and agents of contention (in that specific order).