Armenians beyond diaspora: Making Lebanon their own

Abstract

decades? In filling these theoretical and empirical gaps, the author adopts a doublepaired comparison of individuals’ emotions, decisions, and behaviours towards calls for public protests against incumbent rulers in Egypt and Morocco. The author utilizes examples of public mobilization in two Arab regimes, where the outcome of public mobilization was different. This emphasizes the importance of public mobilization against authoritarian leaders in different autocratic settings. To support this argument, the author uses a combination of three methodologies, an ethnographic study based on face-to-face interviews with a selection of respondents from different age groups and socioeconomic backgrounds, speech analysis, and the examination of social media content, mainly Facebook. By analysing members’ interactions on two Facebook groups, We Are All Khaled Said and le mouvement du 20 février, the author depicts participants’ emotions and infers motives related to the improvement of socioeconomic conditions, the consolidation of political and individual freedom, and the assertion of human dignity, behind their engagement in protests against authoritarian regimes in Egypt and Morocco. The author investigates these Facebook groups’ discussions in addition to the in person interviews she conducted with various actors to identify factors that generate both positive emotions and negative emotions. Then, she explains how these emotions and motives lead to either participation or disengagement from protest activities. This book provides a concise and synthetized study on the impact of emotions on individuals’ behaviours and decisions towards participation in protests against authoritarian regimes. In doing so, it sheds light on the reasoning process underlining emotions’ impact on individual decisions of engagement or disengagement into protests. It is a singular, rich, and novel study in the field of Social Movement Theories and Political Psychology, and hence, should be a guiding reference for scholars and students specialized in these fields in general and in the Middle East and North Africa in particular.