Competing Microfoundations

A microfoundational approach to social explanation builds from an explicit stipulation of how individuals behave. Two distinct approaches to microfoundations dominate contemporary social movement theory. The first treats individuals as self-interested agents who optimize their allocation of resources by obtaining information, forming beliefs on that basis, and then choosing the most beneficial course of action.Footnote ¹⁰ Individuals protest as a means to other ends, and are unlikely to participate if costs remain high. On these grounds, theorists track the factors that should generate protest by decreasing its costs and increasing its expected ability to bring about change. They give particular attention to factors such as leaders' strategic solutions to collective action problems, the development of dissident organizations and social networks, and shifts in the structure of political opportunities that indicate the increasing vulnerability of the status quo to protest.

Many of these factors were notably minimal in the Arab uprisings. Pre-existing organizations and leaders appeared to have played a role secondary to that of spontaneous grassroots mobilization. Regime institutions and incumbent strategies kept political opportunities closed; autocrats were not only adroit at curtailing opposition, but also poised to facilitate hereditary succession in presidential and monarchical systems alike.Footnote ¹¹ Most fundamentally, strong coercive apparatuses warned that the costs of protest remained high.Footnote ¹² Those who joined demonstrations in 2011 had every reason to expect violent repression. Yet they assumed those risks—many of them unlike ever before. Their participation highlights a paradox: popular rebellion, rather than resulting from a decline in the costs of dissent, can be the context in which individuals accept costs that they previously had not accepted.

Other arguments building on the microfoundations of instrumental rationality emphasizes the availability of information. Technological innovations such as the Internet and mobile phones altered the cost/benefit ratio of protest by reducing the time and resources needed to communicate updates and rally large numbers to participate.Footnote ¹³ In addition, rational actors become increasingly likely to participate as they adapt to fresh information about the extent or success of protest. In this context, news of the shocking resignation of Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali caused people throughout the region to update their calculations about the probability that popular protest could overthrow a head of state. Kurt Weyland develops a microfoundational account of this dynamic, arguing that updating in this case was widespread, but ultimately ill founded.Footnote ¹⁴ He assumes that individuals are rational, but that rationality is bounded by imperfect information and inherent deficiencies in individuals' ability to process it. They thus rely on cognitive shortcuts, particularly in the absence of strong organizations and leadership. Acting on the heuristics of availability and representativeness, citizens in other Arab countries overestimated their countries' prospects for replicating Tunisia's success. They thus rushed to emulate revolution without seriously evaluating opportunities and risks.

Weyland's argument sheds light on rapid the diffusion of rebellion across countries. Yet it leaves several questions unanswered. It does not explain why some countries in the region were not swept by the revolutionary wave, despite similar political grievances and presumably the same cognitive psychology. Neither does it address the many participants who explicitly recognized the differences among Arab countries. On the question of “whether Syria would follow in the footsteps” of its Arab neighbors, a Syria-based scholar found her interviewees to be acutely aware of the “structural differences between Syria, Tunisia, and Egypt.” They consistently mentioned uniquely Syrian experiences with sectarianism and regime violence as the “important variables” governing prospects for contentious action in their country.Footnote ¹⁵

When protestors did take to the streets, it was without illusions about the enormous obstacles that they faced. According to a Syrian commentator, Syrians “know the road ahead is still full of sorrow and ambushes, and the price for their freedom and dignity will be high.”Footnote ¹⁶ A Libyan rebel recalled the onset of protest in similarly sanguine terms. “We did not know how far we could go or if changes were going to be possible in Libya,” he explained. “All we knew that our attempts to try would be hard and bloody.” He noted that, whereas Qaddahfi “had faith he would win this war,” rebels were pushed primarily by the sense that “despite a lack of weapons … we had to do something.”Footnote ¹⁷ These and many other protestors were not “rash” and “unthinking” about either easy victories or their governments' readiness to use force. They advocated revolution not out of erroneous forecasting, but out of hope. Richard Lazarus defines hope as “fearing the worst but yearning for better.”Footnote ¹⁸ It is not a cognitive crutch, but an emotion.

Some of the anomalies unexplained by instrumental understandings of microfoundations find explanation in an alternative approach emphasizing noninstrumental values. According to this view, individuals defy authority due to the inherent benefit of actualizing their convictions or sense of self, sometimes regardless of the ability of protest to effect change. This is what Vaclav Havel refers to as “living in truth,”Footnote ¹⁹ Timur Kuran calls “expressive utility,”Footnote ²⁰ and Rachel Einwohner understands as a “sense of honor.”Footnote ²¹ An emphasis on the noninstrumental rewards of protest underlies theories of social movements that often emphasize culture, identity, new forms of consciousness, or meaningful social relationships.

Varshney crafts an explicit appeal for such an approach in what he, invoking Max Weber, terms “value rationality.”Footnote ²² Varshney argues that exercising voice fulfills human needs for recognition, integrity, and self-respect. This understanding of microfoundations helps account for high-risk protest in the Arab revolts. However, if the need for dignity explains political resistance, what explains resignation to indignities? The latter was a part of Arab politics for decades. In Rashid Khalidi's words, “incessant infringements by these authoritarian states on the dignity of nearly every Arab citizen, and their rulers' constant affirmations of their worthlessness, were eventually internalized and produced a pervasive self-loathing and an ulcerous social malaise.”Footnote ²³ Identification of the importance of autonomy and self-worth alone does not help us predict under what occasions rational people will or will not undertake risks on that basis.

We are left in a bind. Why do people defer to a cost-benefit calculation that discourages protest at some times, and protest despite high costs and uncertain benefits at other times? Why do people rebel in order to actualize dignity or alternatively bow before degrading abuses of power? In a third approach to these questions, Kuran combines instrumental and value rationalities into a synthesis model.Footnote ²⁴ Like others,Footnote ²⁵ he conceptualizes mass mobilization as a cascade that swells when a few “early movers” act and others adapt to new cues. He argues that individuals have private preferences regarding political outcomes. The public preference that they choose to convey to others, however, is a product of three factors: the intrinsic, substantive utility of the desired outcome; the reputational utility of revealing preferences for one's social status; and the expressive utility of being true to oneself, and thus the personal harm incurred by preference falsification. Given these three utilities, all individuals have a threshold at which they will reveal their true opposition, which depends on the number of others who are already doing so. A contingent event that prompts even a few to protest can trigger people with successively higher thresholds to join. This encourages others to do likewise until a full revolution is underway.

Kuran's model captures the surprising and sudden momentum of the Middle East uprisings.Footnote ²⁶ His concept of preference falsification also offers a useful lens for understanding the role of social media, insofar as these media generated relatively safe ways for people to reveal their views and gauge how many others shared them. Nonetheless, Kuran's schema has important limits. Preference falsification was not ubiquitous in semi-authoritarian countries such as Egypt, where citizens aired political criticism in speech and print for years.Footnote ²⁷ Indicators of discontent were pervasive, yet the revolution still took nearly everyone by surprise. More fundamentally, Kuran's focus on the interdependent dynamics of decision-making brackets its subjective dimensions.Footnote ²⁸ He treats individuals' substantive, reputational, and expressive utilities as additive for the sake of “simplicity,”Footnote ²⁹ not because this is consistent with knowledge about the human mind. We are left to wonder how his framework might benefit if complimented by direct exploration of the internal processes by which people adjudicate between competing imperatives.

This comes to the fore in the question of revolutionary thresholds. The notion that people have fixed points at which they join protest misconstrues the contingency of decision-making.Footnote ³⁰ Alternatively, the idea that a shift in private opinion precedes the choice to participate misses the personally transformative experience of revolution. Kuran proposes that a minority in any population are activists who protest for its own sake.Footnote ³¹ By contrast, the nonactivist majority has weak expressive needs,Footnote ³² and only engages in dissent on the basis of expected rewards and punishments.Footnote ³³ While elegant, this schema does not consider how people's expressive needs may change as they actually feel what it is to express themselves. One Syrian oppositionist described demonstrations as a nearly transcendent event in which “you visualize all the walls of fear and the markers of humiliation falling,” and find a will to “continu[e] your hysterical chanting, because for the first time you can hear your voice.”Footnote ³⁴ Another added, “Nothing will bring back those who have … experienced the ecstasy of rebelling.”Footnote ³⁵ In the course of a popular uprising, nonactivists, who once scarcely imagined criticizing the regime, can become activists willing to die for a cause. As these participants' words relay, this is a journey paved by an overcoming of fear and shame and a discovery of joy and pride. In other words, it is infused with emotions.

Kuran scarcely mentions emotions. Weyland and Varshney explicitly reject emotions as an explanatory factor, and equate them with irrationality.Footnote ³⁶ If there is an implied role for emotions in their theories, it is only in the “consequentialist” sense that rational people might factor future emotional benefits into their utility functions. They do not consider the impact of “immediate emotions” experienced at the moment of decision-making.Footnote ³⁷ That oversight contradicts decades of research in psychology and neuroscience that demonstrates that emotions are inextricably intertwined with thinking and action.Footnote ³⁸ It also ignores experiences that are clearly felt and articulated by participants and close observers of social movements, such as the Arab uprisings.Footnote ³⁹

Against those who bracket emotions, I posit an approach to microfoundations that puts them at the forefront. My aim is to employ what science has learned about emotions, as well as what the self-understandings of actors can teach us, in order to produce a richer and more psychologically nuanced understanding of politics. My approach finds support in the various subfields of political science.Footnote ⁴⁰ A body of research in American politics examines how emotions influence votingFootnote ⁴¹ responses to framing,Footnote ⁴² and the effects of campaign advertising,Footnote ⁴³ among other topics.Footnote ⁴⁴ Some writings in international relations consider emotions in interstate conflict and cooperation.Footnote ⁴⁵ Political philosophy from antiquity until the present has grappled with the relationship between passions and reason.Footnote ⁴⁶ Contemporary political theory has foregrounded themes of recognition, courage, and dignity, giving attention to their affective dimensions.

Closest to my own project, different waves of scholarship on social movements have addressed the role of emotions. Classical theories of collective behavior looked distrustfully upon the passions whipped up by crowd dynamics.Footnote ⁴⁷ Shedding such negative connotations, works in the 1970s argued that indignation was a psychologically and socially grounded response to perceived injustice, and hence a powerful motivator of rebellion.Footnote ⁴⁸ Since the 1990s, a new trend has explored the role of emotions in mobilization theoretically and empirically.Footnote ⁴⁹ Roger Petersen argues that emotions are resources that entrepreneurs strategically manipulated to mobilize ethnic violence in the Balkans. Elisabeth Wood attributes support for insurgency in El Salvador to moral commitments with affective meanings, such as the pleasure and pride found in participation, defiance, and agency.Footnote ⁵⁰ Deborah Gould's case study of the direct-action AIDS movement posits that visceral feelings influence political action or inaction by shaping people's sense of what is politically possible.Footnote ⁵¹ These and other studies support an argument that cuts to the foundations of political science: actors' articulations of fear, outrage, courage, and joy deserve to be taken seriously in their own terms. Moreover, doing so suggests a conception of individual behavior different than those which typically dominate the discipline.

Analyzing Emotions

Defining emotional terms is famously difficult. For my purposes here, I recognize that emotional experiences operate at the levels of individuals or groups, and can be short or long lasting. Adapting existing definitions, Figure 1 identifies four kinds of emotional experiences.

Figure 1 Four emotional experiences distinguished

Reflex emotions arise suddenly in encounter with the environment, but then subside and do not necessarily motivate future action.Footnote ⁵² When an emotion continues to influence a person's social interactions after it is experienced, it can be called an affective orientation. These individual experiences shape and are shaped by emotions experienced collectively. Crowd feelings emerge in interaction with a group and dissipate after that group has dispersed. Emotional climates are more amorphous moods that endure within a collective over time.Footnote ⁵³ The instability of transient emotions makes them subject to swift and powerful fluctuations. This changeability is an avenue through which contingent events can gain sudden causal impact. Idiosyncratic incidents are less likely to effect surprising changes in other variables pertinent for politics that evolve gradually, such as ideas or institutions. By contrast, enduring emotions change slowly and their influence carries over from one situation to another.Footnote ⁵⁴

External impetuses influence individuals' behavior by shaping their cognition and emotions. Emotions in turn influence both cognition and action in ways that are not reducible to external factors.Footnote ⁵⁵ Building on Petersen and others, I posit a causal chain that begins with a stimulus of some sort of new event or information. This causes people both to feel certain emotions and to prioritize particular values.Footnote ⁵⁶ I concentrate on two values: security, which is the most basic material interest, and dignity, a primary nonmaterial need. The triggered emotion and value priority re-enforce each other, and both encourage particular action tendencies (refer to Figure 2).

Figure 2 Causal process underlying emotional microfoundations

Four categories of neuroscientific findings elaborate the mechanisms connecting the components of this causal process. First, emotions infuse how people define interests. As Petersen explains, individuals have many desires and their ranking of these desires is not fixed. Rather, emotions affect that which is most salient at any juncture.Footnote ⁵⁷ In Ronald de Sousa's words, emotions are not reducible to beliefs or desires, but instead “set the agenda” for both. They “tip the balance between conflicting motivational structures, but they do so neither in a merely mechanical way nor merely by adding more reasons.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Second, emotions influence how people assess information. Emotions activate relatively automatic appraisal tendencies. These in turn lead individuals to focus on information relevant for or congruent with that appraisal and discount other information.Footnote ⁵⁹ Emotions therefore affect how people perceive new events and forecast the future.Footnote ⁶⁰ In shaping judgment, emotions appear to overpower nonemotive considerations more than vice versa. Joseph LeDoux explains that “emotions easily bump mundane facts out of awareness, but nonemotional events (like thoughts) do not so easily displace emotions from the mental spotlight.”Footnote ⁶¹ The implications resonate with Weyland's argument that eventful times can encourage erroneous inferences. However, this effect is due not only to the reliance of cognition on shortcuts, but also on the ways that cognition is influenced by emotions.

Third, once activated, emotions are powerful motivators of action.Footnote ⁶² For Lazarus, linkage to an action tendency, readiness, or impulse is what distinguishes an emotion from a nonemotion.Footnote ⁶³ Considerable, though not uncontroversial, evidence suggests that automatic emotional judgments are a primary engine of human behavior while slow, conscious calculations play a secondary role.Footnote ⁶⁴ The more intense the emotions, the more likely they are to supersede deliberative decision-making and exert a direct impact on behavior.Footnote ⁶⁵

Specific emotions influence motivation, appraisal, and action in systematic ways. In Table 1, the unshaded rows reference findings most relevant for the question of protest. I distinguish between two clusters of emotions, which I label dispiriting or emboldening. I propose that each is connected to a different value priority, identified in the top row. I also posit that each carries a different implication for the likelihood of participating in political resignation or resistance, as indicated in the final row.

Table 1 Emotions encouraging political resignation or resistance

Stimuli that emphasize the high value of security and that trigger emotions such as fear, sadness, and shame give rise to dispiriting effects. They increase individuals' tendencies to make pessimistic assessments, discount prospects of change, privilege information about danger, have a low sense of control, and avert risk. In consequence, these emotions encourage people to resign to political circumstances, even at the cost of accepting indignities. By contrast, stimuli that emphasize the value of dignity and that trigger emotions such as anger, joy, pride, and shame have emboldening effects. They expand one's sense of identity, and heighten attention to slights to that identity. They also promote optimistic assessments, a sense of personal efficacy, and risk acceptance. Such emotions increase an individual's likelihood of political resistance, even if it jeopardizes security.

These emotional microfoundations support a macropolitical argument: mass rebellion is improbable to the degree that dispiriting emotions prevail among a population, and emboldening emotions can drive defiance despite strategic disincentives. Relevant here is the relative intensity of dispiriting or emboldening emotions; one need not exist to the complete exclusion of the other. In fact, anger and fear are contrary, yet often oscillating adaptations to threat.Footnote ⁷¹ The question is thus not the conditions under which fear disappears, but under which people press on despite fear. As Bahraini activist Maryam Al-Khawaja said of the uprising in her country, “Everyone is afraid. What we need is not the absence of fear, the fear will always be there because we know what the regime is able to do. We try to overcome the fear. We want to fight despite our fear.”Footnote ⁷² The ability to overcome fear, Richard Avramenko argues, cannot be explained in terms of rational choice. “One does not choose to act courageously in a given situation. Instead one musters courage,” he writes. “Courageous actions emerge from beneath the liminality of reason.”Footnote ⁷³

What enables people to overcome fear? As Corey Robin argues, fear among the less powerful of the more powerful is endemic to society's various vertical cleavages. It is created or used by leaders to ensure that some groups submit to hierarchies while others benefit at their expense.Footnote ⁷⁴ Episodes of contention disrupt this pervasive, structural form of fear, yet can elicit other forms. Government repression sometimes frightens people and sometimes incites defiance, a variability contributing to what is dubbed the coercion-protest paradox. Analysis of emotions alone does not resolve this puzzle. However, it highlights an issue to which analysts should be attentive: the intertwining of fear and anger with a subjective sense of efficacy. In Nico Frijda's words, fear is the emotion of “uncertainty and lack of control” that renders it “of no use to stick your head out in efforts at control.”Footnote ⁷⁵ By contrast, anger is both an urge to fight and the sense that “fighting is meaningful.”Footnote ⁷⁶ For this reason, “anger implies hope.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Theodore Kemper similarly conceptualizes fear as the emotion produced by a “structural condition of insufficient power.”Footnote ⁷⁸ It is a “personal thwarting” that results in subjugation when no alternatives to subjugation are available.Footnote ⁷⁹ In contrast, anger stems from “hunger for … status and benefits denied” by another agent. Animosity is released when one feels worthy but does not receive due recognition or respect.. When anger is not expressed, however, people suffer both the original injury and the additional “loss of self-esteem by virtue of cowardice in taking the injury lying down.”Footnote ⁸⁰

If felt efficacy is a fulcrum distinguishing fear from anger, then dispiriting emotions dominate where people are unable to mobilize the hope to do other than submit to a threat. This may be the case where past experiences leave people fatigued and saddened. Alternatively, when people marshal the emotional resources to overcome fear, the initial trigger may lay in a “moral shock,” a deeply felt stimulus that sparks visceral reactions against a reprehensible reality.Footnote ⁸¹ Moral offenses have mobilizing power because indignation puts “fire in the belly and iron in the soul.”Footnote ⁸² Employing empirical findings from behavioral economics, Edna Ullmann-Margalit and Cass Sunstein argue that indignation can “lead the disadvantaged to disrupt an otherwise stable situation” of inequality or perceived injustice because they come to feel that they have “nothing to lose but their chains.” Objectively, “they do have something else to lose—the material payoff of the status quo—but … that material payoff … is worth less to them than the cost of remaining in a situation of perceived injustice.”Footnote ⁸³ Indignation can be analyzed from a rationalist perspective insofar as it entails a set of judgments about unacceptable actions. Yet it is also, irreducibly, an emotion.Footnote ⁸⁴ Though indignation does not burn indefinitely, it activates immediate appraisal and action tendencies that embolden behavior. It can therefore bring people to act in ways that neither conventional social science nor they themselves might have predicted.

The Authoritarian Context

In the Middle East, authoritarian regimes both produced and were reproduced at the macro-level in part by the dispiriting emotions that they generated in citizens at the micro-level. Under dictators such as Saddam Hussein, state violence generated mortal dread. “Terror struck deeper into the population,” Kanan Makiya wrote about his native Iraq, “withdrawal, cynicism, suspicion, and eventually pervasive fear replaced participation as the predominant psychological profile.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In hybrid autocracies such as Egypt, regimes subdued their populations through a combination of co-optation, monitoring, and physical coercion, while allowing controlled pluralism and limited freedom of expression. Those who gained privileges from the system feared losing those privileges. Those who did not were aware that, to find a job, resolve administrative matters, or just meet basic needs, they were best defer to power. Power-holders wielded fear as a tool for survival, enforcing it with security apparatuses and state discourses that warned that the alternative to the regime was chaos or Islamic radicalism. No less, fear was often self-enforced by people's dispirited sense that the status quo was unchangeable, and societally enforced by norms regarding those who fought it as foolish, if not reckless. In Nathan Brown's assessment, the prevailing sentiment in the Arab world was futility. For most people, “working for change was like fighting gravity … and so few tried.”Footnote ⁸⁶

The sense that politics was inevitably corrupt and corrupting imbued society with cynicism. John Waterbury's description of Morocco in the early 1970s offered a telling portrait of the region for decades thereafter:

In several countries, small forms of defiance contributed to emboldening emotions over time. Demonstrations on permissible foreign policy issues hinted at domestic discontent and showed a capacity for street politics. Satellite television, the Internet, and civil society activism expanded means for voicing criticism, as did episodic protests and strikes. These developments varied across the region and nowhere significantly undermined regime strength in terms of institutions, elite loyalty, and material resources. Nonetheless, precursor protests helped unmoor the dispiriting effects that cemented authoritarianism. In the words of one columnist, they prepared people for rebellion “at the level of their minds, hearts, mentalities, and political awareness, consciously or unconsciously.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Indignities accumulated, especially in those “republics” that once claimed a revolutionary, redistributive legitimacy, but by the twenty-first century offered citizens little more than “presidents-for-life.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Arab citizens often invoked the exasperated term “zahqna”—meaning that they were fed up and could not bear the status quo any longer.Footnote ⁹⁰ Yet most did bear it. In the 1970s, Waterbury observed that Moroccan “society appears to be ever on the verge of an explosion that never occurs.”Footnote ⁹¹ Forty years later, the same could arguably still be said about the region as a whole. Nonetheless, the “personal thwarting” that Kemper identified as anger without outlet remained the “volte-face potential” in everyday life under authoritarian rule.Footnote ⁹² Small shows of defiance tapped into that emotive power. If it could be harnessed en masse, a dispiriting emotional climate might be transformed into an emboldening one, and the social power unleashed would be tremendous.

Revolt in Tunisia

In December 2010, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali's 23-year rule appeared secure. In the book Tunisia: Stability and Reform in the Modern Maghreb, published that year, Christopher Alexander noted that “one is struck primarily by how little the substance of Tunisian politics has changed [over the past five decades].”Footnote ⁹³ Scholars attributed durable authoritarianism to a strong coercive apparatus, the loyalty of business elites, severe restrictions on free speech, and containment of opposition.Footnote ⁹⁴ No less important were affective orientations of fear and futility across society. One Tunisian explained that his compatriots opted for the safe path of “seeing nothing, hearing nothing, and saying nothing.”Footnote ⁹⁵ In a country where informants were everywhere and “even walls had ears,” citizens “used to look right and left before talking, even in private.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The urban middle classes typically “kept their heads down” and “checked out of politics.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Alexander wrote that, seeing no viable alternative to the status quo, “many Tunisians have simply given up on politics.”Footnote ⁹⁸

It was rational to resign to the status quo. However, doing so injected life with a pained sense of indignity. To live in Ben Ali's Tunisia was to deny the core values that Varshney predicts should motivate resistance. Sadri Khiari explains: “Each Tunisian was forced to be complicit with corruption to a certain degree. This phenomenon led to a form of collective and individual self-degradation … Multiple compromises, different ways of paying allegiance to power, even active participation in its networks … produced frustrations, humiliations, and feelings of disrespect for oneself and others.”Footnote ⁹⁹

In Kemper's terms, feelings of self-worth denied were a sign of introjected anger. Ordinary Tunisians were repulsed by the mafia-like immorality of the president, his wife, and their relatives, who treated the country as private property and its people “like serfs.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ A 2008 United States Embassy cable observed that “although petty corruption rankles, it is the excesses of President Ben Ali's family that inspire outrage among Tunisians.” The abuses of the president's wife and her family provoked “the greatest ire,” and conspicuous displays of wealth “added fuel to the fire.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Protests by students and the unemployed in the early 2000s vented such indignation, as did the 2008 and 2010 demonstrations that engulfed the impoverished Gafsa region.Footnote ¹⁰² Nonetheless, police crushed them before the explosive power of cumulative frustrations could spread and transform the resigned emotional climate dominating the country at large.

In December 2010, protests again erupted in the southern periphery. The spark was a self-immolation by street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi, after reportedly being insulted by a policewoman and failing to retrieve his confiscated wares. Bouazizi's sister described his death as a “rebellion against insult” pushed by “oppression, injustice, and despotism.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Though the act dramatized the particularly intense despair of unemployed youth, Tunisians from all walks of life empathized with the feelings of shame and frustration that animated it. “[Bouazizi] killed himself because he was humiliated,” an activist explained. “All the classes felt humiliation.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ For Mohammed Bamyeh, Bouazizi's “protest-suicide” allegorized the “extreme desperation and exasperation” of life without hope.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As a stimulus for others, it both intensified prioritization of the value of dignity and triggered righteous anger. The immolation embodied the essence of indignation, which some define as the feeling provoked “by an agent who, intentionally and without provocation or adequate reason, causes a victim to suffer harm.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ If there were ever such wanton and pitiless harm, it would seem to be authorities' denial of this man's “last meager resource … for leading a decent life.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Bouazizi's family and others marched in outrage that day. Police responded with beatings and tear gas, which provoked further indignation.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As riots spread to nearby towns, several others also publicly took their lives. One shouted “No to misery!” before electrocuting himself.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It is difficult to explain this protest as utility maximization. Rather, echoing Ullmann-Margalit and Sunstein's words, it was a “desperate rebellion … driven by indignation, not by a belief that it will have strategic advantages.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Given a choice between facing “Ben Ali's heavy hand” and accepting “an oppressive and impoverishing status quo,” these citizens were pushed toward the latter.Footnote ¹¹¹ No identifiable opening in the structure of opportunities propelled that choice. On the contrary, protest was “a response to a sense of closed possibilities,” if not “the absence of any opportunities whatsoever.”Footnote ¹¹²

Activists intervened to spread and sustain protest. Though political parties remained uninvolved, local members of unions and professional syndicates organized continued demonstrations and articulated increasingly political demands.Footnote ¹¹³ For decades, the regime had generally managed civil society organizations.Footnote ¹¹⁴ It was only in an emboldened emotional climate that they fulfilled their oppositional potential. Activists made a major contribution to the revolutionary cascade. However, this did not primarily lay, as Kuran argues, in exposing regime vulnerability, convincing people of the system's wrongs, or generating select incentives for participation.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Rather, one of their major roles was to urge nonactivists to find the courage to voice dissent. They did so in part by modeling that courage themselves. A sign at a lawyers' syndicate protest declared “After today, no more fear,”Footnote ¹¹⁶ The message was both plea and observation. For a Tunisian blogger, it “perfectly summed up” popular sentiment. He wrote that “Tunisians, who have been accustomed to being silent, afraid and obedient for decades, are finally taking their destiny in their own hand.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

Technology also played a role in these events. Citizens circumvented a government media blackout by filming protests with cellphones, posting videos online, and following updates on satellite television.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Yet means of communication were only as powerful as the emotional impact of that which they communicated. News and images were meaningful because they reenacted moral offenses and lay bare protestors' passions. Social media also helped larger circles of Tunisians muster courage. “Facebook allowed us to overcome our fear of the regime,” an activist remarked. “We felt like we belonged to a group which, even though it was virtual, would protect us.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ The safety offered by online networks was virtual, but its emboldening impact was real. In helping people to surmount fear, it encouraged optimistic judgments about the future and willingness to embrace risk.

After ten days, Ben Ali delivered a television address in which he dismissed protestors as extremists and mercenaries, and promised severe punishment. By then, police had killed two people and injured dozens. Repression, one protestor commented, was both “terrifying” and “provocative.”Footnote ¹²⁰ It tipped further in the direction of incendiary when regime forces killed 21 unarmed civilians in the western towns of Tala and Kasserine—including one seven month-old baby.Footnote ¹²¹ From January 8–12, snipers on rooftops fired on a funeral procession and riot police shot citizens at close range, some in the back of the head. Security forces stormed a women's bathhouse with tear gas and blocked its exits. Semi-clothed women and choking children barely managed to escape.Footnote ¹²² At a time when calm had largely returned to the south, this bloodletting reignited outrage and rebellion at large. An Arabic daily later reflected that

The massacres were a turning point. As an activist noted, Ben Ali's “fundamental mistake was thinking killing people would make others afraid.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Instead, the killings roused the indignation of the theretofore silent majority in the capital. A reporter noted that it “transformed what had been a regional uprising into a genuinely nationwide movement” and “pushed the middle classes of Tunis into the streets.”Footnote ¹²⁵

The growing emotional climate was one of righteous anger beyond fear. Desperate to turn the tide, the president again appeared on television and promised reform. “Ben Ali ruled by fear, and when he thus implied that his government would respond to the Tunisian street, he was no longer Ben Ali,” Eric Goldstein wrote.Footnote ¹²⁶ The dictator to be dreaded thus became a man to be defied. The transformation occurring at the grassroots forced change in key institutions. The leadership of the national trade union, the UGTT, had remained loyal to the president. Under pressure from local branches, however, it called for a general strike.Footnote ¹²⁷ Meanwhile, military leaders had decided not to fire at demonstrators, in part out of concern that soldiers might refuse orders.Footnote ¹²⁸ Beyond this, many shared civilians' resentment of the regime. Ben Ali showered his Presidential Guard with privileges, while leaving the regular army with poor pay, minimal benefits, and a dearth of equipment. In the words of one officer, “We were driven into beggardom by the Ben Ali regime.”Footnote ¹²⁹ According to the International Crisis Group, the army regarded the president's contempt as “a source of humiliation.”Footnote ¹³⁰

On January 12, protests reached the suburbs of Tunis. Youths threw stones at the police, while chanting, “We are not afraid, we are not afraid.”Footnote ¹³¹ The following day, hundreds “gleefully” ransacked the mansion of a presidential relative while police fled the scene. “Now, we can say we what we want,” one protestor described his emboldenment. “It has started to change.”Footnote ¹³² In the capital, meanwhile, union activist Wical Jaidi would recall being “terrified.”Footnote ¹³³ She was beaten by police at a demonstration but returned to protest everyday, nonetheless. In Kuran's terms, this self-identified “militante” had “fixed public preferences more or less consistent with private preferences.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Kuran might say that she fit his definition of activists as those who are “inclined to speak their minds even at the risk of severe punishment.”Footnote ¹³⁵

That would be accurate. However, Kuran's treatment of such risk acceptance as a straightforward cause of activism misses its significance as the outcome of emotional processes. Activism in oppressive circumstances is not an automatic extension of ideological commitment. It is a continued struggle to prevent fear from becoming a barrier to action. Kuran's description of activists as those who “obtain unusually high satisfaction from truthful self-expression”Footnote ¹³⁶ is thus very far from Jaidi's self-description of being “scared shitless.” On the eve of the revolt's end, she and a colleague were apprehended and brought to the dreaded Ministry of Interior. “It was such a fear that it has never really left me,” she recalled. “If we entered that door, we knew we would be raped and killed, and no one would ever hear what happened to us.”Footnote ¹³⁷

For these and other Tunisians, protest meant putting their lives on the line for the fight for dignity. Kuran and others recognize that risk acceptance varies across individuals.Footnote ¹³⁸ Yet they offer fewer clues about why a single individual manifests different willingness at different times, or why people might surprise themselves with their own daring. Nor do they elucidate how devoted revolutionaries come to marshal, in Avramenko's words, the courage to risk life and limb for something they care about fundamentally.Footnote ¹³⁹ If we do not devote analytical attention to such emotional struggles, we miss processes without which high-risk protest might never occur.

On January 14, the UGTT held its strike and some 10,000 Tunisians flooded the streets of the capital. Anger and pride were evident in defiant signs such as “Game Over” and “Liar, you have not have stopped the fire.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ It was further dramatized by those who climbed the walls of the Interior Ministry. That exuberant crowd feelings galvanized once unimaginable boldness suggests a “power in numbers” that went beyond the size of the crowd. Not mere arithmetic, the joy of acting in concert gave the assembly a force greater than the sum of its parts. Many of these citizens had previously been demobilized by feelings of helplessness before an amorphous and unfixable system. Emboldened, they targeted their grievances directly at its figurehead. Their doing so demonstrated an appraisal tendency associated with anger rather than sadness. It also illustrated findings that the more specifically people pinpoint blame for injustice, the greater their inclination to protest.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Blame could not have been more narrowly attributed for the thousands of Tunisians who defaced the president's picture and chanted, “Ben Ali dégage!”—Ben Ali, get lost.

Mass mobilization created new pressures upon the army, which intervened against Ben Ali. He fled that night. The weeks that followed were enveloped in uncertainty as governments fell and all aspects of politics came under debate. Yet one thing was not in flux: the shift in the emotional climate of politics. A Tunisian diplomat was overwhelmed by the transformation in his homeland. Once omnipresent, the sense of “oppressive fear … was palpably absent.”Footnote ¹⁴² On the first anniversary of Ben Ali's departure, a correspondent noted that “many Tunisians feel that their liberation from fear is the most important achievement of this revolution.”Footnote ¹⁴³ When a Tunisian director produced the first major documentary about the uprising, he gave it a simple title that encapsulated both its defining trait and its hope for the future: “No More Fear.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Revolt in Egypt

By 2011, Egypt was characterized by pervasive discontent due to unemployment, corruption, inequality, police brutality, rigged elections, crumbling infrastructure, and the specter of an octogenarian president's succession by his son.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Nonetheless, Hosni Mubarak's 30-year reign appeared immune. Scholars attributed its durability to a strong coercive apparatus,Footnote ¹⁴⁶ cohesive ruling party,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ and institutionalized clientelism.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ These elements generally curtailed opposition and forestalled elite splits. “Mubarak's structures of dominion were thought to be foolproof,” Mona El-Ghobashy summarized. “And for 30 years they were.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Yet regime stability was not attributable to institutional mechanisms alone. In the words of one analyst, Mubarak was “basically ruling via apathy.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Ashraf Khalil explains that Mubarak so disrespected Egyptians that they lost respect for themselves, and with it any sense of being able to make change:

Affronts to basic values did not inspire collective action, as Varshney would predict, as much as a pervasive sense of futility. This was articulated in popular expressions such as “walk next to the wall,” which cautioned people to avoid politics and focus on feeding their families,Footnote ¹⁵² and “buy back your brain,” which warned that only dupes dreamt of something better.Footnote ¹⁵³ Political activity seemed “useless.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Fouad Adjami lamented “the lapse of the country's best into apathy and despair.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Dispirited emotions became a pillar of durable autocracy. Still, a daring to speak out developed from the bottom up. Increasingly after 2000, unions, non-governmental organizations, youth movements, and opposition parties mounted protests.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The reformist Kefaya (Enough) party broke taboos by confronting power-holders directly. Activists used the Internet to voice dissent and cultivate domestic and international networks.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Exposure of police brutality and other abuses, such as the 2010 torture and killing of Khalid Said, reached large audiences. Nonetheless, a strong civil society met its match in a strong regime.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Though grassroots efforts chipped away at feelings of fear and futility, Egyptians continued to joke that the only place where they could open their mouths was at the dentist's.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Even activists admitted hopelessness. “I used to believe … that revolution is the answer,” an oppositionist said in 2005. “But our people are not cut out for revolution.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰

In this context, the impact of Ben Ali's resignation was profound. Weyland argues that the stunning events in Tunisia made Egyptians abandon “prudence and caution” and “[jump] to the conclusion that they could repeat a similar feat in their own country.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ In contrast, I propose that Tunisia's primary effect upon Egypt, as upon the rest of the Arab world, was an emotional jolt. It was a stimulus that intensified the value of dignity and triggered emboldening affects. Many Egyptians felt a mixture of pride and joy in what Tunisians had accomplished, and embarrassment and envy that Egyptians—who prided themselves in being leaders of the Arab world—had not done so first. “Machismo played a big part,” an Egyptian blogger admitted. “Egyptians looked at Tunisia and said, ‘Wait that's possible? And you're just … Tunisia! We're Egypt!’”Footnote ¹⁶² Activist Asmaa Mahfouz directly harnessed such emotions of pride and shame in a viral YouTube video in which she challenged her compatriots: “If you have honor and dignity as a man, then come out [to protest].”Footnote ¹⁶³

As importantly, Tunisia gave Egyptians hope. In demonstrating the once “unthinkable” truth that mass protest could force a dictator to resign, it “unblocked something in [their] psyches.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ As discussed earlier, Lazarus defines hope as an emotion that means “wishing … for the realization of a positive outcome when the odds do no greatly favor it.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ That Egyptians were aware of sobering odds was manifest in the expression that many repeated at the time, “Egypt is not Tunisia.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ At the same time, Tunisia offered a lesson that even veteran Egyptian statesman Amr Mousssa dubbed “obvious.” It made clear, he said, that “people will no longer accept to be marginalized and pressurized like this.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Egyptian activists sought to rally feelings of hope as they urged people to participate in the annual demonstration called for Police Day, January 25, 2011. Whereas Weyland depicts Egyptians as driven by a sense of certainty that they would succeed, closer examination reveals what Lazarus identifies as hope's defining components: uncertainty and yearning.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Though some 80,000 people pledged on Facebook that they would attend, the history of prior protests suggested that most would not turn up.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ A prominent blogger-activist later conceded that “I have to admit, a few days earlier I wasn't taking it seriously.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ An organizer recalled, “We went out to protest that day and expected to be arrested in the first ten minutes, just like usual.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ A young Egyptian described the uncertain days prior to January 25 as ones in which “everyone was contemplating whether to go or not and asking each other whether they were going.”Footnote ¹⁷² Tweets in the wee hours of the night revealed nervous anticipation. “Scared, excited and hopeful,” an activist tweeted just before midnight. “Yes, I'm worried about tomorrow. Which is exactly why I am going,” another replied.Footnote ¹⁷³ These testimonies question the usefulness of Kuran's argument that, given private preferences, people's revelation of dissent depends on the expected level of public opposition. In the Egyptian case, as Charles Kurzman said of the Iranian Revolution, people struggled to predict turnout, but found it exceedingly difficult to gauge.Footnote ¹⁷⁴

Hence, as in other countries, Egypt's “Day of Revolt” did not begin with explosive anger as much as trepidation.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ By day's end, some 20,000 people stunned the police by converging on Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. The record-breaking turnout cannot be attributed to organizational structures and social networks, as many demonstrators lacked prior contact to dissident movements. “There may be a core of activists who have been preparing for this day,” Issander El-Amrani noted. “But they are outnumbered by people who are there just because they have had enough.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Hani Shukrallah added, “The revolution, virtually in the blink of an eye, went far beyond the scope and political and organizational capacities of both the young people who triggered it and the old people who lead the various opposition political parties.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷

The day was a turning point. “Egyptians were liberated from addiction to fear,” an Egyptian filmmaker reflected. “That is the difference between pre- and post-January 25, 2011.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Video footage showed demonstrators daring to shout at police, strangers chanting in unison, and a buoyant woman calling that day the happiest of her life.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Echoing findings that emotional gratification is stronger when it comes as a surprise,Footnote ¹⁸⁰ protestors' pride and joy were intensified by the fact that the large attendance was unexpected. “I was shocked. Everyone was,” an activist recalled. “I had an ear-to-ear smile on the whole day.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ Even the Interior Minister later testified to being “astonished” by a “situation … beyond imagination”: the sight of such “angry people and indescribable hatred of the government.”Footnote ¹⁸² A lieutenant colonel was flabbergasted. “A young man standing in front of an armored vehicle, jumping on it to strike it, falling off and then doing it again?” he exclaimed. “Honestly, there was no fear.”Footnote ¹⁸³

Building on this emotional surge, organizers called for another demonstration on January 28. Targeting still other emboldening emotions, they dubbed it “Day of Rage.” Demonstrations again began throughout city and marched toward Tahrir. A massive security deployment fired tear gas and water canons, but “enraged” crowds pushed forward and pounded them with rocks. One participant described the power of their indignation saying, “Some people were ready to eat [security cadres] alive.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Eventually, some troops abandoned their vehicles and fled. Khalil identified this as the “exact turning point” that fear collapsed. Protestors outnumbered police, who realized that they no longer deterred dissent. The change in the balance of forces was not the result of a slow shift in political structures.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ “In an instant,” Khalil wrote, “the fearsome and hated bullies of the Interior Ministry had become pathetic and irrelevant.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ The emotions inspired by that second mass protest were captured in a video from a solidarity demonstration in London the next day. Weeping in joy, an expatriate thanked the heroes of his homeland for doing what he never imagined possible in his lifetime.Footnote ¹⁸⁷

The military's decision not to turn guns against the people undoubtedly lowered the costs of protest from what they otherwise might have been. Yet other security forces, as well as paid thugs, did not shy from physical force. By revolt's end, more than 800 would be killed, 6,000 injured, and 12,000 arrested. In unleashing violence, the regime attempted to rekindle dispiriting emotions. The rebellion, in turn, extracted pride from death by honoring the courage of martyrs and singing songs such as “Cursed be fear, oh God.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸ The regime tried to generate chaos by setting prisoners free and withdrawing police from the streets. In a new spirit of community, citizens formed watch groups to protect their neighborhoods. Mubarak appealed to empathy by citing his history of service and offering concessions. Protestors received these words as insults. In this way, much of the action-reaction dynamic of the regime and its challengers was emotional in content. Even Mubarak's severing of communications technology on the uprising's fourth day affected emotions as much as logistics. “When I woke up … and there was no net or mobile phone coverage, that's when I got really mad,” one Cairo resident explained.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

Protestors occupied Tahrir and resolved to stay until the president resigned. Signs quickly filled the square with messages that, ranging from witty to indignant, expressed and embodied the shift from a dispirited to an emboldened emotional climate. Some conveyed remorse for the prior decades of submission, pleading, “Forgive me Lord, I was afraid and silent” or “My country, I'm sorry it took me so long.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Others testified to the sense of participation as a kind of rebirth. A mock identity card read, “Name: Citizen; Place of birth: Tahrir Square; Date of birth: 25 January 2011.”Footnote ¹⁹¹ These messages were consistent with the shift from preference falsification to voice that Kuran theorizes, but go beyond in communicating the emotions that render it not simply a choice, but rather a process of personal transformation. Transformation, unlike choice, carried a sense of refusing to go back to the way things had once been. A poster announced, “I would rather die in Tahrir Square than have you govern me and live in humiliation.”Footnote ¹⁹²

As in Tunisia, chants directed toward the president the contempt that people felt he long showed them. The flipside of animosity for Mubarak were citizens' new feelings of solidarity toward each other. Egyptians donated blood, medicine, food, and other materials to sustain the uprising. These acts, as well as the energy produced by demonstrating together, generated an emotional climate that was the antithesis of the cloud previously cast. Many in the square were “shocked” to realize both the extent of their alienation from their compatriots and the gratification that they found in joining with diverse sectors of society. “I had been asking myself, where are the Egyptians? I came here and I found them,” a protestor said of Tahrir.Footnote ¹⁹³ Another agreed. “My relationship to the country has transformed … People never used to talk to one another. This has been broken.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Such feelings recruited and sustained participation, despite risks and weak pre-existing personal ties.

Many who participated did so not only to challenge the regime, but also to rebuild society on better values. In rallying with others, some felt exhilaration that they were already doing so, from the ground up. In Ahdaf Soueif's words, the revolution “brought out the best in us and showed us not just what we could do but how we could be.”Footnote ¹⁹⁵ The sense of unfolding change was experienced individually as well as socially. “Protestors not only transformed [Tahrir],” Khalil posited. “They were themselves transformed by their presence in it.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶ “I learned to say no, I am not a coward anymore,” explained a 40-year-old who camped in Tahrir. “I am Egyptian again, not marginalized, not without value or dignity.”Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Kuran would describe these individuals as revealing preferences to the public; they described themselves as discovering determination that they did not know resided within them.

The uprising lost momentum as a standoff disappointed hopes for swift victory. February 8 brought another emotional turning point. Millions of Egyptians viewed a televised interview with Wael Ghonim, the creator of the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook page, just hours after his release from detention. Shown photographs of protestors killed, Ghonim burst into tears and walked off the set. His breakdown inspired tremendous sympathy, especially among those middle class Egyptians who identified with Ghonim yet had not joined the uprising. The interview, Mona Eltahawy tweeted, gave the revolution “a shot of adrenaline in the heart.”Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Though the effect on protest numbers eludes precise measurement, many in Tahrir the next day said that the interview had moved them to participate,Footnote ¹⁹⁹ some for the first time.Footnote ²⁰⁰ One newcomer remarked:

This 16-year-old demonstrated an awareness of the free-rider problem: some were bearing the burden for public goods that all would enjoy. She knew what a narrow sense of self-interest deemed rational, yet purposefully rejected that choice. A 22-year-old echoed her sentiments. “Someone had to stand up and say ‘enough is enough’—and that is why I decided to take part in the revolution,” he explained. “At first I was afraid to take part. But, as I realised the demands of the revolution were my own demands, I was willing to pay whatever price.”Footnote ²⁰² These protestors made no reference to reputational concerns, as Kuran posits, or belief in near victory, as Weyland suggests. They recognized that participation carried significant risks and uncertain benefits, but pledged to face them, regardless.

Protest continued, as did international pressure and the army's assessment that Mubarak had become a liability. On February 10, news circulated that Mubarak was to announce his resignation. A celebratory mood took shape as hundreds of thousands gathered in Tahrir for the televised address. Yet when Mubarak finally appeared, he refused to step down. Some Egyptians were moved by his emotional appeals to patriotism and loyalty. In Tahrir, however, the crash of palpable optimism into rage warned of pending escalation.Footnote ²⁰³

Military leaders realized that intervention was in order. The next day Mubarak's resignation was announced. The response across the country was euphoric. Egyptians took to the streets and exchanged congratulations with an expression that confirmed a revolution in emotions had accompanied Mubarak's fall. Whereas people once advised bowing their heads shamefully, they now exclaimed, “Lift your head, you are Egyptian.”

This analysis of the emotional dimensions of the Egyptian uprising complements, rather than discounts, appreciation of its rational and organizational components. That Egyptian protestors were feeling subjects does not deny that they were also strategically adroit, particularly in avoiding violence and divisive ideological issues.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Emotions affected protestors' appraisals of changing circumstances and willingness to assume risk. They embodied the uprising insofar as they deprived the authoritarian system of the sentiments that underpinned it. “Reservoirs of confidence, creativity and empowerment emerged which some feared had been lost forever,” Khalil wrote.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Adjami penned a similar observation. His 1995 essay had been titled “The Sorrows of Egypt.” A commentary after the revolt came under the headline, “How the Arabs Turned Shame Into Liberty.”Footnote ²⁰⁶

Non-Revolt in Algeria

Algeria shared with Egypt and Tunisia not only collective identity and geographic proximity, but also many of the problems that drove rebellion. Its citizens suffered poor living standards, socio-economic inequality, domination by a single ruling party, and widespread corruption.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Some 70 percent of the population was under the age of 30, and unofficial estimates put unemployment above 30 percent.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Algerians were so familiar with the indignities of unaccountable and abusive government that they coined their own term, hogra, to express rulers' contempt for the ruled.

These grievances were the backdrop to some 11,500 riots and demonstrations in 2010 alone.Footnote ²⁰⁹ In early 2011, when Tunisian protests were in their second week, the Algerian government enacted a price increase that sparked days of rioting. Indeed, a comparison of Algeria and Tunisia during the first week of January arguably showed the former to be more poised for nationwide revolt than the latter.Footnote ²¹⁰ Demonstrations and strikes continued throughout the year, with more than 100 Algerians setting themselves on fire.Footnote ²¹¹ Nonetheless, protest never went beyond localized or sporadic and expressions of discontent. Despite efforts by an opposition coalition, they did not mobilize mass participation or seriously threaten ruling authorities.Footnote ²¹²

Scholars offer various explanations for the absence of an “Algerian spring.” Some cite the opaque and oligarchic nature of regime leadership, dubbed le pouvoir (the power).Footnote ²¹³ Whereas centralization of authority in the authoritarian president gave rebellion a unifying target in Tunisia or Egypt, Algerians' were demobilized by a murky ruling structure. This logic arguably also applies in Syria. There masses rebelled even though regime power was invested in a network of elites and institutions as much as a single individual. Others contend that the Algerian regime dampened discontent by using oil and gas rents to subsidize public services, staple goods, and loans.Footnote ²¹⁴ The government increased social spending when protests began in 2011. It also rescinded the unpopular price hikes, ended the 19-year state of emergency, authorized new political parties, and announced parliamentary elections.Footnote ²¹⁵ Conciliatory measures certainly played a role in curbing revolutionary momentum. Yet we are left to wonder why concessions failed to mollify protestors in other autocracies, or why rentier politics did not prevent uprisings in Libya or Bahrain.

A third argument credits large deployments of well-trained police for containing demonstrations with minimal bloodshed.Footnote ²¹⁶ However, the fact that police sometimes outnumbered protestors raises the question of why sweeping participation did not instead overwhelm deployments, as happened in Egypt and Tunisia. Finally, some claim that fractures in civil society compounded a lack of unity and organization in the national opposition.Footnote ²¹⁷ That Berber uprisings in 1980 and 2001 centered on cultural and linguistic rights forecasted the difficulty of rallying all Algerians under a single banner. Yet social fragmentation did not prevent national revolts elsewhere, as seen in Yemen and Libya despite tribal divisions, or in Syria despite sectarian cleavages.

Tellingly, the authors of these competing explanations, like those of dozens of other academic or journalistic analysis, uniformly mention another reason why mass protest did not gather momentum: fear.Footnote ²¹⁸ In 1988, tens of thousands of Algerians participated in cost-of-living riots. The government responded with shocking repression, after which it granted extensive new civil liberties and multiparty elections. An outpouring of optimism and energy accompanied what appeared to be the Arab world's first democratic transition. The opposition Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) triumphed in the first round of elections in 1991. It was likewise assured to win the second round when the military seized power, canceled elections, and declared a state of emergency. A brutal civil war ensued between the government and various Islamist rebel groups. Some 100,000 Algerians were killed and 7,000 disappeared before conflict waned by 2002.

Today, in Fareed Frahi's words, “memories of blood are still fresh in Algerians' minds.”Footnote ²¹⁹ The war is a “ghost” that haunts the population and leaves it with no “appetite” for radical change.Footnote ²²⁰ “To put it simply,” an Al-Jazeera investigation summarized, “people are scared.”Footnote ²²¹ Such an affective orientation is particularly prominent among young people. The generation that led defiance in neighboring states is, in Algeria, scarred by childhoods of witnessing bloodshed. A 23-year old explains:

Fear, both as an individual orientation and an emotional climate, dampened the will to rebel by leading Algerians to prioritize security above other values. “Even if we would like to fight against corruption, for justice, freedom and democracy, Algerians are still traumatized,” psychology professor Cherifa Salhi explained. “We need more time to overcome the effect of ten years of violence.”Footnote ²²³ In the words of another Algerian, “the people who died have died … and the ones that are left behind just want to live in peace.”Footnote ²²⁴

Dispiriting emotions were both cause and effect of people's appraisals of information. Many Algerians felt that they already had their Arab spring and concluded that a seeming blossoming of democratic possibility can carry seeds of disaster.Footnote ²²⁵ Looking around them at other rebellions in 2011, they were more likely to derive lessons congruent with that pre-existing fear. This was distinct from Egyptians, who gained emboldening inspiration from events in Tunisia, and Yemenis, Bahrainis, Libyans, and Syrians, who gained inspiration from Egypt. By contrast, many Algerians focused less on triumphant people's power than the resultant “messy transitions.” Events in the region thus only “strengthened” their own trepidation.Footnote ²²⁶ A columnist in an Algerian daily noted that his compatriots “feared the repetition of a tragic experience, some of the facets of which are now being seen in certain Arab countries.”Footnote ²²⁷ The violent Libyan experience was particularly foreboding. “We dislike what happened in Libya,” an Algerian citizen explained. “We cannot again go through this kind of problem.”Footnote ²²⁸ Foreign intervention in Libya also rekindled emotional memories of Algerians' own colonial experience. “We don't need to go down the route of the Libyan disaster,” an Algerian expatriate paraphrased the sentiments of his family back home. “We don't want the France we expelled in 1962 to come back to our country.”Footnote ²²⁹

The Algerian government took advantage of and worked to reinforce these popular fears.Footnote ²³⁰ Hence, against Weyland's argument, revolution in one country did not trigger overly optimistic inferences everywhere in the region. Weyland argues that cognitive heuristics made people throughout the Arab world “willing to throw caution to the wind.”Footnote ²³¹ Algerians, however, may have clung to caution to an undue degree. Their words suggest what Weyland does not consider: that interpretations of information are colored by both cognition and emotion, and thus may vary in accord with the emotional climates dominant at any time and place.

The emotional climate in Algeria increased aversion to risk, and hence a tendency toward resignation rather than resistance. In May 2012, parliamentary elections unfolded without event even though, in the words of one Algerian, they were but “a theatrical production prepared by innovators in the art of corruption.”Footnote ²³² Algerians suffered an “atmosphere of political suffocation”Footnote ²³³ no less than their brethren in countries that launched uprisings. Yet most preferred the known problems of the status quo to the terrifying uncertainty of renewed instability.

The Case for Emotional Microfoundations

Charles Kurzman asks, “What would happen if we not only recognize meaning-making as an important facet of social movement mobilizations, but privilege it as the central feature of such phenomena?”Footnote ²³⁴ In taking up this question in the case of the Arab uprisings, I aim to use these historic events as an opportunity to intervene in disciplinary conversations about the microfoundations that underpin contentious politics. Two dominant approaches respectively envision people as utility-optimizers or self-actualizers. Elaborated formulations of each, such as bounded rationality and value rationality, offer nuance. I argue for an even more psychologically inflected conceptualization of individuals as guided by both cognitive appraisals of information and emotional experiences. I take my lead from testimonials from the Middle East and North Africa. Citizens under authoritarian regimes were rational either to submit to authoritarianism or to rebel against it, so rationality alone cannot fully explain their behavior. Emotions also played a role, which was neither reducible to values nor epiphenomenal to information. Different emotions shaped people's sense of what mattered most, as well as how they made sense of external cues, judged the future, and approached risk.

Under some circumstances, an approach to microfoundations that accentuates emotions generates predictions distinct from those that emphasize instrumental or value rationality. Under others, it produces similar predictions, but attributes them to causal mechanisms that are potentially more consistent with psychology research and actors' self-understandings. In either case, it can help explain anomalies left unexplained by theories that build on other microfoundations. The cultural value of dignity was similar across countries that did or did not revolt, while the prospective costs and benefits of protest varied considerably among those that did. In some countries, such as Egypt, criticism and protest emboldened society in small ways prior to 2011. Yet in others, such as Syria, silence reigned. In some countries, such as Tunisia, armies' refusal to shoot demonstrators widened the space for defiance. Yet in others, such as Bahrain, military forces led brutal crackdowns. In some cases, such as unions in Tunisia, formal opposition groups were important in aiding protest. Yet in Yemen, they joined only after revolt was underway, and in Libya, scarcely existed. From online communities to extended families, social networks helped recruit protestors across the region. Yet these informal ties existed before 2010 and appeared compatible with general resignation to authoritarianism … until they were not.

What uprisings across the Arab world held in common, and what distinguished them from the past, was the dramatic transformation from dispiriting to emboldening emotions evidenced by large portions of the population—especially those who had never before participated in public resistance. Repression generated an indignation that gave energy and courage to resisters. Emboldened by uniting with others and hopeful about the potential for change, people intensified their demands to the once unimaginable overthrow of the regime. These emotive experiences were not simply calculated or organized. Nor were they a mere byproduct of structural or strategic conditions. Rather, they helped change those conditions by propelling people into the streets and thereby altering—suddenly and shockingly—the balance of power between regime and opposition.

Future research can develop these themes by examining the role of emotions as causes, effects, or mechanisms linking contentious processes. It can explore different forms of evidence of emotions and study how emotions interact with other factors of causal import. New investigations can also advance knowledge about current developments in the Middle East by exploring a larger range of emotions. My interest in the initial shift from resignation to resistance leads to a focus on emboldenment. Others can follow the lead of Petersen and others, and probe darker emotions such as hatred, resentment, and desire for revenge. Research can also follow what happens when the provocative effects of moral shocks fade or ephemeral exhilaration evolves into disillusionment. The Egyptian filmmaker who described his compatriots as addicted to fear proposed that, 16 months after the revolution, they had become addicted to anxiety.Footnote ²³⁵ At its two-year anniversary, feelings of dashed hopes rendered the dominant mood one of ihbat, or being weighted down by frustration.Footnote ²³⁶ In Tunisia, meanwhile, a renewal of old affects motivated recurrent protest in the impoverished south. “There is a feeling that we are just not paid attention to, that no-one cares about our problems here, that no-one really respects us,” one demonstrator said in late 2010.Footnote ²³⁷ These analyses remind us that ever evolving events shape emotions, and vice versa. Investigation of the two in tandem can yield new understandings of politics.

The outcomes of the Arab uprisings remain uncertain. As of this writing, elements of old regimes retain power in many countries and civil violence rages in others. The euphoria of revolutionary victory is an increasingly distant memory. Still, something fundamental has changed in the politics of the Middle East and North Africa. In the old order, elites took societal acquiescence for granted and citizens regarded mass protest as unimaginable. The emotions that cemented those assumptions, and likewise the rules of the political game constructed upon them, have dissipated—at least for now. Even if new rules prove no less friendly to democracy, the emotions that they generate are unlikely to be an exact replica of the past. This may be the most profound legacy of the Arab revolts.