Protesters acting against repressive regimes face a particular problem: the tools they use to organize demonstrations can also be deployed to repress their actions. For example, when citizens communicate on the Internet to plan a protest, a ruling regime can access this information and be prepared to break up the demonstration. so what
What happens next, according to MIT political scientist Mai Hassan, is that protesters can engage in “coordinated discoordination,” as she calls it, finding ways to quickly create new demonstrations, sidestep security forces, and keep movements active social, even in face. of the regimes that work to stop them.
“People need to be on the same page for any kind of anti-regime mobilization to happen, and that’s easier to do through a formal organization like a trade union or an opposition political party, or in recent years, Internet, including Facebook or Twitter events,” says Hassan. “But that only causes a fundamental tension, which is that dissidents become identifiable and can be found by the very regime they’re trying to overcome. How do you organize when the organization makes it easier for the regime to engage in repression?
Hassan has written about this topic in a new article based on research he did on the ground in Sudan in recent years, where public movements emerged in protest against former autocratic ruler Omar al-Bashir. By interviewing many protesters and studying their tactics, he was able to identify protest dynamics that would otherwise not be visible. He concluded, as he writes in the document, that “social protest movements must perpetually innovate.”
The open access document, “Coordinated incoordination,” appears in advance online in the American Political Science Review. Hassan is the sole author.
Hassan conducted his research from December 2018 to December 2019, interviewing more than 100 focus groups and individuals involved in the protest movement against al-Bashir, who had seized power in 1989. It took time to identify some key leaders of the protest and talk to people. trying to keep a low profile in certain respects; some belonged to what the Sudanese call “Lijān,” or informal neighborhood resistance committees in greater Khartoum, by far the largest metropolitan area in Sudan.
What emerged from Hassan’s research is not a quantitative study, although this is characteristic of much of his other work, which has often examined rights and politics in Kenya’s recent history. It is, however, an empirical study of fleeting and evolving protest tactics that have proven difficult to capture through traditional forms of political science measurement.
As Hassan observed, the largest protest group in Sudan at the time was a loose alliance of formal groups and interests called the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), which organized many of the largest protest events. But as Sudanese government security forces began to closely monitor and compartmentalize these events, grassroots participants began to organically invent what Hassan calls “parallel” activities in addition to these main events.
Hassan observed two main types of activities that protesters used as they adapted to the regime’s security efforts. One, which she calls “stirring,” was the rather spontaneous formation of protest events, at the same time as large pre-planned gatherings, but in various locations in the urban area, to take advantage of the heavy security focus on major events. In this way, more protests could occur with a lower proportion of police forces present.
Second, protesters began organizing what she calls “takhfīf,” or alternative demonstrations that would emerge once police forces began breaking up planned events. Here, the precise objective was to draw security forces away from events where the response had begun to turn violent. (The word “takhfīf” means “lighten” or “reduce” in Arabic, as in reducing the burden of the main demonstration.) Protesters often briefly used social media platforms or other communication technologies to gather information about the state of a demonstration and decide. if they should initiate a takhfīf event.
“These people are really brave and innovative,” observes Hassan. “These ideas arose among different lijāns. They were not centrally organized by the FFC.”
A necessary condition of this dynamic, Hassan points out, is that Sudan has existed as a rather weak state, without enormous social control or the great capacity to severely repress protest movements.
“Many dissidents were engaged in a cat-and-mouse game against the regime, trying to wear down the regime,” says Hassan. “They constantly reiterated that they were facing a weak state, that the regime was not strong. Some of these officers cracking down on them were their neighbors, and they could see that the officers’ wives were no longer buying clothes or buying the best cuts of meat at the grocery store. People got the idea that with their salaries going down, officer morale must go down, so the campaigners’ idea was that we have to wear them down.”
Even if Sudanese-style protest tactics cannot work everywhere, a key point of Hassan’s study is to capture their evolution over a short period of time, to chronicle how they these adaptations are necessary.
Many scholars have studied the “Arab Spring” protests in the early 2010s, for example, and concluded that social media platforms were vital to these mass demonstrations. But once authoritarian regimes noticed that protesters were organizing on, say, Facebook, they quickly began cracking down on those efforts.
“A lot of [research] in the Arab Spring examines the role of social media, and yes it played a role and caught some regimes off guard, but that’s only going to happen once,” Hassan says. His question is: How can protesters sustain themselves after regimes have become more social media savvy? The Sudanese case is one example, but Hassan hopes that scholars will continue to examine the evolution of social movements globally, noting that changes are needed and constant innovations in their tactics.
“It’s not that the repression makes all the movements get involved in this [precise] tactics,” says Hassan. “It’s that repression will force people to participate in tactics that we haven’t thought of yet. If people mobilize in a particular way, the regime has the opportunity to learn and prevent that form of mobilization to occur. In a sense, protest tactics must be random and unpredictable to work.”
