 Great. All right. Thanks. Great to be here. Thanks all of you for being here for, I think, the last panel of the conference and I'm really excited to be part of this panel. I'm also not sure quite how this paper fits into the broader theme, but it's generally anything about resistance and agency. So this is about revolutions and unarmed resistance. We've heard several papers on armed and violent resistance. This is co-authored work with Chantal Berman, who's a professor at Georgetown where I am as well, and Rima Majid, who is at the American University of Beirut. In contrast to some of the earlier presentations, this is very, very early stage work. So we don't have a book. We barely have a paper, actually. And so we're at the stage of sort of very open ideas, not quite sure where we're going with the project, have some theoretical ideas about where we want to go, but really open to feedback. So looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this. So the title of the talk is Revolution and Democracies, the 2019 uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq. So we're dealing with two cases here, two recent cases of unarmed, what we're calling revolutions or uprisings. The first is the Lebanese Thaurah, which took place between October and March 2019 and 2020, and then almost at exactly the same time we had an uprising in neighboring Iraq, the Tishrian uprising. And so we're looking at these two cases in comparative perspective. In terms of situating these cases, we think that, you know, there's some data now coming out that at least, you know, sort of speculative data that 2019 was really a sort of unusual year. There was a really major wave of uprisings in 2019, and also part of a recent decade of really sort of unusual levels of uprising and protests globally. Some have called this wave of protests unprecedented. We're not sure. The data's not great, but it certainly seems like we're in a sort of unique moment where we see a lot of revolutionary mobilization around the world. So here's just one representation from one of the many data sets that sort of claims to be documenting this. And these uprisings sort of are part of this wave. One of the interesting things about this recent wave of uprisings is that many of them are occurring in nominally democratic states. So these are countries that do have elections. They are democracies. The elections are generally free and fair, more or less. There is competition. But as I'm going to get to, they're problematic in many respects as well. So here are some examples. 2017 in Romania, Bolivia in 2019, Guatemala in 2015, Nigeria in 2020. So these are uprisings that are happening all over the world. They're clustering in certain regions, particularly in Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the Balkans. But we think there's something interesting and new going on here. And this is showing up in some of the data sets that are documenting this. So this is from a recent data set that's just been published. Happens to be by my advisor, Mark Beisinger. He's got a book coming out in October. And he's built a data set of revolutions globally starting in 1900 to 2020. And what this shows here is a simple bar plot that basically shows the number of revolutions that he's documented that are occurring in countries with a polity score above five. So according to polity, these are democracies. And as you can see, there's very little of these types of revolutions or uprisings historically up until about the 1990s. But then we start to see something new in the 2000s and particularly in the most recent decade in the 2010s. So we do think there's something interesting and unusual, a trend going on here that needs to be unpacked and accounted for. Now, of course, this is theoretically not really supposed to happen. So let me just go through. There's basically three quotes from three famous revolution scholars of different generations all saying that revolutions should not take place in democracies. And the reasons are intuitive and obvious. Why would you go out into the street and protest and call for the overthrow of the government when you can more easily wait until an election comes around and vote the government out? So that's the logic of why revolutions normally should not take place in these types of regime contexts. But what we see is that these are regimes in which democracy exists in a sort of Schumpeterian minimal sense that they have elections. But they're very problematic. We're calling them broken democracies, right? And these are themes that we all know well. So they have competitive elections. There's little fraud. There are few regularities. But the governments that they produce have these sort of collusive tendencies. They result in these what Slater and Simmons call party cartels, where there's very little difference in programmatic policies and visions for governance. There are deeply ingrained corruption. There's crony capitalism. The policies they bring about are deeply neoliberal. Often they're actually about rolling back welfare institutions. And many of them practice unaccountable state violence on the part of the police. So these are some of the reasons that these revolutions are breaking out. People are feeling like, okay, we have a democratic government, but it's actually not doing a very good job of representing our interests or giving us real choices. So what we're trying to do in this paper, as that was sort of a long prelude, but basically what we're trying to do in this paper, potentially book, we're not sure yet, but is to try to theorize and think about how revolution might work differently in these regime contexts, right? So there's by now a fairly well established theoretical framework for thinking about unarmed uprisings or unarmed revolutions in autocracies, right? A lot of this emerges from scholarship that's merged over the last decade. But also there's older scholarship on this. So, you know, the idea is you construct a broad negative coalition of diverse participants. You have a single goal, a very clear and well-defined goal where you're targeting an autocrat and you want the autocrat to resign. And you leverage the moral power of unarmed resistance to generate outrage in response to state violence. And then you use the combination of that moral outrage and that mass participation to try to elicit defections, usually from the military, right? And then that brings around about regime change, right? Prototypical models of this, you know, the Arab Spring in 2011, the colored revolutions in Eastern Europe, etc. So how might these revolutionary dynamics differ in broken democracies versus autocracies? Well, in autocracy, you have a dynamic in which power is highly centralized in the hands of the dictator, right? Who maintains total control of the institutions of government. But in these broken democratic contexts, you don't have that, right? You don't have a single dictator with concentrated authority. Instead, you have a power system in which power is shared between a series of decentralized and distributed networks of corrupt elites, right? And so we think this has a few implications for dynamics of revolutionary mobilization. On the plus side, you have a, you know, usually a less, although not always, but usually a less repressive state with less state control. So you should have more room for civil society to organize and build revolutionary movements. So that's on the pro side. But then on the on the negative side, you don't have that single point of authority. You don't have a dictator. So you don't have that ability to build negative coalitions around least common denominator goals. The other thing that, and this is maybe the sort of less well developed idea, so open to feedback on this, but we think that the repressive dynamics in the state response are different in these regime contexts as well. Because you have these more network dynamics in the regime and power is more distributed across different actors, you're likely to see repression emerge from both state and non-state authorities, which makes it more difficult to trace and pin down blame and responsibility for state repression and therefore to generate that moral outrage that that elicits defections. So how are we working through these these dynamics and questions? We've built two protest event data sets. All three of us have a background in working with event data. We use local Arabic language sources to do this. So we've built a data set for Lebanon and one for Iraq that covers basically these full six month long revolutionary periods. I'm happy to answer questions about the data if you're interested. They're all based on local newspapers, more or less. So all right, let me show you a little bit of let's see if I can get this. How does this work? Okay, good. So this is Iraq. And these are just protest counts, right? Bottom here is weeks. And then the counts are on the vertical axis here. And so this shows the general arc of protest in Iraq. Just to periodize this a little bit. The revolution begins in September and then rapidly escalates in the end of October. And then at a certain point, the prime minister in Iraq, the prime minister Abdel Mahdi, resigns, right? So in fact, the executive does resign, right? But of course, this is not a presidential system. This is not an autocracy. So the resignation of the executive doesn't actually bring about any real change. And so protests continue. And then at a certain point, at this point, there's no government. And the protesters say, okay, we're going to give you a deadline to appoint a new prime minister, appoint a new government. It's called the Nazaria deadline. And when that expires, it's another major protest spike. A new prime minister does end up getting appointed. But again, nothing really changes. And then at a certain point, the protest just kind of petered out. What we're doing theoretically here is we're trying to think through sort of how are they different? How can we periodize this mobilization and use this periodization to help us think theoretically about what's going on? So we break this revolution into four phases. We talk about an escalation phase at the beginning, up until the point where the prime minister resigns. We then talk about a phase, a second phase, which we're calling the dispersion phase. This is going to be clear when I get to the demands. But this is basically a period when you lose that least common denominator goal, that idea of a single point of authority, a single target, and the demands fragment, people are protesting over different things. And the level of protest sort of decelerates. Then you have one major sort of last gasp resuscitation, where everyone kind of concentrates around another single goal. In this case, it's the formation of a new government. You get one last big spike of protest, and then you get a long arc of demobilization. And what's really interesting is that we see almost exactly the same set of phases in Lebanon. So in Lebanon, you similarly have an escalation phase. It's a shorter escalation phase. Partly, this is an artifact that we haven't actually collected the data for September yet, which we're working on. But basically, there's a similar dynamic, or a sharp increase of protest. The Prime Minister, Hariri, resigns in the third week of the revolution. Then you have this dispersion phase, which you're going to again see a little more clearly when we look at the demands. In fact, they do actually appoint a new Prime Minister, as opposed to Iraq. But he doesn't announce a cabinet. So he's a Prime Minister, but there's no government. And so you have a similar dynamic of this sort of last gasp resuscitation phase in mid-January, where people are demanding, okay, we need a government that meets the revolution's demands. And you have a big spike of protest. Again, he does appoint a cabinet, but it looks very much like the cabinet that existed before. And nothing really changes. And then things just sort of peter out. And just to show you a little bit more of what the... So this is now looking at the same protest data, but what we've done is we've coded the demands for the protests. And we've just broken these demands into four categories. So the dark blue are protests over... They're very clearly calling for the fall of the government or the fall of the regime. So if you know Arabic, it's called the Nizam, like these kinds of direct anti- government regime change demands. Yellow protests are basically protests that don't have a really clear demand. They're supportive of the revolution, but they don't have a clear express demand. Light blue are protests over other political issues. And then the red protests are over labor issues, social issues, things like this. And you can see a lot more clearly now that after the Prime Minister resigns in Iraq, you get this basically dispersion in demands over all kinds of different things. And then you get a sort of... In the salutation phase, this sort of this government change, fall of the regime demand comes back. And then again in the demobilization phase, you get a dispersion again. And this pattern again bears out pretty well in the Lebanon data as well. And just anecdotally, Rima Majid, who actually participated in the Lebanese revolution, has these great anecdotes and stories about participating in these meetings and these groups in the Bidens, in the squares, and trying... Deliberating and saying, okay, what's our demand going to be next week? What kind of claim can we make that's going to rally everyone together in the same way that opposing the government did? And so she's got this amazing evidence of the struggles that activists were going through in trying to come up with a similar clear crystal demand that could bring together a negative coalition in the same way that existed during these early stages of the uprising. This is just an example of one of these efforts to try to... Try to do that. Yeah, so I'm not going to get through all a state response, but we basically, with the protest data, were able to also map the repressive response to these protests. Now, Iraq was a lot more violent than Lebanon, so this is a count of the number of injuries per week. Again, over time, you can see that in the beginning part of the uprising, it was quite violent. This notion that democracies do not repress people is clearly not born out in this case. Lebanon, much less violence, but still several incidents, several weeks where you see hundreds of injuries occurring. And one of the things that we're working on and thinking through is what was the role of non-state repressive actors in these repressive incidences? Because we see a pretty clear role for, in both cases, non-state repression. In Iraq, this was mostly executed by a group of militias called the Popular Mobilization Forces, which were created... There's a history to this around fighting ISIS, which I can get into in the Q&A if you're interested. And in Lebanon, these were militias allied with the Tushia political parties, Hezbollah and Amal. Now, in terms of proportions, you know, so these are minority of events that are repressed by these repressive actors. So, you know, still most of the repression is occurring in Iraq, by the police, and in Lebanon by a combination of the police and the military. But what we're, and again, we're working through this, what we think is going on here is that these non-state repressive actors are being used basically to do all the most violent repression. That the violence, the really violent repression is being outsourced to these militias and non-state repressive actors. We've got a little bit of suggestive evidence from some initial regressions we've run on the probability of a violent, of a repressed event being especially violent, so resulting in injuries or deaths. And in both cases, you see that the non-state actors, I mean, in Iraq it's also, whoopsie, it's also, it's also the military, are engaging in the most violent forms of repression. So, we're still working through this. We obviously have to collect some evidence about the causal process behind these associations, but we think there's something suggestive here that there's a strategic logic around how these non-state actors are being used. Great, so I'll leave it at that. We're provocatively claiming that maybe revolutions and democracies are actually harder than revolutions and autocracies, but that's a very speculative and provocative claim that happy to hear your input on. So, thank you.