Chapter 4 begins with an in-depth process tracing of the decisions around political party formation in Egypt after Mubarak’s ouster. We revisit the puzzling variation in party formation across the Egyptian political opposition landscape, particularly examining the decision on the part of Egyptian organized labor and pro-reform activist groups not to form political parties, tracing the link between the structure of the opposition under the Mubarak regime to the strategic incentives and organizational constraints faced by groups at this juncture. We then conduct an in-depth within-case comparison of the mobilization prior to Egypt’s 2011 elections, utilizing granular data on political parties’ specific campaign strategies and methods to trace the link between the adaptations that various groups made during the Mubarak era to the relative organizational and persuasive resources political groups had, and the mobilization tactics and strategies they were then able to use. We also specifically examine compelling evidence for common alternatives or contributing explanations for the Muslim Brotherhood’s success, and show that while these explanations certainly fill in part of the picture, they are incomplete without an understanding of mechanisms linking authoritarian legacies to the 2011 elections.

Chapter 5 expands the tracing of the theorized causal mechanisms beyond Egypt to see how far these mechanisms travel and if they operate in the same way across other cases of founding elections. Each case comparison begins with an analysis of the processes of party formation, linking the political opportunity structure of the authoritarian era to the contours of the ideological landscape and the strategic incentives facing different groups at this juncture. Each case then examines the evidence for the mechanisms linking the authoritarian era political opportunity structure to the organizational and persuasive resources available to each political group and their ability to use different mobilization tactics. As in Egypt, opposition groups that were excluded from electoral participation possess similar organizational and symbolic resources and thus are able to use more effective voter mobilization tactics than other political groups, resulting in their electoral success. The accounts find evidence for this causal chain in Tunisia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Zambia, but the mechanism operates differently in the case of Brazil, offering useful insight into the scope conditions under which the mechanisms theorized in the Egypt case operate elsewhere.

Chapter 7 demonstrates that militias successfully mobilize members when they appeal to common social conventions, create innovative institutions and provide an opportunity for self-empowerment. In particular, the chapter shows that the appeal to common social conventions such as traditional healing facilitated the mobilization process, as the new militia institution resonated with local communities and created a belief in agency, which enabled the large-scale mobilization of members. The chapter develops these arguments with evidence from Nicoadala district in Zambézia province and explores their validity with evidence from the main district of militia activity in Nampula province, Murrupula.

Chapter 4 describes the debates that took place in the press immediately after the Balkan Wars (1912–13), which drew attention to the relationship between new concepts of the able body and the militarization of discourses of productivity. In the first Balkan War, the Ottoman armies were soundly defeated, and the empire lost its last landholdings in the Balkans. The perceived infirmities of the “Ottoman body” became a common thread in social critiques calling for all-out mobilization. This chapter traces the relationship between conceptualizations of the healthy, productive, and able body and discourses on the formation of an ideal citizen, as articulated by moralists, journalists, public figures, and memoirists of the Balkan Wars. I expose how calls for a productive body militarized a social issue during a time when Ottomans faced imminent threats of invasion. The militarization that characterized the last decade of the Ottoman Empire and the first decades of the Turkish Republic cannot be understood without first considering the process by which the body of the citizen became a site of national anxiety.

This chapter develops a theory of how local political exclusion drives ethnic riots in multiethnic countries during political transition. I discuss existing accounts of the onset of ethnic riots and their limitations in explaining why ethnic rioting rises and subsequently declines during political transitions in multiethnic countries. I argue that ethnic riots in democratizing countries are driven by local elites’ demands for inclusion in local politics. This deployment of ethnic riots as a form of political engagement is particularly prevalent in weakly institutionalized multiethnic settings, where institutions are less reliable and where available local networks tend to be ethnic-based. Once a group’s demands for inclusion have been met and violence has served its purpose, rioting will decline. I derive a set of observable implications and hypotheses I will examine in the subsequent empirical chapters.

This chapter traces the emergence of ethnic cleavages in the Indonesian archipelago, across three time periods: (1) the early modern period, (2) Dutch rule and Japanese occupation (1596–1945), and (3) Soekarno’s regime (1945–1966). It shows that although Indonesians have been accustomed to diversity along various dimensions over the years, ethnicity became relevant as a basis for mobilization when the ruling authorities allocated resources and treated groups differently along ethnic lines. At times, ethnic groups engaged in violence to challenge their treatment by existing authorities. These precedents for using violence to contest existing political configurations and to renegotiate the boundaries of who is “in” or “out” set the stage for the more recent mobilizations of violence during Indonesia’s democratic transition.

What makes some challengers willing and able to embrace a strategy of civil resistance and others not? This chapter shows how social ties–direct interpersonal connections that link members of a challenger organization to other actors in the society–are central to each of these processes. Two types of relationships, what I term “grassroots ties” and “regime ties,” are especially important. Each has distinct implications for different dynamics of challenger-state contention. I develop a typology of challenger networks based on different combinations of these ties, and make predictions about each type of challenger’s likelihood of initiating a campaign to overthrow the regime using a strategy of civil resistance. An attention to challengers’ social ties holds the potential to explain cases that other theories struggle with, such as variation within regional “waves,” within states, or even within movements over time. It can also improve our understanding of how other theoretical mechanisms work by suggesting why some movements might be more vulnerable to repression or fragmentation than others, or how tactical repertoires can evolve.

The early months of 2011 saw a wave of upheavals across the Middle East and North Africa that became known as the Arab Spring. But despite the spread of resistance campaigns against aging dictators across the Arab-speaking world, not all campaigns employed the same strategy. This chapter reveals how the social ties that underpin challenger groups can explain variation we see across cases in the Middle East as well as the tragic trajectory from civil resistance to repression to civil war within Syria. I begin with a brief discussion of Egypt and Libya, both to provide background context as well as to illustrate their consistency with the theory. I then turn to the case of Syria’s uprising to show how practices of selective social exclusion from the state resulted in a challenger coalition that had substantial grassroots ties to various social groups throughout the country, but limited ties to the regime. This produced a campaign that was initially able to attempt civil resistance, but eventually fractured into violence in the face of extreme state repression.

In 1996, the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist launched an insurgency that lasted 10 years and killed an estimated 16,000 people. But the case of Nepal's Maoists is particularly fascinating for the way in which the conflict ended: with their decision to put down their arms and join with other political parties in a campaign civil resistance. Drawing on original field research, this chapter will make the argument that the Maoist change in strategy was the result of changes in their social ties that came about as a result of territorial gain through war and coalition with other political parties. These changes caused the Maoists to reassess the relative viability of armed and unarmed strategies of rebellion.

This chapter turns to cases from South Africa and India to highlight the challenges inherent in trying to launch and sustain a civil resistance campaign within a highly divided society. In both contexts, movements refrained from even attempting national campaigns with maximalist goals when they had only insular networks, preferring instead to either try to work for reforms within the system or to pursue more limited goals during these periods. When they had established grassroots ties and were able to engage in massive nonviolent mobilizations, they encountered massive repression from the regime and struggled to constrain violence within their own ranks. But in the end, both movements were successful in achieving their goals. The cases therefore offer valuable lessons for how challengers, especially those from excluded groups, may be able to overcome some of the social barriers to civil resistance that have presented in this book.

This chapter traces the strategic evolution of the Nepali Congress from its deliberation and rejection of nonviolence through a vote of party leaders in Calcutta in 1950 to its gradual return to an exclusively nonviolent platform by 1990. It illustrates that the movement's lack of social ties with other groups within Nepal limited its ability to generate mass mobilization, causing leaders to sour on the prospects of being able to achieve victory through civil resistance. But over the course of the following four decades, the Nepali Congress party was able to substantially enlarge its social base in ways that made it far better positioned for civil resistance. Interestingly, a challenger with a very different ideology, the Marxist-Leninists, underwent a very similar transition. After a failed effort at inciting revolution through the beheading of “class enemies” in the early 1970s, the Marxist-Leninists, like the Nepali Congress, engaged in a program of organization- and coalition-building that paved the way for the adoption of civil resistance.

An important reason personal networks matter is that individuals can turn to them when they have a need. But how do people decide whom in their network to turn to? Researchers across several literatures have studied this question under different rubrics, including “help-seeking behavior,” “the mobilization of social capital,” and the “activation of social ties.” The question arises when people seek social support, information about jobs, help when they are ill, advice about college enrollment, and more. The process of turning to others is ultimately a decision, and the research addressing this question has explicitly proposed or implicitly suggested the common-sense notion that, when deciding, people first assess their needs and options and then choose the best available match between the former and the latter. This idea suggests that the decision-making process is largely consistent across situations, autonomous in nature, and at least minimally deliberative. In what follows, I argue instead that, in practice, the process is heterogeneous across situations; that the heterogeneity can be characterized by the degree to which it is internal vs external, deliberative vs intuitive, and personal vs organizational; and that it can be expressed in terms of an interaction space and an institutional space of possibilities. I outline the conditions likely to shape the decision-making process in each space, and propose that the more intuitive mobilization is, the more it will depend on interaction conditions, and the more organizational it is, the more it will depend on institutional ones. I discuss the substantive, theoretical, and methodological implications of understanding decision-making in context, and propose an agenda for future work.