Movements as Communities

Oxford Handbooks Online

Movements as Communities  
Hatem M. Hassan and Suzanne Staggenborg
The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements
Edited by Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani

Print Publication Date: Nov 2015

Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, Political Behavior
Online Publication Date: Dec 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199678402.013.37

Abstract and Keywords

In viewing movements as communities, scholars have gone beyond conceptualizing social

movements as collections of formal organizations. Using the concept of social movement
communities (SMCs), we aim to capture the diverse political and cultural elements that
contribute to movement goals and sustain protests over time. Scholars first developed the
concept by studying decentralized movements in democratic settings. Here, we ask
whether movement communities can form under authoritarian governments in the Middle
East. Although the recent wave of revolutionary activity provided some room for
resistance, despotic tendencies persist. Using cases from Palestine, Iran, and Egypt, we
test the resilience of the SMC concept and explore the forms movement communities may
take in such contexts. We conclude by proposing alternative conceptions of community
and emphasizing the importance of communication technologies to better understand
unconventional forms of resistance in non-democratic settings.

Keywords: social movement communities, Middle East, everyday resistance, information and communications
technologies (ICTs), collective identity, campaigns

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Movements as Communities

SOCIAL movements are diffuse phenomena with permeable boundaries consisting of a

variety of actors, ideas, and events that change over time. Scholars have struggled to
conceptualize movements in ways that capture their emergent qualities and ongoing
interactions with supporters and targets. Tilly (1984: 305–306) sees social movements as
shifting coalitions of actors in “sustained interaction” with authorities and other targets.
In his view, movements are means of engaging in “public politics” that emerged in
historically specific contexts in the Western world (Tilly 2004: 7). Tarrow (2011: 9) builds
on Tilly’s approach to offer a widely used definition of social movements as “collective
challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction
with elites, opponents, and authorities.” Other theorists propose more expansive
definitions of social movements as operating in a variety of cultural and institutional as
well as political arenas, targeting various types of authorities (Snow 2004) and including
“ideologically structured action” as well as political movement organizations (Zald 2000).
While scholars recognize the importance of the multiple social movement organizations
(SMOs) that often mobilize and sustain social movements (McCarthy and Zald 1977;
Gamson 1990), they also understand that movements are comprised of social networks,
collective identities, and cultures as well as political campaigns and organizations
(Melucci 1989, 1996; Diani 1992; Polletta 2008).

The notion of social movement communities aims to capture the interactions among
diverse political and cultural elements that help to sustain social movements. The concept
originated in studies of movements in Western countries, such as the women’s movement,
and has largely been employed to understand local or regional movements rather than
national or international ones.

In this chapter, we begin by discussing the concept of social movement community and its
usefulness in understanding the mobilization and maintenance of social movements,
showing how it differs from related concepts. We then explore questions about its
relevance and limitations when studying non-Western movements in authoritarian
(p. 341) settings, using cases from the Middle East. In the recent revolutions, we have

witnessed the emergence of “free spaces” (Polletta 1999) once denied by despots. Yet,
many ruling governments in the region continue to deny movements and individuals of
such spaces to freely express their demands. By asking whether movement communities
can exist in the region, and studying them in different scenarios, we consider a range of
possible avenues for participation and sources for social change in authoritarian contexts.
Finally, we move beyond original conceptions to include alternative community structures
while stressing the growing significance of information and communication technologies
(ICTs) in allowing for the development of movement communities in authoritarian and
non-Western contexts.

The Concept of Social Movement Community

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Movements as Communities

A social movement community (SMC) consists of networks of individuals, cultural

activities, institutional supporters, and alternative institutions as well as SMOs and other
actors that support movement goals (Staggenborg 1998: 182). Movement communities
vary on a range of characteristics that affect their cohesiveness and ability to maintain
movement ideas and activities. Some local movement communities are linked to national
and international ones, while others are strictly local. Specific movement communities,
such as women’s movement and environmental movement communities, may be more or
less connected to one another via networks and organizations. During cycles of protest, a
general movement community, such as a radical or progressive one, may connect activists
with various interests and concerns (Staggenborg 1998). Within SMCs, networks between
individuals and among groups may be more or less dense. Some SMCs contain movement
centers or common meeting places that facilitate interaction while others are more
decentralized. SMCs also vary in the number of SMOs they include and in their
institutional support.

The concept is broader than some related concepts, including that of a “social movement
industry” (SMI), which consists of all SMOs in a movement (McCarthy and Zald 1977),
and that of a “multi-organizational field,” which consists of various types of organizations
within local communities, including both movement supporters and opponents (Curtis
and Zurcher 1973; Klandermans 1992). Whereas the SMI and multi-organizational field
concepts recognize a variety of organizations involved in movements, the SMC concept
conceives of movements as including other actors besides organizations, such as
individuals and cultural groups. The notion of an SMC is also broader than that of “civil
society” in that the latter is typically used to identify non-governmental actors, whereas
the former may include supporters from within the government, such as a government
agency. The concept of a movement community is useful in that it allows us to emphasize
informal and cultural elements of movements, (p. 342) including amorphous social
networks of individuals and the various rituals and events that support movement ideas,
as well as explicitly political organizations and campaigns.

The SMC concept originated among American scholars who were trying to incorporate
informal organizational structures and cultural elements into our understanding of how
social movements emerge and maintain themselves. It was first used by Steven Buechler
(1990), who argued that some aspects of social movements are better understood as
communities than organizations. In his example, Buechler points out the absence of
formal organizations in the American women’s suffrage movement in its early years,
describing how a network of women’s rights activists, previously involved in the abolition
and temperance movements, mobilized the movement through women’s rights
conventions held between 1848 and the Civil War (Buechler 1990: 45–46). Similarly, in
the 1960s, the women’s liberation movement in the United States created a “social
movement community of like-minded, informally linked activists who are capable of rapid
and intense mobilization around specific issue areas even in the absence of formal
movement organization” (1990: 70). While various feminist groups came and went, a
women’s movement community maintained itself in places such as women’s centers and
women’s studies programs at universities, feminist bookstores and cafes, women’s health
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Movements as Communities

centers, rape crisis centers, women’s music festivals, and issue-oriented projects (1990:
75–76). Taylor and Whittier (1992) argue that lesbian feminists are central to these
networks and alternative institutions, and that “lesbian feminist communities sustain a
collective identity that encourages women to engage in a wide range of social and
political actions that challenge the dominant system” (1992: 105). Staggenborg (1998)
also shows how cultural, institutional, and political elements of the women’s movement
community have maintained feminism in the United States.

Scholars examining other movements have also found the concept of social movement
communities useful. Stoecker (1995) uses the concept to examine collective identity in a
neighborhood movement, showing how individual and collective identities converge
through interaction between participants and other community members. If such a
convergence does occur, and when threatened or aroused by particular issues, local
communities may turn into movement communities (Woliver 1993; Stoecker 1994). Also
taking a local approach, Lichterman (1995) examines different types of movement
communities in the environmental movement, showing how the cultural practices of
groups affect efforts to build multicultural alliances. Lichterman (1996) also discovers
that while some movement communities are based on pre-existing communal ties, such as
those that are found within churches, others build on the personalized commitments of
individuals.

Thus, the SMC concept allows theorists to explain movement-building dynamics within
communities and how movements sustain themselves during periods when there is no
visible protest. Much of the existing literature attempts to explain how movements are
sustained after public protest disappears. This may occur in a variety of ways: as
institutions, such as universities and state agencies, absorb movement goals and cultures
of resistance (Staggenborg 1996, 1998); as one movement community (p. 343) spills over
into another (Meyer and Whittier 1994); as cultural activities sustain movement networks
and ideology (Taylor and Whittier 1992; Taylor and Rupp 1993; Staggenborg 2001); or as
“elite sustained organizations” keep the movement community alive during a period of
“abeyance” (Taylor 1989). Informal personal networks enable individuals with critical
worldviews to experiment with new lifestyles and alternative cultural models even when
movements are unable to mount public challenges to the existing powers. Melucci’s
(1989, 1996; see also Donati 1984) investigation of the youth, women’s, ecological, and
“new conscience” movement areas that emerged in Italy in the aftermath of the crisis of
the opposition movements of the 1970s well illustrates these mechanisms.

A movement community may also precede political movement activity. Rochon (1998)
argues that “critical communities” often help to create new values and ways of thinking
about issues that are then be taken up by broader movements. Organizational structures
in movement communities are also important to the growth of collective campaigns
(Staggenborg 1998; Staggenborg and Lecomte 2009). For example, the Southern black
church became an arm of the American civil rights movement, as leaders adapted and
borrowed its rituals and frames (Morris 1984). Similarly, the American women’s
movement emerged not simply within political spaces, but also from cultural and

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Movements as Communities

commercial spaces, such as women’s softball teams, coffeehouses, and bars (Enke 2007).
In such instances, one important process to be explained is the transformation of a
community into a movement community.

In relatively undemocratic contexts, sustained movement campaigns are unlikely, and it is

reasonable to ask whether an SMC can exist at all in such settings. When protests do
emerge, seemingly spontaneously, they are likely to build on community practices and
structures. And in settings where repression makes public organizing implausible,
alternative and often informal practices, traditions, and cultures might support future
movements. In an attempt to explore the usefulness of the SMC concept in non-Western
and non-democratic settings, we turn to cases in the Middle East.

Movement Communities in the Middle East

The Middle East has not experienced the same kind of expansion, diffusion, and
institutionalization of protest activity observed in Western settings. Moments of mass
mobilization, such as the 2011 uprisings, emerged without the strong presence of
organizations, influential leaders, or a unified ideology (Bamyeh 2011). Contentious
episodes before the uprisings, however, were not uncommon (Beinin and Variel 2011).
Class-based, grass-roots, student, and women’s movements have been active throughout
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In relatively democratic settings, such moments
often lead to sustained protest campaigns or to the creation of free spaces where
individuals (p. 344) can foster collective identity and aim towards a unified goal.
Institutional access and competitive elections, even under dictators, can give individuals
the space needed to form NGOs, cultural groups, and grass-roots organizations (Almeida
2003).

Here, we move beyond political opportunities structures by focussing on the relationship

between political and cultural aspects of community and heightened periods of protest
activity. Do the organizational, ideological, and cultural bases of pre-existing communities
influence subsequent moments of mobilization? Do movement communities emerge from
these episodes of protest and, if so, how does the state respond? We begin exploring
these questions by looking at three spectacular moments in recent history: the 1987
Palestinian Intifada, the 2009 Iranian Green Movement, and the 2011 Egyptian
revolution. The cases illustrate three different scenarios within the movement community
process: a movement community that was quickly and violently suppressed, a developing
(pre)movement community, and a virtual movement community in between two
contentious episodes. In each case, the link between community and protest campaigns is
contingent upon local and national cultures of resistance, pre-existing community
infrastructures, the character of the contentious episode itself, and responses from the
regime.

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Movements as Communities

The Intifada: When Movement Community Meets the State

The 1987 Palestinian uprising gave birth to one of the most notable and recent examples
of grass-roots organization within the region. It is difficult to explain the speed and scale
of mobilization against Israeli forces without noting the rapid emergence of Palestinian
neighborhood groups known as popular committees (PCs) (Hiltermann 1993). Responding
to Israel’s decisions to deploy troops to the occupied territories, the original
neighborhood groups emerged during the first few days out of a necessity to provide
food, protection, and basic healthcare services (Robinson 1997). Partly formed by local
student, women’s, and labor groups, committees gained popularity by connecting the
everyday problems of ordinary Palestinians to Israel’s occupation.

The authoritarian case forces us to consider how the state’s response to protest activity
might affect the likelihood of a future movement community. If PCs represented a
potential building block for an emerging movement community—and indeed the pre-
existing organizational infrastructure (e.g., women’s movement, student movement, etc.)
suggests that a movement community could have existed in the past—then Israeli
authoritarianism coupled with the paternalism of nationalist political parties quickly
eliminated such possibilities. Eventually, informal PC networks were unified and co-opted
by the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), a coalition comprised of the
PLO and its supporters. With national and international political elites competing over
them, popular committees lost their intimate ties to local communities. It is no surprise,
then, that these neighborhood groups were largely absent (p. 345) from the (2000–05)
second Intifada (Hammami and Tamari 2001). One might argue that the UNLU had
established a different type of movement community that privileged formal and national,
rather than grass-roots, mobilization. What emerged was, in reality, an organizationally
homogenous, NGO-dominated movement with little connection to the traditions and
culture of community organizing witnessed during the first uprising.

Iran and the 2009 Green Movement: A (Pre)Movement Community

Whereas the Palestinian case provides an example of an emergent but quickly repressed
SMC, the Iranian case allows us to see the gradual development of a movement
community. In 2009, millions of Iranian citizens, many of whom were women from all
sides of the political, religious, and class spectrum, took to the streets in response to the
alleged rigging of the June election. In the weeks leading up to the final round, the public
domain momentarily lost its repressive features and became a free space (Tahmasebi-
Birgani 2010). The Convergence of Women, a newly formed coalition consisting of forty-
two women’s organizations, tapped into a dispersed network of activists, lawyers, public
officials, students, and workers. Together, groups, coalitions, and informal networks
converged, asserting the presence of women in the political realm, and doing so on a
scale rivaled only by the 1979 revolution. But did the Green Movement emerge, at least

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Movements as Communities

partially, from a bourgeoning women’s movement community, or was the presence of

women symptomatic of a larger, heterogeneous campaign that needed no previous SMC
to emerge?

The existence of a “true” Iranian women’s movement is still hotly debated (Hoodfar and
Sadeghi 2009). For nearly two decades, women had been establishing what Moghadam
(2003) calls a “contemporary women’s (pre)movement.” Overlapping professional, grass-
roots, and conscience communities (Aunio and Staggenborg 2011), have been responsible
for palpable, though gradual, change in Iran despite the absence of sustained public
demonstrations. In the mid-1990s, the vibrant feminist publications industry grew
considerably by building solidarity, publicizing controversial issues, and promoting
cultural events. One example was the 1995 Women’s Week Festival, where famous female
filmmakers, NGOs, women athletes, and academics came together for art exhibits,
competitions, and seminars (Bayat 2007: 169). By the turn of the century, formal
organizations, movement entrepreneurs, and women in parliament were consistently
targeting the regime through single-issue campaigns, such as the international Campaign
on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) (Shekarloo
2005). In 2006, middle-class women formed the “One Million Signatures” and “Stop
Stoning Forever” campaigns to reform traditional family laws. Meanwhile, ordinary
Iranian women gradually made their presence felt in the public sphere, resisting
patriarchy (p. 346) through their everyday practices, such as storming soccer stadiums to
watch a traditionally male-only sport and pushing back the hijab (Islamic headscarf).

By identifying a (pre)movement community, with its overlapping but dispersed networks,

formal organizations and campaigns, cultural organizations and alternative institutions,
and everyday resistance by ordinary people, we can better understand the collective
character of social change in particularly repressive contexts. The freedom that
characterized the movement leading up to the 2009 election was ephemeral and was met
with brutal repression by the Basij, the regime-backed paramilitary forces. But despite
limited success, these movement-building activities provided the impetus for some to
continue advocating for social change in less explicit ways. Many young Iranians, for
example, continue to discuss the goals and ideas of the movement on their blogs, forums,
and other ICTs. As the next section demonstrates, despite the strict policing of physical
spaces, young members of the community are often able to continue the discussions,
expand the networks, and even sustain public protest in the years leading up to a moment
of mass mobilization.

Egypt and the 2011 Revolution

If anything in Egypt resembled a movement community under Mubarak, it would look less
like the Palestinian and Iranian models and more like the online virtual spaces that were
established between the 2004 pro-democracy movement and the 2011 Revolution. In
2004, activists began a campaign to prevent Mubarak’s re-election and to show support
for Palestinians under occupation (Oweidat et al. 2008). At the forefront of the movement

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Movements as Communities

was an ideologically diverse, but socially and economically homogenous, coalition.

Though the Egyptian Movement for Change lost popular support by 2007 due to a
combination of repression, arrests, and its elite orientation, it influenced future
movements—most notably the April 6th movement in 2008—and paved the way for a
virtual online community. Although decentralized like the Iranian example and grass-roots
like the Palestinian PCs, Egyptian activists moved beyond physical spaces to sustain their
movement goals and ideas years after formal groups had been crushed.

Eventually, we saw a re-emergence of some of these demands, albeit on a national scale.

During the initial eighteen days of the Revolution, activists and ordinary Egyptians
further developed already growing demands, beliefs, and ideas that had been introduced
during the 2004 wave of protests. Like pieces in a puzzle, mobilization heavily relied on
impromptu debate circles in Tahrir Square like those that occurred in the streets of
Tehran in 2009; social media technologies; popular committees similar in the structure
and function of those in Palestine; and a palpable, but ideologically nimble notion of “the
people” (al-sha’b). Between the two waves of mobilization, free spaces were developed to
sustain, at the very least, dialogue among activists. With central security forces
monitoring both public and private spheres in Egypt, it is highly unlikely that physical
communities and free spaces for dialogue could have emerged, let alone sustained, a
movement campaign.

Alternative Conceptualizations of
(p. 347)

Community
If we define a movement community as consisting of actors who advance the same
concrete movement goals, consciously share a collective identity, meet in physical “free”
spaces, and participate in sustained collective movement activities (Staggenborg 1998),
then the three major episodes of contention just described do not always qualify. More
often, they reflect what Scott (1990) refers to as the culture of everyday resistance.
Although the SMC concept is not irrelevant to non-Western and non-democratic settings,
the community is likely to take a different shape. To adapt the SMC concept to contexts
such as the Middle East, we propose two models of community that might exist in
authoritarian settings: (1) an informal community of individuals that participate in
everyday resistance, and (2) an online community that evades repression of an
authoritarian regime. In both models, we see the emergence of imagined communities
(Anderson 1991).

Informality, Everyday Resistance, and Imagined Community

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Movements as Communities

While recent scholarship has increasingly emphasized the decentralized networks and
fluid organizational structures of Western movements, in authoritarian contexts the
informal structure has been the very backbone of resistance and survival (Beinin and
Variel 2011; Bayat 2013). Social and economic informality in Middle Eastern cities are
responses to urbanization, increased economic inequality, closed political spaces, and
failing states (Singerman 1995; Roy and AlSayyad 2004; Elyachar 2005). Most notably,
the urban poor, through their everyday practices based on the principles of mutual aid
and self-empowerment, have been able to “quietly encroach” onto public spaces (Bayat
2013). In Cairo, residents have created their own informal housing and economy, tapped
into electricity grids, built their own ramps to major highways, and squatted in public
parks for subsistence. In Tehran, women gradually pushed back the hijab after Khomeini’s
regime enforced conservative dress codes. Informal opposition, however, is not exclusive
to one particular class or subaltern group. Egyptian intellectuals, active on university
campuses between the 1960s and 1980s, continued their discussions into the twenty-first
century through “more subtly activities in the literary field” when more formal leftist
organizations were dismantled (Duboc 2011: 51). However, these individual practices
alone cannot be seen as political.

Although everyday resistance and informality involves individual actions, a struggle for
essential goods and services has kept community central to the equation. Local responses
often allow both ordinary individuals and activists to evade the draconian tactics of
authoritarian regimes (Duboc 2011). Egypt’s Six-day and October wars; the Iraqi invasion
of Kuwait; and Lebanon’s civil war are examples of local neighborhood (p. 348) groups
that emerged rapidly during moments of crisis. But at times, these community responses
are as ephemeral as the events that provoked them. During revolutionary moments in
Palestine and Egypt, for example, neighborhood committees emerged as a response to
the security vacuums and disappeared shortly thereafter. And yet, the informality that
characterizes the everyday lives of ordinary citizens across the Middle East can become a
culture of resistance, especially in times of political and economic crisis.

But when do informal community responses to a particular event or crisis transform into
a sustained movement community? Bayat (2013) suggests that, over time, seemingly
atomized practices of everyday resistance accumulate and become a “nonmovement,”
leading to gradual but concrete social change. Using different language, Eckert suggests
that “practice movements” endure over stretches of time, “stand[ing] out from other
quotidian practices…. [by] explicitly transgress[ing] restrictions inherent in the nexus of
the material organisation of space, property relations, status orders, and almost always
normative regulations” (Eckert, this volume; Isin 2008). Yet, in order for us to be able to
call this a movement, one can imagine the necessity of some sort of collective identity
that unifies that action towards some goal. The accumulation of atomized practices
becomes a movement towards social change only when, “identification of similarity, of
comparability [exists]…. what happened there could happen here; their situation is in
some way comparable to ours; what they have done we could do” (Eckert, this volume;

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Movements as Communities

Eckert 2012). In this way, even citizens marginalized by oppressive systems of

subordination can experience something akin to Anderson’s (1991) imagined
communities.

In Palestine, the establishment of an imagined community among neighborhood groups is

inextricably linked to the traditions of nationalism and self-help. During the Intifada, a
heightened patriotism coupled with a collective memory of occupation translated into
solidarity, self-sufficiency, and mutual aid (Robinson 1997). Individuals and
neighborhoods struggling to attain basic necessities, such as food and security, reached
out to other PCs through their pre-existing networks of local, extended families (1997:
96). Fluid and amorphous, these “submerged networks” (Melucci 1989) provide a space
where ordinary Palestinians can interact with one another in order to link their everyday
actions and needs to the larger movements against Palestinian occupation.

This sense of “we”—one that emerges from below and through largely impersonal
networks of ordinary individuals—is also what makes the actions of women in Iran a
(pre)movement community. Overlapping feminist groups share a collective identity
referred to as hamdeli, or “shared feeling…. about their inferior position in society and….
[their wish] to do something about it” (Bayat 2007: 169). The identity is, of course, not a
concrete, neatly framed, or unified ideology constructed by movement professionals; its
nimbleness is a reflection of dispersed collective action and grievances that Iranian
women experience on a daily basis. But the consequences of this sense of “we” are
anything but imagined, as can be seen by the communities of professional activists,
academics and lawyers, artists and musicians, and, finally, ordinary Iranian women that
have gradually coalesced to demand concrete change. Put simply, Iranian women with
disparate political, social, and economic backgrounds can only come together through
(p. 349) submerged networks that connect their everyday subordination to the larger

structural inequality.

Collective identity is but one factor that can sustain an SMC; the larger point here is that
an imagined community, which can transform a community into a movement community,
may depend upon the informal cultures of resistance already present in a given
environment. In many repressive settings in the Middle East, a tradition of everyday
resistance and informality coupled with an ethos of mutual aid can take on a
“transgressive character” (Eckert, this volume) when submerged networks are used by
ordinary individuals pushing for gradual and less confrontational social change. In Egypt,
groups comprised of well-known intellectuals and activists influenced the Kefaya
movement through daily publications in leftist magazines and newspapers (Duboc 2011).
The Egyptian case also provides another type of community, one that has grown through
virtual organizing. Although relevant to social movements of all types (Earl and Kimport
2011; Bennett and Segerberg 2013), online communities are becoming particularly
important in undemocratic states where physical free spaces are lacking or vanishing.

Virtual Communities
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Movements as Communities

Everyday cultures of resistance may not be enough to provoke substantive social change.
Indeed, the point here is not to romanticize informal and everyday resistance and equate
it with more explicit forms of activism. “Hidden” practices can lead to demobilization,
“enabling actors to keep their level of engagement minimal and thereby facilitating
phasing down in their activism” (Duboc 2011: 53). However, movements in both
repressive and relatively democratic settings have used ICTs to organize supporters and
engage in targeted actions. If the SMC concept is to remain relevant to twenty-first-
century movements, we need to incorporate such changes.

Using cases of online activism following the 2008 global financial crisis, Bennett and
Segerberg (2013) argue that there is a “logic of connective action” distinct from more
familiar, face-to-face collective action. While concepts like collective identity remain
central to explaining the latter, the authors associate the former with an “individualized”
form of citizenship in which participants seek “flexible association with causes, ideas, and
political organizations” and wish to “personalize” collective action frames (2013: 5–6).
One might argue that the increasing presence of online and individualized connective
action renders SMCs obsolete. Yet, as we will see in the case of Egypt, a collective
identity can emerge despite highly personalized ways of communicating grievances.

For example, Caren et al. (2012) reported the emergence of the social movement online
community (SMOC) in their analysis of right-wing white nationalist forums. They argue
that collective identity, network building, and claims-making remain central to both
SMOCs and face-to-face SMCs. But because SMOCs are often comprised of
geographically dispersed individuals rather than organizations, their networks are able to
expand or contract more rapidly than other SMCs (2012: 171).

(p. 350)Returning to our Egyptian example, the role of ICTs in political movements
remains contested (Diani 2011). We do not suggest that communication technologies
were the central factor in mobilizing citizens during or even prior to the 2011 Revolution.
Instead, we focus on how the use of ICTs sustained movement goals between the two
episodes of contention. Virtual free spaces became increasingly important after 2005,
when pro-democratic activists responded to brutal repression by creating a national and
decentralized network of blogger activists. But as in more traditional SMCs, a blogger-
activist identity emerged to sustain the beliefs, goals, and debates of the original Kefaya-
led campaign, long after the formal group’s repression.

In the wake of the second Palestinian Intifada and the American invasion of Iraq, an
emerging “blogosphere” and pro-democratic movement Kefaya (“enough”) came to
reinforce one another in a campaign against the government’s authoritarian practices. As
both a platform for personal posts and an alternative to state-sponsored narratives, blogs
and online forums immediately assumed a powerful role in the campaign against
Mubarak (Al Malky 2007). But the community of bloggers was close-knit, consisting of no
more than forty individuals at the time of their emergence, and only expanded in 2005
(Al-Sayyid 1993). In the face of continuing state repression and blatant authoritarianism,
politics and online blogging became inseparable as the number of bloggers soared to

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Movements as Communities

1,800 three years after its emergence. Although blogging was later used by the general
public as an ordinary method of communication (1993: 8), “the blogger” became a
concrete identity assumed by many young Egyptians tired of Mubarak’s draconian
policies.

The Egyptian blogger-activists created more than an identity; they established imagined
communities that were participatory, inclusive, and geographically diffuse. The
anonymous character of the blogger identity, coupled with an amorphous network of
activists, rendered SMOCs the regime’s biggest challenge. Even after the 2007 arrests of
famous Egyptian blogger-activists and journalists, several communities of bloggers with
explicitly political intentions remained active, now with a more fluid organizational
structure:

The core remained, yet a much larger group of activists developed and the
country’s blogosphere lost its center, becoming a network of identity communities
linked in a virtual place by virtue of their Egyptianness. Having a blog became a
necessity for staying up to date with activists and being an activist.

(Al-Sayyid 1993: 9)

Blogs and other ICTs can be used as both one-directional and interactive tools. Between
2004 and 2011, blogs were used to update protestors and the general public and to
document cases of police brutality and corruption. Yet, one of the blogosphere’s most
important contributions to creating free spaces was its ability to allow for open discourse
and debate among activists with disparate ideologies—including even those who belong
to formal opposition groups like the Muslim Brotherhood (Lim 2012). As a free space, the
“blogosphere” in Egypt between 2004 and 2011 represented a novel approach to
resisting undemocratic governments: a platform consisting of a sustainable network of
diverse (p. 351) individuals and groups that shared broad goals and objectives while
constructing a fluid, yet coherent, collective identity. Although Egyptian SMOCs were
under fire by 2007, the network had become too agile, dispersed, and heterogeneous for
a despot to dismantle. To be sure, physical free spaces and concrete collective identities
continue to be central to social change in Egypt. Yet, during the period when pro-
democratic movements were violently put on hold in Egypt, online communities became
movement communities in order to maintain the movement’s beliefs, debates, and
networks.

Conclusion
Like movement communities in democratic environments, SMCs in authoritarian contexts
often consist of an amalgam of organizations, coalitions, submerged networks, alternative
institutions, and cultural groups. Yet, actors in repressive circumstances have also
created and used hidden networks, everyday forms of resistance, and ICTs to advance

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Movements as Communities

their goals and demands. The intentionality of such actors, however, requires additional
attention. Unlike movement actors in democratic settings, such as second wave feminists
and American civil rights activists, it is often unclear whether individuals in repressive
situations deliberately create and sustain these types of communities, or whether they
are incidental to their overall accommodation strategies. Future research involving in-
depth fieldwork in local settings can tap into these submerged networks and assess the
intentionality of actors within these movement communities.

Thinking about movements as communities allows us to capture their diverse structures

and participants, including informal and cultural as well as formal and political elements.
The processes by which SMCs, as well as their characteristics and interactions, emerge
vary in different settings. In relatively democratic contexts, SMCs are better able to
establish diverse networks of movement organizers and supporters, create collective
identity, sustain campaigns, and keep a movement in abeyance. In more authoritarian
contexts such as the Middle East, movement communities are likely to emerge from
alternative community infrastructures. Our three examples show different scenarios
where movement communities can appear despite an authoritarian environment. At
times, what can explain them best are informal, everyday structures of resistance and the
construction of an imagined community—a sense of “we.” At other times, online
movement communities become particularly important, offering the free spaces that
movements require in repressive contexts. The fluidity of the social movement community
concept makes it a valuable tool in understanding how movements diffuse and maintain
themselves in different environments.

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