Contention under Consociationalism: The Selection of Strategies by Postethnic Protest Movements in Lebanon and Bosnia and Herzegovina

For decades, divided societies have been approached as testing grounds for conflict management strategies, with a primary focus on the effectiveness of power-sharing agreements and their potential to foster peace. However, the growing mobilization around non-ethnic issues has redirected attention toward the agentic role of citizens. Interested in this shift, this thesis asks: Under which conditions do postethnic protest movements select their strategies in consociational systems? To provide a nuanced answer, a comparison is conducted between the 2014 Social Uprising in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the 2019 October Uprising in Lebanon. Through forty interviews and hundreds of statements issued by protesting groups, this thesis highlights the rigid process of structuration, in which multiple actors engage, to different extents and degrees. Structuration here is understood as the conditions that enable the reproduction or amendment of the systems in place. By organizing the analysis around different fields of interactions, this thesis demonstrates that structural and agentic frameworks are overly simplistic when applied to consociations. In particular, structure-oriented theories, such as Political Opportunity Structure (POS), often overlook the distinctive complexities of institutional engineering in consociations. On the other hand, agency-focused theories tend to inflate the autonomy of dissidents. As such, consociations offer a nuanced context for exploring the interplay between agency and structure, through the lens of Anthony Giddens theory of structuration.<p></p>

Author dc:creator

• Larissa Abou Harb (21039800)

• Postethnic Protest Movements

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved
• Open Access after 2031-06-22

Identifier

10779/exe.32760018.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/32760018