What happens when regime officials appear to treat certain kinds of protests as too trivial to warrant any serious attention or when they appear dismissive of protesters’ mobilization? What about cases where days go by without an official response or when government officials appear to make a dismissive statement? What conceptual tools can we use to gain more insight into those scenarios? Although scholars have long studied the interaction between regime response and popular mobilization, they have largely focused on the categories of repression, concessions, and tolerance.Footnote 1 I argue that these categories fail to capture important protest dynamics, especially in cases where regime officials appear dismissive of popular mobilization, either through inaction or contempt. These dynamics include protesters’ perceptions of the reaction of government officials during the period that elapsed between their initial mobilization and the end of their protest. During this period, protesters may start to develop their own reactions to the perceived dismissiveness of regime officials. The focus on repression directs attention to the behavior of security forces but obscures interactions between protesters and the targets of their mobilization. Similarly, the exclusive focus on whether concessions are eventually offered obscures the fact that protesters’ perceptions of dismissive behavior on the part of the targets of their mobilization can influence how protesters perceive future concessions and subsequent interactions with regime officials. At the same time, the focus on “tolerance” or “toleration,” to borrow a term increasingly used by scholars of contentious politics in China,Footnote 2 obscures the fact that protesters may have divergent perceptions of the police response on the one hand, and that of targeted officials on the other. In addition, studies that invoke the concept of “tolerance” focus primarily on why authoritarian regimes would tolerate certain forms of dissent but not others, rather than on the way in which protesters perceive this “tolerance.” Even if the term “tolerating” effectively captures the response from the regime side, it carries positive connotations that obscure the various ways in which protesters might interpret or perceive such a response.
Arguing that “tolerance” is often treated as a residual category that carries little analytic leverage, I propose the concept of “ignoring” as an analytically distinct category of regime response to protests to capture situations in which government officials appear dismissive (either through inaction or contempt) of popular mobilization. Ignoring refers not only to actions by regime officials but also captures protesters’ perceptions of those actions. Examples of ignoring include not communicating with protesters, issuing condescending statements, physically evading protesters, or acting with contempt toward popular mobilization.
The focus on ignoring allows scholars more leverage for understanding what happens when protesters perceive government officials to be dismissive of their mobilization, thereby illuminating dynamics of subsequent mobilization. Drawing on research on the role of emotions in protest politics and on framing and social movements, I argue that ignoring protests can trigger emotional responses that encourage people to engage in protest, such as anger, indignation, and outrage. Ignoring protests also contributes to the development of collective identities and collective action frames that shape protesters’ future interactions with regime officials and facilitates subsequent mobilization. I do not seek to explain why authoritarian incumbents might ignore popular mobilization nor do I make assumptions about whether authoritarian incumbents ignore protests for strategic purposes or a result of an incoherent policy process. What matters here is protesters’ perceptions of the behavior of the targets of their mobilization, regardless of the rationale behind this behavior.
Introducing the concept of “ignoring” to the study of regime responses to protests is important for both empirical and theoretical purposes. On an empirical level, there is evidence that authoritarian incumbents have increasingly ignored popular mobilization. Scholars had previously assumed that authoritarian incumbents might favor the use of repression over concessions given the costs involved in offering concessions to “any groups challenging their monopoly of power.”Footnote 3 While this might still hold, authoritarian incumbents might—on some occasions—find it convenient and less costly to ignore “innocuous” protests.Footnote 4 Scholars of contentious politics in China have recently drawn attention to the fact that the Chinese regime “tolerates” certain protestsFootnote 5 and proposed some hypotheses to explain this phenomenon. Examining the Jordanian case, Jillian Schwedler suggests that certain types of protests have become extremely routinized, and thus “scripted.”Footnote 6 I build on these studies by contributing to the conceptualization of regime responses to protests that fall short of either repression or concessions.
Theoretically, the analysis here has three primary implications for the broader literature on protests in authoritarian regimes and the effects of regime response on future mobilization. First, most theoretical accounts of the effects of regime responses to protests are based on the assumption that authoritarian incumbents face a “concession-repression dilemma” in dealing with popular mobilization.Footnote 7 Ignoring is rarely considered as an important part of the calculus. As a result, we know very little about how ignoring interacts with repression and concessions. For instance, is there a “concession-ignoring” dilemma or a “concession-repression-ignoring” dilemma? Seen as a multidimensional concept rather than a residual category, ignoring can interact with other modes of regime response to protests in consequential ways.
Second, I contend that the sequence in which ignoring is used can have important consequences for the nature of future mobilization. For example, if ignoring is employed first, then followed by concessions, this might result in different consequences than if the opposite sequence if employed, and so on. Scholars have hypothesized about the sequencing of concessions and repression,Footnote 8 but have not usually factored in ignoring as part of that analysis.
Third, I argue that ignoring protests can have important consequences for future mobilization. These consequences can only be understood with reference to the fact that when government officials ignore protests, protesters might perceive those actions as dismissive. These perceptions develop over repeated interactions with regime officials. This means that protesters’ cumulative experiences with certain regime officials might shape their subsequent strategies and might, in some cases, render traditional tools, such as concessions, less viable in the long term.
I draw on a 2007 protest episode in Egypt to generate new theoretical insights into an existing typology of regime responses to protests. Given my goal of advancing a novel conceptual category—ignoring—I use the case study as a starting point for conceptual development and the generation of preliminary hypotheses about the effects of ignoring on future mobilization, a purpose that case studies are particularly well suited for.Footnote 9 As John Gerring notes, “case study research is a boon to new conceptualizations.”Footnote 10 In particular, “case studies may be more useful than cross-case studies when a subject is being encountered for the first time or is being considered in a fundamentally new way.”Footnote 11 In addition, Alexander George and Andrew Bennett point to the value of case studies in typological theorizing.Footnote 12
The focus on workers’ protests in late Mubarak Egypt is particularly fruitful for this analysis. This period (2006–2010) witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of workers’ protests. Although the conventional tools of repression and concessions were used on some occasions, many protests were left unattended for long periods of time. This offers an ideal opportunity to examine what happens when the targets of mobilization appear dismissive of popular mobilization.
This article is based on fieldwork conducted in Egypt before and after the 2011 uprising for a broader project on the emergence of independent unionism in Egypt in the context of a long history of state control over workers’ representation. During this time, I conducted semi-structured interviews with more than 60 labor activists, activists in non-governmental organizations, and members of officially-sanctioned unions, and academics.Footnote 13 These interviews were conducted with an ethnographic sensibility, in the sense that the goal was to understand how actors made sense of their experiences over the course of their collective mobilization and how they perceived their interactions with government and union officials.Footnote 14 This approach is particularly fruitful for the study of contentious politics as it helps close the gap between participants’ experiences and theoretical models.Footnote 15 It also invites open-ended reflections that help generate novel theoretical insights. As Edward Schatz argues, “ethnography holds out the promise of epistemological innovation. Research conducted at close range invites the researcher to ‘see’ differently. … Instead of resting content with those broad categories she searches for subtypes and generates ‘problematizing redescriptions.’”Footnote 16 I supplemented this research with media accounts, including reports by independent newspapers as well as numerous testimonies by protest participants recorded in TV shows covering protests in Egypt during the 2007–2011 period (available on YouTube). The extensive TV testimonies provided unique insights into how protesters recounted their experiences at the time of their mobilization. This allowed me to triangulate my interview research with accounts documenting the protests at the time of their occurrence.
The article is divided into three sections. I first develop the concept of “ignoring,” distinguishing it from conventional categories such as repression, concessions, and tolerance. I then draw on the resurgent literature on emotions in protest politics and on the social movements literatures on framing and identity formation to posit some potential consequences of ignoring on future mobilization. The empirical section draws on the case of regime response to workers’ protests in Egypt during the late Mubarak period to illustrate some of the potential consequences of ignoring protests. I conclude with a discussion of the comparative utility of the concept of “ignoring” beyond Egypt and the implications of this analysis for broader theoretical debates on the consequences of regime responses to protests for future mobilization.
Ignoring and Its Consequences
Authoritarian incumbents have an array of strategies to deal with popular mobilization. The extant scholarship on regime response to popular mobilization has identified violent repression, concessions, active encouragement and support,Footnote 17 tolerance,Footnote 18 and counter-mobilization.Footnote 19 Both theoretically and empirically, repression and concessions have been the central focus of this research program. Here, I take a first step toward conceptually delineating a particular type of regime response to protests that is characterized by the absence of both repression and concessions but that carries analytically distinct consequences.
Repression and concessions have been extensively theorized, both in terms of the conditions under which incumbents resort to them and in terms of their respective effects on future mobilization.Footnote 20 The question of whether the use of repression encourages or discourages dissent has been particularly vexing, leading to debates about the “repression/popular-protest paradox”Footnote 21 or the “repression-mobilization nexus.”Footnote 22 Despite years of research, scholars continue to debate the consequences of repression for future mobilization.Footnote 23 While some scholars argue that government repression increases the cost of subsequent mobilization,Footnote 24others contend that repression leads to increased mobilization in the long run.Footnote 25 Enid Zimmerman’s apt observation that there is evidence for “all conceivable basic relationships … except for not relationship” between government coercion and dissent remains valid today.Footnote 26 The mass uprisings that have swept the Arab world since 2011 have reinvigorated this debate.Footnote 27 Scholarship on the relationship between concessions and mobilization has produced similarly inconclusive findings. While some argue that concessions can mollify the opposition and dampen dissent,Footnote 28 others find that concessions can signal government weakness and encourage further mobilization.Footnote 29 Caught between the risky use of concessions on the one hand and the costly use of repression on the other, authoritarian incumbents face what Youngshun Cai refers to as a “concession-repression dilemma.”Footnote 30
Repression and, to a lesser extent, concessions have also been the subject of significant conceptualization.Footnote 31 Christian Davenport distinguishes between repressive acts that involve restrictions on civil liberties and those that involve “personal integrity violations.”Footnote 32 The latter refer to “state or state-affiliated activities which target the integrity of the person (i.e., which directly threaten human life) such as torture and mass killings.”Footnote 33 The former could be conceptualized as what Graeme Robertson calls “institutional forms of repression”Footnote 34 or what Anthony Oberschall terms “channelling.”Footnote 35 Lucan A. Way and Steven Levitsky distinguish between low- and high-intensity coercion, arguing that the latter “refers to highly visible acts of violence or abuse, usually involving well-known figures or large groups.”Footnote 36 Jennifer Earl has also developed a useful typology of repression on the basis of three dimensions, namely the identity of the repressive agent, the nature of the repressive action, and the degree to which it is observable.Footnote 37 Scholars have also distinguished between different types of concessions, including procedural and substantive concessions or material and rights concessions.Footnote 38
The analytical dominance of repression and concessions has meant that attempts to broaden the typology of regime responses to protests have remained conceptually limited. Examining collective mobilization in Latin America and China, for instance, James Franklin and Youngshun Cai have rightly called for systematic attention to two additional types of responses: a mixture of repression and concessions; and tolerance or toleration.Footnote 39 Attention to these additional categories, they argue, can help scholars to assess the conditions under which each of the four responses is used.Footnote 40 Despite the usefulness of this exercise, both of these responses remain analytically derived from repression and concessions. This begs the need to devote more attention to the myriad of ways in which responses to popular mobilization can transcend both repression and concessions. More importantly, however, responses that entail the absence of repression and concessions should not be assumed to be analytically similar.
The category of “tolerance” has gained some attention in recent years, especially in studies of popular mobilization in China.Footnote 41 The concept is mostly defined in negative terms, signifying the absence of both violent repression and concessions. Cai defines tolerance as a situation where “citizens’ demands are ignored but the government also tolerates their resistance.”Footnote 42 Similarly, Franklin defines “toleration” as the “absence of either repression or meaningful concessions.”Footnote 43 Substantively, research dealing with the category of tolerance has focused mostly on explaining the conditions under which authoritarian incumbents might tolerate certain protests but not others. Inverted, this was a question about the conditions under which authoritarian incumbents are likely to refrain from the use of violent repression or the use of concessions when dealing with certain protests. Discussing the long-term advantages of toleration, for instance, Franklin argues that it “should cause individuals to lower their expectation of future success,”Footnote 44 a claim that is based on the hypothesis that concessions can signal weakness and encourage people to demand more.
I argue that the category of tolerance offers very little analytic leverage as it has often been treated as a residual category. Conceptualizing tolerance as a residual category runs the risk of obscuring theoretically important dynamics of protest politics, especially situations in which protesters perceive government officials to be dismissive of their demands. Notably, protesters respond not only to the absence of repression on the part of security forces or the way in which their protest is ultimately resolved, but also to the behavior of the targets of their mobilization throughout the course of the protest episode. In addition, “tolerance” is understood mostly from the perspective of the regime. Protesters’ perceptions are not taken into account, which makes it difficult to account for the effects of “tolerance” on future mobilization.
To rectify some of these conceptual problems, I propose the concept of “ignoring” as a more analytically specific category that has the potential to offer some leverage in terms of its effects on subsequent mobilization. Ignoring refers to both inaction and contemptuous actions on the part of the targets of mobilization. The concept also captures protesters’ perceptions of these actions. Introducing the concept of ignoring is analytically useful as it helps shed light on the dynamics of subsequent mobilization. As I will explore in greater depth, ignoring protests can fuel subsequent mobilization by generating emotions such as anger, outrage and indignation. It can also drive protesters to develop collective identities and collective action frames that make mobilization more likely and that shape their subsequent interactions with regime officials.
Ignoring can be distinguished from other responses that fall short of concessions or repression. These could include adopting a sympathetic attitude toward protests. Such an attitude would entail communicating with protesters early on during their mobilization, or acting in ways that show concern for the plight of protesters and acknowledge their presence, even if regime officials are ultimately unable to accommodate protesters’ demands. Similar to ignoring, the category of “sympathizing” incorporates protesters’ perceptions of the actions of regime officials. Ignoring is thus a specific type of response to protest that can be clearly distinguished from other types of responses characterized by an absence of repression and concessions. Ignoring also has unique consequences for future mobilization that cannot simply be deduced from the absence of concessions and repression.
The term “ignoring” connotes a certain degree of disengagement on the part of regime officials who are the direct targets of protesters’ mobilization from the action of protesters. It is meant to capture situations in which regime officials appear distant from the actions or demands of protesters. In this context, I distinguish between regime officials on the one hand, and police or security forces on the other. This points to the need to disaggregate the “regime,” thereby complicating the notion of “regime response” to protest. While regime officials, often the target of protests, might be disengaged from the action of protesters, security forces are typically involved in some capacity to police any given protest. Even if police forces refrain from using violent force against protesters, they are typically deployed to ensure order at any given protest. As will be seen in the case study examined later in this article, protesters might perceive regime officials to be dismissive of their demands while at the same time citing their amicable relations with the security forces who sometimes act as intermediaries between protesters and regime officials.
On the regime side, then, the concept of “ignoring” refers primarily to the response of government officials who are the direct targets of the protests. With issue-specific grievances, protesters often target their mobilization to particular officials in relevant government agencies. With broader issues, protesters may not target specific officials but may expect their protests to be addressed by relevant authorities. If government officials do not take any pro-active steps to try to resolve the particular protest at hand, this would be an indication of ignoring. Alternatively, if government officials make no effort to communicate or meet with protesters within a few days of the start of the protest, this would indicate ignoring. One way to measure whether regime officials are ignoring protests is to examine the length of time that it takes for them to publicly respond to protesters’ concerns, either by issuing a statement or officially communicating with protest leaders. Another measure of ignoring involves gauging the tone of communication between regime officials and protesters. If the tone signals lack of concern or ridicule, it would be indicative of ignoring. Some of these measures are subjective, such as the length of time it takes for officials to respond. This subjective dimension reveals the crucial role that protesters’ perceptions play in interpreting the behavior or verbal pronouncements of regime officials. The perceptions that protesters might develop in response to ignoring will be discussed in greater detail in the following section.
Much like other types of regime response to protests (such as repression and concessions), ignoring can be conceptualized as a multidimensional concept. Time and severity are two important dimensions. The dimension of severity could be seen along a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, we find passive behavior including the absence of a response. On the other end of the spectrum, we find more active types of dismissal or indications of disregard for protesters. Time constitutes another important dimension of ignoring; ignoring protests for a long period of time is likely to have more severe consequences than ignoring protests for a short period of time. Social movement scholars have noted the importance of timing and sequencing to contentious politics. Ruud Koopmans stresses the temporal and spatial interdependence of protest episodes.Footnote 45 Doug McAdam and William H. Sewell, Jr. introduce the notion of “transformative events” to capture the importance of particular events in shaping the trajectory of social movements or revolutions.Footnote 46 “The precise sequencing of actions over a the course of a few hours or days and the particular contingencies faced by actors at particular times,” they argue, “may have structuring effects over a very long time.”Footnote 47 Depending on the severity of the response that they receive and the length of time that elapses, protesters may perceive that they are being dismissed at best or humiliated at worst. These perceptions have important long-term implications for protesters’ subsequent interactions with regime officials. Taking seriously protesters’ perceptions toward various levels of ignoring, I propose that ignoring protests can have important consequences for future mobilization, ones that are obscured when treating the absence of repression and concessions as a residual category.
In addition, it is important to point out that much like any other type of response to protests, ignoring is rarely used alone. In fact, as pointed out earlier, it is possible for regime officials to ignore protests at the same time that security forces play a more positive role, at least from the perspective of protesters. In addition, if protests are conceptualized as episodes, stretching over a certain period of time, it is possible for different responses to emerge at different times within these episodes. At another level, it is possible for a certain class of protests to be ignored for a period of time while another class of protests to be repressed during the same period of time. The conceptualization of “ignoring” proposed here is particularly attuned to a holistic view of regime responses to protests. In doing so, this conceptualization takes seriously the dimension of time by emphasizing the way in which protesters may use their time on the street and the perceptions that they develop of regime officials during this time. It also pays particular attention to sequencing by emphasizing that the sequence in which ignoring is used vis-à-vis other types of responses can have important consequences for future mobilization. Although perceptions of ignoring may develop among aggrieved groups before they interact with government officials through protest, I focus primarily on ignoring as a type of regime response to protests. As such, I limit the scope of ignoring to the onset of collective mobilization. Importantly, I argue that the scope of ignoring extends beyond a given episode of collective mobilization, influencing future interactions between protesters and the targets of their mobilization. Drawing on a long tradition of research on protests, I argue that protests have dynamics of their own and that protesters’ interactions with the targets of their mobilization over the course of an episode of collective mobilization produces dynamics that are unique to that setting.
If ignoring protests is analytically distinct from other types of regime response to protests, as I have argued thus far, then what consequences does it have for future mobilization? Social movement scholars have repeatedly emphasized the importance of accounting for protesters’ perceptions when explaining collective mobilization.Footnote 48 In hypothesizing the effects of repression and concessions on future mobilization, Jack Goldstone and Charles Tilly take protesters’ perceptions into account, arguing that “weak repression or concessions can increase perceptions of state weakness.”Footnote 49 And yet, we know so little about how protesters respond when their mobilization is faced with neither repression nor concessions. At best, we assume that tolerating protests is a residual category that has the same consequences as simply the absence of repression and concessions.
Far from being a residual category, I argue that ignoring protests has consequences of its own for future mobilization. As I have noted earlier, ignoring is distinct from other categories of response characterized by the absence of both repression and concessions, such as sympathizing. Bringing the concept of “ignoring” to the forefront, I take seriously the various ways in which protesters respond to what they perceive as a form of dismissiveness on the part of the targets of their mobilization. In theorizing these perceptions and their effects on future mobilization, I draw on the growing literature on the role of emotions in protest politics,Footnote 50 and on the social movements literatures on framing and identity formation.Footnote 51 Several scholars of social movements and protests have recently brought emotions back to the study of mobilization.Footnote 52 Writing in 2001, Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper, and Francesca Poletta lamented that “once in the center of the study of politics, emotions have led a shadow existence for the last three decades, with no place in the rationalistic, structural, and organizational models that dominate academic political analysis.”Footnote 53 In response, Goowdin, Jasper and Poletta sought to “reverse this trend, reincorporating emotions such as anger and indignation, fear and disgust, joy and love, into research on politics and protests.”Footnote 54
Following other work on emotions, I conceptualize emotions in an intersubjective manner. As Jorge Cadena-Roa argues, “emotions are not simple inner feelings, and differ from other mental and psychological states. Emotions are referential; they are always directed toward some real (or perceived as real) object.”Footnote 55 In addition, drawing on the work of several scholars of emotions and social movements, I see no clear dichotomy between emotion and rationality.Footnote 56 As Deborah Gould argues, “rather than being a source that interferes with reason that should therefore be sequestered from the public, political realm, emotion here is viewed as a crucial means by which human beings come to know and understand themselves and their contexts, their interests commitments, their needs and their options in securing those needs.”Footnote 57
Theorizing the emotional effects of repression, Wendy Pearlman argues that repressive acts can provoke anger, compelling people to engage in protest.Footnote 58 Charles Brockett argues that outrage in response to state repression can fuel protest.Footnote 59 I argue that, much like repressive acts, ignoring can trigger some of the same emotional responses that encourage people to engage in protest, such as anger, indignation, and outrage. These responses become more severe when authorities repeatedly ignore protests, ignore protests for a long period of times, and when authorities issue statements or behave in condescending ways toward protesters.
Anger and Recognition
Scholarship on emotions and protests suggests that protesters can have powerful emotional responses when they believe that their actions have no impact or their voices are not being heard.Footnote 60 These emotional responses often compel protesters to engage in further collective action. Jasper argues that the “frustration of not having an impact, shows why protestors often adopt as targets the governmental procedures that have failed to protect or aid them … indignation at one’s own government can be especially moving, as it involves a sense of betrayal.”Footnote 61 At its core, ignoring protests leads protesters to believe that government officials are dismissive and disrespectful, compelling them to take further action. Building on Theodore Kemper’s conceptualization of anger as stemming from “hunger … for status and benefits denied,” Pearlman argues that “animosity is released when one feels worthy but does not receive due recognition or respect.”Footnote 62 Understood as a reaction to the lack of recognition or respect, anger can be seen as a key response to perceived dismissiveness to popular mobilization. Indeed, as will be discussed in more depth in the following section, mutual recognition is at the heart of protest politics and its absence can lead to feelings of indignation among protesters.
Several scholars of emotions and social movements point out that anger can be a basis for mobilization. Jacquelien van Stekelenburg and Bert Klandermans refer to it as “the prototypical protest emotion,”Footnote 63 or “a valued commodity,” while Helena Flam calls it “the very currency of protest.”Footnote 64 In contrast to “subordinate” emotions such as shame, despair or fear, “anger moves people to adopt a more challenging relationship with authorities.”Footnote 65 When seen as a “moral emotion,” Jasper argues, anger can become a “form of righteous indignation, a moral sensibility as well as a gut feeling of oppression.”Footnote 66 In this form, anger can become the basis for mobilization.Footnote 67 When the targets of mobilization refrain from communicating or making any statements to protesters, they essentially deny them any form of recognition. This is especially the case in political contexts where protest is one of the few channels available to aggrieved citizens to address their governments. In such contexts, I argue that the failure to afford protesters due recognition through silence or lack of action can result in anger and spur determination for further collective action or the adoption of more disruptive methods aimed at attracting the attention of protest targets. This is particularly pronounced when protesters bring their mobilization geographically close to their intended targets. As will be discussed in the empirical section that follows, protesters repeatedly lamented the fact that government officials had not even acknowledged their mobilization even when they had been protesting in front of these officials’ offices for extended periods of time.
Indignation, Framing, and Collective Identities
Severe forms of ignoring, especially condescending statements or humiliating actions, can generate moral outrage and indignation. Jasper argues that moral shocks, “often the first step toward recruitment into social movements, occur when an unexpected event or piece of information raises such a sense of outrage in a person that she becomes inclined toward political action, whether or not she has acquaintances in the movement.”Footnote 68 Some of the behaviors associated with ignoring protests, especially condescending actions toward protesters, constitute moral offenses that may be equally provocative but that are generally outside the scope of what Jasper might consider a moral shock. Actions construed as deeply humiliating or degrading, for instance, are moral offenses that can trigger feelings of indignation and moral outrage. Citing the work of behavioral economists Cass Sunstein and Edna Ulmann-Margalit, Pearlman argues that indignation “‘can lead the disadvantaged to disrupt an otherwise stable situation’ of inequality or perceived injustice because they come to feel that they have ‘nothing to lose but their chains.’”Footnote 69
At its core, indignation is a reaction to perceived injustice. Feeling indignant is “feeling angry about something that has happened, or that someone has done, and that we consider unjust.”Footnote 70 Brought about through interaction with others, indignation can happen at any of three levels: “how do I feel about what others do to me; how do I feel about what I do; and how do I feel about what others do to third parties.”Footnote 71 As Cadena-Roa puts it:
indignation is provoked by the belief that some moral norm has been deliberately broken and that harm and suffering are being inflicted upon undeserving people. Indignation requires that the indignant person believe that there is a responsible party whose action or lack thereof show hostility, ill will, or indifference towards other individual or group.Footnote 72
This is precisely what happens when protesters are faced with severe forms of ignoring on the part of the targets of mobilization, especially degrading or condescending behavior. “The quotidian experience of invisible hurdles that poor and dominated people have to overcome,” argues Cadena-Roa, “transforms indignation into resentment, and resentment into anger. Indignation, resentment and anger can then be mobilized against political targets.”Footnote 73
In addition, as Sonia Albert’s work on recognition suggests, indignation is also closely tied to mutual recognition and often provoked by its absence.Footnote 74 Protesters expect the targets of their mobilization to acknowledge their actions and treat them with respect. This explains protesters’ indignation toward state authorities who neither respect nor recognize their mobilization.
Insights from social psychology lend further support to the claim that people are motivated to act when they feel disrespected or perceive injustices in their interactions with authorities. Tom R. Tyler and Heather J. Smith find that people place a premium on matters of procedural justice (i.e., fairness in procedures and respectful treatment) in their interactions with authorities.Footnote 75 As Van Stekelenburg and Klandermans aptly put it, “People care more how they are treated than about outcomes—do authorities treat them with respect, can authorities be trusted to do well by their people?”Footnote 76 Procedural grievances, such as those identified by Tyler and Smith as well as those involved in police mishandling of protest, “can be powerful, as they involve a sense of betrayal by one’s own government, the same agent that is supposed to protect citizens and process complaints.”Footnote 77 Stephen C. Wright, Donald M. Taylor and Fathali M. Moghaddam find a “relatively strong relationship” between “emotions and perceptions of disadvantaged group members, on the one hand, and their overt actions on the other.”Footnote 78
Shared feelings of indignation may also make it easier for movement activists to craft collective-action frames, thereby leading to further mobilization. Collective-action frames, according to David Snow and Robert Benford, are “action oriented sets of belief and meanings that inspire and legitimate social movement activities and campaigns.”Footnote 79 William Gamson proposes injustice, agency, and identity as three components for collective-action frames. The injustice and identity components are particularly relevant here. The injustice component refers to the “moral indignation expressed in this form of political consciousness. … An injustice frame requires a consciousness of some of the human actors who carry some of the onus for bringing about harm and suffering.”Footnote 80 “Injustice,” according to Gamson, “focuses on the kind of righteous anger that puts fire in the belly and iron in the soul.”Footnote 81 A shared experience of humiliation at the hand of protest targets can thus form the basis for an injustice frame that movement leaders can draw on to compel members to act.
In addition, shared feelings of indignation make it possible for movement activists to construct identity frames. According to Gamson, the identity component of collective-action frames “refers to the process of defining this ‘we’ in opposition to some ‘they’ who have different interests or values.”Footnote 82 At the heart of identity construction then is the drawing of boundaries between group members and foes. In severe cases of ignoring, group leaders might marshal memories of collective humiliation in their construction of the group's collective identity. Doing so reinforces ties among group members and makes collective action more likely in the future. The more severe the level of dismissiveness or devaluation perceived by the protesters, the more difficult it will be for protesters to erase these memories. These hardened memories might cloud future interactions with regime officials, rendering some of the more conventional tools of concessions less effective down the road. Notably, repeated experiences of ignoring could solidify feelings of indignation among protesters. In a sense, then, protesters’ shared experiences of indignation accumulate over the course of repeated interactions and become more difficult to erase over time.
Importantly, there is no direct link between emotions and collective action. Scholars of emotions have noted the important role that social movements play in the “emotional re-framing of reality.”Footnote 83 “As challengers to the status quo, social movements re-interpret specific aspects of social reality, call for new, obligatory emotions and feeling rules and wish to draw on these to mobilize individuals for collective action who aim it is to achieve social change.”Footnote 84 In her work on AIDS activism in the United States, Gould shows how the lesbian and gay community experienced a shift in “emotion culture,” whereby indignation and anger replaced pride and shame.Footnote 85 “This new constellation of emotions pointed in the direction of militant AIDS activism.”Footnote 86 Verta Taylor shows a similar process in the evolution of the American post-partum depression movement in the 1980s and 1990s.Footnote 87 Changes in emotion cultures can be triggered by shocking events, such as the Hardwick ruling in the case of AIDS activism.Footnote 88 In addition, social movements and their leaders play an important role in framing key events or interactions with authorities in a way that appeals to members’ moral convictions.Footnote 89
Ignoring Workers’ Protests in Late Mubarak Egypt
The following empirical analysis will draw on evidence from the way regime officials responded to some episodes of workers’ protests in late-Mubarak Egypt, particularly in the 2007–2011 period, to illustrate the dynamics surrounding ignoring protests discussed earlier.
In the decade preceding Mubarak’s ouster in 2011, Egypt witnessed an unprecedented level of popular mobilization, especially among workers. Writing in 2007, Joel Beinin and Hossam El-Hamalawy noted that “the longest and strongest wave of worker protest since the end of World War II is rolling through Egypt.”Footnote 90 According to some estimates, more than 2 million workersFootnote 91 participated in more than 3000 protests between 2004 and 2010.Footnote 92 This wave of protests was largely a response to the more aggressive adoption of neoliberal economic reforms by Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif. As Rabab el-Mahdi puts it, “the appointment of the Nazif cabinet in July 2004 and its subsequent headlong pursuit of neoliberalism had, by 2006, created the conditions for the emergence of a larger and more entrenched movement.”Footnote 93 For the most part, protesters engaged in direct popular action rather than sought established formal channels to voice their grievances.Footnote 94 With very few exceptions, in contrast to the 1980s, the Mubarak regime largely eschewed the use of violent repression in dealing with workers’ protests starting in the mid-2000s.Footnote 95 It is beyond the scope of this article to address possible explanations for this variation. Confronted with a dramatic increase in the number of workers’ protests in the 2004–2011 period, regime officials seemed to ignore some while offering concessions to others. Despite this, however, concessions—when offered—mostly came on the heels of long periods of ignoring. There are some instances in which regime officials responded relatively quickly, offering substantial concessions, such as in the case of a major strike in the industrial city of al-Mahalla al-Kubra in December 2006. But this was more the exception rather than the rule.
More importantly for the purposes of this article, however, government officials often appeared dismissive of popular mobilization. It became commonplace for protesters to hold extended sit-ins in highly symbolic locations in downtown Cairo, often directly in front of the offices of targeted officials. Despite this, however, their mobilization was often met with silence or ridicule. If anything, government officials often seemed to treat popular mobilization as an inconvenience. In December 2007, for instance, amidst a sit-in organized by municipal real estate tax collectors, Prime Minister Nazif went to his office on the outskirts of Cairo to evade protesters camped outside his downtown office.Footnote 96 In contrast to the direct targets of mobilization, security forces sometimes played a more sympathetic role—at least from the perspective of protesters. Security forces were simply tasked with cordoning protests to ensure that they remain within certain parameters. In fact, many protesters report feeling “protected” and “well treated” by security forces.Footnote 97
Anger, Recognition, and Mobilization
Evidence from the study of workers’ protests in the late Mubarak period suggests that protesters responded with anger and with determination to engage in further collective action when government officials ignored their mobilization. Protest groups consistently lamented the fact that officials did not respond to them, often leading them to resort to more disruptive measures such as breaking social taboos to draw attention, making a lot of noise, or blocking traffic in front of major government buildings. Having protested and slept on the sidewalk of the people’s assembly for 43 days but gotten no official response, workers in the Nubariya Company for Agricultural Engineering took off their shirts and their undergarments to express their desperation. In some cases, protesters also started to use rocks to pound on the steel barriers set up by state security forces to attract attention. In a statement to a daily TV news show on Dream 2 satellite channel in May 2010, an enraged worker in the company Amunsito said: “No one is answering us at all. We have been staying here for 15 days, standing on the sidewalk … there is nothing new … no one is responding to us. … this is why we adopted the system of pounding on the steel and using whistles so that someone would respond to us.”Footnote 98 In April 2010, a woman working with the agency for agricultural land improvement told al-Mehwar satellite channel that it is “shameful and catastrophic that we are sitting here [at the sidewalk of parliament] and they are blocking their ears and covering their eyes toward our rights.”Footnote 99
In other cases, workers staged public performances to bring attention to their cause, thereby addressing regime officials as well as their fellow Egyptian citizens. In May 2010, for instance, a group of Amunsito workers staged a mock funeral service in front of parliament, symbolizing their grievance over the symbolic death of the worker. In another protest during the same month, members of the same group took off their shirts in public and wore their undergarments in an attempt to communicate their desperation. Others put on the white linens used to wrap the deceased, thereby symbolizing their imminent death in case their demands were not heard. For their part, municipal information center employees, working for the Council of Ministers, put together a giant cardboard skeleton, reading: “This is my state after nine years in Information Centers” during their demonstration on May 1, 2010.Footnote 100
Case Study: Municipal Real Estate Tax Collectors
The mobilization of Egyptian real estate tax collectors in 2007 offers an ideal opportunity to explore the concept of “ignoring.” The group’s mobilization occurs in the context of a larger wave of workers’ protests in Egypt. As mentioned earlier, this wave was characterized by far less violent repression than earlier ones. In addition, the group’s mobilization efforts in 2007 marked the first successful attempt to organize large-scale street protests by workers in Egypt at the time. On the two main occasions I discuss (November 2007 and December 2007), the group succeeded in mobilizing thousands of members, making the group’s mobilization the first large-scale attempt to occupy a public space in late Mubarak Egypt by any protest group. Second, the group succeeded in achieving significant financial concessions by the end of its December 2007 strike. Despite this, however, memories of collective humiliation and shared feelings of indignation shaped the group’s collective identity for years to come. The group’s experience thus presents an ideal opportunity for exploring the long-term consequences of ignoring, even in cases where mobilization is eventually resolved through concessions. This allows me to highlight the interaction between ignoring and other, more widely studied, types of regimes responses to protests, such as concessions.
On December 3, 2007, thousands of municipally-based real estate tax collectors gathered in front of the council of ministers’ building on Hussein Higazi Street in downtown Cairo. Their primary demand was to become administratively tied to the ministry of finance (rather than municipalities), seeking wage parity with Cairo-based real estate tax collectors. When they arrived, they did not know how long they would stay or where they would be allowed to sit in. After initial negotiations, they ended up camping in front of the council of ministers’ building, where they decided to hold an open-ended sit-in. Almost a week went by as police forces amicably ensured that protesters did not go outside a certain cordoned area. Describing the behavior of security forces, a movement activist from the Delta governorate of Menoufiya said that “the security treatment was respectful and more.”Footnote 101
In the meantime, protesters had made the space in front of the council of ministers’ building their second home. They set up tents, cooked meals, schooled their children, and collectively prayed. For their part, no public officials appeared to respond to the sit-in. Perhaps operating on the logic that aggrieved constituencies should be allowed to vent their anger or that protesters will tire and go home in despair, neither the prime minister nor the minister of finance, the targets of the sit-in, felt compelled to respond to the protesters in one way or the other. When the minister of finance finally did, almost a week after thousands of real estate tax collectors had been camping outside his office, he dismissively said that he would “not be arm-twisted.”Footnote 102 Eleven days into their sit-in, the minister of finance finally conceded to the demands of the protesters by matching their salary to that of Cairo-based real estate tax collectors. This effectively meant a 300 percent wage increase. Given the political context at the time and the fact that the Mubarak regime had historically responded to workers’ mobilization in a swift manner—either through repression or quick concessions (or sometimes both), it was unusual for protests to go unresolved for more than a day or two at the most. Even when street protests—more generally—started to become more prevalent in 2003, especially in opposition to the Iraq war, it was highly uncommon for protests to last longer than a few hours before being dispersed by the police or resolved through negotiation. The sit-in organized by the real estate tax collectors in December 2007 marked one of the first episodes of extended street mobilization in late Mubarak Egypt.Footnote 103
The December 2007 sit-in was preceded by a series of demonstrations in September and October 2007. In September 2007, real estate tax collectors staged local demonstrations in front of real estate tax authority bureaus in the governorates of Giza, Daqahliya, and Beni Suef. Dissatisfied with the lack of attention accorded to their issue, they were determined to communicate their grievances to higher-ranking government officials. In October 2007, they organized a demonstration in front of the ministry of finance in Nasr City in Cairo and then marched to the council of ministers’ building in downtown Cairo to make their voices heard by Prime Minister Nazif but the authorities continued to “deny [them] an audience.”Footnote 104 The group also tried to appeal to the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF), organizing a three-day sit-in in front of its headquarters in downtown Cairo in November 2007. The ETUF, Egypt’s sole trade union federation since 1957, and its affiliate General Union for Bank, Insurance, and Financial Affairs Employees, are the bodies responsible for representing real estate tax collectors. Disappointed with the pace and futility of ETUF-led negotiations, more than 5,000 real estate tax collectors, traveling from various governorates, began (on December 3, 2007) an open-ended strike and sit-in in front of the council of ministers’ building in Hussein Higazi street in downtown Cairo, just steps from parliament and other major government buildings.
Bypassing the ETUF and the ministry of finance, municipal real estate tax collectors chose to direct their demands—namely wage parity with their Cairo-based counterparts and their financial and administrative inclusion under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance rather than municipal governments—directly to Prime Minister Nazif.
In responding to the real estate tax collectors’ sit-in in December 2007, government officials initially ignored the sit-in and abstained from making any statements. Illustrating the desire for recognition discussed previously, municipal real estate tax collectors appealed to Nazif to look out of his window or go down to talk to them.Footnote 105 A member of the strike committee and key leader from the governorate of Daqahliya writes that a few days into the sit-in, at a time when no officials in the ministry of finance had addressed the protesters, they began to raise doubts about the efficacy of their sit-in.Footnote 106 Instead of going home, however, they vowed not to leave until their core demand was met.
Notably, it was not until the seventh day of the sit-in that the Minister of Finance Youssef Boutrous Ghali commented on the issue. In another sign that government officials appeared to disregard the protest, Prime Minister Nazif evaded the whole issue by physically distancing himself from the site of protest and simply leaving for his office on the outskirts of Cairo.Footnote 107 When the Minister of Finance finally made a statement, he stubbornly declared that “I will not be arm twisted” into succumbing to popular pressure.Footnote 108 “If protesters tell me to resolve the issue or we will stay on the street,” he said, “I would tell them to stay on the street.”Footnote 109 A leader in the real estate tax collectors’ movement from the governorate of Daqahliya asserts that Ghali’s statement enraged the participants and made them more steadfast in pursuing their goals. Protesters remained camped in front of the council of ministers’ building until their demands were finally met, four days later.Footnote 110
Reflecting on the way in which regime officials responded to his group’s mobilization (despite the eventual concession), the same activist recalls that “regime officials ‘arrogantly’ assumed that a group of government employees could not do anything.”Footnote 111 In a sense, then, given the fact that group members had developed shared perceptions of dismissiveness on the part of government officials, they were much more likely to perceive the eventual concession not as a sign of government rapprochement but as a gain that they accomplished in spite of the ridicule that their group had received over the course of its mobilization. Repeated experiences of dismissiveness altered the way in which group members eventually responded to the concession.
Indignation, Framing, and Collective Identities
“Megawer, Farouk Shehata … we have divorced you three times.”Footnote 112 This is how real estate tax collectors responded to a visit by Hussein Megawer, EUTF president and Shehata, head of the General Union for Bank, Insurance, and Financial Affairs Employees, to the site of their sit-in in December 2007. The protesters were expressing their anger toward what they perceived to be an ineffectual union leadership. The phrase “divorced you three times” is in reference to the fact that a divorce is only final once the man utters the word three times, according to Islamic law.
The saga informing this antagonism and this perception dated back to November 2007, when more than 3,000 real estate tax collectors from around 10 Egyptian governorates organized a sit-in in front of the headquarters of the ETUF on Galaa’ Street in downtown Cairo. The sit-in represents perhaps the most flagrant episode of ignoring protests in the late-Mubarak period in Egypt. The sit-in was the third in a series of protests and sit-ins organized by the employees. In October 2007, real estate tax collectors had organized a sit-in in front of the Ministry of Finance. Having failed to meet any official in the ministry, real estate tax collectors decided to resort to the ETUF to help mediate their grievances. Having promised them to make some calls to government officials, Megawer asked them to leave the building. The employees insisted on gathering in front of the ETUF building. Although protesters were neither prevented from staging the sit-in nor were they physically harassed by the security forces, the ETUF leadership refused to allow them access to the building, including use of the restrooms. This extended over the three days of the sit-in.
The humiliation that the protesters expressed in response to this approach could not have been more pronounced, even as they recalled the events in conversations in 2011, almost four years following the incident. Indeed, when asked about their general experience with the ETUF, nearly all group members with whom I have spoken immediately invoked this incident. The sense of humiliation and betrayal shared by group members is particularly evident in their recollection of the fact that they had to travel to nearby mosques to use the restrooms during the three-day sit-in in front of the ETUF headquarters.
“Our experience with Megawer was really bad,” recalls a group leader from Daqahliya.Footnote 113 “He closed the door when we held our sit-in in front of the ETUF; he closed the door. Everyone who slept on the sidewalk in front of the ETUF headquarters on November 13, 14, and 15 [2007] remembers this experience,” adds the same leader. “We were treated in the worst manner,” adds another movement member from Menoufiya.Footnote 114
The antagonism created early on in the movement’s trajectory between rank and file members and the ETUF leadership was also reflected in the way in which movement members greeted the president of the General Union for Bank, Insurance, and Financial Affairs Employees—Farouk Shehata—during his visit to the sit-in in December 2007. Movement members asked Shehata to leave when he came to visit their sit-in in December 2007.Footnote 115 Later that month, they barred him from taking part in negotiations between the high strike committee and Minister of Finance Ghali.Footnote 116
The markedly bitter attitude that movement members had toward the ETUF leadership in light of this episode and the antagonism created early on in the movement’s trajectory between rank and file members and the ETUF leadership had clear consequences for subsequent interactions between the two. First, the collective memories of humiliation shared by movement members contributed to the emergence of a group identity defined in opposition to the ETUF leadership. As Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani argue, “identity construction should not be regarded simply as a precondition for collective action … On the contrary, it is through action that certain feelings of belonging come to be either reinforced or weakened. In other words, the evolution of collective action produces and encourages continuous redefinitions of identity.”Footnote 117
Second, group members developed a certain level of distrust toward the ETUF leadership that made it difficult for them to view the ETUF as a legitimate defender of their rights, thereby opening the door for subsequent calls for the formation of a real estate tax collectors’ union outside of the umbrella of the ETUF. In a sense then, severe forms of ignoring on the part of ETUF officials during the episode had path-dependent consequences for the group’s subsequent development. While ignoring alone does not explain why real estate tax collectors decided to form an independent union, it created suitable conditions for defection and rendered subsequent co-optation efforts much less effective. I propose two primary mechanisms through which high levels of ignoring facilitated the conditions for defection: (1) directly antagonizing and, to some degree, humiliating rank and file group members, not just militant leaders, thereby making rank and file group members much more open to alternative arrangements; and (2) offering movement leaders a perfect frame for advancing an argument in favor of defection.
In an interview held one year after the December 2007 sit-in, one of the group’s leaders recounts: “The position of the [ETUF] toward our famous sit-in last year was the primary inspiration for what is called the independent union after the union organization took the side of the government in robbing our rights; it threatened us more than once during the time of the sit-in in an attempt to abort it. It also left us and those who were with us to sleep on the marble floor; none of its leaderships thought to open one of the rooms for us; instead they locked the bathrooms to pressure us. This is despite the fact that the compulsory monthly dues are taken from our food and that of our children.”Footnote 118 “Our experience with Megawer made us want to become independent,” recalls another union member from the governorate of Sohag.Footnote 119 “There was an official union structure that stood against the demands of the workers. Forming an independent union was spontaneous. The official union structure dared to prevent workers from making their demands,” notes a union member from the governorate of al-Wadi al-Gadid.Footnote 120
The memories created in the movement’s early stages of development informed the group’s subsequent interactions with official union representatives. Indeed, the slogan “we will divorce you three times” resurfaced on several other occasions in the movement’s development, most notably in April 2009 when the group formally established the first independent union in Egypt since 1957.Footnote 121
Comparative Dimensions of Ignoring
The dynamics identified here are not unique to the mobilization of Egyptian real estate tax collectors in 2007. At the heart of the foregoing analysis is the claim that ignoring, much like repression, can generate anger and indignation, driving people to engage in collective action. Severe forms of ignoring can provoke such reactions because they violate people’s sense of dignity. As argued in previous sections, severe forms of ignoring can trigger indignation when protesters perceive that they have been unjustly treated by authorities. This is especially the case when protesters are faced with degrading behavior on the part of government agents or other representatives who are considered responsible for protecting them. In a sense, then, protesters take seriously the way in which they are treated by government officials, not only whether their demands are eventually met.
The focus on ignoring thus helps us understand the centrality of demands for human dignity and for recognition in other episodes of contention. Demands for human dignity figured prominently not only in the Arab uprisings of 2010–2011 but also in popular protest in the preceding years. Writing on the Arab uprisings, Marc Lynch notes that anger and demands for dignity played a more important mobilizing role than other factors, such as changes in perceptions of risk and opportunity.Footnote 122 Pearlman has also shown the centrality of indignation to popular mobilization in the 2010–2011 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.Footnote 123 Documenting various forms of resistance that preceded the Arab uprisings, Charles Tripp argues that demands for dignity have been at the center of “common experiences of power” in the Middle East and North Africa,Footnote 124 and “have been central in explaining why resistance can be taken up by large numbers of people, across a country and, as the events of 2011 showed, across a region.”Footnote 125 For Tripp, these acts of resistance were essentially calling for public recognition.Footnote 126
Writing on the decade-long mobilization that preceded Mubarak’s ouster in 2011, Jeroen Gunning and Ilan Zvi Baron argue that a change in the emotion culture had already been taking place in Egypt.Footnote 127 Drawing on Gould’s work, they argue that “activists had succeeded in legitimizing anger, redirecting anger concerning the injustices and struggles of daily life toward the regime.”Footnote 128 In doing so, they had displaced other emotions, such as fear.Footnote 129
The politics of ignoring also figured prominently in the way in which Egyptian authorities responded to the January 25, 2011 uprising.Footnote 130 Commenting on the protests in a press conference on January 27, 2011, Safwat al-Sherif, former Secretary General of Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party, said that only a few thousand people had participated.Footnote 131 It took former president Hosni Mubarak several days to make a statement about the protests. It was only after the bloodiest day of protests (January 28) that Mubarak addressed the nation in a televised speech. The much-awaited speech was perceived as a sign of complete disengagement with the unprecedented mobilization that had rocked the country in the preceding days.
Beyond the context of the Arab uprisings, however, there is evidence that indignation has been at the center of global protest movements, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement or the “indignados” in Spain.Footnote 132 Tova Benski and Lanren Langman highlight the centrality of emotions to popular movements against global capitalism in 2011. These include the Spanish “indignados” movement, the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, and the Greek and Israeli protest movements in summer 2011. “Crises,” they argue, “especially those that affect people’s everyday lives in ways that often humiliate or degrade the self, lead to strong emotions of the ‘anger-hate-humiliation’ family which form powerful emotionally based motives to seek amelioration.”Footnote 133 Commenting on the mobilization of young unemployed adults in the Arab world, Southern Europe, and the United States, Benski and Langman argue that “many of the economically distressed see themselves politically marginalized and their interests disenfranchised and ignored by elites, and feel humiliated, deprived of the basic requirements for a decent and dignified life.”Footnote 134
Conclusion
In this article, I have offered a preliminary conceptualization of ignoring, arguing that it constitutes an analytically separate category of regime response to protests. This analysis has important implications for broader theoretical debates on the relationship between regime response to protests and future mobilization. First, the arguments made here underscore the fact that ignoring must be taken into account when considering how various modes of regime responses to protests interact with each other. Scholars must thus consider ignoring as an additional element in the much-discussed “concession-repression dilemma.”Footnote 135
Second, this analysis implies that the particular sequence in which various regime responses to protests are employed can have important consequences. For example, if ignoring is employed first, then followed by concessions, this might result in theoretically different consequences than if the opposite sequence if employed, and so on. Scholars have hypothesized about the sequencing of concessions and repression,Footnote 136 but have not usually factored in ignoring as part of that analysis. In addition, these sequences might be qualitatively different depending on the type of ignoring. For instance, protesters’ experiences with severe forms of ignoring could alter their perceptions of subsequent concessions or interactions with regime officials. Certain forms of ignoring could thus have path-dependent consequences, thereby altering the way in which protesters respond to other types of responses following ignoring.
Third, this analysis reveals that protesters’ perceptions of dismissiveness on the part of regime officials develop over repeated interactions. This means that protesters’ cumulative experiences with certain regime officials might shape their subsequent strategies. Protest leaders might capitalize on perceptions of regime dismissiveness to construct movements’ collective identities, which might prove difficult to reverse in the long term. This can undermine an authoritarian regime’s capacity to co-opt these protest movements down the road.
Fourth, attention to the concept of “ignoring” not only offers us an analytic tool to better understand what happens when protesters are met with inaction or contempt, it also forces us to unpack the notion of “regime response” to protests. While we typically focus on the action of riot police when thinking about the use of repression and on government officials when analyzing concessions, the concept of “ignoring” forces us to focus more explicitly on the behavior of the direct targets of a given protest. In doing so, it prompts us to think more systematically about the multiplicity of agents or agencies involved in responding to protests and the potential for their actions to overlap, and in some cases, produce contrasting perceptions on the part of protesters. Recent research on China has shown that even within a single local state, agencies pursue different and sometimes contradictory methods of control, with the paradoxical effect of inducing self-censorship as well as entrepreneurial behavior.Footnote 137 The case study explored here highlights the fact that protesters may develop different perceptions of the treatment of police forces on the one hand, and that of the officials who are the direct targets of their protest on the other. In this particular case, protesters had positive perceptions of the behavior of the police but negative perceptions of the behavior of the officials who are the direct targets of their mobilization. Indeed, and perhaps surprisingly, protesters praised the behavior of the police.
Finally, addressing the consequences of ignoring for future mobilization prompts us to better appreciate the dimension of time in our analyses of regime response and future mobilization. We are forced to consider, for instance, what it feels like for protesters to sit on the street for days while their presence goes unacknowledged by the targets of their protest. Seen only from the perspective of the conventional notion of “tolerance,” we might assume that protesters will be content with their new-found ability to express their grievances or might even be emboldened to mobilize in the future. While such conclusions are not necessarily inaccurate, they obscure the fact that protesters might become even more frustrated when faced with a situation where they are allowed to voice their grievances, even within close geographic proximity to decision-makers, while at the same time being denied any form of recognition.
Supplemental Materials
Online Appendix
Sample questions and excerpted responses from interviews with members of the real estate tax collectors’ movement
YouTube videos consulted
Clips of Protests (including chants)
