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Laura May: hello and welcome to the Conflict Tipping Podcast for mediate.com,

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the podcast that explores social conflict and what we can do about it.

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I'm your host, Laura May, and today I have with me Dr.

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Benjamin Abrams, lecturer at UCL L'S Faculty of Education Society, and Deputy

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Chair of the UCL Sociology Network. He is also a Leverhulme Trust fellow chief Editor at Contention Journal,

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and he has just published his latest book entitled The Rise of the Masses.

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So welcome Ben. Benjamin Abrams: Hi Laura.

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Excited to talk to you today. Laura May: I'm extremely glad to have you here today, especially because as we're

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recording this, it's your book release day, so you must be feeling very relieved.

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Benjamin Abrams: Yeah, a little. I have to say, I, I thought that today would be the day that I would just pop the

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champagne corks and party immediately. It turns out that there's all this promotional stuff that one has to

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do the most pleasant of which is, is coming on to talk to you today.

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But lots of emails and messages to bookshops and event planners

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and things like that coming up. But I will have a bit of time to celebrate this evening,

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which I'm looking forward to. Laura May: Well, I mean, hey, if you wanna start drinking champagne while on

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the podcast, I'm not gonna judge you. That would be fine.

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So let's just dive on in, because on the blurb for the rise of the Masses,

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you mentioned four mass mobilizations.

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You talk about the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd's

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murder, the Arab Spring, occupy Wall Street, and the French Revolution,

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which seems a little random when compared to the others, right?

1:42

So what is special about these four movements?

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Benjamin Abrams: So you, you tweaked something, which I think is

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really important about the whole approach I took to the book, right?

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Is that I wanted to choose things that didn't sit easily together.

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Laura May: Mm-hmm. Benjamin Abrams: A really common practice in academia is that we

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choose a few countries and next to each other and we say, oh look,

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this is like a natural experiment. We're gonna tweak some variables between countries and come

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up with some conclusions. My approach is the opposite.

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I'm trying to build a new set of ideas, a new theory here.

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And so what I want to see is whether my ideas are worthwhile in context,

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which are as different as possible. So I want to try and test things across the span of time and space to see

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whether the ideas that I have hold up.

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Laura May: I love that the span of time and space.

2:30

I mean, you're here ready to present theories of the universe, but specifically

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about mass mobilization, so I guess limited to human history at any rate

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Benjamin Abrams: hope so. I hope so. Yeah it's, it's, it's been a bit of a funny one to be honest.

2:42

When you are coming up with ideas about something as generic

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as mass mobilization, right? Because at the end of the day, mass mobilization is just

2:50

lots of people doing a thing.

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You have to kind of keep yourself constrained a little bit and

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not get overly ambitious. It's very easy to lapse into trying to theorize all of human's social

3:01

action because you think, well, really anything could be mobilization, right?

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And so I've tried to try to keep myself focused very distinctly on

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this initial decision that people make to show up to something.

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So that moment when someone says, all right, I'm gonna go and drive the

3:19

protest that I've heard about, or I'm going to go and join these people in the

3:23

streets who are carrying a no torches and pitchforks or whatever, and really

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focusing on that particular element. But that's obviously a phenomenon we see in many different cases.

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And so I wanted to make sure that I was coming up with an idea that

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worked for, you know, French peasants and city dwellers in 1789 and for.

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Urban protestors in 2020, and that was the real challenge of the

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whole research process, but one that I actually greatly enjoyed.

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Laura May: And so you just mentioned coming up with this idea that could

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explain all these mobilizations. What is that idea at its core?

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Benjamin Abrams: So the idea is basically composed of two elements.

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The first is looking at people's predispositions to participate.

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Something that I term affinity which I break down into

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specific subsets of affinities.

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These can be things like your social position, your patterns

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of activity, or things that are more like your political identity,

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your persuasions, your perception of injustice, that kind of stuff.

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So that's the first element, right? Whether someone is predisposed to choose to act in a given scenario.

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And I kind of filter that out into all these little bits.

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The second element though, is what causes those decisions to convert, right?

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Why so many people would make this choice at once without being.

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Recruited by, you know, existing activists or organizers being

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contacted and told to show up why they do it, of their own accord.

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And so I call that process or that thing convergence this literal

4:54

convergence of decision making. And I pinned this down as a series of social conditions that cause

5:00

people to see protesters either more opportu more important or more

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permissible and kind of exceptional in a sense where norms are loosened

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and they feel more able to do things. And I argue that the combination of these affinities on the one hand and these

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conditions of convergence help explain why ordinary people decide to participate

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in mass protest off their own accord. And I call that kind of fittingly affinity convergence theory.

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Laura May: The dash is the important part, Benjamin Abrams: Yeah, I, I had a lot of conversations with my copiers

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over the presence of the dash, and we eventually agreed that the dash

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is, is a vital grammatical element.

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It did originally not have a dash, so I've had to

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adjust to Laura May: Oh my goodness. Very academic.

5:44

And so what I like about your explanation just now is you did use this word

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protest because as you were describing your theory, all I could think

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about were marathon runners, right? Cause I mean, they have a certain sort of social affinity

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and they decide, you know what? I'm gonna sign up to the New York Marathon or London Marathon or whatever,

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and they show up in the mass, right?

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It's one thing together. But it was only when you said protest that I understood.

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Well, okay, there's a particular type of mobilization he's looking for here.

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It's not about running in circles around the city, it's about something else.

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So is that where you actually draw the line between something like a marathon

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and something like the Black Lives Matter movement, like the Arab Spring?

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Benjamin Abrams: So I think one of the things which is quite interesting is

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that And I'm fascinated that you chose a marathon, but it is the case that these

6:32

kind of events, you know, protests, compete with ordinary behaviors for

6:38

people's participation essentially.

6:40

Right? And so this is one of the things that is really key about what I call these

6:44

convergence conditions which is that you might have an affinity to say, go

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and visit the occupation in Zuccotti Park during the 2011 occupy Wall Street

6:54

protests, but you are also gonna have a predisposition to, you know, go and, yeah,

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run the, the New York Marathon or, or go to the cinema or do something else, right?

7:03

And so, Focusing specifically on protest meant that I had to try and think

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about what it was that took all these individuals with their very kind of

7:11

heterogeneous interests and sculpted their participation and catalyzed it in favor

7:18

of a particular cause at a particular time, often in a particular place.

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And that is, I think, yeah, the distinguishing element really.

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Laura May: Fascinating. And I mean, as you're talking, one thing I noticed is, you

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do sound quite British, right? And yet you've chosen studies that are all outside of the uk.

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Is there a reason for that? Benjamin Abrams: There are a few reasons for that.

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Yeah. The first is, at the time which I was working on the book the majority of

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major protest events had happened outside the United Kingdom particularly the

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ones that we were most interested in as scholars, and that mystified us the most.

7:54

So for example, the 2011 Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street protests were

7:59

both seen at the time as these almost inexplicable movements that at first

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we tried to attribute to social media. We tried to say, well, you know, everyone went on Twitter and

8:08

had a revolution or whatever. But very soon after we realized that wasn't the case.

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And so we were asking this question, where did these protests come from?

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And that's also been a recurrent. Problem with regard to the French Revolution.

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There's this famous scholar, George Ruda, who says that the element of

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the revolution, which still cannot be explained by historians, is

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this mass mobilization component. And then I was lucky enough to be working on another project at the same time as

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the Black Lives Uprising, which meant I already had clearance to go into research

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on that, and it was such a perfect fit. And so the cases came together really, really beautifully in some sense,

8:44

and I feel really lucky to have been able to explore all of them.

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I would also probably add that. I began actually by looking at these 2 20 11 cases.

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They were kind of the original cases through which I developed the theory.

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And that was because I was responding to these events that

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were, were very current at the time. I began work on this in 2013 when I was a PhD student.

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And so it had only been a couple of years since these things had happened.

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We still didn't understand them. And then once I built this theory from those two cases, I put it to the test

9:13

in first France and then the US in 2020 to kind of really push it as, and

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make sure that it did work and could explain these different scenarios.

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Laura May: I really like that you've addressed this and you've come up with this theory.

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Cuz you're sort of taking a bit of the credit away from Twitter as the

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the core of mobilizing populations, which could be good or bad in the

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wake of what's happening today with that, with regard to that platform.

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But I actually wanna turn to something else now because I mean, we've mentioned

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that you did the French Revolution, so 17 hundreds, and then also very,

9:45

very recent protests and mobilizations that were happening at the time.

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So what methods could you use that would actually address.

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This huge array of time, short of a time machine, which I'm hoping you, you

9:57

don't have, or you'll be sharing it. Benjamin Abrams: Well, obviously, you know, the time machine project

10:01

is maybe a couple of books later. I'll let you know how that one goes, but the yeah, the methods

10:07

were really interesting and, and actually very fun part of the project.

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The grand framing of everything was something called comparative history

10:15

or comparative historical Sociology.

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And that generally involves looking at the historical material on offer

10:22

usually secondary sources and maybe an array of choice primary sources

10:25

if you really want to go in depth and trying to build explanations from

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that thinking about the patterns in historical events and comparing them.

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But what I found with this project is that, that kind of.

10:38

Overview approach we could call it wasn't really enough, so I had to augment it.

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And this led to me developing something that I call in the book comparative

10:46

History Plus this is kind of stealing from some other really brilliant

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scholars who came up with the concept of Ethnography Plus, where they did

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kind of the opposite of what I ended up doing, but reaching a very similar place.

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And so the Plus really involves all these other methods that I employed.

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And these were primarily the use of interviews in the case

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of contemporary protests. So occupy the Egyptian Revolution and the 2020 Black Lives Uprising where I,

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I went and talked to people in depth for, you know, usually hours at a time

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about what they had experienced or were experiencing during the protests.

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Then for the French Revolution, obviously I couldn't do that.

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So I went to the archives and I looked through police reports and diary entries

11:26

as well as an array of other sources that were available at the National

11:29

Library of France, which actually has all of the periodicals that were published

11:32

during the Times, or the revolutionary newspapers and things like that.

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I also used for the, for the most recent case, for the Black Lives uprising, I

11:40

also was able to use live footage streams contemporary content as the process were

11:45

happening because I was doing the research while these events were in motion.

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And so I was able to capture this very rich uh, understanding of what was

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unfolding on the ground at the time. And that's something I actually want to bring into most all my

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future research on protests. Cause I think it really strengthened those chapters and, lent them

12:02

a vibrance that I, I wish I could have put across the book.

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Laura May: And so before we dig into that vibrance a little, I actually wanna ask

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you about these interviews that you were doing right, the ones you just mentioned.

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I mean, you are a pretty white guy.

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I and yet you were doing a lot of interviews in the context of Black Lives

12:20

Matter and also with the Arab Spring,

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where there's obviously a particularly interesting British history.

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So given that background and context, how were you able to build trust during

12:30

these interviews and conversations? Benjamin Abrams: It's interesting actually.

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The, the least trusting context that I was in throughout the entire

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project was actually my work on Occupy Wall Street, which was decried often

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for being a very white movement. And so, I think we often think about trust as a kind of insider outsider that's say

12:53

you trust people that you think look like you or that you think, you know, belong

12:57

to a similar identity group to you. But when someone is an outsider for whatever reason, you might say,

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oh, well, I'm not sure of them. What I found actually is because of the work I was doing, I had more

13:08

or less the opposite phenomenon. So in the context of the Egyptian revolution, the fact that I was

13:13

this kind of young white guy in Cairo talking to a bunch of Egyptian

13:18

activists was something that they found relatively relaxing because there

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was a security culture at the time that involved regular surveillance of

13:27

activists by pretty much anyone that they could potentially be near, you

13:30

know, taxi drivers, people at cafes.

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It was a really scary time and many people were being disappeared and so peculiarly

13:37

as this like very foreign British guy.

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I was understood not to be a likely informant, not to be

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the kind of person who could be spying for their own government.

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And so in in this kind of peculiar manner, my outsider characteristics

13:54

played to my advantage situationally because there was this worry at the

13:58

time that once fellow countrymen could be what was termed uh, uh, honorable

14:02

citizens as the kind of rough translation that it's kind of said sarcastically.

14:06

Who would be informing on them potentially. With the Black Lives uprising.

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I think it was an interesting situation there.

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I think generally speaking the trust element came for, three reasons.

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The first was that I made sure to establish relationships

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with people before I had these initial conversations with them.

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So I wasn't just completely reaching out in the blue.

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I'd have some initial conversations. We'd get to know each other.

14:30

They would often ask me how I felt about certain political issues.

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Kind of gauge out where I was at on these things, make sure I wasn't coming from you

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know, someone like Talking Point USA to try and portray them in a negative light.

14:42

These kind of things. But by and large, a lot of the people I talked to were first time protestors, and

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so they didn't really have the kind of concerns about speaking to outsiders that

14:55

you might see in established activists. By contrast, with Occupy Wall Street, a lot of the people who had been first time

15:01

protestors at the time heard by the time I actually got into the field to interview

15:06

them, become quite involved in activism. And so they had developed a security culture that was very

15:11

cautious about outsiders. And that there were times where I was kind of taken to one side by trusted

15:17

people in the movement and kind of grilled on who I was, what I was doing,

15:20

so that people felt okay to talk to me.

15:23

There was one person who accused me of being a c i a agent at one point.

15:26

But fortunately they, they revised their view within a matter of minutes.

15:31

Clearly I'm not competent enough to be one of those, but By and large, even then, I

15:35

mean, everyone was just incredibly kind and forthcoming and trusting, and I feel

15:42

really lucky that people chose to share as frankly as they did and as honestly

15:47

and openly as they did their experiences.

15:49

Because it really was nice to get a kind of completely

15:53

unvarnished account of things. And that took time to get into that with people.

15:56

Often you'd have multiple meetings, you'd hang out for a

15:58

while first, that kind of stuff. But once you really got into it together, you were able to have really

16:04

frank conversations where people just talked about how they felt about events

16:08

and talked about what was going on in ways that I don't think I could have

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done if I'd done these kind of short answer interviews where you only see

16:15

the person for maybe half an hour. You know, sometimes you need to hang out with someone multiple times over many

16:20

hours to really get to the point at which you're comfortable having a conversation

16:23

about things which are often, you know, difficult or scary to talk about.

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Laura May: So building that rapport. I really like how you divided this between sort of new first time activists and

16:37

longer term activists because it brought to mind, so I accidentally got caught up

16:42

in the GSI park situation in, was it 2011?

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It was a while ago. Right. So mass protests in Turkey, sort of in favor of social liberalizations in short.

16:53

And so I was in Istanbul for an unrelated reason I thought was I

16:56

didn't turn up to go to a riot. That would be, I mean, I don't know what your theory would say

17:00

about that, but that wasn't the case. And so I was actually there and able to go through Gezi

17:04

Park as it was being occupied. And see sort of the people who were there dancing and singing and sharing

17:10

stories and being very friendly and welcoming and actually, you know,

17:14

volunteering, experiencing, like I'm, at the time it was slightly less

17:17

extroverted than today and people just come up and they would wanna tell their

17:20

story and , the next day the tear guests came out and everything was disrupted.

17:26

And I had this experience of, well firstly I moved outta of, out

17:30

of that area in a different area cuz I don't like being teargas.

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But then for days afterwards, cause I was a media blackout in the country,

17:37

people would come up to me as a visibly non Turkish person and say, could you

17:40

please tell people what's happening here? Could tell the outside world because you can get out.

17:44

Right? And it had that new protestor feeling that you've just described and that

17:49

they were less cautious about, you know, who is this strange girl?

17:52

It's like, oh, as an outsider we can tell 'em and then we'll take the message out.

17:56

As opposed to later on when I started joining a lot of really hardcore right

18:00

wing Facebook groups to do research, and I was immediately treated with all kinds

18:03

of suspicion, especially, I used sort of like, you know, three syllable words

18:07

that started to become a real issue. I've learned to never use the word intersectional, but anyway, that's,

18:12

that's by the bite, because I wanna get back to these interviews that you

18:15

had, because you did mention their vibrance and these deeper stories.

18:19

So, I mean, I'm sure they're in the book, but can you give us a

18:22

preview, like what were some of these stories that really touched you?

18:26

Benjamin Abrams: So there's no kind of mold for them to be honest.

18:31

The every interview I did was really different because I was trying to

18:36

focus in so much on how people's individual circumstances interacted

18:40

with these large scale structures. And so there is, a huge amount of super rich material that couldn't

18:47

all fit in the book to be honest. I mean, I wish I had more space than more pages just to tell some of the stories

18:52

in people's own words cuz they're amazing and they have such variety in depth.

18:57

I guess one that really comes to me is I was, I was talking to someone

19:02

in the Egyptian Revolution about the first time that they had ever gone to

19:05

a protest that was on January 25th.

19:07

So this is the kind of very, very first protest at the Revolution.

19:11

It's not actually terribly well attended or at least not

19:14

compared to the subsequent events. And they talked about the experience of marching with their friends, and

19:23

feeling this collective effervescence and feeling so helpful and so joyful.

19:27

And then being met by lines and lines of police with teargas and life fire

19:33

ammunition, seeing their friends get shot and having to flee and run away.

19:38

And the absolute horror that they experienced, and they talked about that

19:43

in terms that were so emotive and so powerful that actually, I mean, Putting

19:48

them into text seemed inadequate.

19:50

I tried my best to convey them in the book briefly, but it was a moment

19:55

that really powerfully affected me emotionally having the interview.

19:58

And I, I, I felt I felt very lucky to be able to actually share that with,

20:04

with the person who told me all about it and then went on to connect that

20:07

event to how it shaped their subsequent protest experience and how actually

20:10

that did radicalize and did make them want to come back and did make them

20:13

feel that this was something that they had to do and all sorts of other stuff.

20:16

That was one that I thought was really powerful emotionally, but

20:19

wasn't necessarily, you know, it wasn't the most upbeat anecdote.

20:23

One of the other ones that I was really, really lucky to to have that was, was

20:27

a bit more upbeat was talking to a Jewish activist who had been involved

20:31

in the Occupy Wall Street protest. And she very kindly read me some excerpts from a diary that she was keeping at the

20:37

time, and she shared these absolutely beautifully written, kind of hopeful ps

20:44

that she had clearly written down kind of the night of the events, talking

20:47

about how amazing she felt and how it was so brilliant feeling that she

20:51

was kind of together with everyone. And yeah, I mean, I got to hear so many beautiful anecdotes and stories

20:59

in, in those interviews, and they, they really stood out and what I put in the

21:03

book are, you know, they read well, but actually some of the things that

21:07

were truly affecting and truly moving, I haven't quite figured out how to

21:11

communicate in purely textual form yet.

21:14

Laura May: Hmm, MECU, I'm very glad you were able to come on the

21:17

podcast and share a bit of this cause we can hear in your voice how

21:20

meaningful these experiences were. And so it sounds like a lot of these first time experiences, or at least the

21:28

first time experiences of protesting were founded in some kind of hope.

21:32

Was that a consistent story, a consistent emotion that you encountered

21:36

? Benjamin Abrams: It was one of the key emotions that people

21:39

felt, but not the only one. So sometimes hope was a big deal, right?

21:45

This feeling that the opportunity was ni that we could accomplish what we

21:49

were trying to do and that everyone could assemble together and that they

21:53

would win, was absolutely pivotal.

21:56

And there were moments where that was the central emotion being felt.

21:59

So for example, towards the end of the Egyptian revolutionary period what's

22:03

called the 18 days in 2011, there was this wellspring of great hope that people

22:10

were feeling and everyone described feeling it, and it was really central

22:13

to people coming together at other times, though it's almost the opposite.

22:18

That's not to say fear so much as to say a sense of threat.

22:25

And the sense of threat really mobilized people at key times.

22:28

So those moments where, you know, whether it's in the Egyptian revolution, in Occupy

22:32

Wall Street, in the French Revolution, or indeed in the Black Lives uprising,

22:35

those moments where the hand of the state asserts itself upon the protestors,

22:40

people get beaten back, they get teargassed in, in more modern contexts,

22:44

sometimes maybe they even get killed.

22:47

What was really interesting is that sense of threat often mobilize people more.

22:51

There was what's sometimes called a backlash effect of repression

22:55

where actually ordinary people showed up to protest to defend.

22:59

Other people they saw being brutalized by the police even when they

23:02

thought it was risking their lives. It speaks also to the anecdote that I mentioned earlier, right?

23:06

This person, after seeing these horrendous scenes, they came back

23:10

and they brought people with them. And so hope is important.

23:14

Threat is also important. But then there was also this third thing that was very, very important.

23:20

What I sometimes call exceptional conditions or sometimes an

23:23

exceptional frame talking about the framing of social reality.

23:27

And that wasn't necessarily about feeling hopeful or about feeling that

23:31

something was threatening or dangerous. It was about the sense that the rules no longer applied to you in

23:38

the way that they may be used to. So in Egypt in 2011, for example, it was generally understood as a woman

23:44

you shouldn't really go to mass. Public events like protest they were dangerous.

23:49

You were likely to be assaulted. Similarly, you were generally discouraged from talking to random people that

23:54

you met on the street for fear of them trying to hassle you or trying to

23:58

inform on you if you were political. And there was this moment in the revolutionary period where those rules

24:03

kind of broke down specifically also in in the space of T Square, which is

24:08

the kind of main square in carrier that they occupied during the revolution.

24:12

And people suddenly felt able to do things that they couldn't do before.

24:15

And this really mobilized people as well. They kind of came to a space to participate in public life in this

24:22

new way or they felt enabled by this new framing of the status quo.

24:27

And that allowed them to access these new forms of action they hadn't tried

24:30

out before, like showing up to a protest or maybe in certain circumstances,

24:33

even using violence themselves to to challenge the regime head on.

24:37

Laura May: That's really interesting. I love that idea of rules breaking down as well.

24:41

Although it's interesting in that they seem to have become possibly even

24:45

more strict afterwards, at least in the case of the Egyptian revolution.

24:49

Right. Benjamin Abrams: Hmm. Laura May: So I'm seeing a bit of a parallel in some ways between the social

24:57

justice movements you've mentioned and perhaps the rising of so-called populism.

25:02

On populistic groups. I understand that you are part of a responses to populism project.

25:08

So can Populistic movements be conceived of as coming about in the same way, and

25:14

what is that project actually about? Benjamin Abrams: So the responses to Populism project is actually

25:20

funded by the Leverhulme Trust. I'm wrapping it up in November of this year.

25:23

So I'm kind of at the tail end of finishing up all the findings from that.

25:28

It's about how societies specifically the kind of actors, political

25:33

actors in society respond to the rise of populist rules.

25:37

So it's not looking so much at why populist movements come about, but

25:41

about what their consequences have been for various different social actors.

25:44

Things like political elites, grassroots movements as well as kind of bystanders,

25:49

civil organizations, people who get caught in the crossfire of populist politics.

25:54

And it's it's been a really fascinating project actually.

25:57

It's part of the reason that that this book had the work on the Black

26:00

Lives uprising in it because one of the key responses to Trump in the

26:04

United States with this kind of surge of grassroots protest not just in the

26:08

form of the Black Lives uprising, but also in the form of this resistance to

26:13

Trump kind of movement that got built. And so one of the things I've been been looking into is how that movement

26:18

developed well, its fortunes were and also how it contrasts with other

26:22

efforts to respond to populism by both grassroots groups and political elites.

26:28

Today in countries like East, Eastern Central Europe places like that.

26:31

Laura May: Fascinating. So earlier I mentioned my own experiences in Gezi Park in Turkey, right?

26:38

And so after, this whole area was, well, I mean essentially flushed out of activist,

26:43

so they, they moved, movement was crushed.

26:46

They actually bulldozed the park from what I understand as

26:49

some kind of symbolic gesture.

26:51

And I understand that actually your previous book, your edited

26:54

manual, talks a bit about spaces and symbolism and movements.

26:57

So was this something that also appeared in the Rise of the Masses?

27:02

Benjamin Abrams: Yeah, so actually when I talk about these conditions of

27:05

convergence, there are three distinct categories that I use to describe them.

27:11

The first is structural conditions, you know, situations.

27:15

The second is cognitive frames, the way in which we perceive reality.

27:19

And the third is spaces specifically.

27:22

And that's because spaces are really, really powerful when it

27:25

comes to bringing people together. Claiming a space or making use of a space that has certain attributes can

27:32

be really powerful to mobilizing people.

27:34

And one of the interesting things about spaces, as opposed to these

27:38

kind of situations and frames is that they can persist for much longer.

27:41

A status quo, structurally speaking, is liable to be changed by regime

27:45

activity or by other things. A frame may subside in favor of some other framing of reality.

27:51

The thing about space is you can hold it, you can maintain it.

27:55

And you can change its attributes and you can build something there.

27:58

And so they become these really powerful places in which you can assemble people,

28:02

politicize them, get them involved. You can also build things that appeal to different affinities.

28:07

So for example, occupy Wall Street had this kitchen.

28:10

So people came just as they wanted to cook it had a library.

28:12

People came to bring copies of their favorite books.

28:15

They wanted other people to read or to participate, just

28:18

more generally had debate clubs. They built this whole kind of micro society in the square.

28:23

This happened to a certain degree in Egypt in 2011 as well.

28:26

It also happened in 2020 in spaces in places like uh, Seattle for example,

28:30

where they claimed a kind of autonomous zone that they started doing things like

28:34

gardening in and having concerts in. And this brings a whole different kind of person into the movement who isn't

28:40

necessarily going to be ultra political, but might have a kind of a separate,

28:43

what I call a drive, a separate drive. To participate some kind of interest or need to which the cause

28:48

or this occupied space caters. And so it becomes super important in bringing in this

28:52

wider periphery of people. It also extends the timeframe drastically.

28:57

And so you can mobilize an enormous number of people over a longer period of time.

29:01

In a relatively small space, you know, a space that maybe fits a couple of

29:04

thousand people can play host to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands

29:10

over an extended period of time. So it's a great way of, of mobilizing the masses without mobilizing an

29:16

enormous number of people at once as well, and drawing a large number

29:19

of people into your movement. As to why these spaces get destroyed, well, it's about rid them of

29:24

these characteristics that allow people to converge in them, right?

29:27

Reading them, rid them of their kind of exceptional opportune or kind of

29:30

paramount ass, I call it, you know, highly important components that draw

29:34

people into them in the first place. And so things like bulldozing the square, as you saw in Gezi Park, erecting, kind

29:41

of large roundabouts on flagpoles as you saw in Egypt re reordering or clearing the

29:46

park as you saw in, in Occupy Wall Street.

29:49

These are all ways through which you can kind of try and rid a space of its

29:53

symbolic attributes that lead people to think more positively about it as

29:57

a space that they might converge in. And that kind of ties Yeah, definitely ties into some work I did my colleague

30:02

Peter Gardner, on what we call symbolic objects in contentious politics, which

30:06

is precisely about how physical things can be these immense reservoirs of

30:10

meaning and import that actually affect how organ people act or are able to

30:15

act when they're co-present with them. So inhabiting them or holding them or things like that.

30:21

Laura May: Fascinating. And as you're talking, it brings two examples to mind, and one is this

30:26

idea of hostile architecture, right?

30:28

Where they, you know, they put spikes and things on park benches.

30:32

People can't sit there, and this is just the upscale version of that, right?

30:36

And then the second one is Ramesses the Great.

30:39

Cuz I mean you keep talking about Egypts now my Egypt stuff coming to mind.

30:42

And because he put statues in himself the whole way down the Nile

30:47

as a symbol of this is my area, this is my reign, I am your God.

30:50

And also don't attack me cuz I've got this. So it's really fascinating how the, these spaces and these symbols sounds like

30:57

they do contribute to Yeah, the duration, extending the duration of movements.

31:02

Benjamin Abrams: Hmm. Yeah, the the urban planning of Paris actually was kind of over the years, as

31:07

France saw successive revolutions and results was over the years configured in

31:11

response to these frequent uprisings to make it impossible to erect barricades,

31:15

to make it easier to move kind of heavy artillery and troops around the city so

31:19

that it became easier to repress protests.

31:22

And so, yeah, the structure of urban space is super important in terms

31:26

of enabling or disabling protests. Similarly, in Egypt, they moved the administrative capital

31:31

outside of the main area of Cairo.

31:34

Previously it was right near Tahrir Square.

31:36

And so there were these very deliberate attempts to remove physically

31:41

power from the people and place it where it couldn't be attacked.

31:47

Laura May: And are there other things, other areas in which you can see the hand

31:50

of the state in terms of trying to repress or prevent protests from happening?

31:54

Benjamin Abrams: Yeah. So I mean, the state activity is really, really important in all these cases.

31:59

Generally speaking the state is much more powerful than anyone who is

32:03

trying to protest against or resist it. And so the capacity for state activity to backfire and be highly influential and

32:11

damaging to the state is very substantial.

32:14

However, the state doesn't have necessarily the best people in charge of

32:18

it, particularly when it comes to local police departments or detachments of

32:21

National Guard local governors in the case of the States or in the context of Egypt.

32:26

You know, people who are leading troops who are maybe underpaid

32:29

officers who aren't making good decisions these kind of things, right?

32:32

So basically the state has a huge amount of influence and generally

32:35

very poor decision makers. And the consequence of this is that state activity is a routine explanation for

32:42

escalations in protest because people who are not really cognizant of the

32:46

effects of particularly the use of state violence, think there is an effective

32:50

way to dispatch peaceful protestors.

32:52

Whereas what it really does is it sets the tone.

32:55

For protests going forward. It encourages and legitimizes the use of violent self-defense methods by protestors

33:02

against kind of state brutality.

33:05

And it also importantly means that the norm of the protest changes, right?

33:10

If you start tear gassing a bunch of peaceful protestors, the only

33:13

people who stay are the ones who are much more comfortable with a

33:17

high octane violence situation. And so you create a situation in which the rules of the game, so to speak,

33:24

in any given confrontation, are ones that encourage more violence response

33:29

to police brutality because you have sent home all the people who were

33:32

setting the norm of peaceful contact. Laura May: As you're talking about this idea of state violence actually making

33:39

symbols and ideas and movements more powerful, I couldn't help but think of

33:43

that photo a couple of months ago of the woman in Georgia, as in the country

33:48

of Georgia, holding up an EU flag in the face of water cannons from, I

33:53

guess state police or what have you. And that was, you know, I had never seen before in social media commentary,

34:00

people saying, Georgia is a European country, it should be in the eu.

34:04

Like that is something that would not, I think, have occurred.

34:06

I mean, like Georgia. Where is that? Is that in the us?

34:08

But now people are like, after that symbol, it's like, of

34:11

course they should be allowed in. Right?

34:13

Or of course they should be part of us. Of course they're European.

34:16

And it just really goes to show the power of these symbols and

34:20

the ineffectiveness of state violence from the sounds of things.

34:24

Benjamin Abrams: Yeah, no, I mean using violence against someone is a really good

34:27

way to make them look good, particularly if that violence is televised and

34:31

mediated and seen around the world. It's especially effective when someone is employing symbols or kind

34:37

of engaging, engaged in performances that are themselves symbolic.

34:41

I'm probably going to mispronounce this, but I'll try my best.

34:43

One of the best examples of this is the self immolation of the Vietnamese monk

34:47

Thich Quang Duc who Yeah, set himself on fire basically in front of media cameras.

34:52

And it became this immortalized image that shifted hearts and minds.

34:56

But and that's kind of interesting example also because someone is using violence

35:01

against themselves to represent a form of oppression that they are experiencing.

35:05

That does involve the active use of violence by the state.

35:08

Very similar thing triggered the Tunisian revolution self-stimulation of Moham Bozi.

35:13

And so yeah, there is some interesting rules when you kind of dig into it as

35:18

to how violence and symbolism operate. Doesn't necessarily have to be the state that's enacting violence on

35:22

someone to create an emotive image that then affects people's moods.

35:26

But it, the state is the most frequent employer of violence and so

35:31

they tend to be the ones involved. Laura May: And so I'm wondering, as you are saying all of this, I

35:35

mean it sounds really interesting. It sounds like you've got a really good framework for understanding how

35:39

these mass mobilizations come about. Who should read your book?

35:43

The Rise of the Masses. Benjamin Abrams: So my hope is that the book will not just be read by by scholars.

35:49

That's always the danger with the scholarly book. But I've tried to write it in a way that is really accessible.

35:55

So I do have three chapters in substance, the introduction, chapter one and chapter

35:59

two which pertains specifically to the scope of the book and its purpose.

36:05

The academic literature that already exists and my theory and how it's

36:08

constructed, and those are probably the most technical chapters you'll get.

36:14

I have run them by general public readers. I think that they enjoyed them.

36:17

So I think that's even that accessible.

36:20

But my intention really is that the book be read by not just scholars,

36:25

but also the informed public. Anyone who's interested in protests and mass mobilization, activists,

36:30

people in social move in social movements, in civil society

36:33

organizations, those kind of things. And also anyone who has a kind of country specialism or case specialism in either

36:40

France or Egypt or the US be it for Occupy or for the Black Lives Uprising.

36:45

One thing I will say that I think the book has that currently not many things on the

36:50

markets, I suppose we could say have at the moment is the level of detail that

36:55

I've been really happy to bring to the description of the Black Lives Uprising.

36:59

I probably had enough material, I could have done an entire book on that, but

37:03

even in the chapters that I have on it in the book, I feel that I've really

37:06

successfully given voice to people's experiences on the ground and depicted

37:10

those situations as they were unfolding. And so certainly anyone who's interested in those protests, I

37:15

think will really enjoy the book. Laura May: Super interesting and I wanna ask you about this linguistic quirk

37:21

because I keep hearing you say the Black Lives Matter uprising, which is not

37:26

something I've actually heard before. Maybe it's cuz I'm not, not in the US and haven't really done

37:30

studies in area, but why uprisings?

37:33

I'm used to hearing as a movement. Benjamin Abrams: Yeah.

37:35

So this is something I had to kind of train myself into doing

37:39

as I was seeing the research. Almost nobody I talked to, called the protests, the Black Lives Matter protests

37:46

or the Black Lives Matter movement. They all caught it, the uprising.

37:50

It was remarkable. It Laura May: People on the ground, you mean who

37:52

Benjamin Abrams: yeah. Yeah. The, the, the ordinary people, not just, not even just the activists,

37:56

the ordinary people who participated. They would call it the uprising and people would refer to it as the uprising.

38:01

There was one person who even referred to it as a revolution, although I

38:04

thought that was maybe a bit strong. They would talk about Black Lives Matter as a cause that they believed in.

38:10

But it became very evident as I was doing the research for this, that

38:14

the protests weren't really being organized by Black Lives Matter.

38:19

This is to say there is a group called the Black Lives Matter Global Network

38:22

Foundation that coordinates an array of local Black Lives Matter chapters

38:25

in the United States, and they kind of have cornered the market on what

38:30

is and isn't Black Lives Matter. And during that uprising, the advice that the vast majority of local

38:35

Black Lives Matter groups, but also this, the central organization we're

38:38

giving to people was Stay at home.

38:42

Black people are disproportionately at risk from covid 19.

38:45

This the middle of a pandemic. Protecting Black Lives means ensuring that you don't get this

38:51

deadly disease that's going around. Similar thing was true of groups like the the Poor People's Campaign,

38:56

and I think also possibly the naacp, they were worried about Black

39:00

Lives epidemiologically primarily.

39:03

That was the main concern, which makes sense. It was Covid right.

39:07

And so what fills the gap are these array of more organic structures,

39:11

local activists and organizers. Sometimes just random people saying, Hey, I want to have a protest.

39:16

And those are people showing up. And Black Lives Matter, the groups and the foundation really only get

39:22

plugged in about a month or so later after all of this has transpired.

39:26

And that's when you start seeing the very kind of more orderly mass

39:29

marches and these kind of things, this change away from more riotous

39:34

protests, that involves property destruction, that involves coming, kind

39:37

of beaten up by the police, and then retaliating and this kind of stuff.

39:40

That's also interestingly when you see a real drop in protest, right?

39:43

It turns out that the tactics that get people on the streets specifically

39:47

with regards to the 2020 Black Lives uprising of Black Lives Matter protests.

39:51

Specifically the time that there is the greatest mobilization is when the police

39:55

try to repress peaceful protestors. And those same protestors respond by pushing back against the police

40:00

and being willing to confront them, being willing to engage in

40:04

property destruction to some degree. And and there was this feeling of collective efficacy at that point, which

40:11

showed I think ordinary people from the states that police brutality could be

40:14

resisted in the streets in real time, and that when they got out the tear

40:19

gas and when they went and beat you up, that wasn't the end of the day for you.

40:22

You could keep going. And you saw this huge wave of protests after the burning of the third precinct

40:29

in Minneapolis specifically, which really dwarfs the protests that occurred

40:33

immediately after George Floyd's murder. And so that's the long and short of it is, that's why I refer to

40:38

it as the Black Lives Uprising.

40:41

It's also important to note that people on the right in the United States

40:43

kept saying Black Lives Matter are burning down police stations, Black

40:47

Lives Matter, are doing these riots. And actually that group is not responsible for that.

40:50

And those were the actions of ordinary people who were mobilized by a

40:55

cause that they really believed in but who were not under the auspices

40:59

of a racial justice organization telling them to do these things.

41:01

And I think it's really important to draw that distinction as well.

41:05

Laura May: Hmm. In some ways, what you're describing actually reminds me of that comedy

41:11

film, Hot Rod, with Andy Samberg.

41:14

You know, the, the protagonists are walking down the street, there's

41:16

some music playing the background. They're getting their groove on and suddenly other people joining behind them.

41:21

Then another group come and they start breaking windows and

41:24

spending things on fire and stuff. And at the end, the poor protagonists, it's like, did we do this?

41:28

Did we cause this? What happened here?

41:31

But I wanna ask you though, about what stops movements and what potentially

41:37

stops movements from happening. Because I noticed that three of the mobilizations you've

41:42

mentioned don't end in guillotines.

41:46

So why not? Where are our guillotines?

41:50

Benjamin Abrams: Well, I mean, I think the guillotines really were an implement

41:53

that was improvised during the French Revolution, partly out of mercy.

41:57

They used much harsher methods before the guillotines came out.

42:00

It was deemed. Laura May: love this pro, pro guillotine movement is

42:03

what I'm hearing Benjamin Abrams: it was deemed, it was deemed much more humane.

42:06

Yeah. Previously you would have these really horrifying methods of public

42:10

execution that were employed. And so the idea of the guillotine is that, was this enlightened, humane

42:15

way through which the revolutionary state could carry out its executions.

42:19

But that small semantic point aside yeah, what, what's interesting is

42:24

actually the people who end up doing most of the guillotine in revolutionary

42:29

France also aren't from the street movements that propelled the revolution.

42:33

They are, they're elites who've managed to gain a hold of the popular movement and,

42:38

and manipulate it for their own purposes.

42:41

And this is a pattern that you do often see in protests.

42:43

Some people would argue that in Egypt in the aftermath of the revolution, a

42:48

great deal of people who were originally involved in spontaneous protests got

42:52

remobilize by the apparatus of the state and state affiliated movements against the

42:57

against the Morsi presidency in a movement that ultimately led to abdu sisi's

43:02

coup and his session to the presidency.

43:05

And so you do often see the case that when the spontaneous movement begins

43:09

to fade, the people that made it up aren't necessarily totally inaccessible.

43:14

They're just much harder to remobilize spontaneously.

43:18

And that's when organizers good or ill intentioned, can kind of grapple

43:23

onto that and begin to integrate people into other structures.

43:26

But that doesn't always happen. Sometimes organizers fail to capitalize on the energy from spontaneous protests.

43:32

This is one of the problems that the Egyptian revolutionary saw, right?

43:35

Which is that the revolutionary organizations that had formed during

43:38

the revolution as well as the civil society groups that existed prior to

43:42

it, weren't really able to build any kind of cohesive structure out of the

43:46

spontaneous protests that happened. It's the complete opposite of what happened in Occupy Wall Street, where

43:52

this enormous infrastructure, which still fuels social movements in the

43:55

US has even supported presidential campaigns got built during this time.

43:59

And that's something I tell a little bit of the story of in the book, the kind of

44:03

afterlife of Occupy Wall Street and how it feeds into all these different movements

44:06

for racial justice, food justice, climate justice, these kind of things.

44:11

But what I think determines the persistence of a movement after

44:16

this moment of spontaneity more than anything is what happens

44:20

during that spontaneous period.

44:22

The bonds that get formed, the organizations that get developed, the

44:25

way in which these affinities might crystallize into something new when

44:30

people come into contact with each other. However, it's also the case that sometimes societies are very good

44:37

at disciplining people out of that. And one of the things I want to look at in the longer run in my research is

44:42

precisely this kind of, I guess we could call it kind of revenge of order upon the

44:47

masses where they get integrated back into daily life, they get paralyzed so that

44:52

they can't participate in protests and they get stuck such that you have a very

44:57

uncon contentious society for a while. And so that's a fascinating thing I want to look into more.

45:02

Yeah. Laura May: It's like forcing people into boxes and being like, you will stay there.

45:05

You will not come out and protest again. Benjamin Abrams: Hmm. Laura May: Like, yikes, very sci-fi.

45:10

And so on the back of the book, on the blurb, it finish this by saying it could

45:15

help predict the uprisings of the future. Now, firstly, I was like, woof, have you rarely see an academic saying

45:20

they're gonna start predicting things? So, huge kudos to you, but I actually wondered, I mean, what's the, the value

45:27

of being able to predict uprisings? I mean, is that not dangerous?

45:31

If I'm a couple years ago, I'm Luka Chenko, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna

45:34

predict that these people are gonna stage a mass mobilization in Belarus.

45:39

Aren't I gonna get preemptive? Am I not gonna be in that?

45:42

Was it Tom Cruise movie where, you know,

45:44

he Benjamin Abrams: Oh yeah. Laura May: so before they happen. So yeah.

45:48

Tell me more about this prediction of uprisings.

45:52

Benjamin Abrams: So it's interesting you've chosen something that I was

45:54

very careful about the phrasing of for this is, "could help predict movements

45:58

to come" is about as strong as I'm happy to have it be on the blurb.

46:03

I specifically wanted it not to be any stronger for two reasons.

46:07

One because I think claims to be able to predict things are always a bit,

46:10

you know, that you're kind of setting yourself up in academia to get told

46:13

that, oh, you can't really predict this. Laura May: Tell that to Fukuyama

46:16

In the late nineties, right? I predicted the end of man.

46:20

Benjamin Abrams: Maybe, maybe if I had, if I, if I have Fukuyama's

46:22

profile, I might be able to try and make some more some more predictions.

46:26

But in this case, yeah, I wanted to be as relatively modest about what I was doing,

46:30

but I also wanted to explain that it could certainly help predict movements to come.

46:37

And this kind of gets me onto a second point, which is I want to be

46:41

very careful about how much it helps predict and who it helps predict.

46:44

And so there's something I say at the very end of the book,

46:46

actually in the conclusion. Laura May: For people listening, he's actually just grabbed his book.

46:51

It looks very nice and shiny, and he is flicking through the page.

46:53

He's gonna read to us directly. I, I wanna say this is a world first, you know, author reading of.

46:59

Benjamin Abrams: it is essentially, yeah. So I'd say, how could this theory be improved?

47:03

And then I say "one option would be to further develop it into a more

47:06

precise micro model of spontaneity.

47:09

There's certainly some utility in trying to further understand the

47:11

interaction of the variables in the book.

47:14

But one of the core lessons emerging from the cases is that spontaneity is

47:17

a dynamic and unfolding process that doesn't proceed in a regular, easily

47:21

formalized fashion, but draws from or manner of constituencies and swells from

47:26

multiplex sociopolitical developments.

47:29

Even if such a fine grain model could be built, whom exactly would it serve?"

47:36

And that's the the kind of point that I really lingered on, which is

47:42

Laura May: Hmm. Benjamin Abrams: if I do turn this into a full predictive model, not just

47:46

something that could help predict the movements to come, it's not gonna help

47:51

any of the causes for social justice that, I, I personally am enthusiastic

47:54

about and I believe need help.

47:58

And it's most likely going to be of assistance to dictators and other kind

48:02

of undesirable, powerful social elements who are looking to cement their hand and

48:06

cement control over popular protests. So I kind of deliberately stepped back from going so far as to build

48:12

the kind of thing that you could, you know, plug into a computer

48:15

and start doing predictions with. But for people who are willing to do the work and think dynamically about

48:22

a given situation, who are organizers, who know their own environment, who

48:26

want to try hard to build something, there's enough there to help you

48:31

get to grips with you know, maybe how you could be most effective.

48:36

Laura May: What I'm hearing is that if you've got a progressive

48:38

cause and you need some help as far as setting it on fire.

48:41

Come to Ben for some private consulting and he'll give you all the secret tips.

48:45

That's what I'm hearing. Benjamin Abrams: Well, it is not far off.

48:47

I actually missed the last bit, which is I did say "might the theory even be

48:51

faintly helpful for oppressed people's mobilizing in context where organizations

48:55

are stratified by regime activity or ro with passivity, or might it be used to

48:59

help social justice campaigns build truly momentous challenges to systemic issues?

49:04

I should hope so. But to offer an affirmative answer would be hubristic at best.

49:08

I can only say that for those who wish to try, I would be

49:10

more than willing to help." And that's how I end the book.

49:13

Laura May: That's a beautiful way to end the book and not just because he used the

49:17

words hubristic and stultifying, which are fantastic words, and I guarantee

49:21

you would get you kicked out of every right wing Facebook group, but beautiful,

49:24

beautiful sentiment to finish that. I'm for sure.

49:27

Well, look, Ben, thank you so much for joining me today, and for those

49:31

who are interested in learning more about your work, where can they find

49:34

you and where can they find the book? Benjamin Abrams: So you can find me on Twitter as at BDM Abrams.

49:42

And you can also find the book available in, I hope all good bookshops, by

49:47

which I mean the increasing number that are gradually stocking it.

49:51

There's certainly on Amazon, it's certainly in Barnes and Noble, or

49:54

Waterstones in the uk, Blackwells have it.

49:56

If all those fails, you can go to the University of Chicago Press website,

50:00

but I'm also trying to maintain on the webpage for the book a list of independent

50:04

bookshops that are stocking it. And I'd really encourage you to patronize them as a priority if

50:09

you're willing to pay the little bit extra maybe for shipping.

50:11

It means a lot to those bookshops. The website address is the rise of the masses.com.

50:16

Laura May: Easy. Very memorable. But look, thank you so much again, Ben, and until next time, this is Laura May

50:23

with a conflict podcast from mediate.com.