Understanding Protest Environments beyond Opportunity and Threat
b"A public lecture delivered by Dr John Chalcraft (LSE) at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, King's College London in February 2017.\\n\\nThis lecture aims to develop conceptual understandings of the relationship between mobilization and the political environment. It presents an alternative to conventional social movement theorizing on political opportunity. A political extension of Gramsci\\u2019s writings on hegemony provides the conceptual framework. Research on movements in the Middle East and North Africa provide the main empirical base. Hegemonic incorporation is understood to be a process whereby established political institutions, procedures and norms win consent among the subordinated members of a given political community. This article identifies and elaborates five incorporation mechanisms: participation, delegation, legitimation, nesting, and co-optation. These mechanisms are enabling conditions for consent and contained contention; they drive forward hegemonic incorporation, thickening and stabilizing hegemonic political structures. When these mechanisms breakdown, disincorporation follows, a process which destabilizes hegemonic structures, and provides enabling conditions for either withdrawal or transgressive mobilization. This analysis aims to get theorists beyond instrumental, static, and deterministic concepts of political opportunity structure, without accepting existing alternatives rooted in culture, attribution, or relationality. These constructionist alternatives do not give political power and structure its due, and they suffer from subjectivism, voluntarism, excessive interactionism, and a too a-structural use of mechanisms. This article aims to open up a new way to understand and research the relationship between the political environment and shifts between transgression, consent, contained contention, and withdrawal.\\n\\nJOHN CHALCRAFT is an Associate Professor in the History and Politics of Empire/Imperialism at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Previous posts include a Lectureship at the University of Edinburgh and a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His research focuses on labour, migration and contentious mobilisation in the Middle East. He is the author of The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: crafts and guilds in Egypt, 1863-1914 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), The Invisible Cage: Syrian migrant workers in Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2009), and Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2016). His current research focuses on protest and hegemony."