From Tahrir to Puerta del Sol to Wall Street: Analysing Social Movement Diffusion in the New Transnational Wave of Protest

This paper examines social movement diffusion through a comparison between two processes within the new transnational wave of protest: diffusion from the Arab Spring to the Spanish indignados, and from them to the New York Occupiers. The comparison shows that the item being transmitted and the type of links through which diffusion took place differ from one process to the other. The Spanish indignados predominantly received a sense of the efficiency of the digitally enabled collective action taking place in North Africa and the Middle East through indirect links while interpersonal communication between the so-called 15M movement actors and activists in New York may have helped to transmit some more practical knowledge related to novel aspects of organizational inclusiveness and with the organization and development of the occupation of public space in the second process. The analysis of this second diffusion devotes particular attention to the role played by migrants who seem to have acted as a significant link connecting the movements in Spain and the United States. I make use of analysis of documents and websites as well as interviews with key informants both in Madrid and New York. The results of the comparison serve as a basis on which to discuss whether a certain type of channel is more likely to facilitate the diffusion of a certain item. A tentative relation is suggested: indirect channels may allow a more ideational type of diffusion whereas more behavioral diffusion may call for direct channels.