Dynamic Social Movement Network Studies: From Theory to Tahrir!

In this paper, I will try to show how a relational perspective can be theoretically relevant and empirically suitable to study the phenomena of contentious politics. More specifically, I will propose a methodological approach, the Dynamic Social Movement Network Analysis (DSMNA), and present a tangible example of its application on the field. Blending traditional and new Social Movement Theories (SMTs) and practices with the Social Network Analysis (SNA) toolkit, the purpose of DSMNA is to map, quantify and interpret the evolution of collective actions and actors through graph and prose. In this case, taking the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region as a case-study and the last ten years as time frame, I intend to understand both the structures and the processes driving the transformation of disorganised discontents into organised contention. Here, the objective is not to define what movements are but to explain how movements move. In order to use DSMNA effectively, we have to look beyond the structuralist and static perspectives of traditional SMTs and SNA. We need to lay our eyes and ground our research on the transformative dynamics of Movnets (social movement networks) and insert them in their context. One of the ways of achieving this goal is to study diachronically the processes of connectivity and change in networks comprised of more than one type of nodes and links. Consequently, besides making a broad introduction to this new methodological framework, I’ll submit a preliminary output of its application: a draft image of the emergent Movnets in the MENA region. This tentative sketch, focused on the Egyptian case, will be drawn from the analysis of Affiliation Networks, two-mode networks that assume a linkage connecting the mobilising Actors to the mobilisation Events across the time-space continuum.