A nested approach to studying the effects of transformative events: Event data as a backbone for longitudinal discourse analysis

Revolutionary movements are not static actors, endowed with certain features and traits that can be in-ferred based on their ideology, class position, or religious affiliation. They come into being via interac-tion. Revolutionary movements are thus better conceptualized as populations of contentious collective actions, which are punctual and discontinuous rather than linear, or continuous. But specific collective action events may become moments of structuring for these discontinuities and shape the parameters for social interaction. These extraordinary moments, captured in the notion of transformative events, repre-sent opportunities to study the contingency of revolutionary episodes: of potential shifts in the ways how contending social players perceive each other as they try to make sense of the unfolding events; of the ways how they redefine the parameters for repertoires of repression and resistance in response to critical junctures; and of the mechanisms how these arenas of social struggles – street politics and the politics of signification – interlink and inform each other. The multimethod framework presented in this paper gives due to these considerations by combining protest event analysis and discourse analysis in a nested re-search design. Conceiving of contested discourses about contentious politics as a symbolic struggle at the level of signifiers, the approach bridges cultural interactionist approaches in social movement studies and discourse analytical approaches in the tradition of the Essex school. It demonstrates how discourse theo-retical considerations about the constitutive effects of discourse on the identities and action choices of social players interrelate with cultural interactionist ideas about the structured contingency of social struggles. And it presents a framework of analysis for the study of revolutionary events in terms of the meanings people bring to them. The approach is empirically illustrated through examples from Lebanon, Egypt and Sudan where transformative events altered the conditions of possibility for social interaction by creating possibilities for activists to renegotiate the limits of what was thinkable, in terms of political alternatives, and doable, in terms of contentious collective action.