Cross-Cleavage Cooperation and Trust Dynamics in Divided Societies. Evidence from Iraq and Lebanon, 2019-2020

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is marked by massive conflicts centered around religious, ethnic and ideological identities. Since the so-called Arab Spring, people have protested across these identity-related cleavages, parties and movements formed alliances across these conflict lines. Moreover, during the second wave of mass mobilization, most notable in Lebanon and Iraq in 2019-2020, protesters raised demands for abolishing the identity-based power distribution in political systems and symbolically challenged divisions in flags and chants, all in the context of civil war experiences involving identities. The paper seeks to explain when and how identity-related cleavages were explicitly challenged and reconstructed by protesters during the mass mobilizations. Building on protest event data, media reporting and secondary literature, it is argued that trust dynamics were key, both short-term, micro-level trust developments as well as long-term trust relations based on previous experiences of contention. The paper demonstrates that different forms of trust grew during the early phase of mass protests: it analyzes the horizontal spill-over of trust beyond the ingroup (of protesters), turning into social trust (in strangers). Exploring how this extra-ordinary trust allows for an active reconstruction of cleavages it also shows how trust in a new political order emerged in this context. I also study side-effects of trust dynamics, e.g. impact of political distrust on the internal organization of the protest movement and the exclusionary dimension of the new “we” that is constructed in protests. The paper identifies emotions as an important part of these processes as well as long-term developments in trust relations. By combining the analysis of contentious politics and trust more systematically, new mobilization dynamics become visible and comprehensible, that is trust in a new socio-political order where society as a whole and political institutions could be trusted and distrust towards other ethno-religious groups is overcome.