When Do Movements Emerge? An Analysis of Egyptian and Palestinian Prison Letters

• In Event: Protest, Social Movements, and Political Competition in MENA

Abstract

This paper explores how and why prisoners’ movements emerge in some contexts but not in others. Through a comparative study of political prisoner movements in Egypt and Palestine, I theorize that the emergence of prisoners’ movements is contingent upon the social and political opportunity structure and particularly the way prisoners are perceived and their roles are framed within their respective movements and societies. To validate this theory empirically, I employ a novel empirical strategy, using various Natural Language Processing techniques, including topic modeling and embedding regressions, to analyze letters from Egyptian and Palestinian political prisoners. This methodology allows for a nuanced understanding of how prisoners perceive their detention and the influence of external political contexts. Findings suggest that variation in movement emergence are in fact related to differences in political environments outside of the prison, with Palestinian detainees more likely to connect their detention with the broader national movement. This project presents two contributions to the social movements literature. Firstly, this project will add to the literature on prisons as sites of contentious politics. Secondly, this project adds to our understanding of the structural factors that cause movements to emerge, underscoring the importance of external political dynamics and internal resistance narratives. Additionally, the use of this methodology demonstrates how machine learning techniques can be used to take advantage of unstructured data in low-information environments.

Author

• Yousuf Abdelfatah, Princeton University