by Jared Cohen
In Tunisia, by contrast, the revolution occurred so quickly that there was no time to form an opposition government like the NTC. When President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled, the Tunisian state remained intact. Citizens continued to protest the government until all remaining members of Ben Ali’s Constitutional Democratic Rally party resigned and an interim government the masses deemed suitable was in place. Had government officials been less responsive to the population’s demands, launching crackdowns instead of reshuffling positions, Tunisia might have followed a very different and less stable path than it did. (Interestingly, many of the leaders elected in the October 2011 Tunisian elections were former political prisoners, who had a different and perhaps more personal level of credibility with the population than returning exiles.) Tunisia’s prime minister, Hamadi Jebali—himself a former political prisoner—told us that, in his view, the first post–Ben Ali regime minister of the interior ought to be a “victim of the ministry of the interior.” As such, he appointed to this position Ali Laârayedh, who under the previous regime spent fourteen years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement.
The downside of an acceleration in the pace of a movement is that organizations and their ideas, strategies and leaders have a far shorter gestation period. History suggests that opposition movements need time to develop, and that the checks and balances that shape an emergent movement ultimately produce a stronger and more capable one, with leaders who are more in tune with the population they intend to inspire. Consider the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa. During its decades of exile from the apartheid state, the organization went through multiple iterations, and the men who would go on to become South African presidents (Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma) all had time to build their reputations, credentials and networks while honing their operational skills. Likewise with Lech Walesa and his Solidarity trade union in Poland; a decade passed before Solidarity leaders could contest seats in parliament, and their victory paved the way for the fall of communism.
Most opposition groups spend years organizing, lobbying and cultivating leaders. We asked the former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who has met with and known almost every major revolutionary leader of the past forty years, what is lost when that timetable is advanced. “It is hard to imagine de Gaulles and Churchills appealing in the world of Facebook,” he said. In an age of hyper-connectivity, “I don’t see people willing to stand by themselves and to have the confidence to stand up alone.” Instead, a kind of “mad consensus” will drive the world and few people will be willing to openly oppose it, which is precisely the kind of risk that a leader must take. “Unique leadership is a human thing, and is not going to be produced by a mass social community,” Kissinger said.
Without statesmen and leaders, there won’t be enough qualified individuals to take a country forward, running the risk of replacing one form of autocracy with another. “The empowered citizen,” Kissinger said, “knows the technique of getting people to the square, but they don’t know what to do with them when they are in the square. They know even less of what to do with them when they have won.” These people can get easily marginalized, he explained, because their strategies lose effectiveness over time. “You can’t get people to the square twenty times a year. There is an objective limit, and no clear next phase.” And without a clear next phase, a movement is left to run on its own momentum, which inevitably runs out.
There are a number of activists on the street who, while critical of their own revolutions and follow-through, would take issue with Kissinger’s view. One such man is Mahmoud Salem, an Egyptian blogger turned activist, who became a spokesperson of sorts for his country’s 2011 revolution. Salem is highly critical of his fellow Egyptians for what he saw as an inability to move past the short-term goal of unseating Mubarak and opening the political system to competition; but his critique is one of Egypt, not of the revolutionary model for the new digital age. As he wrote in June 2012, just after Egypt’s first post-revolution presidential election, “If you are a revolutionary, show us your capabilities. Start something. Join a party. Build an institution. Solve a real problem. Do something except running around from demonstration to march to sit-in. This is not street work: real street work means moving the street, not moving in the street. Real street work means that the street you live in knows you and trusts you, and will move with you.” He exhorted street activists to participate in governance and in reforming the culture of corruption against which they protested. This means wearing seat belts, obeying traffic laws, enrolling in the police academy, running for parliament or holding local officials accountable for their actions.
Tina Rosenberg’s book Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World is yet another defense of what the crowd can achieve. By looking at the importance of human relationships in defining individual behavior and major social trends, she argues that revolutionaries can channel peer pressure to propel individuals and groups toward more desirable behaviors. Perhaps the most compelling evidence for what she describes as a “social cure” is found in the example of the Serbian activist group Otpor, which played a major role in ending Slobodan Milošević’s regime. She describes how the group used playful and flashy street theater, pranks, music, slogans and peaceful civil disobedience to break the culture of fear and helplessness. In cracking down on the group, the regime was revealed to be both brutal and at times foolish, and support for Otpor grew.
But more important than what groups like Otpor represent for the past is the role their leaders can play in the future. As Rosenberg points out in a powerful story of Serbian activists from the past training future activists around the world, successful revolutionaries must develop dual strategies for virtual and physical action. Without both, what’s left will be an oversupply of celebrities and coattail riders, and not enough trusted leaders. Historically, a prominent position implied a degree of public trust; with the exception of notorious political types like warlords or machine bosses, the visibility of high-profile leaders corresponded with the size of their support base. But in the future, this equation will be inverted: Prominence will come first and easily, and then a person will need to build tangible support, credentials and experience.
We’ve seen this already with the self-fulfilling prophecies of “buzz-worthy” American presidential candidates. Herman Cain, a relative unknown outside the business world, became highly visible for a period in the 2012 presidential campaign, and he was treated as a serious contender by some despite his political unsuitability for the position—something that revealed itself slowly over weeks, but surely would have been discovered instantly had he been vetted by the party establishment. Political celebrities like Cain will exist in multitudes in future revolutionary movements because flash-in-the-pan charismatic figures who have a strong online presence will rise to the top of the pile most quickly. Without the experience of taking political heat, these revolutionary celebrities are likely to be thin-skinned and will be exposed easily if there is no substance behind their flash.
How opposition movements handle the challenge of finding sustainable leaders will depend on where they are and how many resources they have. In countries where the revolutionary movements are underfunded and under the nose of the regime, pruning the crowds to find genuine leaders will be difficult. In well-resourced and more autonomous movements, however, a crop of consultants might well identify born leaders and subsequently help develop the skills and networks they need. Unlike the run-of-the-mill political consultants of today, these people will have degrees in engineering and cognitive psychology; technical skills; and a much firmer grasp of how to use data to build and fine-tune a political figure. They will take a promising candidate whose prominence exceeds his credentials and measure his political potential through a variety of means: feeding his speeches and writing through complex feature-extraction1 and trend-analysis software suites, mapping his brain function to determine how he handles stress or temptation, and employing sophistic
ated diagnostics to assess the weak parts of his political repertoire.
Many activist groups and organizations will project a virtual front that is far grander than their physical reality. Imagine a new opposition group being formed just days after a revolution in Algeria, which successfully recruits brilliant digital marketers and designers from the Algerian diaspora in Marseille. The core group consists of only five members, all twenty-somethings barely out of college with almost no prior exposure to politics. Their organization has no track record, but with its sophisticated digital platform they appear to the Algerian public competent, highly motivated and widely networked. In reality, they are disorganized, lacking in vision and wholly unprepared to take on any real responsibility. For groups like this, the dissonance between online presentation and actual operational capability will cause delays and friction within emergent movements. In extreme circumstances, we could see an entire movement that, online, looks like a genuine threat to a regime, when in fact its efforts represent little more than a clever use of technology and actually pose no threat whatsoever. By raising expectations and creating false hope around a movement’s prospects for success, opposition groups that can’t ultimately rise to meet the challenge may do more harm than good, serving as a costly distraction for the rest of the population.
No doubt every revolution in history has had its share of organizational weaknesses and false prophets, yet in the future, such flaws run the risk of heightening public disenchantment with opposition groups to an extreme degree. If society at large loses faith in a rising movement and its ability to deliver, that’s enough to stifle a transformative opportunity. When combined with the instability of leadership, dissonance between the physical and virtual fronts will thoroughly curtail a movement’s prospects for support and success in any given country. The consequence of having more citizens informed and connected is that they’ll be as critical and discerning about rebels as they are about the government.
This critical eye toward potential opposition forces will have consequences for returning exiles and members of the diaspora, too. Typically, exiles parachute into a country with international support but a limited grasp of the needs and desires of their home population. This disconnection from the realities on the ground has manifested itself in some public flameouts (like onetime Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi) and very public struggles (like those of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan). On one hand, greater connectivity will decrease the gap between the diaspora communities and the population at home, so returning exiles seeking to have an impact on the revolutionary process will find themselves better suited to connect with local actors. On the other hand, the populations at home will be better informed about the exiles who return (who, no doubt, will have generated long trails of data online about their background and activities), and this information will be used to shape narratives about them before they arrive.
Imagine a prominent Eritrean diaspora member, who made a fortune in the Western media industry, gathering a large virtual constituency with lots of online supporters, both internationally and at home. He might find it difficult to create a physical constituency in Eritrea, since many local citizens might be skeptical of his background or his ties to international media. Promises that played well on the international circuit, and with his online audience, might ring hollow to the population back home. Returning to his country expecting to find a path cleared for his political future, he could well watch his promising head start wash away as locals spurn him in favor of a leadership contender they can relate to better.
Successful leaders with ties to the diaspora will be the ones who adopt a sort of hybrid model, whereby the desires of the virtual and physical constituencies are both addressed and somehow reconciled. Winning over and making use of both those groups will be a challenge, but it will be critical for sustainable leadership in the digital age.
A wave of revolutionary false starts will lead successive generations to demand from their opposition groups not only vision but a detailed blueprint of how they intend to build a new country. Such expectations will be true particularly for newer dissident organizations that, in the absence of a track record, still have to demonstrate their bona fides to the public. This follows naturally in the footsteps of technology trends like greater transparency and free access to information. Potential supporters will act more like consumers, less swayed by political ideals than by marketing and product details. There will be more avenues to become a leader (at least in name) and with so many leadership candidates and so little to go on, people will bestow and withdraw their loyalty with ruthless calculation. But competition is as healthy for opposition groups as it is for companies.
Would-be demonstrators looking for a leader will expect any serious opposition group to do its institution-building online, including indicating who the ministers will be, how the security apparatus will be organized, and how goods and services will be delivered. Today, particularly in countries where connectivity is slow to spread, opposition leaders can make vague statements and give assurances that they know what they’re doing, but an informed public in the future will demand the details. To the extent that opposition groups exist before a revolution begins—whether in the country itself or in exile—they would be wise to genuinely prepare themselves. Proofs of preparedness to govern will be more than an exercise; the designs will be taken literally as the foundation of a new system. Any opposition group unwilling to produce them or unable to execute them effectively might find lingering praise for its community-organizing skills, but its leadership and governance credentials would certainly be called into question.
Even if an opposition movement presents a credible blueprint, and contains genuine leaders with real skill, there are still a number of uncontrollable variables that could derail a revolution. Tribal, sectarian and ethnic tensions run deep in many societies and remain a minefield for even the most cautious operator to navigate. Internal and external spoilers, like terrorist groups, militias, insurgents and foreign forces, can disrupt the security situation. Many revolutions are spurred by bad economies or fiscal policies, so the slightest economic recalibration (for good or ill) might reverberate through the country and change protesters’ minds.
Then there is the dreaded expectations gap. Even if a revolution successfully “finishes,” with new players in power and public optimism at its highest point, few new governments will be able to match the expectations and desires of their populations. The consequence of popular uprisings involving many millions more people, thanks in large part to connectivity, is that even more of them will feel abruptly excluded from the political process when the revolution ends.
We saw this directly in Libya and Tunisia when we met with activists and government ministers; neither group felt satisfied or fully appreciated. Following the revolution in Egypt, so many people were unhappy with the way the military rulers, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), led the country after Mubarak that they subsequently reoccupied Tahrir Square, the site of the original uprisings, several times. And when the population found itself with limited choices in Egypt’s first post-revolution presidential election—Ahmed Shafik, a symbol of the army, and Mohamed Morsi, a symbol of the Muslim Brotherhood—frustrations and the sense of exclusion only deepened. The degree to which people can feel involved now through connectivity will raise expectations as never before.
New governments will try to meet these demands for accountability and transparency by pursuing “open government” initiatives like publishing ministers’ daily schedules, engaging with citizens in online forums and keeping the lines of communication open where possible. Some citizens won’t be pacified by anything, however, and in them the ousted political elite will find its own online support network. Clever loyalists will make use of this expectations gap by staying connected to the population online and nurturing its grievances while they attempt to reconstitute the regime. Eventually, they might come to form the new online opposition movement.
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nbsp; Virtual Crackdowns and Containment
Faced with diffuse and omnipresent revolutionary threats, states will look for quick solutions for uprisings that bubble to the surface. They’ll have to get creative. Traditional methods like crackdowns and blackouts will become increasingly ineffective as connectivity spreads; the age-old autocratic strategy of suppressing rebellion by violence and rounding up ringleaders is much less relevant in the age of digital protests, online activism and real-time evidence dissemination. Historically, with a few notable exceptions (Tiananmen Square in 1989, the massacre in Hama, Syria, in 1982), crackdowns were rarely captured on film and it was very difficult for images and video to spread outside the country. If the regime controlled all the communications channels, the media and the borders, outside dissemination was nearly impossible.
As soon as mobile devices and the Internet became a feature of rebellion and mass protest, regimes adapted their strategy: They shut down the networks. Initially, this tactic seemed to work for several governments, most notably for the Iranian regime during the 2009 postelection protests when an almost complete shutdown quite effectively curtailed a growing opposition movement. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had every reason to believe his virtual crackdown would put a stop to the revolutionary agitation in Tahrir Square less than two years later, but, as the story below illustrates, this strategy had already become counterproductive.
In the early hours of January 28, 2011, anticipating widespread antigovernment protests later that day, the Egyptian regime effectively shut down all Internet and mobile connections within the country. “Egypt Leaves the Internet” read the headline of one of the earliest blog posts on the event.2 It had blocked access to social-networking sites and BlackBerry Internet service a few days earlier, and with this move, the disconnection was complete.3 The country’s four main Internet service providers—Link Egypt, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr and Vodafone/Raya—were affected, and mobile-phone service was also suspended by all three telecom operators. The largest of the telecoms, Vodafone Egypt, issued a statement that morning that said, “All mobile operators in Egypt have been instructed to suspend services in selected areas. Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it.”
