’If people are mobilizing in a particular way, the regime has an opportunity to learn and stop that form of mobilizing from happening. In a sense, protest tactics have to be random and unpredictable to work,’ says MIT political scientist Mai Hassan Credits : Image: Gretchen Ertl
'If people are mobilizing in a particular way, the regime has an opportunity to learn and stop that form of mobilizing from happening. In a sense, protest tactics have to be random and unpredictable to work,' says MIT political scientist Mai Hassan Credits : Image: Gretchen Ertl On-the-ground study of Sudan shows how protestors have kept their tactics evolving in the face of oppressive rulers. Protestors acting against repressive regimes face a particular problem: The tools they use to organize demonstrations can also be deployed to repress their actions. For instance, when citizens communicate on the internet to plan a protest, a ruling regime can access that information and be ready to break up the demonstration. Then what? What happens next, according to MIT political scientist Mai Hassan, is that protestors can engage in "coordinated discoordination," as she calls it, finding ways to rapidly create new demonstrations, divert security forces, and keep social movements active, even in the face of regimes working to stop them. "You need people to be on the same page for any sort of antiregime mobilization to occur, and that's easiest done through a formal organization like a labor union or opposition political party, or in recent years, the internet, including Facebook events or Twitter," Hassan says. "But that just brings out a fundamental tension, which is that dissidents make themself identifiable and findable to the very regime they're trying to overcome.
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