Modern communication technologies and the extension of the territory of struggle: Conceptualising Tunisia’s jasmine revolution

Abstract

This article seeks to conceptualise the role of modern communications technologies in revolutionary social movements starting from the jasmine revolution in Tunisia. After pointing to the limited explanatory potential of rationalist models of resource mobilisation and political opportunity structures in the case at hand, the article offers to investigate the extent to which the Internet provided new, immaterial territories over which discontent could prosper. Importing Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘territorialisation’ in the study of contentious politics, the article proposes to apprehend social movements on the basis of the inclusiveness and thickness of their territorial foundations and hypothesises that immaterial territories of struggle gave rise to an extremely inclusive but fairly shallow social movement, which was only able to solve basic collective action problems. More complex forms of collective action were conducted in less inclusive communities with thicker territorial foundations.