The Role of Grievances, Adversarial Attributions, and Negative Emotions in Motivating the October 17th Lebanese Uprising: A Social Psychological Content Analysis of Protesters’ Speech in Live TV Coverage

Abstract

Lebanon is a religiously diverse country that has witnessed multiple political upheavals revolving around disputes within and regarding the power-sharing sectarian system of its governance. Several social movements have tried to call for the abolishment of the sectarian political system without success. Most recently, economic grievances led to mass mobilization that swept the streets of the country on the evening of October 17, 2019, in what developed to be the largest anti-regime movement in the country’s recent history, calling for a complete overhaul of the system.

Building on several traditions within the field of social-psychological collective action research, the current work examines the different types of perceived injustices (grievances) which motivated the October 17th Lebanese uprising, in addition to the different outgroups identified by protesters as being responsible for said injustices (adversarial attributions), and the self-reported negative emotional states of the protesters (emotions) as they actively engaged in collective action. The roles of these factors are discussed in aggregate terms as well as in terms of temporal development (temporality) over the course of the analysis time frame. The utilized methodology is a combined approach of qualitative and quantitative content analysis of protesters’ discourse in live local television footage during the first three days of the uprising.

The results of our analyses showed that protesters predominantly cited being aggrieved by economic grievances, attributed blame to the totality of the system for these injustices and expressed exasperated anger in their spontaneous speech. The temporal analysis demonstrated that, while fluctuations were present in all of the emergent factors, the abovementioned ones remained the most frequently cited within each respective category of collective action motivators. The thesis concludes with a contextual discussion of the results as well as limitations to the current work and future directions for further research.