Chapter 4 provides the first empirical assessment of the pathways developed earlier in the book. It focuses on access to judicial remedy mechanisms, defined as any process initiated in the court of law. This chapter asks: how does confrontation shape governance outcomes in terms of access to legal remedy efforts? I draw from political science and legal scholarship on the logic of deterrence to illustrate how Institutional Strength represents an important pathway to judicial remedy mechanisms. The Corporate Characteristics pathway is developed by engaging with political economy and management scholarship to explain the ways in which firm-level characteristics (e.g. foreignness, profitability, and size) explain variation in access to judicial remedy. Finally, the Elevating Voices pathway draws from the human rights scholarship, which illustrates how civil society participation (e.g. NGO or INGO involvement) can shape governance outcomes. Using case studies from the CHRD, this chapter also provides rich illustrations of victims’ access to judicial remedy mechanisms.

Chapter 5 explores the same pathways but draws on different scholarship, as non-judicial remedy mechanisms represent a much broader set of administrative or mediation-based activities that can be initiated by state or non-state actors. The Institutional Strength pathway explores how rule of law influences access to non-judicial remedy. To inform the mechanisms that drive the Corporate Characteristics and Elevating Voices pathways, this chapter employs slack resource theory to explain why profitable firms might be more likely to engage in socially responsible practices, such as non-judicial remedy. This approach suggests that when firms have the slack, or extra resources to do good deeds, they will do so. Other scholars explore how firm size can also shape firm involvement in such activities; larger firms are more vulnerable to civil society pressure and, thus, may be more likely to engage in non-judicial remedy mechanisms. Detailed vignettes provide concrete illustrations of victims’ efforts to access to non-judicial remedy mechanisms.

Latin America differs from our other cases in crucial ways. It did not suffer as badly from the Great Recession as did many other regions, although it experienced its own crisis when the boom in commodity prices burst. And historically, cultural issues over race and ethnicity had not been as politicized as in Europe and North America. Nevertheless, we see a similar causal process in this region as in our other cases. As regional economies suffered, antagonism towards politics as usual increased. The nature of discontent, however, differed radically depending on the details of the dominant political order it opposed. In Brazil, discontent came to resemble Trumpism, with a focus on cultural issues that had been addressed by the formerly dominant Workers’ Party, while also addressing rampant corruption. In Chile, discontent centered on the elitism of Chile’s democracy, and the institutions that reinforced it, placed insurmountable barriers in the path of political outsiders and insurgent parties; as a result, discontent in Chile manifested as mass contention. This chapter uses analysis of existing datasets (including LAPOP and national election studies) to show how economic concerns, exacerbated by democratic deficits, drove discontent over cultural discontent, corruption, and elitism.

Chapter 4 describes the Maidan events – the start of the war. Mass social mobilization began when the government rejected an EU trade agreement. It ended with a regime change. These protests marked the first time since independence that police used excessive force against protesters in a significant way. A radical subset of protesters then used violence strategically against the police. The Party of Regions imploded and power transferred to the opposition. This created a crisis of political legitimacy and two opposing narratives. In one narrative, the illegitimate police violence against protesters finished the regime (“Revolution of Dignity”). In the other, the street violence against the police created an illegitimate political outcome (“fascist coup”). Anti-Maidan protesters in the East formed militias, acting on the second narrative. The roots of Ukraine’s war – whatever one calls it – can thus be traced to Maidan.

Tripoli, October 2019: Young people from various religious backgrounds and all walks of life sang and danced together in the city’s central al-Nour Square, shattering the myth of Tripoli as a ‘cradle of terrorism’ or ‘citadel of Muslims’. The Islamists who had often dominated Tripoli’s urban space retreated, and youths, families, and members of the educated middle class filled al-Nour Square during Lebanon’s revolutionary moment.

Why and how did Tripoli become the country’s prime centre of contentious politics in otherwise-peripheral Lebanon?

The introduction presents the main argument of the book, introducing the concepts of the dethronement of secondary cities, politics of autochthony, and erosion of city corporatism in Tripoli. It then discusses the broader lessons of the Tripoli case, which speak to three strands of literature: studies of Lebanon and the Levant; discussions on sectarianization in the Middle East; and debates on the ‘Sunni Crisis’ in the Middle East. Lastly, the research methods used for data collection are presented.

The 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri unleashed a political earthquake in Lebanon. Tripoli and its surroundings became a Sunni base for the Future Movement, led by Rafiq Hariri’s son Saad and other neoliberal elites from Lebanon’s nouveaux riches political class. For the first time, Tripolitanians rallied around a political party based outside their own city.

Many Tripolitanians supported the Future Movement in 2005 because they hoped that Saad Hariri, with his personal wealth and connections to Saudi Arabia, might bring investments to marginalized areas in northern Lebanon. However, these expectations were not met.

The Future Movement was an elite-based party, and its strategies of outreach to the poor had severe shortcomings. It used divisive sectarian (anti-Shiʿi) electoral strategies in Tripoli and empowered Sunni radicals, leading to a spiral of violence. Sunni hardliners gained prominent roles in Tripoli after Hizbullah and its allies turned their weapons inwards in Beirut in May 2008. However, this sectarian resource was insufficient to help the Future Movement maintain its popularity in Tripoli in the long run.

New social forces that emerge as part of the process of development turn structural change into political change. Their struggles for representation and incorporation occupy a prominent place in our understanding of regime change. Even elite-driven democratic transitions necessitate moments of mass mobilization that push liberalization into regime change. Many scholars also contend that an active citizenry leads to democratic stability via more effective government. In contrast, others warn that a mobilized and polarized civil society can undermine democracy – particularly if the demands of social forces outstrip the capacity of institutions to process them. In this chapter, we explore the effects of social organization and mobilization on democracy. Using the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) and Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) data, we gauge the extent to which organized and mobilized social forces are responsible for levels and changes in democracy. We find that civil society participation and nonviolent protest positively affect democracy and that rightwing anti-system movements constitute the largest threat to democracy.

The uprisings that shook the Middle East in 2011 shaped the subsequent decade of civil wars, coups and political crisis. The ‘Arab Spring’ has, therefore, come to be seen as a failure – a failure of transition from authoritarian to democratic regimes. Such transitions were expected to follow the model established in the last quarter of the twentieth century, producing only political rather than social transformation. Rather than revolutions, however, the 2011 uprisings have come to be seen as at most unsuccessful revolts. The reasons for this failure are typically ascribed to peculiarities of the region, in the presence of Islamist oppositions, sectarian division and external intervention into relatively weak states. Yet the crushing of the Arab uprisings represents not an inevitable failure or defeat but success: the success of counter-revolution.

Chapters 7 unpacks how lawyers can serve as brokers of compliance when controversial judicial decisions spark backlash. As European integration became politicized from the 1990s onwards, disruptive European Union (EU) laws and European Court of Justice (ECJ) decisions have often provoked on-the-ground resistance. Yet these controversies can also open surprising opportunities for court-driven change, provided that Euro-lawyers mobilize as "interpretive mediators:" Public advocates who vernacularize EU law and rally local stakeholders and the press to promote compliance. The chapter develops a case study design to compare lawyers' role in two explosive controversies that generated litigation before the ECJ: The 1991 Port of Genoa case (analyzed in this Chapter), which quashed the control over port labor of a centenarian union of dockworkers, and the 2015 Xylella case (analyzed in Chapter 8), which mandated the eradication of thousands of centenarian olive trees. The chapter traces how Euro-lawyers in the Port of Genoa case preempted backlash and promoted compliance by mobilizing public and interest group support via media savvy advocacy. It speaks to readers interested in how contentious politics transform legal mobilization, how lawyers cultivate people's legal consciousness when the law is politicized, and how these efforts shape judicial policymaking and Europeanization.