Mass mobilization is defined as a process that engages and motivates a wide range of partners and allies at national and local levels to raise awareness of and demand for a particular development objective through face-to-face dialogue.
In other words, social mobilization seeks to facilitate change through a range of players engaged in interrelated and complementary efforts.
In a study of over 200 violent revolutions and over 100 nonviolent campaigns, Erica Chenoweth has shown that civil disobedience is, by far, the most powerful way of affecting public policy.
[2][3] Activist and researcher Kyle R Matthews has questioned the applicability of these findings, which concern regime change, to other kinds of movements, such as Extinction Rebellion.
[13] North Korea frequently employs mass mobilization to convince its people to publicly express loyalty around important events and holidays.
Mobilization is also used to acquire a workforce for tasks such as construction, farm work, keeping public places clean, and urgent disaster relief.
Rulers were forced from power in Tunisia,[19] Egypt,[20] Libya,[21] and Yemen;[22] civil uprisings erupted in Bahrain[23] and Syria;[24] major protests broke out in Algeria,[25] Iraq,[26] Jordan,[27] Kuwait,[28] Morocco,[29] and Oman;[30] with minor protests in Lebanon,[31] Mauritania, Saudi Arabia,[32] and Western Sahara.
The protests shared techniques of mostly civil resistance in sustained campaigns involving strikes, demonstrations, marches, rallies, as well as the use of social media to organise, communicate, and raise awareness in the face of state attempts at repression and Internet censorship.
[36] According to Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow, the mechanism that produces violence in the declining phase of the collective action cycle is a result of the competition that arises among different sectors of the social movement.
Together they formed a theory stating that as mass mobilisation winds down, political violence rises in magnitude and intensity.
[37] In his study of the wave of mass protests that took place in Italy between 1965 and 1975, Sidney Tarrow stated that "[i]n the final stages of the cycle, there was an increase in the deliberate use of violence against others.
"[38] Donatella della Porta, in her comparative analysis of political violence and cycles of protest in Italy and Germany between 1960 and 1990, maintains that "when mass mobilization declined, the movements went back to more institutional forms of collective action, whereas small groups resorted to more organized forms of violence.
As he says, "the rise of violence in the USSR in significant part was associated with the decline of nonviolent mobilization contesting interrepublican borders.
However, their efforts had little effect on the peasantry, and it was after this bitter experience that they made the momentous decision to adopt terrorist tactics.