Data Gathering Methods

The methods used in this research were all of a qualitative nature, and therefore suited to generating rich, in-depth information about the way in which political actors

perceive and interact with the world around them (Miles and Huberman 1994; Fraser 1995; Adcock and Collier 2001; Auerbach and Silverstein 2003; Maxwell 2012; Lindekilde 2014; Yin 2016). Qualitative methods have been seen to add a missing ‘subjective’ component to conventional empirical-analytic research, by enabling researchers to document actors’ perspectives, motives and self-understandings (Auerbach and Silverstein 2003: 22). As indicated in Chapter 3, the theoretical framework centralises meaning making practices. In turn, and if meaning is the condition in which a person’s life, or significant events in it, ‘make sense’ (Wuthnow 1987: 35), then it has been argued that ‘qualitative research is the study of meaning, and this requires access to the subjective interpretations people attach to their objective circumstances’ (Packer 2010: 52 – author’s emphasis). The use of

this thesis, in which ‘descriptive validity’ or ‘authenticity’ (Maxwell 2012) is considered to be the determinant parameter for evaluating the strength of the inferences made, over generalisability.

The research methods deployed in this thesis can be categorised into three main types: semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Libyan activists and political figures; ‘social movement material’ from the 17 February uprising, spanning media

statements, movement communiqués, slogans and cultural productions such as music and graffiti; and archival material on the Qadhafi regime, including speeches,

documents on the institutional-administrative structure of the Jamahiriya, iconographic displays such as regime-sanctioned music, and tolerated comedic television programmes. Taken together, these forms of material enabled the analysis of what has been termed ‘the dynamic relationship between texts and their wider social, cultural, and political context’ (Lindekilde 2014: 208). The combination of strategic messaging materials (such as official statements by political actors) and symbolically rich texts (such as cultural productions) was designed to address a two- pronged theoretical framework that focuses on the semiotic and strategic components of rhetorical contestation.

Interviews

Semi-structured interviews served as a central research method for this project, and contributed substantially to unpacking the representational and meaning making practices of Libyan activists, and indeed, their rationalisation of these activities. Unlike strictly systematic modes of questioning, this method was particularly valuable for generating unanticipated insights and perspectives (Peabody et al 1990), and for

exploring the values and understandings through which participants perceive and structure their actions (Morris 1991). I conducted 31 interviews with Libyan activists and political figures who were involved– in various dimensions – in the mobilisation effort against the Qadhafi regime. This group comprised a diversity of actors:

opposition figures involved in or connected to Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC); diaspora activists based in the UK, the USA and Canada; and youth protesters who were based in different Libyan cities (Benghazi, Tripoli and Zawiya). Some of the activists I interviewed traversed these categories, travelling from the diaspora to Libya in order to be more directly involved in the revolutionary effort.

As noted by Mario Small (2009: 28), in-depth interviews should not be assessed by the standards of classical statistics, in which bias and representativeness are key metrics of appraisal, but be guided by the principle of ‘saturation rather than

representation’. Through the ‘selection’ of interviewees (Stake 1995: 56), I focused on gauging the perspectives of individuals who played a central role in ‘framing’ the Libyan uprising to constituents and bystanders by communicating its grievances and objectives. In line with the agency-centred perspective of the research, I was

particularly focused on interviewing actors whose voices and experiences had received little exposure in the media coverage of the uprising. This is not a contradictory endeavour: many of the activists I interviewed, despite playing a prominent role in ‘framing’ the uprising, had deliberately shielded their personal identities from public view in an effort, at the time, to be representative of ‘all Libyans’. Other Libyan activists have narrated their revolutionary experiences in the form of memoirs, interviews and stories, many of which were published in opposition newspapers during this uprising, and this material was used as a secondary

I contacted activists principally through targeted outreach, ‘purposively’

selecting those who would yield relevant but diverse insights for the study (Yin 2016: 93). On occasion, this was followed by snowballing from the initial pool of

interviewees, speaking to some activists as an offshoot of existent interviews. The initial subset of activists that I interviewed were already pre-identified as being prominent voices in the revolutionary discursive space - for instance, the founders of the Libyan Youth Movement, and members of the Libyan political opposition under Qadhafi – and I reached out to them using social media outlets and/or email

communication. After these interviews, some of them were able to refer me to other activists whom they thought would shed complementary or even different

perspectives on the Libyan uprising (for instance, by being located in another city during the events). This approach was particularly fruitful: in particular, the referrals on the basis of ‘difference’ insured that I spoke to a wide demographic of activists, often with different political affiliations, modes of activism and interpretations of what transpired in 2011.

The escalation of instability and outbreak of violence in Libya, which began in August 2014, led the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) to deem travel to Libya unsafe, including the Western region, in which I was initially planning to conduct interviews. This presented an initial barrier to the generation of empirical material, but one that I attempted to offset: the majority of the interviews were held across various UK cities, with activists who were either located in the country or visiting temporarily from Libya; others I conducted in Tunisia, which I travelled to in March and April 2015, and the remainder over Skype or telephone. The interviews themselves constituted substantial discussions, with most around two hours long, and held in either English or Arabic, depending on the interviewee’s preferred language.

There was a common structure to the line of questioning. Interviews unpacked the nature of the individual’s political activism in relation to Libya, prior to and during the uprising, and engaged with the way in which their perceptions of that activity emerged and shifted over time. Questions were also adapted based on the insights generated during the course of the interview, and in accordance with my own, pre- researched understanding of their role during the uprising.

While conducting and analysing the interviews, I was attuned to the fact that participants were relaying recollections of past events, and that they were not

speaking presently about their activism, as is customarily the case in social movement framing research (Johnston 2002; Valocchi 2005a; Lindekilde 2014). Accounts of past activism are undoubtedly shaped by experiences of current events (Irwin-Zarecka 1994; Olick and Robbins 1998), and – as noted in the Introduction – the current context of political instability in Libya generated a tone of revolutionary

disillusionment that saturated the content of some interviews. However, I do not believe it possible or desirable, from a constructivist perspective, to eliminate this subjective dimension and to separate activists’ subjective reconstructions of their motivations, from their ‘actual’ motivations, however contemporaneous the research. As argued by Robert Miller and John Brewer (2003: 191), ‘the meanings that people ascribe to their actions may be incomplete, not taking account of deeper motivations, inhibitions or humankind’s capacity for self-deception’. In addition, although the current political context in Libya did shape the direction of the interviews, this was consciously incorporated into the questions in an attempt to understand the way in which the aftereffects of activism shape activists’ perceptions of their political agency. Because interviews were triangulated with social movement material from 2011, I was also able to situate activists’ retrospective interpretations of their motives

with the understandings that were communicated during the revolutionary period itself.

Social Movement Materials

In order to understand the emergence of contentious, representational activity during the Libyan uprising, this thesis relies substantively on what have been termed ‘social movement materials’: a data corpus that includes ‘anything that is written, can be translated into texts, or whose symbolic meaning can be analysed’ (Lindekilde 2014: 209). This includes qualitative material both produced by movement activists or about movement activists, for instance, by the revolutionary media outlets that sprang up during the 2011 Libyan uprising. Due to digitalisation these materials are now available on a much greater scale. Reinoud Leenders (2013: 283) has argued that digitalised storytelling tells powerful, effective and accessible stories of revolution: these stories reflect people’s perceptions, and ‘give us important hints of how people perceive themselves, their conditions, their goals, their tactics, and their opponents’. The spread of social media platforms and the availability of these texts has shifted the challenge from being one of obtaining social movement materials, to one of filtering and selecting them.

Online material was collated into different categories of text. One category comprised statements publicised by both political elites (members of the Libyan NTC) and by diaspora and civil society activists: these took the form of written statements, audio and video interviews and newspaper op-eds. A second category of materials comprised the Arabic media messaging of the Libyan uprising. I collated and manually coded the weekly and fortnightly editions of two revolutionary

newspapers that were published between May and August 2011: Al-Manarah, which was printed and distributed across all opposition-controlled territories in Libya from June 2011, and Mayadeen, which was distributed in Benghazi from May 2011. I also substantiated this written material with episodes of political programmes that were aired on Libya Al-Ahrar, the main opposition television channel in 2011, and subsequently uploaded onto the video hosting website, YouTube. The third class of materials comprised the cultural productions of the uprising. I transcribed and analysed over 70 revolutionary songs that were produced from January to August 2011, as well as a collection of revolutionary graffiti and artwork, slogans and chants. This latter collection, alongside interviews, formed the central empirical basis for Chapter 7, in which I describe the process of symbolic contestation during the uprising.

Social movement materials, which encompassed both instrumental and expressive texts, enabled a varied appraisal of the manner and extent to which representational practices transformed the Qadhafi regime’s construction of social reality. Such material was gathered from a diversity of sources, including an archived version of the official NTC opposition website, Western news outlets, independent Libyan opposition websites, social media platforms and dedicated online portals such as the Libyan Uprising Archive. The scope of this material is vast and the analysis of it in its entirety was far beyond the remit of this study. In some instances, as in the coding of the two revolutionary newspapers, I self-imposed a limit based on

theoretical selection: both newspapers have distinctive ideological leanings, and were disseminated in different areas of Libya. In other instances, as with cultural

until a saturation point was reached, and the analysis began to yield recurrent insights and understandings.

Qadhafi-era Materials

Another branch of empirical material that I analysed was generated prior to the Libyan uprising, and was targeted at understanding the Jamahiriya as a material and symbolic ‘institution’. This included speeches by Qadhafi and his son Saif al-Islam, regime iconography (particularly music) and all available, online episodes of the state-sanctioned television programme ‘They Said It’ (Galooha), which was aired intermittently from 1998 to 2005 during the month of Ramadan, and which trod a fine line between regime subversion and affirmation. A limited number of speeches made by Qadhafi were available to view online; others were extensively quoted in a book published by Mohammed Magariaf, the founder of the main opposition group in exile, which I managed to obtain. In addition, I also analysed satirical materials that were developed by Libyan opposition members in exile, and that were uploaded onto websites such as Libya Al-Mostakbal. These materials were bolstered substantively by the interviews, many of which included subjective reflections on life under the Jamahiriya, and were supported by studies that have described the operation of Qadhafi’s political system (Vandewalle 2006; Pargeter 2012; Wright 2012), and dynamics of citizen participation and ‘political culture’ in Libya (Al-Werfalli 2011).

Lastly, in addition to these texts, Chapter 5 also examines a series of documents produced for the Libyan government by Adam Smith International, one of the UK’s largest foreign aid contractors, in 2007. Titled ‘Libyan Public Sector Administration Development’, this project scrutinised Libyan government organisations and

institutions, civil service executive structures and the entire process of policymaking in Libya, principally in order to make multiple recommendations for institutional reform. This project provided a valuable insight into the mechanisms through which the ‘formal’ Libyan political system, and the Libyan public sector as a whole,

operated –or indeed, failed to operate - in practice. Above all, the chapter interpreted the findings of this avowedly apolitical report, not simply as evidence of civil service failings, but as part of the Jamahiriya’s broader institutional dynamics, and the way in which it embedded popular complicity within its material practices of domination.