Criterios de inclusión y exclusión Tabla 2 Tabla 2

Among other types of events, different kind of protests are included in the SCAD. More precisely, what I call here protests, are in the SCAD referred to as demonstrations and violent riots. A demonstration is defined as “[d]istinct, continuous, and largely peaceful action

directed toward members of a distinct “other” group or government authorities.” A violent riot is similarly “distinct” and “continuous” “action directed toward members of a distinct “other” group or government authorities.” But where a demonstration is “largely peaceful”, violent riot is violent action where “[t]he participants intend to cause physical injury and/or property damage” (Salehyan & Hendrix 2014). In my analyses both demonstrations and violent riots are evenly counted as protests. I have also counted as protests all events which have started as something else and then escalated into a demonstration or violent riot and events which have started as a demonstration or violent riot and then escalated into something else. In SCAD a demonstration or violent riot continuing more than one day is counted as one event and there

is a separate column where the duration of a protest is recorded—as precisely as possible. I follow here this logic and count a protest only once no matter how long it has lasted. SCAD also provides information on how many people have been participating in an event, this is done with a seven step scale: less than 10, 10 to 100, 101 to 1000 and so on. Arguably it is more notable if there is a protest with 100 001 to 1 000 000 participants than a protest with 10 to 100 participants. Thus the information about the numbers of participants is included in the graphs presented when studying hypothesis 1. Otherwise than that, it is unclear how this information could be operationalised. And more importantly, in some one third of the protests this information about the number of participants is missing. Thus one protest is counted as one protest no matter how many people took part.

In ACLED there are again several event types, and among them is an event type labelled as “riots/protests”. There, in short, a “protest describes a non-violent, group public

demonstration, often against a government institution [and] rioting is a violent form of demonstration”. However, if rioters use violence against civilians “for example [against] a political official, or a representative of a business” or if there arises violence against peaceful demonstrators, the event will not fall in the category of “riots/protests”, but is coded as “violence against civilians”. The peaceful demonstrators, who were faced by violence are still “coded as Protesters, to distinguish [this] from wider patterns of violence against civilians not engaged in demonstrations” (Raleigh & Dowd 2015: 9, 12–13). Thus for my analyses I have not classified protests based on event type, but on interaction code instead. With interaction code I have selected all those events where at least other side involved in the event are “protesters” or “rioters”. Doing this captures all events where protesters or rioters are involved despite the event type, in other words also in the case that a demonstration has for example turned to being “violence against civilians”. In ACLED an event lasts only one day, this is to say that if a protest in reality lasts more than one day, it is coded as several events in ACLED. Still, if it is said in the source material used by ACLED that an incident occurred during three months, only those days are coded when reported activity took place (Raleigh & Dowd 2015: 16). Then again, if there are two events in the same location on the same day but there are different actors in these events or the event type is different, these are coded as two separate events. In the protest data of I will use there are slightly more than 7 500 protests recorded in ACLED between 1997 and 2014 in those seven North African Arab countries in which we are interested. Without going through them one by one it is not easy to figure out how many of them are protests which are continuing for more than one day and therefore coded as several events. However, there are about 2 000 such protests which occur in a

location where there has on a previous day been or where there on the same day is another protest event. Most likely some of these 2 000 events are separate protests which just happen to occur in the same location on successive days. But this is to say that at least a vast majority, about 5 500, of these 7 500 protest events should be unique events in the sense that they occur on one day in one place and not protests continuing from the previous day or previous days and therefore coded as several events.

The level of organised violence is measured with the number of fatalities caused by organised violence. I define organised violence following the definition of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). This can be practically seen as a necessity since I am using UCDP GED data which is provided by UCDP and coded according to its own definition, but this definition is also justifiable in a sense that it is widely used. UCDP defines that there are three types of organised violence which are state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one- sided violence (Croicu & Sundberg 2015: 15). Further, state-based conflict “is a contested incompatibility that concerns government and/or territory where the use of armed force between two parties, of which at least one is the government of a state, results in at least 25 battle-related deaths in one calendar year”. Non-state conflict instead refers to the “use of armed force between two organised armed groups, neither of which is the government of a state, which results in at least 25 battle-related deaths in a year”. And one-sided violence is defined as the “use of armed force by the government of a state or by a formally organised group against civilians which results in at least 25 deaths in a year” (Uppsala Conflict Data Program 2016b). It is easy to note, that 25 deaths is mentioned as a threshold in all three definitions. However, there is a slight change to this rule in UCDP GED which I apply here. If a conflict or the use of one-sided violence has, in a single year, crossed the threshold of 25 deaths and it has caused one or more fatalities also in previous or in subsequent years, these years and deaths are included in the UCDP GED, even though the death toll has not crossed 25 (Croicu & Sundberg 2015: 15). In my analyses I have included all fatalities of organised violence no matter to which of the three above mentioned categories they belong.