Diplomatic Support for Protest Movements:

Causes and Consequences

Diplomatic support for protest movements has increasingly become a popular foreign policy tool. Many political leaders around the world do not hesitate to express their support for protesters in other countries and condemn the host government's repressive actions. As fashionable as it has become, theoretical and empirical work on the causes and consequences of diplomatic support remains limited.

My research addresses three major questions on the causes and consequences of diplomatic support for protest movements. First, why do states provide diplomatic support for protest movements in other countries? To explore the why of diplomatic support, I focus on diplomatic support from Western democracies in the post-Cold War period. Why only Western democracies? For two reasons. First, as shown in the second chapter, Western democracies make up the absolute majority of diplomatic supporters. Second, due to their enormous economic and political power, diplomatic support from Western democracies is more likely to influence the dynamics of protest movements.

Second, when do Western democracies use coercive diplomacy and when do they use public diplomacy and rhetorical support to back protesters? In order to understand the dynamics of Western diplomatic support for protest campaigns, I collected 523 diplomatic stances on protest events from 1990 to 2019 by extensive reading of more than 50 newspapers and other international news agencies.

Third, is diplomatic support effective? Does diplomatic support increase public sympathy for the protest campaigns? Does it encourage more people to join protests? To answer this question, I conduct a survey experiment in Iran to understand how third-party diplomatic support influences public attitude in the host country.