Abstract

Protest campaigns linked to episodes of democratization are often described as sudden: surprise, excitement, and innovation are terms often used to describe eventful democratization, as times are perceived as exceptional. I suggest that one major transformation during those events is what we can conceptualize as time intensification. The latter appears in the form of critical junctures at the macro level, in the form of eventful protest at the meso level, and in the form of signaling mechanisms at the micro level. Looking at the ways in which time has been addressed from these three perspectives, in this paper I discuss the impact of relational processes of time intensification and then time normalization. Bridging the three levels, I suggest that changes are produced at the meso level as eventful protest interrupts routines. Acting collectively, social movements can be seen as producing critical junctures at the macro level, where structures become more liquid. The implication at the micro level is that actors look for signals of others’ thoughts and behaviors that might guide their choices. In order to underpin this, I analyze activists’ perception of time by means of in-depth interviews carried out with activists from two Central Eastern European countries that can be considered as being paradigmatic for such sudden events ). Building upon my recent Where did the Revolution go?, I argue that revolutionary temporality is depending on endogenous dynamics that unfold in a series of contingent choices that in their turn resulting in unexpected, abrupt, and open-ended change.