How Does the Geography of Surveillance Affect Collective Action?

How does residing in the proximity of surveillance infrastructure – i.e., checkpoints, the separation barrier, and military installations – affect support for cooperative and confrontational forms of collective action? Cooperative actions involve engagement with outgroups to advance the ingroup cause (e.g., negotiations, joint and peaceful actions), whereas confrontational actions involve unilateral tactics to weaken the outgroup (e.g., boycott, armed resistance). Combining geo-coded data on surveillance infrastructure across the entire West Bank and Jerusalem with a representative survey of the adult population from 49 communities (N=1000), multilevel analyses show that surveillance does not affect support for confrontational actions, but instead decreases support for cooperative actions. Our analysis identifies a new, community-level mechanism whereby surveillance undermines cooperative actions: through limiting the shareability of (alternative) conflict narratives that challenge dominant ‘us vs. them’ perspectives. These effects are empirically robust to various individual- and community-level controls, and to potential issues of reverse causality and residential self-selection. These findings document how, in effect, cooperative voices and the fabric of social communities become the first casualties of surveillance. They also speak to the importance of considering contextual factors and thus have broader implications for the socio-psychological study of collective action.