Distant Countries, Shared Struggles: Emotional and Cognitive Mechanisms of Cross-National Protest Diffusion

How and why does protest in one country inspire individuals in distant and distinct countries? Traditional diffusion scholarship emphasizes geographic proximity, historical, linguistic, and cultural ties, organizational networks, and structural similarity as key factors facilitating the spread of collective action across borders. Recent protest waves, however, challenge these assumptions, revealing complex pathways of diffusion shaped by new communication technologies and the experiences of micro-level actors, including unorganized protesters and loosely connected groups. This article examines the cross-national spread of collective action through two “least likely” cases: the 2013 protests in Turkey and Brazil, and the 2019 protests in Hong Kong (China) and Catalonia (Spain). Drawing on 47 in-depth interviews with activists in Brazil and Catalonia and employing a grounded theory approach, the study aims to reconstruct the microfoundations of diffusion by analyzing its emotional and cognitive dimensions. The findings show that individuals first interpret foreign protests as contextually and motivationally similar, enabling sympathetic identification across distance. Emotional resonance rooted in shared traumatic experiences and moral shocks then generates cathartic emotions such as indignation and admiration, providing motivation for engaging in similar action in the local context. The adoption of protest repertoires, however, depends on evaluative judgments of moral legitimacy, cultural resonance, and tactical feasibility. By emphasizing emotional and cognitive processes as constitutive of diffusion, the article advances a more agentic and culturally embedded understanding of how collective action spreads across borders.