PhD thesis defence by Juliette Saetre
This dissertation investigates how political attitudes and behaviours diffuse through human mobility. While influence is often assumed to flow downstream— from institutional centers to peripheries, or from majority populations to minorities—I examine how it can also move upstream: from ordinary individuals who, by virtue of their mobility, carry novel political content into the contexts they move through. It explores when and how such content, once introduced, takes hold within receiving communities, reshaping local attitudes and behaviors.
The inquiry unfolds through three empirical papers. The first shows how historical migration patterns can generate latent network infrastructures that enable protest to diffuse transnationally. It traces how a feminist performance, rooted in the Chilean context, gained global traction through the structure of the Chilean diaspora and the ties its members had built with hostcountry residents over time. The second investigates why Chile’s dictatorship (1973–89) prompted widespread solidarity mobilizations in the West, while Argentina’s did not. I argue that Chilean refugees activated host communities by embedding a distant conflict in local settings and transmitting credible, bottom-up information—whereas the relative absence of Argentine refugees, and their weaker integration into host networks, limited such diffusion. The third demonstrates that returning Norwegian peacekeepers from Lebanon introduced counter-narratives about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict into otherwise homogeneous communities. These testimonies, circulating through trusted in-group ties, catalyzed a sharp decline in public support for Israel between 1978 and 1980.
Together, the papers show that human mobility can drive upstream political influence—but only when the ideas it carries are reinforced through trusted social ties in receiving communities. While mobility enables the circulation of new political content, its broader impact depends on the networks through which it flows.
Juliette Sætre’s work sits at the intersection of sociology and political science, focusing on how political attitudes and behaviours diffuse through migration and how this shapes collective action and public opinion in receiving communities. During her PhD, she was a visiting researcher at New York University and Sciences Po. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Sociology. From January 2026, she will join the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow.