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Claims made during mass protests in Hong Kong in 2019 and Thailand in 2020 became increasingly transgressive. Localist demands and calls for the reform of the monarchy, respectively, violated conventional political norms in these two hybrid regimes. This paper examines the dynamics of opposition discursive radicalization during ongoing autocratization. Observational data and protest event analysis are employed to assess the scaling up of claims-making and its relationship to protest size and group solidarity. The paper argues that radicalization can best be understood relationally, between a hybrid regime, on the one hand, and moderates and radicals in the opposition, on the other. It identifies the following three points of convergence that lead to similar protest trajectories in both cases: the marginalization of moderates along with their gatekeeping role of transgressive discourses; the creation of digitally enabled protest networks that facilitated mass mobilization and claims diffusion; and the intensification of protest policing that provoked a departure from reformist to revolutionary claims. The argument offered here shows similarities to but also nuanced differences from the repression literature and casts doubt on the assumptions about the demobilizing impact of autocratization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between the articulation of the 15-M movement in Spain and the expansion of Feminist Economics (FE) at the feminist base of this movement, in particular, in Feminism Committees (FC-15 M). We assert that this expansion was due to FE's capacity to explain the 2008 crisis beyond its economic-financial dimensions and to analyse the effects of the political-economic austerity measures on the sustainability of life. We claim that a differentiating feature of FE in Spain is its permeability to dialogue with social movements. Therefore, it has become more politicized and critical than other academic fields. This influence has also been reflected in the structure and contents of the most recent FE national conferences, which from 2013 on included not only the classic academic strand but also training and political action strands. In order to explore this development, our methodology includes interviews with key informants; document analysis of material generated in the conferences and the Feminism Committees of 15-M; questionnaires to activists, academics, and practitioners of FE; and informal observation as direct participants of the described processes and events. The paper begins with an introduction to FE thought and its connections with so-called 'Feminism for the 99%' and continues with a methodological section. The twofold results section analyzes the dialogues between FE and FC-15 M. It concludes with a summary of the key ideas presented and some final remarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the increasingly widespread practice of prepping, and examines how it differs from conventional forms of activism, which generally involve explicit and purposeful efforts to instigate collective social change. Drawing on Luhmann’s sociological theory of risk and the narrative concept of foreshadowing, the paper explores how preppers understand the future and their own responsibility in shaping it, as well as the ways in which their visions of the future show up in the present. The paper argues that while the practice of prepping may appear apolitical and perhaps even asocial at a first glance, its political potential lies in the implicit and largely unintended performative consequences that arise from popularizing and proliferating the idea of a potential alternative to capitalism. Consequently, the paper demonstrates how ‘taking the future seriously’, much like conventional activist movements, albeit within the context of viewing the future as dangerous as opposed to risky, can have performative effects that may ultimately function as a form of ‘implicit activism’. This implicit activism could potentially prove as, if not more, effective in terms of challenging the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism. Considering this, we argue that social movement scholars and activists could benefit from a more profound engagement with the practice of prepping. Empirically, the paper draws on a selection of popular self-help books on prepping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do people attend protests despite infection risk during health crises? This paper studies motivations to participate in protests during public health crises under authoritarianism, despite the risks of infection and repression by regime forces, with a focus on economic grievances and moral indignation. It examines motivations for protest participation in the case of workers’ protests in Turkey during 2020 and 2021, using an online survey and interviews with supermarket, delivery, and municipality workers, and waiters in Istanbul. The paper argues that, although the pandemic amplified the cost of participating in protests due to infection risk and government restrictions such as lockdown measures and heavy fines for violating them, it escalated economic grievances and moral indignation even more. By implication, small groups of workers persisted in their protests for months. Unjustified terminations of employment, mistreatment, and poor working conditions resulted in income loss and moral indignation, which increased the perceived costs of not protesting more than the costs of protesting. This paper challenges the expectation that infection risk, lockdowns, and repression by regime forces would discourage protest participation during the pandemic. Theories developed for normal times must consider how pandemic-induced grievances and moral outrage interact with the perceived risks of repression and infection. Furthermore, while studies on protest participation under authoritarianism focus on how moral indignation and anger trigger large-scale protests, this analysis reveals that small groups can also protest for an extended period despite significant risks under authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protesting government tuition increases in 2012, Quebec university and college students participated in collective action that they contentiously characterized as a ‘strike.’ While oppositional actors insisted students were boycotting classes – not striking – student activists claimed legal and cultural justifications for their action. This paper asks: How did Quebec student activists discursively characterize and legitimize their protest tactic as a strike? How did this discourse – and opponents’ counter-discourse – structure the terms of the debate within higher education institutions? Using discourse analysis of student newspapers and organizers’ first-hand accounts of the strike, this paper argues that striking students developed a discursive repertoire constituted by two components: they linked their action to a collective identity with a historical legacy of striking and adopted collective action frames that characterized the action as disruptive and collective. While the debate within higher education institutions centred around legitimacy, it was deeply rooted in contestation over individualism versus collectivism and the ongoing neo-liberalization of higher education. Through the case of the 2012 student strike, I propose employing collective identity and collective action frames together in a dialogic framework of discursive repertoires, thereby providing analytical clarity to this concept for social movement scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the roles of professional networks in mass protests. The extensive participation of professionals in the anti-extradition movement in Hong Kong, using their professional expertise, specialized networks and institutional positions, constituted a novel form of collective action. Based on framing analysis of sectoral petitions and interviews with participating professionals, this paper shows that state–corporatist arrangements and social movement abeyance structures laid the foundation for sectoral mobilization in the anti-extradition movement. It reveals the conditions under which professional activism can move beyond individual practices and overcome organizational barriers to generating resources to sustain a mass movement. Perceived threats to the professional ethos triggered cross-sectoral participation. Sectoral mobilization modes and levels were contingent on an array of institutional constraints, informal networks and conjunctural events that made for widespread and legitimate professional involvement in a networked movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen the rise of a ‘postapocalyptic environmentalism’, which sees environmental catastrophe as ongoing or inevitable and therefore rejects the hope of avoiding that catastrophe. So far, research on this form of environmentalism has pointed to the paradoxes and ambivalences involved in its rejection of hope, as well as to environmental activists’ difficulties translating non-hope into movement strategy. However, postapocalyptic environmentalists’ efforts of practicing non-hope have yet to be investigated. Drawing on interviews with participants in a Swedish online environmentalist network committed to ‘collapsology’, the present paper therefore investigates postapocalyptic environmentalist non-hope as an emotional practice of conviction. The paper approaches non-hope as a form of emotional deintegration, in which collapsologists seek to dehabituate the hope and optimism that inform the dominant emotive-cognitive frame of environmental politics in Western industrial societies. They do so by vigilantly maintaining feelings of certainty about the inevitability of civilizational collapse. More specifically, in rejecting hope, the interviewed participants articulate this non-hope as a form of conviction. However, the participants present this conviction as haunted by doubts, dissonances, and ambivalences, and therefore as needing vigilant maintenance efforts. Such efforts include what I call ‘impossibility work’. Implications for further research on postapocalyptic environmentalism and related movements are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the role of music in Extinction Rebellion (XR), a radical environmental movement founded in the UK in 2018. Through an analysis of the lyrics and sound of 80 songs (which comprise XR’s ‘Rebellion Song Book’) XR’s music is presented as both a purposeful strategy (i.e. a framing mechanism) for articulating core grievances and their accompanying solutions, and as a binding mechanism that works to reinforce solidarity and collective identity among members. The results show that XR’s songs reflect the broader messaging of the movement – that environmental degradation has caused a climate emergency and that unless immediate action is taken to address this an ecosystem collapse awaits humanity. As well as clear grievances emerging in the lyrics, solutions to these are articulated (through stressing the importance of heeding science and organizing citizens assemblies to steer government decisions); and calls to action are made (through calling for rebellion). The paper shows that while XR’s music can inspire collective action to address climate issues, an equally important function is that it can engender emotional responses in both those who sing and listen to it, bringing members together and reinforcing a form of collective identity and solidarity, and thus strengthening the cohesion of the movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2011, one of the most important social movements since the end of the dictatorship proposed a change in higher education in Chile. More than two hundred thousand people participated in public demonstrations. Facing the failure of the negotiations with the government, the student movement focused on proposing changes to the 2012 Budget Law. What coalitions did the leaders of this student movement form to influence the Budget Law? The aim of this paper was to analyse the factors that explain coalition formation to impact the 2012 Budget Law. In doing so, an analysis has been carried out, focusing on the leaders of the student movement (CONFECH). This paper emphasizes their coalition with the rectors of public universities and their relationship with other educational actors and the opposition parties. The analysis includes the review of documents and national newspapers and interviews with the leaders of the CONFECH. The results of the analysis show that the traditional factors explaining coalition formation are useful but not sufficient to explain the student movement alliances. This paper argues that the factor that explains the student movement coalitions is the 'strategic sense' that the movement is focused on an outcome-based strategy. The leaders consider a coalition with the rectors of public universities as outcome-tactics. However, the relationship with opposition parties was much more difficult because of their distrust resulting from what happened in 2006. This study thus has significant implications for the coalition formation theories and its relationship with social movements' impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While social movement studies have long focused on the formation and dynamics of social movement coalitions and "boundary spanning', much less attention has been paid to why and how social movement alliances break down and dissolve. Expanding theoretical reflections on the 'dark side of digital politics', the current paper bridges critical Internet research and research on movement coalitions and explores how subversive digital media practices deepened existing conflicts within the Indignados movement. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of activists' texts, I outline the specific digital practices that fuelled the unmaking of the movement: trolling discussions, creating fake profiles in order to infiltrate closed groups, hijacking social media accounts, and manipulating voting systems. On a more general level, the paper analyses also how conflicts between activists have been affected by the possibility to capture and 'save' internal discussions and to disseminate snippets of them with the help of screenshots. The use of screenshots as instruments of proof, persuasion and manipulation has become a crucial and often underestimated subversive digital practice in contemporary activism. At the same time, I find that activists have developed strategies to cope with digital subversion and to fix broken connections in the name of new political projects, such as Podemos. Thus, the paper argues first, that technology is political and can be used to dissolve alliances and construct boundaries, and second, that the very notion of the 'political' should be enriched to go beyond the friend-enemy distinction and take into account forgiveness and compromise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hydraulic fracturing ('fracking') was a controversial issue in the United Kingdom that sparked national and community-led groups to organise protest mobilisations. To date, however, the social science literature has largely focussed upon general anti-fracking discourse rather than on the physical, community-led mobilisations that emerged from the frustrations of people directly affected at a local level by threats to their community. This paper develops and applies a novel conceptualisation of political opportunity structures at the nexus of the national and local levels to more fully explore the usually overlooked role of local-level structures in interaction with the national level in shaping protest. It uses protest event analysis with data derived from two key activist-specific sources. The analysis draws on data from over 1,400 protests occurring across 69 counties from 2011 to 2019. In so doing, this paper observes and accounts for variance in the form and frequency of community-led anti-fracking protest events within and between different areas of England across the life course of the protest episodes. This paper finds that trends in protest frequency and form over time correlate to shifts in opportunity structures, particularly regarding local and national-level interactions, and that this can be usefully conceptualised through a local-national-state-nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International tax justice issues, such as corporate tax avoidance, have gained particular salience over the past decade in an environment of financial instability and government austerity. Civil society involvement has ranged from trade unions and NGOs calling for parliamentary inquiries to civil disobedience by less established actors. Since the international financial crisis, how have levels of contentious collective action around these issues waxed and waned? Is contentiousness associated most with domestic politics or global media events like the Panama Papers? This paper uses an original hand-coded dataset from five national newspapers in the United Kingdom and Australia between 2008 and 2016. Political claims analysis (PCA) was used to collect all instances of claims around international tax justice and compare the types of actions and the different frames used by civil society actors. In both countries, mobilising grievances are generated most strongly in the period after domestic austerity policies are introduced. The qualitative coding provides evidence of accompanying frame alignment in these periods, as international taxation is problematized in terms of national revenue, demonstrating scale shift from the global to the national political stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In dialogue with Della Porta’s work on protests as critical junctures and drawing on the comparative analysis of four case studies in Europe (Barcelona and Dublin) and North America (Baltimore and Montréal), the paper develops a neo-Gramscian perspective on the impact and legacies of urban resistance to austere neoliberalism after the Global Economic Crisis (GEC) of 2008–9. Framed by the postulated ‘interregnum’ in the hegemony of neoliberalism, it argues that the conjunctural politics of the period are defined by a continuing conflict between passive revolutionary subsumption and generative anti-systemic politics, which plays out in acute form in the international urban arena. The paper accordingly contributes to the journal’s work on the relationship between protests and social structures, situating urban movements in multi-scalar socio-economic, political and cultural contexts and developing reflections on the conjunctural significance of anti-systemic struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrants, and particularly undocumented immigrants, are oftentimes seen as disrupting the nation state and destabilizing its boundaries. This paper develops the argument that immigrants can, under certain conditions, actively employ nationalist frames and language to support their rights claims. It presents a two-prong argument to explain for this outcome. First, immigrant rights advocates needed to select a 'master frame' that would will resonate with audiences in different regions of the country and counter the anti-immigrant discourses of their adversaries. These constraints favored the selection of a frame that was nationalist enough to make sense to middle-of-the-road Americans and liberal enough to provide 'deserving immigrants' a pathway to citizenship. Second, advocates needed to ensure that their frames were delivered with a degree of consistency in different localities across the country. This favored a robust and centralized discursive infrastructure that could exercise dominance over the production and diffusion of core messages. The paper uses a range of sources – including interviews with leaders of immigrant rights associations, organization documents, training materials – support the argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have studied charisma almost exclusively as a form of authority, following Weber's original conceptualization. While there have been many elaborations on Weber's work, the full richness of charisma as a concept has remained unexplored and its potential applicability to radically egalitarian movements limited. This paper offers a more democratic conceptualization of charisma by putting Weber's classic theorization into conversation with Hannah Arendt's theory of action. It argues that charisma is best understood as a latent capacity to act, a quality that is not exclusive to a few extraordinary individuals but rather is quintessentially and universally human. Using the US draft resistance movement during the Vietnam War as a case study through which to develop this conceptualization, the paper centers the charismatic act and explores the conditions of existential distress that elicit such acts and the conditions of (emergent) political community that enable and are constituted by them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on repression in social movement studies focuses mainly on protest behavior and neglects other aspects of activism. This paper expands this literature by looking at how surveillance as a covert form of repression affects organizational practices in social movements. The secessionist mobilizations around the 1 October 2017 referendum in Catalonia serve as a case study to explore this question. Semi-structured interviews with organizers from the Catalan independence movement were used to identify two surveillance threats. Organizers feared the monitoring of their digital communication and the infiltration of their assemblies. They responded to these threats with five moves of counter-surveillant organizing: encryption, face-to-face communication, analogizing meetings, committee decision making, and closingoff assemblies. How organizers perceived surveillance and responded was closely connected to the cyclical dynamics of contention over time. The five moves allowed the movement to resist surveillance at least in the short term without moderating their claims or going underground. However, they were also harmful to the Catalan independence movement's organizing culture based on inclusivity and horizontality. These findings suggest that the consequences of repression for social movements go well beyond protest behavior and have a profound impact on their organizational practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the extrajudicial use of legal norms by activists. It aims to show how law serves as a useful symbolic resource for activists to strengthen their strategies for political pressure outside the courts. It does this through a qualitative investigation of six citizen debt audit groups from three European countries (France, Belgium, and Spain). Based on an analysis of legal provisions mobilised by activists in public documents, when addressing decision-makers, and in interviews, we identify several common uses of the law: the 'legal call to order'; the 'contradiction game between norms of the same legal order'; the 'call to derogation of certain norms'; and, the 'call to produce new norms'. This work is a valuable contribution to legal consciousness studies. We assert that activists have a complex legal consciousness, being neither completely enchanted ('before the law'), nor completely withdrawn ('against the law'). In their political interventions, the citizen audit groups under study rely on certain legal norms that they consider legitimate to make claims, while they seek to disqualify others of the same legal order. One can thus contest positive law without being against the law per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South African students have since 2015 returned to the forefront of the country's social movement struggles. Central to this wave of contention was the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) movement at the University of Cape Town (UCT), which coalesced with uprisings at universities across the country under the banner of #FeesMustFall, focusing demands on abolishing tuition fees, decolonizing education and society, and ending campus worker exploitation. In the process, students imagined how education and society could be different. In this paper, we discuss the relationship between social movements, occupations, and imagination, by examining a crucial event in the #RMF movement: the student occupation of an administrative building at UCT. Because social movement theory has an underdeveloped conception of the imagination, we draw on Sartre's and Fanon's understanding of the imagination and apply it to students' activism. Based on original qualitative research we demonstrate how imagined futures guide movement activity, while their prefigurative practices in the occupation enacted these in the present. The #RMF occupation was seen as a break from reality that catalysed students' imaginations, honing their critiques of society and shaping two central imaginaries of alternative futures, decolonization and intersectionality. The #RMF movement's imaginaries and enactments were influential in reshaping the South African higher education landscape and even inspired movements internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen a series of anniversaries of iconic protests. This draws attention to social movements' long-term legacies both in terms of their impact on society at large as well as their influence on subsequent cycles of mobilization. The growing literature on the interconnections between memories and movements provides crucial insights into such legacies as it explores how movements are remembered or forgotten. The paper aims to contribute to this literature and our understanding of continuities and discontinuities between different cycles of mobilization. For this purpose, we explore how activists of a central strand of the German anti-austerity movement, Blockupy, remember the '68 movement. Based on interviews with Blockupy activists and a media analysis, the paper shows how Blockupy activists largely share a joint memory of '68 despite ideological and generational differences. This shared memory is characterized by recurrent patterns of mnemonic adoptions of some '68 traits and rejection of others. At the same time, we reveal that this memory is only partly movement-specific as it overlaps with public memories in several respects. Activists however clearly reject public memories with respect to '68's central goals. The paper's findings show how impacts of past movements on later activism are shaped by activists' memories of that past and in particular by two levels of mnemonic rejection and adoption: how activists reject or adopt characteristics of a past movement and, in doing so, how they reject or adopt public memories of that movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the mobilizational plane of Spain's Podemos party's populist proposal to transform popular outrage into political power. Drawing on thirty-four semi-structured interviews with current and former party members, it sheds light on how and why a group of formerly horizontalist activists decided to rely on a charismatic figure as both a symbol and a strong leader. This decision is explained in relation to the Laclau-inspired theoretical reflections on leadership and representation of Íñigo Errejón, Podemos' chief theorist in the early stages and intellectual author of the party's first organizational model. This paper also follows the evolution of Errejón and his circle as they move from advocating the need for strong leadership to blaming themselves for 'failing' to erect effective counterweights to centralized and personalized power. We see that they attribute this failure to their lack of a proper theory of organization, which, in turn, is tied to their belief that a charismatic leader could make up for the lack of well-developed organizational structures and lead Podemos to power before the 'populist moment' passed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the anti-extradition bill movement in Hong Kong, this paper employs the concepts of doing and undoing gender to investigate the barriers that female frontline protesters encountered and the strategies they adopted. It shows that stereotypes linking high-risk activism and physical prowess with masculinity, the association of the frontline with high risks of arrest and injuries, and physical confrontation with the police meant that the frontline was marked discursively as a male domain. However, the leaderless characteristic of the movement facilitated women crossing this discursively marked gender boundary. Once on the frontline, women took different paths. Some began to do gender by taking on tasks that were considered less risky and more compatible with femininity because of the gendered interactions amongst protesters. On the other hand, women with experience, and access to social support and mentorship gained the confidence they needed to take on tasks that were seen as 'masculine', and thus undoing the gender stereotype that women lacked the capacity for frontline protest. The findings illustrate the continuous challenge women face as they are held accountable for their gender in social movements. At the same time, they also suggest that women's doing of gender in social movements is not inevitable, but contingent on social contexts and interactions. Certain factors such as the leaderless characteristic of a movement and peer support and mentorship can facilitate gender boundary crossing and neutralize gendered interactions. These, in turn, allow gender to be undone in social movements and promote women's participation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a long time after the end of large-scale student unrest in the 1970s Japan stood out by a comparatively low level of protest. Yet spectacular waves of mass-protest returned with the anti-nuke mobilizations following the 2011 Fukushima meltdown and other 'post-2011' movements. In this paper I develop an analytical framework inspired by the multi-level perspective in transition studies to illuminate two questions: how can the relatively low level of protest in Japan before 2011 – in particular the so called 'ice age' of protest from the 1970s to the early 2000s – be explained, and what enabled the recovery of protest afterwards, starting in the early 2000s and leading up to the post-2011 protest cycle? I point to the crucial role played on the one hand by niches in the form of social movement spaces in fostering oppositional discourses and on the other hand by landscape changes that destabilized the established politico-cultural regime. A crucial role was played by the creative work of freeter activists in social movement spaces during the 1990s who reinvented activism in response to stigmatization of open protest after the collective trauma of the perceived defeat of the New Left in the 1970s. This creative work was a precondition for the rise of protest movements in the early 2000s which in turn prepared the way for the post-2011 protest wave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, loosely affiliated protesters came together around the slogan ‘freedom’ in the online and physical places of anti-lockdown protests. These protesters held shared grievances against official health advice and social distancing measures. Although the slogan freedom emotionally validated protesters, they articulated a diverse set of interrelated motivations, identifications, and beliefs with this slogan. This paper studies the ways the collective identity of the anti-lockdown protests in the UK was formed, relying on 33 go-along interviews and ethnographic observations in London anti-lockdown protests. The findings, first, show that protesters came together around an anti-political identity, which reflected a larger political alienation from the political system. Their strong emotions of anger and ressentiment towards official health advice and social distancing measures and their distrust towards elites, political institutions, and mainstream media created a shared sense of ‘we-ness’. Second, the paper uncovers how the feeling of solidarity amongst protesters in London did not only originate from online platforms despite the increase in Internet use during the pandemic, but it was also materialized in local neighbourhoods, which fed larger anti-lockdown protests in physical spaces and online publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how activists negotiate tensions in disciplining offenders who transgress norms in prefigurative politics. Through the disciplinary process of calling-out, activists negotiate a key tension between building a community that is extensive and inclusive or intensive and exclusive for its members. Derived from consciousness raising groups in New Left activism, call-outs are a rhetorical tactic that expose oppressive acts in etiquette, action, or procedure. This tactic, used in physical and virtual space, is a form of normative discipline where challengers, offenders, and any third parties negotiate between reintegrating the accused or expelling them from the spaces. Drawing on in-depth interviews with queer activists and allies in Austin, TX, a city with deep New Left activist legacies, this paper illuminates how offenders react to call-outs and how these responses shape whether the process leads to a redemptive, purgative, or dialogic resolution. From passive acceptance, belligerence, and dialogic dispute, different modes of the call-out enable and constrain how challengers, offenders, and third parties can negotiate a resolution to these transgressions. Call-outs nevertheless risk creating sectarian dynamics when they are used to berate, eliminate dialogue, and fracture groups by weaponizing identities. By drawing on Gorski's theory of discipline, this paper contributes to the study of the disciplinary practices of prefiguration. In doing so, it explores tensions internal to movements between leniency and stringency, inclusion and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the participatory legacies of social movements in democratic settings often find that the individuals who take part in these movements remain more likely to engage in politics, decades later. What is the participatory legacy of social movements in authoritarian regimes, where they are often repressed and erased from public memory? Understanding such impacts is challenging due to self-selection and severe censorship. In this paper, we address both challenges with a unique design, comparing the behavior of individuals who began college just before and just after a massive student movement. This design allows us to measure exposure to the movement and the subsequent state crackdown without directly asking respondents and also addresses endogeneity by predicting exposure using an exogenous indicator, birthdate. We find that exposure to the movement increased participation in elections, reduced participation in protest and lobbying, and had no impact on conventional participation. We argue that social movements can continue to shape patterns of political participation in authoritarian regimes, decades after being crushed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change and environmental degradation are the most serious and fundamental problems of our time and focal points for many activist groups and organizations. In this paper, we adopt a psychological perspective to explore the emotions and emotion regulation of environmental activists. We know from the literature that facing the reality of the climate crisis, and the risks involved, often means having to deal with powerful emotions such as fear and anxiety. In addition, activists in general typically deal with personal, cultural as well as structural challenges that often lead to dropout or burnout. Although we know quite a lot about the ways in which emotions mobilize and energize activism, we know less about the ways in which environmental activists regulate their emotions to improve their wellbeing for sustained activism. In the present study, we interviewed a broad international sample of 30 activists from Extinction Rebellion and similar organizations sharing the principles of regenerative culture encouraging emotion regulation among members. The informants experienced a wide range of negative, but also positive, emotions in relation to the experience of ‘living in climate truth’ as well as their everyday activism. Their emotion regulation strategies could be grouped into two themes: ‘Taking action to heal’ and ‘healing to sustain action’. Both themes reflected the ability to remain emotionally flexible through questioning, and not being attached to the outcomes of activism. This implied the down-regulation and transforming of negative emotions as well as the cultivating and tempering of positive emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-consumerism is a rich and diverse field of advocacy and activism and has historically been studied in terms of its tactics, representations and ideologies. This paper presents an original contribution to this field through, first, its presentation of primary research conducted among subvertising practitioners in an international context. Subvertising (aka culture jamming) can be both a movement and a set of tactics used by movements. As an emergent anti-consumerist social movement, it has been connecting individuals and collectives in transnational actions against advertising. Drawing on twenty-four interviews with subvertisers in seven countries, I illustrate their perspectives of advertising as a problem, as well as their practices as responses to that. I argue that their theory and practice of anti-consumerism goes beyond a for/against binary which regards advertising as an ideological enemy. Instead, they protest the deleterious effects of contemporary Habermasian 'publicity'. Thus, the second contribution of this paper is in its application of a grounded theory approach complemented by framing theory to gain insights with respect to those, specifically in terms of public wellbeing, damage to democracy, and damage to the environment. To this set of problems, they offer solutions oriented towards critical pedagogy or policy change. Mobilising all tools at their disposal, from media production to media disruption, subvertisers are involved in the struggle against consumer capitalism, in both cultural and material terms. In their articulation of resistance narratives, and through their variant and often coordinated practices, subvertisers are united in a transnational anti-consumerist social movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores protest mobilizations related to the 2015 migrant crisis in the post-communist Czech Republic and Slovakia. Despite dominating anti-refugee sentiments and similar historical and political background in the two countries, the mobilization patterns were fairly different in both scale and organization of migration-related mobilizations. To systematically explore and account for these variances, we investigate the short-term political conditions, focusing on 1) key features of the national political environment – discursive opportunities and political space, and 2) movement/countermovement dynamics. We build on the original protest event data during the most intense protests over migration in 2015. We show how a different political space and a different extent of openness of discursive opportunities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and interactions between the anti-refugee movement and the solidarity countermovement played an important role in the timing and scale of protests and their organizers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While activists have effectively used the #blacklivesmatter hashtag to organize protests against police brutality and racism, this success has also drawn out many who use the hashtag to express their opposition. How do supporters of the Movement for Black Lives and their opponents coordinate on Twitter? Drawing on a corpus of 18.5 million tweets, this paper compares coordination among supporters and opponents of #blacklivesmatter in terms of relations and spatialities. We elaborate two different models of coordination: the swarm and the grassroots. Compared to their adversaries, supporters of #blacklivesmatter are more strongly rooted in places and embedded in local relations, suggesting that their online activism builds on grassroots communities. Opponents can be differentiated into two categories. One group consists of conservatives that are rooted in places but in a markedly different geography than supporters; they are more often located outside of major cities and outside of the coastal states. A second group of digitally networked extreme right opponents coordinates more in the fashion of a swarm: they synchronize without being rooted in places or embedded in local relations. These findings demonstrate that movements and countermovements benefit from the affordances of social media in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses 1) how #MahsaAmini has become a significant hybrid movement in Iran and 2) how it is taking Twitter activism into the post-fake news era. I will begin by reviewing the existing literature on Twitter and democracy. Then, I will discuss the roots of the #MahsaAmini, which make it a hybrid movement. Further, I will show how Iranians have circumvented the regime’s fake news campaigns and cyber army. This paper argues that while non-democratic regimes have developed more complex methods of suppressing digital protests, these efforts are ineffective in large-scale protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Veganism's visibility has soared in recent years. Contemporary veganism has built a trident approach of outreach that emphasises health benefits, ethical concerns about animals, and environmentally sustainable consumption. With this growth, there have been opportunities for influencer-activists to profit from positioning themselves as movement leaders. This is often connected with thin, white, wealthy women and the wellness industry, but there is also a changing 'meatless masculinity' within vegan influencer-activist spaces. Hegemonic ideals of masculinity around physical strength and virility are being hyper-individualised to 'sell' veganism through embodied and cultural performances of 'redemption narratives' by vegan influencer-activist men. However, in interviews with vegan men in Britain, their relation to these meatless masculinities was found to be in tension with hegemonic masculinity. Interviewees instead related their veganism to an ungoverning of masculine bodily ideals. Veganism was revealed in the interviews as entangled with men representing themselves as part of a progressive masculinity that engages with feminist ideas, even if they are sometimes misunderstood. In this paper, I explore the prevalence and purpose of these masculinity narratives online through social media examples, before exploring a contradictory growth in the re-thinking and rejection of hegemonic masculinity within the vegan constituency through interviews. I conclude that while vegan masculinities offer the potential for men to be a little less governed by gendered norms there remains a need for vegans to more fully embrace a feminist and intersectional veganism that is not dominated by whiteness and masculinist ideals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses forms of political engagement in the therapeutic field. Drawing on ethnographic research on popular psychology self-help, alternative and complementary health practices and new spiritualities, the paper takes issue with the dominant interpretation of the therapeutic as a depoliticizing force. Although this interpretation captures important facets of the phenomenon, the paper suggests that something more complex is afoot. It argues that therapeutic practices may also animate political contestation and critique, and challenge the prevailing grammar of political conflict. It substantiates this argument by identifying two modalities of politics in the therapeutic field: collective mobilization through a political party, and therapeutic practices as a form of lifestyle politics. It goes on to suggest that, together, these modalities constitute a subaltern counterpublic politicizing the political economy of health and the erosion of democratic governance. The paper concludes by suggesting that analysis of the therapeutic field may shed light on the shifting logics of political contestation at the contemporary political conjuncture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how those who adopt an 'anti-diet' stance use strategies to challenge weight-loss dieting norms. We used a qualitative survey to examine how a heterogenous collective of feminists, fat activists and health professionals (and those on the margins of these groups) define the source(s) of power underlying diet culture and discuss the strategies they use to challenge it. One hundred and eighteen people (Mage = 36.67, SD = 10.50) took part. Most were female (n = 112), heterosexual (69%), and residing in Australia (59%). A small proportion (13%) had a culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) background. Thirty-seven per cent were health professionals, and over half identified as non-diet activists (52%). We generated three themes in our thematic analysis: 'Describing diet culture: Unpacking cultural and material forms of power,' 'Self-care as a political strategy: Refusals and ambivalence in the anti-diet community,' and 'Relational strategies: Challenging diet culture in work and everyday interactions.' Participants viewed diet culture as being reinforced through internalized multi-institutional patriarchal, Eurocentric and capitalist systems. They challenged cultural norms and institutions that reinforce diet culture by being critical of gender norms and rejecting consumerist dieting practices. We argue that the self-care and relational strategies used by participants across communities signify an awkward but unified 'anti-diet movement.' Future research should recruit a more culturally and ethnically diverse sample and examine the 'anti-diet' movement beyond the Global North context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From enslaved people capturing vessels during the Middle Passage to Greenpeace’s and Sea Shepherd’s famous anti-whaling campaigns in the latter half of the twentieth century – resistance at sea is a phenomenon that is as old as human seafaring. Yet, while social movement scholars have a long-standing interest in transnational movements and what it means to act politically beyond the borders of nation-states, much less is known about social movements acting outside of national territory, in the international waters of the planetary ocean. This article addresses this gap by bringing the phenomenon of sea-oriented civil society to the attention of social movement scholars and proposing a conceptual framework for understanding ocean activism. Bringing together currently scattered accounts of maritime movements with relevant literature from the recent ocean turn across the social and political sciences, the article argues that we may understand ocean activism along three defining, sea-specific characteristics: (1) material specificity (due to the sea’s elemental qualities), (2) technological dependency (from ships to AIS), and (3) extra-territoriality (outside national jurisdiction). The paper contributes to discussions of transnational social movements in particular, demonstrating that scholarly attention to the ocean enables new perspectives on their spatial politics, media and data practices, and materiality. Thus, addressing social movement scholarship’s terrestrial bias does not only allow us to begin to conceptualize ocean activism but opens up paths to better understand political acts in extra-national terrains, in and beyond the sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diffusion is a long-established concept that deals with the mechanisms explaining the prevalence of social movements. However, previous empirical studies on digital movement merely used diffusion as a term referring to increasing numbers of posts or public attention, without distinguishing what is diffused nor asking how information is diffused. Studies applying social network analysis have restricted themselves to retweet networks from a static perspective and emphasized the main actors and critical messages driven by the crowds. While the previous studies examined information diffusion as an outcome, they were unable to reveal the underlying processes that define how digitally networked movements spread over time among crowds embedded in different communities. As a case study, this paper investigates how the German-speaking network #FridaysForFuture was facilitated and contested through different diffusion dynamics. By inferring a diffusion network based on 237,892 retweeting sequences and the following/follower relationships of the 51,803 engaged actors in the early stages of #FridaysForFuture, it quantifies the digitally networked movement from a top-down perspective: the network, the tweets, and the retweets, concerning aspects of both actor and content. The findings suggest the development of digitally networked movements depends on their ability to influence and spread among different networked publics. The diffusion mechanisms of information, discourses, and beliefs of digitally networked movements were mainly enabled by, and flowed through, preexisting networks rather than situational spontaneity. However, they varied according to issue salience and were distinguished by the network structures, political positions, ideological lines, and geographical proximities of the involved communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delves into "inner transition", a set of subjective changes mobilized by the Transition Network (TN) that emphasize the role of the self to tackle the climate crisis. Its scholarly contribution is twofold: on the one hand, it engages with current literature on neoliberal environmentalism, empirically analyzing how "inner transition" is entwined with the emergence of a specific environmentality through a set of practices, habits, lifestyle changes and webs of associations with non-humans; on the other hand, it contributes to existing research on the TN and in particular to literature on the understudied phenomenon of "inner transition", presenting it as an emblematic case study to unpack the biopolitics of neoliberal environmentalism. We carried out 20 semi-structured interviews with members of the TN in Portugal, following a post-phenomenological approach that recognizes the deeply mediated character of inner transition. Through the support of interview excerpts, our analysis delves into three main topics: perceptions of inner transition; transition and self-transformation; habits and lifestyle changes. Informed by this data, our paper presents a characterization of a specific environmentality entwined with "inner transition", exploring how selves are reconfigured in order to address the challenges of climate change and the environmental crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the role of hope and emotions more broadly in the two newest peace movements in Israel – Women Wage Peace and Standing Together – this paper investigates how both movements ‘work’ on their activists’ emotions and combine emotions. A comparative and gendered approach sheds light on differences between the movements. While both were established in 2014–2015 and strive for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, each has distinct characteristics. Women Wage Peace is a women’s movement focused on reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians, while Standing Together is a mixed movement with a holistic mandate of reaching peace and transforming Israel into a more egalitarian society. The paper draws on qualitative methodologies – in-depth interviews with Jewish and Arab-Palestinian activists, ethnographic work, and analysis of documents produced by the movements. It suggests that both movements consciously work on their activists’ emotions, but that Standing Together combines the positive emotion of hope with the negative emotion of anger (‘moral battery’), while Women Wage Peace combines the positive emotion of hope with the positive emotions of love and joy. The paper also argues that Women Wage Peace’s combination of positive-only emotions is part of an absolute politics of positivity that contrasts with Standing Together’s more limited politics of positivity. Possible implications include the value for peace movements to actively work on their activists’ emotions and trigger hope, which can be combined with negative or positive emotions, as movements consciously place themselves along the ‘politics of positivity’ spectrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how volunteer and staff participants influence coalition functioning and outcomes. We compare two environmental coalitions in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: the Clean Rivers Campaign (CRC), which was supported by a general progressive movement community and led by organizational staff members, and Protect Our Parks (POP), an all-volunteer alliance that was part of a more specific anti-fracking movement community. While much research on social movement coalitions focuses on their formation, we show how coalition structure and types of participants affect the mobilization, longevity and goal achievement of our two cases. Both coalitions succeeded in mobilizing supporters for their campaigns, but the CRC enjoyed greater longevity and had a clearer impact on public policy. Paid staff and organizational members were better able to recruit new activists, maintain commitment and transform coalition goals, affecting longevity and goal achievement. This finding contributes to our understanding of the impacts of different types of structures and activists on coalition outcomes, suggesting that paid organizers do not necessarily limit the range of coalition tactics and goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative research has been rare in social movement studies and scholars who embark on this path are confronted with several analytical and methodological challenges. This paper offers an avenue for developing comparative analytics using 'local spaces of protest' as path for comparison. We first situate this concept vis-à-vis other models available (field, space, arena, networks). We then define the three dimensions of 'spaces of protest': specific aim prompting collective action; particular distribution of political actions along different poles (electoral, protest, concerted and participation) and specific scales of protest (local, societal or/and global/glocal). By invoking critical geography to enhance the definition of place and scales of actions, we propose a systematic set-up for comparison. The last part of the paper shows how this notion allows for the comparison of local social forums (gatherings of activists fighting against neoliberal globalization) in two societies, France and Québec. The data presented have been gathered during extensive fieldwork and semi-structured interviews conducted between 2010 and 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores the role of the radical non-violent Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir in retaining long-term member loyalty. More specifically, this study explores Hizb ut-Tahrir's framing of the group and the creation of a deep-rooted social identity that fosters loyalty and long-term membership among its associates. Starting with a review of the relevant scholarship on frames and social identity, this paper explores the origin of Hizb ut-Tahrir's frames – the group's 'Aqeedah (doctrine) – and the consequent set of values that define HT members' social identity. This paper concludes that while frames are essential in the creation of a new social identity that strongly binds the individual to the group, two mechanisms produce HT members' loyalty over the long run: self-efficacy and positive intergroup differentiation. These mechanisms account for Hizb ut-Tahrir's appeal and activities in more than 45 countries around the world, where the group represents the choice of all those segments of Muslim diaspora communities who might agree with Islamist arguments but who strongly reject the use of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public spaces are often contested sites involving the political use of socio-material arrangements to check, control and filter the flow of people. In Sweden, the recently established police project (REVA) in is an attempt to strengthen ‘internal border’ controls. This paper discusses the emergence of practices in which activist groups organized and performed resistance through the use of counter technologies in the transport sector. We explain how a hybrid alliance of human and nonhuman others generated new virtual and urban spaces and provided temporary autonomous zones, to groups of undocumented immigrants. REVA Spotter, for example, was a tool, a manifesto and a peaceful means of resistance to the REVA policing methods through continuous Facebook status updates on identity checks at metro stations in Stockholm. The technology enabled reports on location and time of ticket controls to warn travellers in real time. Attempts by authorities to exert control over the ‘spatial’ underground were thereby circumvented by the effective development of an alternative infrastructural ‘underground’ consisting of assemblages of technologies, activists, undocumented immigrants, texts and emails, smart phones and computers. Based on ‘netnographic observations’ and interviews, the paper utilizes the case of the REVA to illustrate processes and practices that simultaneously configure the powerful surveyor, the discriminated and those who contest these politics through hybridities of cyber/material, human/nonhuman and urban/virtual space. The paper argues that by configuring such hybrid alliances, activists provided cyber-material autonomy to undocumented immigrants and other travellers in the metro, thereby creating new virtual and urban spaces for mobility and flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primacy of networks vs. identities divides research on activism. Analyzing activist commitment in CasaPound, a movement organization of the far right in contemporary Italy, this paper advances a sequential multipath theory of activist commitment. In the recruitment phase either networks or identities suffice for movement entry. During the follow-up phase of integration, networks and identities reinforce each other: each is a necessary but no longer a sufficient condition. In the final phase, commitment is solidified by affective ties and emotional investments. To make this argument, our theory introduces a typology that differentiates between coming home and finding home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Official framing has received increasing attention in social movement studies. Yet current research often focuses on the negative side of framing, that is, how authorities vilify and demonize challengers to justify coercive reactions, whereas little scholarship has scrutinized positive framing, i.e., how officials recognize the legitimacy of citizens' grievances and portray state co-optation or conciliation as responsive governance. Neither does existing research examine institutional foundations of official framings. To address these omissions, this paper devises a conceptual framework of negative and positive framings, which incorporates the examination of a variety of formal and less formal institutions undergirding different types of framing strategies. I develop this conceptual framework through a case study of how a local government framed protest against waste incineration in China. It documents how authorities portray the implementation of an unpopular policy as responsive governance and how different institutions facilitate official frames. An in-depth analysis of official framing not only contributes to the development of studies of frames and contentious politics but to a better understanding of social control and legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long seen as divergent in nature, the fields of populist studies and social movement analysis have rarely been the focus of cross-disciplinary research. This paper, by encouraging such convergence makes two significant contributions to both the study of populism and social movements. First, by combining a discourse theoretical approach to populism with social movement theories of abeyance and 'cultural repertoires', it examines populist discourse as a form of contentious politics. Second, using primary and secondary sources of both a textual and visual nature, it applies this framework to a case study of North Italian populist regionalism and in doing so takes a diachronic approach to populism. This allows for a clearer understanding of not only of the decline of certain populist movements, but also how these movements' repertoires are transmitted between separate waves of activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the disjunctive temporalities of Occupy Philadelphia's political constituencies. Drawing on both an ethnographic participant observation study of the Occupy Philadelphia movement and Philadelphia's neoanarchist political communities, and on recent social scientific theorization of events, the paper argues that contradictory ideas about temporal timescales, momentum, duration, sequences, and rhythms of tactical and strategic action problematized interaction and coordination among movement participants. These points of coordinative disjuncture can be traced back to differences in participants' ideas about prefigurative politics and strategic temporalities. Limning the temporal expectations and experiences of social movement participants, this paper contributes to the examination of both linkages and disjunctures between eventful temporalities experienced in moments of protest and in social movements with diverse timescales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the production of knowledge by Muslim environmental activists in the United States and Great Britain, applying Eyerman and Jamison's theory of cognitive praxis to demonstrate how religious and political knowledge and practices are synthesised by the activists. The paper emerges from research conducted with Islamic environmental organizations in the United States and Great Britain in 2012–2013 and utilises data gathered from interviews conducted with Muslim environmental activists working in those organizations and from the publicly available newsletters, websites, and articles produced by the activists and organizations. I argue that through the integration of environmental and religious knowledge, Muslim environmentalists construct a 'critical community' within Islam that seeks to transform orthodox Islamic knowledge and practice. In the process, Muslim environmentalists demonstrate that religiously-grounded social movements may simultaneously pursue religious and political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responses to the Great Recession are varied across welfare states and gendered in their consequences. Combining gender, social policy and social movement scholarship, this paper investigates how the differential policy responses to the Financial Crisis in three European countries shaped gender-differences in anti-austerity demonstrations. We compare the involvement and characteristics of women and men in anti-austerity protests using data collected at street demonstrations (2010–2012). We conduct cross-national multi-level analysis of demonstrators from countries representing different gender regimes (Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom). Our results show that gender regimes have a significant impact on women's and men's involvement in anti-austerity protests. We thus make an important contribution to research on gender differences in participation in anti-austerity demonstrations post-Great Recession. Our comparison of women's and men's participation in anti-austerity street demonstrations suggests that at the country or regime level resources matter more than grievances, but that grievances matter at the individual level. This innovative paper links scholarship on gender regimes with research on protest participation. Resources and experiences of grievances are shaped by gender regimes which provide access to decision-making and social support. We reveal novel insights into the connection between gender regimes and demonstration participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement organizations use consumer activism to mobilize public pressure and cause economic or reputational damage to their target. However, current frameworks fail to explain why organizations would use indirect consumer activism: targeting one firm to elicit change from a third party. This paper aims to explain this choice, drawing upon theories of opportunity structures to explain why groups choose to use indirect strategies. I examine three campaigns using indirect strategies: US-based Grab Your Wallet and Sleeping Giants, and UK-based Stop Funding Hate. Groups use indirect strategies to reach inaccessible targets and to mobilize the public; these strategies help social movement organizations to raise public awareness at the beginning of a campaign. I conclude with some expectations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the decentralisation of decision-making processes in local government. Empirically, I analyse how Brazilian housing movements are included in participatory processes by examining the ways in which participatory models integrate social movements in spaces of decision-making. I argue that the rules and focus on incremental policy-making limits the participation of social movements. Findings suggests that unequal power structures at local councils, barriers to the participation of citizens, and the lack of transparency of government decisions all prevent social movements from having a more influential voice in decision-making. Although previous studies in Brazil examined the integration of citizens in government institutions, this paper contributes to the literature in two ways: firstly, it provides new evidence on the impact of decentralisation in local government. Secondly, by examining the attitudes of housing council members towards popular political participation, it provides new insights into the limits of decentralisation and participatory governance in contemporary Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]