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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

This paper explores environmental protest outcomes during the decade of the 2010s in the UK. In doing so, it presents the results of a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of all 54 major environmental protest campaigns during the period. The study explores alternative causal conditions relating to a number of strategic and tactical options that environmental movements typically face. It finds that two alternative routes were sufficient for environmental protest campaigns to be successful: perseverance over time, in which longstanding campaigns staged a relatively large number of protest events; and instances where opposition political parties drew on, and supported, the demands of protesters. Interestingly, some of the more contested tactical options, including whether to adopt more or less disruptive methods, were inconclusive in explaining the successful outcome of protest-led campaigns. The article argues that this supports the case for tactical diversity. The findings show how in a context of austerity-era neoliberalism, where the government was (ostensibly) committed to tackling climate change, then protests (regardless of the organisational form or type of protest) proved able to exert effective pressure upon the government and firms, to ensure some degree of concession to the climate movement, provided that the protest campaign was able to persevere over time and/or secure the support of opposition political parties. This suggests a susceptibility, by both the state and firms during austerity-era neoliberalism, to (considerable) popular and political pressure arising from protest, but in the absence of which economic interests would otherwise take priority over environmental concerns. [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]

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]

The risk of cooptation – of being absorbed by powerful elites without gaining new advantages – is an important concern in studies of social movements and social change. Through cooptation, elites undermine movements by stripping them of their credibility as agents of change. This paper aims to explain why, despite its powerful rationale, cooptation does not occur more frequently. Building on political process theory and relational sociology, it demonstrates that cooptation appears rational only on the condition that cooperation is valued lower than political domination. But elite-movement interaction may result in mutually strategic relationships that are conditional on each side's recognition of the other's interest. Two empirical cases illustrate this possibility: the US Civil Rights Movement and Latin American participatory budgeting. In both cases, the actors involved chose a strategy of 'mutually assured autonomy' over cooptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper broadens and deepens the debates on the recent protests against austerity in Greece. The paper begins by investigating how the global crisis is understood, embodied and contested through the participatory forms of collective action and political organization in Greece. Secondly, it highlights transformations in the political behaviors and lived experiences of the subjects who participated in the recent and on-going wave of anti-austerity mobilizations in Greece. Finally, it emphasizes the '(re-)politicization of everyday life' through the commons, which is a process grounded in the establishment of novel and open spaces of solidarity and trans-local collective action within and beyond institutional and state solutions. Building on these considerations, it is argued that the recent forms of everyday collective action have played a crucial role in challenging the prevailing neoliberal crisis politics, while at the same time are raising key issues for progressive governments and other institutional agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 (3/11), Japan has witnessed a nationwide upsurge of antinuclear demonstrations as well as protests against diverse concerns. Why did this upsurge of protests occur beyond the antinuclear concerns? The exact mechanism that caused this general upsurge of protests has not been explored in detail. Given the limited number of first-time participants, this phenomenon can be fully explained only through an analysis of network-building processes among social movement organizations (SMOs). Based on the first nationwide survey of SMOs conducted in Japan by our team in February 2018, covering 308 groups, we analyzed the constellation of the SMOs' networks after 3/11, their logic of coalition building, and their network effects on mobilization. We observed that the new characteristics of the constellation of the SMOs' networks are twofold. The first feature is that the networks of various SMOs were bridged by antinuclear groups. Antinuclear organizations served as the hub of SMOs' networks, enabling the mobilization to cross different concerns. The second feature is the connections between the citizen groups and labor unions. Labor unions increase the participation during events by mobilizing their partner unions. Both new connections contributed to the general upsurge in large-scale demonstrations for various concerns after 3/11. Our paper contributes to the general discussion on the relation between coalition of SMOs and mobilization by focusing on the dyadic level of networks, and analyzing its effect for mobilization through egocentric network analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive liberation is often treated in the social movements literature as a mediating factor through which political opportunities and mobilizing structures generate protest. This paper unpacks multiple dimensions of cognitive liberation and finds that they may operate in tension with one another. Building on scholarship that focuses on subjective factors in social movements, the paper examines the case of the Korku, an oppressed indigenous community in central India, who choose not to protest despite the presence of several dimensions of cognitive liberation. Rather than engage in collective political action, the Korku’s grievances are deflected toward depoliticized religious goals. The Korku seek communal improvement through Hindu piety in a context of the Hindutva cultural-nationalist ideology, rather than protest against the encroachment of this ideology on their community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Protests offline, under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic and regulations such as a stay-at-home, require the adaptation of existing tactics and/or the use of innovative tools in the contention repertoire. This adaptation concerns restrictions related to pandemic measures, the lockdown of businesses/institutions, and social distancing along with access to resources, protesters' security, and the no-harm principle. This paper provides examples of protests which have occurred since March 2020, under four categories: (1) tactics adjusted to pandemic-related limitations, (2) tactics that are an essence of such limitations, (3) tactics related to opposition to the lockdown, and (4) protest tactics use framed as 'pandemic'. In the first section, I show how street protest (if permitted at all) is strengthened by symbolic action and how inability to refer to the 'logic of numbers' subjects the tactics to the 'logic of bearing witness.' However, the challenges and tactical limitations do not apply to the opponents of lockdown, breaking the rules of the sanitary regime. The demonstrations against the lockdown preserve the positive effects of street protests and even strengthen them. Discussion concerning high-risk protest actions under threat of infection results, however, in medicalization of political contention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines the influence of key social movement theories – rational choice (as measured by interests), resource mobilization (RM), and political opportunity structures (POS) – in mobilization by local communities responding to mining in southern Perú. The selected cases are similar in many respects, but reveal divergent mobilizations, with a high level of protest against the Tía María mine, and low mobilization (with negotiation) in response to the Quellaveco mine. Extensive interviews and process tracing reveal that all of the social movement theories play a role in affecting the level of mobilization (the 'synthetic model'), but that RM and POS are largely a function of rational choice (interests). These interests are represented by communities' judgment of the socioeconomic costs and benefit of mining, as well as their perceptions of risk. The paper's main theoretical takeaway is an argument for reemphasizing rational choice in evaluations of social movement theories, particularly in the context of mining in Perú. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how activists conduct participatory democracy and realize prefiguration and horizontality in a protest camp setting. Recently, scholars have shown increasing interest in the internal lives of social movements. Anti-G8 direct action in Japan has provided an opportunity to examine how protesters practise prefiguration and horizontality in everyday experiments in alternative ways of living together. In the protest camp in Japan, participants faced institutional and material limitations. This study discusses the social reproduction processes within protest camps that operate according to these limitations. Three key findings emerged: first, the protest camp shows a great openness towards beginners; they can easily find roles in its social reproduction processes. To accomplish this, they use skills developed in their daily habits outside the protest. Second, the collective practice of social reproduction creates and clearly displays a hierarchical partnership between activists, in the sense that beginners are not only politically socialized, but that they learn the limited cultural codes of anti-globalism movements from other activists. The relationship between teaching and taught serves to create hierarchy and exclusion among participants. The third key finding is related to exclusion. For some activists who have experienced discrimination, the protest camp is a frustrating experience because it forces upon them codes and manners constructed in capitalist society. To them, the camp recreates the cleavage between majority and minority protesters. The paper argues that both exclusive and inclusive sides of the protest camps, particularly when discussing collective lifestyle practices, exhibit ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is now a substantial literature on the diffusion of protest events, tactics, identities, and frames between locations and among movements. This paper asks how the patterns identified in this literature may change as the time scale of diffusion extends across single cycles of protest and beyond the life spans of individual activists. I focus especially on two types of differences: the changing weight of relational and non-relational channels of diffusion; and ways in which, over longer stretches of time, the mediation of diffusion by formal organizations, institutions, and public history works to filter the influence of past activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies point to the relevance of situational factors in the emergence of violence. This paper applies these insights to a systematic analysis of how and why peaceful protest marches transform into violent clashes. It focuses on the micro-situational patterns and emotional dynamics during protests. The exploratory study compares 20 peaceful and violent protests of the Global Justice Movement in the United States and Germany. It employs a triangulation of visual data with document data. The study relies on in-depth qualitative analysis, based on the principles of process tracing. Findings suggest that in those protests where violence emerges, a prior micro-situational pattern is systematically visible. The discussion of exemplary cases shows that two emotional phases precede the outbreak of violence. These phases emerge in a specific temporal danger zone of 1–3 h after the start of a protest. Further, specific triggering moments seem to prompt the outbreak of violence, like the breaking-up of police–protester lines, actors being outnumbered, or falling down. The emotional dynamic between protesters and officers during a protest likewise influences the intensity of violence and how violent situations end. Consequently, the paper suggests that actors need to go through a confrontational micro-situation in a demonstration in order to be able to use violence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I analyze the ways in which the US anti-sweatshop movement - particularly United Students Against Sweatshops and the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) - has engaged in a process of strategic innovation in the face of new challenges. While scholars of social movements have studied the outcome of this process - strategy - there has been less attention to the process of how movements develop strategy - strategizing. This involves a dialectic between experience, consolidated in the form of strategic models, and ideology, that is the values, social theory, and norms of the movement. When the movement encountered new obstacles, they engaged in strategic innovation through a process of democratic deliberation where they reflected on their past experiences. During this phase, the anti-sweatshop movement drew on their ideology of worker empowerment to help them decide what goals they wanted to achieve and to make sense of how their social environment was creating obstacles for them. Their ideology served as an interpretive-analytic lens through which they reflected on and learned from their past experiences. In this paper, I focus on two periods of innovation in the anti-sweatshop movement: first, the development of the WRC as an independent monitor of apparel companies and second the development of the Designated Suppliers Program as a new means of disciplining them to respect workers' rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much social movement research focuses on how activists actively cultivate affect and how social movements benefit from shared emotions, these ideas rarely intersect with research examining how race constructs emotional responses in a white settler society. I bridge this theoretical divide by examining the 2009 Tamil diaspora protests in Canada to study dimensions of suffering and apathy through the construction of the racialized protest(er). Drawing upon illustrations from a critical discourse analysis of 153 mainstream news articles and interviews with activists and journalists, this paper explores how racial logic frames media and public discourse through (1) the expression of protesters’ suffering and (2) the construction of racial apathy by the Canadian public. The paper theorizes why and how race frames the production of suffering and apathy, and offers considerations for social movement theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contributes to the growing field of studies on party–protest linkages that highlight the dynamic nature, complementarity and fuzziness of the parliamentary arena and protest arena. Taking the policy field of asylum, it investigates, first, the conditions for the permeability of the protest arena for party activism and, second, the ways in which party activism shapes and transforms the protest arena. The empirical observations refer to Austria, which has a political framework with highly politicized immigration, strong political parties and a weak protest culture. Methodologically, the paper combines a protest event analysis with two in–depth case studies on protests. The authors argue that the openness of the asylum protest arena for parties is characterized by modest protest demands, and depends on the dominant political position as well as the decision making structure regarding the protest issue. The article demonstrates that pro-asylum protests are less open to political parties than anti-asylum protests, which are in tune with the dominant political position on asylum in Austria. The findings also show that anti–asylum protests are not only more likely to attract the involvement of political parties, but also tend to become instrumentalized for party–competitive ends. Pro–asylum protests, in contrast, keep their substantive, grievance–focused orientation even when political parties step in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offering a contribution to cultural approaches to studying social movements, this paper explores how people incorporate social change efforts into broader self-projects. I use the contemporary abstinence pledge movement as an archetypal example of a lifestyle movement, a movement that advocates for lifestyle change as its primary challenge to perceived cultural problems. To capture the public face crafted by this movement, I coded complete website content for ten pledge organizations, as well as their print and social media presence. The data demonstrate: how pledge organizations explicitly target culture, rather than pressuring the state to enact policy change; how participants employ individualized tactics while still believing in their collective power to engender change; and that pledgers craft a moral self, engaging in 'personal' identity work. Expanding the lifestyle movement literature to think about outcomes and influence, I then show how pledgers contest perceptions of movement success, redefining effectiveness towards abstract, long-term, and subjective measures. I conclude by locating lifestyle movements in the context of late modernity and suggesting how theorists might use and further develop the concept in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the role of social groups in mobilizing resources for protests in repressive contexts. In particular, it examines the impact of organizations and informal groups on individual engagement in the protests developed in 2010 in Tunisia and in 2011 in Egypt. The empirical analysis draws on the following data sources: the second wave of the Arab Barometer (2010–2011), two focus groups in Egypt conducted between 2011 and 2015 with members of trade unions and of Popular Committees who had participated in the 2011 protests in Egypt, eight semi-structured interviews conducted in 2017 to workers in Tunisia who had engaged in the 2010–2011 protests, and interviews conducted in January and February 2011 to 100 women in Tunisia within a study tackling police violence against women during the Tunisian uprisings. Findings show that both in Egypt and Tunisia protests were neither spontaneous nor fully organized as formal organizations and informal and spontaneous groups strictly interconnected in sustaining protests. In Egypt, established Islamic charity networks provided the structural basis for Popular Committees to engage in the 2011 protests and the initially spontaneous workers' groups, institutionalized through the legalization of EFITU, were crucial for national wide protests occurred throughout 2011. In Tunisia, the major trade union UGTT was essential for mobilizing workers in the initial stages of protests but was backed by informal and spontaneous groups of workers during the process of protest diffusion. Results remark that the 2010–2011 Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings were therefore well-grounded on intermediate mobilizing structures capable to survive in the interstices of an authoritarian context. Findings suggest to consider that, in repressive context, spontaneous groups and more established and formal organizations continuously switch from one form to another, overlap, and transform themselves faster than they would do in democratic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is it difficult to sustain collective action that challenges the political and economic status quo? To develop an answer to this central problem in the study of social movements, this paper investigates the possible role of cognitive mechanisms using the framework of System Justification Theory. It examines the explicit and implicit attitudes of London bankers and Occupy St. Paul's protesters towards capitalism and an alternative economic system (Resource Based Economy: RBE) using the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure and questionnaires. As hypothesised, bankers were more likely than protesters to demonstrate positive attitudes towards conservative capitalistic worldviews/values on both explicit and implicit measures. Also as expected, protesters had more positive explicit attitudes towards the RBE than did bankers. However, implicit attitudes towards the RBE were neutral for both groups. The implicit capitalism measures correlated positively with the explicit Capitalism Semantic Differential Scales (SDS) and negatively with the RBE SDS. No correlations were found between the implicit RBE measures and any of the explicit SDSs. The central theoretical insight of this paper is that implicit attitudes play an important role in maintaining the status quo, and that cognitive factors may underpin the resilience of extant social, political and economic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of the corporeal female body in social protest has a long and complex history, particularly in anti-gender based violence movements. From early 20th Century suffragists in international coalitions circulating images of women protesters withered by hunger strikes to the more contemporary staging of nude protest by groups like FEMEN, women’s bodies have certainly functioned as powerful symbols. But such repertoires have also been controversial within the movement, as conceptualizations, norms and security surrounding female bodies can vary so much depending on culture and socioeconomic status. This paper uses the 2011-2014 SlutWalk movement to explore the use of female bodies in mobilizations staged by actors across those differences. It investigates the varying degrees of privilege associated with the choice - or choicelessness - protestors encounter when collectively considering effective repertoires. As the discourse unfolded around Slutwalk and who had the ‘right’ or ‘privilege’ to practice nudity as a protest repertoire, it illuminated deep divisions within anti-sexual violence and feminist activism. I argue this created important opportunities for the movement to integrate analysis of structural inequalities beyond gender, particularly in attempts to improve processes of deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective protest actions by the unemployed and the precariously employed spread throughout the European countries during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Social movement scholars became interested in these mobilizations because these protest actions challenged the assumption that poor people and weak interests rarely engage in such activities. This paper deals with these challenges by summarizing and discussing the latest research on the mobilization of the jobless in order to present available findings from three European countries and to unveil conducive conditions. Particular emphasis is placed upon mobilization structures. This paper argues that ongoing changes at a societal level—here mainly related to grievances, constituencies and organizational infrastructures—provide a beneficial background for increasing the probability of collective action by the jobless. While local protests were much more common, attempts to stabilize and widen political mobilization across time and space proved to depend on available political opportunities at the national level. Here, apparent differences between the European countries become evident. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The closure of the ‘public’ Paternoster Square, or more accurately, the fortifying of the space with police, private security and metal barriers, was a moment when the real nature of this ‘public’ space was revealed—only a very specific type of public was welcome, and their activities are restricted to those of work and consumption. The sudden transformation of Paternoster from public to private reflects, in fast-forward mode, the process of the privatization of urban space that is happening in the City of London and beyond. This privatization of vast swathes of the City makes it out of bounds to ordinary people and protest, which greatly undermines the state of our democracy. Armed with picnic baskets, Twister, badminton racquets and our own ‘Street Bingo!’ a group set off to walk and play in the City in order to explore and challenge the increasingly blurred boundaries between public and private space, and with the aims of creating and reclaiming public space. The City of London is predominantly used as a space of financial accumulation for the elite, however, we reckoned, using the City in different ways would displace and disrupt this primary (dys)function. This paper draws from this action-walk around the City of London using it to discuss the changing nature of urban space that has been central to people's discussions and experiences at Occupy London. The paper also argues that the walk can be a powerful action in which people can begin to re-imagine and re-create urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How do transnational summit protests affect local activists and the internal dynamics of organizations and movements in a host city? This paper uses Sewell’s concept of ‘eventful temporality’ to explore the impacts of the G20 summit protests in Pittsburgh (2009) and Toronto (2010) Interviews, and field notes are analyzed to show how the mobilizations enhanced the skills of local activists, increased connections between their movements, changed local tactical preferences, stirred emotions, and spawned and shaped new campaigns. The summit protests mobilized new activists, but also exhausted and demobilized some existing protesters. The findings suggest the need for a more nuanced and temporally sensitive framework for understanding outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As political activists increasingly use social media in local protests, scholars must redirect attention from large-scale campaigns to scrutinize the ways in which geographically confined actors use social media to engage in protests. This paper analyses how a 2013 anti-mining campaign in Kallak, Sweden, combined on-site resistance with social media strategies via Facebook pages. The study examines which activist roles and forms of social media use that emerged and aims to explore what larger practical and theoretical implications one can derive from this specific case of place-based struggles. Results show that three typologically distinct activist roles emerged during the protests: local activists, digital movement intellectuals and digital distributors. These different types of actors were involved in four different forms of social media use: mobilization, construction of the physical space, extension of the local and augmentation of local and translocal bonds. Based on our findings, we argue that the coming together of these different activist roles and the different uses of social media added a translocal dimension to the peripheral and physically remote political conflict in Kallak. Media users were able to extend a locally and physically situated protest by linking it to a global contentious issue such as the mining boom and its consequences for indigenous populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on activist participation has aimed to explain motives to engage in protest and collective action or becoming an activist. The outcomes, for the individual, have been neglected. Therefore, we set out to systematically document and organize the psychological and behavioural changes associated with activism into a typology of change. The review contains 57 papers describing changes. Psychological changes identified in the literature can be classified into 19 main forms: marital status, children, relationship ties, work-life/career, extended involvement, consumer behaviour, identity,empowerment, radicalization/politicization, legitimacy, sustained commitment, self-esteem, general well-being, ‘traits’, self-confidence, religion, organizing, knowledge and home skills. Our analysis highlights the lack of analysis of the relation between type of protest and type of change, and lack of research into the processes behind the various psychological changes. What is needed now is more precise investigation of the relationship between types of protests, social and psychological processes, and psychological outcomes. Further, more longitudinal studies are required to explore the relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the legitimation dynamics of the student protests in Chile 2011, explaining how the support of 'strangers' strengthened its position and endurance. By analysing interviews with both activists and uninvolved citizens, I describe a steady pattern whereby they express the strength and legitimacy of the movement by assessing the 'abstraction' of the link between protesters and their supporters. The more abstract these relations - the stranger supporters are - the most relevant and meaningful is their support. Beyond establishing the worthiness of protesters' claims, strangers provide protesters with a mandate, fostering the movement's cohesion and thus affecting its ability to endure through the conflict. While the literature has mostly looked at adherents as only potential (or failed) constituents, I argue that support that remains external plays a crucial role in social movements' chances of success. This support needs, however, to avoid being framed as insufficient engagement. Further analysis shows that the distinction between protesters and strangers often requires active boundary work, allowing the movement to maximize the benefits of strangers' support while managing its risks. The relation between these boundaries, the efficiency of different contention tactics and their adaptation is analysed here. The study argues that strangeness can involve very different, even opposed phenomena, which are often confounded, namely 'otherness' and 'abstraction'. Critically drawing upon Simmel, I explain how it is 'abstraction' in particular that helps our understanding of the role of strangers in social movements and consider how this distinction could enrich research on the symbolic aspects of contentious politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconstructs the emergence of a student mobilization that occupied a central place in the Mexican political scenario in May and June of 2012. Within the framework of a formally democratic regime with an authoritarian functioning logic, the #YoSoy132 (#IAm132) movement was launched within social networks and quickly became an agent of dissatisfaction with the role played by the media as an interested party in a flawed electoral process. The shift from spontaneous protest to organic mobilization involved extending the proposal beyond the private university to which its first members belonged. It also meant that the initial reactive position gave rise to a collective movement of a proactive nature. Although the future of this movement is still uncertain, spaces for struggle have opened up around it, which have been described as the Mexican Spring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In between the Arab Spring and the US Occupy movement, Israel has had its share in demonstrating the people's power against unjust authority in general and socioeconomic wrongs in particular. This paper analyzes the context, rapid growth and yet swift abatement of the Israeli protest-tent summer of 2011. I argue that the reasons for the shortly lived Israeli protest summer related more to difficulties in coping with intra-movement challenges, framing alignment and a relatively ‘closed’ political environment, and less to the omnipresent security complex and militarized political culture, which has repeatedly been suppressing other episodes in Israel's history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a progressive policy platform and radical political programme, the right to the city suggests that the formulation of specific policy demands for affordable housing, free transit or municipal services can advance in tandem with a shared political understanding of the underlying roots of inequality and exclusion. The right to the city offers a useful, twofold challenge to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement: to more clearly motivate its tactics in the reclamation of city space; and to cultivate openness to collective political transformation in the midst of struggle. This paper argues that the practical questions associated with OWS encampments—and particularly, the relationship between public space occupations and homelessness—are an opportunity to advance a shared political analysis across an ideologically and tactically fragmented left. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes a study examining how different groups at some of the G8 protests, Gleneagles, 2005, negotiated experiences of (dis)empowerment. A recent survey of protest events speculated that, as a function of their social identities, experienced activists have available to them particular strategies to counter disempowerment and hence provide motivation for continued involvement. The G8 direct actions in Gleneagles provided an opportunity to examine such dynamics of (dis)empowerment in situ. An ethnographic study was carried out covering the duration of the Gleneagles events, including interviews with forty participants. Two key findings were as follows. First, across the protest group as a whole there was little unification and no agreed definition of success. Consequently, feelings of empowerment varied systematically across the sample. The second key finding concerned changes in definitions of success among some participants. For experienced activists, their activist identity entailed access to sets of arguments and discussions with fellow activists which allowed potentially disempowering events to be (re-)interpreted positively. An example was the re-evaluation of the importance of the Stirling campsite, which came to be seen by some as a key achievement. We argue in conclusion, however, that some activist strategies to maintain empowerment, while appearing to be based on a radical position, can operate as a break on escalation. The analysis as a whole suggests both the subjective and objective significance of identity and empowerment in movement dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2005 225,000 people marched through Edinburgh enjoining the G8 to 'Make Poverty History'. The coalition's own assessment of their campaign highlighted the importance of media by focusing on the extent of media coverage. Media outlets, however, have their own agendas. Detailed analysis of newspaper coverage preceding the G8 Summit suggests a disjuncture between campaign objectives and media frames. This paper explores how far newspaper accounts of G8-related protests were 'framed' in terms of social movement aims, and how far in terms of anticipated violence. Our findings lead us to caution against an uncritical equation of 'coverage' and 'success', offering a more nuanced account of the interplay between social movements and media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines ‘violence’ in the Global North alterglobalization movement. It reviews major theories of violence and non-violence used by social movements and their analysts, indexes the kinds of movement events which get described as violence, and then analyzes the significance both of the movement's tactical experiences and of the discourse itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with how people involved in 'local' protest might come to see themselves as part of wider social groupings and even global forces of resistance. An ethnographic study of the No M11 Link Road Campaign in London examines participants' definitions of their collective identity boundaries at different stages of involvement. Cross-sectional material from the beginning and later in the campaign shows that there was a transformation in collective identity boundaries towards a more inclusive definition of 'community'. Analysis of participants' accounts before and after involvement in the eviction of a tree suggests the role of conflict with the police in producing an oppositional definition of the collective identity, facilitating links to other groups in resistance to illegitimate authority. Finally, biographical material indicates the implications of transformed identity boundaries for co-action with wider social groups. It is argued that the same intra- and inter-group processes that determine how identity boundaries extend to include a broader community might account for how people come to see themselves as part of a global social movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last weekend of February 2003, between six and ten million people in 60 different countries protested against the imminent Iraq War. Commentators quickly described the worldwide protests as a manifestation of a new form of transnational contention, which would lead to new forms of transnational memory and identity. Building on efforts to connect social movement and memory studies, this article examines if the massive size and transnational nature of the February 2003 anti-war protests resulted in an equally widely shared and transnational form of memory. Following research that describes the crucial role of visual communication for social movements and memory, it approaches this question by studying the size and shape of the online visual memory of the 2003 anti-war protests. Applying the Google Cloud Vision API to retrieve and analyse 1746 online circulations of twenty-five photographs of the 2003 anti-war protests in the period 2003–2019, we find that, compared to other famous images of protest, the online circulation of images of the protests remains limited. This suggests that the massive protests of 2003 did not result in a widely shared and transnational form of memory. Rather than focusing on individual images, this article argues that studying patterns in their online circulation can explain why some movements remain in the public eye, while others quickly disappear from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the role of affect and emotions in Finland's first large-scale anti-deportation protest, the 2017 Right to Live protest in Helsinki. Despite deportation protests having recently gained scholarly attention, their emotional dimensions have not been sufficiently studied, especially as concerns the emotions of protestors with vulnerable legal status. This article is based on in-depth interviews with key activists in the anti-deportation protest network in Finland, including asylum seekers, refugees and Finnish citizens. The article argues that in order for the protest of asylum seekers facing the threat of deportation to become public and visible, it was important that citizens who supported the cause not only offered material assistance but also shared their emotions. The article applies Margaret Wetherell's theoretical concept of affective practices to analyse interactions between asylum seekers and their supporters, and Sara Ahmed's circulation of affect and affective economies to explain how affect and emotions played a role in mobilizing protesters and sustaining the protest. The article concludes that the circulation of affect within the network of asylum seekers and supporters produced lasting affective value during the protest and after the protest ended. Strong affective ties enabled the protesters' network to function effectively in a challenging political climate and despite the network's lack of formal organization, leadership and shared ideological premises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social protests present democracies with a dilemma because their governments must balance respect for citizens' right to free expression against maintenance of law and order. Drawing on litigation data from Taiwan between 1999 and 2018, this study empirically examines how Taiwanese courts decided on cases involving social protesters. Aggregate results reveal that Taiwan's district courts convicted about 60% of the protesters prosecuted by the state, and approximately 93% of those found guilty were given probationary instead of prison sentences. There was a significant association between the type of crime with which they were charged and the court rulings, although that relationship varied over time. Considerable evidence consistently suggests that Taiwanese courts may be attempting to find a middle ground in trials involving social protesters, one in which the society's laws and the individual's right to dissent are both given due respect. This study concludes that further comparative research is needed to determine whether Taiwan's judicial response to contentious political episodes is comparable to that of other democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the protests of resident doctors in Poland, with a particular focus on their hunger protest in October 2017. We use a theoretical framework of three types of groups – epistemic communities, communities of practice and interest groups – to show their strategies used for gaining influence upon healthcare. We show the dynamics of the protest, with a shift from self-centred to public-oriented demands. We present how a professional group managed to shape the public discourse on healthcare, introducing their key demands, which became not only media catchphrases, but also the axis of the media discourse on any future healthcare reforms. We also reconstruct how the resident doctors defined and identified themselves as an epistemic community, with an elaborate and well-planned strategy employed to gain public visibility, media attention and public support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines public contestation of Europe by the far right in France. It investigates whether far-right mobilization on the EU has changed over time, and how it diverges in the party and non-party sectors. Specifically, we follow a politicization approach and address mobilization in terms of three interrelated dimensions: intensity, issue focus, and action repertoire. This allows comparing collective action in the electoral and protest arenas, thus assessing how the far right politicizes Europe in public debates. The study relies on a mixed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the content of the press releases posted by far-right parties and movements on their official websites, scraped automatically from 2012 to 2019. The results show that European integration is increasingly at the core of far-right politics in France, but its politicization unfolds in different ways in the protest and electoral arenas. As political conflict over the EU expands, far-right parties and non-party actors are challenged to differentiate their respective profiles. These findings complement existing research on the linkages between protest and elections, and suggest that the rooting of the far right in society is reconfiguring the structure of political conflict in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement research has shed light on the relationship between processes of alliance building and multiple factors related to political opportunities, framing, identities, networks and resource mobilization. However, less is known about the impact of eventful protests on coalition building dynamics. Drawing on a paired comparison between the Portuguese and Spanish cycles of protest under the Great Recession, we aim at accounting for social movement alliances over time. While these countries present parallel protest dynamics until 2011, after that point two eventful protests lead each country into different trajectories. While the cycle in Portugal was marked by intermittent large protest events dominated by institutional actors, in Spain the peak of mobilization was consistently high between 2011 and 2013. When comparing these cases two factors stand out: the mobilization capacity and the autonomy of new emerging actors vis-à-vis institutional ones. Eventful protests were a key factor in articulating these elements. In Spain, the strength and autonomy of 15M assemblies and anti-austerity actors facilitated the formation of strategic alliances with trade unions. In Portugal, transversal initiatives and sustained alliances did not follow after the Geração à Rasca events. These emerged only later in the cycle, however were nonetheless hampered by overlapping membership and a lack of autonomy from institutional actors. Two original protest event analysis datasets are used to illustrate these arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To unlock the explanatory potential of grievance, I conceptualise it through a multidimensional and multilevel theoretical model and test it on cross-national data from European Social Survey Round 8 Data (2016). I define three forms of grievance: economic, political, and social. Such a typology assumes that inequalities are reproduced not only within the field of the economy but also structured by political and social mechanisms. I also argue that grievances have multiple dimensions of complexity. I define two dimensions of grievance, that can be captured by indicators used in cross-national survey data: conditions and cognitive perceptions. Conditions are structural components that reflect existing inequalities when cognitive perceptions indicate an individual feeling of dissatisfaction about economic, political or social issues. Furthermore, grievances may interact differently with specific forms of contentious political action. I examine three forms of protest behaviour: signing petitions, attending demonstrations, and boycotting products. While the results are consistent with the PPT showing that grievances highly intersected with the lack of income and political opportunities create constraints for protest participation, they also show that factors related to dissatisfaction with external institutions and association with a discriminated group of people could increase the chances of protest for deprived individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we analyze the evolution of the protests after the election of the Venezuelan Constitutional Assembly in 2017. We adopt the idea of a social conflict over diverging opinions about how the world should be. Sharing similar opinion is one basis for a sense of collective identity that facilitates participation in action to bring about desired changes in the world. We approach social conflict as an interaction between different opinion-based groups, in which opinions are formed and transformed leading and supporting different forms of collective action. We analyze Twitter conversations before, during, and after the events of the summer 2017 anti-regime protests in Venezuela. Correspondence and cluster analysis of a corpus of 60,036 tweets is used to investigate the theme and opinions from July to September 2017. Results show that opinions become more extreme and one-sided in response to overt repression and the authority's lack of negotiation with movements. After the repression of the protests and President Maduro's successful implementation of an elected Constitutional Assembly, tweets supporting the rule of law and democratic procedures dissipated, while more radical positions strengthened. These finding suggests that democratic principles rest on a precarious relationship between the individual and the authority. Protest movements may arrive at the paradoxical position in which radicalization is the most straightforward response to repression: The most radical positions survive, while the moderate ones are co-opted or suppressed by the regime. We argue that this dynamic may have potentially negative consequences for democracy and social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although rarely considered within the existing scholarship on social movements, even a cursory analysis of protest activity suggests that movements regularly invoke historical citations (whether consciously or not) while working to clarify aims and mobilize constituencies. In order to make sense of this process, and to account for the variations that arise among the different citation modalities favored by movements on opposite ends of the political spectrum, I draw upon the theoretical contributions of Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin and, in particular, on his exploration of 'wish images' and 'dialectical images,' their attributes, and their interrelationship. According to Benjamin, such images summoned the past either to project visions of future happiness (as with the wish image) or to deposit the witness before a moment of decisive, present-tense reckoning. After outlining the role of historical citation in social movements and in the broader cultural field through which these movements find expression, I analyze two recent protest events – the 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, VA, in which wish images were actively deployed, and the 2017 Women's Strike in New York City, where a dialectical image arose from the constellated nodes of the march's route – to consider the relationship between citation modality and protest outcome. Following from this analysis, and in keeping with the unapologetically partisan nature of my investigation, I conclude by advancing some strategic recommendations for movements seeking – as Benjamin once enjoined – to 'improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the rise of social media affects the temporal relations of protest communication. Following a relational approach, it traces how regimes of temporality are constructed and transformed through the entanglement between media infrastructures, institutions, and practices. These regimes involve particular 'speeds' -the rate at which media content is renewed – as well as 'temporal orientations' towards present, past, and future. The article questions how specific temporal regimes enable or complicate protestors' efforts to gain public legitimacy. A large body of research suggests that it is difficult to gain such legitimacy in the mainstream news cycle, in which protest is primarily covered from an 'episodic' perspective, ignoring larger protest issues. The present analysis suggests that despite the participatory affordances of social media, it has not become any easier to generate sustained public attention for structural protest issues. Drawing examples from three case studies, it demonstrates that the dominant mode of social media protest communication reproduces and reinforces the episodic focus of the mainstream news. While other temporal perspectives on protest are certainly developed in the alternative and mainstream news, as well as in activist social media communication, these do not fundamentally challenge the prevailing temporal orientation towards the present, towards the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing theories of social movements have a weak conception of temporality, which is generally tied to truncated protest waves or else to micro-scale sequences of interaction. Neither approach enables an understanding of continuity and change in the content and form of social movements over longer periods. This article develops a new conceptual terminology intended to bring temporal sensitivity to our understanding of the interplay between movements and their socio-political environments. Vectors highlight evolving patterns of interaction that carry ideas and action orientations into a range of social settings over a period of decades. Examining the interplay of different vectors, and accounting also for the unfolding character of historic events, enables the apprehension of an overarching timescape within which movements move. This theoretical approach is illustrated with an examination of three significant periods of transnational contention associated with the Alter-Globalization, Anti-War, and Occupy movements. Analysis of vectors that shape discourses of conflict, organizational preferences, and practices of individual autonomy explain dynamics of continuity and change across different movements, each of which is shaped by a dynamic neoliberal timescape. Abbreviation CBDM: Consensus-based Decision Making; ICT: Information and Communication Technology; IFI: International Financial Institution; IMF: International Monetary Fund; WTO: World Trade Organisation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent times have been defined as momentous: great transformation, great recession as well as great regression have been frequently used short-cut terms to characterize the period following the financial breakdown of 2008. As for contentious politics in these times, we frequently hear references to crisis as well as eventful protests, as calls for what was expected to be routine protest triggered portentous waves of contentious politics. Reference to moments of change can be found in different approaches addressing social movements from the macro, meso, and micro levels. While neoinstitutional approaches have looked at extraordinary times from a macro perspective, the Chicago School adopted a micro perspective, looking at the sudden breaking of established paths, the reproduction of ruptures, and their stabilization. An emerging concern in social movement studies with 'great transformations' that triggered big mobilizations can also be seen at the meso level Drawing on these perspectives, I argue that some eventful protests trigger critical junctures, producing abrupt changes which develop contingently and become path dependent. While routinized protests proliferate in normal times, under some political opportunities, some protests – or moments of protest – act as exogenous shocks, catalyzing intense and massive waves of contention. Referring to the debate on critical junctures, and bridging it with social movement studies, I thematize a sequence of processes of cracking, as the production of sudden ruptures; vibrating, as contingently reproducing those ruptures; and sedimenting, as the stabilization of the legacy of the rupture. With the aim of mapping some relevant questions, rather than providing answers, I refer for illustration to research I carried out on movements in democratic transitions during economic, political, and social crises, as well as their legacy and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to produce shale gas remains controversial. Most research in this area has focussed on the environmental and economic impacts, with concerns for water, soil and air pollution, seismic activity and cost effectiveness being most prevalent. In contrast less attention has been given to the identities and experiences of a growing number of anti-fracking groups and campaigns. This research explores how grassroots activists in the UK have been framed and reframed in media, political and campaigner discourse. Through a combination of semi structured interviews with activists at three protest sites in July 2017 and analysis of media coverage at that time in the national and local press, it explores the extent to which discretionary policing practices, conflicting media reports and fluctuating framings have impacted the movement's ability to exercise its democratic right to protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]