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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]

In 2011 the 15 M movement occupied squares across Spain demanding true democracy. Four years later, bottom-up municipalist initiatives won the 2015 local elections in seven medium-size and large cities. In coalition with traditional parties, these initiatives formed new left-wing governments that incorporated former activists as mayors and councilors. This history has sparked debates about the consequences of co-optation, institutional alliances, and state openness to social movements. In this article we aim to contribute to that debate with a discussion of the outcomes of municipalist governments in four cities (Madrid, Barcelona, A Coruña, and Cádiz) during the 2015–2019 mandate. Theoretically, we argue for the necessity to interpret these outcomes against the background of the political and economic contexts that constrain (and enable) a progressive urban agenda. Empirically, our results reveal that municipalist governments only to a certain extent performed as instruments of grassroots movements. Despite favorable alliances and partial achievements, we identify various constraints to the responsiveness of municipalist governments to activist demands. Especially, we conclude that supra-local neoliberal policies, various concerned capitalist interests, and the relative waning of the 15 M protest movement limited the potential benefits of those alliances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an overview of the Istanbul park forums that emerged in parallel with the Gezi events – social protest movements that took place in summer 2013. Despite the criticism that Gezi events were short-lived, impulsive, and ineffectual I argue that they have a long-lasting influence on democratic consciousness and new forms of political action. Istanbul park forums, the street and urban squares have become an important link between those who wish to transform the qualities of both democracy and the regime at large with efforts to create influence over local and national policy-making processes through engagement in political action. Drawing from the political theory of Hannah Arendt, this study assigns the capacities of 'deed and speech' to redefine 'politics'. Analyzing the politics of the park forum process through the lens and concepts of Arendt's political theory suggests an alternative way of evaluating the eventual dissolution of the Gezi events: rather than suffering from the inability to organize themselves within the conventional format of party politics, I show that the Gezi community deliberately created a new manner of engagement through political action, and thereby cast its influence as a historic landmark in the future of Turkish politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent do perceptions of public opinion effect individual support and political participation in political action? To what extent might media use moderate the role of public opinion in predicting political participation in the digital age? This study investigates these questions by analysing unique data from an experiment and a representative survey designed and conducted at the height of the summer 2011 protests in Israel. This study offers a new analytical model for studying activism by independently and simultaneously examining the direct and indirect effects of perceptions of majority support, individual support and media use on political behaviour. The experimental results suggest that perceptions of public opinion and media use did affect participation in the 2011 social movement. Specifically, increased perception of majority support for the movement led to increased rates of participation. Moreover, media use was inconsequential among those respondents who perceived that a majority of the public supported the protest. Digital media had a moderate effect on the association between perceptions and support for the protest movement, but there was no such effect with respect to mainstream media use. The findings provide new empirical insight into the effects of perceptions of public opinion and media use on political behaviour. In doing so, they help to explain the development of mass protest movements in the digital age and especially the potential effect of perceptions and media use in promoting the evolution of social movements as well as involvement in collective action in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a conceptual framework and introduction to the special section 'Mobilising around Europe: pro and anti-EU politics in an era of populism and nationalism'. By means of its four articles, the special section seeks to address the 'politicisation of Europe' outside of the conventional party-political arena. Whilst the future of European integration has become increasingly contested, not least due to the rise of Eurosceptic political parties of the populist radical right, we observe that politicisation has also occurred in the protest arena through grassroots activism. The contributions in this special section analyse these mobilisations, which have thus far received limited scholarly attention, and the positions and frames activists and various social movement organisations (SMOs) adopt concerning the future of European integration. By doing this, these articles reveal the often complex and context-dependent stances towards 'Europe' amongst actors across the ideological spectrum, which extend beyond dichotomous pro-/anti-EU positions. [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]

Flash mobs are commonly portrayed in the media as light-hearted events intended to surprise bystanders. Meanwhile, academic literature features a number of explicitly political interpretations of flash mobs. However, to date, no empirical study has addressed why individuals organize and take part in the internationally spread mass events organized by the most popular contemporary flash mob incarnation, the Urban Playground Movement (UPM). In this paper, we place Budapest's UPM on an entertainment practice versus social movement mobilization spectrum. Our interviews with the leaders of the largest Hungarian UPM organization show that the functioning of the UPM in Budapest heavily relies on social movement continuity, where organizers see their events as ways to reclaim public spaces and to prefigure more social cities. However, among participants surveyed at the most notable yearly UPM event, the International Pillow Fight Day, we found fun as the primary motivation for participation, thus showing movement discontinuity. We conclude that the UPM in Budapest is a collective action, but not a social movement. Secondly, we find that the UPM exhibits 'thin' diffusion both in its reliance on individual activists over coalitions and in its usage of commercial social media as its diffusion infrastructure. Lastly, our results show that UPM collectives can act as 'containers' of social movement frames, implying that these playful groups could function as vehicles in the spread of protest in movement milieus. Our key finding that UPM is not a social movement contradicts the numerous academic interpretations of flash mobs as outright political events. [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 introductory article sets out the core concerns of this special issue on time and temporality in relation to social movements. It examines three areas: historical times, events, and sequences. In each area, we examine the ways that time and temporality are (often implicitly) embedded in existing social movement scholarship. We then introduce some of the problems raised by our contributors, and the ways in which they utilise greater sensitivity to time and temporality in furthering our understanding of the dynamics of the mobilisation, functions and fortunes of social movements. [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]

Studying the nexus of media and social movements is a growing subfield in both media and social movement studies. Although there is an increasing number of studies that criticize the overemphasis of the importance of media technologies for social movements, questions of non-use, technology push-back and media refusal as explicit political practice have received comparatively little attention. The article charts a typology of digital disconnection as political practice and site of struggle bringing emerging literatures on disconnection, i.e. forms of media technology non-use to the field of social movement studies and studies of civic engagement. Based on a theoretical matrix combining questions of power, collectivity and temporality, we distinguish between digital disconnection as repression, digital disconnection as resistance and digital disconnection as performance and life-style politics. The article discusses the three types of digital disconnection using current examples of protest and social movements that engage with practices of disconnection. Abbreviations: AFA: Anti-Fascist Action; CHRI: Center for Human Rights in Iran; DDoS: Distributed Denial of Service [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]

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]

Existing studies of protest outcomes have focused on the effects of organizational characteristics, disruptive tactics, and political opportunity structures. However, most studies, especially those situated in Western democracies, fail to adequately account for the paths to successful protests in authoritarian regimes like China because of the structural differences between the two types of regimes. By incorporating insights from studies of protests in China and communication studies, this article extends the political mediation model and argues that the success of protests is shaped by the tripartite relations among protest forcefulness, favorable political contexts, and media exposure. In face of joint occurrence of elite support and media exposure, large size of protest is sufficient, whilst large size and disruptive actions are required when media exposure is present but elite support is absent. This result shows that the effectiveness of protest characteristics is dually mediated by political and media conditions. This study not only enhances our understandings of protest outcomes in China but also brings scholarly dialogue between social movement studies and communication studies so as to enrich the literature of protest outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study advances the protest paradigm as a transnational theory by examining how ideological affiliations within and across national borders influence the framing of a protest movement. Our empirical focus is the coverage of the 2016–17 South Korean 'candlelight' protests to oust conservative President Park Gyun-hye in Korean and US newspapers. Content analysis of 6 months of coverage suggests that liberal publications in both nations (Kyunghyang Shinmun and New York Times) were supportive of the movement, framing the protests as large yet peaceful and relying on protesters for information. In contrast, the conservative press in the US (Wall Street Journal) was closer in its coverage to Korea's conservative publication (Chosun Ilbo), which was defensive of Park and her supporters. We argue that ideological affinities can operate beyond national boundaries – what we term 'ideological parallelism' – to make news organizations sympathetic or hostile toward a social movement. But nationalist sentiments also remain significant to the extent that a foreign (Korean) social movement affects a nation's (US) foreign policy. We identify a novel framing device – Gaze – under which the coverage of both US newspapers converged and considered the adverse implications of candlelight protests for America's relations with South Korea and its containment of North Korea and China. We also show how the US media's Gaze recursively shapes South Korean press coverage, indicating that transnational protest frames impact local perceptions of social movements and can potentially influence their legitimacy and outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some social movements researchers argue that the Internet globalises protest and equalises cross-national inequalities in opportunities for activism. Critics warn against such techno-optimism, highlighting continued individual-level inequalities and country-level variation in protest participation. In this paper, we operationalise Manuel Castells' theory of social movement development to test the extent to which contemporary demonstrators share the characteristics of global activists. We also examine how country-level economic and political institutions affect levels of protest and moderate the relationship between individual-level predictors and activism. We find support for Castells' contention that use of online media is a significant predictor of protest. However, we also find that having a sense of global connectedness does not significantly affect one's likelihood of engaging in demonstrations. Protest participation continues to be stratified by traditional markers of social privilege including education and gender. Moreover, national political and economic contexts have independent effects on protest and moderate how individual-level political and economic grievances affect civic engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the interface of protest movements and opposition parties, considering this remains conceptually under-specified. It does so by proposing a processual framework involving three mechanisms of party-movement interaction - signaling, frame-alignment, and coalition-building - at play in different phases of a contentious cycle unfolding under electoral conditions. Drawing on novel interview data, the article validates this proposal by tracing direct and indirect effects between protest signals, activists, and Argentine opposition parties during the year-long contentious cycle that preceded the defeat of the Kirchner government in the 2013 legislative elections. On this basis, it is argued that interactive dynamics between protest actors and political parties can significantly affect opposition politics, supporting the emergence of collaborative strategies that may have major electoral implications. The article thus makes relevant theoretical and empirical contributions, by both offering an analytical bridge between social movement and party politics literatures with potential for further elaboration, while illuminating new developments concerning the positioning of Latin American center-right parties in relation to mass protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines engagement with digitally networked, politically contentious actions. Maintaining engagement over time is a key challenge for social movements attempting to network digitally. This article argues that proximity serves as a condition to address this challenge, because it configures the personal networks upon which transmission depends. This is a paradox of digital activism: it has the capacity to transcend barriers; however, proximity is essential for sustaining relations over time. Examining Twitter data from the #not1more protest campaign against immigrant deportations in the United States, quantitative and social network analyses show a differentiated development of engagement, which results in a particular geographical configuration with the following attributes. First, there is a robust and connected backbone of core organizers and activists located in particular major cities. Second, local groups engage with the campaign with direct actions in other cities. Third, a large and transitory contingent of geographically dispersed users direct attention to the campaign. We conclude by elaborating how this geographically differentiated configuration helps to sustain engagement with digitally networked action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy reloaded: inside Spain's political laboratory from 15-M to Podemos: (Oxford Studies in Culture and Politics), by Cristina Flesher Fominaya, New York, NY, Oxford University Press, 2020, xxiv +344 pp., index. By examining the genealogy of the 15-M movement, Flesher Fominaya shows that the 2011 protests arose not from the appearance of an entirely new movement, but rather the latent activities of a pre-existing social movement community (latterly dubbed "15-M") with roots as far back as the Global Justice Movement. I Democracy Reloaded i adopts what Flesher Fominaya calls a "Genealogical Approach" to social movements, which she contrasts with the "cycles of contention" approach (commonly associated with the work of Sidney Tarrow). [Extracted from the article]

The frame alignment perspective emphasizes the importance of congruence in beliefs between protest participants and protest organizers. Although frame alignment is widely used in social movement research and matters for important movement processes, it has remained largely unclear how we can explain different degrees of frame alignment among protesters. We use empirical evidence regarding organizers’ and participants’ frames, surveying 4000 protesters in twenty-nine demonstrations between 2009 and 2012 in Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The results show that frame alignment depends on variables that tap into protesters’ exposure to organizational and alternative messages. Participants who are recruited by staging organizations, and events organized by strong and more professionalized organizations, display higher levels of frame alignment, whereas salience of the protest issue in the political arena severely constrains frame alignment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with the anti-austerity movement in Portugal and a frame analysis of calls for protest, the paper explores the relation between collective memory of a country and collective group memory. The Carnation Revolution which began on 25 April 1974 is the most important event in Portugal’s recent history. Most activists in the anti-austerity movement did not experience this event personally, so their memory depends completely on the existing, politically contentious collective memory of this event. The paper shows (1) the way in which group memories of the Revolution are constructed and (2) the functions these group memories have for the activist groups. It argues that collective memory of important historical events impacts on social movements’ identities, their aims, repertoire of contention and framings. Activist groups engage in the construction of their group memories, and by doing so they refer to collective memory at the national level. These processes are not purely strategic and are sometimes counterproductive in terms of possible success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During a wave of protest in 2011, Morocco was home to its own uprisings, spurred on by the 20 February movement. Unlike its neighbors to the east, the Moroccan regime was never dismantled. So, what was the sociopolitical significance of the 20 February movement? This profile examines the landscape at the time of uprisings and presents brief interview data to make the case that these protests facilitated a political articulation and a new deliberative street politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been little comparative research on the differences across radical social movements in the context of consolidated democracies. This paper analyses the squatting movement, as an exemplary case of contemporary radical movement. This study aims to identify the causal contexts that explain the differences of strengths within these movements across 52 large cities in Western Europe. It examines three main hypotheses drawn from the literature on social movements concerning the characteristics of political systems, the availability of resources and the presence of economic grievances. We use fuzzy sets qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify configurations of causal conditions. The findings show that diverse contexts (multi-causation) lead to strong movements. A first causal context combines grievances, resources and closed or unresponsive institutions, and is typically found in Southern European cities. A second context highlights the presence of robust far-right parties in combination with less severe grievances and relative scarcity of resources, and is typically found in Northern European cities. These findings demonstrate that resources and grievances are quasi-necessary conditions for strong radical movements, although polarization can lead to a similar outcome where these characteristics are not present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying Charles Tilly's notion of ‘repertoires of contention’, this paper discusses strategies and modes of protest carried out by the movements against hydropower projects in India. It compares the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA; Save Narmada Movement) in Madhya Pradesh and the Shramik Mukthi Dal (SMD; Labour Liberation Party) led mobilisations against hydropower projects in Maharashtra. It explains the more dramatic repertoires deployed by NBA as opposed to moderate and pragmatic movement repertoires of SMD. The paper concludes that the differences in ideology, organisation and cultural–historical legacy of the two organisations, as well as their different modes of interaction with the state, are the causes behind different contentious repertoires deployed by them, which resulted in different trajectories and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the context of the new period of mobilization begun in Spain with the rise of the indignados in May 2011, protests against home evictions are today at the center of local and international discussions. This article seeks to make an initial examination of these mobilizations and their relationship with routine politics in Spain. After a brief historical introduction the article looks at the different kinds of action, both contentious and conventional, employed by the movement against the evictions, as well as the various scale shift mechanisms that have diversified the number and range of actors involved in this particular case of contentious politics. The conclusions look at the question of as to what point recent developments have broken with the deep-rooted tendency toward a lack of interaction between protest movements and institutional actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of transnational activism and of the Global Justice Movement have paid scarce attention to Southern transnationalisations. A good way of understanding the material and symbolic logics that underlie such processes is to study the way Southern activists participate in transnational events. Based on a collective ethnographic survey conducted at the World Social Forum (WSF) held in Nairobi in 2007, this article examines the practical modalities of access of African participants to the WSF, i.e. how they actually managed to travel to Nairobi, through what material help and to what extent they depend on the NGO sphere. It aims to show that the concept of career is a relevant lens to underline both activism and internationalisation as a process, which helps to avoid binary qualifications of internationalisation of Southern participants, reduced to being either simply part of the ‘civil society’ or ‘unauthentic’ because of their very internationalisation. It then examines how this internationalisation process reveals some affinities, albeit critical ones, with the former colonial sphere, but also how their engagement with the international sphere transforms their daily existence, through processual stages (as internationalisation is not always an effect of a cosmopolitan socialisation, but can also be encouraged by Northern partners' stance and orientation towards sending ‘authentic’ grassroots people to the North), and how the ‘NGOisation’ of social movements in the global South may in turn be understood as a specific form of political enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Analysing the Occupy movement is important for understanding the political importance of social movements and the theoretical limits of social movement approaches. Occupy enables us to critically re-examine and question what we think we know about the processes of collective action. We identify eight contentions which illustrate why Occupy matters to scholars and which challenge us to re-examine existing assumptions: (1) the core claim to space that Occupy asserts; (2) the power of the language of occupation; (3) the need to pay more attention to the importance of crafting and repeating slogans; (4) the politics of prefiguring a new society (and its contradictions); (5) the implications of not making demands on the state; (6) the importance of ritualising and institutionalising protest; (7) the messy diffusion and mediation of a potentially global movement and finally (8) why confrontation with the police is understood as important as a movement tactic. Whatever the outcome, Occupy has enthused and mobilised activists in new ways and has articulated that inequality is something we all can, and should, seek to remedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Italy was the birthplace of the first mobilisation targeting the crisis-related austerity measures: in 2008, students protesting against the governmental cuts chanted ‘We won't pay for the crisis’. After that, Italy appeared unable to play a significant role in European anti-austerity mobilisation. The waves of protest of the last three years seem much less influential, in the global context, than the British, Spanish, Greek or Chilean events, let alone the Arab Spring. Furthermore, all the attempts to start some occupy-style mobilisation, during the Fall of 2011, failed. Having participated as an activist/researcher in hundreds of demonstrations, assemblies and meeting, in this paper I propose some hypotheses for future research aimed at understanding and explaining this failure: the political context, with the peculiar role of Berlusconi in attracting on himself all the criticism regarding the crisis, saving from the popular blame the EU and the 1% and paving the way for Mario Monti's quasi-unanimous approval; 15 October, with the loss of credibility for the movement after the riots and the internal breaks, with consequences on any other attempt of mobilisation; the complex interaction between political groups and general movement, once a resource for mobilisation, and now a potential obstacle, given the difficulty of fitting the sophisticated ‘Italian theory’ in the post-political and down-to-earth frame of crisis-related indignation. This exploratory paper aims to take part in the reflexive elaboration of the Italian movements and to break the academic habit of studying only successful protests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Occupy movements have given voice to the widespread frustration that so few (the 1%) seem to hold all the power. The vast majority (the 99%) lacks an (equal) say in the social, economic, financial, political and ecological processes that affect our lives. Inspired by the 2011 global wave of protests including the Arab Spring, the Greek resistance, the acampadas in Spain, the Wisconsin uprising and the Israeli summer, and starting with the takeover of New York City's Zuccotti Park on 17 September 2011, the Occupy movements have sought to overturn these power imbalances by using the occupation of public spaces, mass assemblies, tent cities and direct action to shine a light on the effects of growing inequality and the disproportionate influence of corporate power over our politics and economy. However, while the occupations rally against external systems of power, a widespread logic of aggregation and majoritarian populism have complicated efforts to recognize and address internal differences and inequalities. This article examines power and exclusion in the Occupy movements through an analysis of race within Occupy Boston, which began in late September 2011 and has continued in a decentralized fashion since the camp's mid-December eviction. As scholar activists from diverse backgrounds, we employ observant participation, interviews and activist reflections to explore how occupiers in Boston have represented, negotiated and addressed internal power relations, suggesting that a shift toward networking logics, practices and forms offers a promising avenue for engaging differences as well as racial, class and other modes of exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In advanced modern societies ecological integrity, democratic renewal, social inclusion and global justice are non-controversial collective concerns. The ecological, economic, social and political unsustainability of the present arrangements is largely uncontested. Demands for radical societal change as they have once been articulated by the counter-cultural new social movements seem to have been fully mainstreamed. At the same time, however, there is an unprecedented consensus of defence reinforcing the established system of liberal consumer capitalism. What is required in order to make sense of these evident contradictions is a theory of late-modern society's discourses of radical change. New social movement theory (NSMT) can neither explain the mainstreaming of the supposedly subversive discourses of radical change nor their relationship towards the firmly established consensus of defence. A critical review of Niklas Luhmann's systems theoretical analysis of protest communication paves the way towards an interpretation of contemporary discourses of radical change as a particular form of societal self-description that functions as a means of societal self-deception: late-modern society uses the form of simulation in order to stabilize and reproduce at the same time the unsustainable status quo and the belief in the radical alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary of the Australian anti-capitalist movement of 2000/01 as seen through the eyes of its activists. On the basis of thirty-five interviews conducted in mid-2002 we examine the background of the activist layer, the nature of the social networks and connective structures which shaped the Australian anti-capitalist movement, the character of the mobilizing structures that were used to organize the protest movement, the degree to which the Australian movement was connected to international activity or learned from international political theorizing, the tactics that were used at the protests, and the political frameworks that shaped the thinking of key activists. We conclude with some considerations as to the strengths and weaknesses of the movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]