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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]

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]

The 15-M mobilizations shook Spanish society and placed the demand for 'real democracy' at the center of political debate. In order to better understand the scope and impact of the Indignados' democratizing endeavors, this article aims to address an issue that has not received much attention: the connection of this protest cycle with the political economy. To this end, both the opportunity structure generated by the economic crisis and the class and generational conflicts shaping the mobilizations are analyzed. The article proposes that the symbolic and short-term success of 15-M in re-politicizing distributive conflicts contrasts with its medium-term inability to materially democratize the political economy. This relative failure can be explained by the confluence of several factors: on the one hand, 15-M's organizational weakness and its disconnection from a somewhat declining labor movement; on the other, the lack of responsiveness of Spain's political institutions to street politics and the powerful structural inertia of economic dynamics created by decades of neoliberalism. The findings of this case study aim to contribute to scholarly debates on the impacts of social movements and their connection to political economy and social classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One distinctive feature of the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong is the 'international front' on which both Hong-Kong-based activists and members of diaspora communities engaged in public diplomacy and foreign government lobbying. While the emergence of the international front can partly be explained by perceived political opportunities and protesters' identity change, this article focuses on the evolution of mobilizing structures. Of particular interest is how the mobilizing structures were activated, expanded, and transformed in a protest campaign marked by certain core features of networked social movements. Based on in-depth interviews with twenty activists, the analysis illustrates the co-presence of and complementarity between digitally enabled, citizen self-initiated actions and organization-based mobilization. The analysis also shows how tactical shifts, negotiation of differences among activists, and state response drove the transformation of activist network. General theoretical implications on understanding of diaspora mobilization and networked social movements are discussed. [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]

In this article, I examine the linkages between the online activism and offline protests against the anti-Muslim, Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed in India in 2019. Muslim women initiated a 101-day sit-in protest at Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, India to challenge both the anti-Muslim rationality of CAA and the ruling party in India. I analyze how the experiences of Muslim women in physical sites of protests are tied with the presence of digital feminist networks which foster translocal connections and sustain the movement through online activism. I study both the corporeal street protests where the female body is physically deployed as an instrument of dissent and the virtual presence of cyberfeminists who use digital platforms to create and circulate discursive and everyday experiences challenging the surveillance of the precarious female body. In unpacking the connections between body-offline-online, I bring to the surface discussions on the pervasiveness of violence against Muslims, especially women, in India and how they are subjected to instances of discrimination manifest in the form of corporeal punishment as well as discursive vitriol and ridicule. I argue that a protest led by Muslim women in India challenges the majoritarian masculinist assumptions about public spaces, politics, and processes of meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2013 Gezi protests still remain the largest to have arisen in the AKP era of governance in Turkey. In light of substantial interdisciplinary attention attributed to this case, this study analyses a previously neglected, yet salient activist strategy known as fraternization that arose during protester-police interactions. We argue that when entrapped in situations marked by confrontational tension with police, protesters strategically attempt to overcome outgroup divisions by getting state forces to sympathize with opposition through fraternization. Utilizing video data analysis (VDA), we assess a sample of 147 publicly available videos featuring protester-police interactions and complement our assessment with semi-structured interviews with protesters. Results reveal that significant levels of fraternization occurred between heterogeneous groups of activists (age, gender, identity) and police. In some cases fraternization attempts contributed to a positive dialogue being established with police, while other attempts had no effect in reducing repression. Although activists were ultimately unsuccessful in convincing police to defect, this inquiry presents new implications for our understanding of the situational dynamics underlying fraternization. [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]

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]

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]

When former president Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal tried to bypass constitutional limitations on renewing his candidature, tens of thousands took to the streets. The success of this mobilisation has been largely attributed to the newly created youth movement, Y'en a marre. Burkina Faso witnessed similar events, when the country saw hundreds of thousands protest against the potential continuation of former president Blaise Compaoré – the action being led by the social movement Balai Citoyen, whose public image also heavily featured music artists. Examining these large-scale mobilisations against term extensions by heads of state from a contentious politics perspective, however, reveals that a large number of actors from civil society and politics were involved in the protests. In both cases, we find cross-movement mobilisations, with none of them forming stable or enduring alliances. I will argue that the reasons for this go back to competitive relations among Senegalese actors, and ideological polarisation in the case of Burkina Faso. My concluding remarks outline the role and relative importance of these social movements within their broader societal contexts, and point at future pathways for research. [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]

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]

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]

We analyse the Chilean Spring of 2019-2020 – the fiercest social outburst in Chile during the last three decades. After discussing the combined role of long-standing grievances, political attitudes, and cultural change in triggering the outburst, we study the interplay among peaceful and violent protests and criminal activity. We argue that brutal police repression and governmental mismanagement contributed to deepening the crisis once it exploded. We conclude by describing the attempts of the political class to cope with the crisis and speculate about its potential political consequences, especially for the Chilean party system. [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]

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]

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 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]

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]

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]

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]

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 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]

Massive demonstrations are the staple of powerful social movements, but research on the factors affecting the size of demonstrations (in terms of number of attendants) is almost nonexistent. Why do some demonstrations pack long avenues with masses of people while other ones barely fill a street corner? Combining resource mobilization, political opportunity, and framing theories, we argue that mobilization strategies - the sequence of decisions and actions taken by protest organizers before staging a protest - shape demonstration size. Multivariate models with 937 Chilean demonstrations between 2000 and 2012 show that demonstrations are larger when they display more demands (especially universalistic demands), target the national government, attract more organizations (especially umbrella organizations), and mobilize cohesive groups with broad public support. We reinforce the internal validity of our argument using interviews with movement leaders and secondary research on Chilean society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite proliferation of political protest by migrants in recent years, analyses from a social movement perspective remain scarce. This lacuna is not coincidental, but theoretically grounded. According to dominant movement theories, migrants are unlikely subjects of mobilization due to legal obstacles, scarce resources and closed political and discursive opportunities. The article therefore explores how marginalized migrants organize transnational political protest against all evident odds. Drawing from extensive fieldwork and bridging transnational migration and social movement studies, it is argued that migrants mobilize within transnational social spaces, which link relations and emotions acquired on the move with the relational qualities at the locality of arrival. The article illustrates how the transnational spaces most migrants inhabit can be politicized and transformed into particular social formations, for which the term ‘transnational contentious spaces’ is suggested. [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]

The recent economic crisis shaped a new wave of protest in Europe mobilising thousands of people. Austerity measures brought not only the ‘usual suspects’ onto the streets, they also awoke less frequent demonstrators. What brought all these people to the streets? Are their motivations the same for participation in all demonstrations? We compare participants in two types of mobilisations against austerity: those called particularistic (which are reactions to particular anti-austerity issues), and those universalistic (which address much broader issues such as questioning the political system). We also compare two typologies of participants taking into account their participation history: regular and occasional protesters. Employing a two-by-two design defined by type of demonstration (Particularistic vs. Universalistic) and the individual’s participation history (Occasionals vs. Regulars), we found that the differences between demonstrations were smaller than those within types of protesters. Nevertheless, even in this period of hardship, motivation to participate in particularistic or universalistic protests differ depending on the perceptions of political system, ideological positioning and organisational embeddedness. Interaction analyses showed that different levels of identity, trust in institutions and satisfaction with democracy are crucial in driving people to participate in different types of demonstrations as occasionals or regulars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines women’s lived experiences as new activists in social movements. Taiwanese women – many of them housewives – joined the Sunflower Movement, a large-scale protest against a trade pact with China, and a related anti-nuclear movement in 2014. This study demonstrates how new women activists’ everyday political practices mutually construct the public and private spheres in the Taiwanese context. By ‘making private public’, these new activists use discourses of citizenship and maternalism to connect politics to social issues and daily life. Public participation makes these women feel empowered, and their daily actions transform politics from a set of formal, institutionalized practices to a practical fact of everyday life. This research also challenges the reproduction of a rigid private/public division in previous feminist scholarship that regards family and childcare as a separate realm that hinders women’s public participation. In a marked break from past accounts, these women don’t separate their caring responsibilities from their political actions. By focusing on new activists’ political action in and through their family and childcare, this research calls into question scholarly discussions that view maternalism primarily as a public discourse for mobilizing women or a visual strategy for collective protest. By considering the disruptive potential of all acts of mothering, this study paints a more complex and nuanced picture of women and mothers as protesters and reveals how activist women’s actions in the family and private social networks can be a central part of maternalist strategies’ radical potential. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This is a detailed portrayal of two major social movements that erupted unexpectedly, challenging expectations of mainstream social movement theory about the lack of large-scale protests in predominantly conservative Asian countries. Ho Ming-sho's book is about the defense of democratic values and the fight for democratization in the Special Administrative Region (SAR) of Hong Kong and the Republic of China (Taiwan) against "Beijing", the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC). The book describes the links established among pro-democracy activists from mainland China, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese dissidents (p.92-93), not yet discussed at great length elsewhere. [Extracted from the article]

In addition, the author carried out participant observation with the Berlin police in spring 2017 in order to better understand protest policing, and conducted interviews with participants and observers of the protest events studied. In doing so, Nassauer persuasively compels us to consider dynamics beyond "the background factors". Using innovative video data analysis, this book examines the processes and situational mechanisms in which violence erupted in protest marches in Germany and the United States of America between 1960 and 2010. [Extracted from the article]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Although the importance of space is increasingly recognized, its conceptualization with reference to social movements varies. For a long time, critical geographers have considered space as socially constructed. Following Lefebvre’s influential distinction, the relevance of three types of socially produced space for social movements have been pointed out: (a) perceived space (or spatial practices), as a material space where everyday life is produced; (b) conceived space, as the representation of space as socially constructed through (dominant and alternative) discourses, meanings and signs; (c) lived space, or representational space, where (a) and (b) interact. This essay maps the various ways through which space structures protest while at the same time being structured by it. We shall address this task by revisiting the contributions of geographers and ethnographers, with the help of empirical research we developed on a case of local opposition to a large-scale infrastructure project: the Dal Molin military base in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Protesters employed a great variety of organizational forms in the cycles of popular contention that rocked the West African country of Burkina Faso from early 2011 through the overthrow of President Blaise Compaoré in October 2014. While some actions appeared largely leaderless and unstructured, others were clearly better organized and under some central direction. The organizations ranged from very local and loosely linked networks of student and community activists to professional national structures, such as union federations and political parties. The latter may have been better at articulating grievances and directly confronting state power and policies. But the former exhibited considerable tenacity and could more quickly draw in wider sectors of the population. Activists did not necessarily see one form as superior to the other; they had different strengths and weaknesses, depending on the particular conjuncture and goal. The big challenge, many agreed, was how to better coordinate their struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Activists need mass media to reach the largest audience possible, but getting media attention is difficult. Although disruptive protests are more likely to get covered by journalists, scholars claim that the resulting coverage is usually undesirable. Getting beneficial coverage presents a tactical dilemma for activists, and an analytical one for scholars. How do activists get the quality of media coverage they want when the tactics getting them attention result in negative coverage? This project contributes to the literature on movements and media in two ways: (1) I offer a new measure of desirable coverage that will be useful to media scholars: graphic description of grievances; (2) I use this measure to show that disruptive and controversial protest tactics may not always result in negative media attention. The new measure of ‘good’ media coverage helped determine conditions under which newspapers provide activists with the coverage they want. I used the Dynamics of Collective Action dataset to analyze all animal advocacy protests covered in theNew York Timesfrom 1960 to 1995, and found that the reputation of the involved organization may be associated with ‘good’ coverage. Organizations that have established a controversial identity may garner coverage that activists want, even if controversial actions do not. Put simply, it is less what activists do than who activists are that determines the quality of coverage they receive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Protest camps have become a prominent feature of the post-2010 cycle of social movements and while they have gripped the public and media's imagination, the phenomenon of protest camping is not new. The practice and performance of creating protest camps has a rich history, which has evolved through multiple movements, from Anti-Apartheid to Anti-war. However, until recently, the history of the protest camp as part of the repertoire of social movements and as a site for the evolution of a social movement's repertoire has largely been confined to the histories of individual movements. Consequently, connections between movements, between camps and the significance of the protest camp itself have been overlooked. In this research profile, we argue for the importance of studying protest camps in relation to social movements and the evolution of repertoires noting how protest camps adapt infrastructures and practices from tent cities, festival cultures, squatting communities and land-based autonomous movements. We also acknowledge protest camps as key sites in which a variety of repertoires of contention are developed, tried and tested, diffused or sometimes dismissed. To facilitate the study protest camps we suggest a theory and practice of ‘infrastructural analysis’ and differentiated between four protest camp infrastructures: (1) media & communication, (2) action, (3) governance and (4) re-creation. We then use the infrastructures of media and communications as a brief example as to how our proposed infrastructural analysis can contribute to the study of repertoires and our understanding of the rich dynamics of a protest camp. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Global crises such as the financial crisis, the energy crisis and the food crisis have, without doubt, social, political and ecological repercussions on the local scale. This article explores the mechanisms that mediate global crises into local conflicts. Based on empirical insights, it aims to contribute to the study of how global structures and processes relate to local conflicts and protest. The study analyses conflicts over the high cost of living in Burkina Faso, where intense protests related to the global food crises have occurred. Scale and framing are used as the central analytical concepts. The location of a problem (such as high consumer food prices) on a particular scale (local, national or global) is a politically contested issue. Referring to the conceptual differentiation between ‘scales of regulation’ and ‘scales of meaning’, the article argues that scalar ascriptions and discourses as such are already integral parts of political conflicts and protest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

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]

This article argues that paying attention to the spatialities of the Occupy movement, and in particular the role of territory, suggests that the dominant metaphor of the network may be insufficient to understanding the diverse spatial strategies of contemporary social movements. The aim of presenting this argument is both to be provocative and also to take seriously the Occupy movement's ‘politics of asking’, not shying away from asking challenging questions. It starts by introducing the reader to the Occupy London movement and its autonomous tendencies of non-hierarchical organisation and do it yourself politics. It then places Occupy London within the wider movement and compares it to the alter-globalisation movement, a similar example of a global movement for socio-economic justice. It is argued that understanding the autonomous politics of the alter-globalisation movement through the logic of networking is not only useful but also limiting in its potentials for conceptualising non-hierarchical organising. The remainder of the essay considers how Occupy may be moving beyond the network as a dominant organisational form and political goal. Specifically, it draws on the author's experiences at international gatherings and in the international commission working group of Occupy London and argues that there has been a renewed attention to territory and territoriality. This does not imply that networked spatialities of activism have become less important but raises questions over the centrality of networked thinking to contemporary understandings of global movements. By way of conclusion, this articles poses questions for activists and academics interested in Occupy. [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]