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Solidarity economies and rhizomatic practices: edited by Forno, Francesca and Richard R. Weiner, Abingdon, OX, Routledge, 2020, xii +131 pp., indices., £44.99 (hardback), ISBN: 9780367342234, £16.99 (ebook), ISBN: 9780429324550 To strengthen its relevancy for future research, the analytical framework laid out by Forno and Weiner would benefit from additional self-reflection on the limits of SCMOs and their social ramifications. Historically, SCMOs have their roots in past forms of social movement organizations such as the I cooperatives i and I mutualités i of the 19th century, as highlighted by Forno and Graziano in Chapter 2. [Extracted from the article]

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]

One challenging example might be the social uprising in Chile led by seemingly unorganized social movements, which have managed to force structural change without relying on traditional left-wing political parties, despite brutal repression from the state and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst the chaos we are currently facing, from the COVID-19 pandemic to extreme environmental and socioeconomic uncertainty, I found in Dean's concise "theory of the comrade" an interesting invitation to rethink our sense of political belonging. Dean's proposal of the comrade, which assumes a context of a revolutionary political party, could be discussed further by scholars and students interested on social movements, especially when considering some current events. [Extracted from the article]

Drawing on ethnographic research with social movement networks in Spain, this article explores the challenges and possibilities of research collaboration. My project focused on the emerging logics and practices of collective action, the ongoing re-definition of grassroots politics. The engagement with social movements as reflexive communities - not simply objects to be studied, but subjects actively producing their own analysis and explanations, their own ‘knowledge-practices’ - deeply transformed the in-fieldwork encounter. Through a series of co-analysis workshops, designed and implemented together with the research subjects/collaborators, this research became an open-ended dialogue of reflexivities. The shift from working on social movements to working and thinking together with social movement activists as co-researchers produced new scholarly knowledge, advancing our understanding of contemporary collective action, while simultaneously making research useful for the activists. Moreover, locating epistemic and methodological questions at the centre of the project, I addressed salient debates in social science, exploring collaborative frameworks in order to problematize traditional forms of knowledge production and validation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary goal of this article is to add to the literature on the role of social movement organizations in facilitating movement involvement and activism. Using Weber’s definition of domination and delineation of ideal types of social action as starting points, my specific focus is on those SMOs that exhibit authority that is situated in the whole (collective) and manifests an extra-ordinary (charismatic) hold on the members/followers. I suggest the term ‘collective charisma’ for this hybrid form of organizational authority exhibited in a subgroup of SMOs. Examples from the radical U.S. feminist movement are used to illustrate how this particular organizational form shapes movement commitment, specifically the creation of collective identity, oppositional consciousness, and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic research on activism in migration issues has mainly focused on the actions of either left-wing or far-right activists. As a result, less homogeneous, more complex configurations of actors have been overlooked. This article addresses this gap by drawing attention to unusual alliances of right-wing and left-wing actors as co-partners in the group of key protagonists of anti-deportation protests. Drawing on 96 interviews with actors involved in 15 studied protest cases that took place in Austria, Germany and Switzerland (2005-2013), we find two ideal types of protest, which we call personifying and exemplifying. Personifying protests include right-wing actors, strongly focus on the case of a particular migrant, and do not challenge the principle of deportation as such. In contrast, exemplifying protests do not include right-wing actors. They are carried out by actors with activist experience in NGOs, and more generally criticize deportation and restrictive migration policies. We argue that exemplifying protests are embedded in the solidarity movement, whereas personifying protests, lacking claims of social change or reform, resemble contemporary forms of pragmatic altruistic engagement aiming at individual solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This profile looks at the wave of at times violent protests against the economic, social and environmental consequences of mass tourism in Barcelona, which came to international attention in the summer of 2017. It outlines the leading role played by left-wing nationalist activists linked to the Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (CUP, Popular Unity Candidacy) political party in the protests. I examine CUP’s direct-action methods, targeting local business interests and foreign tourists, as well as the largely critical response this prompted from the wider anti-tourism industry movement. This profile addresses the CUP’s justifications for the action and the echo effect it had in other parts of Spain. It argues that to understand the events requires a focus on aspects of both continuity and change in urban social movement mobilisation in Barcelona, against processes of neoliberal urbanisation, in which anti-tourism industry contestation is to the fore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writings on the fringe Jewish settler grassroots network known as the Hilltop Youth have proliferated in recent years, following the increase in violent activism associated with the network. But knowledge on this violent activism, called Price Tag, has remained conflicting and problematic. Central questions persist: What is the meaning of Price Tag violence? What explains the increase in the rate and salience of Price Tag violence? What are the social-political implications of Price Tag violence? This article argues that Price Tag violence represents a new strategy of contention taking shape in the context of a fundamental reconfiguration of relations within Israel’s institutional and non-institutional radical Right, and that it represents a highly consequential social and political phenomenon with destabilizing and destructive effects nationally and regionally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines atheist activists from a lifestyle movement perspective. I focus on how atheist activists adopt the term ‘sceptic’ as a distinct identity marker to represent their growing interest in other types of activism beyond atheist community building and criticism of religious beliefs. My data come from thirty-five interviews with Canadian atheist activists and participant observation in the province of Alberta. In contrast to previous social movement approaches to atheist activism, I deemphasize the importance of collective identity and instead attend to personal identity as the site of social change. My findings show that being a sceptic is a personally meaningful identity in the context of a relatively weak secularist collective identity. Moreover, atheist activists who also identify as sceptics wish to expand the boundaries of the atheist movement to include individualistic projects of personal affirmation based on science and critical thinking. This work contributes to our understanding of the everyday activities of activists who engage in individual action in the absence of a strong collective identity. In particular, this article expands our understanding of lifestyle movements beyond the current focus on socially conscious consumption. Instead, I return to the roots of lifestyle movement theory, that is, how one’s everyday choices serve as a form of protest. Finally, this work contributes to atheism scholarship, which has neglected the diversity of individual identities within atheist organisations and among atheist activists. [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]

This introductory essay conceptually situates the dialogue between Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Social Movement Studies that this special issue aims to foster. Rather than considering ANT as a theory in the classic sense, we define it as a theoretical sensibility open to permanently redrawing its own shape in response to the relational entanglements it studies. ANT and its sibling, assemblage theory, have allowed scholars to attend to the complex ecologies within which agents, both human and non-human, mobilise to effect change in overlapping social, ecological, economic and technological realms. In these studies, relations take precedence over substances, thereby forging a radically decentred, redistributed approach to mobilisation. As such, ANT offers a point of departure from dominant understandings of social movements that rely on modernist, dualist epistemologies; ANT studies have expanded the body politic through the incorporation of non-human actants, and redefined collective action as a form of association between heterogeneous entities. Ultimately, we argue that ANT is a useful tool in the task of constructing forms of attention and care that aspire to learn from and think with social movements, rather than explaining them away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking his most recent publications on ways to engage with the planet as a point of departure, this conversation with Bruno Latour considers some of the political and conceptual challenges associated with what he calls the New Climate Regime. Latour discusses the need for breaking with the modernist framework that set the stage for the environmental crisis in the first place, and which has also hindered the capacity of social movements to affect the situation. Latour argues that only a new body politic (inclusive of non-humans) and a new geosocial politics (attuned to Gaia) will open up the possibility for sustaining life on our severely damaged planet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overflows that interrupt the ‘normal state of affairs’ are generative events that make visible the agential force of nonhumans. Practitioners of posthumanist disciplines - such as STS, ANT, economic performativity and animal studies - have exposed how nonhumans take part in the making of ‘the social.’ Due to their predominantly small-scale perspective, these efforts have left broader sociopolitical effects mainly unattended. Here I explore how the political agency of nonhumans can provoke sociopolitical consequences when approached through political ontological lenses. I argue that by conceiving reality as the precarious effect of struggles between competing ways of performing the world, human/nonhuman associations can be understood as part of non-dominant ontologies, revealing the world’s multiplicity and expanding the borders of political communities. To do so, I study a citizen/swans association that emerged in Valdivia, Chile, in response to a disaster that since 2004 has affected the Río Cruces wetland and its colony of swans, following the installation of a new pulp mill by Arauco. This unprecedented mobilization provoked the breakdown of Chile’s environmental framework and forced reform. I find that the suffering of the swans was ‘the’ most agentive force within the struggle, leading all sorts of actors to act in response. Based on an ontological reading of Rancière’s understanding of ‘the properly political’ and on Critchley’s notion of the ethical call that drives political action, I show how, through their ‘doings,’ the swans - previously unaccounted - became overtly political actors, ontologically reconfiguring the political community [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the relationship between a sonic entanglement and its ruling in a weekly assembly. In doing so, material participation is foregrounded through focus on this specific entanglement and the ways in which it is enacted within the context of a weekly assembly of a citizen-led project. Based on ethnographic work developed in el Campo de Cebada - a temporary use open-air urban site - I describe the case of a noise complaint, and how relationships around it are deployed in multiple directions. Different heterogeneous actors play specific roles in the development of a controversy, and the assembly of the project in question deals with them in order to govern them. The paper is organised around three moments: (1) the emergence and formation of a sonic entanglement; (2) the bestowing of legitimacy on the weekly assembly to deal with a controversy lacking legal standing; and (3) the process of ruling that sonic entanglement by the legitimised assembly. In studying this case, I explore how activist projects are complex heterogeneous assemblages that are developed, governed, and ultimately benefit from the enactment of what I call the ‘politics of welcoming’. I argue that those politics of welcoming - against politics of confrontation - are based on the management of timing through several governance mechanisms that allow stretching, lengthening, delaying, shortening or slowing time. Among those mechanisms, but not limited to them, we find radical openness, under-definition, re-definition, subjective perception, interpretation, exception and postponement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution calls attention to the values of assemblage thinking for the study of contentious economies. A syntactical perspective can make visible social arrangements that are otherwise difficult to represent in traditional social movement categories. With the help of a jar of jam, an object that has meaningful entanglements in anti-camorra activism in Campania (Italy), the article begins by empirically illustrating instances of mobilisation that disrupt relationships of mafia dependency. The focus lies on the force of composition, the syntax of contention. The second section moves on to explore the theoretical backdrop of the analysis, and does so by suggesting some possible points of dialogue between social movement studies and assemblage thinking. These are the themes of network, conflict and identity. In various ways, assemblage thinking might be seen as diametrically opposite to many movement theories. However, these traditions share many interests: both are essentially concerned with grasping how different orders come to be, what makes them last and what makes them fall apart. Despite these similarities, these two traditions have not spoken systematically to each other. As divergences in social movement studies have significantly revolved around hierarchies (i.e. do political opportunities, personal gains or culture matter most to movement development?), I conclude by suggesting that assemblage approaches might have something to offer: they shift the perspective from ‘what matters most’ to ‘how it comes to matter.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2010–2012 were years of global protests. This wave of mobilization has been celebrated for its horizontal, leaderless, and participatory character. But this was not the case in all countries. In Israel, which saw the largest social contention in its history, the protest was marked by a dominant and centralized leadership and by cooperation with institutional actors and corporate media. Based on the study of the Israeli case, this research seeks to contribute to explanations of how movements’ organizational forms develop. Social movement scholars have shown that activists’ forms of organization are limited to a familiar repertoire of action. Building on previous scholarship, I argue that activists’ organizational repertoires are shaped by ahabitusthat familiarizes and routinizes certain practices. But while existing scholarship focuses on how organizationalhabitusdevelops within the field of activism, I expand the applicability ofhabitusand show how movement repertoires are also influenced by habit in fields unrelated and even antagonistic to activism. Based on participant observations and interviews, I show how in the Israeli case, militarism formed part of activists’ organizationalhabitusand contributed to the 2011 protests’ centralized and hierarchical character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2007, Petrova and Tarrow coined the termtransactional activism, arguing that, despite weak individual-level political participation, civil societies in Central and Eastern Europe were surprisingly strong due to their capacity to establish transactional links. Yet the research which followed, relying mostly on quantitative data, has not uncovered much evidence ofhowtransactional activism works. To make advances here, we take a more qualitative approach and focus on transactional ties among NGOs, developing a more fine-grained conceptualization. Specifically, we distinguish associative ties of loosely defined cooperation and interlocking ties based on the division of labour. We utilize this new conceptualization through a successful anti-corruption initiative known as ‘Reconstruction of the State’. The initiative presented itself largely in transactional terms (plurality of participating actors) and was extremely successful in the run-up to the Parliamentary elections in 2013 in the Czech Republic, inspiring similar initiatives abroad. We use social network analysis and qualitative interviews to test our concept of interlocking transactional ties. In contrast to our expectations, we find limited division of labour in the initiative, with just one organization, in the main, shouldering most of the important tasks. We use our findings to question the previously claimed importance of transactional activism in Central and Eastern Europe. Specifically, we call for more robust evidence describing how cooperation among organizations empowers civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging with the wider ‘movements of the squares’ of 2011, Occupy London was defined by occupation, and by participants’ negotiation of what occupation meant. Its forms and meanings changed as London’s Occupiers moved between occupied sites, through uprootings by eviction, and into post-eviction attempts to extend Occupy’s territorial politics without the camps. This paper builds on three years of ethnography to consider occupation as an unfolding process, using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘refrain’. This describes territory in three ‘moments’: the marking of a fragile centre; the stabilization of a bounded ‘home’; and the breaching of boundaries, extending in progressive directions. This rubric is used to analyze London’s occupations, and their defining tension, between an expansive desire to ‘Occupy Everywhere’ – connecting to the wider ‘99 percent’ – and the tendency to become embedded in the protest camp ‘home’. The features of ‘home’ are analyzed using Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’, highlighting an alterity with ambivalent consequences for Occupy’s project. The paper argues that despite a desire to ‘deterritorialize’ occupation, Occupy London stalled in the moment of ‘home’, a consequence of the camp’s status asthe&#x2018.common ground’ of an often disparate movement, and the reduction of productive capacities characterizing Occupy’s terminal downswing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent global eruption of large protests calls for a rethinking of the question of movement participation. The conventional model of movement as organized mobilization led by pre-existing organizations and top–down leadership clearly fails as an adequate portrait. As an alternative, horizontality with its emphasis on direct democracy, decentralized decision-making, and prefigurative politics (the rejection of instrumental view of participation) emerges in the global justice movement. This article explores an intermediate pattern of movement participation between these two extremes. Analyzing the protest occupation of Taiwan’s national legislature in 2014, the so-called Sunflower Movement, I theorize the mechanism of improvisation, defined as ‘strategic responses without prior planning,’ as a vital process that facilitates coordination in a large-scale protest. Improvisation involves decentralized decision-making, but it proceeds as a means to a clearly defined and consensual movement goal. The creative collaboration by dispersed, but experienced activists plays a critical yet often neglected role during contentious confrontations against the government. Improvisation is capable of orchestrating large-scale protests because movement leadership is oft constrained by the lack of real-time information and their command is more effective when it provides room for improvisation from below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eruption of the Spanish 15M movement in 2011 was marked by a high degree of political participation and creative experimentation. The political repertoire has constantly been re-evaluated, with methods revised and evolving, from the occupation of public spaces to the recent creation of new constitutional parties. One of the key aspects of these tactical revisions has been the involvement of anarchist actors in an experimental process of engagement in electoral processes, a method of political engagement anarchists standardly oppose. Our study identifies the motivations and theoretical justifications that have recently led libertarian activists to take the electoral path. This paper stands in the small but growing tradition of works that examine the recent phenomenon of new parties built by ‘street’ activists, but uniquely concentrates on a detailed case study of the anarchist actors linked to the platformCastelló en Moviment(CsM). It thus describes the anarchist influence in recent electoral developments, identifies proponents’ justifications for engaging in these previously rejected methods and highlights some of the doubts raised about the electoral experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The military coup against president Morsi in July 2013 sparked the largest wave of Islamist mobilization in Egypt’s modern history. As the ousted president’s supporters took to the street in what became known as the ‘anti-coup’ movement, they were met with fierce repression. This article retraces the contentious dynamics in the summer of 2013 in a nested research design and with a focus on contentious repertoires. Drawing on data for over 2400 protest events and debunking the myth of a swift defeat of the anti-coup protests, we show how repression, besides affecting protest levels, markedly changed the quality of contention. Most notably, three transformative events involving massive repressive violence impacted on protest spaces, tactics and timing: rather than binary notions of escalation vs. demobilization, adaptive mechanisms of decentralization, diversification and substitution dominated the anti-coup movement’s reaction to repression. Centralized mass protests evolved into smaller, more flexible, and highly decentralized forms that were better fit to skirt the regime’s repression efforts. Our findings have important implications for the theorization of the protest–repression-nexus. They prompt scholars to conceive of repression and backlash as multi-layered phenomena and study their effects in a disaggregate framework. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

‘Post-hegemony’ is a critical notion introduced by theorists who take issue with the modern politics of hierarchical organization, representation, unification, the state and ideology: the politics of ‘hegemony’ according to A. Gramsci and E. Laclau. Post-hegemonic thinkers tend to celebrate, by contrast, contemporary social movements which appear to be horizontal, leaderless, participatory, diverse, networked and opposed to the state, global capitalism and ideological closures. Critical responses to the ‘post-hegemonic’ thesis object that contemporary democratic resistances do not attain, in effect, a full rupture with hegemony or they should not attain it. The paper offers, first, an illuminating, up-to-date map of the different positions in the debate over post-hegemony. It seeks to demonstrate, then, that diverse figures of contemporary activism are indeed post-hegemonic not as this has been understood in most post-hegemonic accounts till now, but in the sense of the ‘post-’ which implies an impure, ongoing development: a time and a space in-between. The second half of the paper is devoted, thus, to recasting and reformulating the conception of post-hegemony, tracing it out in the values, the practices and the logics which inform recent democratic movements, as these craft new modes of unification, leadership and representation beyond the hegemonic mould. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Egyptian ‘revolutionary’ repertoire of action, that is to say the repertoire used by the protesters of January 2011, was characterized by a combination of several features: occupation of a symbolic place; ‘horizontal’ forms of organization; recourse to new electronic information and communication technologies (especially social networks); and rhetoric centered around universal values such as dignity, social justice, human rights, and democracy. This repertoire was born as a result of the merging of two parallel cycles of mobilization, which had actually started during the previous decade, one animated by activists from the educated middle class, and the other by workers struggling for economic and social reforms. After the fall of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, it demonstrated its extreme modularity, being appropriated by different players from all sections of the political spectrum, from the Salafisthāzimūnto proponents of the military power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Police face a unique dilemma when policing protests that explicitly target them, such as the anti-police brutality protests that have swept the United States recently. Because extant research finds that police response to protests is largely a function of the threat – and especially the threat to police – posed by a protest, police may repress these protests more than other protests, as they may constitute a challenge to their legitimacy as a profession. Other research suggests police agencies are strongly motivated by reputational concerns, suggesting they may treat these protests with special caution to avoid further public scrutiny. Using data on over 7,000 protests events in New York over a 35-year period from 1960 to 1995, I test these competing hypotheses and find that police respond to protests making anti-police brutality claims much more aggressively than other protests, after controlling for indicators of threat and weakness used in previous studies. Police are about twice as likely to show up to anti-police brutality protests compared with otherwise similar protests making other claims and, once there, they intervene (either make arrests, use force or violence against protesters, or both) at nearly half of these protests, compared to about one in three protests making other claims. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2015 Milan hosted the Universal Exposition with the theme ‘Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life’. Even if characterized by various scandals and problems, the edition was narrated by the mainstream media as a political and economic success. Critical voices were almost completely obscured by favorable propaganda and the ideas of development and the future proposed by the Expo rhetoric was presented as inevitable, configuring ‘the best of all possible worlds’ in a more general post-political frame. In this profile I first present the main characteristics of the No Expo Network, e.g. the actors that composed it and the main critiques that they advanced. I will then focus on the reasons for its defeat, which is then contextualized in relation to the election of the Chief Executive Officer of Expo 2015 as new Mayor of Milan. Here, we can see the continuation and structural strengthening of the neoliberal politics of Expo2015 beyond the mega event itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The following article traces the tactical co-development as a process within ‘mutual brokerage’ between Anglo-American abolitionists. In the case of the Anglo-American abolitionist network of the early nineteenth century, the co-production of so-called ‘world conventions’ brought together an international network of abolitionist actors tied to one another through previous fora for discussion and debate. Mutual brokerage is perhaps most clearly seen within the example of female abolitionists during the nineteenth-century abolition campaigns. Women brought to the Anglo-American abolitionism the co-development of tactics through writings, planning, meetings, speeches, and petition writing. The article argues for a dialogical account regarding the spread of ideas and a reexamination of the role of brokerage within tactical diffusion. The writings and in-person debate about the ethical and moral concerns of the movement were channels through which ideas flowed. Instead of a one-directional flow with brokers as translators bringing new tactics from one locale to another, the channels were characterized by the absence of earlier ‘originators’ and later ‘adopters’ – traditional categories assigned to actors within the diffusion process. Rather, the article posits that the channels of transmission shaped the spread of ideas and subverted the traditional categories of ‘transmitters’ and ‘receivers’ found in more monological accounts of diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

The existing research highlights how effective strategies facilitate social movements in recruiting participants and attracting resources. Less effort has been done to investigate the relationship between strategies and their long-term impact on the movement. In this article, I examine a grassroots education reform movement – the Community University Movement in Taiwan since 1998 to shed light on the dynamic relationship between initial strategies and the movement development. Specifically, I examine the latecomer phenomenon – one of the crucial consequences brought by initial strategies. Movement leaders often face a dilemma that encouraging broader participation runs the risk of attracting latecomers with diverse backgrounds to the movement. Based on my ethnographic work, I find that the latecomers bring four types of impacts to the community university movement – fragmentation, competition, goal replacement, and political-patronage. I further investigate how movement leaders coped with this situation. The findings show that without sufficient organizational capacity, movement leaders were in a weak position to harness the influence of the latecomers. I also find that those community universities founded by activists, in order to compete, had become more like their competitors to emphasize performance and efficiency. These findings thus highlight the importance of choosing the initial strategies that would minimize the potential negative effects brought by the latecomers. [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 qualitative content analysis of online documents compiled from the North American Animal Liberation Front (ALF), Earth Liberation Kollective (ELK) and Grassroots Ontario Animal Liberation (GOAL) network websites and Facebook pages explores how activism within the Radical Animal Liberation Movement (RALM) intersects with other social movements. While most literature to date traces the RALM’s (dis)junctures with other forms of social justice activism through analyses of their broad ideological assumptions, or the views of renowned RALM scholars, this research provides authentic insights into the voices of Canadian, American and Mexican activists as they are represented in documents they author themselves. Like activists in anarchistic, anti-capitalist, immigrant rights, Indigenous, prison abolition, prisoner support and radical feminist movements, those in the RALM critique capitalism, colonialism, hierarchy, racism, sexism, state power and the prison industrial complex. Our research calls into question the existing narratives that depict the RALM as an extremist, single-issue movement oblivious to all other forms of social inequality, injustice, marginalization and oppression. Rather, RALM activists are building alliances with other radical social movements to achieve the common goal of ending both human and animal suffering and exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many Western democracies have seen an increase in extreme right mobilization over the past several decades but extreme right mobilization is not a new phenomenon when we look historically. In this paper, we examine fifty years of white supremacist protest in the United States to help shed light on the factors that explain variation in levels of right-wing mobilization. Using annual time-series analysis, we find that traditional strain explanations do not explain these protests but that threats to the traditional economic, political, and social power of whites were critical. Ethnic competition associated with black population growth and political threats stemming from the political power of northern Democrats, a divided federal government, and civil rights protest stimulated this mobilization. These findings support a broadened ethnic competition/power devaluation model of right-wing mobilization that emphasizes the mobilizing effects of economic and political threats to a relatively advantaged group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everyday feminist practices are located in the personal lives of feminists, therefore, third wave feminists frequently use the slogan the personal is political to emphasise the political value of such practices. Often, second wave feminists do not agree with this interpretation of the famous feminist catchphrase, which initially meant to call for collective political responses to personal experiences of gender inequalities. This article investigates this dispute that is symbolic of the broader relationship between second and third wave feminism. It compares both perspectives on everyday feminism by relating arguments for and against the political value of everyday feminism to empirical findings of a qualitative study. Based on 40 interviews with second and third wave feminists in New Zealand, I argue that the dispute is based on a number of misunderstandings between the opposing perspectives. Disentangling those misunderstandings, I conclude that although everyday feminism as a manifestation of ‘the personal’ works towards ‘small’ political aims, it is a political practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social change endeavors are increasingly shaped by corporate interests and, in some instances, large corporations take over ideas and practices initiated by social change advocates. We label this process ‘corporatization’ and argue that, while it is clearly a variant of co-optation, it has specific qualities that warrant a separate analytical framework. Using existing research to examine the cases of breast cancer activism, organic food, and recycling in the United States – all extreme examples of corporatization – we conceptualize corporatization as a subset of co-optation in which: (1) corporations come to dominate fields initiated by activists; (2) corporatized versions become widespread; and (3) alternative, ‘response,’ movements emerge to oppose corporatized versions. We posit that, in each case, ‘corporate takeover devices’ allowed corporate entities to ‘join the game’ and eventually come to dominate fields initiated by social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Analyzing fear, hope, anger, and guilt in climate activism, we consider these pivotal emotions to climate activists. The way they are managed affects activists’ motivations and mobilizing strategies. This argument builds on the theoretical premise that emotions energize and orient all actions. Qualitative interviews were carried out with climate activists in Denmark, Sweden, and at two UNFCCC Conferences of Youth. Our analysis shows that fear motivates action by raising awareness of the threat of climate catastrophe. The paralyzing potential of fear is mediated by hope: Hope propels action while (collective) action generates hope and manages fear. The danger-alerting capacity of fear is embraced ‘internally’, but rejected as an effective emotion in mobilization. Instead, a hopeful ‘positive message’ is emphasized by activists from the Global North. Anger is treated cautiously as an emotion to be pacified/transformed and guilt/blaming is largely rejected too. There is a different pattern in the southern narratives. Here hope, guilt, and anger combine to manage acute fear. Hope lies in collective action but also in the angry ascription of responsibility to the North. Contrasting the North, acute fear is thus managed by anger. Different patterns of emotion management derive from different political and socio-material contexts/experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reveals and explains the workings of generally ignored mechanism of state–movement interaction proposed by Charles Tilly, namely thecompulsion mechanism. Specifically, two types of compulsion mechanisms will be defined:compulsive supportandcompulsive control. In both types, without using physical repression, the state’s institutions reinforce the movement’s identity while also prompting it to adapt its repertoire of strategies to the state institutions’ requirements. Empirically, this article focuses on the interaction of the assembly movement with the state in the City of Buenos Aires. This movement emerged as a result of the socioeconomic and political crises of 2001–2002 in Argentina. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, the purpose is to unpack how the assembly movement’s identities and strategies were built and how its interaction with the state evolved. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to understand an understudied phenomenon: governmental players joining forces with non-governmental players in contentious actions against policies they want to prevent or redress. This behaviour, which we call ‘governmental activism’, problematizes important assumptions in the social movement literature on state–SMO dichotomies and on seeing ‘the state’ as a homogeneous and unified actor that solely provides the context for SMO activities. Governmental activism also problematizes assumptions on cooperation and ‘new’ modes of coordination in the governance literature. To understand governmental activism, we build on the strategic interaction perspective from social movement studies and on third-phase institutionalism from political science. In our analysis, we show the particulars of governmental activism. Our arguments are illustrated by empirical material on a case of municipal amalgamation in the Netherlands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent decades, social movement scholars have expanded our understanding of ‘terrorism’ by analyzing a particular trajectory,movement to armed group, whereby movement demobilization spurs armed struggle. This article analyzes an alternative trajectory:armed group to movement. Once armed struggle’s limitations become apparent, armed groups often adopt an attritional military strategy suited to their capacities. To securely wage an attritional campaign, groupsdisembedthrough the adoption of insular structures, removing them from their milieux and from recruits and resources needed for organizational reproduction. To offset this, armed groupsreembedthrough the development ofpolitico-military movement structures: forming allied aboveground movement organizations; coordinating armed and unarmed activism; and creating a ‘movement’ identity. This offsets disembedding in three ways. First, collective action augments armed groups’ violence by expanding the struggle into new domains. Second, mobilized support provides armed groups political legitimacy, countering the ‘terrorist’ label. Third, aboveground movement organizations assist in recruitment, alliance-formation, public communication, and mobilization, facilitating armed groups’ organizational reproduction. This paper investigates the strategic decision to adopt movement structures by analyzing documents produced by militants linked to the IRA and to rival ETAs, ETA Politico-Military and ETA Military, allowing for the exploration of different aspects of the decision to adopt movement structures. From Irish republican texts, insights into the basic benefits of movement development are gleaned. Basque separatist documents, on the other hand, provide perspectives on the nature of interorganizational centralization and coordination within politico-military movements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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

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 article tackles two main aspects related to the interaction between social movements and digital technologies. First, it reflects on the need to include and combine different theoretical approaches in social movement studies so as to construct more meaningful understanding of how social movement actors deals with digital technologies and with what outcomes in societies. In particular, the article argues that media ecology and media practice approaches serve well to reach this objective as: they recognize the complex multi-faceted array of media technologies, professions and contents with which social movement actors interact; they historicize the use of media technologies in social movements; and they highlight the agency of social movement actors in relation to media technologies while avoiding a media-centric approach to the subject matter. Second, this article employs a media practice perspective to explore two interrelated trends in contemporary societies that the articles in this special issue deal with: the personalization and individualization of politics, and the role of the grassroots in political mobilizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we aim at expanding the event-based and protest-centered perspective that is typically adopted to study the nexus between social media and movements. To this aim, we propose a network-based approach to explore the changing role that these tools play during the dynamic unfolding of movement processes and, more particularly, over the course of their institutionalization. In the first part, we read the added value of social media as a function of the ‘integrative power’ of the networks they foster – a unique and evolving form of sociotechnical power that springs from the virtuous encounter between social media networking potential and social resources. In the second part, we investigate this form of power by focusing directly on online networks’ structure as well as on the type of communication and participation environments they host. We apply our proposed approach to the longitudinal exploration of the Twitter networks deployed in the period 2012–2014 during three annual editions of the transnational feminist campaign ‘Take Back The Tech!’ (TBTT). Results from our case study suggest that, over time, TBTT supporters do in fact make a differentiated use of social media affordances – progressively switching their communicative strategies to better sustain the campaign’s efforts inside and outside institutional venues. Thus, the exploration of the TBTT case provides evidence of the usefulness of the proposed approach to reflect on the different modes in which social media can be exploited in different mobilization stages and political terrains. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article we develop the notion of the technology-media-movements complex (TMMC) as a field-definition statement for ongoing inquiry into the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in social and political movements. We consider the definitions and boundaries of the TMMC, arguing particularly for a historically rooted conception of technological development that allows better integration of the different intellectual traditions that are currently focused on the same set of empirical phenomena. We then delineate two recurrent debates in the literature highlighting their contributions to emerging knowledge. The first debate concerns the divide between scholars who privilege media technologies, and see them as driving forces of movement dynamics, and those who privilege media practices over affordances. The second debate broadly opposes theorists who believe in the emancipatory potential of ICTs and those who highlight the ways they are used to repress social movements and grassroots mobilization. By mapping positions in these debates to the TMMC we identify and provide direction to three broad research areas which demand further consideration: (i) questions of power and agency in social movements; (ii) the relationships between, on the one hand, social movements and technology and media as politics (i.e. cyberpolitics and technopolitics), and on the other, the quotidian and ubiquitous use of digital tools in a digital age; and (iii) the significance of digital divides that cut across and beyond social movements, particularly in the way such divisions may overlay existing power relations in movements. In conclusion, we delineate six challenges for profitable further research on the TMMC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written in recent years about the growing impact of social media on social movements. While authors have extolled the virtues of Facebook and Twitter as organisational and informational tools for a range of movements from the Arab Spring to Occupy, evidence remains patchy as to under what conditions social media is most effective at engaging and mobilising the wider public. Drawing on the work of Tarrow, this article considers the impact of cycle effects on the effectiveness of social media as a mobilising and organising tool for the 2010/11 U.K. student protests. Although preceding the broader ‘movement of the squares’ contention cycle, the protests made similar use of social media for generating mass participation. Yet, its mobilising power was dependent on a number of temporal factors, including amplification through mainstream media and the urgency of its initial campaign goal. Moreover, towards the end of the cycle, activists were found to be using social media – via ‘secret’ Facebook groups – in ways that reinforced emerging group hierarchies, arguably contradicting their initial commitment to open-access networks and participatory democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The information environment that social movements face is increasingly complex, making traditional assumptions about media, messaging, and communication used in social movement studies less relevant. Building on work begun within the study of digital protest, we argue that a greater integration of political communication research within social movement studies could offer substantial research contributions. We illustrate this claim by discussing how a greater focus on audiences and message reception, as well as message context, could advance the study of social movements. Specifically, we discuss a range of topics as applied to movement research, including information overload, selective attention, perceptions of bias, the possibilities that entertainment-related communications open up, and priming, among other topics. We suggest the risks of not adapting to this changing information environment, and incorporating insights from political communication, affect both the study of contemporary (including digital) protest, as well as potentially historical protest. The possibilities opened up by this move are immense including entirely new research programs and questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has recognized the role of emotions in protests and social movements in the offline world. Despite the current scenario of ubiquitous social media and ‘Twitter revolutions,’ our knowledge about the connections between emotions and online protests still remains limited. In this study, we examine whether online protest actions follow the same emotional groundwork for supporting and nurturing a social movement as in the offline world, and how these emotions vary across various stages of the social movement. Through a computer-assisted emotion analysis of 65,613 Twitter posts (tweets), posted during the Nirbhaya social movement (movement against the Delhi gang-rape incident) in India, we identified a strong resemblance between online emotional patterns and offline protest emotions as discussed in literature. Formal statistical testing of a range of emotions (negativity, positivity, anger, sadness, anxiety, certainty, individualism, collectivism, and achievement) demonstrates that they significantly differed across stages of the social movement; as such, they influenced the course of the online protest, resonating parallels with offline events. The findings highlight the importance of anger and anxiety in stirring the collective conscience, and identify that positive emotion was pervasive during the protest event. Implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have become an essential part of contentious politics and social movements in contemporary China. Although quite a few scholars have explored ICTs, contentious politics, and collective action in China, they largely focus on the event-based analysis of discrete contentious events, failing to capture, reflect, and assess most of the political ferment in and around the routine use of digital media in people’s everyday lives. This study proposes a broader research agenda by shifting the focus from contentious events – ‘moments of madness’ – to ‘the politics of mundanity’: the political dynamics in the mundanity of digitally mediated, routine daily life. The agenda includes, first, the investigation of the dynamics underlying the mundane use of digital media, which not only places the use of ICTs in contentious moments into ‘a big picture’ to understand the political potential of mundane use of ICTs, but also reveals ‘everyday resistance,’ or less publicly conspicuous tactics, as precursors of open, confrontational forms of contentious activity. Second, the agenda proposes the examination of mundane experiences to understand the sudden outburst of contention and digital media as the ‘repertoire of contention.’ Third, the agenda scrutinizes the adoption of mundane expressions of contentious challenges to authoritarian regimes, as they allow for the circumvention of the heavy censorship of collective action mobilization. Mundane expressions have thereby emerged as a prominent part of the mobilization mechanism of contention in China. Addressing ‘the politics of mundanity’ will provide a nuanced understanding of ICTs and contentious collective action in China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Anonymous is notoriously elusive as the movement takes on radically different guises, constantly mutates, and traverses national borders and ideological divides. Since Anonymous is difficult to grasp with conventional social movement theory, this paper uses insights from complexity theory to analyze the movement’s evolution in general and its dynamics of power in particular. While participants in Anonymous radically reject hierarchy and leadership, dominant groups emerged at various points in the movement’s evolution. This paper aims to explain how such dominant groups emerge and concentrate power and how they subsequently dissolve and lose power. Drawing on ethnographic research as well as secondary sources, it identifies mechanisms of power concentration and diffusion within nominally horizontalist movements. [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]