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The 2019 Fridays For Future global climate strikes were extraordinary protest mobilisations in many respects, both in terms of size, age composition and the absence of a specific external triggering event. To properly understand it, one must account for Greta Thunberg's leadership role in the mobilisation – the 'Greta effect'. We contribute to such an account by linking the 'Greta effect' on individual mobilisation to theories of political iconicity and political role models. Empirically, we use unique data from two waves of international surveys of participants in European Fridays For Future protests – on 15 March and 20–27 September 2019 – demonstrating that the perceived individual impact of Greta differs considerably among those who were mobilised in climate strikes. Through multilevel regression analysis, we furthermore show that (a) young women were especially prone to have been inspired and mobilised by Thunberg as a role model and (b) subjectively assessed mobilising influence by 'Greta' – in her capacity as a political icon – is positively related to protest participants' instrumental motivation, sense of solidarity and collective identity. We argue that our results contribute to a better understanding of informal social movement leadership in contemporary political mobilisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been much debate about the consequences of the internet and social media for activism and social movements. According to Lance W Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, digital activism involves a logic of 'connective action', in which collective action and collective identity lose importance. To assess the validity of this theory, I focus on personal testimony campaigns that have by now become a familiar digital tactic, especially in online mobilisations around issues of gender and sexuality. Drawing on discourse analysis of some of the most prominent examples, from #MeToo to #GirlsLikeUs, I argue that more than a logic of connection, what is at stake here is a 'logic of collection', involved in gathering personal testimonies as specimens of various grievances people are affected by (sexual harassment, discrimination, etc.). Aggregating personal testimonies around shared hashtags provides a means to construct and/or trasform the collective identity of the groups involved in order to raise their self-awareness and place them in a better position to engage in collective action. These practices thus suggest the need to overcome the opposition between personal and collective identity inherent in the theory of 'connective action', and refocus research on the forms of online identification that connect these two levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hacktivists oftentimes challenge or subvert existing power relations or structures and attempt to promote reform. How the public perceives occurrences of hacktivism can influence the direction and impact of operations, including their potential success. Public support can encompass person power, computational ability, resources and solidarity, among other things. This study examines socio-legal contexts in which an individual is embedded and personal perceptions as predictors for support for hacktivism. Using representative survey data from 23 countries (n = 23,140), the study finds that more effective civic participation mechanisms and more positive views toward alternative actors and hacktivists' utilitarianism motives were associated with heightened support. In contrast, greater trust in legal and state authorities promoted opposition. Effective justice was not associated with more support but was with less opposition for hacktivism. Implications for campaigns, social movements, and desistance of activity are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates—based on an interpretive discourse analysis of three types of memes (Rabid Feminists, Women's Bodies, Policy Ideas) and secondary thread discourse on 4chan's "Politically Incorrect" discussion board—two key findings: (1) the existence of a gendered hate based scientific discourse, "science fan fiction," in online spaces and (2) how gender "science fan fiction" is an outcome of the male supremacist cosmology, by producing and justifying resentment against white women as being both inherently untrustworthy (politically, sexually, intellectually) and dangerous. This perspective—which combines hatred and distrust of women with white nationalist anxieties about demographic shifts, racial integrity, and sexuality—then motivates misogynist policy ideas including total domination of women or their removal. 4chan users employ this discourse to "scientifically" substantiate claims of white male supremacy, the fundamental untrustworthiness of white women, and to argue white women's inherent threat to white male supremacist goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media and digital platforms have become essential tools for the new generation of youth activists. However, these tools subject youth to both new (and old) forms of surveillance and control. Drawing on in-depth interviews and social media walkthroughs with 61 youth activists, I examine hybrid tactics that these youth employ to resist surveillance and other forms of digitally mediated control as they participate in politics and social movements. I show that even in democracies like the United States and Canada, for individuals along intersecting axes of marginalization (e.g. race, gender), public political acts do not capture the full range of young people's political repertoires. Young people, especially those from marginalized groups, adopt hidden, under-the-radar tactics in response to pressures of social, state, and corporate surveillance. I develop the concept of "digital infrapolitics" referring to the ways in which digital politics and activism go below the radar under surveillance and control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With growing public distrust toward European institutions, Eurosceptic populist radical-right parties make up almost a third of MEPs in the current European Parliament. As part of the larger scholarly debate on populist parties' success, this article examines intra-party selection logic for the 'perfect' populist radical-right MEP candidate. Using original data from participant observation and interviews with Alternative for Germany delegates during the 2018/2019 European Election Assembly, this study suggests that party members were more likely to be selected as candidates if they (1) possessed extensive network with right-wing social movements to strengthen their electoral mobilization; (2) and showed strong commitment to party cohesion and good reputation to fend off accusations of racism and Nazism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on #MeToo has examined the feminist underpinnings of the movement and affordances of digital platforms to create space for telling stories of sexual harassment and violence. This essay makes a different contribution, in that we seek to understand the impact of the viral version of #MeToo on the established primarily Black community developed by Tarana Burke. In this essay, we use the framework of intersectionality and organizational paradox to examine the differences in the social construction of the two versions of the movement. The framework of intersectionality allows us to examine how the viral version of #MeToo perpetuated by Alyssa Milano reified the social construction of inequalities and interlocking systems of oppression for Black and other women of color. The article examines the effects of Milano's entrance into the "me too" space on the community built through Burke's "me too" movement. We identify an illumination/occlusion paradox that creates the illusion of inclusivity, creates difficulty in community boundary management, and allows for outsider gaze into a previously safe space. We argue for moving beyond the considerations of assigning credit for the movement and instead consider the impacts of the paradox of the original community experiencing erasure through the abrupt and swift increased visibility of the hashtag. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health policies and the problems they constitute are deeply shaped by multiple publics. In this article we conceptualize health policy counterpublics : temporally bounded socio-political forms that aim to cultivate particular modes of conduct, generally to resist trajectories set by arms of the state. These counterpublics often emerge from existing social movements and involve varied forms of activism and advocacy. We examine a health policy counterpublic that has arisen in response to new forms of HIV public health surveillance by drawing on public documents and interview data from 2021 with 26 stakeholders who were critical of key policy developments. Since 2018, the national rollout of molecular HIV surveillance (MHS) and cluster detection and response (CDR) programs in the United States has produced sustained controversies among HIV stakeholders, including among organized networks of people living with HIV. This article focuses on how a health policy counterpublic formed around MHS/CDR and how constituents problematized the policy agenda set in motion by federal health agencies, including in relation to data ethics, the meaningful involvement of affected communities, informed consent, the digitization of health systems, and HIV criminalization. Although familiar problems in HIV policymaking, concerns about these issues have been reconfigured in response to the new sociotechnical milieu proffered by MHS/CDR, generating new critical positions aiming to remake public health. Critical attention to the scenes within which health policy controversies play out ought to consider how (counter)publics are made, how problems are constituted, and the broader social movement dynamics and activist resources drawn upon to contest and reimagine policymaking in public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances recent debates on social movement (relational) fields, outcomes, and successes by suggesting that the analysis of such fields as a whole must be temporal. The relational interpersonal and intersubjective choices made by interdependent actors in social life take place in fields of interaction, but these interactions and their networks of social relations have a history. Hence, the social movement field is characterised by multiple temporal periods through which the actions of activists both shape and are shaped by the long-term socio-political environments in which they are embedded. To develop this analysis, we identify a football supporter-movement in England, 'Safe Standing', revealing the complex interplay of cultural and technological patterns of interaction across the compelling timeframes and orientations of a 30-year movement field. Adopting a theoretical framework which synthesises research on the strategic interactions of movement 'players' and 'arenas', and sport-focused security fields, we identify a series of compound and sub-players across the political, symbolic, mediatised, technological, and legislative arenas which constitute the security field of contention, in what is an under-researched lifeworld in sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a recent surge in the literature on the far right, there has been a theoretical gap in studying the relationship between the dynamics of change in the far right and the changing digital landscape. Drawing on a set of interrelated concepts developed in far-right studies, social movement studies, and media and communication studies, this theoretical paper adopts a framework based on the concepts of digital network repertoires and the mediation opportunity structure to discuss the ways in which various actors on the far right – reactionary conservatives, online antagonistic communities and right-wing extremists and terrorists – exploit the affordances of mainstream and alt-tech platforms for their own purposes. Through this discussion, this article seeks to shed light on the interplay between e-extremism and the online far right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this qualitative study, we focus on Las Kellys, a Spanish movement of room attendants who have mobilised against labour precarisation and social devaluation, to address two challenges: (1) to characterise the role of social media in the construction and politicisation of collective identity as a stepping stone to mobilisation, and (2) to describe the lines of interplay between online politicisation of collective identity and other mobilisation factors such as grievances, social embeddedness and efficacy. Findings suggest that (1) room attendants build a politicised collective identity on Facebook, which functions as both an online community of coping and a locus of politicisation and micro-mobilisation, and (2) online politicisation of collective identity happens in online/offline interplay with the process of consensus mobilisation around the room attendants' issues (grievances), the social capital accumulated within intragroup and intergroup networks (social embeddedness) and the expectation of changing conditions and/or policies through protest (efficacy). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban studies have shown that the affordances, constraints and forms of urban climate change mitigation often emerge from 'entrepreneurial' modes of governance that have developed in post-Fordist cities. However, comparative research stresses that concepts focused on the growing power of private capital under neoliberalisation are inadequate to comprehend developments in German cities. In this article, we argue that municipally owned corporations occupy critical positions in climate change mitigation governance. While municipal ownership of utilities in principle increases local governance capacities, municipally owned corporations' roles are shaped by fiscal relations and asymmetric organisational capacities between 'agents' and 'principals'. In the case of Cologne, we show that the city has failed to leverage ownership over its public energy utility to decarbonise energy provision. Managers were able to assert corporate interests in the face of fragmented political actors and entrenched fiscal crisis. In this context of political incapacity and fragmentation, environmental social movements become important actors for translating widely shared decarbonisation objectives into concrete political demands towards municipally owned corporations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In some speech-related disputes, censors do not gauge their success by whether the challenged cultural product or practice has been suppressed in accordance with their explicit demands. This article proposes a theory of performative censorship that can help explain this paradox. Building on the concepts of expressive laws and symbolic crusades from legal studies and social movement studies respectively, performative censorship disputes are defined as contentious episodes in which demands for or against speech regulation are expressed partly for the broader objective of gaining recognition for a group's way of life, dignity or status. Case studies of two highly contentious conflicts are offered: over Confederate statues in the United States and cartoons of Islam's Prophet Mohammed. The case studies show that movements' goals and tactics are neither uniform nor static, making them more complex but also presenting opportunities for de-escalation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People's organized struggles for housing challenge Brazil's exclusionary urbanization. Occupations of vacant buildings by social movements have been pressing municipalities to guarantee the right to the city. Climate change accentuates the risks associated with exclusionary urbanization, and responses to its impacts demand mitigation and adaptation measures that support transformations tackling inequalities and vulnerabilities. This paper highlights the dimensions of inequality, as well as the role of social movements in setting an agenda on climate justice while reducing vulnerability and creating housing alternatives in vacant central buildings of São Paulo and Natal. To this end, we conducted a review of relevant literature along with participatory action-research on insurgent practices of housing social movements in both cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous social movement organizations are increasingly using social media to engage in strategic framing, a dynamic discursive process that seeks to attribute meaning to events and circumstances. But there remains a gap in our knowledge with respect to the impact of social media on the capacity of Indigenous actors to engage in frame competition in the virtual world. Based on a comparative frame analysis of online content in three Latin American countries where Indigenous organizations have recently engaged in large-scale protest, we ask to what extent the frames generated by Indigenous actors on social media are reflected in the online public sphere. We examine how their protest action is framed by Indigenous organizations themselves, the media, and government agencies. We find that social media do provide an outlet for Indigenous actors to disseminate counter-hegemonic frames. But state and media actors do not engage with Indigenous frames disseminated over social media, and their messages do not change the tone or direction of online discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the discursive strategies used by #EndSARS protesters in their tweets and Facebook comments to construct SARS officers, hold the Nigerian government accountable and demand social change. Informed by social media critical discourse analysis (SMCDA) and social movement theory, the analysis revealed three strategies: constructing SARS as oppressors, representing the Nigerian government as insensitive and issuing a clarion call for action. The analysis shows that these strategies enabled the protesters to construct the victim-aggressor categorisation, thereby legitimising their resistance to police brutality and demand for change. The study also highlights how the protesters deployed local linguistic resources and ideologies to appeal to the emotions of other Nigerians to join the protest. The study demonstrates how digital political mobilisation can galvanise reform in Nigeria, where leaders and law enforcement agencies are held accountable for their (in)actions. This study contributes to the developing interdisciplinary studies on SMCDA and digital activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the potential of digital mourning for activists and social movements, enabling them to navigate the injuries inflicted by hegemonic powers and harness these experiences as a meaningful force for social change. Through a literature review of scholarly works on mourning within digital platforms, the article identifies theories and characterizations that foster critical reflections on the significance of these online instances. Moreover, by presenting three examples of digital mourning activism (Black Lives Matter, COVID-19 protests, and the Arab Spring), the paper highlights the significance of digital platforms as spaces for collective mourning, shaping public opinion, building collective memory, and driving activism beyond the digital realm. Overall, this essay aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of digital mourning as an empowering tool for activism, shedding light on its role in facilitating meaning-making processes and fostering the potential for profound social change in the face of systemic challenges and injustices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dialogic framing means that the frames are constructed through interaction among multiple parties in a discursive system with socio-cultural specificities. The meaning of a frame is articulated through such dialogic interaction and under constant contestation. We used the marriage equality movement in Taiwan as a case study and demonstrated how dialogic framing could advance the understanding of framing in the digital mobilization of collective actions. Analyzing Facebook posts by opposing advocacy groups, we identified "collective identity" and "rights" as two dominant frames. Marriage equality activists framed legalizing same-sex marriage as a testament to the democratic progress of Taiwan and a validation of gay and lesbian people's right of love. The countermovement challenged this framing by arguing that equalizing gay love to heterosexual marital love violated the civil rights of the silent majority. The queer critique of marriage as state-sanctioned regulation of sexual citizenship and the very state power being critiqued are also constitutive of the dialogic framing of collective actions for or against same-sex marriage on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements see participation formats of international organizations (IOs) with suspicion. They increasingly retreat from cooperation to contest IOs from the outside, because they fear co-optation without real policy impact. However, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) was an exception to this trend because its opening up was seen as long-term dialogue facilitating discussions about the nature of food production, and because it created credible institutional mechanisms that were trusted by activists to give influence to farmers and peasant movements. Therefore, the food sovereignty movement participated within the FAO framework in a remarkably institutionalized way throughout the 2010s. But in 2019, when the United Nations (UN) announced to hold a food systems summit (United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS)), this changed dramatically. The food sovereignty movement, many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and eventually scientists, decided to boycott the summit, instead organizing an alternative Peoples' Summit, and withdrawing from long-held institutional roles in the FAO. How can this be explained? This article traces the process from the announcement of the UNFSS to its implementation, stressing how institutional trust was damaged by several decisions in the process that undermined the good faith of activists. As we show in detail, the circumvention of established institutional mechanisms, and the feeling of betrayal on the side of the movement, was decisive for losing institutional trust. Importantly, a mixture of substantive and institutional changes in the context of UNFSS not only undermined the movement's trust into the integrity and ability of the summit organizers, but thereby also provoked movement efforts to delegitimize UN food governance at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peace processes and international order are interdependent: while the latter provides the normative framework for the former, peacemaking tools and their underlying ideology also maintain international order. They indicate its viability and legitimacy partly by meeting local claims as well as though the maintenance of geopolitical balances. In the emerging multipolar order, the international peace architecture (IPA), dominated by the liberal international order (LIO), is contested through counter-peace processes. These processes contest the nature of the state, state-society relations and increasingly international order itself. This paper investigates the tactics and strategies of regional actors and great powers, where they engage in peace and order related activities or interventions. Given the weakness and inconsistency of the IPA and the LIO, such contestation leads to challenges to international order itself, often at the expense of the claims of social movements and civil society networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 8 August 2019, Israa Ghrayeb, a 21-year-old Palestinian living in Beit Sahour, was brutally beaten by members of her family. Since that moment, protests have erupted throughout historical Palestine and beyond, also reaching Palestinian women of the diaspora. Not only did this eventful protest mark the resurgence of a wave of women's protests in Palestine, but it also brought about the start of a new feminist and anticolonial movement: Tal'at. Using frame analysis to examine the movement's declarations, Facebook posts, and the archival material available at the Basso Foundation Archive, together with firsthand data collected through interviews conducted during my fieldwork in Historical Palestine, I will try to answer the following questions: How does this new feminist protest-movement differ from the previous ones? What are the elements of continuity with previous Palestinian women's movements? How did this movement manage to frame an aggregating message in such a fragmented territory? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging feminist and queer of color theory as well as work emerging from social movements, this piece critically examines narratives of impasse between Black Studies and Native Studies in the US, particularly assertions of incommensurability between the goals of Black freedom and Native sovereignty. The article outlines some of the theoretical debates between Black and Indigenous Studies that have calcified into impasses, focusing particularly on Afropessimist and Settler Colonial Studies' framings of either slavery/anti-Blackness or settler colonialism as the foundational violence around which a racist/settler modernity is structured. This article argues that approaches that emphasize relationality and the co-determination of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism can help us to think beyond a Black/Native impasse and towards a mutual futurity for both Black and Indigenous people in living in the place we currently call the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Me Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism" by Alison Phipps is a book that explores the exclusivity of mainstream feminism. Phipps argues that mainstream feminism fails to address intersecting inequalities based on class, race, religion, (dis)ability, citizenship, and gender identity. The book examines the history of racism, classism, and sexism within mainstream feminism, as well as the exclusion of trans women from the movement. Phipps emphasizes the need for intersectionality within feminism and calls for the dismantling and rebuilding of oppressive structures. [Extracted from the article]

Social movements, NGOs and other political actors often mobilise the law for social change. Strategic litigation and collective legal mobilisation can be key instruments to face current political challenges like the climate crisis, human rights violations against refugees or the exploitation of workers along global supply chains. Although these struggles are framed by a societal context and have impacts on the political and juridical fields, the literature about legal mobilisation still does not decidedly engage with a social-theory-based perspective on such struggles. By developing the concept of legal struggles, the article proposes a conceptual framework to analyse both the ambivalence and the emancipatory potential of progressive struggles in the juridical field. Critical Theory, Materialist Theory and the Theory of Social Fields by Pierre Bourdieu are combined to investigate the specific form of collective legal struggles carried out in this arena. We examine repertoires and strategies of collective actors as well as the emancipatory potential of these mobilisation strategies. Our conclusions point to the structural distinctions and selectivities which define the juridical field in capitalist societies and also the conditions of possibility of political struggles using the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements like BLM and Rhodes Must Fall have recently re-emphasized the need for "working through" our collective past. I argue that we must be careful to distinguish two distinct and sometimes conflicting understandings of what it means to work through the past. An "idealist" understanding which sees "working through" as a process of self-enlightenment and moral learning through uncovering and acknowledging past moral failures and incorporating them into our collective self-image. The "materialist paradigm", in contrast, understands "working through" as a process of uncovering the ways in which the structural causes of past moral catastrophe have endured into the present. It rejects idealist calls for reconciliation with the past and present and aims at the negative goal of preventing future moral catastrophe through changing tainted social structures. I argue, finally, that effective processes of working through the past have to engage in both idealist myth-building and materialist deconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines a critical systems theory approach to the study of populism by arguing that populism is an avenue of contestation which assumes a distinct role and function in the existing constitution of the political system. Most notably, it is characterised by the re-entry of a popular sovereignty dimension within regular political procedures. By taking up a critical systems theory perspective, it becomes possible to more precisely distinguish populism from other forms of politics, such as oppositional politics, social movement politics or procedural constitutional politics. Further, populism's oscillation between democratic and authoritarian dynamics can be elucidated as an inversion which operates from within its political form. Finally, it is argued that the critical systems theory approach provides a more nuanced understanding of populism's inherent problems and, consequently, moves beyond a blunt defence or rejection of populism as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alain Touraine, a prominent French sociologist, passed away at the age of 97. He was known for his theories on social movements and the production of society through social conflicts and cultural choices. Touraine developed the concept of "actionalism" as a theoretical perspective for analyzing large-scale social change. He studied the transition from industrial to post-industrial society, theorized the "new social movements," and advocated for sociological intervention as a method of action research. Touraine was a public intellectual and engaged in various social and political struggles throughout his life. [Extracted from the article]

Scholarship that has studied the #EndSARS movement in Nigeria remains scanty. In contributing to debates surrounding the #EndSARS movement, we focus on the Niger Delta region and the effect of the movement on the people. Online interview of 20 participants across the region, reports from Amnesty International, the Human Rights Watch and Facebook posts provided data for the qualitative study. Castells' 'network society' enabled us to explain how youths formed a 'network of protesters' to resist a repressive police system. The #EndSARS protest was another opportunity for the Niger Delta youths to express their dissonance with an exclusionary political arrangement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we build on feminist scholarship to narrate how the MeToo movement in Iceland was formed through collective reflexivity and resistance, ultimately connecting different groups of women in affective solidarity. In our exploration of how the movement unfolded, we draw on anonymous MeToo testimonies and media discussions. We argue that the feminist lexicon, particularly the notion of 'returning the shame', was instrumental in hailing different groups to the movement. We trace how the concepts used restructured the women's affective relations to their experiences and thus enabled the 'feminist snap' that reverberated across and connected different groups. Speaking positions on different social locations revealed the intersectional nature of sexual violations and were necessary for seeing connections between and among different groups and going beyond politics centred on middle-class pain. We conclude that painting a bigger feminist picture of sexual violence is always an incomplete and ongoing process but is necessary for allowing us to hope for a better future for everyone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars increasingly point to polarization as a central threat to democracy—and identify technology platforms as key contributors to polarization. In contrast, we argue that polarization can only be seen as a central threat to democracy if inequality is ignored. The central theoretical claim of this piece is that political identities map more or less onto social groups, and groups are, in turn, located in social structures. As such, scholars must analyze groups as they are embedded in relations of power to meaningfully evaluate the democratic consequences of polarization. Groups struggling for equality, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, often cause polarization because they threaten the extant power and status of dominant groups. To develop a shared theoretical lens around polarization and its relationship with inequality, we take up the case of research on the role of platforms in polarization, showing how scholarship routinely lacks analysis of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how activist organizations wield collective memory as they advance cross-racial solidarity on Instagram. We center digital memory-making in political work by Black and Asian activist organizations as a contribution to understanding social movement communication and online organizing. We study Instagram content from local organizations in Minneapolis (and the Midwest region), Atlanta (and the Southeast region), and national digital organizing collectives between the end of May 2020 to June 2021. This corpus of material includes the summer uprisings for Black liberation following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, as well as the increased visibility of incidents of anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, including a mass shooting at massage parlors in Atlanta. Among our findings is the centrality of memories of internationalist feminist movements to contemporary cross-racial politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political consumerism can be a routinized everyday practice, an organized campaign, or a tactic in a protest movement. When becoming (part of) a collective action campaign, activists need to articulate its relevance and effectiveness and mobilize people to participate. Digital media can play a significant role, especially in a networked movement without centralized leadership. This article demonstrates how digital media facilitated the emergence of political consumerism, codified under the label of "yellow economic circle," in the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement in Hong Kong. A qualitative analysis of online discussions and public discourse illustrated how movement participants gradually co-developed the idea of yellow economic circle by integrating symbolic resources, responding to ongoing events, and drawing mainstream media and public figures' attention. Survey analysis showed that using social media for public affairs information and discussion positively related to engagement in political consumption, particularly among movement supporters who were receptive to radicalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of urban living is evolving, and there is a growing interest in creating smaller, more connected, and hyperlocal neighbourhoods, where everything people need is within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. This paper challenges the concept of the '15-minute city' as a panacea for urban ills, by exploring the history of utopian urban planning and regeneration aimed at creating sustainable, inclusive and vibrant communities by desegregating disadvantaged groups. Specifically, we examine social mixing policies, which are recurring top-down interventions that pathologise concentrated urban disadvantage. We trace the evolution of these policies in Europe from the Garden City movement to post-war social housing redevelopment to the current 15-minute city, which we consider to be social mix by stealth. While such policies can reduce the degree of concentrated disadvantage in the short term, they tend to be ineffective in the long term, as deprived neighbourhoods often remain so despite attempts to make them more diverse. The paper argues that the 15-minute city would be implemented through de facto social mix actions at the neighbourhood level, which are insufficient to address the deeper structural issues that perpetuate spatial inequality and deprivation. We propose that longitudinal and comparative analyses, combined with 'right to the city' perspectives, should be considered in future research and policymaking to understand – and more importantly address – why urban renewal initiatives that aim for equitable outcomes at the neighbourhood scale ultimately fail to deliver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2008, the call to 'remunicipalise' water resources has become a key strategy for water movements across Europe. Remunicipalisation aimed at opposing the new wave of privatisation programmes and water commodification incentivised under austerity frameworks. However, the water movements' lack of direct engagement with questions of re/commoning resulted in under-explored links, in practitioner and scholarly arenas, between demands for water remunicipalisation and practices of commoning. This article brings into dialogue the bodies of literature on commoning and remunicipalisation. It examines the conditions which enable crossing the paradigm threshold from municipal governance, towards more collective and situated models of water governance rooted in practices of commoning. The article operationalises the concept of recommoning water to capture this process, and proposes an analytical definition grounded in a case study of water remunicipalisation in Terrassa, Spain. In 2019, Terrassa achieved remunicipalisation to create a citizen water observatory. The empirical findings demonstrate that water activists in Terassa's Observatory are reclaiming and reproducing the commons on a daily basis through a process of experimentation with institutional bricolage and (re)negotiation of power and autonomy. This citizen-led observatory is ensuring that resources are shared in common, are used for the common good and are reproducing the commons. The study concludes that water remunicipalisation can act as an important step for enabling processes of recommoning. Nevertheless, the institutionalisation of recommoning water under a public management regime is confronted with multifaceted tensions that merit attention from both activists and policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding social movement structures is important for political decision-makers to enable them to recognise the various motivating factors behind these movements. The Fridays for Future movement characterises a political group that has a majority of young people, frequently using social media to organise actions. By conducting a social network analysis on hashtags, this study contributes to the understanding of the global Fridays for Future movement. Particularly, we focus on the use and connection of hashtags on Instagram. We collected 59,112 posts tagged with #fridaysforfuture and analysed 91,172 hashtags used therein. Subsequently, the 140 most used hashtags were divided into 11 clusters, which provide not only information about the organisation of the social movement via social media, but also insights into lifestyle-related aspects. The clusters include the topics: climate; nutrition, lifestyle and health; memes; cycling; art; sustainable consumption and the Earth Day. The article shows that the motives of the Fridays for Future movement are broad. We can demonstrate that Fridays for Future is connected to other social movements and gain insights into the everyday life of the Fridays for Future stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous-led activism against proposed oil pipelines has relied heavily on social media, as in the #NoDAPL campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline. This paper explores affective engagement in online activism, including the Standing Rock 'check-in' campaign on Facebook. Moving beyond dichotomous understandings of embodied vs digital activism, Cannupa Hanska Luger's Mirror Shields Project employs digital media in order to support direct action at Standing Rock. Patricia Clough draws a direct link between affect and technoscientific understandings of the body in her concept of biomediated bodies. This helps explain how physical and digital activism are linked: the digital and the physical cannot be understood as independent of each other, since online engagement always has an embodied aspect as well. Luger's Mirror Shields Project functions as a form of alterlife, in resistance to biopower, recognizing historical and ongoing harms while also creating new possibilities for resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the diversity of tactical interventions that transpired at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2019, culminating in the resignation of the vice-chairman of its Board of Trustees. Instead of accepting the myth of museum neutrality, the activist campaign, spearheaded by the action-oriented movement Decolonize This Place, treated the Whitney as a site of ideological struggle, permeated by inner divisions and conflicting interests. Through their organizing efforts, activists prefigured a movement-based form of cultural production, mapped connections between seemingly disparate struggles, and built decolonial solidarities. While the activists' actions were essential to stage the antagonisms that had been dormant in the institution, a multiplicity of actors needed to step in during the process, creating multiple pressure points and taking sides in the division. To amplify the Whitney staffers' attempt to hold the museum leadership accountable, they sought to bring political protest into the institution, challenging the very principle of counting who belongs to the community and who is excluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a book review of "Advanced Introduction to Social Capital" by Karen S. Cook. The book provides a concise and accessible overview of social capital, focusing on the work of Robert Putnam. It explores the concepts of networks, norms, and trust as essential principles of social capital and their impact on civic engagement, democratic institutions, and collective action. The book also discusses the dark sides of social capital, such as homophily and inequitable network access, and highlights the challenges policymakers face in balancing social control and innovation. Overall, the book offers valuable insights into understanding and addressing global problems through the lens of social capital. [Extracted from the article]

Social media platforms provide people all over the world with an unprecedented ability to organize around social and political causes. However, these same platforms enable organized actors to engineer fabricated social movements to advance their agenda. Such movements leverage a variety of tools and techniques, ranging from simple spam operations to sophisticated efforts involving numerous orchestrated accounts coordinated across linguistic and cultural clusters. While the former category is straightforward to analyze via data mining methods, campaigns in the latter category are engineered to mask their true nature from the public. We build on existing work to formalize a framework to detect coordination phenomena in the second category, based on anomalies in three key dimensions of participant behavior: network, temporal, and semantic. We test this framework on three case studies and find that, in all three cases, the framework enables us to detect coordination as behavioral anomaly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do disadvantaged ethnic groups favor violent over nonviolent conflict tactics? To understand when and why civil war breaks out, we need to study violent and nonviolent forms of conflict together, using analytical tools that can account for the choice between them. Yet, most large-N analyses of the causes of civil war do not account for nonviolent conflict, and vice versa. Because the mechanisms held to link horizontal inequalities to civil war closely resemble those used to explain largely nonviolent social movements, this article studies group disadvantages, political violence and nonviolent resistance together. To reduce concerns about selection bias in horizontal inequality research, it extends the analysis to socially as well as politically relevant groups around the world. A consensus is emerging that politically disadvantaged ethnic groups shun nonviolent tactics, because they lack ties to people close to the regime and its institutions. This article challenges the consensus, by showing that political group disadvantages predict nonviolent as well as violent forms of conflict. Groups' economic status helps explain tactical choices. Among economically advantaged groups, political disadvantages increase the risk of nonviolent conflict. Among the economically disadvantaged, they facilitate violence. This pattern is strongest in situations where no policies are in place to remedy group disadvantages, in authoritarian and less economically open societies, and in analyses that account for conflicts of low intensity, to capture onsets early. The results point to the importance of economic and other forms of leverage, which have been largely overlooked in the econometric literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces Palestinian women's political mobilization for social change emphasizing historical and contemporary involvements in national struggles against colonial occupation and patriarchal oppression. Second, critical Middle Eastern feminists' analyses, through their attunement to gendered orientalism, unmask a troubling pattern of culturizing categories of violence against women (VAW) within global feminist and human rights discourses. In particular, culturized framings of gender-based violence in the lives of Palestinian women ignores the multiple sources of violence and power of settler colonialism as ongoing everyday realities. Third, I share how social science instruments like the Conflicts Tactics Scale (CTS), criticized by US gender scholars, is widely used as a measure of VAW in the global South. By overestimating interpersonal gender-based violence among Palestinian women, Global feminist discourse and the otherness of women outside the West continue to reciprocally constitute each other. Thus covertlsolidifying global feminist discourse universalistic assumptions in scientific and objective forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working towards social transformation through forms of participatory and economic democracy is a core element of the new municipalist agenda. While utilising a 'politics of proximity' to develop citizen-led collectives in various forms and at various scales, these projects reimagine and reclaim the local state for social and ecological justice. However, much of the empirical literature that has fed into the development of this conceptualisation of new municipalism, while having a global ambition, has been based on European experiences. Thus, there are key questions around its applicability to other places, particularly in the Global South. South America has generated some of the emblematic cases of struggles against neoliberalism through reclaiming public services, from important interventions in reversing privatisations in the region to influential municipalist innovations, including participatory public policies such as participatory budgeting. This article seeks to critically interrogate new municipalism through an engagement with key social and political changes, state–civil society dynamics and political concepts in South America, illustrated with examples from municipal grassroots initiatives in Argentina and Chile. It argues that municipalism can be more extensively theorised by, first, engaging with a broader temporality than just moments of crisis; second, being attentive to the longer history of diverse participatory municipal initiatives in the region; and finally, incorporating the concept of territory (territorio in Spanish), which has emerged as a key dimension for understanding social transformations in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Logistics, as the language and practice that organises the distribution of matter and value, not only scripts the infrastructural expansion of late capitalist urbanisations, it also informs the tactics of survivability and resistance that address the spatial and social disparities generated by the latter. Behind the arrangement of makeshift infrastructural set-ups for commercial exchange, food distribution and community support, there is a form of popular logistics, interventions put in place to articulate the circulation of resources, weave nodes of solidarity and navigate the bureaucratic and territorial distances that exist across institutional scales. The paper frames the integration of these forms of counter-logistical expressions as an emerging form of municipalism. Focussing on municipal responses to the pandemic, the essay describes the emergence of counter forms of logistics in Rosario, Argentina. It registers the material and virtual adaptations that social movements, neighbourhood organisations and public agencies put in place to configure different forms of producing and distributing goods and services in the city. In a context where privatised infrastructures of distribution mediate the expressions of urban life, the paper positions the articulation of common and popular forms of logistics as a strategic dimension of municipal politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging literature on 'new municipalism' has identified attempts not only to transform local state functions to respond to the urban crises of neoliberal austerity, but also to transform the structure and practices of the state itself, embedding democratic processes into local government. This article utilises the historical experience of the 'new urban left' within the Greater London Council (GLC) from 1981 to 1986 to explore the internal dynamics of state transformation in a context of municipal activism. It situates the GLC's progressive policy responses to the urban crises of the early 1980s within a more quotidian project of state remaking, in which activists worked in-and-against the established political cultures and practices of the local state. The new urban left's transformative, rather than simply instrumental, approach to the local state – rooted in the democratic politics of progressive social movements – challenges straightforward dichotomies between state and society. The article frames these nascent municipalist characteristics with a theoretical argument based on an autonomist-Marxist account of the state as a form of social relations, one that emphasises how capitalist crises pivot on the internal contradictions of labour. This reading directs theoretical attention to the 'prosaic' labour of state officials, and the article thus considers the quotidian experience of politicised officials in the GLC, whose activity blurred boundaries between political activism and professional labour. The practical contradictions involved in such forms of 'activist state-work'– working within bureaucratic and legal limits, experimenting with new organisational forms, and negotiating contested workplace subjectivities – reveal forms of boundary-bridging between activism and statehood that highlight the potentially transformative dynamics within the labour of local governance. This unstable tightrope-walk between bureaucratic constraint and political agency at the nexus of state-work contributes to new municipalist thinking about reshaping the conduct of urban governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, urban social movements that emerged in the Yugoslav successor states decided to form political platforms to enter the institutional arena, often after years of mobilisation for the right to the city. Their aim was to seize power at the local level, trying to provide an answer to the crisis of representative democracy and to oppose the process of centralisation of power. These platforms ran for elections in Zagreb (Croatia) and Belgrade (Serbia), to reclaim local autonomy on societal, environmental, economic and political matters. Based on ethnographic work, document analysis and a series of in-depth interviews with activists, this article explores the trajectories of two platforms, 'Zagreb Is Ours' (Zagreb je naš) in Zagreb, Croatia, and 'We Won't Let Belgrade D(r)own' (Ne davimo Beograd) in Belgrade, Serbia. It analyses the factors accounting for the choice of urban activists to embrace new municipalist ideas as strategic ideological and political positioning of their electoral platforms, arguing that the reasons are twofold: the embeddedness into regional and transnational activist networks, which facilitated the process of diffusion of new municipalist ideas across Europe and locally, and the resonance of new municipalism with socialist Yugoslavia's decentralised system of self-management and direct democracy, an historical experience that the platforms' initiators partially reappraised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the politics of new municipalism in Naples in relation to the constellation of 'new institutions' that has arisen from this politics. These 'new institutions' are illustrative of a politics of the interstices as a distinctive trait of the convergence between city government and social movements in Naples, as the latter have opted for staying neither outside nor inside official institutions and the city government has adapted its conduct to this strategy. To illustrate this point, the article explores the emerging constellation of 'new institutions' in Naples, which is understood as an embryonic form of radical 'face-to-face democracy' (in Murray Bookchin's terms) at the municipal level, that departs from mainstream conceptions of participatory democracy and commons-based democracy. Through this analysis, the article argues that the experience of new municipalism in Naples offers evidence of a kind of participatory urban democracy understood not in a procedural sense but in a genuinely political vein, where civic participation and political conflict productively coexist with institutional creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open data is increasingly being promoted as a route to achieve food security and agricultural development. This article critically examines the promotion of open agri-food data for development through a document-based case study of the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative as well as through interviews with open data practitioners and participant observation at open data events. While the concept of openness is striking for its ideological flexibility, we argue that GODAN propagates an anti-political, neoliberal vision for how open data can enhance agricultural development. This approach centers values such as private innovation, increased production, efficiency, and individual empowerment, in contrast to more political and collectivist approaches to openness practiced by some agri-food social movements. We further argue that open agri-food data projects, in general, have a tendency to reproduce elements of "data colonialism," extracting data with minimal consideration for the collective harms that may result, and embedding their own values within universalizing information infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement organizations (SMOs) increasingly rely on Twitter to create new and viral communication spaces alongside newsworthy protest events and communicate their grievance directly to the public. When the COVID-19 pandemic impeded street protests in spring 2020, SMOs had to adapt their strategies to online-only formats. We analyze the German-language Twitter communication of the climate movement Fridays for Future (FFF) before and during the lockdown to explain how SMOs adapted their strategy under online-only conditions. We collected (re-)tweets containing the hashtag #fridaysforfuture (N = 46,881 tweets, N = 225,562 retweets) and analyzed Twitter activity, use of hashtags, and predominant topics. Results show that although the number of tweets was already steadily declining before, it sharply dropped during the lockdown. Moreover, the use of hashtags changed substantially and tweets focused increasingly on thematic discourses and debates around the legitimacy of FFF, while tweets about protests and calls for mobilization decreased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests the general explanatory power of political opportunity theory for cross-national variations in protest throughout the world, and considers how opportunities influence individual-level characteristics crucial for coalition-formation and campaigns. This study constructs a multilevel model of protest potential, using survey data from individuals across 43 countries, drawn from the fifth and sixth waves of the World Values Survey, combined with political, economic, and cultural factors measured for each country. While many individual factors predicted individuals' protest potential, a mixture of country-level factors—including select political opportunities—are of general importance. Country-level regime durability and empowerment rights moderated the effect of organization membership, social trust, and political ideology on protest, demonstrating how political opportunity interacts to enhance the impact of individual characteristics relevant to coalition-building and campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article engages critically with the literature on the relationship between social movements and political parties. It traces the representation crisis in Chile with a dual focus on the meso-institutional supply side of partisan politics and the microfoundational demand side of protest activity (2006–2019). I argue that the dialectical relationship between political parties' programmatic dealignment and realignment and social actors' framing politics determined the magnitude, intensity, and ideational content of protest mobilization. Social actors' perception of their position in polity structure determined the content of their demands. Savvy actors started with a realignment frame in 2006 to push through socioeconomic reforms from within the parameters of the existing system. They, however, afforded an anti-establishment frame with the 'social outbreak' in 2019 to weed out the vestiges of Pinochet's regime. Social forces pushed political parties to reposition their policy programs, reset agenda priorities, and recast their linkages to society. I draw on interview data, archival works, and Observatory of Conflicts–Cumulative Dataset to substantiate my argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]