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During the past two decades, the movement toward eGoverment has shifted many government services online. Despite initial hopes that the Internet could be leveraged to increase voter participation, eGovernment has changed little about the voting process. Our field experiment compares two treatments sent to voters via postal mail prior to the 2010 general election in Maine: (1) recruitment to request a mail ballot via Maine's new online system and (2) recruitment to request a mail ballot using Maine's traditional paper application. We find that recruitment to vote by mail using a traditional paper ballot application significantly increased turnout. Contrary to the expectations of advocates of eGovernment, the mailer encouraging voters to use Maine's innovative new online ballot request system generated no significant increase in overall voter turnout. Our findings indicate why eGovernment continues to contribute less to democratic participation than anticipated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The focus of this paper is the digital transition in major Japanese newspapers that sell millions of copies per day. By digital transition we refer to the shift to publishing content on digital platforms—in this case the shift from print to online and mobile media. Japan is globally one of the most important newspaper markets with the world's largest daily newspapers measured by circulation. The research focusing on the digital transition in Japanese newspapers and the implications of this shift has been hitherto almost non-existent. In this paper, the digital transition is examined by means of qualitative in-depth interviews with representatives from leading Japanese newspapers. The conclusion deriving from the empirical analysis is that for Japanese newspapers the most essential approach in coping with the transition to digital is protecting the printed paper and treating the digital platforms as supplementary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claims made during mass protests in Hong Kong in 2019 and Thailand in 2020 became increasingly transgressive. Localist demands and calls for the reform of the monarchy, respectively, violated conventional political norms in these two hybrid regimes. This paper examines the dynamics of opposition discursive radicalization during ongoing autocratization. Observational data and protest event analysis are employed to assess the scaling up of claims-making and its relationship to protest size and group solidarity. The paper argues that radicalization can best be understood relationally, between a hybrid regime, on the one hand, and moderates and radicals in the opposition, on the other. It identifies the following three points of convergence that lead to similar protest trajectories in both cases: the marginalization of moderates along with their gatekeeping role of transgressive discourses; the creation of digitally enabled protest networks that facilitated mass mobilization and claims diffusion; and the intensification of protest policing that provoked a departure from reformist to revolutionary claims. The argument offered here shows similarities to but also nuanced differences from the repression literature and casts doubt on the assumptions about the demobilizing impact of autocratization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This working note is centred on snippets of the journey of two Sri Lankan queer couples as they negotiate the normative authoritarian regime of Sri Lankan state and society. Through the authors' reflections, based on their involvement as activists in these couples' lives, the paper points out to the distance between dominant discourses in state, society and even among elite queer spaces in the country and the needs of ordinary queer folks in dire situations. It suggests possible paths from which to imagine taking forward the struggle towards decriminalization, freedom, dignity and respect for the LGBTQIA+ community. It shows that these paths have a lot to learn from as well as contribute to, moments and the future impact of the mass mobilization for change in Sri Lanka in 2022 and the repression of the same that the people of Sri Lanka are currently living through. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While prior studies have suggested that legal strategies offer promising tools for social accountability, the existing literature has not yet identified the underlying mechanisms that link legal strategies to accountability improvements. In this theory-building paper, we argue that there are four mechanisms by which legal strategies can enhance accountability. First, the courts can help those affected by policy failures to overcome the collective action problem. Second, courts can provide civil society with access to information about rights violations, malfeasance, and poor policy performance. Third, legal strategies can set in motion court-backed reforms that redress immediate rights violations and strengthen state capacity for more accountable governance. Fourth, court recognition can increase the symbolic and discursive resources of claimants, making their demands for accountability more effective. We illustrate these mechanisms through a comparative analysis of two policy arenas in Colombia, environment and healthcare – two areas in which civil society engagement with the judiciary opened up new routes for social accountability. By bridging the previously disconnected literatures on legal mobilisation and social accountability, this paper creates an analytical framework to understand the menu of options that citizens face about where and how to seek accountability from the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the difficulties that diasporas face in relation to mobilising around helping the homeland at a time of crisis, using qualitative research on the Greek and Palestinian diasporas. Rather than assume that long-distance nationalism, emotional attachment to the homeland and diasporic obligation will galvanise diasporic populations into assisting, and mobilising around, the homeland, the paper argues that those in diasporas do not necessarily help their homelands in times of crisis, even if they have strong socio-cultural connections to it. At times of crisis these feelings are heightened but not do not always translate into direct action; this may especially be the case at times of prolonged crisis when past efforts to help do not seem to have worked. This paper argues that it is often hard for those in diaspora to find meaningful ways to help at a time of crisis and many question the effectiveness of their actions if they do not see positive outcomes over time. The paper demonstrates that trying to help the homeland can therefore be a frustrating process and can make those in diaspora feel distanced and isolated from the homeland due to their inability to find concrete ways to help. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that eudaemonic legitimation is a useful tool in understanding how insurgencies seek to justify their "effectiveness" and "performance" vis-à-vis the state in order to enhance authority and mobilise support for their strategic objectives. By examining primary FARC documents, conference and plenary findings, and select interviews with former and active FARC, ELN and M-19 members, it demonstrates how FARC constructed social contracts and integrated illicit financing into its operations as a strategy to appeal to its eudaemonic legitimation in its areas of proto-state influence, in turn aiming to mobilise support and consolidate a full-spectrum normative system. "Effectiveness" in FARC's strategic approach through rule-setting allowed the organisation to expand to control significant portions of Colombian territory, which to a degree impacted positively on social mobilisation and challenged the government's legitimacy by consolidating power structures in areas where there was a lack of government authority. FARC further appealed to social and economic "performance" by using revenue from its fundraising activities through engagement in the coca trade and kidnap for ransom to not only strengthen its military capacity, but also implement social initiatives and provide material goods. In turn, FARC was able to develop zones of security through the creation of social contracts in which stable economic practices were able to solidify, contributing in its effectiveness in providing proto-state authority and allowing for insurgent expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explain how the international relations of authoritarian regimes shape their reaction to nonviolent popular mobilisation. We identify four main strategies of authoritarian survival and argue that – from the incumbents' perspective – repression and democratic opening are riskier than informal and formal co-optation. Thus, we ask why some nondemocratic rulers select riskier rather than safer strategies. Although recent studies have devoted much attention to the relevance of international factors in shaping domestic politics, this proposition has not been thoroughly theorised nor scrutinised empirically. We focus on authoritarian regimes that have established patron–client relations with foreign powers and argue that patrons' regimes influence the selection of specific survival strategies by threatened clients. We hypothesise that dictators with democratic patrons are induced to adopt riskier strategies of survival, whereas clients of autocracies are more likely to select safer strategies. We test our hypothesis on MENA countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper explores the experience of 16-17 year olds participating in the Scottish independence referendum and discusses whether it can be seen as positive or negative considering civic attitudes and participation. Using data from two comprehensive and representative surveys of 14-17 year olds, it engages empirically with claims about young people's alleged political (dis-)interest and provides qualifications for commonly believed stories of young people as mere recipients of information given to them by parents and teachers. The paper develops a positive view of young people's engagement in the referendum process and suggests that inputs from parents and schools actually have distinguishable effects on young people, who do not simply 'follow the lead' of others uncritically. The analyses suggest that the discussion of political issues in the classroom (rather than the simple delivery of civicsstyle classes per se) may act as a positive factor in the political socialisation of young people, but suggests that further research is required to examine these effects beyond the specific context of the Scottish independence referendum in particular in relation to questions about whether reducing the voting age to 16 could be expected to generally lead to positive outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 2017, the community of Buenaventura, Colombia's main port and the city with the largest Afrodescendant population, went on a general strike. By scrutinising this event, this article reveals some shades of the entanglements of race, class, political subjectivity, security, capitalist development and histories of colonialism that structure the racial dynamics of space. Relying upon discourse analysis of policy papers, legal regulations and secondary sources, coupled with informal interviews and direct observation, it is argued that violence and coercion have been central techniques for harnessing the local poor population in accordance with the needs of the port as the emblem of capitalist development. The article pays particular attention to how law is implicated in the violence deployed in the city-port either as a legitimising factor or as discursive formation which portrays the local population as dangerous and thereby as a security threat to the port. This narrative about the insecurity of the poor, created and recreated by the law, reinforces the image of the Black population as undeserving poor, while at the same time legitimising the coercive interventions that have characterised the control of criminality and social mobilisation in the city-port. However, the strike allows us to see that precarity and violence have resulted in a politically active population and sophisticated levels of mobilisation which have managed to stop capitalist development, at least for a while. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how international, large-scale skills assessments (ILSAs) engage with the broader societies they seek to serve and improve. It looks particularly at the discursive work that is done by different interest groups and the media through which the findings become part of public conversations and are translated into usable form in policy arenas. The paper discusses how individual countries are mobilised to participate in international surveys, how the public release of findings is managed and what is known from current research about how the findings are reported and interpreted in the media. Research in this area shows that international and national actors engage actively and strategically with ILSAs, to influence the interpretation of findings and subsequent policy outcomes. However, these efforts are indeterminate and this paper argues that it is at the more profound level of the public imagination of education outcomes and of the evidence needed to know about these that ILSAs achieve their most totalising effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pro-government protests are on the rise in recent years, mostly in populist and/or authoritarian settings, including Turkey. Based on the literatures on populism and social movements, this paper looks at the first mass pro-government mobilization in Turkey, namely the Respect the National Will rallies organized in the summer of 2013. To understand how these rallies contributed to democratic backsliding in the country, the article uses critical discourse analysis. Four discursive mechanisms were identified in play in Turkey during these rallies: nomination, predication, argumentation and intensification. The article argues that the rallies were countermobilizations organized by the ruling party, and this mobilization and the discourse mechanisms used further contributed to democratic backsliding in the country by delegitimizing anti-government protests and protestors, shrinking the democratic space for opposition and opening the path for increased levels of pro-government mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I want to analyze bullying and cyber bullying for the Colombian case. I want to show the role social media plays in the dissemination of hurtful words and symbols, especially emoticons and memes. This paper analyzes the long history of social mobilization where Courts have played an important role to advance their rights, and how, in some cases, social media, memes and emoticons have been used to express agreement or disagreement with this struggle. At the end, I want to analyze whether these emoticons, symbols, pictures or expressions fall within the reach of freedom of expression, according to Colombian Constitutional Court and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patriotic campaigns and mass mobilization draw on existing xenophobic attitudes of the public, reinforcing the 'us vs. them' dualism between China and 'the West'. However, patriotic campaigns are not always top-down, state-led, nor are they always primarily driven by political ideology. Patriotic content appeals to a growing nationalist audience who consumes a mixed feeling of perceived victimization at the hand of foreign aggression and the pride arising from being a Chinese citizen. This paper argues that the profitability of patriotic content circulating on social media exacerbated the tension between market-driven grassroots patriotism and state-led patriotic campaigns. The tension grows out of, and is manifested in, the online popular debate around economically driven, grassroots 'patriotic' content that can challenge the state state-led patriotic rhetoric. While the state sometimes strategically co-opts some patriotic contents into its own patriotic narratives, it also delegitimises other undesired ones through labels such as 'high-level black' (gaoji hei) or 'low-level red' (diji hong). These labels were initially used to differentiate meticulously crafted political satire and parody from incompetent, illogical and vulgar propaganda pieces that unintendedly blemish the state's patriotic campaigns, but later evolved into an exercise of power to distance the CCP from undesired patriotic content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of this paper is to propose a dynamic mapping for knowledge and ignorance mobilization in science research and innovation. An underlying argument is that ‘knowledge mobilization’ science policy agendas in countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom fail to capture a critical element of science and innovation: ignorance mobilization. The latter draws attention to dynamicsupstreamof knowledge in science research and innovation. Although perhaps less visible, there is ample evidence that researchers value, actively produce, and thereby mobilize ignorance. For example, scientists and policymakers routinely mobilize knowledge gaps (cf. ignorance) in the process of establishing and securing research funding to argue the relevance of a scientific paper or a presentation, and to launch new research projects. Ignorance here is non-pejorative and by and large points to the borders and the limits of scientific knowing – what is known to be unknown. In addition, processes leading to the intentional or unintentional consideration or bracketing out of what is known to be unknown are intertwined with, yet remain distinct from, knowledge mobilization dynamics. The concepts of knowledge mobilization and of ignorance mobilization, respectively, are understood to be the use of knowledge or ignorance towards the achievement of goals. The value of this paper lies in its conceptualization of the mobilization of knowledge as related to the mobilization of ignorance within a complex, dynamic and symbiotic relationship in science research and innovation: it takes two to tango. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the international activities of trade unions in Turkey and the influence of the AKP government policies on these activities between 2002 and 2018. It addresses the question of the limits of the influence of international organizations in social mobilizations in an authoritarian context. The first part puts forward the conceptual framework and discusses existing literature. The second part explains how the international relations of the Turkish trade unions are influenced by government policies. The third part focuses on the sectoral level in order to analyse the concrete consequences of this transformation in different industries. This paper is based on the fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2016 in Turkey composed of 111 interviews with trade union representatives and observations at the three main Turkish trade union confederations, completed by 12 interviews with IndustriAll, ETF, EFFAT, ETUC representatives in Brussels in April 2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates the possibility of gaining meaningful insights into a place by exploring its relationship with its surroundings. A model is suggested for examining the possible significances of this relationship and the actual meanings attributed to it by those who plan and use the place. The site analyzed here is Sidnā 'Alī, an Islamic shrine on Israel's Mediterranean coast. Sidnā 'Alī, which has been a pilgrimage site for centuries, was abandoned during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War; it was renovated in the late 1980s by Muslim Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel. The paper discusses the social mobilization for the renovation of the old mosque as a prelude to exploring the meanings of Sidnā 'Alī's relationships with the surrounding landscapes, places and buildings. The study of the social function of the renovation campaign focuses on its role in unifying the people involved and on forging a collective identity based on the shared struggle to return the site to Muslim hands. The spatial interpretation presented examines the renovation project as a form of Palestinian, Arab and Islamic resistance to the covert and overt Zionist hegemony in the public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out the theoretical and methodological approach of a study of the politics of persuasion and the mobilisation of interest in relation to the Trust schools initiative in England. Drawing on the discourse theoretical approach of Laclau and Mouffe the paper argues that the politics of consensus associated with New Labour reconfigures the field of politics, closing down legitimate democratic space. Building on this approach and that of policy sociology the paper outlines how the researchers seeks to address the following questions – if the space for legitimate democratic debate is so severely constrained then how does a social democratic government deal with the kind of opposition that Labour faced in relation to Trust schools? How do governments persuade dissident citizens to support unpopular policies? How are citizens mobilised to support such policies? This also raises questions about how, in such a restricted political space, do those questioning or resisting such policies, engage in the politics of persuasion and the mobilisation of interests? The reconfiguration of the field of politics and what this means for the constitution of legitimate democratic debate is the object of study of the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, many scientists and science advocates have taken the responsibility to mobilize for the sake of science. With fake news or "alternative facts" on the rise, many scientists and science supporters are determined to protect the credibility of science and promote evidence-based policy-making. At the core of these mobilization efforts is teaching: making science accessible to the public and policy makers in ways that mitigate false information. This paper argues that communication scholars can contribute to this important conversation through exploring instructional aspects of science activism. The paper proposes potential areas of investigation focused on intersections among science, mobilization, teaching, and learning. To do so, such research will involve scientists and nonscientists, as well as lifelong and first-time activists, in negotiating instructional practices to mobilize for science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we set the scene for this special issue by outlining the main concerns that underlie the study of migrant politics and related forms of social and political mobilization. We begin by examining the changing ways in which migrant and minority politics and mobilization have been articulated in recent decades, exploring key facets of the intersections between forms of migrant and minority mobilization and the wider social and political environment. We continue by discussing how these politics and mobilization have been analysed, both from a conceptual and empirical angle. We conclude by mapping the core themes of the substantive papers that make up this volume and by highlighting some issues for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholarly attention has been devoted to social media's potential mobilizing function, they may also contribute to demobilization discourses: social communication actively promoting nonvoting. This paper examines discourses around mobilization vs. demobilization in the context of the municipal elections in Jerusalem. As the sweeping majority of East Jerusalem Palestinians have continuously been boycotting Jerusalem's municipal elections, this is a potent case through which to examine how demobilization functions in action, through social media conversations. Using a mixed-methods analysis of Twitter contents as structured by different languages, our findings show how mobilization and demobilization discourses can co-occur during the same election event. Users of different languages – reflecting different social and political identities – interpret the elections in contrasting ways, with tangible implications for (in)equality in political participation. The study thus contributes theoretically to several domains of political communication, including election studies, local politics, and language fragmentation in online political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the consequences of the narrative used to support immigration reform by some immigrant activists, and especially how this narrative may negatively impact potential allies. Policies and policy proposals such as the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals have been consistently championed using a specific narrative of undocumented youths which presents them as well-assimilated, driven, and US-educated. The paper is drawn from 60 in-depth interviews conducted with undocumented youths in 2013 in New York City and northern New Jersey. The paper builds on the literature relative to narratives in social movements, framing and policy-making. Findings indicate that recent campaigns continue to make extensive use of this narrative, even though it creates a divide within the undocumented community. This unintended consequence has recently led some activists to step away from the ‘perfect DREAMer’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decades, social enterprises have been acknowledged as key welfare actors in several EU countries. In spite of the dramatic research devoted to exploring them, several issues concerning the definition, drivers and roles played by policies in sustaining social enterprise growth are still highly contested. Drawing on the papers published in this Monographic section, the introduction to this issue reconstructs the debate that has accompanied the emergence and development of social enterprises with a view to providing evidence of the advantages of collective participation for social enterprise emergence and growth. Next, the introduction pays attention to the factors that have led to the emergence and success of social enterprises as a form of self-organization of civil society; and briefly describes the papers included in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insurgent planning practice is an emerging idea for counter-hegemonic urban planning in the Global South, derived (generalized) from empirical work on specific southern contexts (Watson, V. 2013. “Planning and the ‘Stubborn Realities’ of Global South–East Cities: Some Emerging Ideas.”Planning Theory12 (1): 81–100. doi:10.1177/1473095212446301). In this paper, we position ourselves with Meth (2010. “Unsettling Insurgency: Reflections on Women's Insurgent Practices in South Africa.”Planning Theory and Practice11 (2): 241–263) who argues that insurgence and insurgent planning practices cannot be generalized across contexts but requires specific case by case empirical analysis to understand tactics and strategies within very different political and institutional situations. This paper is based on empirical evidence from two specific case-by-case analysis of potential insurgent action in Kathmandu, Nepal. We find that if insurgence is to present hope for counter-hegemonic outcomes in the context of Nepal, it is contingent upon a maturity of grass-roots organization, sharing of power among these, what constitutes ‘planning’ in insurgent planning and how success of such actions is measured. There is also a strong role of the nature of social mobilization and the institutional context of planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flash mobs are commonly portrayed in the media as light-hearted events intended to surprise bystanders. Meanwhile, academic literature features a number of explicitly political interpretations of flash mobs. However, to date, no empirical study has addressed why individuals organize and take part in the internationally spread mass events organized by the most popular contemporary flash mob incarnation, the Urban Playground Movement (UPM). In this paper, we place Budapest's UPM on an entertainment practice versus social movement mobilization spectrum. Our interviews with the leaders of the largest Hungarian UPM organization show that the functioning of the UPM in Budapest heavily relies on social movement continuity, where organizers see their events as ways to reclaim public spaces and to prefigure more social cities. However, among participants surveyed at the most notable yearly UPM event, the International Pillow Fight Day, we found fun as the primary motivation for participation, thus showing movement discontinuity. We conclude that the UPM in Budapest is a collective action, but not a social movement. Secondly, we find that the UPM exhibits 'thin' diffusion both in its reliance on individual activists over coalitions and in its usage of commercial social media as its diffusion infrastructure. Lastly, our results show that UPM collectives can act as 'containers' of social movement frames, implying that these playful groups could function as vehicles in the spread of protest in movement milieus. Our key finding that UPM is not a social movement contradicts the numerous academic interpretations of flash mobs as outright political events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Election Commission of India (henceforth, the EC), an institution created by the Constitution of India in 1950, manages and conducts parliamentary and state assembly (provincial level) elections. In recent elections, it has made tremendous efforts to make the electoral process more participatory. More than 900 million people were eligible to vote in the Indian parliamentary elections of 2019. In addition to the conventional ways of spreading voter awareness, the EC tried to reach out to voters through previously untried means to persuade them to come to the polling booths and vote – reflecting an institutional enthusiasm for popular mobilisation. However, there are also a significant number of missing names from the electoral rolls, and the EC faces accusations of being apathetic towards this anomaly. Is this eagerness on one hand and anomaly on the other symptomatic of 'democracy at crossroads', with India transiting to a more efficacious and involved institutional functioning, or is this an instance of strained institutional performance in the face of rising popular aspirations and tighter executive controls? The paper tries to explore this theme by looking at the functioning of the EC and its efforts towards voter participation in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent laws introduced by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government aim to centralise India's federal structure, for the goal of a unified (Hindu) national market, and to corporatise its agro-food system at the expense of smallholder farming and small-scale trade. These laws are being challenged by mass mobilisations led by farmers' unions from northwestern states—once-booming agricultural regions where, in recent decades and in the aftershocks of the Green Revolution, agrarian suicides have become endemic. The roots of this catastrophe are rapid marketisation in the 1960s (installing monocropping dependent on petrochemical inputs, destroying local agroecology) followed by post-1980s neoliberalism (with highly inequitable contract farming, alongside defunding of public infrastructure). Farmers and labourers now face interwoven crises of social reproduction—ecological depletion, precarisation, and chronic indebtedness, with no post-agricultural future in sight. The new laws claim to redress this by employing populist rhetoric against "exploitative middlemen"; in reality, markets are re-regulated in favour of large export-oriented agribusiness, thereby endangering food security, livelihoods and climate. The laws also herald digitalisation in agriculture and retail—further subsuming smallholders into productivist, financialised and outsourced logics. Their promulgation has triggered substantial FDI from global Big Tech, including Facebook and Google, aided by Indian conglomerates with close ties to the BJP built during PM Narendra Modi's prior tenure as Chief Minister of Gujarat. This paper details the above and concludes by contextualising the ongoing protest movement. We focus on southern Punjab, a region that has suffered acute crises of health and ecology, as well as violent political conflict and state repression. Decades of left-wing rural union activity in this region, fighting debt and dispossession as well as in support of anticaste land struggles, have laid the organisational groundwork for hopeful new political trajectories, including potentials for grassroots red-green coalitions centring women and landless labourers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The USA and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have been waging war against the Taliban in Afghanistan for more than a decade, with territorial gains by coalition forces often proving to be ephemeral. This paper traces the origins and evolution of the current Afghan insurgency and explores the framing of the Taliban movement's discourse on Twitter and other interactive websites. The paper postulates that Taliban activists are utilizing social media to disseminate their views and frame their movement in the phraseology of militant Islamism, traditional Pashtun folklore, anti-imperialism, social justice, and universal human rights. Taliban militants are attempting to align their discursive frames with various transnational ideologies that resonate not only with prospective recruits and supporters in Central and South Asia and the Middle East, but also potentially receptive audiences in the West. Such frame alignments are essential components in the micro-mobilization of movement participants. Taliban activists apparently recognize that there are important symbols, narratives, and channels already in existence that can facilitate the growth of their insurgency, while effectively discrediting coalition forces. This paper examines frame alignments and other insurgent-mobilization communication strategies by conducting a content analysis of recent tweets and blogs written by Taliban cyber-activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a local level examination of the political spaces and opportunities that arise for radical political agents in the aftermath of a climatic disaster. It explores the theoretical argument that disasters break the social contract between the state and disaster-affected communities by opening political space for change. The empirical work is based on a large-scale flooding disaster that affected southern Pakistan in 2010 and 2011 and caused international concern around increased Islamist mobilisation through their disaster relief programmes. The case study investigates the extent to which the climatic disaster opened political space for the radical Islamist group, theJamaat-ud-Dawa, to mobilise. Based on fieldwork conducted in three districts of Sindh in southern Pakistan, this paper demonstrates that climatic disasters are able to impact radical politics. This connection is not linear or causal but rather very complex. It further explains why this type of inquiry is relevant in order to understand climate change and security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Places of worship in the Christian tradition are often considered to retain fixed and static identities. However, circuits of globalization and global mobilities are increasingly present within such sites and drawn upon to construct new forms of place and geographies filtered through the individual church’s channels of mobilities. Following on from the new mobilities paradigm and relational approaches to ‘place’, this paper explores how the global and the local become implicated in places of worship. Using participant-observation and diary-interview methods based in Baptist churches in Bristol, UK, and framing the findings through Urry’s framework (Mobilities, Cambridge: Polity, 2007), the research examines the multiple interdependent mobilities of imaginary travel, communication, virtual travel, and corporeal travel. Whilst global mobilities were present within the sites, locality and local mobilities also featured prominently. The combination of interdependent mobilities, produced unique place identities in each of church that engaged with the global yet retained local circuits and community identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a strategy to temper centralized governance with a degree of public participation in China, the "Mass Line" approach has been used throughout the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to mobilize citizens in support of national projects and use this engagement as a channel for feedback. The Mass Line has been employed in attempts to address "radicalization" and challenges to centralized state control, indicating that the CCP's approach to counter-terrorism goes beyond the top-down, oppressive tactics that China is often associated with. This paper explores China's programmes of mass mobilization as a part of its counter-radicalization strategy in order to deepen understanding of how the country is responding to a key security challenge. It demonstrates that this approach reflects significant historical continuities, and thus national characteristics, in terms of political culture and state control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of social mobilisation and community engagement in contexts where traditional relations of power are elite-based and exclusionary. Informed by contemporary critiques of community development, it takes the Pakistan-based Rural Support Programme Network's (RSPN) "three-tier social mobilisation strategy" as a case study and asks whether and how it has transformed traditional relations of power. The study reveals that despite a strategic focus upon transforming community relations and reducing social inequities, RSPN's specific mobilisation strategy, in practice, enables traditional elites to exploit newly formed community organisations in ways that reproduce traditional, exclusionary, elite-based relations of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the mass mobilisations and occupations of urban squares since 2011 that came as responses to the global financial crisis, the spatial practices of social movements have undergone crucial transformations. This paper addresses these through the case of Athens and contends that the territorialisation of movements in urban space occurred through thecentralisationof counter-austerity struggle in the occupied Syntagma Square and, following this, through thedispersalof spatial practices that emerged out of the squares across the city. In the first instance, solidarity, mutual aid and collective self-organisation practices articulated in the occupied square introduced new collective action repertoires; while, in the aftermath of Syntagma, these were transposed in local groups, solidarity initiatives and networks that produced new territorialised forms of struggle and solidarity in Athenian neighbourhoods. Through these, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on contestation ‘from below’ emerging in urban contexts of austerity as constitutive of contemporary contentious politics. The arguments raised here on the transformations of movements occurringduringanddue toausterity span the period between 2011 and 2014 and empirically draw on participatory ethnographic research conducted in Athens, Greece between October 2012 and May 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article assesses the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) during the presidency of John J. Sweeney, which lasted from 1995 until 2009. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including press accounts and the AFL-CIO's own papers, it provides one of the first scholarly assessments of the entire Sweeney presidency. Sweeney won office in the first contested election in the AFL-CIO's history, and he came into power promising to revitalize the Federation, which is the largest labor federation in the Western world. Under Sweeney, the AFL-CIO invested an unprecedented amount of resources into both organizing and political mobilization, two key areas. In the early years of his presidency, Sweeney oversaw some important gains, particularly in the organizing arena, but the 2000 presidential election proved to be a turning point. After 2000, Sweeney's reforms were undermined primarily by external factors, particularly mounting corporate opposition, deindustrialization, and a hostile political climate, although internal resistance and division also played a role. As a result, a major campaign to secure labor law reform fell short, and union density continued to decline, yet the rate of decline was slower than it had been in the 1980s and early 1990s. Overall, although the results of Sweeney’s efforts were mixed, the important role that the AFL-CIO played in electing Barack Obama partly justified Sweeney’s emphasis on political mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses topics within the issue including colonial heritage and its importance in culture or market led regeneration projects; urban regeneration; and mobilizations of heritage.

One of the most important civic phenomena emerging from favelas in Rio de Janeiro today is “community (photo)journalism”, which is practised by favela residents who are trained in journalistic and artistic techniques to raise critical awareness and promote political mobilisation in- and outside favelas. This paper looks at some of the work produced at one training place for community photographers, the agency-schoolImagens do Povo(“Images of the People”) in Nova Holanda, a favela located in Rio’s North Zone. Using an ethnographic approach, this article first provides an account of the working practices of the School and its photographers. This is followed by a discussion of a small sample of their photographic work, for which we employ a social semiotic paradigm of image analysis. This methodological synergy provides insights into how these journalists document long-term structural as well as “spectacular” violence in favelas, while at the same time striving to capture some of the “beauty” of these communities. The paper concludes that this form of photographic work constitutes an important step towards a more analytical brand of journalism with different news values that encourage a more context-sensitive approach to covering urban violence and favela life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper contributes to the discussion on deliberative, direct democracy and volunteer mobilization in the Internet era by analyzing the vote participation levels of Wikipedia volunteer editors (Wikipedians). On 18th January 2012 in the ‘first Internet strike’ against the American ‘Stop Online Piracy Act' legislation, over two thousand Wikipedians took part in the vote concerning whether their site should undertake a protest action, with vast majority expressing support for this action. However, the vote participants formed only a tiny fraction of the total number of Wikipedians who number in millions. Although Wikipedia can be seen as an open, democratic forum practicing deliberative, direct democracy, the process of voting on Wikipedia is significantly influenced by participation inequality, with a majority of the vote participation coming from a small group of most active contributors – an effective oligarchy. This paper discusses the intricate dynamics between Wikipedia egalitarian ethos and the creed to discuss project matters deliberately on one hand and the conspicuous lack of promotion and advertisement stemming from a rule against ‘canvassing’ and an overall skepticism regarding the status of majority votes. While voters' passivity and lack of interest play a major role, as expected, another factor emerges as a significant factor responsible for the low levels of participation: an inefficient information distribution system, as the vast majority of Wikipedians were not aware of the ongoing discussions and the vote itself until after their conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Swedish image as a welfare society is challenged due to increasing spatial concentration of poverties. While Sherry Arnstein's Ladder of citizen participation lives on in new models for participatory governance under development in local municipalities, her focus on social inclusion, empowerment and community self-mobilization seems abandoned. This paper uses a case study in a marginalized suburb of Gothenburg to discuss how the local authority met a community-led initiative aiming at creating a new meeting place. The process is analysed in terms of institutional framing, which comprises both formal and informal practices, both policies and underlying beliefs. The study indicates that a strong control orientation and focus on formal procedures may be grounded in a tradition of representative democracy, but also that it may constitute an obstacle for a flexible and supportive approach towards community-led initiatives. Possible implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many biomedical and behavioural HIV/AIDS programmes aimed at prevention, care and treatment have disappointing outcomes because of a lack of effective community mobilisation. But community mobilisation is notoriously difficult to bring about. We present a conceptual framework that maps out those dimensions of social context that are likely to support or undermine community mobilisation efforts, proposing that attention should be given to three dimensions of social context: the material, symbolic and relational. This paper has four parts. We begin by outlining why community mobilisation is regarded as a core dimension of effective HIV/AIDS management: it increases the 'reach' and sustainability of programmes; it is a vital component of the wider 'task shifting' agenda given the scarcity of health professionals in many HIV/AIDS-vulnerable contexts. Most importantly it facilitates those social psychological processes that we argue are vital preconditions for effective prevention, care and treatment. Secondly we map out three generations of approaches to behaviour change within the HIV/AIDS field: HIV-awareness, peer education and community mobilisation. We critically evaluate each approach's underlying assumptions about the drivers of behaviour change, to frame our understandings of the pathways between mobilisation and health, drawing on the concepts of social capital, dialogue and empowerment. Thirdly we refer to two well-documented case studies of community mobilisation in India and South Africa to illustrate our claim that community mobilisation is unlikely to succeed in the absence of supportive material, symbolic and relational contexts. Fourthly we provide a brief overview of how the papers in this special issue help us flesh out our conceptualisation of the 'health enabling social environment'. We conclude by arguing for the urgent need for a 'fourth generation' of approaches in the theory and practice of HIV/AIDS management, one which pays far greater attention to the wider contextual influences on programme success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ability of civil society actors to champion environmental justice in an industrial risk society in South Africa by way of mobilisation and protest action. This paper presents viewpoints from key stakeholders at the Durban city level and three local case study sites to examine social capital relations to achieve environmental justice. It explores how civil society engages in social capital for mobilisation with itself and subsequent protest actions to engage with government and industry. The paper highlights that social actor response to engage in social capital for mobilisation and protests is best understood in relation to the socio-economic and political positioning of individuals or organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper approaches conflict financing as a combination of available revenue sources and the cost to start and maintain armed conflict. The paper therefore goes beyond conceptualizations of conflict financing that only look at the total available revenue of armed groups. Based on recent small arms research, the paper sketches a tool to estimate the mobilization cost of armed groups with the objective to establish data points for barriers to entry into armed conflict and the cost of competition during armed conflict. The paper argues that what matters in conflict financing is to identify the financing and mobilization costs together, and if an armed group can pay for the type of conflict required to reaching its objective. The paper contributes to an evolving literature on the feasibility of conflict and provides a new perspective on conflict dynamics with implications for peace processes, peacebuilding, and policy against conflict financing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate advocacy organizations are increasingly focused on citizen mobilization via social media as a strategy, proposing that by mobilizing the existing climate issue public into expressive action they will better be able to pressure policy makers. This paper explores the origins of and rates of participation in bursts of collective attention to the climate issue on Twitter over a five-year period. We find low levels of repeated user participation over time in spikes of public attention to climate on Twitter, while also identifying a small group of organizations and individuals who are "serial" participants in climate actions on Twitter. The high rate of participant turnover suggests continued questions about how to sustain public attention to the climate issue over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How significant were popular mobilizations like the colour revolutions and the Arab Spring in raising legal regulatory barriers for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Eastern Europe and the Middle East? How do different types of nondemocratic regimes approach NGO laws and state-society relations? This paper investigates and provides a comparative analysis of the NGO regulatory environment of nondemocratic regimes in Eastern Europe and the Middle East from 1995 to 2013, based on an original dataset measuring the severity of laws for the registration and operation of civic groups. We examine whether the uprisings instigated the passage of legal initiatives designed to curb NGO activism in each region, and assess whether patterns emerge based on differences in nondemocratic regime types. We determined that while NGO regulations have largely increased in Eastern Europe, they have actually declined in the Middle East on average. Moreover, greater NGO regulations exist in authoritarian and closed regimes that approach civil society by erecting clear legal blockades to civic activism. In contrast, hybrid regimes employ more-intricate legal strategies in order to raise the costs of entering and working in the NGO sector without necessarily overtly stifling civic activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have called for a synergy between studies of deliberative democracy and social movements for their mutual enhancement. The existing literature generally applies the principle of deliberation to evaluate social movements, but few studies have examined the corresponding practice of deliberative democracy within a movement. The Occupy Central (OCLP) campaign in Hong Kong is a rare case in which the organizers incorporated Deliberation Days into a social movement; however, participant self-selection turned it into an instance of 'enclave deliberation'. This paper studies the impact of enclave deliberation on social movements based on the case of the OCLP campaign and argues that enclave deliberation can be a powerful tool for mobilization, particularly for gaining public support and for recruiting core participants. However, the coherence and support of the movement can decline when enclave deliberation is used to make decisions for the general public, because enclave deliberation incorporates only a small spectrum of like-minded participants who might not seriously engage with opposing views. The findings of this study imply that enclave deliberation could facilitate mobilization, but it has its inherent limitations for decision-making in a movement. Given the selective nature of social movements, deliberation within social movements is likely to be enclave deliberation in most cases. This study thus has significant implications for the practice of deliberation in social movements in other contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health Promotion in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is currently facing many difficult challenges. Health status is worse than in any other region, with the midpoint data indicating that that SSA is not on track to achieve any of the Millenium Development Goals. This paper explores the history of health promotion in Africa, from before Alma Ata, through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and up to the present. Using examples from Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa during their transitional periods, and health promotion approaches adopted to tackle HIV/AIDS, diarrhoea and non-communicable diseases, the paper shows how the focus has shifted away from the ideals of the Ottawa Charter to an individualistic behaviour change approach. The reasons for the shift reflect political choices of governments that have favoured technocratic approaches over harnessing the popular mobilisations that have accompanied national struggles. The experiences of global movements, such as the Global Equity Gauge Alliance are considered as a way of enhancing local health promotion initiatives which, as presently conceived, are limited in their ability to address equity and the broader determinants of ill health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyberspace has dramatically affected social and political movements over the last 10 years. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest a strong role for information communications technologies (ICTs) in a changing landscape of organization and mobilization for large-scale social and political movements in countries around the world. This paper analyzes the 2013–2014 Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine using big data collected from open source content including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, forums, and news sites and mixed methods and assess the ramifications and impact of social media on social mobilization. This work compares digital and physical engagement directionality and finds the impact of social media on physical protest turnout is significant and leads to increased numbers of protestors in the streets. The analysis also highlights means of developing and assessing social mobilization through the use of linguistically and regionally categorized social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an analysis of mobilization strategies among Ukrainian diaspora groups in Canada in their response to the Ukrainian crisis of 2014–15. By mapping recent Ukrainian diaspora activism, the purpose of this article is to understand international non-state actor influence on transitional justice during crisis. The first part draws on studies of traumatic memories and the role they play in developing a victim-based identity among a diaspora. Practices of memorialization of the famine 1932–33 in Ukraine were created through emotional causal mechanisms that captured traumatic emotions on paper in the diaspora, creating narratives that were further sustained through value-based mechanisms. The second part explains how the diaspora bridged its interpretation of traumatic memories with the home country. The last part demonstrates how existing narratives and discourses were utilized through a strategic causal mechanism to create a rapid response among Ukrainian Canadians to the crisis in Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Belfast, Jerusalem, Brussels, Montreal, Sarajevo and Nicosia are among the most oft-mentioned examples of ethnically divided cities, situated in a wider context of ethnonational conflict (to varying degrees of intensity). At the same time there are other cities where ethnic and cross-community tensions are significant, but which have not occupied sufficient academic interest. In the Israel/Palestine context, the cities of Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Haifa represent such cases. They both contain a minority of Israeli-Palestinians whose patterns of political mobilization and interaction with local state institutions have rarely been explored. Yet the interaction between urban governance actors and Palestinian activists in these cities reveals much about the nature of contemporary ethnopolitics in Israel/Palestine. The aim of the paper is to provide an analysis of the ways through which the different mobilization strategies of Israeli-Palestinians in these cities are shaped by altercations between local governance mechanisms, and the internal and external intricacies of ethnic movement politics. The paper develops a relational approach to the study of citizenship in ethnically polarized cities. It suggests that powerful insights into patterns of claiming citizenship can be gained by incorporating dynamic institutional approaches to local minority mobilization with the important roles of symbolic urban politics and the politics of place. The constellation of those factors provides for a rich picture of the subtleties of minority strategies and the governance of ethnically fractured cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]