‘So few of us and so many of them’

Public protest against the Persian Gulf War in 1990–1 was only part of the story of US American women's resistance to war in general and to that war specifically. Although the gendering of war is seldom discussed outside feminist scholarship, the events of 11 September 2001 and its aftermath as well as all events and processes having to do with war are gendered events and processes. Both women and men participate in war in various ways, some of which, particularly in the case of women, are either not noticed, are deliberately ignored or made invisible. In this essay, the stories of some women who protested the Persian Gulf War are represented alongside questions that their narratives prompted about what constitutes anti-war work, and what the ramifications of such work are in the present international context.     

Acts of resistance: the performance of women's grassroots protest in Peru

Creative approaches such as theatre are rarely addressed in analytic terms in the arena of grassroots political protest. In this article, is is argued that theatre can be an effective medium through which to engage with social change, and that theatrical protest articulates in a variety of intricate ways to achieve this. Two cases of political protest events which use theatre are examined, both performed by Peruvian grassroots women's organisations and set against a backdrop of the volatile period leading up to President Fujimori's dismissal in 2000. In a context of state authoritarianism, poverty and gendered inequality, four key aspects of the practice of performance contribute to political resistance. Firstly, the symbolic potency of making one's voice heard in public as an actively participating citizen promotes a process of ‘democratic discourse.’ Secondly, the reversals and inversions of public space and authority figures challenge established discourses of power relations. Thirdly, theatre as a ‘positive’ form of dissent provides a celebratory contrast to the ‘violence’ of traditional forms of protest. Finally, theatre contributes a space for ‘bearing witness’ to state oppression or corruption. This article demonstrates that in these crucial ways, theatrical grassroots protest is a potent tool through which marginalized sectors of civil society can engage in creative political dissent.     

The River Movements' Struggle in Mongolia

For decades, the landlocked local homelands of the Mongolian nomads were isolated from the global market. But in recent years, they have been crowded out by those who are looking for the untapped natural resources in their ‘homelands’. The River Movements' struggles of local civil society groups seeking to protect the environment and livelihood, or the ‘homeland’, of the local people from the threats imposed by mining operations, have come to be the most sustained grassroots movement in Mongolia during the past decade. Based on data collected between 2006 and 2010, this article traces the trajectory of the movement and discusses the conditions that shaped the course and consequences of the movement. The discrepancy between local values and opportunities and transnational norms and ideas had a significant effect on the trajectory of the movement.     

The Domestic Issue-Specific Political Opportunity Structure and Migrant Inclusion Organization Activity in Europe

This analysis compares broad and issue-specific political opportunity structures (POS) to help explain the domestic conditions under which migrant inclusion organizations across the European Union undertake political activity. Using data from an original survey of European migrant inclusion organizations, the analyses model nine domestic activity types that range from conventional lobbying to more confrontational tactics. The results show that the national issue-specific POS is a stronger predictor of groups' domestic action, mobilizing participation across a range of activities. In contrast, the broad POS tends to decrease participation after controlling for issue-specific factors. The results lend support to the importance of refining the concept of the POS to include variables specifically relevant to the movement in question. Moreover, they demonstrate that the nation-state is an important factor in explaining groups' activities.     

Radical Social Movements in Western Europe: A Configurational Analysis

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

Social accountability as social movement outcome: Protests in a Chinese city

ABSTRACT

Social accountability is a concept that has been used much in development studies and democratic theory to study informal ways for civil society to achieve social change and hold governments accountable. Surprisingly, it has been far less used in social movement scholarship and we argue that social accountability, understood as a combination of answerability, legal claim attainment, and sanction, is a useful way to examine social movement outcomes in China. Social accountability directs the focus of research towards the target of protest and not only whether the protest resulted in policy changes or not. Based on field work in 2013–2015, this article examines four cases of social protests in the Chinese city of Hangzhou. In line with previous research we find that when citizen claims accord with government policies and protesters are well-organized, local authorities tend to accommodate the protesters’ claims. However, answerability and sanction do not always follow the same pattern. Answerability can be relatively high also when legal claims are unsuccessful. This means that cases that are commonly seen as unsuccessful protests because the legal demands were not accommodated may still result in partial social accountability. In addition to the presentation of original empirical findings, the study makes a theoretical contribution by linking the two research fields of social movement and social accountability, which will be of interest to a wider scholarly audience.     

The Quebec student protest movement in the age of neoliberal terror

Reflecting on the 2011–2012 youth-led resistance movements in North America, this essay contextualizes and evaluates the Quebec student movement against the increasing influence of neoliberalism on North American and global society as a whole, comparing its strategies and impacts with those of the Occupy movement in particular. The Quebec movement launched a series of protests that awakened society to the prospect of what struggling for a radical democracy might mean, and how crucial free, accessible higher education must be to such a struggle. The key challenge for these social movements will be to continue to develop and circulate their views in the public sphere through forms of political organization that are as coordinated as they are flexible and open to new ideas. Both the Occupy movement and the Quebec student resistance have ignited a new generation of young people who now face the ongoing challenge of developing a language and a politics that integrate a meaningful consideration of public values and imagine the possibilities of a democracy not wedded to the dictates of global capitalism. This emerging public culture should make pedagogy central to its understanding of politics and work diligently to provide alternative subjects, narratives and power relations that contribute to sustainable educational institutions and enlarged public spaces in which matters of knowledge, identity and social responsibility become central to creating a democratic formative culture – here understood as the very precondition for the modes of agency, public values and engaged citizenship required to support any just and inclusive society.     

Online feminist protest against sexism: the German-language hashtag #aufschrei

Abstract

Twitter is becoming a discursive but also contested space for articulations of feminist protest. A hashtag that collected experiences with everyday sexism in the German-speaking world was #aufschrei, which became the 2013 hashtag of the year. In exploring the role of online feminist protest in the construction of alternative meanings, this paper draws on theories of the public sphere. Specifically, we build upon a communication studies model that refers to mutually permeating spheres of discourse in three layers, the simple, intermediate, and complex, each of which exhibits its own communication forms and forums. The methodology includes both a quantitative and a qualitative content analysis of #aufschrei tweets and of feminist blogs in order to comprehend argumentation patterns and networking practices. We argue that Twitter adopts the function of a simple public, where values and norms are negotiated at an everyday level. Feminist blogs create an intermediate public, in that they generalize experiences and are oriented towards networking. However, the persistent number of anti-feminist and sexist messages on Twitter likewise shows that online debates on gender topics have been increasingly infiltrated by these positions. Against this backdrop, in the conclusion, we discuss the feminist activist potential of #aufschrei.     

维权情境中的自发性认知解放——以业主积极分子的权利意识的演进为例

本文旨在考察业主维权情景中行动者的认知过程。作者提出了理解主观认知的分析框架,并根据权利内容即财产权抑或自治权、权利性质即反应性抑或进取性两个维度,对业主权利意识进行类型学划分。对微博的分析呈现了近年来业主积极分子权利意识的分布和演变状况;访谈结果则显示积极分子对权利意识的认知解放是一个自发、互动的过程,而且抗争面临的阻力促进相似抗争的连结,社会化媒体为类似抗争的串联提供了平台,推动了认知解放过程。本文阐明了在中国情境下框架化和认知解放过程的自发性和互动性,同时指出未来的研究应该从以事件为中心的案例分析转向以议题为核心的抗议事件族的分析。     

The Non Dominated Set in Bayesian Decision Problems with Convex Loss Functions

Bayesian decision problems require subjective elicitation of the inputs: beliefs and preferences. Sometimes, elicitation methods may not represent perfectly the judgements of the decision maker. Several foundations propose to overlay this problem using robust approaches. In these models, beliefs are modelled by a class of probability distributions and preferences by a class of loss functions. Then, we are in the conditions of a Pareto order. Hence the solution concept is the set of non dominated alternatives. In this article we focus on the computation of the efficient set when the preferences are modeled by a class of convex loss functions.