Instrumental Civil Rights and Institutionalized Participation in China: A Case Study of Protest in Wukan Village

The current study uses the Wukan protest as a case study to assert that the Chinese farmers involved in the incident demonstrated “instrumental civil rights consciousness” in their protest. Civil rights is a means by which farmers strive for their economic rights and not an end in itself. Without real “rights consciousness,” the Wukan protests resemble “institutionalized participation” more than “rightful resistance.” The grassroots elections and self-governance that have resulted from the protest are not so much a harbinger of the emergence of bottom-up civil society as top-down initiatives by the central government. The central government has incorporated opposing powers into the existing institution to adjust state–society relations. By using bottom-up institutionalized participation, the central government has managed to strengthen its supervision over local governments, fight corruption, and stabilize its authority.     

“I Will Be Out There Every Day Strong!” Protest Policing and Future Activism Among Ferguson and Baltimore Protesters

An established body of literature shows that people engage in protest events for a number of reasons, including grievances, collective identity, increased efficacy, and emotions. However, it is unclear what happens to individuals’ motivation toward protest participation as they experience the reality of repressive policing. This study contributes to the theoretical body of knowledge of protest policing and social movements by investigating the microlevel processes that affect protest participation. Specifically, we build from the insights of previous research by examining how 102 Ferguson and Baltimore protesters with varying levels of commitment—revolutionary, intermittent, tourist—experienced repressive policing and how such tactics affected their subsequent decision to engage in future activism. Our findings suggest that those with the strongest commitment toward protest goals experienced the most repressive tactics, and yet did not seem to be deterred in their motivation to be engaged in future protests. In contrast, while repressive tactics appeared to deter the less committed individuals from street protests, they remained motivated to engage in other forms of civic engagement.     

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.     

What is the right way to protest? On the process of justification of protest,and its relationship to the propensity to participate in different types of protest

This study explores how citizens in Spain perceive different tactics employed in anti-austerity protests in 2011–2013, and tests the model of the process of justification of protest. This model combines the elements of Gamson’s collective action frames theory (effectiveness, anger and grievances, operationalized as appraisal of harm) with the concept of legitimacy. It also links justification to the intention to participate. We empirically differentiate between three protest tactics: normative demonstrations, non-normative peaceful strategies, and non-normative violent actions. We find that demonstrations are perceived to be more legitimate, but less effective than non-normative peaceful protests. Violent strategies, on the other hand, are seen to be more effective than legitimate. We postulate and find that legitimacy and effectiveness partially or fully mediate the impact of political ideology, anger, and appraisal of harm on the probability of participation in non-normative protest. Finally, we establish meaningful differences in the predictors of the likelihood of joining normative, non-normative peaceful, or non-normative violent protests. Overall, our results suggest that the study of justification of collective action and especially, the inclusion of the notion of legitimacy, enriches our understanding of the popular approval of and propensity to participate in different forms of collective protest.     

Between Revolution and Defeat: Student Protest Cycles and Networks

This article reviews the literature on student protest movements, during and after the mass mobilisations of the 1960s. It considers the usefulness of the major social movement frameworks that have been applied to student protest movements. The first part of the article explains how the new social movement paradigm developed from the wave of 1960s protests in the United States and Europe. This was because of a rare conjunction of social and political structural societal changes and dynamics within the student population. The second part considers student protest movements in authoritarian regimes. In particular, how the political process approach allows for an analysis of student protests after the 1960s within and outside of the occident. The third considers the relatively recent application of social network analysis to student protests and the politicising effect of the university campus. Finally, the article concludes by arguing that student protest movements are not a homogenous phenomenon. Their dynamics and the political structures they challenge vary between countries. Furthermore, although the conditions of student life and the rapid turnover of generations suggest sustained long-term political activity is not possible, recent research drawing upon social network analysis suggests political activity across student generations may be maintained.     

Democracy denied,youth participation and criminalizing digital dissent

Attention is given in this article to recent action by many liberal states to regulate and criminalize certain forms of political dissent reliant on new media. I ask how those working in the fields of youth studies and social science more generally might understand such processes of criminalizing political dissent involving young people digital media. I do this mindful of the prevailing concern about a ‘crisis in democracy’ said to be evident in the withdrawal by many young people from traditional forms of political engagement, and the need to encourage greater youth participation in democratic practices. A heuristic or guiding frame is developed to analyse how new laws, amendments to existing laws and other regulatory practices are being implemented to contain certain forms of political participation, performed in large part by young people. A case study of ‘Distributed Denial of Service action’ is offered to examine government responses to political practices which I argue constitute legitimate forms of protest and civil disobedience.     

This Is What Democracy Sounds Like: Protest Performances of the Citizenship Movement in Wisconsin and Beyond

This article is a case study of an ongoing singing protest in Wisconsin, the group that calls itself Solidarity Sing Along (SSA). An offshoot of the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising, for the first 15 months of its existence SSA was an important nexus of local activists working to recall Republican state senators and the governor. After the recall's failure the group not only continued to carry on but quite effortlessly reoriented its claim making and centered its protests on the freedom to assemble and petition the government, which had been an important cause from early on. Maintaining its pro-labor orientation, SSA has become part of a broader movement for democratic citizenship rights. Situating the group in musical practices of the Wisconsin protests and social movements more generally, I show that how SSA makes and performs its music makes it a part of the citizenship movement. This case study reveals a novel form of claim making within the repertoire of contention practiced by social movements: SSA is a ‘part-time occupation’ and as such has potential to be more resilient and durable than ‘permanent’ occupations à la Occupy Wall Street.     

Beyond the iconic protest images: the performance of ‘everyday life’ on social media during Gezi Park

ABSTRACT

Using the Gezi Park protests as a case study this article considers the performative component of protest movements including how and why protestors actively produce protest activity ‘on the ground’ and how this is expressed through visual images. It looks beyond iconic images which appear as emblematic of the protest and instead shifts our focus to consider the more ‘everyday’ or mundane activities which occur during a protest occupation, and explores how social media allows these images to have expressive and communicative dimensions. In this respect, protests can be performed through humdrum activities and this signifies a political voice which is communicated visually. The research is based on visual analysis of Twitter data and reveals methodological innovation in understanding how protestors communicate.     

Challenging the Republic from the Provinces: An Analysis of Crowd Action after the French Separation Law (1905)

Abstract

The Separation Law of 1905 is widely considered a defining moment in modern French political culture and an enduring legacy of the Third Republic. Whereas scholars have mostly concentrated on the political and intellectual genesis of the law, this article asks how ‘ordinary Catholics’ reacted to separation. It concentrates on crowd action in response to the so-called inventories of 1906, during which State officials audited all property that the Church either possessed or of which it had rights of use. By analysing the forms, motives and legitimation strategies underlying popular resistance against the inventories in Brittany, this article highlights the importance of space for structuring protest and violence in early twentieth-century France. It argues, first, that crowd action heavily drew on concepts of homeland, alternately understood as the local commune, the Breton region or the international community of Catholic believers. Secondly, the article demonstrates that these protests targeted the Republic itself and not, as had been the case during the 1890s and the post-1907 period, individual republicans. Finally, by analysing how crowd action sought to defend the homeland against the encroaching power of a State poised for change, the article reveals the persistence of reactive protest in post-1848 France.     

Local press meets transnational activism: news dynamics in an anti‐WTO protest

Transnational protests often involve a cross‐cultural encounter between “foreign” protesters and the local media and public, whose repertoires of contentious practices and discourses may differ. Examining how transnational and local actors interact in these events is one way to understand the significance and impact of transnational activism. At the same time, local media coverage of transnational protests can also be analyzed as such a cross‐cultural encounter. Following these premises, this article examines Hong Kong media coverage of the transnational protests during the World Trade Organization's 6th Ministerial Conference, which was held in the city in December 2005. The analysis focuses particularly on how this non‐routine news event provided the conditions for a more reflective interactive dynamics between the protesters and journalists, which contributed to emergence of media discourses negotiating and redefining the existing cultural understanding of protest actions. However, the case study also shows the limits regarding how far the redefinition and negotiation can go. Theoretical implications of the analysis are discussed.     

Kunuk took it to the streets of Greenland: single-issue protests in a young online democracy

Single-issue protests and online mobilization have proliferated in the wake of social media. While significant ground has been covered regarding the changing possibilities for mobilization, the question of how specific circumstances condition the political impact of online mobilization and public protests has received much less attention. During the last couple of years, Greenlanders have increasingly employed Facebook to mobilize the populace and arrange public demonstrations with noteworthy results. Arguing that single-issue protests cannot be separated from the issues they are concerned with, the paper explores how a single and potential trivial political issue – a new parliament building – developed from a prestige project supported by a nearly unanimous Parliament into a public-contested issue and a failed political project. The paper invokes Actor-Network Theory to account for the trajectory of the issue and how it was translated along the way as actors built and broke alliances. The concepts of mobilizing structures, opportunity structures and framing processes are employed to shed light on the conditions of possibilities for the emergence, development and impact of the protest against the parliament building. Finally, the paper discusses social media’s impact on the image of politically engaged Inuit and on the power relations between citizens and parliament in Greenland. This discussion is of paramount importance as Greenlanders are struggling with their colonial heritage while they are constructing Greenlandic democracy.     

Unpacking the effects of repression: the evolution of Islamist repertoires of contention in Egypt after the fall of President Morsi

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

Everyday politics,social practices and movement networks: daily life in Barcelona's social centres

The relations between everyday life and political participation are of interest for much contemporary social science. Yet studies of social movement protest still pay disproportionate attention to moments of mobilization, and to movements with clear organizational boundaries, tactics and goals. Exceptions have explored collective identity, ‘free spaces’ and prefigurative politics, but such processes are framed as important only in accounting for movements in abeyance, or in explaining movement persistence. This article focuses on the social practices taking place in and around social movement spaces, showing that political meanings, knowledge and alternative forms of social organization are continually being developed and cultivated. Social centres in Barcelona, Spain, autonomous political spaces hosting cultural and educational events, protest campaigns and alternative living arrangements, are used as empirical case studies. Daily practices of food provisioning, distributing space and dividing labour are politicized and politicizing as they unfold and develop over time and through diverse networks around social centres. Following Melucci, such latent processes set the conditions for social movements and mobilization to occur. However, they not only underpin mobilization, but are themselves politically expressive and prefigurative, with multiple layers of latency and visibility identifiable in performances of practices. The variety of political forms – adversarial, expressive, theoretical, and routinized everyday practices, allow diverse identities, materialities and meanings to overlap in movement spaces, and help explain networks of mutual support between loosely knit networks of activists and non‐activists. An approach which focuses on practices and networks rather than mobilization and collective actors, it is argued, helps show how everyday life and political protest are mutually constitutive.     

Revisiting Cyber-Diplomacy: Canada–China Relations Online

This paper situates Canada–China relations in the context of recent internet developments and debates about information and communication technologies (ICTs) infrastructure. I argue that protest events in Hong Kong surrounding the #occupycentral movement help us understand the tension between internet access, technological innovation and state centric forms of internet governance. By foregrounding the tension between the horizontal exchange of ideas and national surveillance and control, it is possible to identify important similarities between Canadian and Chinese state and the experience of internet users. In the wake of the Hong Kong occupy protests, it is possible to see how the internet promotes the practices of ‘Other Diplomacies’, functional relationships between citizen, market and foreign actors that present challenges for national regulation and traditional diplomatic mechanisms. The paper proposes a revival of the concept of Cyber-Diplomacy to better explain the challenges of state-to-state relations in an era of ICT innovation.     

Anti-hierarchical activism in Hong Kong: the post-80s youth

In 2009, a political youth movement known as the Post-80s emerged in Hong Kong to protest against the construction of a high-speed railway. While local academics and government officials framed the motivations of these youth protesters using economic rationales, I argue here that the Post-80s are better understood as conveying their dissatisfaction towards existing political structures in the city. This profile sets out Post-80s criticisms of the entrenched hierarchical dynamics in Hong Kong political culture that has shaped interactions between the government, political parties and the wider population, and discusses how the Post-80s have responded to the representational imbalances imposed by these hierarchical practices in the local political sphere by advocating for a way of doing politics where individual voices (as opposed to the collective) are emphasized, and where horizontal structures are used. I conclude by exploring the repercussions of this critique on recent political discourses and protests observed in Hong Kong.     

Protesting the police: anti-police brutality claims as a predictor of police repression of protest

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

Globalization and the policing of protest: the case of APEC 1997

The policing of protest at international events conflicts with the political and policing culture of the host nation. Previous research shows a trend toward softer, more tolerant styles of policing protest within various Western democracies. We present a case study of an exception: the repression of protest at an international event in which one Western democracy hosted rulers of less democratic regimes in a ritual celebration of economic globalization. We explore reasons why, in the face of protests about undemocratic regimes elsewhere, the Canadian government and police were willing to use blatantly undemocratic tactics popularly believed to be more characteristic of those other regimes. Implications are discussed concerning protest policing, economic globalization, the nation-state and social movements.     

Strain,ethnic competition,and power devaluation: white supremacist protest in the U.S., 1948–1997

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

A Little Spark Kindles a Great Fire? The Paradox of China's Rising Wave of Protest

Mass protests in China in recent years have been more frequent and widespread than in other authoritarian settings and have thus become a serious source of concern for the party-state. Many believe that a rising tide of protest has the potential to impose a significant political challenge to the stability of the regime in comparison to the fragile situation of 1989 the Tiananmen incident. However, the motives behind today's protests are clearly not revolutionary. The growing protest movements do not serve as a severe threat to the continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party for three reasons. First, the nature of recent protests has not been that of pro-democracy; rather, the participants are aggrieved citizens who have suffered economic losses and who demand concrete and practical rights for unfair and unjust treatments. They are politically weak despite their huge numbers. Second, the characteristics of recent protests do not constitute any of the features that would involve serious political risk. Instead, protests are focused on local issues and target specifically at local authorities. Third, the shifting international environments and China's rise to international power change the political visions of educated Chinese and further undermine their potential to initiate protests that would have more serious political implications.     

The reconfiguration of social movements in post-2011 Romania

ABSTRACT

Since 2011, a series of citizen mobilizations have emerged in Romania, from local replicas of the ‘Occupy’ movement to the 2017 and 2018 mass protests against corruption. In this article, we develop three arguments for a better understanding of the successive waves of protests that have shaken the Romanian social and political landscape since 2011. First, while each protest has a specific claim and target, the forms of commitments, repertoire of actions and relationship to politics point to clear continuities between protest events that should be analyzed as part of the same cycle of protests. Second, while some analyses have emphasized the specificities of the Romanian context, we maintain that the actors and dynamics of this cycle of protest are simultaneously deeply national, embedded in the mutations of Eastern European civil society, and in resonance with the post-2011 global wave of movements. Third, while it is indispensable to analyze these citizen mobilizations as a whole, it is equally important to understand that they result from the convergence of diverse activist cultures, from left-wing autonomist activists to right-wing citizens and even nationalist militants. Each of these activist cultures has its own logic of action and its vision of democracy and of politics.