Protests,signaling, and elections: conceptualizing opposition-movement interactions during Argentina’s anti-government protests (2012-2013)

ABSTRACT

This article explores the interface of protest movements and opposition parties, considering this remains conceptually under-specified. It does so by proposing a processual framework involving three mechanisms of party-movement interaction – signaling, frame-alignment, and coalition-building – at play in different phases of a contentious cycle unfolding under electoral conditions. Drawing on novel interview data, the article validates this proposal by tracing direct and indirect effects between protest signals, activists, and Argentine opposition parties during the year-long contentious cycle that preceded the defeat of the Kirchner government in the 2013 legislative elections. On this basis, it is argued that interactive dynamics between protest actors and political parties can significantly affect opposition politics, supporting the emergence of collaborative strategies that may have major electoral implications. The article thus makes relevant theoretical and empirical contributions, by both offering an analytical bridge between social movement and party politics literatures with potential for further elaboration, while illuminating new developments concerning the positioning of Latin American center-right parties in relation to mass protests.     

Contesting middle-class civility: place-based collective identity in Hong Kong’s Occupy Mongkok

The global wave of popular protests since 2011 has highlighted the importance of place to contentious politics. Focusing on Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, this article analyzes how place, when dramatized by the practice of protest camping, shapes collective identity formation and contestation. By examining the Mongkok protest camp, I argue that the symbolic meanings being attributed to the place have shaped a collective identity distinctive from other local protests. This place-based collective identity was constituted by two dimensions: a tactical dimension that advocated militant actions against the police and counter-protesters; and an associational dimension that sought to identify with the grassroots in political activism. While its formation helped to galvanize protesters’ solidarity at the early stage of the movement, the two dimensions gradually generated intensive conflicts, which eventually weakened solidarity and the movement claims.     

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.     

What affects media commentators’ views of protest actions? Evidence from the Portuguese wave of anti-austerity contention

ABSTRACT

Media attention is crucial for social movements in pursuing their goals. Opinion makers in the press, in particular, can be expected to influence how mass audiences perceive protests. Yet we still have a poor understanding of the factors that explain the level of legitimacy that media commentators award to different protest actions. To address this gap, this paper compares 45 opinion articles written by press commentators in main-interest Portuguese newspapers about two of the prominent anti-austerity demonstrations in the country: the Geração à Rasca demonstration on 12 March 2011, and the Que se Lixe a Troika demonstration on 15 September 2012. Content analysis of this corpus of articles suggests that there were important differences in the level of legitimacy that commentators awarded to each of the protests. An analysis of the way commentators framed each protest suggests the use of a similar set of frames related to the characteristics of the protest events (e.g. claims, strategy), but differential deployment of these frames across the cases. For example, the same frames were sometimes used to legitimize one protest event, and delegitimize the other, and hence could not explain the differences in commentators’ views. It was rather the different context of the protests (e.g. social, economic and political), and the way that media commentators framed that context, that explains the level of legitimacy awarded to the two protests. Because the QSLT demonstration of 15 September 2012 was a protest directed against a measure that commentators framed as unfair and unnecessary (raising the single social tax), they regarded the demonstration as being more legitimate. In turn, because the Geração à Rasca demonstration occurred in a context where austerity was framed as necessary and unavoidable, it was regarded as less legitimate.     

Evictions,Petitions and Escraches: Contentious Housing in Austerity Spain

In the context of the new period of mobilization begun in Spain with the rise of the indignados in May 2011, protests against home evictions are today at the center of local and international discussions. This article seeks to make an initial examination of these mobilizations and their relationship with routine politics in Spain. After a brief historical introduction the article looks at the different kinds of action, both contentious and conventional, employed by the movement against the evictions, as well as the various scale shift mechanisms that have diversified the number and range of actors involved in this particular case of contentious politics. The conclusions look at the question of as to what point recent developments have broken with the deep-rooted tendency toward a lack of interaction between protest movements and institutional actors.     

The role of identity in the 2015 Romanian shepherd protests

Shepherds have a particular place in the history and culture of Romania. For centuries they have had rights to graze their sheep in public pastures and manage their flocks using traditional methods. Changes at the national and European level have threatened this way of life and provoked protest, most recently in December 2015 over plans to limit sheepdog numbers and restrict winter grazing rights. This article draws on interviews with participating and non-participating shepherds to examine the motivations behind the protest action and its relation to their position in contemporary society. The findings suggest how marginalised groups in society are able to draw on folk histories and cultural identities in the formulation of contentious politics in defence of their interests. The post-communist setting of the protests also highlights the persistence of traditional practices during a period of social and political upheaval.     

Affect's Effects: Considering Art-Activism and the 2001 Crisis in Argentina

Anxious of straying too far from traditional rational actor models and an unrelenting positivism, social movement scholars have displayed a persistent tendency to overlook the specificities of visual tools and aesthetic experience in claim-making and political protest. Often, as a direct consequence, the possibilities for mobilization and the matrices within which action takes place are described and understood in ways that are oversimplified, even distorted. Notably, small steps have been taken to overcome these distortions by building in a theory of affect that reserves a crucial space for the extra-discursive in the study of contentious politics. Extending some of these insights, this article reveals how an affect-informed approach can be particularly illuminating in studies of art-activism. It takes stencil protests from the aftermath of the 2001 crisis in Argentina as a case in point, discussing affects and their effects on porteño street artists. In so doing, it strengthens the case for greater incorporation of affect as a tool for understanding in literatures that deal with questions of framing, art-activism and the possibilities for social change.     

From mobilization to improvisation: the lessons from Taiwan’s 2014 sunflower movement§

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

When right-wing actors take sides with deportees. A typology of anti-deportation protests

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

Who Protests in America: An Analysis of Three Political Alternatives—Inaction,Institutionalized Politics,or Protest

Theories of social movements and collective action typically present social protest as one of three alternatives available to the individual: inaction, institutionalized political action, or protest. These political alternatives are rarely considered simultaneously nor are they modeled explicitly. In this paper we make use of survey data from a representative sample of the United States population. We employ multinomial logistic regression to determine what differentiates those who protest from those who engage only in institutionalized politics and from those who engage in no political action. We find that those who engage in social protest are similar in many respects to those who engage actively in institutionalized politics, yet education on social and political issues, participation in community organizations, and frequent church attendance increases the likelihood that individuals will engage in protest relative to institutionalized politics.     

Globalization and Its Countermovement: Marxian Contention or Polanyian Resistance?

This article surveys the scholarship on the countermovement against the diffusion of capitalism and market economy in the Global South. We identify two streams of analysis in the literature. On the one hand, scholars observe contentious politics instances where the spread of capitalist production relations enables the associational capacity and bargaining power of social classes. On the other hand, there are voluminous studies on contentious politics in the Global South where groups such as peasants, shopkeepers, and urban poor resist the intensification of the market economy. We use Beverly Silver's distinction between Marx‐type and Polanyi‐type protests, which focuses on how globalization makes and unmakes social groups, to unpack the heterogeneity of the impacts and experiences of globalization. We argue that although Silver's distinction is of great analytical value, there are strong warrants for separating the effects of the market economy from capitalism in studying contentious politics against globalization. Such an analytical strategy (i) expands the scope of the distinction between Marxian and Polanyian contention to social groups other than the working class and (ii) emphasizes that the roots of these struggles lie in the interconnected diffusion of capitalism and market economy.     

From ‘moments of madness’ to ‘the politics of mundanity’ - researching digital media and contentious collective actions in China

Abstract

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

Together all the way? Abeyance and co-optation of Sunni networks in Lebanon

ABSTRACT

This article assesses how social movement continuity may vary in non-democratic and repressive contexts. Using a single case study of Islamist networks in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli over three decades, I ask: Under what conditions is social movement continuity possible, and in what form? Former studies have three levels of abeyance - activist network and personnel; movement goals and repertoires; and collective identities and symbols - are instructive. Network survival and abeyance structures can facilitate rapid mass protests in case of a facilitating external conjuncture. This analysis relies on data collected during fieldwork conducted over a decade in Tripoli, triangulated with secondary literature and primary sources in Arabic. I find that four individual-level continuity pathways are available in authoritarian contexts: continuation of activism; disengagement; co-optation; and arena shifts. These pathways should not be seen as final and stable outcomes but as fluctuating and contingent processes, or pathways. Due to the ambiguity of informal networks, co-opted movements may easily turn against the authorities once again. Moreover, local legacies of protests may be used as resources by new protest leaders.     

From connective to collective action: internet elections as a digital tool to centralize and formalize protest in Russia

Over the past decade, an extensive body of literature has emerged on the question of how new communication technologies can facilitate new modes of organizing protest. However, the extant research has tended to focus on how digitally enabled protest operates. By contrast, this study investigates why, how, and with what consequences a heavily digitally enabled ‘connective action network’ has transitioned over time to a more traditional ‘collective action network’ [Bennett, W. L., Segerberg, A. (2013). The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 47]. Specifically, the article scrutinizes the trajectory of the Russian protests ‘For Fair Elections.’ This wave of street protests erupted after the allegedly fraudulent parliamentary elections of December 2011 and continued into 2013. As is argued, the protests were initially organized as an ‘organizationally enabled connective action network.’ However, after eight months of street protests, Russian activists reorganized the network into a more centralized, more formalized ‘organizationally brokered collective action network.’ In order to implement this transition, they deployed ‘Internet elections’ as a cardinally new digital tactic of collective action. Between 20 and 22 October 2012, more than 80,000 activists voted online in order to create a new leadership body for the entire protest movement, the ‘Coordination Council of the Opposition.’ As the study has found, activists implemented this transition because, within the specific Russian socio-political context, enduring engagement and stable networks appeared crucial to the movement’s long-term success. With regard to achieving these goals, the more formalized collective action network appeared superior to the connective action form.     

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.     

Polarization and convergence in academic controversies

Not many years ago both anthropology and political science experienced internal disputes—in the first case over the publication of a book accusing a noted anthropologist of endangering indigenous subjects and in the second over the nature of the field. While the first led to polarization, the second produced a partial convergence and modest reforms. This article examines the two processes and seeks the key mechanisms that produced those differences, closing with a call for broadening the study of contentious politics to cover non-public controversies like the ones examined in this article.

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Humor and Social Movements

At first glance, humor and politics may appear oppositional. Politics is often understood as serious, important, and grave, while humor is perceived as lighthearted and frivolous. Beneath the surface, however, it is evident that humor and politics are actually inextricably linked and have been throughout political history. This paper interrogates the tensions between humor and seriousness, importance and frivolity, and legitimate and dismissible to examine the manifestations of humor in social movement protest. I discuss how humor is used as a communicative and emotional strategy for social movement activists and organizations and focus on two constellations of movement humor: humor directed outside the group in the forms of tactics and frames, which I term external humor, and the role of humor in leadership, collective identity, and emotional labor, termed internal humor. To illustrate the role of humor in protest, I integrate examples from scholarly research, media depictions, and participant observation data to provide examples of how humor is manifest as an external tactic, social movement frame, and its potential role in strengthening ties to leadership and collective identity. The essay concludes by highlighting some potential paths for future study about the relationship between humor, ideology, identity, and power.     

Contention and Social Movements in an International and Transnational Perspective: Denmark 1914 – 1995

Ever since the emergence of mass movements as a mode of political organization in the 19th century we have witnessed simultaneous waves of protest in different countries and the diffusion of social movements across nations. After a presentation of data, methods, and theory, this article endeavors to analyse the development of contentious politics in Denmark, 1914 –1995, as a function of the international distribution of power, international political and economic crises, and the diffusion of social movements. The important analytical implication is that social movements and contentious politics must not only be understood in the light of national factors, but the existence of international opportunity structures must also be considered.     

Tweeting India’s Nirbhaya protest: a study of emotional dynamics in an online social movement

Abstract

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