Comparing Protest Massacres

Why do some bouts of collective action end in bloodshed? This study evaluates a diverse collection of cases featuring opposition movements that experienced government‐led massacres. Historically, protest massacres originate to 19th century struggles associated with populational needs of obtaining public goods and political representation from governments. Unlike genocide and politicide which are likely to take place during heightened conflict, protest massacres tend to occur outside of war and civil war. Data on 76 incidents (1819–2017) capturing direct action strategies, preceding levels of mobilization, regime threat levels, and temporal characteristics of each massacre is analyzed.     

Selective Mobilization in Craft Protest

Abstract Resource mobilization theory, while useful for understanding the conditions under which individuals act together to remedy their grievances, neglects other problematical features of collective action. In some settings the more interesting question is not why mobilization occurs but, instead, why individuals with varied grievances mobilize around certain goals and in certain alliances rather than others. Collective protest among skilled workers confronting industrial change illustrates this problem of selective mobilization. Characteristics of the labor process, craft unionism, industrial relations, and workshop organization favored the mobilization of some interests, goals, and coalitions and inhibited others. Contrasting patterns of protest among British engineers and American machinists before 1920 support the argument.     

Protest Camps and Repertoires of Contention

Protest camps have become a prominent feature of the post-2010 cycle of social movements and while they have gripped the public and media's imagination, the phenomenon of protest camping is not new. The practice and performance of creating protest camps has a rich history, which has evolved through multiple movements, from Anti-Apartheid to Anti-war. However, until recently, the history of the protest camp as part of the repertoire of social movements and as a site for the evolution of a social movement's repertoire has largely been confined to the histories of individual movements. Consequently, connections between movements, between camps and the significance of the protest camp itself have been overlooked. In this research profile, we argue for the importance of studying protest camps in relation to social movements and the evolution of repertoires noting how protest camps adapt infrastructures and practices from tent cities, festival cultures, squatting communities and land-based autonomous movements. We also acknowledge protest camps as key sites in which a variety of repertoires of contention are developed, tried and tested, diffused or sometimes dismissed. To facilitate the study protest camps we suggest a theory and practice of ‘infrastructural analysis’ and differentiated between four protest camp infrastructures: (1) media & communication, (2) action, (3) governance and (4) re-creation. We then use the infrastructures of media and communications as a brief example as to how our proposed infrastructural analysis can contribute to the study of repertoires and our understanding of the rich dynamics of a protest camp.     

Elites and Collective Protest*

Efforts to explain collective protest have increasingly stressed the causal significance of elite structure and behavior. This trend is an unexamined manifestation of the broader and widely discussed trend away from “pluralistic” theories and toward “political” theories. But thus far, applications of the elite concept have been largely ad hoc, with little attention paid to its theoretical status or to developing it as an analytical tool. This problem can be rectified by turning to the neoelitist paradigm on which a number of scholars have been working in recent years. In particular, the neoelitist paradigm provides a conceptualization of unified and disunified elites which is theoretically and empirically grounded, capable of operationalization, generally applicable, and which plausibly helps account for variations in political conflict. It therefore complements and carries forward recent developments in the collective protest literature. This implies that the neoelitist paradigm merits serious attention alongside pluralist and Marxist paradigms as a guiding framework for macro social and political analysis.