Training for Civic Leadership

In this article, the authors offer social studies educators a way to deepen students' understanding of civil disobedience as a democratic and nonviolent means of instigating social change. The authors explore the concept of civil disobedience from a historical perspective and examine the justifications and ramifications of each historical example. In addition, they provide several examples of events that are often mistakenly categorized as civil disobedience. Through these examples, the authors develop a sound definition of the concept, while explaining its application to contemporary society. In actualizing the significance of civil disobedience in the secondary social studies classroom, the authors use five components: the historical importance of civil disobedience, the concept of civil disobedience, the argument for civil disobedience, the argument against civil disobedience, and teaching about civil disobedience. They also incorporate civil disobedience into a lesson plan.     

Explaining spontaneous occupation: antecedents,contingencies and spaces in the Umbrella Movement

This paper examines the antecedent and contingent causes sparking the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Spurred by two contingent events generating pre-emptive and backlash mobilization, the movement is a spontaneous transformation of the staged Occupy Central campaign. Based on an onsite survey (n = 1681) and in-depth interviews (n = 18), this paper demonstrates how protest experience and social media networked and rallied autonomous individuals from diverse backgrounds to occupy the physical spaces, thereby sustaining a self-mobilized, horizontal and resilient movement. Spontaneity, however, did not come out of nowhere. As an integral part of Hong Kong’s bottom-up activism and ecology, this spontaneous episode encapsulates antecedent events diffusing stalwart actors, decentralized organization and transgressive repertories. This paper situates spontaneity in temporal, spatial and emotional contexts to understand the uncompromising claims and participatory practices of the spectacular occupation.     

Social media and Umbrella Movement: insurgent public sphere in formation

The study examines the role of social media during the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong that lasted from September to December 2014. By interviewing a random sample of 1011 respondents over the telephone before the end of the Umbrella Movement, it was found that social media had become an insurgent public sphere (IPS) in the protest movement. Data showed that acquisition of political news through social media was related positively to support for the Umbrella Movement and adversely with satisfaction and trust of established political authorities, including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government, the Hong Kong police, and the Chinese central government. The insurgent public sphere role of social media, its implications, and likely development vis-à-vis the state and the market are discussed.     

Psychological antecedents and motivational models of collective action: examining the role of perceived effectiveness in political protest participation

The present study examines Hong Kong citizens’ willingness to participate in the Occupy Central/Umbrella Movement. A representative adult survey (N = 816) was conducted before the Occupy Central protest in 2014. Regression analyses showed that the core psychological antecedents of political identity (psychological attachment to pro-democracy parties and Occupy activists), political efficacy (perceived effectiveness of individual and movement agency), ideology (dissatisfaction with the pace of democratization), and emotion (anger with the political environment) were significant predictors of likely participation. Measures of perceived effectiveness of the Occupy movement to achieve successful outcomes (i.e. its ability to influence public opinion, strengthen the pro-democracy cause in Hong Kong, and facilitate opinion expression) explained additional variance even after controlling for demographics and the core antecedents. An integrated motivational model of collective action was then tested using structural equation modeling. Findings are consistent with the extant literature. Moral convictions (democracy as a fundamental human value) served as an antecedent of identity, efficacy, ideology, and anger, while identity exhibited direct and indirect effects on participation through efficacy, ideology and anger. The model also pointed to a role for perceived effectiveness, supporting the idea that individuals are motivated by other potential outcomes of a protest beyond achieving its primary objective.     

The Occupy Movement and the Politics of Vulnerability

The Occupy movement has generated a significant amount of scholarly literature, most of which has focused on the movement's tactics or goals, or sought to explain its emergence. Nevertheless, we lack an explanation for the movement's broad appeal and mass support. In this article we present original research on Occupy in New York City, Detroit, and Berlin, which demonstrates that the movement's heterogeneous participants coalesced around the concept of vulnerability. Vulnerability is an inability to adapt to shocks and stresses, and it inhibits social reproduction and prohibits social mobility. Rather than specifically discussing the wealth of elites per se, Occupy participants consistently expressed the feeling that the current political economic system safeguards elites and increases the vulnerability of everyone else. We argue that the Occupy movement has reworked the relationship among a range of political struggles that were hitherto disconnected (i.e. ‘old’ and ‘new’ social movements) and rendered them complementary through the politics of vulnerability.     

The generalized action potential of protest movements: The new class,social trends,and political exclusion explanations

Three explanations have been advanced to account for the generalized action potential of contemporary protest movements: the rise of the new class, a set of general social trends that cumulatively lead to liberalized social values and loosened social restraints against protest, and the mobilization of excluded groups. Analyzing three dimensions of generalized action potential—protest potential, political action repertoires, and protest movement support—we find support for all three explanations. Educated salaried professionals, especially sociocultural and public sector professionals, display greater protest potential, especially for civil disobedience, and are supportive of emerging “middle class” movements. A set of general social trends centering on increased education, life-cycle and generational change, secularism, and increased women's autonomy also create greater action potential. Reflecting mobilization against political exclusion, African Americans display a consistently strong generalized action potential. These protests reflect the rise of new political repertoires, particularly “protest activism,” which combines protest with high levels of conventional participation and is centered among the more educated.     

Internet alternative media,movement experience,and radicalism: the case of post-Umbrella Movement Hong Kong

This article examines the relationship between online alternative media consumption and public support for radical social movement goals and tactics. Theoretically, online alternative media use could relate to the holding of more radical views either because such views are propagated by the alternative media or because of the breeding of extreme views through communications among like-minded people. At the same time, this relationship is expected to be particularly strong when online alternative media use is coupled with specific types of movement experiences. Analysis of a representative survey (N = 1012) in Hong Kong shows that both online alternative media use and participation in the Umbrella Movement in 2014 related positively to the attitude toward violent protests and toward Hong Kong independence, and the relationship between online alternative media use and radical views was particularly strong among the Umbrella Movement participants. The analysis also shows a distinction between the implications of consumption of alternative media belonging to different political factions.     

Real Politics in Occupy: Transcending the Rules of the Day

Abstract

This paper analyses the Occupy movement in order to explore the mode of its participants' engagement with radical change. It also sketches the framework of real politics within which they were acting. It is a politics that accepts the constitutive lack of the political sphere, irreducibility of social antagonisms and alterity. First, by utilising Lacan and Derrida's theoretical constructions, the article examines ways in which Occupy aimed to transcend the ‘rules of the day’. It then describes the challenges of non-hierarchical organising and radical inclusion that the movement faced. Subsequently, I briefly analyse 2 aporias that were endured in Occupy: between the ideal and non-ideal as well as between unity and singularity. These aporias did not mark a stalemate that paralysed the movement but pointed to the limits that had to be negotiated by Occupy's participants. Occupy demonstrated that, in reality, direct democracy does not work like an ideal of a self-transparent and completely non-alienated form of decision-making; this is perhaps the most important lesson that has to be borne in mind when considering the question of whether it is inevitable that the lacks in the system and in subjects continually re-emerge, and when asking what this can mean for the potential of universalising direct democracy and the future of radical activism. This paper draws on ‘militant ethnographic’ and participatory action research within Occupy in Dublin and semi-structured interviews with participants from Ireland and the USA.     

Contested news values and media performance during the Umbrella Movement

Social crises are a huge challenge to the performance of the media. The norms and routines of news making with which journalists comply can become problematic in the context of intensive public sentiment and empathy. News values, including the sacred belief in objective reporting, are questioned in the light of controversies over editorial judgment within and outside the newsroom. I examine the contested news values that manifested in the Umbrella Movement of Hong Kong in 2014. In particular, I focus on the arguments and deliberations regarding news objectivity, which involved several parameters of the performance of the media during this social crisis.     

Media and information praxis of young activists in the Umbrella Movement

Young people were key participants in the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the media also played an important role in this protest. This study examines how Hong Kong’s young activists developed communication strategies and media practices to mobilize this social movement. A framework termed “media and information praxis of social movements” is proposed for the analysis. The findings showed that in their praxis, the young activists used their media and information literacy skills to initiate, organize, and mobilize collective actions. They not only used social media and mobile networks but also traditional mass media and street booths in a holistic and integrated approach to receive and disseminate information. Hence, these young activists served as agents of mediatization. The results also indicated that the young activists moved away from the traditional movement mode which just tried to motivate a large number of people to protest in the streets. They actively engaged in the new movement mode, which emphasizes the media and information power game. Their praxis in the Umbrella Movement reflects the trend toward the mediatization of social movements in Hong Kong.     

Mobilization by images: TV screen and mediated instant grievances in the Umbrella Movement

This article discusses the effects of the televised images of the use of tear gas on people participating in the Umbrella Movement. Although the role of the Internet and social media in political mobilization has been widely discussed, the importance of television cannot be overlooked. This article argues that the widely transmitted broadcasts of live images of the police firing tear gas into the protesting crowd generated “mediated instant grievances” in a substantial sector of the viewing public, thus contributing to the size and scale of the Umbrella Movement. The study reported here provides evidence for this argument by analyzing the results of a survey of protesters that were on site during the early stage of the movement (N = 969). The study sought to determine whether and how the television images were related to the participants’ political attitudes, reasons for participation, and views of self-mobilized actions. The findings showed that, in particular, mediated instant grievances motivated the participation of the “amateur protesters” in the movement.     

Corporation as climate ambassador: Transcending business sector boundaries in a Swedish CSR campaign

At a time when corporations are addressing increasingly complex, global corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues, this study examines and evaluates the strategies used in Vattenfall's challenging and innovative CSR campaign which aimed at establishing the energy company as a credible climate ambassador. Based on an analysis of the campaign outcomes in terms of the distinct interests and competencies of business, government and civil sector actors, I suggest that the company's credibility was weakened by its portrayal of Vattenfall as being more intent on organizing a public, collective action to fight climate change than on securing company-related business interests. Two ways to ensure greater credibility in similar cases are proposed: communicating explicitly about company motives for conducting CSR campaigns, and carrying out CSR campaigns in collaboration with non-profit organizations.     

A legal realist view on citizen actions in Hong Kong's umbrella movement

This article considers the legal validity of citizens' actions in civil disobedience as it pertains to the umbrella movement in Hong Kong. It introduces the critical approach of “legal realism” in order to reconsider normative law, such as police enforcement and court interventions, in relation to political struggle. It has been argued that the legal precepts of rights, responsibility, and the rule of law are capable of contingent and contextually appropriate interpretations by different legal actors, including citizens who participate in civil disobedience. In politics, justice, and most importantly law, civil disobedience offers an alternative legal normativity to consider the citizen's right, and even duty, to express dissent. Furthermore, this right or duty is legally persuasive and conducive to guarding democratic principles.     

Occupation as refrain: territory and beyond in Occupy London

Emerging with the wider ‘movements of the squares’ of 2011, Occupy London was defined by occupation, and by participants’ negotiation of what occupation meant. Its forms and meanings changed as London’s Occupiers moved between occupied sites, through uprootings by eviction, and into post-eviction attempts to extend Occupy’s territorial politics without the camps. This paper builds on three years of ethnography to consider occupation as an unfolding process, using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘refrain’. This describes territory in three ‘moments’: the marking of a fragile centre; the stabilization of a bounded ‘home’; and the breaching of boundaries, extending in progressive directions. This rubric is used to analyze London’s occupations, and their defining tension, between an expansive desire to ‘Occupy Everywhere’ – connecting to the wider ‘99 percent’ – and the tendency to become embedded in the protest camp ‘home’. The features of ‘home’ are analyzed using Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’, highlighting an alterity with ambivalent consequences for Occupy’s project. The paper argues that despite a desire to ‘deterritorialize’ occupation, Occupy London stalled in the moment of ‘home’, a consequence of the camp’s status as the ‘common ground’ of an often disparate movement, and the reduction of productive capacities characterizing Occupy’s terminal downswing.     

The Feeling Edge of Culture

During the 1960s, the new generation changed the American Creed by deemphasizing sensitivity to evidence, emphasizing feelings and deductive thought, while assuming an adversarial position against the sociopolitical order and embracing the American Black's struggle against racism. Driven by pain, fueled by fear and anger and oriented by existential values of being the Civil Rights Movement, sought to actualize political values of justice and equality. As peaceful demonstrations dwindled, violence increased, converting individual anger to social rage. Anger's cognitive structure changed the concept of society into a dichotomy of Black victims and Ulhite oppressors, forming an ethic of sensitivity with victims occupying the moral high ground. Pain and tragedy were banished from view and blamed on oppressors as individual identities divested civil traits and acquired cultural identity, disuniting the civil society. Rubbing against the American Creed, the ethic ofsensitivity produced a feeling of malaise posing a threat to mentaL health.     

In sight,in mind: Spatial proximity to protest sites and changes in peoples' political attitudes

Occupying public spaces can be an effective tactic for conveying a semantic message of protest and gaining wider support; however, it may also severely disrupt the everyday lives of non-participants and causes a backfire. Therefore, it remains unclear whether and how the occupy movements have shifted political attitudes among the general public. Bringing a social-spatial perspective to the case of the Occupy Central Movement (OCM) in Hong Kong, this study investigates how the attitudinal impact of occupation has varied according to people's spatial proximity to the protest sites. Using two waves of individual-level panel data collected right before and after the OCM and detailed geo-information on the respondents' home addresses and the occupied areas, we apply a difference-in-differences (DIDs) design to identify the causal link between space and attitudes. In addition, propensity score matching (PSM) methods are used to ensure the comparability of nearby and faraway residents. The results show that after the OCM, residents living near the occupied areas not only maintained their support for the pro-democracy camp but also became more liberal as compared to faraway residents. This phenomenon can be explained by the “on-site” effect, which suggests that the direct exposure to protestors' solidarity and the repressive actions of authorities arouse bystanders' sympathy for the protestors and support for their political cause. Such influence appears to be long-lasting and can be evidenced by the local election results after the protest.     

Yellow or blue ribbons: analysing discourses in conflict in the televized government-student meeting during the Occupy Movement in Hong Kong

In this commentary, the legal discourses in conflict evolving around the 2014 Occupy Movement in Hong Kong are analysed with Lemke’s theorization of textual semantics and Goffman’s participation framework. Specifically, I analyse the thematic patterns of “democracy” and “rule of law” in the televized meeting between the HKSAR Government officials and the representatives of Hong Kong Federation of Students on constitutional reform on 21 October2014. It is revealed that both sides not only construct dramatically different representation of “democracy” and “rule of law” but also show different orientational stances towards Hong Kong and China. I then propose a more plural understanding of each other and exploration of the other’s discourse histories as one strategy and the first step to going beyond binarism on the road of constitutional development in Hong Kong.     

Between the Procedural and the Substantial: Democratic Deliberation and the Interaction Order in “Occupy Middletown General Assembly”

This article analyzes interaction from an intentional, self‐reflexive democratic meeting of ordinary citizens—a “General Assembly” from the 2011 Occupy Movement—to explore two competing theories of democracy: Habermas's democratic deliberation and Mouffe's agonistic pluralism. The group's rational ideals and procedures for democratic deliberation approximate those of Habermas's “ideal speech situation,” but appear limited in their capacity to ensure Habermasian understanding or consensus. Intertwined with these rational procedures are practices best explained in terms of what Goffman called “face‐work”—the ways in which participants maintain a working consensus of mutual acceptance and respect in conversation. These face‐work procedures—rather than sincere, rational intentions—help constitute the civility necessary for rational deliberation and participation. Such symbolic valuing of self and other provide interactional grounds for the liberty and equality of agonistic democratic conversation as conceived by Mouffe.     

Organizational identity,political contexts,and SMO action: Explaining the tactical choices made by peace organizations in Israel,Northern Ireland,and South Africa

Students of social movements have long been interested in the question of why social movement organizations (SMOs) employ the tactics that they do. This paper explores this question by examining twenty-seven SMOs engaged in peace and conflict resolution in Israel, Northern Ireland, and South Africa. While the investigation reveals that SMOs across the sample employed an eclectic mix of tactics to pursue their goals, both cross-region and within-region variations in SMOs' tactical behavior are identified. The paper argues that cross-region variations in tactical behavior are best explained by the political contexts of each region and demonstrates that SMOs' organizational identities best account for within-region variations. Overall, the analysis supports scholars' claims that organizational identities ultimately drive the goals that SMOs pursue, the mix of tactics they emphasize, the degree to which they change their tactics over time, and, most importantly, the extent to which they are willing to engage in extra-institutional modes of action (protest, civil disobedience, violence).     

Negotiating civic identity across different political contexts: Immigrant participation in social movements and political incorporation

This article examines the understudied intersection between migration and contentious politics, focusing specifically on immigrant participation in social movements within their host societies. Drawing upon data from the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) Movement in Hong Kong, it illuminates the process through which Chinese immigrants become politicized, evolve collective identities, and mobilize against civil dominance. Further, it underscores the transformative potential of social movements in facilitating immigrant political incorporation. However, it also recognizes the unilateral acceptance determined by mainstream society, which often leaves immigrants sidelined in discussions regarding their qualifications for unconventional political participation. To address civil inequality, immigrants establish their civil identities, challenge dominance, and amass political capital for future incorporation. This study extends the migration and social movements literature by shedding light on the political dynamics of immigrant participation and the hurdles they encounter during their journey toward political incorporation. It also underscores the significant role of progressive social movements in fostering immigrant political participation. Furthermore, the research highlights the unique immigrant political identity that emerges and evolves through participation in social movements, contesting exclusion and monopolistic dominance over democratic realization.