Online messaging app Telegram has increased in popularity in recent years surpassing Twitter and Snapchat by the number of active monthly users in late 2020. The messenger has also been crucial to ...protest movements in several countries in 2019-2020, including Belarus, Russia and Hong Kong. Yet, to date only few studies examined online activities on Telegram and none have analyzed the platform with regard to the protest mobilization. In the present study, we address the existing gap by examining Telegram-based activities related to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. With this paper we aim to provide an example of methodological tools that can be used to study protest mobilization and coordination on Telegram. We also contribute to the research on computational text analysis in Cantonese—one of the low-resource Asian languages,—as well as to the scholarship on Hong Kong protests and research on social media-based protest mobilization in general. For that, we rely on the data collected through Telegram’s API and a combination of network analysis and computational text analysis. We find that the Telegram-based network was cohesive ensuring efficient spread of protest-related information. Content spread through Telegram predominantly concerned discussions of future actions and protest-related on-site information (i.e., police presence in certain areas). We find that the Telegram network was dominated by different actors each month of the observation suggesting the absence of one single leader. Further, traditional protest leaders—those prominent during the 2014 Umbrella Movement,—such as media and civic organisations were less prominent in the network than local communities. Finally, we observe a cooldown in the level of Telegram activity after the enactment of the harsh National Security Law in July 2020. Further investigation is necessary to assess the persistence of this effect in a long-term perspective.
Previous studies have found a positive relationship between the youth and the educated with protest number, but the form that these protests take needs further research. We argue that students are a ...unique group, acting neither as an educated nor a young population, and three possible mechanisms push students toward non-violent rather than violent forms of protest. By promoting values of tolerance, higher levels of human capital, and social mobility, education serves as a factor that pacifies destructive tendencies in protest movements. At the same time, universities are a platform for cooperation, and the large amounts of free time and energy make the costs of participating in protests for students minimal compared with other groups. Using a negative binomial regression and a rare events logistic regression, we find that the proportion of students is a strong and consistently significant predictor of the number of nonviolent demonstrations. However, the share of students in the total population does not turn out to be significantly associated with violent protests/armed uprisings.
This article offers a preliminary analysis of the hundreds of youth-inspired mass protests staged in Thailand during 2020. It argues that while calling for reforms and flirting with revolutionary ...rhetoric, the protestors lacked a clear programmatic agenda and were primarily engaged in disrupting dominant narratives about the country's politics, especially in relation to the previously taboo question of the political role of the monarchy. Despite the ad hoc and sometimes incoherent nature of the protests, the students mounted a dramatic challenge to Thailand's ruling elite. Ultimately, the conflict exemplified a generational divide: people from Generation Z, aged under 25, have radically different understandings of power, deference and legitimacy from older population groups. Whatever happens to the protest movement in the short term, the demonstrators have made a decisive break with the old social consensus that existed during the long reign of the late King Bhumibol (1946-2016).
In this commentary, I use the current protest movement in Israel as an entry point to discuss urban autonomy and social protest in an age of growing polarization between progressive cities and ...reactionary states. While the nationwide protest is not explicitly framed in urban versus national terms, it has a clear urban dimension. Tel-Aviv-Jaffa is not only the place where the protest movement is the strongest, but the municipality also leverages the protest to demand enhanced autonomy against the right-wing government’s illiberal agendas. I suggest that viewing urban protest through an urban autonomy lens is useful to fully unpack the current wave of protest and situate it within the larger political processes that shape it.
This article analyses the protests of resident doctors in Poland, with a particular focus on their hunger protest in October 2017. We use a theoretical framework of three types of groups - epistemic ...communities, communities of practice and interest groups - to show their strategies used for gaining influence upon healthcare. We show the dynamics of the protest, with a shift from self-centred to public-oriented demands. We present how a professional group managed to shape the public discourse on healthcare, introducing their key demands, which became not only media catchphrases, but also the axis of the media discourse on any future healthcare reforms. We also reconstruct how the resident doctors defined and identified themselves as an epistemic community, with an elaborate and well-planned strategy employed to gain public visibility, media attention and public support.
In "Why Democracy Protests Do Not Diffuse," we examine whether or not countries are significantly more likely to experience democracy protests when one or more of their neighbors recently experienced ...a similar protest. Our goal in so doing was not to attack the existing literature or to present sensational results, but to evaluate the extent to which the existing literature can explain the onset of democracy protests more generally. In addition to numerous studies attributing to diffusion the proliferation of democracy protests in four prominent waves of contention in Europe (1848, 1989, and early 2000s) and in the Middle East and North Africa (2011), there are multiple academic studies, as well as countless articles in the popular press, claiming that democracy protests have diffused outside these well-known regions and periods of contention (e.g., Bratton and van de Walle 1992; Weyland 2009; della Porta 2017). There are also a handful of cross-national statistical analyses that hypothesize that anti-regime contention, which includes but is not limited to democracy protests, diffuses globally (Braithwaite, Braithwaite, and Kucik 2015; Gleditsch and Rivera 2017; Escriba-Folch, Meseguer, and Wright 2018). Herein, we discuss what we can and cannot conclude from our analysis about the diffusion of democracy protests and join our fellow forum participants in identifying potential areas for future research. Far from closing this debate, we hope our article will stimulate...
•We present a novel tripartite framework for understanding civil society organisations’ engagement with services in the MENA region.•We argue that services play a crucial, yet highly varied, role in ...CSOs’ efforts to mobilise and build legitimacy.•Service provision has a mixed role because it can be used to bolster the legitimacy of both CSOs that are critical of existing powerholders and those that are supportive of them.•Inadequate service provision acts as an important focal point for protests that challenge the status quo.•These patterns suggest that CSOs’ engagement with services has potentially important impacts on peace and conflict dynamics.
How and why do civil society organisations (CSOs) engage with service delivery and with what consequences for political change in conflict-affected contexts? Most existing work in this area focuses on specialist NGO service provision, concluding that this remains a relatively apolitical sphere of activity with little relevance for peace and conflict dynamics. By examining the experience of CSOs in three countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, we show that engagement with services plays a crucial, yet highly varied and hitherto under-studied, role in these organisations’ efforts to build legitimacy and pursue their political goals, with potentially important implications for peace and conflict dynamics. By bringing literature on social movements into conversation with research on NGOs and civil society in conflict settings, and drawing on interviews with key informants, we develop a novel tripartite framework for understanding civil society engagement with service delivery. We identify three main patterns where CSOs’ engagement with services contributes to political change and highlight the dynamic interaction between these three patterns: providing to initiate a challenge (where services provision is used as a means of establishing new organisations that are critical of the status quo by bolstering community-level legitimacy), protesting (where services are used as a focal point for critical groups’ mobilisation and coalition building) and providing to reinforce (where groups that are supportive of the status quo use civil society service provision to shore up support). We show that in the MENA region, civil society’s engagement with service delivery makes an important but mixed contribution to political change. While it can contribute indirectly to political transformation by cultivating the legitimacy of new civil society groups or provide a focal point for a wider critique of the status quo, it can also undermine a shift towards political transformation by entrenching the position of existing elites.
Protest Dynamics in the Global Context Ustyuzhanin, Vadim V.; Medvedev, Ilya A.; Ufimtsev, Andrey I. ...
Journal of globalization studies,
11/2023, Volume:
14, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
At a time of growing socio-political instability, the analysis of the numerous protests taking place around the world is becoming of the utmost interest. This article focuses on the dynamics of ...non-violent destabilization processes, which are becoming increasingly dominant even in developing countries and less developed regions with many socio-economic and political problems. The authors provide empirical data on non-violent protest activity based on the Global Protest Database, which consists of a huge number of media in nine languages and is presented in the Google News aggregator. With a list of more than 520,000 articles in nine languages from January 2005 to December 2021, the authors standardized all the data on the number of news sources per month, and then used the principal component method to aggregate the information into a variable that can be considered as an index of protest activity. The observed value of the index for each month and trends are presented in the article. This study was supported by strategic project ‘National Centre for Sci-ence, Technology and Socio-Economic Foresight’ of Higher School of Eco-nomics integrated development programme.
History suggests universities are hotbeds of political protest. However, the generality and causal nature of this relationship has never been quantified. This article investigates whether ...universities give rise to political protest, drawing on geocoded information on the location and characteristics of universities and protest events in the 1991–2016 period, at the subnational level in 62 countries in Africa and Central America. Our analysis indicates that university establishments increase protest. We use a difference-in-differences and fixed-effect framework leveraging the temporal variation in universities within subnational grid-cells to estimate the effect of universities on protest. Our analysis indicates that localities with increases in number of universities experience more protest. We suggest a causal interpretation, after performing different tests to evaluate whether this reflects confounding trends specific to locations that establish universities, finding no support for this. We also provide descriptive evidence on the nature of university-related protests, showing that they are more likely to emerge in dictatorships and that protests in university locations are more likely to concern democracy and human rights. These findings yield important general insights into universities’ role as drivers of contentious collective action.
A qualitative shift is underway in the nature of labor protest in China. Contrary to prior literature that characterized strikes as being largely defensive in nature, the authors suggest that since ...2008, Chinese workers have been striking offensively for more money, better working conditions, and more respect from employers. They explain these developments using a "political process" model that suggests economic and political opportunities are sending "cognitive cues" to workers that they have increased leverage, leading them to be more assertive in their demands. Such cues include a growing labor shortage, new labor laws, and new media openness. Their argument is supported by a unique data set of strikes that the authors collected, two case studies of strikes in aerospace factories, and interviews with a variety of employment relations stakeholders.
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