Why are citizens in some communities able to protest to bring attention to their grievances, while not in others? While a long literature has contended that informal civil society institutions ...facilitate contentious collective action, not all organizations do so, and some might even discourage it. I argue in this article that inclusive institutions—open to everyone in a community—facilitate protests, while non-inclusive institutions uniting some particularistic sub-groups within communities hinder them. The former provide communities with broad social networks fostering communal unity, while the latter erode communal unity through provoking internal conflicts. I provide evidence for this theory in the sub-municipal context of Mexico, using statistical analysis of data from an original survey of sub-municipal community presidents and qualitative fieldwork evidence from Puebla and Tlaxcala.
This article presents an in-depth case study of large-scale conflict in a small town, and reveals the complex ways that community groups and activism, hyperlocal news media, and political power ...intersect through rural environmental disputes. An important but under-recognized feature of such conflicts is the unique role performed by notions of rurality in the construction of environmental protests, discourses, and decisions; that is, the ways in which rural communities’ conservation efforts can be unfairly characterized as “backwards” and “anti-development”. Through a series of interviews and focus groups with protestors and residents, our case study examines a controversial boat ramp development that had a marked environmental impact on the isolated coastal town of Mallacoota (population 1,000) in the state of Victoria, Australia. We show that the environmental activism of protesters lifted the issue's visibility to the level of regional, state, and national news and politics. But the community consultation processes that occurred in response to protests raise significant concerns about government decision making that fails to acknowledge and negotiate the diverse understandings of place and rurality that exist within a community. The outcomes of struggles for power in this small town are lamentable and lasting, damaging the hyperlocal news environment and undermining the community newspaper's reputation among citizens.
In the early Xi Jinping era, Chinese veterans escalated their contention and repeatedly staged cross-regional collective actions, sparking concerns about the internal stability of the governing ...regime. However, by 2019 veterans’ broad-based mobilizations had largely faded into obscurity, even though local and individual activism persisted. How did the government successfully contain veterans’ mobilization without radicalizing the entire issue group? Drawing on evidence from fieldwork, media accounts, and government documents, this article argues that the regime has embraced a campaign-style stability maintenance approach, defined as the concerted top-down mobilization of all available resources by central authorities to silence designated targets within a defined time frame. This approach differs from the transformative campaigns prevalent in the Mao Zedong era, as its chief purpose is to defend rather than transform the existing sociopolitical and economic order. It also deviates from routine stability-preserving practices, as the intensity of protest suppression, the breadth of targeted subjects, and the speed of conflict resolution have all been markedly escalated. In the post-Mao era, the state adopts this approach when it urgently needs to silence a particular group or preserve stability during sensitive periods. Although this strategy has indeed assisted the regime in managing politically threatening forms of contention, its implementation often comes at the expense of upholding the rule of law. Furthermore, since its primary goal is to swiftly demobilize protests rather than fundamentally redress grievances, the achieved outcomes may lack long-term sustainability.
Populist studies are increasingly interested in the effects that populism has on the politics of contemporary democratic systems. This article analyzes the relationship between populist parties and ...politicians and the intensity of political protest. Arguing that populists generate feelings of anger and outrage at establishment politicians, develop close relationships with social movements, and instigate further polarization and resistance from the opposition, the existence of populist actors in a political system is believed to generate more political protests. Using a unique dataset of populist parties in European, Latin American, and North American countries, cross-national testing demonstrates strong positive correlations between the presence of populists in power and anti-government demonstrations, testifying to the effect that populists have on protest activity. Tests for the existence of populist parties in the opposition, however, reveal no empirical support for increased levels of political protest, implying that the strongest effect only comes once populists come to power. These results provide necessary nuance to our understanding of the destabilizing effects of populism and its consequences for contemporary liberal democracies.
•Empirical research with 64 climate strikers in six cities in four different countries.•Examines knowledge, emotions, motivations, and actions of climate strikers.•Large variation in climate strikers ...regards to knowledge, emotions, motivations and actions.•Strikes provide opportunism also for other social and political action.•Values underpinning climate action range from individual to planetary concerns.
In August 2018, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg started to strike from school on Fridays to protest against a lack of action on the climate crisis. Her actions sparked a historically large youth movement, leading to a series of school strikes across the world. Over the course of one week in September 2019, striking school children, students and other grassroots movements, such as Extinction Rebellion, called for everyone to participate in a global Climate Strike. This paper is based on comparative research with climate protesters in six cities: Brighton and London (United Kingdom), Montreal (Canada), New Haven and New York (USA), and Stavanger (Norway). Based on original interviews with 64 protesters, the study examines their knowledge, emotions, motivations, and actions in relation to climate change, including any lifestyle changes they have undertaken before or after their protests. Our findings show that protesters have varying degrees of knowledge about climate change, and have taken a range of actions in their own lives to address climate change. They also manifest a wide spectrum of emotions about climate change, and different motivations for taking part in climate strikes. These features are under-studied and dynamically evolving at the present conjuncture. On this basis, we call for expanded academic attention to human, emotional, epistemic, and seemingly mundane aspects of climate protests, their structural tendencies and relational expressions, and the implications for our ability to address underlying drivers.
In the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic, governments around the world have implemented exceptional measures aimed at restricting people's mobility or banning public spaces used, among other things, ...for protest, thus causing the expected regressive effects in the socioeconomic sphere. What happens with social protest when the public space is banned? Does it stop, is it displaced, does it occur in any other form? In this article we present a map of protest in Argentina since the beginning of the pandemic. We conclude that the levels of participation remain high and that, given the features of the protest itself, its claims may be channelled into the institutions.
Episodes of mass political violence, such as genocide and civil war, have been thought to both encourage and discourage future political mobilization. We square these competing hypotheses by ...disaggregating between protest onset and resilience. We argue that exposure to mass violence decades ago should on average decrease protest onset, by heightening fears of repression and retribution. However, conditional on protesting, prior exposure to violence should increase protest longevity, by generating greater political grievances that fuel commitment to the cause. We find evidence of both effects in Algeria during the 2019–20 Hirak protests that toppled President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Pairing an original dataset on massacres during the 1990s civil war with a rolling online survey of 18,000 Algerians in 2019–20, we find that areas exposed to greater violence in the 1990s had on average fewer, but more committed, protesters in 2019–20.
The 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill protests in Hong Kong culminated in diverse forms of political participation, but as yet little attention has been paid to the impact on the pro-democracy ...movement at the micro-level. This paper explores pro-democracy protesters' evolving views of politics and their new modes of political participation during and after the protests. Using interview data, this paper shows that participants in the pro-democracy movement have increasingly recognized the inseparable relationship between everyday life and political life. This paper examines two forms of everyday political participation - political consumption and digital activism - that have been widely deployed by protesters to express political claims, circulate political information, and garner support from local and international audiences. While the politicization of everyday life provided impetus to street demonstrations in 2019, it has continued despite the adoption of a wider scope of repressive measures by the Chinese and Hong Kong governments after the protests. Through the case of Hong Kong, this paper demonstrates how, in an authoritarian context, everyday resistance is applied to struggle for regime change and democratization.
Between 2009 and 2019, Chile experienced the rise and fall of a powerful and influential environmental movement. This movement spurred massive protests against large-scale energy and mining projects, ...successfully blocking many of them. Although these demonstrations brought together people of all ages and backgrounds, youth were particularly active in advocating for the environment. As digital natives, young people may experiment with new ways of engaging in participatory actions, especially through social network sites, instant messaging and other social applications. We use data from the annual Youth, Participation, and Media Use surveys fielded between 2009 and 2019 to study the individual-level relationship between social media and environmental activism among young Chileans. As expected, we find that social media use is positively associated with participation in environmental issues. Nevertheless, this relationship is dynamic, gradually weakening over time. Thus, our results suggest that social media effects on environmental activism are contingent upon the specific stage of the protest cycle. We close with a discussion of the relevance of our findings as well as their limitations.
This book is among the first comprehensive efforts to collectively and academically investigate the legacy of the Euromaidan in conflict-torn Ukraine within the domain of civil society broadly ...understood. The contributions to this book identify, describe, conceptualize, and explain various developments in Ukrainian civil society and its role in Ukraine’s democratization, state-building, and conflict resolution by looking at specific understudied sectors and by tracing the situation before, during, and after the Euromaidan. In doing so, this trailblazing collection highlights a number of new themes, challenges, and opportunities related to Ukrainian civil society. They include volunteerism, grassroots community-based activism, social activism of churches, civic efforts of building peace and reconciliation, civic activism of journalists and mediators, digital activism, activism of think tanks and expert coalitions, the LGBT movement, challenges of civil society relations with the state, and the closing of civic space.
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