This article reexamines spontaneity as an important, albeit neglected, mechanism in collective action dynamics, and elaborates on its operation and effects in protest events and social movements. We ...do not presume that spontaneity is routinely at play in all collective actions. Rather, based on our grounded analysis of historical and ethnographic data, we contend that spontaneity is triggered by certain conditions: nonhierarchical organization; uncertain/ambiguous moments and events; behavioral/emotional priming; and certain ecological/spatial factors. We conclude by elaborating why the activation of spontaneous actions matters in shaping the course and character of protest events and movements, and we suggest that spontaneity be resuscitated in the study of collective action and everyday life more generally.
The widespread opposition to unprecedented austerity measures in Greece provides a unique opportunity to study the causes of mass protest. This article reports the results of a survey of the adult ...population in which two-thirds of the respondents supported protest and 29 per cent reported actual involvement in strikes and/or demonstrations during 2010. Relative deprivation is a significant predictor of potential protest, but does not play any role in terms of who takes part in strikes or demonstrations. Previous protest participation emerges as a key predictor of actual protest. This study seeks to place these results within a comparative context, contrasting Greece with other countries facing similar challenges, and discusses the implications for the future of austerity politics.
In protest, activists sometimes turn to disruptive and violent tactics to meet their goals. Doing so, however, can also undermine support for their claims. We argue that how protestors weigh this ...trade-off depends on their targets and the extent to which their claims appeal to diverse constituencies, which then factors greatly into their choice of protest tactics. We complement past work that suggests that forces of professionalization and counterpressure alter activists' tendency to use violent and disruptive tactics. With data on over 23,000 protest events in the United States between 1960 and 1995, we find that protest events characterized by broadly resonating claims are more likely to employ tactics that are disruptive but nonviolent. By contrast, events espousing narrower claims are more likely to employ disruptive tactics that are also violent. Moreover, when governmental entities are targeted, protests are less likely to witness the use of both violent and nonviolent disruptive tactics. We discuss the implications of our results for social movement theory and the dynamics of collective violence.
How do public opinion signals affect political representatives' opinion formation? To date, we have only limited knowledge about this essential representative process. In this article, we theorize ...and examine the signaling strength of one type of societal signal: protest. We do so by means of an innovative experiment conducted among Belgian national and regional politicians. Elected officials were exposed to manipulated television news items covering a protest demonstration. Following Tilly's previously untested WUNC claim, four features of the event were manipulated: the demonstrators' worthiness, unity, numerical strength, and commitment. We argue that these protest features present elected officials with useful cues about what (a segment of) the public wants. We find that these cues affect elected officials' beliefs. The salience they attach to the protest issue, the position they take, and their intended actions all change as a consequence of exposure. The size of a protest event (numbers) and whether the protesters agree among themselves (unity) are the most persuasive protest factors. The effects of the protest signals come on top of strong receiver effects. We find no evidence that elected officials' predispositions moderate the effects of the protest features.
The Streets Are Talking to Me MARIA FREDERIKA MALMSTRÖM
MECW: The Middle East in the Contemporary World,
11/2019
eBook, Book
This sophisticated book presents new theoretical and analytical insights into the momentous events in the Arab world that began in 2011 and, more importantly, into life and politics in the aftermath ...of these events. Focusing on the qualities of the sensory world, Maria Frederika Malmström explores the dramatic differences after the Egyptian revolution and their implications for society-the lack of sound in the floating landscape of Cairo after the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, the role of material things in the sit-ins of 2013, the military evocation of masculinities (and the destruction of alternative ones), and how people experience pain, rage, disgust, euphoria, and passion in the body. While focused primarily on changes unfolding in Egypt, this study also investigates how materiality and affect provide new possibilities for examining societies in transition. A book of rare honesty and vulnerability,The Streets Are Talking to Me is a brilliant, unconventional, and self-conscious ethnography of the space where affect, material life, violence, political crisis, and masculinities meet one another.
Since 2004, South Africa has experienced a movement of local protests amounting to a rebellion of the poor. This has been widespread and intense, reaching insurrectionary proportions in some cases. ...On the surface, the protests have been about service delivery and against uncaring, self-serving, and corrupt leaders of municipalities. A key feature has been mass participation by a new generation of fighters, especially unemployed youth but also school students. Many issues that underpinned the ascendency of Jacob Zuma also fuel the present action, including a sense of injustice arising from the realities of persistent inequality. While the inter-connections between the local protests, and between the local protests and militant action involving other elements of civil society, are limited, it is suggested that this is likely to change. The analysis presented here draws on rapid-response research conducted by the author and his colleagues in five of the so-called 'hot spots'.
This paper uses social movement theory to examine one way in which secondary stakeholders outside the corporation may influence organizational processes, even if they are excluded from participating ...in legitimate channels of organizational change. Using data on activist protests of U.S. corporations during 1962-1990, we examine the effect of protests on abnormal stock price returns, an indicator of investors' reactions to a focal event. Empirical analysis demonstrates that protests are more influential when they target issues dealing with critical stakeholder groups, such as labor or consumers, and when generating greater media coverage. Corporate targets are less vulnerable to protest when the media has given substantial coverage to the firm prior to the protest event. Past media attention provides alternative information to investors that may contradict the messages broadcast by protestors.
There are good reasons to test more refined measures of protest to better understand protesters' disaffection with and disconnection from politics. This article assesses whether disaffection and ...disconnection predict each of: protest participation (aggregated), participation in demonstrations, and differential participation in demonstrations. Failure to vote does not predict participation in demonstrations but positively predicts participation in "protest" (aggregated). Those who demonstrate more frequently are more likely to participate in electoral politics than less frequent demonstrators. Most protesters are at least moderately engaged with formal politics, despite lacking trust in political institutions. Protest is not, therefore, a straightforward expression of anti-politics.
Protests offline, under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic and regulations such as a stay-at-home, require the adaptation of existing tactics and/or the use of innovative tools in the contention ...repertoire. This adaptation concerns restrictions related to pandemic measures, the lockdown of businesses/institutions, and social distancing along with access to resources, protesters' security, and the no-harm principle. This paper provides examples of protests which have occurred since March 2020, under four categories: (1) tactics adjusted to pandemic-related limitations, (2) tactics that are an essence of such limitations, (3) tactics related to opposition to the lockdown, and (4) protest tactics use framed as 'pandemic'. In the first section, I show how street protest (if permitted at all) is strengthened by symbolic action and how inability to refer to the 'logic of numbers' subjects the tactics to the 'logic of bearing witness.' However, the challenges and tactical limitations do not apply to the opponents of lockdown, breaking the rules of the sanitary regime. The demonstrations against the lockdown preserve the positive effects of street protests and even strengthen them. Discussion concerning high-risk protest actions under threat of infection results, however, in medicalization of political contention.
This article highlights the way in which Chinese protestors resisting home eviction and demolition have begun to develop innovative, media-savvy tactics for winning public sympathy for their causes ...and framing their plights as unjust, and considers the political implications of this trend.
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