The Dissident Politics in Václav Havel’s Vaněk Plays: Who is Ferdinand Vaněk Anyway?, written by Carol Strong

This chapter develops an analytical framework of understanding the politics of peaceful and violent protests by focusing on not only the relations between the central state and local state but also the role of civil society and external actors. This framework can help us comprehend the politics of peaceful and violent protests. Moreover, the chapter reviews 15 perspectives on the politics of protests, namely (1) legitimacy; (2) state violence and repression; (3) organized crime, vandalism and violence; (4) political violence; (5) democratization and violence; (6) citizenship and violence; (7) social movement and violence; (8) the art of peaceful protests; (9) the relevance of totalitarianism; (10) the psychology of public fear; (11) populism and violence; (12) political symbolism; (13) anarchism and “uncivil society”; (14) insurgency; and (15) the role of the failed state. All these perspectives can help us understand the origins, dynamics and interrelationships of peaceful and violent protests in the case of Hong Kong.

This chapter centres on one particular aspect of youth activism in an age of surveillance, exploring the role of arts-based strategies and aesthetics within young people’s political protest. In doing so, it addresses one of the key themes of the book, i.e. the paradox that liberal-democratic states ostensibly committed to democratic values now repress various forms of political action, including the use of artistic strategies within young people’s protest. The chapter works on the premise that this repression occurs not only through overt measures of criminalisation and control but also, in a Foucauldian sense, through the more diffuse workings of power within neo-liberal states. This highlights a further paradox, i.e. that the systems and institutions through which such power operates are also the very sites in which political dissent can have most effect. Based on a Rancierian reading of a specific instance of political protest amongst young people in the UK – in which the very act of politics is seen as an aesthetic activity in itself – the chapter offers an optimistic intervention on this paradoxical situation. In particular, it illustrates how young people’s political dissent can disrupt existing power structures through an aesthetic reconfiguration of roles and places that also turns the diffuse operations of surveillance on themselves. This has important implications for art, aesthetics and activism, and the chapter concludes by arguing for a shift in emphasis from artistic activism to a recognition of the aesthetic dimensions of young people’s political protest and dissent.

Generally, there are three types of protest, namely prophetic, political and sacramental protests. The prophetic protest has to do with various prophets protesting against nations, kings and policies of the government. Political protests have to do with various groups of people protesting against government policies of oppression. Protest by a group of people of certain faith against the evil that is perpetrated by governments or other authorities is known as sacramental protest. This article is about an individual called Ebed-Melech who protested against the wicked act of King Zedekiah and his princes. The article discusses how Ebed-Melech’s protest, just as the prophetic, political and sacramental protest, can become a model for modern protests all over the world. This article insists that Ebed-Melech’s courage, concern for justice, love, kindness and compassion makes him suitable to be a model for prophetic, political and sacramental protests in the modern world. The Ebed-Melech protest is an example of individual responsibility in the modern world that is filled with injustice.

This book argues that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have an important effect on political participation in the developing world. Contrary to popular belief, they promote moderate political participation through formal mechanisms such as voting only in democracies where institutions are working well. This is a radical departure from the bulk of the literature on civil society that sees NGOs and other associations as playing a role in strengthening democracy wherever they operate. Instead, Carew Boulding shows that where democratic institutions are weak, NGOs encourage much more contentious political participation, including demonstrations, riots, and protests. Except in extreme cases of poorly functioning democratic institutions, however, the political protest that results from NGO activity is not generally anti-system or incompatible with democracy - again, as long as democracy is functioning above a minimal level.

Religion is considered to have different aspects of influences on political protest, and some have argued that religious participation often mobilizes collective political actions by enhancing individuals’ civic skills and political efficacy. By contrast, religious values and beliefs that emphasize the importance of traditional norms and conformity tend to reduce individuals’ propensities to participate in political protest. The influences of religion on individuals’ attitudes toward coping with injustice and unfairness can be critical for explaining their propensities to participate in political protest. Using data from the fourth wave of the Asian Barometer Survey, this study investigates the role of perceived unfairness in shaping the link between religion and political protest in 13 East Asian countries. In accordance with the arguments of mobilizing and conforming effects, we find that religious attendance increases individuals’ propensities to engage in political protest, while religiosity has a negative effect on political protest. In particular, the results show that the perceived unfairness of income distribution mediates the indirect effects of religion on political protest. They also present that religious affiliations mitigate perceived unfairness and indirectly reduce individuals’ propensities to participate in political protest. Nevertheless, the direct effects of religious attendance on mobilizing political protest are stronger.

Studying the types of protest, defining the essence and basic concepts is an urgent problem. The experience of protests demonstrates the presence of a number of unsolved socio-economic problems, insufficient effectiveness of the authorities in communication with society. The protest potential of society lies not only in the plane of socio-economic issues, but is formed on the basis of such factors: the level of political activity of citizens, relations between representatives of various ethnic groups, religions, ideologies, external information influence, etc. The role of the media is growing, both as tools for the dissemination of information and for the implementation of the political activity of citizens. New forms of protest are emerging, the study of which is important for understanding their direction, predicting possible options for the development of the situation and developing mechanisms to reduce negative consequences. This article reveals the essence and basic concepts of political, social and cultural protests. The main purpose of the article is to determine the characteristics of political, social and cultural protests by studying the reasons for their occurrence. The study conducted a literature review and a thematic analysis of data from scientific articles collected on the topic. Key words: protests, political protest, social protest, cultural protest.

Political contestability is an important issue in the ethical analysis of corporate political activity (hereafter CPA). Though previous studies have proposed analytical frameworks for creating contestable political systems, these studies conceive firm-level factors such as size and wealth as the main (and perhaps, only) determinants of contestability. This relegates the influences of informal managerial-level attributes such as tribalism, especially in ethnically diverse contexts where politics and tribe are inseparable. In this article, I explore the linkages between managers’ tribal identity and political contestability among firms in Ghana. I found that contestability is affected by tribal consonance (similarity) and tribal dissonance (difference) between corporate executives and policymakers. I also found that dissonance creates liability of tribe, which causes contestability problems in all four stages of the CPA process—i.e., political planning, political access, political voice, and political influence. Overall, this article extends the micro–macro link of political connections from performance to the ethics of political competition and contestability. It offers important contributions to the literature, advances insightful implications for practice, and outlines useful future research directions.

Political socialization is required in order to develop a civic culture among the citizens and instill into youths a cognitive, affective, and evaluative orientation towards the political objects and leaders of any state. This study aims to explore the nature of the political socialization of students at the University of Dhaka. In order to collect the primary data, 400 students from four faculties of the University of Dhaka were surveyed purposively. The study argues that the students at the University of Dhaka are politically socialized, although their degree of political socialization varies among the students according to whether their educational background is in the arts, social sciences, science, or business. Of all the agents, the media impacts the most on the process of students’ political socialization. The study found that most of the students at this university possess the cognitive, affective, and evaluative capacities to understand political issues and objectives. The media, their family, and the university play prominent roles in developing the students’ attitudes and knowledge about political objects and issues. The findings indicate that the media play the most influential role in generating cognitive, affective, and evaluative attitudes and orientations towards the political leaders and political institutions.

The article is devoted to the coverage and comparison of the normative-legal base of the political protest of Ukraine and the Republic of Poland. The right to freedom of peaceful assembly, guaranteed by the constitutions of democratic states, is considered, and it allows the society to demonstrate disagreement with the policy of the state. In addition, in special cases, freedom of peaceful assembly and political protest are a kind of act of political communication between civil society and government. The peculiarities of the legal and regulatory framework of Ukraine regarding political protest are considered, and it is determined that the regulatory framework is limited by a small number of normative legal acts, and of the forms used by the legislator in the issues of regulating the relations of citizens and authorities regarding the issues of political protest are fairly blurry. It is noted that the wording of the political protest in the Constitution of Ukraine is rather vague, and it is noted that there is no direct article in the Constitution about political protest, but there is some hint that political protest is considered as a part of human rights. The peculiarities of the normative and legal base of political protest in the Republic of Poland are considered, it is noted that the normative-legal basis does not provide for a direct norm regarding political protest, it is stated that there are only two normative legal acts regulating relations between the state and the protesters as a social phenomenon. The concept of «political protest» in general, its kinds, forms and mechanisms under which political protest has the right to be realized is considered. The normative-legal base of political protest of Ukraine and the Republic of Poland is analyzed and compared. Conclusions are made regarding the regulatory framework of political protest of the two countries, where the Ukrainian legal framework in the field of political protest is still poorly developed and needs to be finalized, however, it still demonstrates greater democracy compared to the Polish, and has prospects for development in a democratic direction.

This paper presents a nonrecursive causal model of violence at protest demonstrations; it seeks to account for violence by both the police and the protestors. The model is tested using data on 126 protest events in the United States. The results of the analysis suggest strongly that the outbreak of violence at protest demonstrations is the result of a dynamic process resulting from the interaction of police and protestors; exogenous variables are found to have little predictive power when the reciprocal causal link between protestor violence and police violence is included in the model. Political protest and political violence have become more frequent in the United States in the last fifteen years; correspondingly, they have come under increased scrutiny by social scientists during this period. Various theories have been proposed to account for both political protest and political violence, and to draw the links between them (Eisinger; Fogelson; Gurr; Lipsky; Lupsha; Muller; Schneider; Schumaker; Skolnick; Von Eschen et al.; Wilson). In this research note, I will examine empirically one small segment of the related questions of political protest and political violence: What accounts for the outbreak of violence at incidents of political protest?' The causal model described and tested below suggests that the outbreak of violence at protest events is, in part, a dynamic process. The analysis assesses the importance of a number of explanatory variables. Unlike a number of theories that view the outbreak of violence primarily as a psychological process (e.g., Gurr; Sears and McConahay), this model suggests that specific outbreaks of violence in settings of protest are primarily the result of events specific to the settings themselves. (For a similar view in a slightly different context, see McPhail; and Moinat et al.). Before turning to the model to be tested, I must define what is meant, for the purposes of this analysis, by political protest and point out an important distinction in the study of political protest. Political protest refers to group activity utilizing confrontation politics to apply stress to specific targets for the purpose of affecting public policy (Terchek, 133). There are many other ways to define political protest but this is adequate for the analysis here. In looking at political protest, whether one is interested in explaining the impact of protest or what *The collection of data for this analysis was supported by NIMH grant No. 5 ROI MH 17421-02 SP, A. Paul Hare principal investigator. I would like to thank Dean MacCannell for making the data available. George Rabinowitz, Burdett Loomis, James Pierson, Michael Boss and several anonymous reviewers provided helpful comments on earlier drafts. Computer time was provided by Rice University, Indiana University, and the University of North Carolina; typing support was provided by the Departments of Political Science at Rice and Indiana Universities.

The colony's recovery from the Depression brought better days for labour unions. Although urban unemployment remained high, workers were less concerned about losing their jobs and more open to parting with union fees. The policy of Indianisation of the public sector continued. The government was determined to press ahead with reducing costs. The impact of the Depression years, together with the state's suppression of political and union dissent, muted workers' voices. From the mid 1930s the most significant union led by Ruslan Wongsokusumo was the nurses' and midwives' union. In February 1937 three members of the central executive of the federation of teacher unions, the PGI, had an audience with the Governor-General. The aims of the PBRI embraced the major issues that concerned lower paid workers. For over two decades the political and labour movements had talked of the need to create overarching national bodies.Keywords: labour movement; midwives union; nurses union; PBRI; political dissent; political movement; Ruslan Wongsokusumo; teacher unions

This paper deals with the role of the most marginalized communities in social and political grassroots activism inside Israel, by focussing on the demanding issue that affects the combination of asymmetric relationships, internal discriminations and increasing inequalities within political protests. In detail, I analyse the involvement of social and political activists struggling to improve the rights of and in solidarity with Mizrahi Jews who have experienced different kinds of discrimination in Israeli society, but also in a few Israeli peace-oriented and leftist contexts. Such heterogeneity of Israeli Jewish political and social grassroots organisations and the crucial role of Mizrahi Jewish activists can be considered as a challenging field of study needing to be analysed and related to the main subject matters concerning the Israeli current status quo.

Variations in perceptions of and attitudes towards justice animate how different people decide to engage in politics. In the US, political attitudes typically vary across salient identity markers such as race, gender, and socio-economic class. Drawing on insights from the Black Lives Matter movement, this research note advances a theoretical framework for understanding justice and political protests through a transnational Black feminist lens. Here, I consider political behavior through the Black feminist frame of interlocking identities and the notion of “the personal being political.” I examine the diverse ways in which Black feminism provides novel insights for better understanding justice and political behavior in terms of theory, methodology, and praxis.

The present article attempts to explain that social media is generally considered as an important source for expanding political protest via survey data obtained from 2628 Iranian youth. Using social media information, it is expected that political discussions within social media may also be expanded, thereby enhancing the willingness to participate in political protest. The results indicate that social media for news usage and the increase in the size of social networks presented in these media increases the willingness to participate in political protest either directly or indirectly and through the strengthening of political discussions. Moreover, using social media for social interactions, although not directly affecting participation in political protest, strengthens political discussions among political protesters.

State capacity and political protest are two variables which are seen as closely if not directly linked. Variations in state capacity, particularly coercive capacity, are thought to be inversely related to variations in the degree of political protest. For example, Theda Skocpol writes in her influential study of revolutions, as Tsarist Russia saw its coercive powers eroded by “massive defeat in total war,” so too did it suffer a rise in political protest and, ultimately, political revolution (Skocpol 1979: 94).1 Conversely, states which maintain or deepen their coercive capacities, Skocpol instructs, are “insulated from, and supreme against, the forces of society” (Skocpol 1979: 94). This causal relationship between institutional strength and social opposi-tion, though intuitive and, in many cases, empirically grounded, nevertheless does not always hold. Social movements in seemingly strong states often catch us by surprise. In Communist Eastern Europe, one author writes, for example, the mass opposition movements of 1989 appeared “out of nowhere” (Kuran 1991). Two years later the superpower USSR itself imploded, much to the shock of Soviet citizens and Western political scientists. With the benefit of hindsight, some scholars have attributed mass demonstrations and Moscow’s resulting collapse of authority to a “loosening of controls” (Dallin 1992, 284-85). Elsewhere in the former Soviet world, though, opposition movements continue to puzzle. In Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, for example, variations in political protest appear to have little relation to what institutional theories of political capacity would predict. Thus, while the Kazakh and Kyrgyz governments share similar coercive powers, political opposition remains largely nonexistent in Kazakhstan whereas opposition has become increasingly pronounced in Kyrgyzstan. And in Uzbekistan, the Central Asian state with perhaps the greatest ability to repress, both Islamist groups and human rights defenders continue to challenge authoritarian rule. These three cases are even more puzzling given that political protestthroughout Central Asia was rare during the Soviet period. In short, not only are variations in Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek political opposition puzzling in that they do not follow what institutional theories of state capacity predict, these differences are also surprising given that, despite these countries’ shared political and, indeed, cultural histories, protest has assumed such divergingoutcomes. In this chapter I address these unexpected outcomes. More specifically, I highlight where existing institutional explanations of state capacity fail to explain variations in Central Asian political opposition and offer, in their place, an alternative explanation which sees political protest as shaped as much by an independent, society-based logic as it is by state coercive capacities. My study of political opposition proceeds in three steps. I begin by out-lining variations in Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek political protest from the late 1980s to the present. I begin in the 1980s rather than with the Soviet collapse because protest in all three polities first emerged during Gorbachev’s perestroika years, well before independence in 1991. As this first section demonstrates, however, while all three polities experienced turbulence during the final years of the Soviet empire, instability has largely subsided in Kazakhstan whereas it continues to define the Kyrgyz and Uzbek political landscapes. In the section “Institutional and society: centered explanations of authoritarian instability” I turn to potential explanations for these variations in political opposition. More specifically, I find that institutional explanations fail to explain differences in Central Asian protest movements. Rather, I argue, variation in Central Asian political opposition is a product of socially produced norms of cooperation. Thus, I demonstrate how opposition groups in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan learned to unite in political protest while those in Kazakhstan remained fragmented and ineffective. In short, in contrast to both those who argue political culture is slow to change and to those who contend institutions and coercive capacity alone determine political opposition, I argue that strategies of protest are learned and though they may develop in one institutional environment they persist even when the coercive capacity of authoritarian regimes increases or decreases. Lastly, in conclusion, I explore the insights my Central Asian comparisonmay hold for broader theories of protest and political stability. In particular, I suggest that the existing literature, perhaps understandably given its focus on institutional weakness, overemphasizes state variables while underemphasizing the causal role of social opposition movements. Institutional capacity, of course, has a pronounced influence on regime stability. And while it remains crucial that we continue to research what makes some institutions strong and others weak, so too must we address that which makes some social opposition movements more coherent and capable of effecting political change than others.