Anti-corruption Protests Research Articles

Interlopers by choice, or interlopers by circumstance? Alexey Navalny and alternative journalistic projects in contemporary autocratic Russia

In February 2024, Russian opposition activist Alexey Navalny died in a Western Siberian prison aged just 47. Known as a vocal opposition leader in Russia in the 2010s, he was regularly trying to be elected but also organised the largest mass anti-establishment and anti-corruption protests in Russia before his untimely death. Deprived of access and coverage in the Russian mainstream media, Navalny and his associates established their own media channels, including personal YouTube channels and online media outlets such as Navalny LIVE to avoid censorship and expose the corruption and abuses of power of high-ranking officials in Russia. However, at the same time, Navalny and his colleagues cannot be labelled as ‘journalists’ in a normative sense. They were not professional journalists and had not gone through the processes of journalistic socialisation, but rather ‘tried on’ journalistic roles and investigative journalism practices to expose corrupt elites. In this sense, Navalny and his team can be called (explicit) interlopers who adopt journalistic identities and force a reconsideration of what journalists are and journalism is. In this study, we look at the case of Navalny and his team and their investigative documentaries on YouTube. We relate his practice to the journalistic concept of (explicit) interlopers, analyse how their unique and alternative journalistic project has diversified a largely monopolised and authoritarian Russian public sphere, and propose extending the notion of interlopers by differentiating between interlopers by choice, and interlopers by circumstance.

‘Nu plecăm până nu plecați!’- A Case Study on the Rise of the Digital Civic Activism in Romania (2015-2018)

In this study we focused our attention on the involvement of the oldest and the most active online community, Corupția ucide, in organising or rallying protests in 2015, 2017 and 2018. We wanted to show to what extent the representatives of this community managed to increase the number of (involved) fans supporting the cause of anti-corruption protests and how they used Facebook as an interactive tool for communicating with users in the case of the three analysed protests. The Corupția ucide community has provided internet users with information about protests and anti-corruption legislation, has succeeded in connecting and engaging citizens to participate also in the street, not only in social media, and has paved the way for the digital civic activism institutionalisation in Romania.

Elite Capture and Corruption: The Influence of Elite Collusion on Village Elections and Rural Land Development in China

AbstractThis article presents a qualitative empirical study of elite collusion and its influence on village elections and rural land development in China. Drawing on ethnographic data collected from two Chinese villages, it investigates how village cadres collude with other rural elites, using bribery, gift-giving and lavish banquets, to establish reciprocal ties with township officials and other public officials. Meanwhile, the officials make use of formal organizations to corruptly obtain profits and form alliances with village elites. The article examines how rural elites, especially village cadres, use this collusion to profit from the misuse of villagers’ collectively owned assets, the manipulation of village elections and the suppression of anti-corruption protests. It also offers new descriptive evidence of how recent reforms designed to strengthen the Party's overall leadership in rural governance may have actually facilitated elite capture and grassroots corruption.

Anti-Corruption Mobilisation in Siberia: The Role of Universities

Universities have long been seen as hotbeds of student activism. Yet institutions of higher education differ in their capacity to serve as mobilising structures. This study argues that history of activism, quality of education and local political climate influence a university’s potential to foster student protest engagement. Using a case study approach, the essay traces how a configuration of structural and cultural factors at three universities in western Siberia shaped Russian students’ involvement in the 2017 anti-corruption protests. At the same time, it demonstrates how universities in contemporary Russia are used as an instrument of authoritarian control to suppress anti-regime mobilisation.

Anti-Corruption Protests and University Students: Evidence from Russian Cities

AbstractThere are conflicting theoretical expectations regarding students' protest behaviour in contemporary autocracies. On the one hand, in line with a resource model of political participation, university students are more likely to protest than their peers without higher education. On the other hand, university students in autocracies might refrain from high-risk activism in exchange for their own financial well-being and career advancement. To address this debate, the article leverages data on anti-corruption protests organized by the opposition politician Alexei Navalny in March 2017. Results show that anti-corruption protests were larger in Russian cities with a larger university student population. Next, employing individual-level data from the fifth wave of the European Values Survey, multinomial logistic regression analysis demonstrates that university students participated in demonstrations at a higher rate than non-students of the same age. More broadly, these findings yield insights into subnational variation in mass mobilization in a repressive political regime.

When protest humor is not all fun: The ambiguity of humor in the 2017 Romanian anti-corruption grassroots mobilization

This article focuses on the ambiguous ideological work of citizen-produced humor in protest. Using the case of the 2017 Romanian anti-corruption protests as empirical data, the article shows how humor can simultaneously signal grassroots creativity and resistance to power structures, and reproduce conservative gender and class hierarchies. Unlike other types of texts, humor presents itself as an innocent and light message, absolved of the need for critical scrutiny. However, protest studies need to engage in a more nuanced way with the ideological articulation of democratic politics via protest humor by asking not only how humor helps protest communication, but also how it achieves shared enjoyment, for whom, and to what consequences for the ideological articulation of democratic politics. The article concludes by proposing that researcher reflexivity can afford a new sensitivity to the ambiguousness of protest humor.

“Chuck Norris, Please Help!” Transnational Cultural Flows in the 2017 Anti-Corruption Protests in Romania

This study examines the meaning-making work of transnational cultural references in protest. Whether using the image of the superhero or re-mixing a famous painting, the presence of such references in home-made protest placards was a striking feature of the 2017 anti-corruption protests in Romania. By means of a qualitative analysis of 58 such signs, this study identifies five types of transnational cultural resources co-opted in the local protest: politics, high and popular culture, brand names, computer culture, and other motivational slogans and protest symbols. Such references are appropriated in local protest for their recognizability potential, their generic interpretive frames, or their usefulness in generating surprising re-iterations of the political cause. Yet, the use of such references remains interwoven with the symbolic and political capital of professional, middle-class elites. In the Romanian case, the use of these transnational cultural references also constructs the protesters as cosmopolitan and aligned with Western cultural consumption and political practices. In turn, this frames political opponents as backwards, parochial, and unfit for democratic politics.

Gauging reference and source bias over time: how Russia’s partially state-controlled search engine Yandex mediated an anti-regime protest event

ABSTRACT Massive efforts have been dedicated to studying political search engine bias in democratic contexts, and a growing body of literature has scrutinized search engine censorship in authoritarian China. By contrast, very little is known still about political search engine bias within Russia’s slightly more open authoritarian media system. In order to fill in this gap, this study asks: How has Russia’s leading partially state-controlled search engine Yandex mediated a large-scale anti-regime protest event (anti-corruption protests on 26 March 2017) in the twenty months thereafter? The study analyzes a data set of 30,471 results, retrieved in regular intervals for nine query terms from four platforms: Yandex.ru, News.yandex.ru, Google.ru, and News.google.ru. As the findings demonstrate, both Yandex algorithms (by comparison with their Google counterparts) referred users to significantly fewer websites that contained information about the protest event (reference bias). In a similar vein, both Yandex algorithms forwarded users to fewer websites that regularly featured criticism of Russia’s authoritarian leadership (source bias). Moreover, Yandex algorithms tended to be particularly biased in the event’s immediate aftermath. In the first week after the protests, for instance, the difference in reference ratios between Google and Yandex Web searches were massive (mean difference: 23% points), while they were less pronounced during the remaining time period studied (mean difference: 7% points). These findings are highly politically relevant because rapid diffusion of information about protest events can be considered of key importance to further protest mobilization.

Mídias sociais digitais, participação política e protestos anticorrupção

A utilização de mídias sociais digitais como instrumento para o recrutamento e a participação em eventos de protesto tem sido considerada pela literatura internacional como um dos principais ingredientes da transformação nas condições e dinâmicas de participação política nos últimos anos. No Brasil, os “protestos de junho” em 2013 evidenciaram a intensificação do uso da internet e das redes sociais no recrutamento e mobilização política. Este artigo pretende demonstrar que, o uso de tais ferramentas nos protestos anticorrupção no Brasil, a partir da onda de protestos iniciada internacionalmente em 2011, expressou o enfrentamento a um sistema político que monopolizava e represava insatisfações e demandas por transformação. Ele se tornou aos poucos um dos principais veículos de aglutinação, manifestação e ação de organizações, grupos e lideranças liberais, conservadores e de direita em torno de uma agenda comum. Esta análise mostra a relevância da dimensão política para compreender o processo de utilização das mídias sociais digitais na dinâmica da participação política.

Remnants Revisited: Guatemala's Landscapes of Fear

Remnants Revisited:Guatemala's Landscapes of Fear Rebecca Clouser introduction I was first approached in January 2020 about writing a retrospective essay reflecting on my article Remnants of terror: Landscapes of fear in post-conflict Guatemala (Clouser, 2009). It was during a coffee break at the Conference of Latin American Geography (CLAG) conference in Antigua, Guatemala. At the time, I began to ponder the shifts that had (and had not) occurred since 2009 in post-conflict Guatemala. These included the historic genocide trial of José Efraín Ríos Montt, the 2015 anti-corruption protests—which led to the resignation and subsequent jailing of then-president Otto Perez Molina—and the more recent disheartening closure of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) in 2019. Of course, since January 2020, the world has shifted not once, but several times. Not only would the CLAG 2020 conference be the last in-person conference I would attend that year, but the coronavirus pandemic has since gone on to infect over 120 million people, killing nearly 2.7 million of them. And in Guatemala specifically, at the time of this writing, there are more than 184,000 confirmed cases, with 6,619 deaths (WHO, 2021). The pandemic has produced landscapes of fear characterized by the eerily empty streets of lockdowns throughout the world, including in Guatemala. Barren images of normally congested zones, like the infamously busy El Trébol intersection in Guatemala City, circulated online (Hernández, 2020). And, as restrictions decimated livelihoods built on the informal economy, white flags denoting hunger and starvation began to dot the landscape of Guatemala as early as April 2020 (Abbott, 2020a). Then, as I settled in to write this essay in late November of 2020, international news headlines prominently featured Guatemala. Two deadly back-to-back hurricanes and massive national protests (one of which resulted in burning part of the National Congress building) captured the world's attention. It is not [End Page 259] new for Guatemala to be framed in a such a way. Popular media's simplistic narratives form broader geographic imaginaries of the country as endemically prone to disaster, corruption, violence, and general bad luck. Yet, as scholars have long argued, the realities of Guatemala are extremely complex, deeply tied to historical legacies, contemporary injustice, U.S. interventions, and enduring sociopolitical structures that enable and perpetuate marginalization, racism, and violence. Beyond headline-inducing moments of cataclysm, in Guatemala the post-conflict daily reality is rife with continued pain, struggle, and fear for millions. In an effort to highlight this quotidian persistence, in my original article I used landscape theory to examine the multiple ways in which fear and insecurity are interwoven into the country's landscape. Analyzing the examples of model villages, scorched earth blank spaces, clandestine graves and exhumations, and landmarks and memorials, I sought to emphasize how both presence and absence in the landscape can serve to reflect and reinforce a culture of fear throughout the country. In this retrospective essay, I revisit these examples to contemplate how things have evolved in the decade since my original article. a landscape of fear framework In 2009, I argued that using the lens of landscape theory, with an explicit focus on landscapes of fear, was a particularly productive point of entry for examining the profound legacies of Guatemala's thirty-six-year civil war, as well as the longer-term legacies of colonization and modernization that various actors have imposed upon Indigenous populations in the region now known as Central America for centuries. Drawing on Tuan's (1979) insistence that landscapes of fear are equally psychological as they are tangible, I unpacked layers of meaning in the post-conflict landscape of Guatemala, highlighting the presence of fear. I sketched out the implications of these deeper connotations, which manifest in inhabitants being "ever on the alert in the spaces of everyday life" (Pred, 2007, p. 363). Finally, noting the works of Crump (1999) and Till (1999), I described the importance of attending to absences in the landscape. Because power imbalances, particularly in post-conflict situations, lead to skewed control in forming the landscape, absences can be critical for understanding the threads of fear...

Anti-corruption protests, alliance system and political polarization

The fight against corruption has become, in recent years, one of the main international causes. Many studies have been done on the effects and consequences of corrupt and corrupting practices for the political system and for the general society. However, there are still few who are dedicated to analyzing the conditions and dynamics of the fight against corruption as a public and international cause and its consequences and impacts on national political systems. Therefore, the objective of this article is to examine the emergence and spread of anti-corruption movements and protests in Brazil, between 2013 and 2018. I aim to demonstrate that the emergence and development of anti-corruption protests and mobilizations in this period are related to the crisis and collapse of the “alliance system” between the main political leaders and organizations, becoming a political resource to recompose and change such alignments. This analysis shows the relevance of the “political dimension” to understand the process of emergence and the development of protests and mobilizations against corruption.

‘Four Populisms’ of Alexey Navalny: An Analysis of Russian Non-Systemic Opposition Discourse on YouTube

The rise of populist movements across the globe has instigated considerable research interest into populism, predominantly in Western democracies. Non-democratic Russia, however, is not exempt from this populist trend, and distinguishable populist rhetoric can be observed both inside and outside the establishment. Alexey Navalny, who regularly organises mass protests in Russia, is considered to be an outsider of systemic politics. Despite several unsuccessful attempts to be elected, his popularity continues to grow, largely due to digital instruments such as YouTube. In light of limited press freedom, YouTube has become one of the most trustworthy platforms for Navalny to publish his investigative documentaries about Russian corruption. In his videos, Navalny adopts a populist communication style to oppose himself to Putin’s ‘corrupt’ elite. Different investigative journalism practices help Navalny to discredit the establishment, whereas his activist appeals may motivate his supporters to engage in political action. In this article, I explore how Navalny combines the practices of investigative journalism and civic activism in his populist communication on YouTube. Using the method of content analysis, I explore a case study of Navalny’s YouTube communication and reveal four types of populism which play a special role in his narration. These are ‘superficial,’ ‘investigative,’ ‘radical,’ and ‘advocacy’ populisms. Advocacy<em> </em>populism, for instance, provides evidence of corruption elite crimes through journalism practices and in calling people to political action. The most visible concentration of these parts of narration was observed in YouTube videos released by the activist before and during anti-corruption protests of 2017.

“Vrem o ţară ca afară!”: How Contention in Romania Redefines State-Building through a Pro-European Discourse

This article belongs to a forthcoming special cluster, “Contention Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe” guest-edited by Nemanja Džuverovic, Julia Rone and Tom Junes. Massive protest waves, mainly led by younger citizens, appeared during the past years in Romania. Gubernat and Rammelt provide an analysis of the production of meaning by the “Romanian street” as a collective actor. They argue that “Vrem o ţară ca afară! (We want a country like abroad!)” became the leitmotif for important parts of the Romanian protests of the past eight years. For so doing, Gubernat and Rammelt analyze the discursive underpinnings and the constructed frames in recent protests in Romania. Their demonstration synthesizes a social phenomenon that appeared during the Roșia Montană protests of 2013, continued with the Colectiv protests of 2015 and was reconfirmed during the 2017–2018 anti-corruption protests: the dichotomy between the discursive appropriation of the West, as a benchmark of progress and social modernization and the “self-racism” manifested in these movements. The use of Frame Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis for the study of these waves of protests enables them to show how the Western hegemonic discourse on state-building provides the cultural conditions for social action as well as it enables mobilizing agents to frame national discontent. “‘Vrem o ţară ca afară!’ Redefining state-building through a pro-European discourse in Romania” concludes that recent protests in Romania reproduce Western ideals of modern state and politics through a value-based discourse around the idea of belonging to Europe.

Too Much Success? The Legacy and Lessons of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala

The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) represents an innovative effort to curb criminal threats to democratic rule and to strengthen state capacity that diverged from the dominant mode of technical assistance. Working through treaty-based international authority, this “hybrid” U.N.-backed mission combined international and national capacities working through Guatemalan laws and courts. The Commission successfully investigated and helped prosecute multiple high-ranking Guatemalan officials, ex-military officers and business elites. Those investigations precipitated anti-corruption protests that ousted the sitting president and vice president in the “Guatemalan Spring” of 2015. CICIG investigations led to 1,540 indictments in 120 cases involving over 70 illicit networks. The mission showed Guatemalans that the rule of law can be applied even to the most powerful, had far-reaching political impact, and contributed to the effectiveness of the Attorney-General’s office. Yet by the time the mission closed in 2019 after twelve years of operation, a cloud hung over its legacy. As CICIG’s cases ensnared an expanding array of top businessmen, officials and political parties, economic and political elites launched an anti-CICIG media campaign and hired lobbyists to undermine what had been strong bipartisan support for the mission’s biggest financial backer, the United States. President Jimmy Morales, elected on an anti-corruption platform in 2015, turned against the Commission after his brother and son were indicted. Morales and his allies won some support from the Trump administration in decrying the Commission as a violation of national sovereignty. Yet during its final years, CICIG’s support in public opinion polls never fell below 70%. Leaving behind a complex legacy, CICIG both inspired a jaded Guatemalan citizenry to stand up to corrupt officials and galvanized former political enemies around the common perceived threat of the Commission. This report evaluates the history of CICIG to analyze its impact on Guatemalan political life and to draw lessons for future hybrid anti-impunity missions.

Reflections on Feminist Interventions within the 2015 Anticorruption Protests in Lebanon

Abstract This essay reflects upon the themes of collaborative research, intersectional feminist activism, and social movements against corruption and sectarianism in the context of Lebanon. The authors focus on the summer of 2015 when protesters filled the streets in response to the government’s mismanagement of garbage in what they called the “You Stink” movement. Feminists, primarily through the formation the “Feminist Bloc,” joined in the protests and presented nuanced frameworks for understanding the problem and mobilizing against the state with a gendered lens. In the pages that follow, the authors historicize the conditions that inspired feminist participation in these protests in order to present the perspectives of a few feminist activists voicing their own analysis of this period. In addition, they reflect upon what it means to write and research collaboratively, between the United States (Nadine) and Lebanon (Deema).

Youth-Led Anti-Corruption Movement in Post-Conflict Guatemala: ‘Weaving the Future’?

This article examines youth-led anti-corruption protests in Guatemala in 2015, which contributed to the resignation of the president and vice-president. It outlines three key factors that were part of the initial success of the #RenunciaYa social media campaign, and the subsequent struggle towards political and structural reforms. First, it can be regarded as part of a much longer history of rights-led civic engagement and protest. Second, while social media proved indispensable for mobilising civic action, it was insufficient to reach beyond urban-based youth activists. Third, the removal of the president and vice-president was possible not only because of public pressure generated by anti-corruption youth activists, but also because of the longer-term work of two Attorney Generals and the International Commission Against Impunity in highlighting the fight against corruption within the national political agenda. Finally, the article argues that civic participation after conflict requires at least one generation to spring.

Romanian Rezist Protest. How Facebook Helps Fight Political Corruption

Immediately after the parliamentary elections in December 2016, the Social Democratic Party wants to amend the criminal legislation and pardon through an revolting ordinance, which caused a third wave of protests in post-December Romania. The core of the protests was made of social activists who held the position of network nodes, had previous experience and acted as rallying coagulant factors in the January-February 2017 events. In the present study, we focused our attention only on the online community: Corruption kills (in Romanian: Coruptia ucide), this being the oldest and most active in the Romanian social media. We wanted to show to what extent the representatives of this community managed to: a) increase the number of fans (involved) who supported the cause of the anti-corruption protests; and b) how Facebook was used as an interactive communication tool for users between January and February 2017. The Corruption Kills Community was perceived as a powerful tool of organization and rallying in the 2017 protest.

Citizens, bribery and the propensity to protest

ABSTRACTIt is widely assumed that the more one experiences corruption the more likely one is to want to protest about it. Yet empirical evidence illustrating this is thin on the ground. This paper fills that gap by focusing on the extent to which self-reported experience of bribery affects the willingness to engage in protests against corruption in Africa. We find that the more one experiences bribery the more one is likely to support anti-corruption protests. A further unexpected finding is that the personal experience of corruption also increases the willingness to rely on bribes to solve public administration problems.

Protesting through poetry: Verses by one of Romania’s most renowned poets draw on his experience of anti-corruption protests in Sibiu

Protesting through poetry: Verses by one of Romania’s most renowned poets draw on his experience of anti-corruption protests in Sibiu

Let Me Walk

Let Me Walk