Contemporary Protest Research Articles

Surveying Spontaneous Mass Protests: Mixed-mode Sampling and Field Methods

Protest survey is a standard tool for scholars to understand protests. However, although protest survey methods are well established, the occurrence of spontaneous and leaderless protests has created new challenges for researchers. Not only do their unpredictable occurrences hinder planning, their fluidity also creates problems in obtaining representative samples. This article addresses these challenges based on our research during Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement. We propose a mixed-mode sampling method combining face-to-face survey and smartphone-based online survey (onsite and post hoc), which can maximize sample sizes while ensuring representativeness in a cost-effective manner. Test results indicate that key variables from the survey modes are not statistically different in a consistent manner, except for age. Our findings show mixed-mode sampling can better capture protesters’ characteristics in contemporary protests and is replicable in other contexts.

The Concept of “Ministry” in English and Russian Discussions of Modern Protestants

The purpose of this paper is to consider how contemporary Protestants interpret the concept of “ministry”. The use of one or another interpretation determines specific ideas on economic and political activity, which, on the one hand, are conditioned by cultural and national contexts and, on the other hand, transform them. In fact, we are talking about the expansion of theological languages into the political sphere and their consequent transformation into political ones. There are two principle approaches to understand “ministry” in Protestant communities. The first assumes a strong connection with church community activities, while the other allows a broader view of the ministry including all areas of professional activity. The second approach is more consistent with the “Universal Priesthood” doctrine, which presupposes the equality of all types of positive activity when evaluated from the perspective of the Christian mission. The terms used by both approaches are somewhat similar, which makes comparisons rather challenging. It is therefore necessary to clarify and analyze the main idioms and adverbs used by the participants in the discussion. The study shows that the result of the first approach to understanding “ministry” is a strengthening of the hierarchies in Protestant communities, and the second is a comprehensive revision of church structures, and then of political and economic realities.

The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875 by Gordon H. Shufelt

Reviewed by: The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875 by Gordon H. Shufelt Lauren N. Henley The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875. By Gordon H. Shufelt. True Crime History. ( Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 171. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-60635-412-4.) In The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875, Gordon H. Shufelt examines the specific circumstances that led to Patrick McDonald, an Irish immigrant, being convicted of manslaughter in the death of Black Marylander Daniel Brown in post–Civil War Baltimore. In so doing, Shufelt offers a methodological framework "in which to examine the social, political, and cultural characteristics that [End Page 180] define the quality of justice in cases of police violence" (p. 6). This approach necessarily draws on what makes this case unique as opposed to representative, ultimately concluding that myriad factors at this particular place and time allowed Daniel Brown's death to be prosecuted in the manner Shufelt outlines. The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown is organized around biographical sketches of the victim and perpetrator, with chapters on the role of the coroner's office, the politics of policing, and the trial itself. It ends with commentary on the post-trial proceedings and on the thread between this nineteenth-century case and the modern Black Lives Matter movement. The biographical chapters, "The Black Man in the Doorway" and "The Irish Policeman on the Doorstep," are solid examples of culling together individual people's lives from fragmentary evidence. Relying on census records, newspaper articles, city directories, published primary sources, and secondary literature, these chapters attempt to characterize Daniel Brown and Patrick McDonald. By the end of the first chapter, Brown is portrayed as a self-assured, literate homeowner who was "inclined to be outspoken about his rights" (p. 24). McDonald becomes an Irish immigrant who "was no stranger to street fighting" and "more willing than most men" to use "fists, clubs, and pistols" aggressively (p. 39). While these depictions are no doubt oversimplified, they provide texture and specificity to that fateful midsummer night in 1875. After convincingly arguing for the unique cultural setting of postwar Baltimore, where residential segregation was not as complete as in the Deep South and where Irish immigrants and Black freedpeople changed the city's demographics in a relatively short span of time, Shufelt turns toward another unique feature of nineteenth-century Maryland: discretionary coroner's juries. By reasoning that a lack of precedents and formalization in the state's coroner positions shaped how cases were adjudicated, Shufelt persuasively demonstrates the importance of coroner's juries in expressing a "community's social and political norms" (p. 54). This focus on the power of this particular component of pretrial proceedings—the coroners' inquests—contributes to the growing literature on race and crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shufelt successfully demonstrates how pretrial records can provide robust insights into how criminality was adjudicated in the Jim Crow era. At times, Shufelt's balance between the specifics of the Daniel Brown case with the broader Baltimorean context seems disproportionate. Chapters 4 and 5 are about perceptions of the police in terms of racial and political biases, respectively. The former chapter's reliance on white newspapers, without explicitly mentioning the Black press, reads like an incomplete account of how Black citizens responded to the city's police. Chapter 5's deep dive into the history of policing and corrupt politics throughout the mid-nineteenth century is a fascinating political history of Baltimore but does not make a strong case for such in-depth background information related to the Daniel Brown case specifically. Given contemporary protests of the killings of Black men and women at the hands of the police, Shufelt's study provides a useful historical lens to understand how the convergence of nuanced factors makes each case unique. [End Page 181] Lauren N. Henley University of Richmond Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Postcolonial Plumbing

Antjie Krog’s A Change of Tongue is a book about political transition, the new South Africa, and the challenges of transformation, but it is also a book about sewage. Toilets, outhouses and worms feature prominently, as do sewerage systems and wastewater treatment facilities, particularly in small towns and rural areas. Scatological themes are a staple of postcolonial fiction, constituting what has been called “excremental postcolonialism”. Krog’s work both underlines that vision through vivid corporeality, while also presenting plumbing as a response to the entropy of the postcolony. The first part of this essay demonstrates the ways in which the book, while explicitly concerned with land, is implicitly just as concerned with water. The second part shows how the depiction of sewage links the local and ecological to the national and continental; highlights questions of service delivery and, presciently, contemporary protest; and evokes the paradox of wastewater, between vital element and excess waste.

Gender and Public Space: Mapping Palimpsests of Art, Design, and Agency in Shahbag, Dhaka

Public space is an essential social infrastructure for the continuous negotiation of city life and democracy because it offers (ideally) an interactive platform for people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds and the forms of public life they cherish. This contribution inquires how public space’s design and materiality play a fundamental role in popular struggles for social justice. By focusing on the differentiated access of women to public space, the role of gender in its design, and appropriation through a feminist intersectionality lens, this article aims to understand better the complex interplay between urban space and its non‐human material agency vis‐à‐vis citizen mobilizations, movements, and socially engaged art interventions. Drawing from extensive participant observation and spatial analysis, the exemplary public space of Shahbag Chattwar (a public square/plaza) will shed light on the “gendered spatiality” of pivotal popular mobilizations and reclamations from the historical momentum of the 1952 language movement, over the 2013 contemporary Shahbag protests, and to the 2020 anti‐metro rail protests at the Dhaka University campus. Analyzing urban space as a “palimpsest,” this research reflects on both historic and ongoing scenarios of popular protests as they repeatedly occupy public space and leave spatial traces through spatial design and art. In sum, the article seeks to gain insight into public space as a principal site of contestation and negotiation of juxtaposed layers of gendered dynamics, civil rights, secularism, and fundamentalism.

The Peacebuilding Potential of Contemporary Protestant Theology in Ukraine

Radyslav Tatsiun. The peacebuilding potential of contemporary Protestant theology in Ukraine. Dissertation for the degree of Candidate of Philosophical Studies, Specialty 09.00.14 – Theology. – National Pedagogical Dragomanov University of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. – Kyіv, 2021.

Ospravedlnění a štěstí. K diskusi o staronovém tématu v současné protestantské teologii

Justification and Happiness. On the Discussion of an Old-New Topic in Contemporary Protestant Theology This article focuses on a topic that, after many centuries, is once again becoming a subject of interest in theology. The reason for the theological distrust of happiness was primarily the belief that salvation cannot be linked to a happy earthly life. Related to this is the suspicion that behind the desire for happiness lies a sinful selfishness that promotes only its own benefit. The two authors discussed here – Jörg Lauster and Michael Roth – attempt to refute these objections and at the same time to build a theology of happiness on the basis of the Protestant principle of justification, understood as God's affirmation of the meaning and unconditional value of every human being. Whereas Lauster sees happiness in the extraordinary, fleeting experience of mean-ingfulness, Roth recognizes happiness in the surrender of self to present reality. What is missing in both conceptions, however, is a deeper connection between justification and the issue of a flourishing earthly life. It is therefore necessary to bring back into theological discussion the idea of human cooperation with God. While synergism between man and God is out of the question with regard to salvation, we cannot do without it with regard to the using and multiplication of the earthly fruits of that salvation. God frees man to rediscover and develop all that he has endowed him with. Both aspects are embodied in the concept of blessing, which can be defined as God's enabling of the good life and favoring of human efforts to live such a life.

Staging Charisma: Anna Deavere Smith’s Black Feminist Theater of the Multitude

AbstractRecently, scholars in American studies have begun to trace the literary and cultural history of charisma, an especially slippery term which most often connotes spectacular, individual male leadership. In this article, I suggest that Anna Deavere Smith’s verbatim theatre provides an alternative notion of this term. Specifically, Smith’s plays enact a Black feminist mode of collectivist charisma, one which has been and can be transported from stage to streets and vice versa. I focus here on Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), a one-woman show that Smith created by interviewing and impersonating dozens of people involved in or affected by the Rodney King “riots.” While the public primarily remembers this moment through King himself, or through spokespeople such as Bill Clinton or George H. W. Bush, Smith refuses either to create protagonists or to channel individualist charisma by staging a multitude. Further, Smith’s decentered theater proffers a collective approach to remembering the broader post-civil rights ethnic and racial tensions that led to the 1992 LA Crisis. Indeed, I suggest that we experience Twilight as part of a performance history of contemporary Left protest by drawing out the similarities between Smith’s multivocal plays and today’s “leaderful,” Black-feminist-led movements for racial justice.

The Rise of the Contentious Right: Digitally Intermediated Linkage Strategies in Argentina and Brazil

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes novel patterns of interaction between right-wing parties and protest movements during major contentious cycles in Argentina (2012–13) and Brazil (2013–16), which preceded the advent of the Cambiemos coalition in the former and the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in the latter. Drawing on a dual process-tracing strategy and a wide range of data sources, this study shows that these interactions are central to understanding why and how right-wing parties leverage novel repertoires and resources from digital activists during contemporary protest cycles, a dynamic conceptualized as a new party linkage strategy through digital intermediation. The study traces its three-phase development in both countries, revealing how differences in institutional contexts and the strength of activist groups contributed to divergent trajectories of partisan opposition toward the end of the cycles, regarding both the subsequent reconfiguration of the right and the entry of digital activists into institutional arenas.

‘People have courage!’: Protest Music and Indigenous Movements

ABSTRACT In recent years, a series of Indigenous protest movements have emerged across North America in response to contemporaneous settler-colonial violence, including the #NoDAPL movement and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis. These movements are responses to political, societal, environmental, and philosophical incongruities with governments and their non-Indigenous citizenry. Music has been at the heart of these political causes, social protests, and cultural movements. Plains-style powwow vocal music, which emerged as the dominant intertribal performative style in the 20th century, has played a crucial role in contemporary protests as mechanisms for articulating messages of resistance through symbolic embodiments and as intertribal expressions of solidarity directed primarily towards Indigenous people for cultural and spiritual uplift. This style also has a long-standing tradition in Indigenous cultures and has been employed in relation to historic external and internal protest/movements. This paper seeks to understand how Plains-style music articulates messages of protest through the use of semiotics and how music has been employed in protest environments. We will draw upon historic and recent examples to demonstrate the long-standing tradition of Indigenous Plains-style protest music.

The transnational routes of white and Hindu nationalisms

ABSTRACT The targeting of social difference by the extreme right is no longer on the fringes of the nation-state. Instead, the far right provides the contours of national community while also dominating the arena of international politics. This paper traces the transnational dialogue that shapes the far right’s ideologies by examining the interconnections between Hindu and white nationalisms. I argue that their projects of cultural nationalism are not only global in their reach, but that they knit together conceptions of racial and religious difference that initially emerged within the contexts of settler colonialism in the United States, colonial science in India, and the strands of Indian anti-colonialism that fixated on majoritarian rule. I examine this mapping of identity/difference across a spatio-temporal terrain that moves from Aryan racial theory to right wing representations of contemporary protests against systemic racism that pose a challenge to both Hindu and white nationalisms.

Is All Protest Work Morally Equal?

ABSTRACT Often used as a tool for raising public awareness about issues that are deemed morally dubious, protests have a long and storied tradition in the history of social change in the United States. The recent ubiquity of protesting and counter-protesting in American public life has raised to the problem of false equivalency, leaving bystanders sometimes confused about how to evaluate the respective “protest” movements. In this piece, I briefly root the history and moral meaning of protest work in the Protestant Reformation and outline a set of questions that can serve as criteria for evaluating whether the moral work of contemporary protest movements is morally efficacious or morally destructive.

The Primitive Church Revived

Abstract Recent scholarship has highlighted the religious dimensions of political argument in William III’s England. This article adds to this trend through a political analysis of pieces on the Apostolic Age that were written, re-printed, or cited, in the reign of William III. The Age was manipulated to legitimise the Williamite settlement in two ways. First, the early Christians’ ecclesiastical structures and practices were compared favourably to the contemporary Church of England, and unfavourably with Roman Catholic regimes. This contrast bolstered the bipolar confessional divide that underpinned William III’s claim to the English throne. Second, the supposed pan-national spiritual sympathy of the early Christians was regarded as a template for contemporary European Protestants, who were worthy of the protection that formed the bedrock of William III’s foreign policy.

Political Street Stickers in Resistance to Biopower in Poland: The Case of Krakow During the 2020 Polish Presidential Election Campaign

Though largely ignored by scholars of political participation, stickers are an increasingly common means of expressing socio-cultural identities and a staple of contemporary protest movements. In Poland, the “LGBT-Free Zone” stickers sold with the newspaper Gazeta Polska in 2019 provided a clear demonstration of ruling party Law and Justice’s (PiS) hegemonic and exclusionary bio-conservative discourse. A year later, during the 2020 presidential elections, as issues related to LGBT+ rights became a key battleground revealing socio-political divisions in the country, a series of pro-LGBT+ stickers appeared in Krakow. This paper first evaluates the combination of linguistic and visual elements that makes political stickers a unique genre of expression. Multimodal discourse analysis of the pro-LGBT+ stickers posted in Krakow subsequently reveals an alternative conceptualization of “Polishness” that includes the LGBT+ community rather than excluding it on biopolitical grounds.

Анархизм, постанархизм и проблема насилия

The article is devoted to the actual and, perhaps, even painful topic of political violence considered through the prism of contemporary anarchist thought and, in particular, through the understanding of violence in the theory of postanarchism. The aim is to fixate with using the historical-philosophical descriptive approach the intensification of conflict discourse in contemporary radical political philosophy, as well as a specific postanarchist articulation of such type of violence, which would imply going beyond the logic of a standard encounter of opposing political forces. Such articulation in works of the leading theorist of post-anarchism S. Newman is accompanied by the reception of the conceptual apparatus of the German thinker W. Benjamin. The resulting thesis of this work can be considered as the conjugation of the increasing politicization of life with the tendency to think of politics and the political in terms of antagonism, war and, ultimately, violence. In other words, if the political is thought in this way, it can be assumed that the growing politicization of practically all aspects of life is fraught with similar impulses. In the context of the above, the consideration of postanarchism seems not only adequate as an example of reflecting current trends in political philosophy, but also from the point of view of novelty, because the postanarchist theory as such is rather poorly covered in the Russian academia. From this, firstly, the practical significance follows, because the article gives a notion of the little-studied phenomenon of Western political thought, which correlates with the realities of contemporary politics. Secondly, this work sets a number of vectors for further research concerning both the relationship between the theory and practice of contemporary protest movements and the reaction of state institutions to them. In addition, further work on the problematization of the theory of post-anarchism itself, which is not distinguished by uniqueness and homogeneity due to its own methods and approaches (anti-essentialism, deconstructivism, micro-political analysis, etc.), can also become perspective. Therefore, subsequent development of the topic with the involvement of a larger number of primary sources on the postanarchist theory seems to be significant.

NOlympics in Amsterdam!

Abstract NOlympics in Amsterdam! The struggle for urban space and the politics of Amsterdam's Olympic Bid, 1984-1986 This article examines the protests against the social impact of Amsterdam’s bid to host the Olympic Summer Games of 1992. Although sporting mega-events have become the topic of a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship, both the related histories of popular protest and governance remain relatively underexplored. The Dutch government established an Olympic organizing committee, consisting of governmental, commercial, and sporting stakeholders, which promoted the Amsterdam Olympics as a catalyst for economic and urban growth. By contrast, city inhabitants as well as local governmental bodies, squatters, and activist groups claimed their right to the city and contested the bid on the grounds of its negative impact on the quality of life and the environment in Amsterdam. International sporting events have always been contested for political reasons, but Amsterdam was one of the first cities where protesters opposed the Olympics’ overarching social impact. Although the protest’s scale remained relatively limited, protesters successfully targeted the International Olympic Committee and international press to present a negative image of Amsterdam as an Olympic host city. Activism against Amsterdam’s Olympic bid is an important precursor to more contemporary protest movements against sporting mega-events.

“The looters are just expropriating what they would otherwise have bought...”. Towards the phenomenology of contemporary protest in the United States

The article analyzes the phenomenon of social protests that swept the United States in 2020. The article considers the evolution of the concepts of sacrifice and redemption in the modern public consciousness of the USA and Europe. The author analyzes the cause-and-effect relationships of what is happening, the phenomena accompanying the protests, in particular, looting, which is perceived by the protesters not as a marginal phenomenon, but as a necessary condition for restoring social justice.

Destruction or dialectics

This essay examines Zoe Strother’s efforts to historicize recent debates about the repatriation of cultural heritage while also situating contemporary protest movements, such as “Rhodes Must Fall,”...

DISRUPTIVE HUMOUR: A CITIZEN PERSPECTIVE IN SOCIAL MEDIA IMAGES FROM MASS PROTESTS

In this research we ask which role humorous social media images play for the representation of political protest in social media. To do so, we collected tweets (n=678946) based on protest hashtags from the G20 protests in Hamburg July 6-8 2017. With a social network analysis we find that while we can see clusters around user accounts of activist collectives, media institutions, and authorities (such as the Hamburg police), we cannot observe a network centred around user accounts of residents of Hamburg. As seemingly neutral humorous perspectives which do neither take the side of the activists or the authorities, these images seem to be shared across various clusters in the network. Yet, these are among the most frequently shared tweets based on number of retweets and mentions. Through a narrative analysis of the most frequently shared tweets with a particular focus on such humorous juxtapositions of the protests and the everyday life of residents, we find that these seemingly apolitical images and videos shared across communities, still play a disruptive role in the narrative about political protest. We argue that the privileging of humorous content that users are perhaps more inclined to share in social media than political messages, activists’ grievances or violent imagery, might (while not actively taking sides) push activists’ grievances in the background and make their actions appear as disruptive. With these findings, this research contributes to furthering our understanding of how the logics of social media might influence narratives of contemporary protests.