History Of Protest Research Articles

Memory and protest in Belgrade: Remembering the 1990s in the mass demonstrations of 2023

The history of the 1990s and of political life in Serbia can be viewed as a history of protest. It was during this decade, in which Slobodan Milošević held power, that an entire generation of activists became part of a process of learning to engage in civil resistance. In waves of massive anti-regime protests as well as in smaller, yet persistent, anti-war protests, they asserted that ‘Belgrade is the World’. This article examines the ways in which practices and themes from these protests have resurfaced more recently, and how this activism is remembered and referenced in the 2020s. Based on data collected in Belgrade during anti-regime protests in 2023, which began as a movement ‘against violence’ (‘ protiv nasilja’), it traces how the memory of protest of the 1990s turned into memory in protest as it appeared in banners, chants, slogans and speeches, as well as in everyday conversation among citizens, some three decades later. Deploying the concept of the memory-activism nexus, the article analyses generational claims in Serbia, the practices of protesters, their hope in activism, their fear of cultivating false expectations and their continuing demands for a better future. It places cultural memory in Serbia in the context of a politics of disappointment, illustrating that memory in protest can function as both a mobilising force and a source of political paralysis.

Palestine is the Vanguard for Our Liberation: Insights from the Students’ Intifada at Columbia University

This essay, written by members and friends of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)—the Palestine solidarity group founded at Columbia in November 2023—brings forth an analysis of our movement. We begin by describing the steps that led to CUAD’s formation, and then its historical continuity with Columbia’s legacy of student activism. We discuss our approach to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, the research that informs our demands, and two of our methods for accomplishing them: an encampment and building occupation. By contextualizing ourselves in Columbia’s student protest history, we hope to explain the lessons we have learned about the content and form of struggle. By explaining our demands, we hope to focus attention to our points of unity, often overlooked or misunderstood, even by our supporters. Finally, by describing our own experience of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and Hind’s Hall occupation, we hope to situate the protests for which most readers know us in our own political, strategic, and practical framework. We analyze our movement through the principal lens of anti-imperialism, while situating ourselves in the context of the US imperialist core, from which we remain auxiliary to the liberation movement in Palestine.

Mutual submission, not complementarianism: Reviving the Chinese marital theology of Watchman Nee and Wang Mingdao

Many Christians in both America and China follow an ideology that has come to be known as gender complementarianism. The husband is the undisputed “head of the household” and the wife must graciously submit to his leadership and decision-making, even if she disagrees with him. During the 2000s, complementarian theology espoused by American parachurch organizations FamilyLife and Focus on the Family spread in China. Today, many house church Christians advocate complementarianism. However, back in the 1940s and 50s, several important (fundamentalist and mainline) Chinese Christian leaders saw Christian marriage more in terms of mutual submission than gendered hierarchy. Rather than seeing husbands as more responsible for leadership and decision-making than wives, Watchman Nee, Wang Mingdao, and the people involved in the Christianizing the Home movement highlighted the need for both spouses to sacrifice, cultivate intimacy, forgive, and communicate well. This may not be the dominant vision of marriage in Chinese house churches today, but it is a long-standing tradition in Chinese Protestant history, one that some individuals in China today are continuing to put forward.

Violent incongruencies: Analyzing The New York Times’s discourse on George Floyd demonstrations and the Capitol riot

American news media outlets have a storied past of delegitimizing protest movements, particularly through violence. However, recent literature has suggested news media outlets in America are slowly beginning to pull away from this trend. Moreover, recent protest history has several memorable examples of this attempted course correction, such as CNN’s viral ‘fiery but mostly peaceful’ headline during the demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd. Along with this series of protest demonstrations, one of the most historically significant demonstrations of protest in the 2020s was the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021. This study utilized a discourse analysis methodology to explore textual and visual framing incongruencies of participant violence in The New York Times’s coverage of these historic demonstrations. Findings point to a consistent visual and textual framing of violence within the NYT’s coverage of George Floyd Demonstrations, but not within its coverage of the Capitol riot. Possible discrepancies in participant labeling were also observed.

A Dilemma between Politics and Evangelism: S. Wells Williams’ Controversial Translation of the “Toleration Article” in the Sino–U.S. Treaty of Tientsin

The Sino–U.S. Treaty of Tientsin (1858), for the first time in history, included an article to ensure the toleration of Protestantism in China, i.e., the Toleration Article. The man behind the article was S. Wells Williams (1812–1884), an interpreter of the U.S. Legation and a former missionary, who negotiated with Chinese officials directly. Williams produced the Chinese version of the clause and its official English translation which led to controversies, for it was deemed unfaithful and humiliating to the Christian communities. This paper revisits this important episode in the history of Protestantism in China. Using first-hand archival materials, it reveals how Williams was forced to “mistranslate” the article in order to satisfy both parties. It further discusses the reasons behind the missionaries’ criticism, which placed Williams in the center of clashes between religious and political interests. Through Williams’ case, the paper foregrounds the crucial roles and difficult situations of missionary translators in diplomatic incidents that shaped the history of Christianity in China. More importantly, it highlights the conflicting interests and ideas in early Sino–U.S. diplomacy and shows how missionary translators worked to mediate the dilemma between evangelism and politics in 19th-century China.

From the Gezi Park Protests to the Akbelen Forest: Care in the Context of Democracy and Political Dissent

ABSTRACT In this essay, a brief history of environmental protests in Turkey will be followed by a discussion connected to two central frameworks: the logic of extractivism and care. Specifically, we argue that analysis of events such as the recent protests in the Akbelen Forest, just as the Gezi Park protests over a decade ago, need to account for the fact that a great deal of environmentalism and environmental activism is linked to broader social and political critique, particularly in countries such as Turkey with what is described as a “neo-authoritarian” or “new authoritarian” administration. We argue that these events and the ways in which they have materialized point to the need to pay further attention to intersections such as narrated space and spaces of narrativity, in this particular case, vis-à-vis care, democracy and political dissent.

The death of ‘traditional’ charivari and the invention of pot-banging in Spain, c .1960–2020

Abstract Banging together pots and pans has become established as a common protest technique in Spain and across the world. Pot-banging can be linked to charivari: a centuries-old, Europe-wide, nuptial practice that subjected a marrying couple to mocking moral critique, which was also adapted for political ends. This article, however, distinguishes between nuptial charivari (the cencerrada) and recent political pot-banging (the cacerolada). The former suffered a process decline and disappearance while the latter, separately, was imported into Spain from Latin America in the late 1980s. The lack of connection between the two is reflected in different terms, but can be further established through close attention to their respective staging, gendered nature, meaning and sound. The case of Spanish pot-banging sheds light on the fate of ‘traditions’ during the Transition from the Francoist dictatorship to democracy, particularly in terms of changing notions of individual rights, civility and gender relations, and has implications for how historians approach the history of collective action. Historians should pay greater attention to how techniques are transmitted and learned within and across borders. The history of modern protest is perhaps more disjointed than modernizing approaches suggest.

Unbroken and Unbowed: A History of Black Protest in America

Unbroken and Unbowed: A History of Black Protest in America

CristyClarke and JohnPage, The Lawful Forest: A Critical History of Property, Protest and Spatial Justice, Edinburgh: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Law, Literature and the Humanities, 2022, 225 pp, hb, £85.00

CristyClarke and JohnPage, The Lawful Forest: A Critical History of Property, Protest and Spatial Justice, Edinburgh: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Law, Literature and the Humanities, 2022, 225 pp, hb, £85.00

The Lawful Forest: A Critical History of Property, Protest and Spatial Justice By CristyClark and JohnPage, Edinburgh University Press. 2022. 248 pp.

The Lawful Forest: A Critical History of Property, Protest and Spatial Justice By CristyClark and JohnPage, Edinburgh University Press. 2022. 248 pp.

Frontløberne som motiv

The 2019 protests in Hong Kong unfolded with a visual forcefulness that shaped a movement that was at once popular and radical, peaceful and belligerent, orderly and sabotaging. One of the movement’s central instruments was to occupy the territory of Hong Kong with visual protest material. Protest walls spread with lightning speed from early July and from August and September, the contents of the city’s protest walls were updated every single day by independent, self-organized groupings and individuals. As long as the walls were updated with the latest information, the protest movement could prove that it was still ready for battle and that the Hong Kong they were all fighting for was right there on the wall in front of them.
 The image of the frontliners as the ones leading the fight against the police came to play a central role in the formation of a political identity for the protest movement. As the protest movement developed and the violent clashes with the police intensified, the images of the frontliners, dressed in black, wearing gas masks and safety goggles and with flag in their hands, emerged as the image of the protest movement.
 In this article, I follow the evolution of the image of the frontliners and the attempt to create a visual language that shapes this specific movement. I follow the development of the frontliners as parts of a history of protest and as parts of an ensemble of protest figures and protest-specific events. I explore what the frontliners and their images do as they unfold in the dynamic between the resistance the movement provides and the oppression they encounter.

Searching for Forms and Methods of Acting on Indigenous Population by Turkestan Soviet and Communist Party Bodies in the Context of Fighting the Basmachi in 1918-1924

The protest movement of the Turkestani indigenous population against the Soviet rule known in history as “Basmachi movement” became the most important stage of the Civil War in the Central Asian territory of the former Russian Empire. This phenomenon, complicated in terms of motivating features, social composition, and ideological dimensions, had been researched throughout the entire period of Soviet Union. However, the researchers were conditioned by rigid ideological framework, the ban on access to documental sources, and several other restrictions, that excluded the possibility to provide unbiased objective assessment of the Basmachi phenomenon. Questions relating to the true causes of the movement, and specifically those that disclosed the support to the movement from the majority of Turkestani population, remained beyond the research scope. The collapse of the USSR, the access to formerly classified closed archives made it possible to largely change the view on the history of this popular protest. In the proposed paper, the author’s research is supported by materials from newly identified sources in the holdings of the Russian State Military Archive and the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History. The author claims in the paper that a significant part of the causes that boosted the scale of the movement and its support from the population resulted from gross mistakes of the Soviet government in socio-political reforms and especially in matters of nationalities policy. Correcting these mistakes, applying new forms and methods of acting on indigenous peoples made it possible for Bolsheviks to gain the victory over the Basmachi and bring the internal political situation in the region to stability.

Urban–ruraljustice

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Two Responsibilities to Protect

The purpose of this paper is to re-theorize the evolution of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) in the UN through to 2011, the apogee of liberal interventionism in the post-Cold War period. Contrary to a common argument in existing literature, and notwithstanding the adoption of the concept as an annual agenda item of the General Assembly, international contestation is not about implementation as neatly separated from meaning, but rather definition or interpretation. To better understand the boundaries of intergovernmental understanding, we need to interrogate the language or terms of the debate, particularly the ways in which those terms have been practiced. There have been two Responsibilities to Protect in international society. A discursive practice called Southern RtoP, traced through UN-based political dialogue, contests a meaning that has been prevalent for 20 years at least: that of Northern RtoP. This article shows evaluative nuance and data from the perspective of the Global South and provides a discursive history of an ongoing non-aligned protest against a NATO-associated theory of defeasible sovereignty. Deux responsabilités de protéger

“A constant surveillance” The New York State Police and the student peace movement, 1965-1973

ABSTRACT Historians recognize that there was an increase in political repression in the United States during the Vietnam War era. While several accounts portray the Federal Bureau of Investigation as the primary driver of repression for many groups and individuals during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly those on the left, historians typically overlook the role played by local and state law enforcement in political intelligence-gathering. This article seeks to advance the study of one aspect of this much larger topic by looking at New York State Police surveillance of the Vietnam-era student peace movement. Drawing extensively on State Police spy files housed at the New York State Archives, this project demonstrates how state and local police contributed to the climate of political repression and surveillance during the Vietnam era. While this article encompasses state police surveillance at all types of institutions, including elite private universities and second-tier state colleges, in doing so it provides the first-ever detailed look at how community college students organized against the war. Since a majority of community college students were from relatively low-income backgrounds, chronicling the history of protest on two-year campuses gives historians another angle from which to counter the persistent myth that antiwar activism failed to penetrate the most working-class sectors of U.S. society.

History of Protestantism in Ukraine

History of Protestantism in Ukraine

Ressocialização do controle social e reversão das manifestações violentas em Moçambique

This research studies the dynamics of violent demonstrations in Mozambique and the author-ities’ response to this phenomenon. The study starts from the record of the first strike in 1993 until the explosion of hidden debts, the biggest financial scandal that shook the country in early 2016, generating intentions of popular revolts until the year 2022. The purpose is to understand how the violent demonstrations were managed by the authorities, changing over time and influencing their trajectory. To this end, a qualitative meth-odology and non-participant observation were used in peripheral neighborhoods with a history of intense protests in Maputo City. The aforemen-tioned exercise allowed us to verify that after the first violent manifestations erupted, the authorities progressively created new mechanisms of social control to replace the mechanisms that had been dissolved by the strikes or had failed in the con-text. In this process, the cycle of social control that prevented violent manifestations against hidden debts, as well as the different forms of peaceful social demonstrations, was consolidated.

Pietismus Handbuch ed. by Wolfgang Breul

Reviewed by: Pietismus Handbuch ed. by Wolfgang Breul Peter James Yoder Pietismus Handbuch. Edited by Wolfgang Breul. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021. xi + 797 pp. Wolfgang Breul, a prominent scholar of Pietism, offers an excellent addition to the growing body of research regarding the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German Protestant renewal movement. In its breadth of engagement, accessibility of information, and collection of formidable contributors, this encyclopedic work stands out among recent German-language introductions to Pietism, especially as it complements and offers correctives to the four-volume Geschichte des Pietismus (1993–2004) commissioned by the Historischen Kommission zur Erforschung des Pietismus. The over fifty articles found in this handbook are grouped under six headings: 1) Orientierung; 2) Anfänge; 3) Personen und Gruppen; 4) Städte, Territorien, Regionen, Länder; 5) Themen; and 6) Beziehungen, Wirkung, und Rezeption. Breul nestles the topics of theology, piety (Frömmigkeit), and society and culture into the “Themen (Topics)” category. The articles are relatively brief synopses, and the list of contributors includes both well-established Pietism scholars and younger researchers, who have brought fresh insight into the study of the movement. The volume begins with a collection of methodological and research-oriented articles. Among these are Brigitte Klosterberg’s “Archive, Bibliotheken, Editionen” and Katherine Faull’s “Digital Humanities,” both of which help further an understanding of access to important Pietist texts and are useful companions to the 127-page bibliography of primary and secondary literature found at the end of the volume. The second section, “Anfänge [End Page 476] (Beginnings),” contains articles on individuals, movements, and theological systems (such as alchemy, “mystical spiritualism,” and Lutheran Orthodoxy) that played a role in initiating Pietism. It is notable that broad, inclusive definitions of Pietism, found in the works of F. Ernest Stoeffler and Martin Brecht, are given a backseat to perspectives that recognize the independence and particularity of German Pietism or the mutual inter-dependence of Pietism and other reform movements. Thus, instead of an article featuring William Perkins as a father of Pietism, Jan van de Kamp (“Pietismus und Puritanismus”) provides insight into the place of Puritan devotional literature in Pietism, noting the complexity in how individuals appropriated certain Puritan writings or ideas into their own contexts. The contributions in “Personen und Gruppen” cover a range of Lutheran, Reformed, Moravian, and “radical” individuals. Among the articles on those associated with Pietism, Douglas Shantz’s “Johann Friedrich Rock und die Inspirierten” and Malte van Spankeren’s “Johann Jacob Rambach” offer insight into individuals and groups often located on the periphery of the movement. The fourth section offers contributions covering important cities, territories, and regions associated with Pietism. Breul has included articles on Scandinavia (Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen and Urban Claesson) and southeastern Europe (Zoltan Csepregi), but there is an absence of contributions on London or the broader connection to England. The section on “Themen (Topics)” does a fine job of covering most major ideas and practices of Pietists, though the important world of catechesis, especially as a platform for renewal, does not find the amount of discussion it deserves. The final section includes eight articles that offer a sense of Pietism’s ongoing place in the history of Protestantism. Jan Carsten Schnurr’s contribution “Erweckungsbewegung (Awakening Movement)” exemplifies the articles of this section. Schnurr elaborates on the complex relationship between the nineteenth-century German awakening movement and Pietism, situating Pietism among other influences upon that awakening. He proceeds to trace specific points in which we find connections between German Pietism, “Spätpietismus (Late Pietism),” and the awakening movements in [End Page 477] Germany. By tracing this religious genealogy, he—among others in this section— provides bookends to the volume. Among recent one-volume introductions to German Pietism, this book stands out as a resource for academics. It offers substantive insight into the various dynamics of Pietism and complements long-standing introductions. The volume’s limitations are to be expected, considering the scope and length of the articles. Where we would hope to find a detailed examination of an idea, individual, or event, we are left with a condensed summary. Nevertheless, this work does a superb job introducing readers to the movement and leading them toward...

On Becoming Neighbors: The Communication Ethics of Fred Rogers, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: Children, Television, and Fred Rogers

On Becoming Neighbors: The Communication Ethics of Fred Rogers, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: Children, Television, and Fred Rogers

О НАРОДНЫХ ВОССТАНИЯХ И ПРОТЕСТАХ В КАЗАХСТАНЕ (1929-1931 ГГ.)

The article deals with the history of popular uprisings and protests in Kazakhstan (1929-1931). In historiography, the works of Kazakh, Russianand foreign historians were analyzed. When studying the issue, first of all, attention was paid to the causes, nature and slogans of the uprisings. In particular, unbearable livestock procurement for the Kazakh population, as well as the nature of the uprisings, nationality or mass character, as well as multinationality, is noted. Slogans from archival documents are given to understand the origins of the uprisings. Particular attention is drawn to the number of uprisings and the number of participants as one of the key points in the study of this problem. Separately, the victims of political repressions, who were shot without trial or investigation during the suppression of uprisings, as well as those subjected to repression by extrajudicial and judicial bodies for participating these uprisings, are shown separately. The article uses a large array of archival documents, such as the Archive of the Prezident of the Repulic of Kazakhstan, SGA KNB of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Many sources are new, not yet introduced into scientific circulation.