Ongoing Protest Research Articles

Tribal mobilization for religious identity and political space: ongoing demand for inclusion of Sarna-Tribal religion in the census of India

ABSTRACT The public mobilization of religious communities to acquire political space has been a heated discussion among scholars worldwide. Research reveals a long history of religious communities participating in political movements. However, in India, the debate on the recognition and protection of religious identity has been reduced to a discourse of minority versus majority religion. This paper examines the ongoing political mobilization by tribal communities in the state of Jharkhand and its demand for a separate religious column in the census of India. The underlying motive of this mobilization is to establish their religious identity, which is separate from both Hinduism and Christianity, and to resist the encroachment of tribal land by campaigning for tribal control over state resources through strengthening the constitutional provisions. The study focuses on tribal protests on social media platforms, in addition to the 2019 protest at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, initiated by tribal groups demanding the Sarna-tribal religion as a legitimate religious choice in the census of India. The study used qualitative inductive analysis on data sourced through participant observation and 50 semi-structured interviews. The results prove that the ongoing protest for the recognition of the Sarna-tribal religion is stimulated by the threat to their religious identity and land rights. Additionally, social media played a crucial role in informing, mobilizing, and stimulating feelings of collective group identity.

Aspects of development: Voices from predisplacement site in Eastern India

The present research paper is an ethnographic account of the travails and resistance of an adivasi (native) community of India called Santhals. These adivasis are facing the threat of eviction due to a planned coal mining in the area, located in West Bengal, a state in the eastern part of India. Amid the ongoing protest against coal mines, many families are ready to give up their land for the project. Even differences in opinion are common among the leaders of those protest groups. These differences in perception about a coal mine project are the central theme of this paper. Drawing from it the paper is going to scrutinize the grand terms like ‘Affected Persons’, used in ‘National Mineral Policy 2019’ and ‘Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (2013)’, and ‘Local Community’ to show that any generalization or universalization of those various perceptions suppress the real needs of the people since they get affected in multiple ways. Further, this paper regards ‘development’ as ‘pharmakon’ for its dual nature, since people in the same community perceive it as poison; in contrast, for others, it is the remedy for their poverty. Tracing from all the varying voices, the paper finally argues for finding ‘significant others’, who are significantly excluded from decision-making.

Challenging dominant education paradigms: posthuman feminist inspirations towards alternate pathways for decolonising the curriculum

AbstractSouth Africa’s curriculum, and education system at large, remains humanistic and dominated by Western Eurocentric ways of thinking, doing and being. The ongoing protest action in higher education has made explicit the inequalities that continue to keep epistemic violence, Eurocentrism, and human exceptionalism intact. Central to this protest action has been the need for curriculum inquiry to reinvent itself and go against the pedagogical grain by advocating for a decolonised curriculum. However, the decolonial turn has largely been a structural exercise of abstract and rhetoric intensity fueled by a language of critique that is entrapped in discursive tendencies that inhibit the type of radicalism needed for it to invigorate alternatives that can challenge dominant education paradigms. This article is inspired by posthuman feminist theory that troubles the logic of advanced capitalism, epistemic injustice and dominant education paradigms. Invoked by new materialism, intra-actions of our becoming within and as part of the world are the deep entanglements of ethics, knowing and being that can spur scholarly activism. Four curriculum studies scholar activists shared their narratives of how they are enacting their curriculum to challenge dominant education paradigms. Their lived experiences as material, relational, embodied and embedded incite posthuman tendencies of what it means to teach to transgress. Experimenting with transversal transgressions this article attempts at a non-anthropocentric, feminist inspired perspective for curriculum inquiry to find alternative pathways for decolonising the curriculum so that it can rise to the challenges of our time.

Cities fight for autonomy: A view from an ongoing protest in Israel

In this commentary, I use the current protest movement in Israel as an entry point to discuss urban autonomy and social protest in an age of growing polarization between progressive cities and reactionary states. While the nationwide protest is not explicitly framed in urban versus national terms, it has a clear urban dimension. Tel-Aviv-Jaffa is not only the place where the protest movement is the strongest, but the municipality also leverages the protest to demand enhanced autonomy against the right-wing government’s illiberal agendas. I suggest that viewing urban protest through an urban autonomy lens is useful to fully unpack the current wave of protest and situate it within the larger political processes that shape it.

Political Convergence, Surpluses of Activism, and Genealogy: Examining Iran's Quasi-Revolutionary Situation

In this intervention, we discuss the ongoing protest movement and the quasi-revolutionary situation in Iran with the goal of offering contextual as well as background analysis. Our objective is to examine the current wave of revolutionary politics in the frame of a longer history, that is, the one of the “unaccomplished” 1979 revolution. We do not argue that the current movement is in continuity with the so-called Islamic revolution; rather, we ask what afterlives of the 1979 revolution and successive waves of mobilizations reverberate within the current situation. We do so from a political transformative vantage point, which we understand as inherently feminist, in that we refuse to recognize any hierarchy between the struggles, the issues, and the demands as expressed by the protesters. Indeed, we understand liberation as a collective project resulting from the intersection of struggles, demands, and issues. Following this line of reasoning, we interrogate the current moment along three thematic axes: the social composition, the prospects for political convergence, and the genealogy, or the ideational connection, of the current struggle with those of the past.

Friends or Foes? U.S. Women’s Perceptions of Racial Justice and the Black Lives Matter Protests during the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT Scholarship on the first waves of the Black Lives Matter protests (2013–2014) has emerged in recent years but little is yet known about women’s responses to the cycle of Black Lives Matter/George Floyd protests that occurred in the Summer of 2020. This study analyzed semi-structured interviews with a racially diverse community sample of 20 women and two nonbinary individuals who mostly identified as feminists (mean age = 34.05, SD = 13.11). To address the salience of BLM framing practices during an ongoing protest, this study explored an awareness of structural racism and reactions to the presumed goals and tactics of this antiracism social movement. We identified six themes in how this racially diverse sample responded to these protests against racism and police brutality: 1) Caricatures of BLM protestors as criminals; 2) Protests were too extreme; 3) Concern about the COVID risks and social context of COVID; 4) More education needed about race relations; 5) Protests were long overdue; and 6) Protests were effective and necessary. Implications for better understanding the rhetoric of white liberalism, solidarity within racial justice movements, and fragmentation or unity among women were explored.

Contested elections, protest, and regime stability: comparing Belarus and Bolivia

ABSTRACT This article examines the 2020 election and ongoing protest movement in Belarus by comparing them to the contested election in Bolivia (2019) that led to the overthrow of Evo Morales and his MAS party. In each case, a contested election brought about widespread street protests, which called into question the legitimacy of the governing regime. However, only in Bolivia do we see a turnover in state power. In Belarus, Aliaksandr Lukashenka has defied social movement protests and maintained control of the state. This article analyzes the role of the police and military forces and the geopolitical relations of each country and argues that, unlike Bolivia, where Morales’s key military allies defected, the Belarusian government has managed to stay in power with the combination of strong coercive capacity and the support of a regional “black knight” – Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Such findings open the way for cautious prognoses for the ongoing protests in Belarus.

Disrupting the system constructively: Testing the effectiveness of nonnormative nonviolent collective action.

Collective action research tends to focus on motivations of the disadvantaged group, rather than on which tactics are effective at driving the advantaged group to make concessions to the disadvantaged. We focused on the potential of nonnormative nonviolent action as a tactic to generate support for concessions among advantaged group members who are resistant to social change. We propose that this tactic, relative to normative nonviolent and to violent action, is particularly effective because it reflects constructive disruption: a delicate balance between disruption (which can put pressure on the advantaged group to respond) and perceived constructive intentions (which can help ensure that the response to action is a conciliatory one). We test these hypotheses across 4 contexts (total N = 3650). Studies 1-3 demonstrate that nonnormative nonviolent action (compared with inaction, normative nonviolent action, and violent action) is uniquely effective at increasing support for concessions to the disadvantaged among resistant advantaged group members (compared with advantaged group members more open to social change). Study 3 shows that constructive disruption mediates this effect. Study 4 shows that perceiving a real-world ongoing protest as constructively disruptive predicts support for the disadvantaged, whereas Study 5 examines these processes longitudinally over 2 months in the context of an ongoing social movement. Taken together, we show that nonnormative nonviolent action can be an effective tactic for generating support for concessions to the disadvantaged among those who are most resistant because it generates constructive disruption. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The Black Pacific and the Shapes of Global Black Power

The Black Pacific and the Shapes of Global Black Power

Neoliberale Kontinuität im politischen Wechselwind

The article focuses on the question why Chile’s extractivist accumulation model is so stable despite ongoing protest, many years of a political left turn in Latin America and wide-ranging ecological damages caused by the extractive industries. It does not only take into account the appropriation of nature but analyses the appropriation of power by a small Chilean class of big company owners. The huge inequality which characterizes Chile’s society also shapes political power. The article distinguishes different power resources of Chile’s big business class and explains how these explain the surprising continuity of Chile’s extractivist economy in a socio-ecological deadlock.

Canada is #IdleNoMore: exploring dynamics of Indigenous political and civic protest in the Twitterverse

ABSTRACTSocial media have been playing a growingly important role in grassroots protest over the last five years. While many scholars have explored dynamics of political cyberprotest (e.g., the ongoing transnational Occupy movement, the 2012 Quebec student strike, the student-led protest movement in Chile between 2011 and 2013), few have studied sub-dynamics relating to ethno-cultural minorities’ uses of social media to gain visibility, mobilize support, and engage in political and civil action. We fill part of this gap in the academic literature by investigating uses of Twitter for political engagement in the context of the Canada-based Idle No More movement (INM). This ongoing protest initiative, which emerged in December 2012, seeks to mobilize Indigenous Peoples in Canada and internationally as well as their non-Indigenous allies. It does so by bringing attention to their culture, struggles, and identities as well as advocating for changes in policy areas relating to the environment, governance, and socio-economic matters. Our study explores to what extent references to aspects of Indigenous identities and culture shaped INM-related tweeting and, by extension, activism during the summer of 2013. We conducted a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 1650 #IdleNoMore tweets shared by supporters of this movement between 3 July 2013 and 2 August 2013. Our study demonstrates that unlike other social media-intensive movements where economic and political concerns were the primary drivers of political and civil engagement, aspects of Indigenous culture influenced information flows and mobilization among #IdleNoMore tweeters.

New South Africa Speak: race talk in an undergraduate debate on racialisation in post-apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACTWorking with a set of theoretical concepts from critical race theory, this article examines perspectives on the impact of micro-aggressions and systemic inequality, as elicited during on online debate among undergraduate students. The debate centred on the degree to which white South Africans may legitimately identify as Africans. This topic served as a means of stimulating talk about the effects of racialisation in post-apartheid South Africa. During the analysis, the arguments that emerged from the online debate were analysed within a framework of white talk, referred to as New South Africa Speak. All contributions to the debate were measured against the discursive forms and functions that characterise New South Africa Speak. The findings are reported in terms of: During the conclusion the potential relevance of these findings to ongoing protest movements at South African universities is considered.

CONTESTING THE DANGER ZONE Creative Protest against Police Surveillance in the Post-Fordist City

In January 2014, residents and activists in Hamburg protested against the declaration of a so-called danger zone (Gefahrengebiet). The police created the zone after violent attacks on police stations had taken place. Inside this danger zone, the police were authorized to search and restrict the mobility of pedestrians. The protest attracted a high level of media coverage due to its creativity. My article discusses a form of protest, which activists and residents invented during the ongoing protest called “Danger Zone – The Real Life Game.” By utilizing playful practices, as well as narratives, activists contested the measures of the police throughout the protest and also, therefore, its interpretation by the media and by the police. Furthermore, they managed to link online to offline practices.

This Is What Democracy Sounds Like: Protest Performances of the Citizenship Movement in Wisconsin and Beyond

This article is a case study of an ongoing singing protest in Wisconsin, the group that calls itself Solidarity Sing Along (SSA). An offshoot of the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising, for the first 15 months of its existence SSA was an important nexus of local activists working to recall Republican state senators and the governor. After the recall's failure the group not only continued to carry on but quite effortlessly reoriented its claim making and centered its protests on the freedom to assemble and petition the government, which had been an important cause from early on. Maintaining its pro-labor orientation, SSA has become part of a broader movement for democratic citizenship rights. Situating the group in musical practices of the Wisconsin protests and social movements more generally, I show that how SSA makes and performs its music makes it a part of the citizenship movement. This case study reveals a novel form of claim making within the repertoire of contention practiced by social movements: SSA is a ‘part-time occupation’ and as such has potential to be more resilient and durable than ‘permanent’ occupations à la Occupy Wall Street.

The elasticity of the Color Line

In light of the ongoing massive social protest that began in Israel in summer 2011, and considering the new interest in the Israeli Black Panthers protest movement marking its 40th anniversary, I wish to reexamine the press photographs of the Black Panther demonstrations taken in 1971. Studying these photographs, I argue that the visual coverage of the protest in the Israeli popular press strictly excluded the demonstrators from the Israeli public using racial signifiers. This occurred precisely during a period in which the use of racial signifiers was diminishing due to the Six Day War. I draw parallels between photographs from the 1967 War and from the Black Panther demonstrations and maintain that viewing the photographs exposes the state dialectic in handling its citizens. This dialectic moves along the axis between acceptance and rejection, identity and difference, and containment and alienation—relying on the racial visual signifier both to presence and to justify identity and difference.

Psychiatrists Occupy Place in Protest Movement

Psychiatrists Occupy Place in Protest Movement

VIOLENT PROTEST AT LOCAL GOVERNMENT LEVEL IN SOUTH AFRICA: REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL?

In this article, a broad overview of the main causes and theories of revolution is presented. The objective is to obtain, by analysing recent events in South Africa pertaining to the ongoing protest actions over service delivery at local government level, some indication of revolutionary potential in South Africa. In this regard, there seem to be two basic views, namely on the one hand, that violent protest action at local level can lead to revolutionary activity, and on the other hand, that the protest can be contained but aspects of policy will have to be adapted.

Counter-Institutionalism in Anglo-Jewry: The Norwood Rebellion

This study researches the history of an institution making extensive use of oral history based on the recollection of scholars' (i.e. students') accounts from the Jewish orphanage, Norwood. Their version reveals a culture of counter—institutionalism that was exceptionally expressed in the Norwood Rebellion. The rebellion was one act of defiance. As an ongoing protest against the regimentation, it was organised as opposition to the discipline and in particular corporal punishment endemic at Norwood. The importance of oral history as a source is examined in the last section. The counter-cultural research provides an addition to the institutional assessment for judging whether Norwood was ‘good enough’ for the children.

Cutting Through Topologies: Crossing Lines at the School of the Americas

Abstract: The School of the Americas (SOA) is a U.S. Army school that trains Latin American military officers. Manuals released detail torture techniques once taught at the school, and thousands of graduates have been linked to human rights abuses. The annual vigil in front of Fort Benning is the largest ongoing protest and civil disobedience against U.S. imperialism being held within the U.S. The movement to close the SOA traces the twisted lines of the topology that shapes spaces of exception in Latin America. It traces those lines back to the SOA, and cuts through them with its own counter‐topographical lines of connection to those Latin Americans that are made into ‘bare life’ by those topologies. This essay looks at the doings of protest space as a form of resistance to the space of exception, and how personal stories, and mourning, can put us beside ourselves, with one another.

Musicology after Identity—: Four Fragments

Musicology after Identity—Four Fragments James Robert Currie (bio) And so, one must accept that the hyperbolic could well end up as a grain of sand. This is, of course, the fate of all actions. Since thought is also an action, since it is not in opposition to action, it must undergo the same fate. Jacques Derrida, "Politics and Friendship" Redeem After the torchlight red on sweaty facesAfter the frosty silence in the gardensAfter the agony in stony placesThe shouting and the cryingPrison and palace and reverberationOf thunder of spring over distant mountainsHe who was living is now deadWe who were living are now dyingWith a little patience. T. S. Eliot, "What the Thunder Said," The Waste Land Eventually, Cindy Sheehan left the highly visible ongoing protest she had established outside of President Bush's Crawford holiday estate in Texas. She had received death threats, been systematically ignored by both the Republicans and the Democrats, and been lampooned by the media, so finally she concluded that the toll on her health, resources, and family had become too much—business as usual for a political activist. What, however, was shocking was the admittance of despair in her resignation. Her son Casey's death, she concluded, had indeed been for nothing and not simply because the reason he had found himself in the place where he would die was founded on lies regarding the Iraq war's justification. Rather, there could be no redemption because no force other than the almost completely corporatized American government could be invoked to revenge her son's ghost. In effect, she proclaimed [End Page 87] that there is no America through alignment to which his death could be dignified, nothing that could be distinguished from the very America that condemned him in the first place, no outside to those forces that are turning the United States, in her words, into a "fascist corporate wasteland." (One wonders, awfully, if she may in fact see Casey as part of her very object of criticism, i.e., as someone complicit with the very thing that killed him.) "Casey died," she states, "for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives."1 Hypnotized by the ghosts on TV that we will never be, we ourselves have become ghosts, and the tangibility of those who die because of our intangibility is barely opaque enough to even register in the space covered by our gaze as it haunts its way from us to the media, where it dreams us into the only solid thing we know: a fetish (an American Idol). We should remind ourselves, a fetish in psychoanalysis is that which stands in place so as to disavow an absence someplace else; it is the worst form of a ghost, a solid one, and so incapable of even spooking us into acknowledgment of what we have lost and of the revenge that we must enact for others as much as ourselves. This is what is terrifying about Sheehan's proclamation: in a world of ghosts there can be no retribution, for that can only be done by the living. And so the political question that our present catastrophic context raises is once more the oldest one of philosophy: How, therefore, must we live? Live Unreal City,Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,I had not thought death had undone so many. T. S. Eliot, "The Burial of the Dead," The Waste Land Concerns that we might not be alive and of the impotency inherent in becoming ghost have haunted modernity at least since Herder and the counter-Enlightenment debates of the eighteenth century. Today we are made ghost by our immersion within, in Guy Debord's famous phrase, a society of the spectacle.2 For Herder, the cause was Enlightenment reason, since reason is itself ghostly. Since, hypothetically, we are all in possession of it, reason is both always within us, here and now as part of...