Popular Protest Research Articles

ICT Use and Entrepreneurial Mobilization of Chinese Grassroots Activists In and Beyond Cyberspace

While prevailing scholarship commonly asserts that information and communication technologies (ICTs) significantly facilitate mass mobilization, a growing body of literature questions the mobilization potential of technologies alone. This literature proposes that ICTs might redirect offline participation by promoting low-risk and low-cost online collective actions, especially in the absence of linkage between offline and online tactics. In the context of these debates, this article explores the nuanced synergies between the online and offline mobilization strategies of individual activists and their underlying motives. It does so through an in-depth ethnographic case study of popular protest mobilization in a Chinese locality. Through an integration of the traditional entrepreneurial mobilization model with the concept of mediatization, this study delves into the intricate mobilization strategies and underlying motives of activists. The findings reveal that through a strategic convergence of offline and online tactics, including extension, amalgamation, and substitution, activists adeptly choreographed and presented protest repertoires, thereby fostering the development of mass mobilization. The research posits that the efficacy of ICTs in mobilization is contingent upon activists’ adeptness in leveraging the norms and practices of ICTs to pursue collective objectives suited to social contexts, thus circumventing the pitfalls of “clicktivism.”

Beliefs, strategic interaction, and Hong Kong’s anti-extradition law movement: A game-theoretic analysis

Given the information and beliefs about the possibility of repression, when will the civil society organize protests against the government? Under what conditions will the government repress popular protests? In this paper, I employ a novel signaling game to model the strategic interaction between the regime and civil society during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Movement in Hong Kong. I illustrate how information and beliefs influence whether the civil society mobilizes mass protests. Specifically, I examine how government actions shape the civil society’s beliefs about the government type, which in turn determine the protest turnouts and the government’s decision to repress.

Waves of Popular Contention and Democracy in Denmark, 1700–2000

AbstractContrary to the dominant narrative of the historical formation of democracy in Denmark, which emphasises a smooth and gradual linear transition to democracy and modernity, this paper accentuates a discontinuous and contentious road towards democratisation. Based on quantitative and qualitative sources, this article identifies four major waves of popular mobilisation that paved the way for the introduction and expansion of political rights. The first wave of popular protest began in the 1830s and culminated in 1848 with the fall of absolutism and the transition to constitutional monarchy. The next protest wave from 1885 to 1887 arose from the so‐called ‘constitutional struggle’ and mobilised hundreds of thousands of ordinary Danes and contributed to the nationalisation and parliamentarisation of the political system. The third wave unfolded around the end of the Second World War, while the hitherto last wave of popular struggle erupted in 1968 with the youth rebellion. The analysis shows that ‘democracy’ was the central issue of contention in all four protest waves and supports the main thesis that periods of intense interaction between popular protest and the state have had a decisive formative influence on the genesis and further development of Danish democracy.

African Popular Protest and Political Change

Abstract: In the twenty-first century, African countries have hosted more mass movements than any other region in the world. In the last decade, one in every three nonviolent revolutionary campaigns has taken place in Africa. The region also has the highest short-term success rate for people power. But is this success predicated on the mobilizational force of "protest democracy" to hold elites accountable? Or are African social movements' remarkable successes an environmental artefact, the result of ordinary protests in contexts of extraordinary instability? The evidence suggests that African social movements are uniquely effective and that political and military elites are increasingly trying to harness their power. Ordinary people—marshalled in massive demonstrations and persistent civil society organizing—have played a necessary, often decisive role in agitating for democracy. However, eliciting successful breakthroughs requires the alignment of protester demands with the abandonment of the status quo by elite blocs. Recent cascades of irregular power transfers in African politics illustrate these distinctive dynamics, where diverse domestic political contexts share an important common ingredient: the combination of mass movements pushing for change and military power players who are willing to help them.

On the move: Autocratic leaders, security, and capital relocations

Why do some countries make the costly decision to relocate their capital city? Existing research offers four general explanations for this momentous action: administrative functionality, economic development, environmental degradation, and national integration. We offer a less sanguine, political explanation: capital relocations offer autocratic leaders a way to mitigate different security threats, including coups, popular protests, and foreign interventions. Using original data on capital relocations in 202 polities after 1789, we test several implications of our argument, at different levels of analysis. First, we show that autocracies are much more likely to relocate their capitals than democracies. Second, using different indicators of internal and external threats, we find that autocracies more likely relocate their capitals when breakdown is looming. Third, running subnational analyses, we find evidence that capitals are relocated to smaller cities and areas less susceptible to urban development.

The Russian Federal Assembly as a Producer of Legal Restrictions, 2012–2021

This article discusses the role of the Russian Federal Assembly in legislating containment of the 2011/2012 domestic protests, the increased contentious politics that followed with the 2018 Navalny campaign, and the 2019 Golunov and Moscow City Council electoral demonstrations. It scrutinizes the evolution of restrictive legislation from 2012 to 2021 and finds that, after the protests of 2011/2012 the Federal Assembly has played an ever more important role in redesigning legislation that undercut the liberal framework of the 1993 Constitution. The study contributes to understanding the role of legislatures in post-Soviet patrimonial regimes; and it discusses how Russia’s patrimonial legislatures respond to popular protest and contentious politics by restructuring societal expectations and enhancing the regime’s coercive capacity, cementing it in personalized authoritarianism.

The National Federation of Labor Youth and the Candy Bar Kids

Thousands of children and youth across the country took to the streets for two weeks in spring 1947 to protest a three-cent increase in the price of chocolate bars. The protest initially generated enthusiastic press coverage and had widespread popular support, but when the National Federation of Labor Youth (nfly), the Communist Party’s youth organization, announced its support, anti-communists in the press and the community red-baited the protesters. The campaign quickly lost momentum, which anti-communists attributed to the presence of Communists but was more likely due to their own red-baiting attacks in the press. Some of these protests were spontaneous reactions to a 40 per cent increase in the price of candy bars, while others were led or inspired by nfly. Either way, the countrywide mobilization of thousands of children and youth marks a turning point in the history of Canada’s left. Erupting in tandem with a nationwide strike of industrial workers and protests of activist consumers demanding greater economic security and a more responsive state, the children’s chocolate bar protest provides a window on this critical moment in the class struggle. The attacks on this popular protest at the moment that the long run of community-based militancy was about to be demonized, delegitimated, and silenced by red-baiting marks a significant milestone in Canada’s Cold War. In addition to adding the youngsters’ challenge to capital and the state to the history of the popular left, the event contributes to the growing literature on children and youth engaged in political protest, while their creative protest strategies offer a youthful dimension to the study of performance activism.

Disappointment and vision in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings

ABSTRACT Most commentators concede that the Arab uprisings of 2010–11 fell dramatically short of meeting their aspirations. For some, this wave of popular protests was an undeniable failure. Others draw more conflicted conclusions. They do not gainsay the realities of authoritarian retrenchment and war, but underscore the democratic practices and attitudes that have expanded over the past decade-plus. In the midst of such discussions, scant attention has been paid to how Arab intellectuals reacted to and evaluated the uprisings’ fates. This article addresses this gap by considering the writings of contemporary Moroccan intellectual Abdelilah Belkeziz. I argue that the sense of disappointment that he both expresses and notes among participants and observers of the Arab uprisings alike serves as a source of vision through which to productively consider the movements and their future trajectories, and to avoid the pitfalls of excessive optimism and despair.

Iranian Identity and National Oppression: Crafting the Modern Iranian Nation–State

During Iran's 2022–2023 countrywide uprising, the intensity of popular protests in Kurdistan and Baluchistan drew attention to the question of national oppression. Some scholars then revisited a debate, originally articulated in Marxist circles, on whether Iran's culturally and politically oppressed communities, like Azeris, Kurds, Baluchis or Arabs, are ethnic or national minorities. This article approaches the debate within the frame of national oppression as a historical construction. It argues that in Iran, as in almost all modern nation-states, nationhood was established through the forcible creation of minoritized communities whose potential claims to nationhood, or an equal place in a politically democratic and culturally pluralist nation, have been denied.

#BeatThePot: Strategies and Discourses of Women’s Protests in Zimbabwe

This paper focuses on strategies deployed by women and discourses of women’s collective action in the #BeatThePot strike which took place alongside popular protests against Mugabe and the failures of ZANU-PF led government in Zimbabwe. Using Judith Butler’s ideas on “bodies in alliance and the politics of the street,” I theorize how women as gendered “bodies congregate, move, speak and strike together as they claim public space into political spaces” (2015, 70). I interrogate women’s use of embodiment as a strategy involving the metaphor of both the “labouring mothering body” and as “bodies that strike,” which demonstrates how women in Zimbabwe confronted violent political, economic, and socio-cultural limits imposed on their bodies. In this strike, women challenged the silencing of women’s public political work and refused to be relegated to the invisible margins of domesticized and undervalued reproductive labour. Thus, through the #BeatThePot protest, I demonstrate how women in Zimbabwe have engaged in body work to a confront violent regime and how they have borne on their bodies violent reprisal through sexual attacks, abductions, incarcerations, torture, and even loss of life. The paper concludes that the feminized body is a site of violent struggle for autonomy and that through collective action women in Zimbabwe have sought to confront and transform the repressive state.

Using Graffiti as a Communicative and Expressive Tool in Popular Protests

Using Graffiti as a Communicative and Expressive Tool in Popular Protests

Calico Madams and South Sea Cheats: Global Trade, Finance, and Popular Protest in Early Hanoverian England

AbstractIn the summer of 1719, woolen and silk weavers took to the streets in cities and towns across England to protest the East India Company's importation of cotton calicoes from South Asia. English weavers viewed these popular imports as hurting their economic livelihoods. During the protests, they violently turned their anger against women wearing calico, tearing off their clothes and even throwing acid on some victims. Their actions spurred widespread condemnation, but the weavers got what they wanted in the end. In March 1721, an act banning the importation and use of all calico cloth in Britain received royal assent. On that same day, an act arranging the first in a series of financial rescues of the South Sea Company in the wake of the South Sea Bubble became law. Drawing from a range of archival and printed sources, the author explores the political and cultural connections between the calico crisis and the South Sea Bubble and investigates how reactions to both episodes intersected ideologically with fears of Jacobitism and foreign invasion and with broader anxieties about gender, the social order, and the political influence of financial corporations.

Taking forward perceptions of identity: the Sea League’s campaign to protect maritime communities and the environment.

The Sea League was a significant but relatively short-lived movement of popular protest (1933-1939), active in the communities of the Outer Hebrides for the purpose of drawing the attention of government to deep concerns over island social and economic circumstances. Founded in the Island of Barra, their cause was political and public recognition of the destruction of inshore fisheries and of consequent loss of livelihoods in island communities. Through its campaign, evidenced through its newsletter and surviving correspondence, the Sea League can be seen as propagating perceptions of identity in fishing communities in the Outer Hebrides based on commonality of interests and the threats to them from a wider society. This gave their cause profile although the wider aims were only partially realised in the nearly six years of campaigning which was effectively ended by the outbreak of the Second World War. Perceptions of identity engendered by the Sea league have continued to be shaped by the culture and language of the Gàidhealtachd, and these same communities in which the language survives are engaging with the contemporary climate-crisis and current debates on environmental conservation. Considerable space is given to this to highlight the relevance of the Sea League’s campaign for the part of ‘human ecology’ in the marine environment.

Popular violence and ‘lay religion’ in centre-west Mexico during Mexico’s Cristero war (1926-29)

This article suggests that the Cristero insurgency of 1926-29 was a form of lay religious violence inimical not only to the Mexican Revolution but also to the interests of the Catholic civilians and hierarchy the rebels claimed to represent. By the same token, Cristeros shared with their Revolutionary enemies a habit of plebeian vigilantism which was informed by economic and politico-religious mobilisation underway since 1910. Focusing on the mestizo and indigenous populations in the states of Zacatecas, Durango and Jalisco, this article shows how the external conflict presented by the Church-state crisis of 1926 was used as a pretext for localised disputes concerning land and pillage. The Cristiada of 1926-29 thus deserves to be understood as part of the pattern of popular protest over land, property and autonomy which had been unleashed by the onset of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. This article concludes with an explanation of the military and political relevance of the Cristero conflict today.

Popular Protests in the Mzab in Light of Intercommunity Conflicts and Ordinary Practices (Algeria)

The Mzab region in the Algerian south has seen numerous clashes between the Mozabite and Arab communities. The most important of these were in 2013–2015. This article considers these clashes as an expression of the problematic of integrating the Saharan regions into the Algerian national fabric, and its interlocking with the end of a political cycle, which has tended to obscure the emergence of new generations of actors. It proposes that these intercommunal conflicts belong to the conjunction between these macro-level dimensions and much more everyday levels, which serve as the substrate not only of the realization of the clashes but also of their justification. The article documents how the ordinary, where the distance between the groups is marked in the everyday, is mobilized in the demands for a “just” state; and how, in the slow unfolding and production of clashes, the state becomes at once their invisibilized third term and their center.

Un violador en tu camino: An artistic intervention against patriarchal injustice in Chile

AbstractIn 2019, Chile’s artistic collective Las Tesis staged the viral feminist performance “Un violador en tu camino” (A Rapist in Your Path), as a popular protest against Sebastián Piñera’s government. This article analyzes the geopolitical context behind Las Tesis, focusing on Chile’s 2019 events and the motivations behind the performance in Valparaíso. Subsequently, I explore the performance’s structure and lyrics as a form of artivism, emphasizing its impact. The third section of this article will be dedicated to exploring the linguistic and musical adaptations of the same performance undertaken by various women’s collectives, associations, or informal groups across the globe.

The Eastern Cape and East London: African Protest and the Historical Context of Bloody Sunday 1952

This concluding overview explores themes which provide background to the four articles in the part special issue on popular protest in the Eastern Cape, with a special focus on East London. As these articles demonstrate, East London became the site of some of the most explosive urban popular protest in South Africa from 1950 to 1952. First, we discuss distinctive features of Eastern Cape African history over the long term. Society in the Eastern Cape was shaped by a particularly violent and protracted colonial conquest, lasting a century, but also by an early and widely dispersed missionary presence and relatively incorporative franchise system. Both left deep legacies. Second, we focus on East London, and some social characteristics that underlay the protests of the 1950s. Despite control by an anglophone white elite, the City Council was strongly committed to segregation and conditions in the ‘locations’ were among the worst in South Africa. This helped to radicalise African urban communities who also united to a degree behind Africanist, rather than class or worker-based, ideas and rhetoric. Third, we discuss participation by women in movements of popular protest in the Eastern Cape, focusing on both rural and urban contexts. Women were deeply engaged in two periods of militant mobilisation in East London: from 1929 to 1931, led by the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (IICU) and 1950 to 1952, led by the ANC Youth League. The relationship between political radicalism and spiritual renewal is also briefly discussed. This overview suggests that all three of these historical processes shaped the ideas, patterns, and radicalism of popular protest in early 1950s East London.

Reconstructing the Political Future of Armenia: Overcoming Contemporary Turbulence Through Role Models

This article deals with the problem of reconstructing the political future of post-war Armenia and overcoming modern turbulence in the context of regional instability. Characteristic features of overcoming widespread anxiety in the Armenian society, which manifested itself on the political stage in different ways, from popular protests and early elections to heated debates about the political future in recent years, are highlighted and described. The most important condition for the development of post-war Armenia is the extent to which Armenian society is able to form a concept for its future. Ideas about the future were of particular importance in critical epochs, when the traditional picture of the world was destroyed and new opportunities for social development opened up. But for many centuries, these ideas did not go beyond prophecies, predictions and various kinds of hoaxes, which essentially became the first attempts to predict the future. This article attempts to uncover the main causes of modern instability in Armenia, thereby contributing to the Armenian society to deconstruct and reconstruct the political future. In this context, it also means that even the scientific methodology for knowing the future has not yet been developed, since most scientific methods remain imperfect and do not give the researcher confidence in the accuracy of the forecast.

Fake-talk and the Spaza Shop: A Fake Food Furore and the Spectre of Public Health Emergencies in South Africa

At the end of August 2018, a controversy erupted in South Africa. Accusations of potentially poisonous ‘fake food’ had been circulating on social media for a month or so, and by early September reports were common on South African news programmes. Accusations fell at the door of foreign-run spaza shops (convenience stores), some of which were looted and their shopkeepers harmed. Many commentators read these events as another outbreak of the xenophobic violence that has flared up across South African townships for more than a decade. Our reading is different. In this Research Article, rather than dismissing accusations of fake-ness as merely a pretext for popular protest and violence, we tackle the question of what work ‘fake-talk’ does. We show that in this instance, accusations of fake-ness brought a distinctive urgency to events, framing what might otherwise have been seen as concerns about inequality in the language of a public health crisis. In response, a state normally hesitant to act on citizens’ long-standing complaints about ‘the duplicity of foreigners’ intervened with a new speed and decisiveness. ‘Fake-talk’, we conclude, is an important site of inquiry because of how it may enable certain actions, regardless of whether suspicions are founded.

Coups d'État, Political Legitimacy, and Instability in Mali

Abstract: Mali, once argued to be a democratic model for Africa, is in a state of perennial crisis, the result of poor governance, unmet democratic expectations, and competition for domestic political legitimacy among the political class, the military, and religious leaders. After the 1991 revolution, international donors poured money into Mali to promote democratization. Meanwhile, most Malian citizens were becoming increasingly disconnected from a growing political class dependent on these funds. This article shows how popular protests led to both the reversal of family-law reform and the instigation of military coups d'état. The lack of accountability of the political class and the influx of donor money have contributed to increased popular perceptions of state corruption and impunity. Peace and security are impossible amid governance failures and serial coups d'état. This article explains the political consequences of the breakdown of popular trust and political legitimacy of the ruling elite and argues that restoring trust and legitimacy is a critical element to rebuilding Mali.