Pro-democracy Movement Research Articles

“I will take part in the revolution with our people”: a qualitative study of healthcare workers’ experiences of violence and resistance after the 2021 Myanmar coup d’etat

BackgroundIn Myanmar, ongoing conflict since the 2021 military coup d’etat has been characterized by targeted violence against health workers (HWs), particularly those participating in the pro-democracy movement. Existing knowledge about the challenges faced by health workers in Myanmar is scant, including their perspectives on mitigating their suffering and the broader impact on community health. This knowledge gap prompted our study to assess the extent of the violence, its impact on the workers and the community, and identify resource priorities.MethodsThis qualitative study employed purposive and snowball sampling to recruit health workers affiliated with the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM). We interviewed 24 HWs in Myanmar between July and December 2022, predominantly physicians and nurses. We used a semi-structured interview guide and conducted interviews remotely due to the security situation. We adopted content analysis to understand participation in the CDM movement, experiences of violence, personal and professional impacts, the sequelae to community health, how HWs responded as well as their ongoing needs.ResultsThematic content analysis revealed that violence was both individually targeted and widespread. Health workers faced professional, financial, and personal impacts as a result. The health system as a whole has been severely diminished. Health workers have had to adapt to continue to provide care, for example some fled to rural areas and worked clandestinely, exchanging their services for food and shelter. In those settings, they continued to face insecurity from airstrikes and arrests. Health workers have also experienced moral distress and burden due to their resistance and protest against the regime.ConclusionThe coup and ensuing violence severely disrupted the healthcare system, resulting in shortages of supplies, reduced quality of care, and exacerbated challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite facing significant hardships, HWs remained resilient, engaging in resistance efforts within the CDM and seeking support from local communities and international organizations. They expressed a need for increased awareness, financial assistance, and concrete support for the health system to address the crisis.

Meso News-Spaces and Beyond: News-Related Communication Occurring Between the Public and Private Domains

The concept of meso news-spaces refers to online spaces located between the private and public realms, where everyday users, more professional media actors, or both, can produce and share news-related content among each other, yet not to a wide audience. Such spaces are afforded by digital media platforms, including, but not limited to, Facebook groups, X spaces, and group chats on WeChat, WhatsApp, or Telegram. This special issue is devoted to further understanding news-related communication that occurs neither in fully public nor fully private realms, but between or across the two. In the introduction to the special issue, we demonstrate the significance of meso news-spaces by considering the example of the use of WhatsApp groups in the mobilization of the pro-democracy movement in Israel in 2023. We then consider the challenges that meso news-spaces pose for researchers, in terms of conceptualization, research ethics, and context. We conclude with a review of the articles of the special issue, and with directions for future research around this phenomenon, that is proving to be a significant one in the digital news environment.

Nigerian Radicalism: Towards a New Definition via a Historical Survey

Abstract Recent military coups in West Africa have put the continent’s democratisation itself into question. In some places, for the moment, these coups appear to have popular backing. Nigeria, where radicalism is firmly rooted in democratic values and a human-rights framework, the radical grassroots opposition to the Buhari government’s creeping authoritarianism lies drenched in blood. The roots of this development go back to the history of Nigeria’s radicalism in the twentieth century. Much has appeared on the global 1968 recently, including that of Africa. 1970s/1980s-style radicalism is reappearing today with Omoyele Sowore’s 2018 presidential candidacy, with the African Action Congress party, the #EndSARS protests and the tragic Lekki Toll Gate massacre (2020) in Nigeria. The shift towards radicalism is palpable with protest music such as Falz’s This is Nigeria, and Burna Boy’s Monsters you Made, both explicitly targeting neocolonialism and police brutality. Contrary to Achille Mbembe’s sweeping dismissal of African radicalism, the movement with very deep roots under study is meaningful once again, and is gathering momentum in West Africa’s giant polity. This article applies Walter Benjamin’s and also Nigerian radical thinkers’ conceptualisation of political, social and artistic radicalism, while it frames the Nigerian version via the movement’s history, in which marxisant theory and praxis, feminism, human rights and pro-democracy movements interact with emancipatory strands of Islam, Christianity, Igbo Judaism, and animism. In the context of Nigerian radicalism, even expressly pro-capitalist art theory performs a radical social function by stressing the African’s right to make universal statements (Olu Oguibe) in its de facto defiance of the neo-colony. As these different strands of protest meet, ethnic uprisings (amongst them IPOB) find ways to establish common cause with social radicalism, posing a composite threat to the prebendalist oligarchy that rules and oppresses the country via a militarised neoliberalism.

Left-wing nationalist-populist movement and identification: A psycho-political analysis of the “comfort woman” statue movements in South Korea

Sonyosang (girl statue in Korean) is a bronze statue symbolizing “comfort women,” the estimated 80,000 to 200,000 women physically, mentally, and sexually exploited by the Japanese Empire during WWII. As a backlash against the 2015 ″comfort women” agreement between the South Korean and Japanese governments, Koreans have installed 384 girl statues across South Korea. Based on ethnographic research that I conducted in South Korea between 2019 and 2021, including in-depth interviews with Korean activists who raised funds for or participated in creating, installing, and managing girl statues in South Korea, this research examines how the girl statue movement in South Korea has developed into a left-wing nationalist-populist movement and how affective identification with the statue generates a populist identity. To this end, this research firstly discusses how former President Park Geun-hye's undemocratic political measures recall the memory of minjungism (Korean populism) that led the pro-democracy movement in the 1980s, enabling Korean nationalist leftists' demands to form a chain of equivalence in the girl statue movement. Secondly, relying on Melanie Klein's theory of identification, this article examines how the ‘people’ is constituted through affective forms of identification with the girl statue. By doing so, this article demonstrates that the growth of the girl statue movement into a left-wing nationalist-populist movement blurs boundaries between the psychological, the personal, the national, and the (geo)political.

Movement meaning of money: Monetary mobilization in Hong Kong’s prodemocracy movement

The resource mobilization (RM) theory has long discovered the significance of money for protests; yet can this insight be applied to nowadays’ decentralized movements, characterized by the absence of organizational leadership and more creative and spontaneous participation from below? While the RM perspective is anchored in a political economy of organizational fundraising, it is time to bring in Viviana Zelizer’s economic sociology to understand how participants utilize the role of donors, consumers, savers, and investors for the movement purpose. Focusing on Hong Kong’s prodemocracy movement, this article theorizes the full panoply of ‘monetary mobilization’ to revise RM’s narrow conception. By offering a safer and anonymous channel of expression, monetary mobilization emerges as a substitute for in-person participation for risk-averse citizens with financial means. Money is always loaded with symbolic meanings and ethical considerations so that it also functions as a vehicle of the moral outrage and utopian aspirations. Participants are keen to establish a proper relationship between sponsors and beneficiaries by exercising diligent oversight to prevent its corruption. Contrary to the instrumentalist conception, money is per se not a fully fungible and all-purpose resource.

Thailand’s 2020–2021 Pro-Democracy Protests: Diversity, Conflict, and Solidarity

Beyond its popular characterisation as an “anti-monarchy youth movement,” Thailand’s 2020–2021 pro-democracy movement brought together a diverse range of agendas, including feminism, poverty, and education reform along with shared political demands. This article explores these different agendas, their relationship to the protests, and their implications for the collective identity of democracy protestors. Drawing from 17 in-depth interviews with protestors, it was found that the protests were not only a platform to express political positions but also for pedagogical socialisation, where protestors learned about different social issues and the struggles of other protestors. These processes led them to understand authoritarianism and democracy with a structural lens, where in addition to authoritarian government and the monarchy, the protestors aim to uproot various institutions exercising practices or cultures resembling that of the authoritarian regime. Their understanding of democracy was similarly expansive, going beyond parliamentary politics to accommodate issues within their daily lived experience. The protestors retained a sense of solidarity by conceiving of democracy as necessarily entailing a diversity of views and subsequently disagreements and conflicts. The protestors’ structural approach means the 2020–2021 protests were unique and a novel development from previous protests in Thailand.

What will the Russian Diaspora Do When "Dvizhukha" Starts at Home?

This 2021 paper discusses the prehistory and some elements of political culture of the new Russian emigration which has been growing since the return of Putin as Russia’s president. Following a sociological study, I argue that a qualitative change occurred between 2012 and 2018 in the moods and action predispositions of the new émigrés which can contribute to a strong anti-authoritarian political culture of a significant part of the diaspora. Small recent additions deal with the Seventh Wave of emigration caused by Putin’s war in Ukraine, and the possibilities of structuration and further mobilization of the cross-border Russian prodemocracy movement.

Political Resistance in the Marketplace: Consumer Activism in the Milk Tea Alliance

Hong Kong, Thailand, and Myanmar experienced waves of pro-democracy movements from 2019–2021. Similar political trajectories and democratic aspirations bound the three territories together under what some called the Milk Tea Alliance. Alongside street protests, pro-democracy citizens in the three territories engaged in politics-driven consumption. The economic strategy turned the market into a resistance site and sustained defiance. In Hong Kong and Thailand, boycotts and buycotts co-existed in the movements with the consumer activism of the former more widespread than for the latter. In Myanmar, anti-military regime citizens primarily adopted the boycott tactic. With a similar objective of politics-driven consumerism, what explains the variations in the adoption of boycotts and buycotts in Hong Kong, Thailand, and Myanmar? Based on in-depth interviews and secondary information from the three territories, this comparative study finds that politics-driven consumerism interacts with political environments. In a closed political system, for instance Myanmar, political consumers can only engage in covert resistance. In hybrid regimes, such as Hong Kong and Thailand, political consumers can leverage both boycotts and buycotts as overt resistance, with the level of political consumer engagement varying according to the availability of alternative political avenues.

What it might mean to live as peers of contemporary art

The population of Hong Kong has been significantly affected by outward migration since the mass pro-democracy movement in 2019. To make sense of nostalgia as a prominent sentiment around the phenomenon, I examine the work of artist and curator duo C&G Artpartment among those who had left. While I long for a Hong Kong with C&G being around, I find inspiration in their lexicon to rethink nostalgia. C&G practices a peer activism committed to both local vernacular and global art talk. While nostalgia that is positive or negative is powered by colonizer and dominator narratives, my nostalgia for them, and for what their departure means for contemporary art in Hong Kong, is neither. It instead carries a pedagogical function. Their peer activism stays relevant in the long-run for admitting transition as an essential preparation for change.

‘What have you done to our world?’: The rise of a global generational voice

Based on a comparative analysis of seven youth movements, this article shows the rise of a rhetoric of intergenerational injustice over the past decade, increasingly associated with a direct accusation of older generations and with a generational and global ‘we’. Theoritically, we propose to approach the ‘generational voice’ – rather than the generational ‘presence’ – to shed light on the generational grievances, emotions and identities carried within movements. We draw on the textual analysis of protest slogans (n = 1914) collected directly from: the Indignados (2011), the student movements in Chile and Quebec (2011–2012), the Paris ‘Nuit Debout’ movement (2016), the Hong Kong pro-democracy movements (2014 and 2019), and the Montreal pro-climate march (2019). Using mixed methods, the article shows the existence of four major rhetorics of generational injustice – be it economic, social, political or environmental – associated with an increasingly radical critique of a legacy, deemed too heavy for ‘future generations’.

Our Htamein, Our Flag, Our Victory: The Role of Young Women in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution

Since the early days of the 2021 Spring Revolution, young women have been at the center of many of the protests against Myanmar's military coup. Women in Myanmar are traditionally viewed as mothers, carers, and wives whose roles mostly belong to the domestic sphere. However, the political landscape shift since the 1 February 2021 coup has galvanized young women to the forefront of the pro-democracy movement, finding new and creative ways to demand an end to both the military dictatorship and the patriarchy. This article examines the role of young women within Myanmar's Spring Revolution and how this upends traditional views of women as passive and domestic carers. It draws on postcolonial and intersectional theories that question assumptions of women's uniform (disadvantaged) position and asks how gender intersects with age, race, and class to mediate social status. This article also reflects on some of the broader shifts in gendered and generational roles and identities that have taken place in Myanmar over the last ten years, which provide possibilities for solidarity and positive change in a future federal democratic union.

Amnesty International’s Human Rights Campaigns and Transnational Democracy in South Korea in the 1970s

This article examines the intersection between Amnesty International(AI)’s global human rights expansion policy and South Korea’s pro-democracy movements in the 1970s. It argues that local pro-democracy actors vernacularized and mobilized AI’s concept of and global campaign for prisoners of conscience, thereby transforming their struggle into a transnational movement. In making this argument, the article highlights a multi-directional conflict over the meaning and uses of human rights between local and international actors. Against the backdrop of seeking to establish a local chapter of AI, pro-democracy actors challenged AI’s political neutrality policy by advocating for South Korean political prisoners as well as for prisoners in other countries; they also challenged the distinction that AI drew between political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. Finding the UN unresponsive to their appeals and recognizing the role of US Cold War policy in buttressing Park Chunghee’s authoritative regime, South Korean pro-democracy actors, acting in concert with liberal internationalists in the US Congress, shifted the primary stage for addressing international human rights abuses from the United Nations to the US Congress. This shift placed the spotlight on US foreign policies that facilitated the South Korean government’s human rights abuses, which in turn led both the US and South Korean government to devise counteractive human rights campaigns that drew on humanitarian and anti-communist rhetoric to preserve the status quo.

The practice of social movement unionism: COVID-19 and the Hong Kong medical workers’ strike

In this Theory into Practice article we discuss the collective agency of Hong Kong medical workers in COVID-19 in the context of social movement unionism (SMU). In particular, the article utilises Dhatt’s framework defining factors influencing health social movements (2019). We focus on the way the pro-democracy movement underpinned and shaped the five-day strike by 7000 healthcare workers that forced the government to close the Hong Kong–China border in February 2020. We argue that the strike was made possible by the political opportunities linked to collective fear arising from the SARS epidemic in 2003 and to revitalised civil society resulting from the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in 2019. It illustrates that framing strategies and organisational capacity capitalised on the discursive power and solidarity linked to these political opportunities. However, the failure to achieve demands related to resource redistribution, occupational safety and union rights reflect professionals’ dilemma on fulfilling their duty of care and the limitations of SMU in Hong Kong.

Digital activism and citizenship: a case study of “yellow” food influencers and political consumerism in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT Political consumerism is widely assumed to have a positive relationship with civic and political engagement, and much scholarly work has argued that marketplace-based politics align neatly with contemporary norms of engaged citizenship. Current studies of Hong Kong have discussed the rise of the “yellow” (pro-democratic) economy in connection with the 2019 pro-democracy movement, arguing that political consumerism is a new form of political participation. However, few studies have examined how food influencers on social media have mediated political messages and shaped the meanings of political consumerism in an increasingly authoritarian society. Drawing on original data collected from interviews with yellow food influencers, content analysis of their Instagram posts, and a survey of educated young consumers, this study seeks to understand the interactions between food influencers and consumers in the post-movement era, as facilitated by social media platforms. This study shows that the meaning of buying from yellow food shops has changed from expressing support for pro-democratic political parties to conserving unauthorized collective memories of protest as expressions of a new Hongkonger identity. Such practices maintain democratic values in a political context where conventional forms of democratic engagement are no longer possible. (191)

Reconsidering social movement impact on democracy: the case of Spain’s 15-M movement

ABSTRACT Social movement impact on democracy has primarily been treated in two ways in the literature: the role of social movements in promoting democratization in the form of regime change; and a more recent literature on the ways social movements initiate democratic innovation in governing institutions and norm diffusion in already existing democracy. In this article, we argue that to fully understand social movement impact on democracy, we need to look beyond these two main approaches, as important as they are. Using the emblematic case of Spain’s 15-M pro-democracy movement to illustrate our conceptual proposal, we draw on existing literature to argue that social movements can impact democracy in several key arenas currently not sufficiently considered in the literature. We provide examples of democratic impact emerging from the experimentation around the central problematic of ‘real democracy’ in the ‘occupied squares’ to highlight several ways social movements’ democratic impact might be explored. We develop the concepts of hybridity and democratic laboratory to analyze these impacts and discuss their relation to contemporary theorizing about democracy and movement outcomes. We argue that adopting this broader approach to the democratic impact of social movements leads to a more nuanced understanding of movement outcomes and ‘success’.

Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

1985년 제12대 국회의원 선거 연구

This article explores the causes of the unexpected rise of the New Korea Democratic Party (NKDP). In the 1985 National Assembly election, a new party, NKDP emerged as the main opposition party, which led to the collapse of the party system manufactured by the authoritarian regime. We argue that the election results primarily aimed at restructuring the ‘opposition bloc’. The election results were less related with public outcry against the Chun Doo-hwan regime or as a punishment for the ruling Democratic Justice Party. However, the election provided a critical opportunity for the regime-challenging NKDP to unite with young people who were the vanguard of political resistance to the authoritarian regime. In that sense, the 1985 election gave an important momentum for the pro-democracy movement later. In addition, social and economic changes such as urbanization, the rise of young voters in the demographic structure, and the mass production of ‘highly educated voters’ were also important factors for the rise of the NKDP in the 1985 election.

Editorial: Pro-democracy movements in a comparative perspective

Editorial: Pro-democracy movements in a comparative perspective

Paying for Online News as Political Consumption in Hong Kong

This article examines the relationship between political partisanship and willingness to pay for online news. Given the prominence of partisan media in the high-choice digital media environment, paying for online news can take on the characteristics of political consumption – that is, acts of consumption driven by political and moral values – and be linked to partisanship and partisan media trust. Depending on the political context, supporters of one side of a political divide may be particularly likely to develop a general concern with the news media’s financial situation and a willingness to support online news media financially. Empirically, an analysis of survey data from Hong Kong shows that in the aftermath of the vast pro-democracy movement in 2019–2020, political partisanship and partisan media trust were related to willingness to pay for online news positively and both directly and indirectly through concern with the media’s financial situation. The general implications of these findings are discussed.

Mobilizing During the Covid-19 Pandemic: From Democratic Innovation to the Political Weaponization of Disinformation

Political scholars express concern for the continued resilience of democracy in the face of multiple crises. In times of crisis, social movements articulate grievances and make demands of political leaders and policymakers. In contrast to the wave of pro-democracy movements following the 2008 global financial crash where protesters demanded accountability from elites, mobilization during the COVID-19 pandemic has defied expectations in several key ways. First, the expectation for protesters to mobilize primarily online in the face of the restrictions and risk associated with large gatherings has not been upheld. Instead, we have witnessed widespread “offline” mass protests. Second, despite high mortality rates and significant disparities in the effectiveness of national public health responses, we have not witnessed widespread mobilizations demanding governments do better to protect citizens from the virus. Instead, we have seen two radically different responses: At one extreme, veterans of “pro-democracy” movements have “pivoted,” using their skills and experience to either make up for weak government responses to COVID-19 (Hong Kong) or to reinforce government efforts to contain it (Taiwan). At the other extreme, “antidemocratic” and predominantly far right-wing movements have mobilized against public health measures, circulating COVID negationist and conspiracy messages. Indeed, the political weaponization of disinformation has been a notable feature of pandemic mobilization. I analyze these contrasting trends, highlighting the challenges they pose for the effective handling of the pandemic, and their broader implications for democratic legitimacy and resilience. In so doing, I call attention to the ways that mobilization during the pandemic challenges scholars to revisit some of our assumptions about the dynamics of social movements in times of crisis, and how they can foster or erode democracy. The analysis also suggests that scholars analyzing the impact of information disorders on democracy need to pay careful attention to offline protest as well as online transmission.