Protest Events Research Articles

Repression, backlash, and the duration of protests in Africa

This article investigates the relationship between recent repression of protest and the duration of future protests. A rich scholarship examines how repression impacts dissent, highlighting dissent dimensions such as the number of future events and violent escalation. Less examined is another dimension of dissent – protest duration. We hypothesize that recent repression of protests is pivotal for longer duration of future protest events. Our expectation stems from a participant type mechanism. Recent repression of protest may generate more societal grievances but also increase protesting risks. A simultaneous jump in grievances and risks may increase the number of people protesting who are also risk-acceptant and willing to protest for longer durations. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project data and hierarchal negative binomial models are used to estimate the association between recent repression of protest and subsequent protest duration. Compared to having none of the most recent three protests repressed, a protest in a location where the last three protests were repressed has a substantively longer duration. The results are consistent with the participant type mechanism and existing literature on repression’s heterogeneous effects on individuals.

“We are shepherds, but not sheep”: farmer protest and rural identity in Bulgaria

ABSTRACT Rural society in Bulgaria has seen considerable upheaval over the past century, moving from a position of political significance, rural actors were subsequently subordinated under the communist regime (1946–1989). The post-socialist period saw further turmoil as land restitution, privatisation, and depopulation reshaped rural communities, leading to increased marginalisation. Facing uncertain futures, rural producers have engaged in a range of actions to challenge and resist threats to their material interests and rural way of life. This article draws on a dataset of protest events in the media by rural producers over the 2000–2019 period to understand how and why they protested. In doing so, it considers how the claims presented can be seen to reflect efforts to protect rural communities in a time of change. The findings suggest that material interests serve as the key mobilising force, but that these rest on a sense of collective identity around the importance of rural society to support their claims.

CATALOGING PROTEST: NEWSPAPERS, NEXIS UNI, OR TWITTER?*

What is the best source for tracking protest activity? Newspaper sources remain dominant, but other options are tempting. This article compares three differently sourced catalogs of protest events in Toronto from July 15 to September 15, 2020. The widely discussed Movement for Black Lives and housing justice cycles of protest are visible in all three catalogs, but apart from this, the field of protest they reveal is very different. While the coverage by the newspaper with the largest circulation, the Toronto Star, shows Toronto protest as state-centered, domestic, and progressive, other catalogs that include television, radio, and social media content reveal a more diverse, fragmented, and globalized protest field. Catalogs sourced from Nexis Uni and Twitter show the significant presence of diasporic protest. These observations suggest new limits to relying on mainstream newspapers for representing the full array of protest activity. We recommend that, moving forward, researchers experiment with media aggregators to incorporate sources such as television coverage and social media into their research while remaining aware of the additional challenges such data generate.

Character and social organisation of community protests in South Africa

ABSTRACT This paper examines the character and social organisation of community protests in South Africa. South Africa’s protests have been critiqued for their supposedly sporadic and unorganised nature befitting of the descriptor, ‘popcorn protests’. Based on the findings of this study, the researcher argues that although these protests are short-lived the movements behind them are not. A closer examination of the processes that activists follow before and after the protest event reveals the social organisation of these protests. The paper explains how and why the deep organising structures harbor participatory potential, albeit with their ineffectiveness so far. The researcher triangulated data from in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and literature.

Selection and Description Bias in Protest Reporting by Government and News Media on Weibo

AbstractExtensive research in Western societies has demonstrated that media reports of protests have succumbed to selection and description biases, but such tendencies have not yet been tested in the Chinese context. This article investigates the Chinese government and news media's selection and description bias in domestic protest events reporting. Using a large protest event data set from Weibo (CASM-China), we found that government accounts on Weibo covered only 0.4 per cent of protests while news media accounts covered 6.3 per cent of them. In selecting events for coverage, the news media accounts tacitly struck a balance between newsworthiness and political sensitivity; this led them to gravitate towards protests by underprivileged social groups and shy away from protests targeting the government. Government accounts on Weibo, on the other hand, eschewed reporting on violent protests and those organized by the urban middle class and veterans. In reporting selected protest events, both government and news media accounts tended to depoliticize protest events and to frame them in a more positive tone. This description bias was more pronounced for the government than the news media accounts. The government coverage of protest events also had a more thematic (as opposed to episodic) orientation than the news media.

Contentious Institutionalization of Protests under Democracy: The Evidence from Taiwan, 1986–2016

AbstractWhile many scholarly works are concerned with how social protests promote democratization, this article addresses the causally reverse question: how democratization shapes the landscape of street protests. We use a unique database of 31 years of protest events in Taiwan, a smooth and successful case of authoritarianism-to-democracy transition, to engage in a dialogue with political transition theory, the institutionalization thesis and networked movement theory. The logistic regression analysis indicates that protest violence persists under consolidated democracy, but it is marginalized. We find an indirect effect from the growth of social movement organizations that foster the adaptation of festive and performative tactics, which are less confrontational in nature. Politicians' involvement, however, remains a constant source of disruptiveness. Our conclusion of contentious institutionalization finds that late-democratizing countries also gravitate towards becoming a ‘social movement society’ as advanced democracies do, but in a highly compressed period of time.

Clashes and crowds: protests, riots, and other mass gathering events in North America 2021–2022

ObjectiveThis study aimed to provide an overview of the scope and challenges of historic events and help better prepare emergency healthcare services for future similar mass gathering events. Study designThis was a retrospective descriptive analysis of protest and conflict events in North America from 2021 to 2022. IntroductionRecent protests, riots, and other conflict events in North America have highlighted the increasing challenges hospital-based and prehospital healthcare providers face. This study provides a retrospective descriptive analysis of protest and conflict events in North America from 2021 to 2022, which may aid emergency healthcare services in understanding the scope and challenges of historic events and help better prepare for future similar mass gathering events. MethodsData collection was performed using a retrospective database search through the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) database. The ACLED database was searched using the internal database search functions for recorded events that occurred in North America from January 1, 2021 to December 31, 2022. Date, event type, event subtype, the country of incident, and fatality numbers were extracted. The results were exported into an Excel spreadsheet and analyzed independently by L.C., H.S., and R.H. ResultsThere were a total of 52,529 recorded events of political conflict in North America, with 30,269 events in 2021 and 29,260 in 2022. Political conflict events included protests (40,934, 68.8%), violence against civilians (11,532, 19.4%), strategic developments (2,819, 4.7%), battles (2,293, 3.9%), riots (1,909, 3.2%), and remote violence (42, 0.1%). Violence against civilians caused the highest fatalities (13,466, 82.6%), followed by battles (2,662, 16.3%), riots (111, 0.7%), strategic developments, remote violence, and protests (57, 6, and 3 respectively). ConclusionMexico and the United States accounted for most of the political conflicts in North America across 2021 and 2022. In Mexico, protests and violence against civilians were the most common types of conflict, with the latter accounting for the comparatively high fatality compared with the other countries. Battles in Mexico between cartels were the most deadly political conflicts recorded in North America.

Protest Event Analysis: A New Method Based on Twitter’s User Behaviors

Protest Event Analysis is important for government officials and social scientists. Here we present a new method for predicting protest events and identifying indicators of protests and violence by monitoring the content generated on Twitter. By identifying these indicators, protests and the possibility of violence can be predicted and controlled more accurately. Twitter user behaviors such as opinion share and event log share are used as indicators and this study presents a new method based on a Bayesian logistic regression algorithm for predicting protests and violence using Twitter user behaviors. According to the proposed method, users’ event log share behaviors which include the rate of tweets containing date and time information is the reliable indicator for identifying protests. Users’ opinion share behaviors which include hate-anger tweet rates is also best for identifying violence in protests. A dataset which consists of tweets that are generated on protests in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement after the death of George Floyd is used in the evaluation of the proposed method. According to information published on acleddata.com, protests and violence have been reported in various cities on specific dates. The dataset contains 1414 protest events and 3078 non-protest events from 460 cities in 37 U.S. states. Protest events in the BLM movement between May 28 and June 30 among which 285 were violent and 1129 were peaceful. Our proposed method is tested on this dataset and the occurrence of protests is predicted with 85% precision. It is also possible to predict violence in protests with 85% precision with our method on this dataset. This study provides a successful method to predict small and large-scale protests, different from the existing literature focusing on large-scale protests.

The Symbolic Management of Protest: Conceptualization, Typology, and Patterns in Mexican Protest

AbstractMany protests are met with symbolic responses instead of, or in addition to, concrete actions, yet concessions and repression receive more scholarly attention than any other protest outcome. This article develops a typology of symbolic protest management, the performative or rhetorical responses that are not only directed at a protesting group, but also are intended to influence the public’s understanding of protest events. The typology is structured around two questions: Does the state response treat protests or protesters as legitimate? And does the state respond in a way that signals a resolution of the conflict? Then, using original data on protest in Mexico, the article explores patterns of symbolic response to protest in Mexico.

Sleep pattern of Hong Kong residents during the 2019 anti-extradition bill controversy

This study examined the sleep pattern of Hong Kong residents during the anti-extradition bill controversy from June to December of 2019. We used crowdsourced sleep data of 5,442,005 sleep records from 76,600 users (15,693 records from 274 users who were Hong Kong residents at the time of the study, mean age 33.3, SD 9.6). A total of 123 participants (44.9%) provided at least 30 days of data. We compared these sleep parameters in Year 2019 to their expected values. The expected value of these variables was computed using linear regression, controlling for time zone, the month of the record, and the day of the record (S/M/T/W/T/F/S). At the nights of major protest events, habitual sleep duration of the participants was reduced by 8 to 23 min and delayed their sleep onset by at most 34 min. Date-specific analysis (12th June, 21st July, 31st August, 1st October, 12th November, 23rd November, and 24th November) revealed Hong Kong residents changed their sleep pattern according to the timeline of the protests.

Moral power of youth activists – Transforming international climate Politics?

Youth Climate Activists are important norm entrepreneurs as humanity is increasingly awakening to the realities of accelerating climate change. They push for seeing climate change not merely through cost-benefit analysis frames but through frames of multiple climate justices. But how successful have these activists been in shifting perspectives in the context of international climate politics? This paper aims to investigate (1) to what extent the normative framework advanced by this movement is increasingly penetrating the international public climate debate, changing arguments, priorities, and frames around the annual UNFCCC COP conferences and (2) the key actors pushing for normative change. Using a unique and comprehensive Twitter dataset for the period between 2014 and 2021 revolving around the annual UNFCCC COP conferences and major youth climate protest events we combine various computational methods, including transformers-based topic modelling and social network analysis in this study. We find that indeed the normative framework advanced by the movement has successfully penetrated the discourse around UNFCCC and that youth climate activists were able gain support from central actors outside the movement, which is further contributing to the diffusion of their normative framework. We conclude that while these results demonstrate the moral power of youth climate activists, more research is needed to understand the influence on the actual negotiations outcomes

Movement versus Party: The Electoral Effects of Anti-Far Right Protests in Greece

The way social protest affects electoral outcomes remains a lacuna. This article helps fill this gap by examining how social protest against far right actors affects their electoral standing. The article utilizes a unique dataset of 4,745 local protest events to investigate how mobilization against the far right in Greece affected its electoral performance. The article finds that protest activity depressed the electoral results of the far right Golden Dawn by as much as 16%, after controlling for a number of important variables. The article identifies and specifies the patterns through which protests against the far right affect its electoral standing. Protests are effective when following the “tango” pattern—when there is close interaction of far right and anti-far right events. The timing of protest is also important and the article shows how the synchronization of protest and electoral cycles affects electoral outcomes. The article uses the findings to discuss the varying impact of protest across electoral cycles.

Symbolic Politics as a Tool in Social Protest

The article analyses the concept of symbolic politics and its potential for explaining the mechanisms and means of struggle used by social protest movements. A detailed discussion of the protest events that took place in Lithuania between 2021 and 2023 reveals how the symbolic capital of major national holidays and commemorations was exploited by the opposing political forces.Between 2021 and 2023, social discontent was rising in Lithuania and so was the number of mass protests in the country. The latter differed significantly from the previous ones not only in the geography and social composition of the participants (mostly not the residents of Vilnius but those of the province, representatives of the so-called lower social classes), but also in the problems and political demands they identified. The rhetoric used was more typical of the ‘culture wars’, with demands for systemic changes and calls for the resignation of some high-ranking officials or even institutions, such as the government of the Republic of Lithuania. The frequency of these protest events and the number of protesters have also been noticeably rising.The main reasons for the growing dissatisfaction of some citizens were the domestic and foreign policies implemented by the ruling coalition formed by the TS-LKD (Tėvynės sąjunga-Lietuvos krikščionys demokratai, Homeland Union-LithuanianChristian Democrats), the Lithuanian Liberal Movement (Lietuvos liberalų sąjūdis, LLS), the Freedom Party (Laisvės partija, LS) and the government it appointed at the end of 2020, as well as the legislative initiatives reflecting the so-called gender discourse. These protests were suppressed with the help of a negative image of the protesters in the mainstream media and (not always adequate to the situation) by demonstrating the measures taken by the force structures structures to control the civil unrest. However, early in 2022, protesters spontaneously discovered and exploited, sufficiently effectively, unconventional or openly counter-conventional symbolic political tools: they used major national holidays and commemorations and public events organised on those occasions, which became an arena for demonstrating openly their negative attitudes towards the political elite.With this in mind, the aim of this article is to take a closer look at the official commemorations of 13 January, 16 February, and 11 March, the three most important national dates in 2022, and the forms of civic dissatisfaction that were expressedduring them. The category of symbolic politics was used as a theoretical basis for the study and is presented in greater detail in the article. In addition to sources such as public speeches of politicians, broadcasts of these events, TV reports or discussions about them in official and social media, etc., anthropological participatory research was chosen as a significant method of analysis.Taking into account the specifics of the development of post-Soviet countries, the topic of the exploitation of cultural memory, especially related to the era of the national movement Sąjūdis (the time of the restoration of the state) in the accumulation of symbolic capital and in the solution of topical socio-political problems was of particular importance for the analysis of the interaction of symbolic politics and social protest. The mass protests of 2021–2023 illustrate how the Sąjūdis epoch and the political values and programming of Lithuania’s development put forward during that era are still being used to challenge, reject, and create a vision contrary to the currently established political discourse and its order, including the commemorative ritual. The ongoing struggle for the right to control the symbolic legacy of the Sąjūdis and the lack of ‘feedback’ in political communication are fuelling hostility and radicalisation on both sides of the conflict. The struggle for the appropriation of the memory and moral capital of the Sąjūdis (and of the first Republic of Lithuania, from which the Sąjūdis evolved legally and symbolically) has become extremely significant for each of them, because the appropriation of this resource also plays the role of the legitimation of a particular political group. Denying the political opponent the right to this symbolic resource simultaneously denies any legitimacy they may have and at the same time eliminates them symbolically from the field of political competition.

Provoking Civilian Disruption against Popular Protests: The Myanmar Military’s Counter-Mobilisation Strategies

While mass contentious movements face a wide range of state-led counter-mobilisation strategies, existing studies have mainly focused on repression by the security forces and violence contractors. Much less is understood about the impact of governments’ more deceptive strategies to provoke anti-protester hostility among the public, including labelling protesters as criminals and engineering widespread violent crimes. This article examines the effectiveness of these two types of strategy by juxtaposing two similar cases of popular protests under military-ruled Myanmar: the 1988 Four-eight Uprising and 2007 Saffron Revolution. The analysis leverages a novel qualitative dataset consisting of content from state media, authoritative secondary sources, as well as original interviews and written accounts by 109 civilians who witnessed or participated in the protest events. It is found that while anti-protester narratives were ineffective, orchestration of criminal activities targeting civilians on a large scale fuelled civilian distrust toward strangers, leading adult men to disrupt protest events by unfamiliar activists. This finding underscores both the crucial role of nurturing inter-group trust in order to grow a broad-based contentious front as well as the challenging conditions for doing so when a regime is steadfastly committed to crushing dissent.

Marching and voting: The electoral protest cycle

ABSTRACT Social movements studies have analyzed how the protest affects the electoral agenda and the outcome of elections. Here, we reverse this approach and analyze whether the electoral cycle affects the protest. With the aid of a new dataset that contains all the demonstrations and marches in Spain from 2000 to 2020 (N = 2,255), we test whether the size of the protest is influenced by the proximity of general elections. As elections offer social movements a political opportunity to air their grievances and make their demands visible to political contenders and the public, we test an electoral protest cycle hypothesis whereby the number of participants in protest events will increase as election day draws nearer. Our results confirm the existence of an electoral protest cycle, even after controlling for potential confounders such as the type of organizers, the claims of the protest, the ideology of the government, and city size.

State Concessions and Protest Mobilization in Authoritarian Regimes

Autocrats typically respond with coercion when citizens take to the streets demanding political reform. Sometimes, however, they tolerate mass protests and even give in to protesters’ demands. While the effect of coercion on mobilization is well-studied, we know less about the role of concession-making. We argue that accommodating demands is rarely an effective strategy in demobilizing opposition movements. Authoritarian rulers are usually neither willing nor able to fully address protesters’ dynamic demands, nor can they offer credible commitments. We conduct a quantitative analysis using multiple cross-national data sets to empirically assess the relationship between concessions by the government and subsequent mass mobilization. By analyzing protest events in temporal and spatial proximity, we estimate the effect of making concessions on protest mobilization at the subnational level in 18 autocracies from 1991 to 2012. Our results indicate that concessions are associated with a significant and substantive increase in subsequent protest activity.

Black lives matter protests and the 2020 Presidential election

ABSTRACT Can protest influence elections? We examine whether Black Lives Matters (BLM) protest during the summer of 2020 shaped the November presidential election. We hypothesize that BLM demonstrations are associated with increased voting for the Democratic candidate. We examine a secondary hypothesis that more contentious events (with arrests, injury, or violence) are likely to produce a negative impact. We use data collected from news media, official election returns, and survey data combined with demographic and political control measures to test our hypotheses. We find strong evidence that BLM protests were associated an increased likelihood of voting for the Democratic candidate, with this effect concentrated among the less contentious protest events. Our findings bolster and extend the emerging theoretical claims and evidence that protest plays a substantial role in shaping electoral behavior.

Did Black Lives Matter Protests Change Public Opinion?

Protest events affect public opinion on the issue of interest. However, the extent to which an individual’s proximity to protests impacts public opinion is less examined. Does a protest event occurring nearby, i.e., within an individual’s neighborhood, impact their opinion? Do protests that happen further away, perhaps in the next county, have the same impact on public opinion? This study analyzes the impact of exposure to protests by focusing on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2020 using public opinion data from Iowa merged with protest locations in Iowa. Specifically, we examine public support for BLM and for defunding the police. We evaluate the role of distance through a discrete mileage cut-off and a distance decay function. Our analysis shows that people living closer to protests show greater support for the BLM movement in general and, to a less extent, for defunding the police. The results suggest that protests may affect public opinion, but only within a very narrow range of a few miles.

Foreign Direct Investment Hosts and Violent Government Repression of Protests

AbstractThere has been a brewing argument on the effects of economic globalization on the repression of human rights. My argument in this article joins the optimistic perspective on the relationship between the globalizing economy and state repression. I argue that governments consider backlash from investors in their decisions about whether to use repression. Investors, motivated by international human rights norms and a fear of violent conflict, would prefer that governments not introduce brute force into a nonviolent protest. Thus, governments in countries that depend more on foreign direct investment (FDI) should be less likely to use violence against protesters than those that are less dependent on FDI. Using data analysis of protest events and inward FDI stock, I test this argument and find a negative relationship between these two variables.

The dead pig's photo album: Affective visual rituals in collective identity formation

Recent research on visually mediated activism has focused on visual practices as forms of political expression. Conversely, this article will demonstrate that visuality is not only used for protest mobilisation, but that it also plays a significant role in solidifying movement-internal collective identity through a set of distinct visual rituals that produce a shared understanding through affect. Based on an ethnography of everyday visual practices and social experiences of visuality (online and offline) in the Save Movement's ‘Pig Save’ protest events, we identify three forms of affective visual rituals: (1) witnessing; (2) mourning; and (3) semiotic rituals. We argue that these visual rituals are not only expressions of shared values, but construct collective political identity through backstage visual emotion work (affect).