Protest Groups Research Articles

Reality bites: An analysis of corona deniers in Germany over time.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in unprecedented government interventions in many people's lives. Opposition to these measures was not only based on policy disagreements but for some founded in an outright denial of basic facts surrounding the pandemic, challenging social cohesion. Conspiracy beliefs have been prolific within various protest groups and require attention, as such attitudes have been shown to be associated with lower rule compliance. Several studies have shown that the characteristics linked to holding COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs are complex and manifold; however, those insights usually rest on cross-sectional studies only. We have less knowledge on whether these cross-sectional correlates also reveal which parts of the population have been newly convinced by conspiracy theories or have dropped their support for them as the pandemic evolved. Using a unique panel data set from Germany, this paper explores a wide range of characteristics and compares the insights gained from cross-sectional associations on the one hand and links to the ways in which people change their views on the other hand. The findings show that cross-sectional analyses miss out on nuanced differences between different groups of temporary and more consistent conspiracy supporters. Specifically, this paper identifies major differences in the profiles of people who have been denying COVID-19 consistently compared to those who changed their minds on the question and those who assessed the reality correctly throughout. In doing so, socio-political and perception-based dimensions are differentiated and distinctions between respondents from East and West Germany explored.

Going local, heading nowhere: the 1974–79 Labour Government’s attempt to introduce comprehensive schooling in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT This article examines the 1974–79 Labour Government’s attempt to introduce comprehensive education in Northern Ireland. The policy found support in, and drew criticism from, different elements within both Protestant and Catholic groups which, although transcending the usual community divide, hardly made the Government’s task any easier. In fact, it carried the risk of antagonising elements from both sides. Claims that the Labour Government acted with ‘fiery zeal’ over the introduction of comprehensive education, in contrast with its efforts on integrated schooling, are misplaced. Proceeding cautiously, but initially with the intention of introducing legislation before the next general election, Labour never even reached the stage of issuing a White Paper. Its caution developed into near stasis, as its policy of local consultation superseded the need to act within the electoral cycle. The guiding principle soon became ‘local planning, for local people, for local circumstances’. Consequently, despite its genuine commitment to the policy of comprehensivisation, Labour’s only achievement in office would be its promise to replace the 11-plus examination, something which remained a mere pledge.

Threat or Godsend? Evangelicals and Democracy in Latin America.

While Protestant and Evangelical groups started as small minorities in Latin America, they have recently experienced explosive growth and now make up a large proportion of the region's religious faithful. This unexpected shift led to a spate of scholarship speculating as to how the new Evangelical communities would impact society. Given the perennial concern over the health of democracy in Latin America, much of this work focused on how Evangelicals might differ from Catholics in terms of support for democratic values and civic participation. Some predicted that Evangelicals would be eager supporters of democracy and an active, positive force in the community. Others warned that Evangelicals were too focused on spiritual matters, which would lead to apathy and a passive acceptance of authoritarianism. This paper uses recent survey data from sixteen nations in Latin America to test these theories with the goal of answering the question: are Evangelicals a threat or godsend for democracy in Latin America?

Path to opposition: the motives of the student protest in Leningrad in the 1920-ies

Students have traditionally been a breeding ground for political protest. This tradition was formed back in the pre-revolutionary period, when students of universities and institutes were active participants in both the work of political parties of various persuasions and the all-university struggle for expanding the autonomy of higher education. In the first period after the revolution, the students continued to be one of the most active protest groups, which was most clearly manifested during the intra-party struggle of the 1920-ies. Continuing the theme of the student movement in the early USSR, which we touched upon in previous publications, in this article we turned to the problem of motivating opposition university students. To do this, we used materials from the Control Commissions of the CPSU (b) and personal party files, which make it possible to compensate for the small number of sources of personal origin related to the history of the Left Opposition. Despite the great growth of interest in the topic of the anti-Stalinist alternative in the CPSU(b), this valuable range of sources was not included in the existing studies. The article provides a grouping of the main motives and reasons for involvement in opposition work, as well as an assessment of how they coincided with the content of program documents prepared by the leaders of the movement. Among the main reasons that we have identified are: disagreements with the Central Committee on the peasant and Chinese issues, suppression of inner-party democracy, the search for thrills, the protection of the authority of the Bolshevik leaders (G.E. Zinoviev, L.D. Trotsky), etc. We will also describe the path of involvement of students in the opposition struggle, and the role of informal and family ties in this process will be determined as well

Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Comparing Abrahamic Monotheistic Religions.

The impact of culture and religion on sexual and reproductive health and behavior has been a developing area of study in contemporary time. Therefore, it is crucial for people using reproductive procedures to understand the religious and theological perspectives on issues relating to reproductive health. This paper compares different perspectives of three Abrahamic faiths, i.e., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on ARTs. Procreation, family formation, and childbirth within the context of marriage have all been advocated by these three major religions of the world. Judaism permits the use of all assisted reproductive technologies when the oocyte and sperm come from the husband and wife, respectively. The different denominations of Christianity have diverse views on reproductive practices. Although the Vatican does not approve of assisted reproduction, Protestant, Anglican, and other religious groups are free to use it. ARTs are acceptable in Sunni Islam, although they can only be carried out if the couples are married. Shia Islam, however, permits third-party donations to married couples under specific restrictions. This comparison reveals that while the three major world religions utilize assisted reproduction in distinct ways, there are also many comparable aspects of each religion.

Iconic 21st Century Activist "T-Shirt and Tote-Bag" Combination Is Hard to Miss These Days!

Iconic 21st Century Activist "T-Shirt and Tote-Bag" Combination Is Hard to Miss These Days!

Covid-19 Protesters and the Far Right on Telegram: Co-Conspirators or Accidental Bedfellows?

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the creation of a new protest movement, positioned against government lockdowns, mandatory vaccines, and related measures. Efforts to control misinformation by digital platforms resulted in take downs of key accounts and posts. This led some of these protest groups to migrate to platforms with less stringent content moderation policies, such as Telegram. Telegram has also been one of the destinations of the far right, whose deplatforming from mainstream platforms began a few years ago. Given the co-existence of these two movements on Telegram, the article examines their connections. Empirically, the article focused on Irish Telegram groups and channels, identifying relevant protest movements and collecting their posts. Using computational social science methods, we examine whether far-right terms and discourses are present and how this varies across different clusters of Telegram Covid-19 protest groups. In addition, we examine which actors are posting far-right content and what kind of roles they play in the network of Telegram groups. The findings indicate the presence of far-right discourses among the COVID-19 groups. However, the existence of these groups was not solely driven by the extreme right, and the incidence of far-right discourses was not equal across all COVID-19 protest groups. We interpret these findings under the prism of the mediation opportunity structure: while the far right appears to have taken advantage of the network opportunity structure afforded by deplatforming and the migration to Telegram, it did not succeed in diffusing its ideas widely among the COVID-19 protest groups in the Irish Telegram.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Negotiated Management as a Tool to Achieve Social Control over Political Protest and Social Movement Organizations

Social movement scholars describe negotiated management as a process of collaboration between those in power and those in resistance. For this research, content analysis and critical discourse analysis are used to evaluate questionnaire responses from law enforcement agencies in communities where competing grassroots political organizations engaged in political protest. Findings indicate that law enforcement exercise different levels of social control toward those least likely to engage in, or submit to, a negotiated management model of policing. I argue that responses toward organizations, as reported in questionnaire responses, demonstrates a structural permanence of social control. Negotiated management between the state and competing grassroots political organizations is a tool used to achieve informal control. Organizations that fail – or choose not – to engage in informal social control of their members risk escalated force by police agencies that seek compliance. Results of this research increase understanding of law enforcement responses to political protest groups.

НЕКОТОРЫЕ СОЦИАЛЬНЫЕ И РЕЛИГИОЗНЫЕ ИДЕНТИЧНОСТИ ПРОТЕСТАНТОВ-УКРАИНЦЕВ УРАЛЬСКОГО РЕГИОНА

This work is devoted to revealing the ranking of the components of social and religious identities according to the degree of importance among Ukrainians - members of Protestant religious organizations operating in the Southern, Middle and Polar Urals. Ukrainians are the largest group of Protestants in the studied regions, having a "foreign" origin. The materials are presented in comparison with data on the general sample of believers. It was found that the systems of identities in the representatives of both control groups are similar; the most important are religious and family identities, the last place in terms of importance is occupied by ethnic identity. At the same time, the results of the research showed that for Ukrainian respondents, religious and family identities are of greater importance, while civil and ethnic identities are of less importance, compared to respondents from the general sample. The greater commitment of Ukrainians to biblical values may be due to the fact that evangelical Christianity historically has more rooted traditions in Ukraine than in Russia; believers who were born and lived for some time on the territory of Ukraine realize evangelical paradigms more fully in their lives.

The finch in the coal mine: Interrogating the environmental politics of extinction narratives

AbstractThe black‐throated finch is an endangered species whose highest quality remaining habitat directly overlaps with the site of the controversial Adani Carmichael coal mine in Central Queensland, Australia. The image of this finch has been widely used by anti‐Adani protest groups as a powerful symbol for the destructive nature of greenfield coal mining. Drawing on extinction studies literature, we problematise the use of the black‐throated finch as a symbol of imminent extinction, highlighting how activists have constructed a fixed finch on‐the‐brink ontology that narrows possible futures for the species. We identify how the finch has been strategically deployed as an affective tool for engaging publics while the anti‐Adani campaign has been primarily driven by concerns around climate change futures. We use primary sources of anti‐Adani ephemera as well as interviews with key scientists, activists, and image‐makers involved in the debate about the Carmichael coal mine. We argue that critical evaluation of the effects and potential consequences of simplified environmental activist narratives and the instrumentalisation of nonhumans is needed to support and enable activism that centres care and responsibility within multispecies entanglements. Engagement with the complexities of environmental intervention in relation to the finch, and not exclusively the mine, is also necessary to locate openings through which more‐than‐human futures can be creatively imagined and enacted.

From Robert Keayne to Angola, Richard, and Grace: Bernard Bailyn and New England's Place in an Atlantic World

From Robert Keayne to Angola, Richard, and Grace: Bernard Bailyn and New England's Place in an Atlantic World

«Плакатная война» как актуальное явление протестной коммуникации в Германии

The article presents the results of studying of poster vandalism practices as an actual format of protest communication in Germany in the recent decade. This format has not become an independent object of study In Russian linguistics. A review of works on this issue by European linguists is presented. In view of the social significance of the phenomenon of protest and the need to characterize its new genre varieties, against the backdrop of a shortage of works devoted to poster vandalism as a new creative form of dialogue between authorities and citizens, and the growing interest of linguists in visual texts, this study is relevant and topical. The study is aimed at determining the current trends in the poster war in today's Germany, clarifying the classification of types of poster vandalism according to the semiotic resources used, the type of modification of the initial poster, the degree of dialogue of the initial, reactive posters and the surrounding space. This determines the scientific novelty of the study. The material of the study was a sample from the German-speaking segment of the Internet, publications about the activities of creative protest groups, a satirical political party in Germany. Semiotic and contextual analysis, methods of systematization and classification are used. The results show that the new trends are associated primarily with the desire of the subjects of the poster war to legalize it. Two groups of poster war practices are singled out and characterized: the practice of various material distortion of the initial poster itself and the practice of recontextualization, resemiotization of the initial poster without material distortion of its components. The frequency and dialogic nature of the studied communicative practices, the role of the surrounding space in creating the context of reinterpretation are characterized.

Policies for Responding to Protest Movements as a Basis for Preventing Demonstration-Protest Crimes

An effective policy of the states reaction to protest movements should form the basis for the prevention of demonstration-protest crimes. Such policy is a specific area of preventing protest movements that 1) follows protests, but is not limited to the use of punitive legal measures; 2) minimizes protests, but does not influence the causes and conditions of protests; 3) is aimed at maximizing the cost of participating in the protest movement and making the state reaction to the protest maximally effective without resorting to the classical and economically costly measures of criminological and criminal law prevention. The reaction of the state to the protest is determined based on the character of demands put forward by the protesters and the strength of the protest movement. It can be described as one of the following: 1) repressions as a reaction to the actions of a weak protest group that puts forward strong demands; 2) a concession as a reaction to the actions of a strong group that puts forward weak demands; 3) ignoring the actions of a group with weak demands that does not have a collective force; 4) wearing out the protest movement as a reaction to the strong demands of a strong protest group. The last scenario, as the most demanded one, is based on the formal respect for the right to protest, but at the same time it effectively reduces its scope. It is comprised of three components: 1) maintaining the unity of power elites and demonstrating the unity of the elites and the society; 2) organization of counter-movements whose demands are in direct contrast to those put forward by the protesters; 3) using the force of court decisions on civil law suits of private persons for the compensation of losses and damages resulting from the protest actions.

From Systemic Underdevelopment to Basic Urban Maintenance: National Priority Projects in the Russian Periphery

The case of urban development in the Russian periphery is often overlooked in the scholarly efforts to theorize the center-periphery dynamics characteristic of the post-socialist contexts, not least in the case of Russia. Consequently, the analysis of urban development initiatives in the regions and provinces defies the logic of large-scale urban projects with characteristic subdominant relations between the state and the private sector, since the latter and the former are tied in competition for limited federal resources. We delve into the particularities of the center-periphery dynamics through the case of the Vologda River embankment renovation project, paying particular attention to the decision-making processes, lack of transparency, and bureaucratic hustle in response to the civil protest—all characteristic of a distinctive, though common across Russia’s peripheral towns, dilemma of systemic underdevelopment vs basic urban maintenance. We rely on discourse analysis of legal and regulatory documents, project plans, meetings proceedings and official correspondence between departmental agencies, and media posts created by the local protest groups during the period of 2018–2019. Through this analysis, we showcase not only the asymmetries of power relations in the postsocialist periphery, but also bureaucratic constraints and uncertainties that often amount to a standstill situation with uncertain prospects for future improvement.

The politicisation of secular mindfulness – Extinction Rebellion’s emotive protest practices

ABSTRACT The environmental movement Extinction Rebellion (XR) not only uses civil disobedience for its radical protests against climate change, but it also employs narratives and practices of mindfulness. Internal guidelines include numerous standardised and mindfulness-based emotional precepts and techniques that promote the well-being of individuals for the purpose of sustainable coexistence. While sociological critiques of mindfulness have primarily condemned its tendency to depoliticise, privatise, and heighten individual responsibility, XR’s novel politicised reception raises numerous questions. Using a qualitative analysis of public documents and the regulations of the movement, this article examines the extent to which mindfulness, which has been criticised for its individualist disposition, can be deployed in a political context. This analysis sheds light on the often conflicting consequences for XR and mindfulness itself. Building on this, the article then explores how institutionalised emotion programmes can work in a decentralised movement to establish order.

Протестные группы в социальной сети «ВКонтакте»: кластеризация пользователей и их типологические особенности

This article analyzes the protest groups on the VKontakte.Using the VKontakte API, we collected an open data of 608.2 thousand user profilesin September 2021.Various data were collected such as gender, age, place of residence, network activity, number of subscribers, political views and value orientations. There were several stages of the study. First, we selected communities relevant to the subject of our research. At the second stage, we collected information from the profiles of members of these communities (563.6 thousand unique profiles). At the third stage, we identified three main clusters based on the engagement of people in protest communities. At the fourth stage, we described a portrait of users of protest communities for each of the three clusters. At the fifth stage, using the logistic regression method, we checked how various variables affect belonging to the third, most «strong» cluster. Based on the results of the analysis, we concluded that users who are members of several protest groups at the same time are exposed to greater information pressure, which increases their chances of moving on to real protest actions.Moreover, such users are more likely than others to launch mechanisms of «social infection» with protest ideas themselves, since they themselves are active commentators and have higher than average values in terms of the number of subscribers compared to users in other clusters. Acknowledgements. The reported study was funded by RFBR and EISR according to the research project № 21-011-32247 «Russian online protest communities: characteristics and features».

La imagen fotográfica de los metodistas en México (1890-1910)

The purpose of this article is to review and expose the use of a series of photographs related to the beginnings of Methodism in Mexico in the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, under two topics. On the one hand, the photography published in the press of this Protestant group, from the invention of the halftone, in the pages of periodicals and, on the other hand, the meaning of the photographic object as a record of the activities of the Methodist mission. Far from being a simple ornament, this paper attempts to use the photographic record as a document for historical analysis.

PROTEST MOOD OF RESIDENTS OF CITIES OF THE NWFD IN THE CONDITIONS OF THE CRISIS

This study presents a comparative analysis of public opinion polls of residents of several municipalities of the North-Western Federal District, namely the cities of Petrozavodsk, Kaliningrad, Murmansk, Vologda, Cherepovets. The current level of protest potential of residents of these territories in the context of crisis processes related to the COVID-19 pandemic was analyzed. Groups of persons distinguished by a certain emotional mood and allowing their participation in protests were identified. Factors of formation of potential protest activity of urban residents have been determined. The results of the study showed that in the context of crisis processes against the background of a pandemic and growing social discontent, the protest potential of residents of municipalities ranges from 24 to 42%, which exceeds the average Russian indicators (18-20%). The continued proximity of assessments of the economic situation, material situation, political sentiment of representatives of the protest group and "other" residents of cities indicates the existence of potential prerequisites for maintaining protest sentiment, as well as poses a risk of increasing social tension in the event of a deterioration of the socio-economic situation.

Soviet music heritage as a discursive middle ground in Belarusian political conflict

ABSTRACT Recent protests against the dictatorship in Belarus and the subsequent political conflict simultaneously polarised the Belarusian nation and unified various groups of protesters with the help of new national imagery. These opposing but connected processes instrumentalise the Belarusian Soviet past. Heritage as a way of past-in-present existence becomes a tool in this struggle. In this paper, I focus on the music band ‘Pesniary’ that represents the Soviet music heritage in Belarus. The manifoldness of Pesniary creativity and the peculiarities of the band’s cultural origins allows different agents to articulate its meaning as Soviet and national heritage at the same time. Using the critical heritage studies approach to heritage as a constantly antagonistic process of meaning-making of the past, I explain how popular music heritage functions in the field of political dissent as a means of assimilation of contested past.