Recent Protest Movements Research Articles

From Wyhl to Wall Street : Occupation and the Many Meanings of "Single Issue" Protest

This article studies the mass protests that took place all around the globe in 2011 in order to reconsider scholars’ conclusions about the nature of protest since the 1970s. It challenges accounts that describe recent protest movements as overly self-referential by focusing on the protest tactic of occupation, perhaps the 2011 protests’ most self-evident commonality. The article shows how the tactic of occupation allows broad coalitions to develop around specific demands, and also the ways that disparate occupation protests are linked together across space, particularly in the imagination of their protagonists. As a result, it shows how occupations can serve as the basis for a new collective politics in an era when mass parties appear to be in decline. Using the 1975 occupation of the nuclear reactor construction site near the West German village of Wyhl as a model, the article looks closely at how occupations develop, the problems their diverse protagonists confront as they seek to work together, and their potential to help activists imagine alternative worlds. This case study reveals the importance of the “infrastructure of re-creation” that protesters build-up on occupied sites for coalition-building, for the broadening of protesters’ demands, and also for the expansion of activists’ sense of the possible. Paradoxically, I argue, it is precisely their fragmented nature that makes occupations so difficult to define, so open to people from different backgrounds, and thus so significant for the social totality.

Digital Narrating for Contentious Politics: Social Media Content Curation at Movement Protests

Digital Narrating for Contentious Politics: Social Media Content Curation at Movement Protests

Fighting with Tools: Prefiguration and Radical Politics in the Twenty-First Century

This article conceptualizes some of the political practices and discourses that characterize recent protest movements such as Occupy and the Indignados. These movements' strategies are distinguished by the central role they give to the occupation and recomposition of public spaces and also by their refusal to engage with representative politics and public institutions. Critics argue that this so-called strategy of withdrawal illustrates a categorical misunderstanding of the political. But as notions such as “withdrawal” or “exodus” give only a rather partial account of these movements' practices and discourses, this paper aims to introduce an alternative, contemporary concept that has a much stronger explanatory potential: “prefiguration” or “prefigurative politics.” In order to flesh out and apply this concept, it reconstructs the political ontologies of two radical traditions that significantly influenced more recent protest movements—namely, early anarchism with its antithetic dialectics (Mikhail Bakunin) and contemporary autonomist Marxism (Antonio Negri).

Krise und Protest auf dem Balkan

The article examines the recent protest movements in Bosnia (especially in spring 2014) and Croatia („For the family“) and tries to draw conclusions on societal development in the Balkans since the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Whereas in Bosnia the protesters were committed to democratic principles and represented an alternative to the official political system, in Croatia direct democratic means are more frequently used by right forces in order to discriminate minorities (such as homosexuals or the ethnic Serbs). Furthermore the article describes how these different types of protest in the given countries could emerge and asks for the limits and possibilities of the protest movements.

The One Percent

Recent protest movements brought attention to the one percent, a segment of the population that is critical to understanding inequality and social mobility but that attracts relatively little research attention. In this article, I survey current research on the one percent in the United States. I distinguish income from wealth and show that both are very concentrated but that the concentration of wealth, particularly financial wealth, is extremely high. I describe the demographic traits and finances of households who are in the one percent and discuss how these have changed in the past decade. I review literature that explains rising top incomes, and I propose that future research will usefully concentrate more on top wealth owners and on the demographic and life course processes that underlie income and wealth concentration. I conclude by speculating about why Americans are so tolerant of resource concentration.

Still Waiting for Barbarians after 9/11?: Cavafy’s Reluctant Irony and the Language of the Future

C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1904) has been adapted and restaged in art, music, and literature throughout the twentieth century. Since the early 1990s, and especially since the events on 11 September 2001, however, it seems to be haunting the Western imaginary. Its various allegorical uses in the press and cultural theory demonstrate the poem’s prominent figuration in debates about post-Cold War and post-9/11 realities. Cavafy’s poem is mobilized in critiques of the American Empire. It helps express the fear of others or of the unknown after the purported rupture of 9/11. But it also captures the desire for overturning saturated systems and forming new narratives and communities in the context of the financial crisis and recent protest movements. Besides functioning as an allegorical formula for capturing contemporary (global) realities, the poem also assumes a mediating function in current debates: it seeks alternative expressive modes, beyond metaphysical truths and essentialist oppositions, as well as beyond cultural relativism. This function takes effect through the poem’s evocation of two genealogies of “barbarism”: a negative and an affirmative one. The poem neither rejects nor fully affirms either of these genealogies. It thereby generates a kind of irony that can be termed “reluctant” in its questioning of and simultaneous attraction to metaphysics and presence. Through its reluctant irony, the poem seeks a viable practice of living in liminal times—a practice much needed in (our) times of crisis.

Building Collective Identities: How New Social Movements Try to Overcome Post-politics

Recent protest movements such as the Indignados and Occupy advocate what they call ‘real democracy’. They radically reject representative democracy as implemented within existing institutions, and ...

Twitter as “a journalistic substitute”? Examining #wiunion tweeters’ behavior and self-perception

Twitter has been cited as a key factor behind a number of recent protest movements. Through interviews with heavy users of the #wiunion hashtag, this study examines the motivations and perceptions behind its usage during the 2011 Wisconsin labor protests. Findings suggest these users see a blurred boundary between citizen journalism and activism, but that their Twitter behavior is driven in part by distrust of traditional news sources and a desire to present an alternative. Notably, most do not see themselves as citizen journalists because they see journalism as an institutional, rather than individual, practice. Their orientation toward information credibility also diverges from traditional journalism, relying on interpersonal trust and the availability of visual evidence. These findings are discussed in the broader context of protest mobilization through information gathering and sharing.

Islamism(s) and the Arab uprisings: between commanding the faithful and mobilising the protestor

This study attempts to situate Morocco within the recent Arab revolutions. The extant literature on Morocco's Islamism deems the 2003 Casablanca terrorist attacks a turning point in the Islamists’ relationships with the regime on the one hand, and the public's view of political Islam on the other. However, with the recent protest movements, the regime can no longer sustain its security approach to Islamism. Further, and unlike the 2003 attacks, which made all Islamists prime suspects, the 2011 Marrakesh bombings brought the regime under further scrutiny by the protest movement. In the midst of the changes sweeping the Arab world, both the monarchial government and Islamists are facing a set of unknown parameters. It remains unclear whether the recent widening of dissent (to include liberals, women and minorities) would strengthen Islamism's presence in the Moroccan political scene. In order to call into question the trend deeming Islamism a recent phenomenon, this study aims to historicise Islamism in Morocco. So, an exploration of the origins, evolution and language of Islamism in Morocco is central to this study.

Theories of Socio-Political Change and the Dynamics of Sub-Group Versus Superordinate Interests

Social change is a core topic within political and social psychology. In light of recent world-wide protest movements directed at social change it is timely to reflect on where current theory and research on socio-political change stands, what the unresolved issues are, and what the necessary next steps. In this paper, three dominant theoretical models are critically evaluated – social identity theory, social dominance theory, and system justification theory – and points of similarity and divergence are highlighted. In addition, it is argued that inclusion of different levels of self-categorization and associated self-interest in the theories has the potential to provide a more “integrated” account of the psychological processes that underpin both system stability and system change.

Virtuality and Ernst Bloch: Hope and subjectivity

Theories of affect have become an increasingly popular tool with which to conceptualise and analyse subjectivity. Of particular interest to us in this article are expositions that have sought to bring to the forefront of analysis notions of excess and virtuality on the grounds that they bear fruit in relation to a potential politics of change. Although contemporary notions of virtuality and excess are highly attractive, they also bring us to one of the more unsettling features of affect theory: How is it possible to suitably analyse the realms of virtuality and excess due to their non-representational qualities? To begin to address this problem, we explore process-oriented theories of virtuality in relation to the Marxist process theory of Ernst Bloch, and draw on the recent protest movements against cuts to Higher Education funding as an example of what we term ‘affective hope’, a concept indebted to Bloch's notion of educated hope.