Street Protests Research Articles

Humor and Rumor in the Post-Soviet Authoritarian State

Humor and Rumor in the Post-Soviet Authoritarian State

Topographies of Protest in the Russian Revolution of 1905

This article explores protest in the Russian Revolution of 1905, taking a thematic perspective whilst looking at a series of case studies. Drawing on a fresh source record including previously unseen police reports from Moscow, Ekaterinoslav and Tomsk, the article takes a regional perspective concerning a series of protests. It explores similarities and differences in demonstrations and funerals for murdered revolutionaries raised in these locations, and the culture of street protest developed by a variety of political actors including Russia’s social democrats. Particularly of interest are the uses of music and song, the cult of ‘martyring’ dead revolutionaries, and religious iconography as used by avowedly atheistic groups. The article is arranged thematically, exploring these different points in comparative perspective.

Disproportionate Service: Considering the Impacts of George Floyd’s Death and the Coronavirus Pandemic for Women Academics and Faculty of Color

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on disproportionate service burdens faced by women academics and faculty of color in higher education created by COVID-19 and the massive, multilocation street protests that followed George Floyd’s death. Our work aims to inform provosts, deans, directors, and other institutional actors in academia who recognize the need for documenting structural inequities and investing in high-impact, long-term solutions. Recommendations are offered to meet challenges, given the need to raise colleague awareness of disproportionate service burdens.

Book Review: Today Sardines Are Not For Sale. A Street Protest in Occupied Paris by Paula Schwartz

Book Review: <i>Today Sardines Are Not For Sale. A Street Protest in Occupied Paris</i> by Paula Schwartz

Hardcore punk as an effort to Indigenize the underground scene in La Paz during the neo-liberal era of resistance 1993–2003

In Bolivia, neo-liberalism did not only have social-economic and political effects, but it also created spaces that allowed for new discourses related to culture and national identity. This research focuses on the changes of the metal underground scene in La Paz that led to the formation of a hardcore punk scene that tried to incorporate Indigenous symbolism in their music and performances as a form of resistance against western-cultural hegemony but also to highlight the positive values of their ancestral cultural heritage. Scholars, journalists and activists have written extensively about the transformations in Bolivia during the age of neo-liberalism but there has not been much research that focused on youth movements specifically those that use music to inspire new forms of social dialogues concerning national identity. This research is self-ethnographic and it includes qualitative in-depth interviews of band members and media figures of that time. The La Paz hardcore punk scene grew as an effort from band members to Indigenize the metal underground scene based on their interpretation of what they believed was Indigenous since none of the band members themselves were considered Indigenous. The meaning of Indigenous symbolism in their music was a result of their daily experiences of the social-political contentious environment during the country’s neo-liberal era. Street protesters used Indigenous symbols to defy the western-led free-market economic policies of the Washington Consensus. Therefore, the need to distinguish themselves from a metal musical genre that was traditionally western gave rise to a hardcore punk scene that focused on Indigenous cultural pride intricately connected to a form of patriotism and national pride. This was fuelled by the emergence of a national collective consciousness to reclaim the Indigenous culture due to the failures of western economic policies and US interventions tied to the ‘War on Drugs’.

The Art of Making a Scene

Through an examination of four contrasting moments of public intervention, we investigate the sonic and cultural implications of “making a scene”—a style of social engagement that draws attention and exceeds expectations of the normative social functions of a particular space. The act of making a scene serves as an avenue for understanding the broad and simultaneous trends toward heightened stratification and political polarization that exhibit a desire to be heard. Be it in the form of impromptu street performances, protests, or riots—which range from exhilarating to terrifying—the desire to be heard can be conceived as a rejection of the liberal values of rational-critical discourse through the radical implementation of voice and sound as a means of temporarily appropriating space and redefining place. Reorienting social activity into a heightened emotive terrain, such acts short-circuit the quotidian, serving to incorporate strangers and force social engagement that would otherwise be unlikely to occur. Building upon and complicating notions of voice as expressive of identity and political agency, we posit that voice serves to transform emotional dynamics through an engagement with the physical qualities of space and its acoustic-vibrational possibilities. Capturing attention through expressive inflections of difference, making a scene momentarily flips the social logics of a place, revealing public space as a site of contestation characterized by the unequal flow and uneven habitability of different bodies and voices.

Instrumentalising sovereignty claims in British pro- and anti-Brexit mobilisations

Despite the growing literature on Brexit, specifically, and conflicts of sovereignty, more generally, there has been insufficient research on how the concept of sovereignty has been used in citizen campaigns and street protests across the United Kingdom – a form of ‘counter-democracy’ through which people attempted to oversee the post-referendum political process. Combining qualitative content analysis of campaign websites with a discourse-network analysis of media articles on Brexit protests, this article shows that claims to sovereignty were mobilised not only in conflicts between the United Kingdom and the European Union, but also in conflicts between different institutions within Britain itself. Both ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ appealed to popular and parliamentary sovereignty at different points in time, pragmatically adapting their framing according to changing circumstances but also as a result of a dynamic series of interactions with each other, including denying, keying and embracing their opponents’ frames. Crucially, conflicts around different institutionalisations of popular sovereignty did not demand system change, a rhetoric familiar from other protests of the 2010s such as Occupy Wall Street with its emphasis on ‘We are the 99%’. To the contrary, pro- and anti-Brexit mobilisations remained firmly focused on Brexit policy itself. They problematised the split between ‘Remainers’ and ‘Leavers’ within the United Kingdom, between 48% and 52%, and thus, on a deeper level, the tension between the political principle of popular sovereignty and the sociological reality of a split country. Finally, the more Leavers opposed Remainers, the more movements and parties on each of these two sides aligned. Politicians featured prominently in campaigns and as speakers at protest events, contributing to close cooperation between protesters and parties, and precluding anti-systemic discourses around popular sovereignty that would target parties and institutions altogether.

Protest and Electoral Breakthrough: Challenger Party-Movement Interactions in Germany

This paper studies party-movement interactions in Germany, focusing on Die Linke and the AfD, the two most recent additions to Germany’s multi-party system. The electoral rise of both challenger parties went along with mass protests, opposition to Hartz IV in the mid-2000s and anti-Islamic PEGIDA mobilisation in the mid-2010s. We shift the emphasis from how social movements turn into political parties, including significant organisational and personal overlap, to more indirect ways of how protest and electoral politics interact. Specifically, we identify a process composed of two interrelated mechanisms: an external politicisation spiral and an intra-party innovation spiral. We show how mass protest triggers both discursive shifts in the public sphere and internal strategic realignment, providing an opportunity for parties to ride the wave, secure their competitive advantages, and mobilise on the protestors’ grievances in the electoral arena. In such a way, challenger parties can take advantage of street protests even when they do not directly emerge from a movement. Methodologically, the article is based on a paired comparison, relying on survey data and an original protest event analysis that provides novel data on anti-Hartz IV and PEGIDA protest mobilisation in Germany.

Сигнатура мятежа: как теория СОК позволяет обнаруживать признаки протестной мобилизации в Сети

The purpose of this study is to detect signs of political mobilization in social networks during the period of intensification of internal political struggle (including street actions of the opposition) at the beginning of 2021 in Russia. This study suggests a new quantitative indicator to reveal online communities (networks) characterized by strong user engagement and high level of political mobilization. VK-communities were mapped and analyzed in order to demonstrate the capability of this tool and determine levels of mobilization. The hypothesis of the study was that mobilized communities are able to turn virtual grievances into street protests. The object of study is a set (cluster) of related protest VK-communities (groups/hubs) through which messages from the most influential information donors are brought to public notice on the Internet. The proposed indicator for the calculation of mobilization level is based on the theory of self-organized criticality (SOC). The theory of SOC was initially created to describe a broad class of natural science phenomena, yet it has recently made its way into humanities and social sciences. Timeline of work: from January 10 to April 30, 2021. It was found that some groups (about 10%) in the considered cluster had a high mobilization index during this period. Many of the mobilized groups were very influential: they were both large-scale information donors and highly specialized protest communities. The practical significance of this study lies in improving the methods of monitoring network activity to identify groups that can influence the behavior of their members (both online and on the streets). This study also has theoretical significance related to the accumulation of knowledge about SOC effects in social systems.

Resisting ‘leftist dictatorship’? Memory politics and collective action framing in populist far-right street protest

ABSTRACT This article contributes to cultural approaches to populism, focusing on the uses of memory in far-right protest politics. Conceptually, it develops a novel approach to memory politics suitable to investigate the uses of memory in grassroots mobilization by integrating scholarship on ‘the politics of memory’ and the ‘movement-memory nexus’. Also, it argues for the conceptualization of populism as a collective action frame to explain the emergence and persistence of populist street mobilization. Methodologically, the article draws from the critical case study of the Dresden-based ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident’ (PEGIDA), one of contemporary Europe’s most sustained instances of populist far-right protest. Based on the interpretive analysis of original ethnographic data generated in demonstrations in Dresden in 2019-20, it shows how PEGIDA deploys controversial reinterpretations of regional, national, and European history to sustain the populist master frame of ‘resistance against dictatorship’, articulating the antagonism between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ as a long-standing struggle of democracy against leftist totalitarianism. Uncovering the many ways in which PEGIDA strategically mobilizes the past, the analysis emphasizes the constitutive relationship between culture and populist protest, and demonstrates the dovetailing of populist and far-right ideational elements in grassroots mobilization.

Pensar a través de la ciudad: La trabajadora de Elvira Navarro y Lectura fácil de Cristina Morales

In so-called “crisis novels” that appeared in Spain following the economic collapse of 2008, the city comes to represent not only the scene of the explicit dramatic situations of the characters (poverty, precarity, unemployment, evictions, homelessness, occupy movement, street protests, or gaps in social services) but also the imagery of decay and conflict. The city comes across as an uncomfortable space, characterised by inhospitable peripheries and abandoned constructions, which is consonant with the sense of helplessness and extreme loneliness of the protagonists. However, in contrast to the paralysis and the nervous breakdown evident in La trabajadora (2014) by Elvira Navarro (alienating perspective), Cristina Morales’s Lectura fácil (2018) represents the urban space as a battlefield that leads to the awareness-raising and the politicization of the experience of a crisis (revolutionary perspective). Both novels, focused on “the right to housing”, come to reveal a great deal of indignation and protest against the neo-liberal policies and the contemporary capitalist city, responsible for exclusion and inequality. Their demands coincide with the political proposal of “the right to the city” (Lefebvre, 1968; Harvey 2013), which raises the possibility of living a worthy life in the city, with an equitable distribution of resources and respect for different sensitivities.

How Political Parties Respond to Pariah Street Protest: The Case of Anti-Corona Mobilisation in Germany

How do political parties respond to street protest by political outsiders widely considered to be ‘pariahs’ (i.e. radical or extremist actors)? Bridging the literature on responses to ‘populist’ radical right parties with insights from social movement studies, we propose a theoretical model that conceptualises potential party responses to pariah protest. Innovatively, our typology distinguishes between a set of formal and substantive responses to street mobilisation. Empirically, we apply this model by providing the first systematic study of how political parties have responded to the ‘anti-Corona’ protests of Querdenken, contributing to social science research on the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysing the critical case of Germany, we underline the stark difference between how the populist radical right AfD and all other Bundestag parties respond to anti-Corona mobilisation, showing how political protest may sharpen the polarisation of party politics. Moreover, we highlight the more nuanced but still important differences in responses by established German parties. Theoretically, the article provides an analytical framework valuable in times of increasing street mobilisation by radical and extremist actors. Methodologically, our analysis relies on a systematic media analysis of articles from two major German newspapers. Empirically, it contributes to our understanding of the difficult but crucial relationship between the German protest and party arena during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Discussion of Dhaliwal, Goodman, Hoffman, and Schwab (2019): Revisiting Tax-Related Reputational Costs

Discussion of Dhaliwal, Goodman, Hoffman, and Schwab (2019): Revisiting Tax-Related Reputational Costs

Anonymity, fidelity to law, and digital Civil disobedience

Making use of the liberal concept of civil disobedience, this paper assesses, under which circumstances instances of illegal digital protest—called “hacktivism”—can be justified vis-à-vis the pro tanto political obligation to obey the law. For this, the paper draws on the three main criteria for liberal civil disobedience—publicity, nonviolence, and fidelity to law—and examines how these can be transferred to the realm of the digital. One of the main disanalogies between street and cyberspace protests is the tendency of hacktivists to remain anonymous, which in turn calls into question their fidelity to law (the third criterion). The paper argues that there are functionally equivalent alternatives to what can be called the “acceptance-of-legal-consequences-condition” (ALCC) associated with the fidelity to law. As a result, the ALCC is not a necessary condition for hacktivists to showcase their fidelity to law, thereby resolving the apparent disanalogy.

‘Thieves Should not Live Amongst People’: Under-Protection and Popular Support for Police Violence in Nairobi

Abstract This paper examines how communities at the urban margins, who are under-protected by the state police, understand police reforms through an examination of the unusual case of street protests in support of a police officer who had killed two young men in Githurai in Nairobi. I explore how the under-protection of communities at the urban margins by the police leads to a reliance on various forms of vigilantism to generate security and justice outcomes. Noting the limitations of community vigilantism, I explore how these communities come to rely on police vigilantism, a form of vigilantism that has received limited attention in African studies. Based on insights generated from data collected in Githurai in March and April 2015, I argue that residents of Githurai protested against the arrest of a local police vigilante, whom they had come to rely on for security, because they considered his deployment of violence against suspected criminals to be justified and also feared that his arrest would expose them to further insecurity. I conclude that police reform efforts should pay attention to the innovations that communities have developed at the grassroots to generate security and justice outcome in absence of reliable protection by the state police.

‘The only thing is you have to know them first’: protest policing and Malaysia’s BERSIH protests (2011–2016)

ABSTRACT This article critically examines the models of protest policing deployed by the Malaysian police during the BERSIH 2.0 wave of protests (2011–2016). Based on participant observation and critical ethnography of these protest events, it explains how the state and police adapted to the surge of street protests in Kuala Lumpur by bringing together various elements of policing practices in its attempt to contain dissent on the streets. I argue that the new ‘Peaceful Assembly assemblage’ of policing practices, though distinct and significantly different in its overall governing logic compared to its predecessor, it remains heavily connected to late colonial forms of public order and counterinsurgent policing, especially the Special Branch and the Federal Reserve Unit (riot police). In this sense, the article shows that colonial policing’s afterlife is a major factor for understanding how Malaysia’s protest policing experience complicates and departs from patterns of protest policing development observed in the Global North.

The consumption power of the politically powerless: The Yellow Economy in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT Although the literature on political consumerism is prolific, political consumerism as a form of domestic political resistance is under-explored. The nascent ‘Yellow Economy’ in Hong Kong – in which citizens have boycotted pro-government (‘blue’) business and buycotted pro-democracy (‘yellow’) businesses – is an economic front of the pro-democracy movement that emerged in 2019. With rising political threats following the imposition of the national security law, street protests and other forms of contention politics have been stifled. The Yellow Economy, however, has become a new protest repertoire that has helped to sustain the movement. Drawing upon 26 semi-structured interviews with the Yellow Economy’s supporters from May to July 2020, as well as secondary data including newspaper articles, this article finds that a shared collective identity among pro-democracy citizens primarily gives rise to consumer activism in Hong Kong. Even though the initiative could not yield intended outcomes, i.e., resource mobilization and political opportunity expansion, pro-democracy citizens have continued engaging in political consumerism to express their solidarity. Furthermore, consumer activism and pro-democracy citizens’ identity are mutually reinforcing.

Electoral Processes and Street Protests in 21st Century Algeria: Features and Traits of Algerian Political Culture

The following article discusses issues of electoral participation and street protest activity in 21st century Algeria. The work is based on the materials on Algerian election campaigns and results of the author&amp;apos;s field research in the country. Describing the current political situation in Algeria, the author points out that the long established alienation between the civil society and government institutions is one of the most significant challenges for the country&amp;apos;s development. The roots of this alienation are much deeper than the 2019 events when A. Bouteflika was overthrown due to mass protests and A. Tebboun became the President. Analyzing the electoral campaigns held since 2000 to this day, the author discovers that mutual distrust between the political elites and the society has been a characteristic trait of Algerian internal politics over the whole two decades. In this context, the Hirak movement founded in 2019 may be seen a an instrument of political transformation rather than merely a way to express popular discontent. However, even though this movement was successful enough to change the political leadership in Algeria, it hasn&amp;apos;t managed to transform the essence of the system and update the social contract. Looking into the reasons for this failure, the author concludes that they stem from the specific traits of Algerian political culture formed in the colonial and early post-colonial eras.

Street art and protest under pandemic conditions in Colombia: A visual semiotic approach

This article engages in a visual critical semiotic analysis of Medellín street art and its interpretation as political action in the Colombian social mobilisation of 2021. I explore three epistemological turns towards a descriptive and contrastive methodology to contextualize street art and its transformative potential. Firstly, the spatial turn leads us to understand how space and street art function as a framework of life and conflict that challenges viewers socially and politically. Secondly, following Peirceʼs ideas, I reinter preted some images. I explain how they function as theoretical objects related to indices, signs and symbols. According to Mitchell's image turn, the image functions as a significant semantic unit. Thirdly, I read the political turn based on Rancièreʼs works in which he equates the political and the aesthetic as an act of visibility, always existing together at a conceptual and substantive level, and with which emancipation is objective. The article does not try to argue whether street art has a transformative power as this has been widely discussed in the literature. The article looks at street art that appeared in the context of the social mobilisation of 2021-2022, and partially in the context of the recent pandemic as a social transformation, the fact of which was proven by the recent elections.

Immigration Raids and Racist State Violence

This article develops an analysis of contemporary immigration raids in Britain, arguing that they operate ideologically as well as institutionally to sustain the material and political conditions of what is a vastly unequal form of social order (that is also a form of racial order). It suggests that immigration raids are located within and develop understandings of a racial state in contemporary Britain. Drawing on ethnographic work at a migrant charity organization, it explains the raid process and its impact on individuals and families. Raids are rationalized as facilitating removal and more broadly operate as part of attempts to generate fear and encourage people to leave “voluntarily.” However, this is not achieved in many cases, and this article suggests that the real purpose of raids is to dominate and oppress illegalized migrants and those who may be vulnerable to immigration control, as well as reproducing the justification for immigration enforcement. Raids can be understood as inflicting harms and as a form of state-sanctioned racist violence which is utilized to try severing solidarities between communities. Enforcement leads to resistance and the conclusion reflects on resistance to raids, demonstrated for example by the 2021 Kenmure Street protest in Glasgow, and the solidarities such resistance ferments and sustains.