Street Protests Research Articles

Comparing the South African and Brazilian student uprisings (2015–2016): Similarities, Circulations, and Distance

ABSTRACT South Africa and Brazil are notorious for having some of the highest levels of (racialised) inequality on the planet, and dysfunctional education systems failing millions in their aspirations for a better life. Over 2015-16, student protests erupted across Brazilian and South African schools and universities, challenging these conditions through strikes, occupations, on-campus and street protests, and intellectual production. This paper builds on a World-Systems theoretical framework to understand the similarities, circulation, and distance between the two contemporaneous movements. In Brazil, the ‘Primavera Secundarista' high school occupations dealt primarily with local political dynamics, such as school closures, and intersectional forms of oppression. In South Africa, the ‘Fallist' university mobilisations demanded free, decolonised education, alongside addressing issues of outsourcing and institutional racism. In the first section, I give a comparative overview of these student movements’ similarities, situating them in their context and highlighting the key concerns and political and pedagogical practices of student activists in each. While these movements did not generally engage with each other, there were some important points of interaction, discussed in the second section. While highlighting these points of connection, I also advance an argument in the third section for why there was nevertheless relatively little direct engagement between these contemporaneous movements that otherwise had so much in common. The points of connection and disconnection between these similar movements offers insights about the functioning of the contemporary World-System and the modes of transnational circulation between movements therein, with lessons for transnational understandings of social movements, especially South-South movements.

Protests in urban environments: review and research agenda

Abstract Although knowledge about the role of space in the field of social movement studies is already well established, it is rarely discussed within the framework of urban spatial design (with some important exceptions). We consider not only how political power is related to architectural design in urban environments but also how it is performed (and contested) during protests within these spaces. We argue that urban spatial planning should address the dual nature of street demonstrations. Public assemblies are seen as symbols of democracy, but they are also disruptive and may turn into riots. This tension is evident along two design lines: facilitating and obstructing street demonstrations in a built-up urban environment. In our essay, we show that street protests are an immanent part of neoliberal democracy, and that cities cannot avoid street demonstrations or simply exclude them in the design process.

When street protests meet feminist activism in the A4 Revolution

when street protests meet feminist activism in the A4 Revolution

Testing the bidirectional causation among media attention and the protest scale: the case of Hong Kong

Media attention is crucial for the success of social movements. In contemporary hybrid media ecology, news media, social media, and on-site protests interact with each other during social movements. The present study investigated the relationships among the scale of street protests, attention from news media, and social media in the Anti-ELAB movement in Hong Kong. The results show that attention from pro-democracy and nonlocal media significantly influences fluctuations in the protest scale. Moreover, they closely correlate with changes in protest size, highlighting the importance of political parallelism in media coverage during contentious movements. We also found a two-way relationship between the degree of social media attention in the LIHKG forum and the scale of on-site protests. This suggests that social media not only serves as a platform for public discourse on protest events but that it also acts as a mobilizing force for participants. Additionally, our results indicate that news media has a significant influence on shaping attention trends on social media, thus confirming the effectiveness of traditional media in driving social movements in Hong Kong, even amid the rise of social media platforms.

T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E.: Tupac Shakur as a Symbol of Black Rebellion for the “Pac Babies” of Black Lives Matter! 1

The late Bay Area Hip Hop legend Shock G stated that Tupac Shakur “rhymed from this pit of his stomach,” asserting that Tupac’s greatness was in the potency and relevance of his message more than the technical skill of his lyricism. Tattooed across the stomach that Tupac rhymed from was the acronym “T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E.” Tupac proclaimed that it stood for “The Hate You Gave Little Infants, Fucks Everyone,” a statement that reflected his worldview and echoed sentiments of those like Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin and Huey P. Newton who viewed youth as the centerpiece of the struggle for Black Liberation. Though Tupac was murdered in 1996, his lyrics and interviews resurfaced in the aftermath of the police killing of Oscar Grant in 2009 and introduced a generation born after his death to his thug persona and T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E. ideology as relavent, and accessible symbols of Black Rebellion. This article explores how Pac Babies, Black youth born after Tupac’s death, have adopted his Persona and Ideology to inform their entry into the Post Racial, social media era of the Black Freedom Struggle. I offer that, by providing T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E. as an alternative to the politics of respectability of the Civil Rights Movement and being resurrected as mythical super hero battling police violence, Tupac influenced both the street protests and social media engagement during the protest phase of "Black Lives Matter!".

Kardeş Türküler as ‘art action’: The multiple cultural heritages of Anatolia

Abstract This article focuses on Kardeş Türküler, a band that reflects the multiple cultural heritages of Anatolia in its concerts and albums. Kardeş Türküler has taken a unique stance in choosing to express itself from a culturally pluralistic perspective rather than following a single language or identity. Referring to Kardeş Türküler as ‘art action’, and utilising the non-reductive methods of John Street that focus on the two-way interaction between music and politics, I conducted in-depth interviews in 2017, 2020 and 2021 with the core members and the former coach of the group regarding its intellectual roots and internal modus operandi. There are three main reasons for Kardeş Türküler's deep engagement with music as protest: being against the cultural–artistic policies of the Republican period; the political meaning of making multilingual music in Turkiye; and Kardeş Türküler's engagement with post-neoliberal street protests such as the Gezi Park movement.

Street Fights and Social Reproduction: The Role of Health Mutualism in Berkeley’s People’s Park Struggle

Abstract: In the social movement literature, the relationship between the political work of collective survival and the politics of the streets remains undertheorized despite robust research on the significance of direct social actions (DSAs). This article revives the work of the Berkeley Free Church during the People’s Park struggles in 1969. Through waves of intense street conflict, the Berkeley Free Church ran grassroots health programs and helped launch a free healthcare clinic. The Free Church’s health programs served both those with daily needs and those needing urgent care in the streets when police responded to demonstrations with violence. This historical case adds complexity to the social movement literature because the Berkeley Free Church’s work reveals a dynamic, interconnected relationship: health mutualism became central to street protest, and street protest in turn made the goals of building projects of health mutualism more feasible.

Taniec na manifestacjach ulicznych jako forma regulacji autonomicznego układu nerwowego oraz sposób wyrażania emocji

The subject of this article is dancing at protests as a form of autonomic nervous system regulation and a way of expressing emotions. Selected results of a survey and interview conducted among people (n=42) dancing at the Women’s Strike demonstration in Warsaw on March 8, 2021 are presented. The protest described was one of many against the October 22, 2020 Constitutional Court ruling declaring abortion for severe fetal defect unconstitutional. In addition to discussing the results of the survey, the article also evaluates the content of respondents’ answers using research tools in the form of S.W. Porges’ polyvagal theory and the regulation zones developed from it by a group of researchers, including D.J. Siegel, as well as the concept of regulating emotions through movement. Dancing at a protest constitutes a zone of regulation, thanks to the activation of the social engagement system in the dancers. It provides protest participants with the opportunity for both self-regulation and co-regulation, producing a sense of safety. It leads to building social resilience, and by establishing a relationship with the body, it is also a way of expressing emotions. Furthermore, it has a community-building function, integrating those who dance and creating a social bond. Key-words: autonomic nervous system, vagus nerve, emotion regulation through movement, regulation zones, dancing at street protests, polyvagal theory, social engagement

From Frying Pan to Fire: Protest, War and the Forging of a Belarusian Nation

Abstract The mass street protests after Belarus’s 2020 presidential election failed to oust dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka. They nonetheless represented a political and national awakening of Belarusian society, with a level of popular engagement in politics unseen in Belarus during the preceding three decades. Eighteen months after the election crisis, Belarusians were plunged into a new crisis as their state provided a supporting role in Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine. This article identifies the main causes of the 2020 protests and their relationship to Belarusian national identity. It assesses the state of the national awakening three years after the 2020 election in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Belarus’s role in that war; asking whether Belarus is still sovereign and whether loss of sovereignty is fatal for Belarusian national identity. It argues that Lukashenka’s position remains highly precarious and that the national awakening hangs in the balance.

Designerly resistance: Professional object design in support of Lebanon’s street protests

Design activism theory calls on designers to take responsibility for using their design skills to make real social change though influencing the mindset of their audience. This paper discusses the specific case of architect and designer Guillaume Crédoz who collaborated with the protestors during the 17 October Revolution in Lebanon to help them carry out acts of political disobedience against corruption and government injustice. The history of design lacks examples of professionally designed objects meant to mobilize the public within protest settings, and the examples of Crédoz demonstrate that such objects can be functional, engage the user, express discontent, and support oppositional attitudes in the name of a more just society. At the same time, they can effectively support protestors in their efforts to resist. Designers can play a supportive role in introducing change through functional objects with a disruptive aesthetic.

:Today Sardines Are Not for Sale: A Street Protest in Occupied Paris

:<i>Today Sardines Are Not for Sale: A Street Protest in Occupied Paris</i>

“WE WON’T BE DIVIDED, WE STAND UNITED!” MOVEMENTS’ PROTEST CLAIMS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

For social movement organizations to create impact, broadcasting the dWUNCness (diversity, worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment) of protest is crucial. Public representations of dWUNC are inherent to social movements’ existence and increase the legitimacy of their acts. However, to what extent do social movement organizations claim dWUNC? Which dWUNC elements do they focus on? And, which protest and social movement features explain their dWUNC claims? In this study, I analyze Twitter and Facebook messages (N = 2,849) of social movement organizations (N = 186) about street protests (N = 232) staged in Brussels (Belgium). Descriptives show that in 67.7% (N =1,929) of their online protest messages, social movements speak in terms of dWUNC. Unity was frequently claimed, and dWUNC was communicated differently across social media platforms. Explanatory analyses show that social movements display dWUNC in and outside the boundaries of protest reality. Findings reveal the outcome of movements’ protest communication strategy in today's digital media landscape.

Долгосрочное влияние силы репрессий в онлайн- и офлайн-среде на численность участников поствыборных протестов (Кросс-страновое эмпирическое исследование)

Although the relationship between state coercive measures and protests has long been studied in Political Science, there are a number of gaps in the modern research studies about the impact of repressions on street protest activity. A serious flaw in these studies is their focus on the influence of repressions on the existing protest campaigns, with little attention to their long-term implications. The impact of repressions on the scale of protest and number of protesters, as well as the role of the Internet as a factor mediating the impact of state sanctions on protests, is understudied. The article attempts to bridge these gaps. The author has first examined theoretical arguments in support of three possible forms of correlation between the severity of repressions and street protest activity — negative, positive, and parabolic (n-shaped), after which he tests relevant hypotheses on a sample of country cases that share the same trigger for protest — suspicions of electoral fraud. To test these hypotheses, the author utilized data on the maximum strength of repressions against civil society organizations, participants in protests and authors of anti-government messages on the Internet in the pre-electoral years, as well as data on protests in the first week following the elections. The study confirmed the influence of repressions on future protest activity. At the same time, the relationship between the severity of repressions and the number of protest participants in the long term has a quadratic n-shaped form: at low and high levels of repression, the number of protesters is minimal, at medium — it is maximal. As for the impact of the Internet, it was not detected on data on repression in the offline environment, but it was revealed on data on the strength of sanctions for political activity on the Web: if the share of Internet users in a country is low, repressions decrease the number of protest participants; if it is high, repressions of medium strength correspond to the maximum number of protesters.

When something is happening but you don’t know what it is: mood and agency after a stolen election

AbstractThe street protests in Belarus following an allegedly stolen election provide a context for an examination of the expression of public mood. We argue that political moods involve pre-agentic intuition rather than cognitively formed agency; and that they constitute a vital, too often overlooked stage of democratic action. Focusing upon such moments entails an understanding of the ways in which early impressions of situations often rely upon peripheral awareness and pre-reflective heuristics. Understanding pre-agentic action poses a significant methodological challenge to researchers who must determine how best to make sense of human responses to situations that do not yet make sense to them. The article explores the transition from mood to agency; that is to say, from generalised affective feeling to political intention and action. We looked through thousands of photographs, video clips, textual messages, voices, smartphone screens, maps and official documents that circulated online during the Belarusian protests both prior to and after the election.

The Ordinariness of Ethics and the Extraordinariness of Revolution

In this article I present experiences of Egyptians too young to have taken part in the street protests and movement of the 2011 revolution. Today in their early twenties, they narrate their experiences during the early months of the uprising. None claimed to be revolutionaries then or now, but the revolution seems to animate them in complex and long-lasting ways. The January revolution failed to bring about change at the level of state power. Yet more is at stake than the political endgame. I turn my attention to how people narrate the revolution as a process of ethical reflection and self-formation through everyday relationships and settings that took on new meanings. These accounts challenge notions of what it means to participate in a revolution and where it is located and generate a conversation between the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of revolutions.

Hong Kong’s new normal: Remaking authorized discourses of “special administration,” 2017–2022

The paper presents a critical discourse analysis of the five annual policy addresses of Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-Ngor, whose term of office (2017–2022) spanned the most tumultuous episode in the modern history of the territory, one bisected by an extended season of street protests and the subsequent imposition of a national security law. Read as an authorized, real-time transcript of governmental rationalizations and responses, delivered in the first-person voice of Hong Kong’s most senior politician, the annual policy addresses narrate a crisis-mediated shift from a postcolonial redoubt of liberal capitalism to an outpost of China’s national-security state. Although the “one country, two systems” formula enshrined in Hong Kong’s Basic Law retains its official status, a distinct transformation is evident, from the evocation of “two systems” as a wedge against one-country assimilation, to an apparently new normal based on the principles of securitized, “one-country” integration. In the process, the chief executive increasingly embraced the received discourses and sanctioned priorities of the Chinese Communist Party in her depictions of a “New Paradigm” for the governance of Hong Kong, founded on the “steer of the Central Government” with the “cooperation” of the government of the Special Administrative Region.

Analysis of coverage of the 11 March 2004 Madrid train bombings in Spain’s El País and El Diario Vasco through war and peace journalism frames

This study examines the way in which two major Spanish newspapers, El País and El Diario Vasco, framed the 11 March 2004 (11-M) Madrid train bombings through peace journalism or war journalism, based on Peace Studies theorist Johan Galtung’s classification. An analysis of the news articles in the immediate aftermath of the bombings finds both frames present. The incumbent Spanish government initially tried to use the news media as a vehicle to present a premature interpretation that the Basque separatist group ETA perpetrated the attacks, even trying to pass a United Nations resolution. However, some journalistic coverage of the events in the week after the 11-M attacks portrayed the Spanish people’s sentiments regarding Spain’s support of the US in the Iraq war, Spaniards’ engagement with their democracy, including massive street protests, and parallels between the Iraqi people’s suffering and the Spanish train bombing victims. Other journalistic coverage focused on the perspectives of high-level Spanish government officials, emphasized the importance of prevailing in ‘the war on terror’, and provided an ‘us–them’ orientation.

Intersectional (In)visibility: experiences of irregular migrants in Barcelona

ABSTRACT This research contributes to ever-growing research on multiple intersecting identities of irregular migrants. Investigating the experiences of 35 irregular migrants in Barcelona, it examines the paradoxical nature of the intersectional (in)visibility model across three analytical categories: institutional (in)visibility, (in)visibility as marginalization, and (in)visibility as strategy. Institutional (in)visibility involves the simultaneous co-existence of institutional invisibility at the national level and institutional visibility at the local level. (In)visibility as marginalization manifests discrimination or ignorance of certain irregular migrants with intersectional identities such as race, gender, or class, despite their shared legal status. (In)visibility as a strategy encompasses various performative actions, including street protests, to insert claims into the public sphere and camouflage to avoid racial profiling. Institutional (in)visibility is connected to the legal status and rights of irregular migrants; (in)visibility as marginalization is related to their race, gender, or class, while(in)visibility as strategy is a performed action as a response to institutional (in)visibility and/or (in)visibility as marginalization.

The Ambivalence of the Liberal-Illiberal Dynamic

This essay discusses the democratic ambivalences of situations when researchers or academic institutions have to decide whom to provide a platform, where to draw red lines even at the expense of freedom of speech, whether to hide certain information, and how to label “illiberal” actors in academic pieces—questions which reflect also one’s position within academia. The article draws on the experience with the unexpected performance of an academic roundtable discussion in the East German city of Frankfurt (Oder) planned to be about weekly local street protests, which eventually was joined by the street protesters themselves. During the pandemic, these marches contested covid restrictions. With the onset of the Russian war on Ukraine, they had transformed into protests against high energy costs, in support of Putin, and against the German government. This type of protest movement resembles a typical expression of contemporary illiberalism: an ideologically heterogeneous milieu from far-right to politically conservative, if not leftist-minded people, who unite a skepticism towards the democratic state, the rejection of public media, and an affinity for conspiracy theories. The German context is particularly challenging as these “Monday demonstrations” prevailing in East Germany entail a reference to the freedom and democracy claims of the 1989 revolution, and reveal unequal conditions between East and West.

Illiberal Constitutionalization and Scholarly Resistance: The Cases of Israel and Hungary

This paper explores the role of constitutional scholars in resisting illiberal constitutionalization attempts or combating existing illiberal constitutional systems. I use Israel as a case study for the former and Hungary for the latter scenario. In Israel, following the initiation of a judicial reform by the new government of Benjamin Netanyahu in early 2023, supported by far-right nationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties with the aim of dismantling the separation of powers and establishing an unbound executive, constitutional scholars, alongside street protesters, voiced their opposition to illiberalism. Since the start of the war in Gaza, triggered by Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023, it became evident that the Palestinian issue also calls for a constitutional solution. In stark contrast, Hungary has seen minimal resistance after the enactment of the Fundamental Law in April 2011, Viktor Orbán’s new constitution for an illiberal regime. The paper investigates the role of constitutional scholars in both countries in seizing or missing the constitutional moment.