Street Protests Research Articles

Mahsa Amini's killing, state violence, and moral policing in Iran

Iranian cities have been the scene of daily antigovernment protests by young women and men since September 16, the day Mahsa Jina Amini died in the custody of the “morality police” in Tehran. Over the next weeks, the waves of protests snowballed as the often very young demonstrators poured into the streets in some 160 cities, chanting antiregime slogans. Many women removed their mandatory headscarves at street protests to call for an end to the dual life forced upon them by the state's dress code. The protesters’ anti-authoritarian outrage met with broad public sympathy, moved beyond the discontented middle classes, and engaged significant segments of working-class youth and the ethnic Kurdish and Baluchi communities. However, workers, teachers, and other sectors of organized labor, who saw no immediate victory in sight, did not join the call for a national general strike. An estimated 500 demonstrators were killed, including 67 children, and more than 15,000 people were arrested. Three months of ongoing protests in Iran have garnered more international sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Though initially shaken, regime has doubled down in its brutality to eliminate the movement. The regime's reluctance to reform has convinced many observers that new waves of protest will follow, converging to break Iran's political impasse. This article outlines an analytical lens for understanding the movement's cultural transformative power as well as its challenges in achieving its political goals. I examine four critical aspects of this protest movement to explore where it stands in Iran's recent political turmoil. These include the radicalization of politics in Iran due to rising state violence over the past decade, the growing number of forced veiling dissidents, the contribution of the youth crisis to the protests, and finally, the confluence of ethnic outrage with women's and youth anti-authoritarian politics.

„Nit gejn in geta”. Pierwszoosobowy protest wobec getta ławkowego

“Nit gejn in geta”. First-person protest against ghetto benches The article deals with a unique form of protest against ghetto benches, namely protest by Jewish men and women themselves. The author provides a preliminary analysis of the forms of dissenting voices, citing specific examples and extensively quoting various sources. The subject of violence against Jews at higher education institutions, of its forms and intensity, has already been analysed by scholars. The present article is an attempt to take a close look at one of the forms of reacting to collective violence against Jewish men and women at higher education institutions in inter-war Poland: protest expressed in the first person, that is in a given person’s own name. The author not so much distinguishes this form of protest from allied protest, but enhances its status. The forms of active and passive resistance to ghetto benches varied and encompassed a wide range of responses to hatred. They took official forms, such as parliamentary questions, as well as street protests, strikes — including general strike — or occupation of a strictly defined space. There were also various letters of opposition and demands to repeal segregation ordinances.

Al-ʿUcha

<i>Al-ʿUcha</i>

The Politics of the Everyday in Occupied Europe

The Politics of the Everyday in Occupied Europe Mary Louise Roberts (bio) Maren Röger. Wartime Relations: Intimacy, Violence, and Prostitution in Occupied Poland, 1939–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 224 pp. ISBN 9780198817222 (cl.); 9780191858758 (ebook). Raffael Scheck. Love between Enemies: Western Prisoners of War and German Women in World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 398 pp. ISBN 9781108841757 (cl.); 9781108894821 (ebook). Paula Schwartz. Today Sardines Are Not for Sale: A Street Protest in Occupied Paris. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 256 pp. ISBN 9780190681548 (cl.). For historians of gender, traditional military history is arguably the last frontier. Battle narratives peopled with generals and soldiers by definition exclude women. Grand strategy has little to do with the cultural construction of gender. More recently, however, help has arrived in the form of a “new” military history, often called the study of “war and society.” This approach looks beyond the battlefield to understand war within the societies it impacts and generates.1 Central to the successful execution of the “war and society” method is a rethinking of power and politics. Gender historians, well-versed in Foucault, have long assumed a notion of power as inhering in personal relations, particularly sexual relations. While more traditional historians privilege power exercised in military, juridical, or political institutions, women’s historians have attended to the politics of the workplace, the marketplace, the altar, and the bedroom. The “history of the everyday” or Alltagsgeschichte has provided still another analytic framework for the study of gender and war. In her recent history of German and Austrian societies under Nazi dictatorship, Elissa Mailänder characterized Alltagsgeschichte as “giving great importance to quotidian forces and proximate relations of power which all too often lay in obscurity.”2 This terrain of the “everyday” is where the historians Maren Röger, Raffael Scheck, and Paula Schwartz stake their claim. They focus on sexual relations and small acts of resistance under the Third Reich. Their books reveal both the startling possibilities and the enormous challenges these “everyday” histories present. German historians Röger and Scheck focus on transgressive heterosexual relations prohibited by the Nazi state. In Wartime Relations: Intimacy, Violence, and Prostitution in Occupied Poland, 1939–1945, Röger explores a range of intimacies between German soldiers and Polish women, from rape and prostitution to consensual relations. In 1939, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler signed a decree forbidding any kind of sexual intercourse [End Page 150] between Wehrmacht soldiers and Polish civilians. Underwriting this prohibition was the Nazi belief that Poles and other “eastern” people were untermensch, that is, racially inferior to Aryan Germans. The ban, however, contradicted another Nazi belief: that “a virile, soldierly masculinity” depended on regular sexual satisfaction (23). These conflicting aims provided a path for Röger to find the light between policy and practice. Scheck follows a similar agenda in Love Between Enemies: Western Prisoners of War and German Women in World War II. “Frenemies” is what we might call his subject matter: French, Belgian, and British prisoners of war who pursued romantic or sexual relations with German women.3 Again, such contact was prohibited not only by the German military but, in the case of the prisoners of war (POWs), by the Allied armies. According to Scheck, roughly 15,000 to 20,000 POWs were court-martialed for pursuing relations with local women during their captivity. Most of these women were working-class laborers or farmers. If arrested and convicted, they were publicly shamed and sent to prison. French prisoners lived up to their reputation as the Don Juans of Europe, making up eighty percent of these court martial cases. Both Röger and Scheck show enormous invention in ferreting out new kinds of sources for these histories. “More than once, when presenting this project, I was confronted by the question of feasibility,” admits Röger. She refers (without names or citations) to the “many historians” who believed there would be no archival material due to the fact that German soldiers rarely disobeyed the rules (16). Because Polish women who were raped or who served as prostitutes did not want their stories known, Röger could not rely on memoirs or...

In search of an appropriate channel for voicing political concerns: political participation among radicalised youth in Europe

ABSTRACT This research aims to identify values related to political and civic participation methods among the two groups of radicalised youngsters: native youth who support movements labelled as far-right (N= 122) and migrant-origin self-identified Muslim youth with strong organisational ties with religious communities (N=109) in Germany, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. The study posits that these these radically aligned youngsters position themselves against politically moderate European citizens, who are less intuitive when making judgements on political affairs comparing to them. Diverging from the unifying European values and hypersensitivities, these youngsters’ political reactions are often radical and loud in their safe-to-speak, segregated movements. By using the narrations of the range of mainstream modes of political participation, the current qualitative research asks what appears valuable for the two groups of young people to express their political discontent. Findings revealed that both groups highlighted similar values regarding voting. Self-identified Muslim youth stressed the importance of volunteering and street protests (despite not having participated in one). Many native youths, on the other hand, stressed the function of unlawful behaviour in street protests to pursue political objectives. The findings such as these are discussed considering the group differences.

National crises and cancer control: challenges for Latin America and beyond

2023 began with the emergence of chaotic and violent scenes from Brazil, as the country weathers a period of high political instability. In January, thousands of far-right supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro stormed Congress, the Presidential Palace, and the Supreme Court in Brasilia in protest against the inauguration of the country's new President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was democratically elected in October, 2022. Bolsonaro's most dedicated supporters refuse to accept the new presidency, claiming electoral fraud, and have led road blockades that have crippled major sectors of the economy, as well as street protests and violent attacks on police and civilians.

Pragmatic aspects of street protests discourse (on the example of protests in Belarus in 2020)

The author analyzes the pragmatic properties of protest discourse, taking into account poster slogans used during mass anti-government protests in Belarus in 2020. The theoretical basis of the research is the concept of discourse, based on four categories: intention, representation, performance and context. The author distinguishes among three types of contexts: cognitive, social and event-related (functional). In accordance with the global function of the protest discourse, three types of constitutive language activities are distinguished: modal-evaluative, modal-disapproving and speech acts of ultimatum. The author analyzes these types of speech acts in detail and provides numerous linguistic examples.

Satire and Protest in Putin's Russia ed. by Aleksei Semenenko (review)

Reviewed by: Satire and Protest in Putin's Russia ed. by Aleksei Semenenko Seth Graham Semenenko, Aleksei (ed.). Satire and Protest in Putin's Russia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2021. xxxix + 197 pp. Illustrations. Notes. References. Index. £109.99; £87.50 (e-book). As its title indicates, this timely and original collection of essays by five authors examines satire as a form of cultural protest in twenty-first-century Russia. The contributions analyse a broad range of satirical texts across media, including stand-up comedy, Internet memes, TV sketch shows and journalistic 'agitainment', the competitive comedy genre known as KVN, rap music, poetry (the 'Citizen Poet' project), queer and camp aesthetics in Russian music and visual culture, street protests and humorous banners ('Monstrations'), and performance and visual art. As Semenenko (editor and author of five of the collection's ten chapters) writes in his Introduction, the book approaches its subject with critical awareness of the two broad, traditional, and purportedly contradictory explanations of political humour's main purpose: 'resistance' (i.e., to effect actual political change) and 'relief' (i.e., to provide a harmless 'safety valve' for otherwise dangerous political hostility). One of the book's strengths is its nuanced scepticism towards this supposed mutual exclusivity. The editor characterizes satirical expression in Russia as 'a process of […] reciprocal confrontation and, in some cases, assimilation and fusion of the mainstream with the opposing tendencies' (p. xix). This proves to be a productive approach, and one that allows the authors to transcend obsolete binaries ('official vs. [End Page 169] unofficial' or 'conformist vs. dissident') that have often characterized the study of cultural production in illiberal and authoritarian societies. Nevertheless, the structure of the book does reflect the dual concepts of 'relief' and 'resistance' acknowledged by Semenenko in the Introduction. Part One is titled 'Satire on a Leash' and Part Two, 'Satire as Protest'. The former includes four chapters — all written by Semenenko — on genres, media and venues that have proven susceptible to partial or complete co-optation and/or censorship by the (Soviet and post-Soviet Russian) state and those supporting the state: stand-up; memes; television satire; and KVN (televised sketch-comedy-team competitions). Semenenko's contextualization of the important recent genre of stand-up (stendap) in the long tradition of Soviet estrada — which also frequented the boundary between the permissible and its opposite — is particularly sharp and relevant. Part Two 'presents five studies of satirical protest that fully or partially managed to escape repression'. The five authors examine the use of satire in music, poetry, street protests, music, and visual and performance art. The chapter entitled 'Transgressing the Mainstream: Camp, Queer and Populism in Russian Visual Culture' by Maria Engström, particularly stands out for its original contribution to the literature not only on satire, but on the state and influence of queer culture in contemporary Russia. Daniil Leiderman's discussion of 'Monstration' — the use of absurd and humorous posters and banners in street protests — convincingly connects the practice to the tradition of Soviet conceptualism, which, he argues, was similarly provocative in its aims. In his Introduction, Semenenko usefully situates the topic of satire in the country's political history, not only pre- and post-Bolotnaia Putinist Russia, but also in the larger context of Soviet culture and its lasting influence. He also acknowledges the methodological difficulties in evaluating the effectiveness of satirical protest, admitting the near impossibility of measuring satire's 'impact on the public' and identifying 'evidence of its influence on public discourse'. In addition, the Introduction places satire alongside other 'modal' or behavioural forms of protest in late- and post-Soviet Russia such as stiob, tricksterism and cynicism, and describes how the state began to exploit these phenomena after the protests of 2011–13 to its own benefit. In addition to its considerable contribution to scholarship on contemporary Russian culture, Semenenko's comparative historical discussion makes it a valuable addition to studies of the place of humour and satire in Soviet culture by such authors as Annie Gerin, Evgeny Dobrenko and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol, and Jonathan Waterlow. This volume also fills a gap in the scholarship on Putin-era culture and cultural politics, which has tended to...

Social Movements in Brazil: From the 1970’s to the Present Day the Influence of Social Movements and their Relationship with Democracy and Party Organizations in the Last Fifty Years

This article discusses the relationship between social movements and democracy in the last fifty years in Brazil. This research aims to analyze the influence of demonstrations and street protests, which took place between 1970 and 2020, on the Brazilian democratic process and party institutions. The analysis starts from the social struggles against the dictatorship and Catholic Church through the CEBs (Base Ecclesiastical Communities) at the end of the 1970s. The struggles for redemocratization and for popular participation in the 1980s are also analyzed. The networked social movements and the new social movements, according to Alain Touraine, are also objects of this research. It is observed that social movements influence not only institutions and the democratic process but also individual and collective identities that share their ideologies, which expressively altered the political game and institutions’ functioning.

Data innovations on protests in the United States

For decades, the United States has been generally excluded from cross-national quantitative datasets on the study of collective action and political resistance. More recently, however, new data collection efforts are on the rise. These projects specifically focus on gathering granular level information about street protests and mobilizations in the United States. In this article, we conduct a rigorous exploratory data analysis of three contemporary protest datasets. These data collect information about the when, where and how of contentious politics in the United States. Our thorough data review first summarizes the key similarities and differences across the datasets. Next, we review the regional, temporal and methodological strengths and weaknesses of each dataset both individually and in contrast to one another. Last, we examine potential research applications of these data by demonstrating what these data reveal about the risks of protesting in these types of events. We conclude by offering recommendations for data use and future data collection strategies for the study of collective action.

The Critical Role of History after Dobbs

The Dobbs majority’s reliance on a flawed and impoverished ac-count of “history and tradition” to deny fundamental freedoms today may tempt us to despair of appealing to the past as a source of consti-tutional rights or principles. But the problem with Dobbs is not its discussion of history per se; rather, it is how and for what purposes the Court looks to the past. History need not preserve archaic values; it can counsel against past errors and justify affirmative approaches to pro-tecting rights and combating inequality. This essay explores critical roles for history in legal, constitutional, and political arguments about reproductive freedom and democracy after Dobbs. These critical approaches define differently the historical voices and sources that matter; the constitutional principles and lessons to be drawn from the past; and the roles that history and tradition should play in shaping our present and future. Critical histories read the Reconstruction Amendments as a mandate for emancipation and for the eradication of all forms of bodily and reproductive coercion. They elevate the voices of those who long were excluded from political participation and place abortion restrictions in a longer history of re-productive control and anti-democratic political traditions. Critical histories can and do inform the interpretation of state as well as federal constitutional provisions in and outside of court. From courtrooms, legislatures, and campuses to workplaces, street protests, and dinner ta-bles, these histories play a more crucial role than ever in informing legal and political discourse about reproductive justice and the future of de-mocracy.

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

Pension reform as a catalyst for rising social tensions in France

In March 2023, social tensions sharply escalated in France. The main trigger for mass street protests was the pension reform initiated by President E. Macron. The author analyzes these events and their consequences for political processes in the country.

From school strikes to webinars: Mapping the forced digitalization of Fridays for Future's activism during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper discusses the forced digitalization of activism brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic in the case of the transnational environmental youth movement Fridays for Future (FFF). Theoretically, we engage with social movement action repertoires to study the shifts in protest tactics associated with the social restrictions during the early stages of the pandemic. A qualitative content analysis of 781 posts across all 27 national FFF Facebook pages in the European Union reveals four clusters of digital action types: digital contentious actions; online information and education; digital community engagement and online partnership development. While digital media were part of FFF's action repertoire in pre-pandemic times, our findings yield that the shift from the movement's iconic street protests to exclusively digital tactics privileges community-building and education over contentious actions, potentially softening the political impact of the movement's landmark 'school strike'. Furthermore, although timely tactical flexibility kept the movement going during country lockdowns, the forced digitalization in the early stages of the pandemic primarily recombined existing action tactics rather than innovating them.

Selective exposure during uprisings: A comparative study of news uses in Chile, Hong Kong, Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon

In periods of political unrest, media habits change significantly, allowing for new patterns of selectivity. This study's main contribution lies in its application of selective exposure theory and its comparison of people's media uses in five Global South polities that witnessed widespread protests in 2019: Chile, Hong Kong, Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. It examines the relationship between people's trust in the media and selective exposure at a global comparative level and within the contexts of political upheavals and hyperconnected media systems. The study also assesses the relationship between issue publics and participation in protests. Using cross-sectional surveys in each of the five countries/regions, it compares participants’ support for the protests and their exposure to legacy and social media. The findings reveal that media trust and issue publics play a significant role in determining the level of preference for pro-attitudinal news content. Trusting pro-attitudinal TV channels relates to following pro-attitudinal TV channels, and trusting counter-attitudinal TV channels relates to following counter-attitudinal TV channels. In addition, the strong issue publics group was more likely than the weak and moderate issue publics groups to participate in street protests.

Safety, Gender, and the Public Transport System in Santiago, Chile

This research evaluated gender differences in the perception of safety in public transport in Santiago, Chile using quantitative and qualitative approaches. With data from the National Urban Citizen Security Survey 2019 (ENUSC), a gender comparison was made regarding the perception of safety in four scenarios: inside buses, inside the metro, at bus stops, and waiting for buses at night. Four ordinal logistic regression models were estimated to analyze how sociodemographic factors and variables associated with the perception of crime influence rider perceptions of safety in public transport. To complement the results, four focus groups were developed to obtain a deep understanding of the participants’ experiences with safety in the Santiago public transport system. We concluded that there is a high perception of insecurity in public transport for both men and women. In general, perceived insecurity inside buses, inside the metro, and waiting for public transport at night is greater among women, older people, and national citizens. Other influencing variables are the perception of insecurity regarding crime in general, the fear of being a victim of a crime, or negative situations that occur in the neighborhood, such as the presence of robberies, alcohol, and drug consumption. We proposed new variables such as fear of harassment, traffic accidents, discrimination, contagious diseases, and street protests among others. To carry out a precise public policy on this matter, a permanent scan on security issues in public transport should be developed, considering a complete set of variables. This result can be applied in Chile and all Latin American countries.

Reflections on Unwritten Letters and the neorealism of contingency

Reflections on <i>Unwritten Letters</i> and the neorealism of contingency

Dynamical modelling of street protests using the Yellow Vest Movement and Khabarovsk as case studies

Social protests, in particular in the form of street protests, are a frequent phenomenon of modern world often making a significant disruptive effect on the society. Understanding the factors that can affect their duration and intensity is therefore an important problem. In this paper, we consider a mathematical model of protests dynamics describing how the number of protesters change with time. We apply the model to two events such as the Yellow Vest Movement 2018–2019 in France and Khabarovsk protests 2019–2020 in Russia. We show that in both cases our model provides a good description of the protests dynamics. We consider how the model parameters can be estimated by solving the inverse problem based on the available data on protesters number at different time. The analysis of parameter sensitivity then allows for determining which factor(s) may have the strongest effect on the protests dynamics.

Nonhuman Animals as Symbols in the #BlackLivesMatter Protests of 2020

Abstract Racial uprisings often include animalized commentary and symbolic use of nonhuman animal bodies. This paper highlights some of the nonhuman animal bodies observed during the #BlackLivesMatter protests within the United States in 2020 – specifically, the use of pig, horse, and dog bodies during street protests. Displays of pigs carry with them a racially rife past in the United States. This history harmed protesters during #BlackLivesMatter protests, being described as suffering “like animals,” and the use of “pig” as an epithet for the police is explored. For the Black Cowboys who joined the protests on horseback, the physical presence of their horses amplified their message, symbolized a shift in their freedom, and positioned them eye-to-eye with the mounted police officers. The use of dog bodies within politics, how they amplified political messages as “sign-carrying vehicles,” and the dangers for them and others in protests are addressed.

Understanding how place is addressed in research on young people’s political action: cases from Sweden

ABSTRACT Following recent critiques of the metrocentric nature of global youth studies, this paper explores the role of place in current research on youth political action in Sweden. Drawing on Agnew’s [2011. “Chapter 23: Space and Place.” In Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, edited by J. Agnew, and D. Livingstone. London: Sage] concept of place and using qualitative interpretive review as our method, we examined three sets of research publications on three different aspects of youth political action in Sweden. Our analysis found that place was addressed differently in each set of publications: youth political socialization and civic engagement were approached as placeless, street protests were examined as place assumed and urban justice movements were studied as place-based. The first two sets of publications contribute to reproducing a metrocentric understanding of youth political action, where urban areas are constructed as the key settings for political action among young people, while rural or peripheral areas are assumed to work in the same way or are depicted as non-political. By contrast, the publications on urban justice movements offered an alternative by exploring political action as place-based. The need to study the place-specific ways that young people do politics is discussed, with its potential to further the understanding of how young people do politics from where they are.