Transnational Protest Research Articles

“We are the Revolution, Abroad”: Diaspora Protests, Identity Construction, and the Remaking of Citizenship in the 2019 Lebanese Thawra

Abstract Diasporas are often viewed as mirrors for their homeland’s politics. The Lebanese diaspora’s involvement in the 2019 Thawra, however, established the diaspora as a locus for autonomous and disruptive political action. Through an analysis of the spatialities of protest, this paper analyses the diaspora’s involvement in the Thawra, its implications for the protest movement, and for the diaspora itself. It argues that diaspora protests gave rise to new tactics and protest repertoires. These mirrored protest activity on the ground, supported protestors in Lebanon, and constituted the diaspora as a locus for contestation and claims-making. Moreover, the diaspora’s mobilization in the Thawra contributed to the consolidation of diasporic identity and the construction of alternative societal imaginaries and conceptions of citizenship that challenge Lebanon’s state-centric and sectarian citizenship regime. This paper thus makes the case for reassessing the autonomous political role of diasporas to gain a fuller understanding of transnational protest dynamics, solidarities, and citizenship beyond the boundaries of the nation-state.

Marcha das Vadias: performing disidentification in transnational protests

Abstract In 2011, protests against rape culture ignited across the globe. Inspired by SlutWalk Toronto (SWT), organizers planned protests that adapted the rhetorical features of SlutWalk to their local contexts. This article examines the visual rhetoric of Marcha das Vadias (MDV), a series of satellite protests in Brazil. I argue that protestors enacted disidentification as a response to the constitutive rhetoric of SlutWalk, bringing into focus how ideologies of race, class, and religion interact with norms of sex and gender to reinforce rape logic. The translation of “slut” to “vadias” centered the linguistic and cultural contexts of contemporary Brazil while maintaining solidarity with the broader SlutWalk movement. Protestors deploy seven rhetorical personae that resituate the constitutive narrative of the movement. Altogether, their performances of personae enact a rhetoric of survivance, which utilizes collectivity, structural critique, non-linear temporality, and storytelling to resist systems of oppression.

Creating Racial Structural Solidarity

This article draws on recent transnational protests against police brutality to advance an understanding of anti-racist solidarity that aims to improve over Mara Marin’s ‘structural solidarity’ view. On Marin’s view, anti-racist solidarity is grounded in the racial structure. But Marin forgets that racial domination exerts a segregative influence on different groups, so that whites and middle-class blacks tend not to frequent the social milieux that would help them develop a sense of solidarity with working-class blacks. To address this problem, the article hypothesises that the conditions for anti-racist solidarity are not inherent in the racial structure but created by social movements, as exemplified by Black Lives Matter: to the extent that white and middle-class black participants in the George Floyd protests experienced the racist police brutality they were denouncing on behalf of the black working class, these protests functioned as non-segregated milieux that could ground the solidarity of the former with the latter at the national and transnational levels.

The impact of local protests on political elite communication: evidence from Fridays for Future in Germany

ABSTRACT The Climate Strike Movement (or Fridays for Future) is one of the most prominent transnational protest movements nowadays. In this paper, I examine the reactions of politicians to this movement to answer the research question: To what extent have German Members of Parliament (MPs) been responsive to local environmentalist street protests by focusing their attention on the Climate Strike Movement and Environmental Policy? To this end, I apply dictionary-based quantitative text-analytical tools to study German MPs’ political communication through 292,949 Facebook posts and 43,644 parliamentary debates between September 2017 and February 2020. Focussing on the effect of the first global climate strike in March 2019 and leveraging varying protest frequencies between the electoral districts, I show that MPs are responsive to protest events in their districts. More local street protest events in an electoral district led to more attention to the Climate Strike Movement and Environmental Policies by political representatives associated with that district. Comparing different discursive arenas, I show how politicians adjust their communication according to the arena’s audience, with protests affecting the political attention to environmental policies more in parliamentary debates than on social media.

Transnational Activism against Genocide Denial: Protesting Peter Handke’s Nobel Prize in Literature

AbstractThis article addresses the protest against the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Peter Handke as an example of transnational memory activism. It analyzes from a transnational mobilization perspective how activists achieved a globally visible protest in Stockholm and what role memory played in the protest mobilization and framing. Genocide survivors and former refugees, human rights activists, journalists, and academics formed a transnational protest coalition. In this way, they drew international attention to their outrage at the honoring of an author who is criticized for denying the Bosnian genocide. The analysis shows that memories of the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia and genocide united the diverse protesters as a “memory community” and shaped their framing. The protesters warned of the potential repercussions of the Nobel Prize to Handke for the internationalization and normalization of genocide denial. They argued that locally, Serb nationalist politicians can find legitimation in it for divisive politics. Moreover, they put the prize in a larger context of globally rising right extremism and islamophobia that find inspiration in the very Serb nationalist ideology and its propagators of the 1990s conflict.

Special Section: Technical Infrastructures, Transnational Protest Movements and the Use of Counter-Expertise

Special Section: Technical Infrastructures, Transnational Protest Movements and the Use of Counter-Expertise

Historical Sankofa: On Understanding Antiblack Violence in the Present through the African Diasporic Past

This essay makes a theoretical and methodological intervention into the historical discipline by arguing that there is a serious and necessary role for historians to engage with the realities of our contemporary world. Using the Black Lives Matter movement and the global uprisings of 2020 as a case study, the author rejects long-standing critiques of presentism in the historical discipline. Instead, she argues that the history of transnational black activism and protest engaged by activists in the African diaspora throughout 2020 were indicative of the ways in which the realities of the past continue to materially inform the lives of real people in the present. The author calls the process of excavating these connections between the past and the present “historical sankofa”—a concept borrowed from the Akan tradition of Ghana.

Shaheen Bagh: Making sense of (re)emerging “Subaltern” feminist political subjectivities in hashtag publics through critical, feminist interventions

In this article, we examine protest of India’s passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Registry of Citizens (NRC) which spurred instances of physical and digital protest. We study the intersections of gender, political subjectivities, and digital activism among anti-CAA-NRC activists, specifically the “Women of Shaheen Bagh.” We discuss our data collection methods, description, and analysis of the protests in the context of larger questions, including how critical, feminist researchers may engage with data tools and how forms of gendered, transnational protest are mediated and represented via individual images, texts, and videos that make up social media data. We illuminate the formation of political subjectivities in the context of transnational, digital protest movements by re-appropriating computational and data tools. This article seeks to demonstrate an interdisciplinary engagement between critical, feminist approaches to knowledge and subject formation and data science approaches to social network analysis and data visualization techniques.

It All Hinges on China: Environmental Governance in the Twenty-First Century

It All Hinges on China: Environmental Governance in the Twenty-First Century

1968 and the Fight for Democracy in Australia: Don Dunstan, Student Activism, and the End of the South Australian “Playmander”

The historiographical debate about the significance of 1968 — the year of transnational political protests and strikes — for Australia has centred on the questions of how derivative and imitative protests in Australia were, and whether 1968 was a singular year here in the longer period of activism. This article presents a fresh angle on the debate by looking at the vital role of students in turning the Dunstan Labor government's electoral loss (in terms of seats, despite winning 54 per cent of the vote) in South Australia into a constitutional struggle. The state's gerrymander (or egregious electorate malapportionment), and questions of electoral reform and democracy in Australia, were specific, local issues, distinct from issues that sparked student protests from Paris to Chicago. When Don Dunstan refused to step aside after the election on 2 March 1968 for six weeks, he created a space for political debate and protests. Blue‐collar unions and other concerned citizens were important participants, but arguably it was students who grabbed the most media attention with their noisy demonstrations. The article contends that the transnational protest moment added to Australian students' radicalisation by the National Service scheme, and that students' role in Dunstan's campaign for electoral reform proved a decisive factor.

Reputation crisis management and the state: Theorising containment as diplomatic mode

This article theorises containment as a diplomatic response mode for states when faced with potentially harmful attacks on their international identity and reputation. Despite widespread agreement in International Relations (IR) scholarship that identities matter in the context of state security, studies of crisis management have paid little attention to ontological security crises. Scholarly literature on public diplomacy has concerned itself mainly with proactive nation branding and reputation building; work on stigma management has privileged the study of how ‘transgressive’ states respond to identity attacks by recognising, rejecting or countering criticism. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we make the case that states do not perform as uniform entities when faced with ontological security crises – government representatives, bureaucratic officials and diplomats have varying roles and action repertoires available to them. Second, we argue that containment is a key but undertheorised part of the diplomatic toolkit in crisis management. Unpacking containment as a crisis management response mode, we combine insights from IR scholarship on emotions and diplomacy with insights on therapeutic practices from social psychology. We substantiate our argument with a case study of how Norwegian government representatives, bureaucratic officials and diplomats responded to escalating international criticism against Norway’s Child Welfare Services following a wave of transnational protests in 2016. A key finding is that whereas the dominant response mode of government ministers and bureaucratic officials was to reject the criticism, diplomats mainly worked to contain the situation, trying to prevent it from escalating further and resulting in long-term damage to bilateral relations.

The Impact of Social Media on the Freedom Movement in Indian held Kashmir

The contemporary phase of the youth-led freedom movement in Indian Held Kashmir (IHK) is not confined to the armed rebellion by the Kashmiri youth but is also coupled with a non-violent approach using social media against the atrocities and human rights violations such as systematic torture, rape, extrajudicial killing, and prisoner abuse, by the committed by the Indian armed forces. Victims' stories have been well-documented and 're-packaged for the world community through social media. The freedom movement went through various phases throughout history, and the most recent phase was introduced in 2016 after the brutal killings carried out by the Indian armed forces that included Burhan Muzaffar Wani, a youth-icon and a freedom fighter who used social media as a communication tool. The use of modern communication technologies like social media ensures that the narrative of the people of Kashmir regarding the freedom from the illegal occupation of Kashmir and suppression by Indian security forces would spread all around the world. This paper applies social movement framing analysis to this contemporary freedom movement in IHK to better understand the ways in which it is being re-defined by activists through exposure and affiliation to other transnational protest movements and re-framed in a manner that stresses the universal applications of contemporary human rights mobilizations.

Calle 13 and Ana Tijoux’s Joyous Rebellion: Modeling Transnational Protest through Lyric and Song

In 2014—in the wake of a global eruption of protests including YoSoy132, 15M, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street—the Chilean rapera Ana Tijoux and the Puerto Rican rap duo Calle 13 both released songs notable for calling their listeners to political activism. In this article, I argue that the songs “Somos Sur” and “Multi_Viral” disseminate a critique of that wave of social movements by insisting upon greater transnational cooperation between activist groups to collectively confront social and economic oppression born out of Western hegemony.

EXPLORING NETWORKED IDENTITY AND TRANSNATIONAL MOBILIZATION IN UKRAINE’S EUROMAIDAN PROTEST

Social media are a prominent space for diasporic mobilization and activism, opening new avenues for studying transnational communities living outside of their countries of origin. This study uses a hybrid methodological approach to consider how Ukrainians living in the United States engaged with homeland politics during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protest and how their use of social media intervened in their transnational protest politics. This study contributes to the broader scholarship on studying transnational mediated protest participation by examining a case of diasporic mobilization of the Ukrainian community in the United States. Triangulating semantic mapping data from online diasporic communities on Facebook with in-depth interviews, we show how diaspora members engaged in the protest despite distance and how their activity and tactical decisions were mediated by social networks. We specifically examine how diasporic personal networks and networked technologies enmesh into a set of hybrid networked practices, circumscribing how Ukrainian Americans interpret political engagement and how they strategically use the affordances of social media for protest participation.

Hirohitler on the Rhine: Transnational Protest Against the Japanese Emperor’s 1971 West German State Visit

This article explores transnational connections between anti-imperialist groups in West Germany and Japan through an examination of the protest around the Japanese Emperor’s state visit to Bonn in 1971. Although anti-imperialist movements in Japan and West Germany had many similarities and moments of contact, there are few treatments of these groups in transnational perspective. The event offers a unique moment of entanglement between New Left groups in the global 1960s and a rare moment of mutual discussion of the Japanese and German wartime past. The Showa Emperor (better known as Hirohito) traveled to Europe as a way to promote a new, peaceful, Japan; however, his role as a wartime leader complicated this image. Hirohito’s presence in West Germany presented major issues of wartime crimes that were filtered through German’s own memory of perpetration and victimhood. Radical students in and West Germany responded to the Emperor’s visit by cooperating with Japanese exchange students to analyze and protest the history of Japanese militarism and fascism – and also its postwar attempts to regain an empire, especially in Southeast Asia and Vietnam. These concepts were seen, therefore, on another level: the US war in Vietnam, and Japanese and West German complicity in this conflict.

Indispensable, safe and sustainable? How the European parliament debated nuclear energy megaprojects in the 1970s energy transition

Present-day energy systems are shaped by past decisions, which were informed by contemporary considerations about different energy sources and visions of the future. Hence, today, at a time when a new energy transition is on the agenda, it is important to understand those past rationales that account for previous energy transitions, notably the introduction of large-scale nuclear power in the 1970s. This article argues that in the debates in the European Parliament, representatives of West European mainstream parties specialising in energy and environmental policy used arguments that reflect the key components of what we today call sustainability. The analysis of the debate on nuclear energy megaprojects in the European Parliament in the mid-1970s examines the arguments used, reflecting expectations about the future that shaped long-term energy planning. Transnational protests at the building sites of nuclear power plants of the mid-1970s were viewed as a threat to what most European policymakers at the time considered an indispensable energy transition. The debate thus offers unique insights into the arguments that underpinned the planned transition to nuclear energy and nuclear megaprojects and attempts to improve popular acceptability, including via better information and participation. The article highlights that those advocating a transition to nuclear power used arguments surprisingly similar to those mobilised in current debates about energy transitions and megaprojects, including the search for nuclear waste disposal sites.

From South Africa to South Central L.A.: Transnational Black Protest, Celebrity, and the Cultural Boycott

ABSTRACT Using Los Angeles as a case study, this essay explores transnational Black protest, celebrity, and the cultural boycott. Although cultural activism was a staple of anti-apartheid activity across the world, Los Angeles was distinguished in the U.S. context by an ongoing campaign that mobilised African Americans for the purpose of confronting Black celebrities who violated the cultural boycott. Organising around the cultural boycott took place alongside novel forms of Black American celebrity whose epicentre was Los Angeles, and amidst worsening social conditions for ordinary Black Americans. In seeking to constrain the activities of Black celebrities even as they critiqued the increasing depoliticisation of African American life, Black radicals injected class politics into an anti-racist struggle while leveraging the cultural capital of Black Americans. As part of a broader effort to highlight the commonalities between social conditions in South Africa and Southern California, work around the cultural boycott invigorated a Black American critique of American social conditions while also demonstrating the value of cultural work as a strategic terrain for transnational political activity.

Searching Racism after George Floyd

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man, was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His death led to U.S.-wide protest that would eventually cross borders, spanning multiple continents. The transnational diffusion of protest and movement frames is a recognized phenomenon in the study of contention. Less well documented are the consequences of such protest for political interest; absent survey data, this is difficult to measure. One alternative is to use Internet search data. This visualization uses Google Trends to document variation in search interest for “racism” across 101 countries and 32 languages during the period before and after George Floyd’s killing. In the majority of countries, there was significantly increased search interest that was sustained for at least two weeks. The findings suggest that transnational protest diffusion may lead to global increases in political interest.

A Transnational Protest against the National Security State: Whistle-Blowing, Philip Agee, and Networks of Dissent

A Transnational Protest against the National Security State: Whistle-Blowing, Philip Agee, and Networks of Dissent

Digitally mediated martyrdom: The role of the visual in political Arab activist culture

Digitally mediated images depicting death and martyrdom as a trope of resistance and contestation against oppressive regimes emerged as recurring and critical instruments of dissent during the Arab uprisings of 2010–11. While the trope of death and martyrdom as a form of political expression and resistance is not a new phenomenon in the Middle East, the affordances of digital and social media technologies have brought forth new opportunities for activists and everyday citizens to construct, circulate and communicate martyr narratives. Drawing from literature in visual politics, digital activist culture, and media and communication, this textual and iconographical analysis of visual tropes focuses on the brutal killing of Egyptian youth Khaled Said, on his construction as a posthumous injustice symbol, and on his subsequent transformation as a martyr of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Activists and everyday citizens participated in symbolically resurrecting Said in and through digitally mediated images and transforming him into a martyr to represent the popular struggle for social justice and universal human rights. The article examines how Said is made a martyr through complex creative processes of recurrent visual appropriation, mediation, re-appropriation and remediation. It shows that the creative authorship of martyrdom is increasingly hybridized, decentralized and driven by a memetic protest dynamic. The article proposes the term ‘digitally mediated martyrdom’ to designate the emergence of a new kind of visually oriented, socially constructed and ritualized protest dynamic. It develops the conceptual framework for understanding digitally mediated martyrdom as a contemporary political practice within activist cultures and popular social justice movements. It also argues digitally mediated martyrdom represents the emergence of a new and transnational protest dynamic.