This article presents the results of a collaborative methodological exercise conducted within a university seminar, developed as part of a teaching-research project in which students created a timeline of major protest movements of the early 2010s, including the Arab Spring (Tunisia 2010), Occupy Wall Street (USA 2011), the 15-M Movement (Spain 2011), the Hambach Forest protests (Germany 2012), the Gezi Park protests (Turkey 2013), the June Journeys (Brazil 2013), and the Umbrella Movement (Hong Kong 2014). Through this process, students gained a deeper understanding of the contexts of the protests and their interconnections. Although shaped by local contexts, these movements share global concerns, especially the intersection of traditional street protests with digital tools and social media. They questioned public policies, confronted the advance of capitalism, and challenged power structures, the traditional media and contested systems that claim to be democratic but operate in authoritarian ways, creating new protest territorialities and narratives. Using cartographic methods, this study explores how these movements mobilized physical, social, and digital spaces to express political demands and contest dominant narratives.

This paper argues that the conflict between China and Hong Kong is not a simple political dispute but is fundamentally tied to the emergence of a new identity within Hong Kong under the umbrella of Chinese identity. The Umbrella Movement in 2014 and the 2019 Extradition Bill movement further highlight the rise of a distinct Hong Kong identity, an identity constructed under the lens of a constructivist and defined by its set of politics, unique culture, and democratic values influenced by British colonialism. In contrast, Chinese identity is understood through a primordialism lens, emphasizing common ancestry and national harmony, interpreted as submission to autocracy. This paper will argue how value incompatibility in both identities is the root cause of this political conflict.

This study explores social media’s potential as a tool for religious peacebuilding, focusing on its capacity to foster harmony through faith-based values in a digitally connected world. With 5.24 billion users globally and 90.8 million in the Philippines, where religion shapes cultural identity, social media offers unprecedented opportunities to connect faith communities, amplify sacred narratives, mobilize action, and educate for peace. Drawing on global and Philippine examples, we examine how platforms like Facebook, X, and TikTok channel religious teachings to promote reconciliation, while addressing challenges like polarization, misinformation, hostility, and slacktivism. Historical narratives, including Hong Kong’s Yellow Umbrella Movement and the Philippines’ #FaithForTruth campaign, illustrate faith’s role in digital peacebuilding. Eight strategies, grounded in religious ethics, propose harnessing social media’s strengths: global reach, real-time engagement, education, and community-building to counter division. By embedding values like forgiveness and truth, religion transforms social media into a sacred space for peace, offering a model for conflict-affected regions like Mindanao.

The second decade of the 21st century can truly be called an era of protests and social movements. These movements emerged equally in both democratic and non-democratic states. Hong Kong, the semi-autonomous region of China was jolted by one such movement called the Umbrella Movement. Though the movement had long historical roots, perhaps the immediate reason for its emergence was the controversy surrounding the election to the office of the Chief Executive. Tens of thousands of people occupied the central parts of the city center for more than two months. Though people bore all kinds of hardships and troubles but could not achieve anything at the end. This paper is about the causes for the emergence and ultimate failure of the Umbrella Movement, launched in the year 2014 to preserve the autonomous status of Hong Kong.

Over a quarter of the Hong Kong population took to the streets on 16th June 2019. Many felt oppressed from the Chinese government's attempt to slowly take control of Hong Kong via the Extradition Bill - a policy which would allow Chinese officers to enter Hong Kong to track down criminals. The policy itself, however, does not matter. Rather, it is the idea of China’s attempt to control Hong Kong despite promising autonomy as a self-governing region until 2047. These movements popularized quite quickly due to the dramatization of media covering such events, as well as censorship and fear spreading across the Hong Kong populus. Even the 1956 riots under British colonial rule, to the more recent 2014 Umbrella Movement under Chinese rule have had their fair share of violence, which have always been portrayed negatively in the media. This essay will investigate whether media coverage of violent riots shape the public perception of these events by looking at news coverage of the 1956 riots and 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. This will be done by analyzing in a social and political lens, such as newspaper outlets covering violent instances. Topics such as censorship, factors involved with spreading of popular ideals, and evolution of media towards dramatization will all be investigated.

ABSTRACT Ten years ago, the ‘Umbrella Movement’ of 2014 demonstrated the commitment of large sections of Hong Kong’s populace to democratic reform. While the popularization of civil disobedience in the Hong Kong context is widely considered its key legacy, the introduction of deliberative democracy to the social movement context was a similarly important innovation. The Umbrella Movement was prepared by an advocacy campaign called ‘Occupy Central’ that featured experiments with deliberative assemblies. The subsequent Umbrella occupations entailed more unstructured forms of street deliberation. This article compares the two movement episodes to investigate how and why participants experimented with deliberative democracy. Based on in-depth interviews with activists, I argue that deliberation served both strategic and expressive purposes in a movement that not just voiced claims for formal democratic reform but also opened spaces for experimental democratic practice. Drawing on the deliberation and social movement studies literatures, I propose a framework that distinguishes between two variants of movement deliberation. Strategic deliberation is a structured communicative form aimed at attaining strategic outcomes. It involves structured assemblies that advance concrete movement goals through functions such as mobilization, education, and decision-making. Prefigurative deliberation, by contrast, is a more open-ended approach that emphasizes the enactment of democratic agency in the present. It creates communicative enclaves that allow participants to experience democratic change in the here and now, irrespective of the state of their wider political environment. By contrasting the two communicative forms, this study sheds new light on the deliberative dynamics of social movements and democratic advancement.

ABSTRACTThe legitimacy of the Hong Kong police has somewhat plummeted amid the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and the Pro‐Democracy Movement in 2019. This study aims to explore the dynamics among Hong Kongers' perception of security, confidence in the police, and their subjective well‐being using the Wave 7 (2017–2022) of the World Values Survey (WVS‐7). Analysing the Hong Kong data that sampled 2075 participants (18 years and above; 952 males and 1123 females, Mage = 47.2 years), feelings of security and neighbourhood deviant behaviours (i.e., perceived security), and life satisfaction and happiness (i.e., subjective well‐being) are used to explore their effects on the participants' confidence in the police. The findings indicate that the participants' feelings of security are positively correlated with their well‐being and confidence in the police, respectively. Despite its nonsignificant moderation effect, this study found a significant mediation effect of the participants' confidence in the police in the relationship between their perception of security and well‐being. Significant sociodemographic differences (i.e., gender, age, social class) in the participants' life satisfaction and happiness are also observed. These findings have important practical implications in areas such as public education and policy development/refinement, with the aim to foster Hong Kongers' confidence in the police and well‐being.

The spread of democratic ideas and economic growth in China—as suggested by the logic of modernization theory—have not initiated political reform toward democracy in China. Various literatures have attempted to explain this failure by emphasizing economic and social learning factors that clash with China’s national interests rather than emphasizing the context of its spreading process. Generally, this article aims to explain China’s failure to reform its politics toward democracy by focusing on the context of spreading democratic ideas in China. Specifically, this article aims to elucidate the relevance and continuity of the spread of democratic ideas in China during the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the Tiananmen Movement of 1989, and the Umbrella Movement of 2014, to the fifth wave of the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS). This article adopts a constructivist paradigm and constitutive localization theory to explain the failure of political reform in China. The findings suggest that Chinese local political ideas have influenced the spreading process of democratic ideas, contributing to China’s failure to acquire political reform toward democracy.

Through its powerful lyrics, catchy melodies, and accessible instrumentation, protest music has historically been a medium used to challenge systems of oppression, promote social changes, and unify people behind common causes. This study analyzes the role of protest music in socio-political movements, especially its usage by youth. From the Civil Rights Movement's anthems like "We Shall Overcome" to the Chinese Umbrella Movement's "Raise the Umbrella," protest music has been a pivotal tool for mobilization and solidarity. The structure of protest music, specifically the melodies and other musical elements, makes it a powerful medium to evoke emotions and lasting impressions socially. Across many decades, from folk and rock to hip-hop and reggae, the evolution of protest music consistently shows its adaptability and enduring power. Youth subcultures leveraged music to form resistance movements in these decades. More recently, the digital age has further amplified the reach of music and social media, thus, protest music has spread more rapidly globally, disseminating powerful messages in the Black Lives Matter and Arab Spring movements. In conclusion, protest music, driven by youthful activism and digital tools, continues to be a force for social change, illustrating its resilience and enduring ability to inspire change across different socio-political movements.

This article contextualizes Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement that emerged in the fall of 2014. We argue that first, the Umbrella Movement was not merely about democracy but must be understood in the context of widening inequality and an ongoing housing and wage crisis; second, that it is part of a broader epoch of contention informed by, third, a distinct “rhizomatic movement logic” that is defined by a diversity of actors and struggles, use of social media, leaderless and grassroots mobilizing, distrust of institutional actors. Fueled by shifts in capital accumulation and changes in communication technologies, the currently dominant movement logic is distinct from previous movement politics. Since the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1994, it has informed movements such as Occupy, the Arab Spring, and more recently the Gilets Jaunes as well as the Umbrella Movement. To be sure, we are not claiming that all these struggles are the same. We stress the similarities exhibited by these movements’ “deep grammar,” so to speak, while recognizing that each must be understood in its particularities. We thus specify the context of Hong Kong and provide illustrations of how this logic has impacted the Umbrella Movement’s actors, organizing, and movement-building dynamics.

This study aimed to map the development of research and scientific publications about social movements on social media. This study used the Systematic Literature Review approach to analyze 471 scientific articles that were selected based on the PRISMA procedure. The articles were taken from the Scopus database published in the 2018-2023 period. Cite Space software was used to visualize the data such as topic clusters, authors, and topic trends in the study of social movements on social media. This study reveals that there are ten topic clusters in the study of social movements on social media, namely collective action (#0), long covid (#1), stock market (#2), umbrella movement (#3), social media (#4 ), environmentally-related migration (#5), racial justice (#6), extreme events (#7), influence odoj (#8), sexual abuse (9#), and systems research (10#). Collective action is the most dominant cluster compared to other clusters, which shows that collective action is a general concept used in the study of social movements on social media, which is related to various issues in other clusters, such as Covid-19, politics, racism, and the stock market. Each topic cluster was discussed by many authors with various study focuses, but all authors used the concept of social media as a social movement to explain the issues that were the focus of their respective studies. Trend topics in the study of social movements on social media show that social movements and social media are a unified concept that can be used to explain various issues to study. This research contributes to the development of social movement studies in the digital era, the internet, mobility networks, and artificial intelligence. The limitation of this research is that the data used were from the Scopus database only so the findings cannot fully explain the study of social movements on social media. Therefore, future research needs to use data or references from other reputable databases such as the Web of Science and EBSCO.

This research aims to analyze how digital media influence the political personalization of content and the coordination of collective action in social movements. This research uses a qualitative approach with case studies of two social movements that use digital media as a means of communication and mobilization, namely the Black Lives Matter Movement in the United States, and the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. This research adapts the theoretical framework of Bennett & Segerberg in 2012 on the logic of collective action, which is a logic of collective action based on identity personalization, inclusive discourse, and digital media-based communication networks. The results of this study show that digital media allow social movement participants to express their identities individually and collectively, use adaptable discourses that reach a wide public, and coordinate their actions flexibly and dynamically through open and interactive communication networks. This research provides theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of digital media and social movements, as well as practical implications for social actors who want to use digital media as a tool for social change.

The general body of literature on the theology of liberation tends to focus either on ecclesiastical debate, theological intricacies, or discussion within the church. Not much attention is paid to the empirical investigation of how civil society members might be influencing the rhetoric of the local church. This article takes a different approach and explores how liberation movements in Ukraine and Hong Kong inform and inspire elements of the theology of social justice within local Catholic communities through bringing to life their social dreams and engaging the churches in action. Looking at how churches and activists interact in the aftermath of the Euromaidan and the Umbrella Movement, we explore how grassroots activists approach religious hierarchies and how, in these circumstances, the clergy of the churches might be pressured into maneuvering between the social dreams of civil society and the Vatican.

This essay outlines how religious ideas and practices shaped the activism of Chin Wan, known as the “godfather of localism” in Hong Kong. While Chin's role in the rise of the localist wave of the 2010s is well known, his role as a religious figure has been completely ignored. As the earliest exponent of “valiant warrior” (yung mou 勇武) and “be water” militant tactics based on Confucian and Daoist narratives, he had a deep influence on Hong Kong protest culture during and after the Umbrella movement of 2014. This case undermines conventional secularist narratives of Hong Kong social movements and offers new insights into the politics of identity in Hong Kong.

Malaysia’s ‘democratic transition’ in May 2018, when a challenger coalition ousted the long-dominant incumbent coalition, raised hopes of a new political climate, more respectful of civil liberties. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Malaysians shared that sentiment; a growing number had even protested openly for political liberalization as part of an umbrella movement for electoral reform. Within months of the election, several higher profile incidents peppered a series of attacks on queer spaces and both state-sponsored and private harassment of LGBT Malaysians – even as Malaysia ticked upwards in global metrics of ‘democracy’. Attention to LGBT peoples and issues remain at an all-time high in Malaysia, driven far less by queer activism than anti-LGBT agitation, in line with a government-led, base-ingratiating ‘pink-blocking’ agenda, rooted in both ‘Asian values’ and religious discourse. Here as elsewhere, queer identities and acts offer a handy diversion and scapegoat – and in Muslim-majority, increasingly Islamist Malaysia, anti-queer policies and policing affirm commitment to the presumed moral high ground of Malay-Muslim rights: pink-blocking offers a way to build coveted electoral support. In contrast, we may find recourse to ‘pink-washing’ strategies in countries lacking a similarly socially conservative, substantial base and/or competitive elections, and/or where currying favour with the west is a higher imperative.

This study aims to investigate the impact of recent events on the Portuguese immigrant community residing in Macao, focusing on inter-group conflict, integration, and disintegration concepts. The research methodology employed includes a thorough literature review, statistical data analysis, in-depth interviews, and subsequent content analysis. Findings reveal that the strict measures implemented by the local government to achieve zero COVID-19 cases, along with the repercussions of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement, have given rise to an inter-group conflict and to the departure of Portuguese immigrants. However, there is no evidence to indicate a decline or disintegration of this community.

Background and Aims: Hong Kong has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world at 1.1 children per woman. Prior studies focused on personal factors such as having a stable relationship and individual maturity as the most important conditions for parenthood. However, there is limited research about the relationship between individual perception of society and reproductive decision-making. Given that Hong Kong has experienced social turmoil such as the Umbrella Movement (2014), the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement (2019) and COVID-19 (2020) in this decade, this study explores whether the sense of social hope predicts fertility intention among Hong Kong childless adults. Method: Five Hundred and Four childless Hong Kong Chinese (Mean age=31.48±5.96) were recruited through community networks and social media. Data was collected between May and June 2022. The modified and translated Social Hope Scale (5-item) specifying “Hong Kong” was adopted to assess the participants’ level of social hope, with a 5-point Likert-scale of 1 (Strongly disagree) to 5 (Strongly agree). The overall internal consistency of the translated version was excellent ([Formula: see text]=.92). Self-constructed items regarding fertility intention and family formation plan were included. Results: 56.7% of the participants considered having children, yet only 28.8% of them had a concrete family formation plan. The average level of social hope was 2.24 out of 5. Regression analyses showed that social hope significantly predicted fertility intention ([Formula: see text]=.111, p<.05). As expected, there was no impact of the level of social hope on sexual desire. In a nutshell, the participants’ hopeful thinking for Hong Kong society predicts their fertility intention. Conclusion: Given the social and political uncertainties are expected to continue in Hong Kong, these findings call for an increased psychosocial and fertility education for citizens to have long-term parenting planning and policies that increase their sense of social hope thus increasing their fertility intention.

Abstract This article explains post-Umbrella Movement shifts in public opinion in Hong Kong by correlating demographic subgroups with changes in support for the status quo, utilizing Asian Barometer Survey data regarding support for the existing system of government and idealized models for the future. The aim is to determine whether public opinion shifts occurred evenly through population subgroups or were limited to participants and peers. The findings show that while Hong Kongers’ views underwent a seismic shift, the expansion of dissent was unevenly distributed across demographic cohorts, rather than representing demographically symmetric diffusion reflecting societal bridging and cross-demographic coalition building. This indicates that, while the social movement may have shifted aggregate public opinion away from the status quo, its precepts permeated differently across age, class, and especially gender lines, and that views on the status quo were also strongly linked to idealized models for their future, relative to China.

This article examines the political imaginaries of youth activists in Hong Kong in the period between the Umbrella Movement of 2014 and the mass protests that began in 2019. Drawing on interviews with young people involved in a range of political movements, it traces the emergence of what I call reinvented acts of citizenship, which emphasise autonomous everyday life practices in the community as a form of citizenship and democratic participation. These are driven by the reflexive practices that are applied in daily life, which tend to inspire a communitarian type of citizenship. Even before the repression of the democracy movement through the 2020 passage of the National Security Bill, young people engaged in this form of citizenship had decided that the pursuit of autonomy in everyday life was a preferable and realistic alternative to struggles which sought to change the structures of representative democracy and rule in Hong Kong. The article charts the emergence of these reinvented acts of citizenship, considers their relationship to other forms of mainstream and activist citizenship in Hong Kong, and speculates on their future prospects as state repression takes hold in contemporary Hong Kong after the imposition of the National Security Law.

Abstract Where the limits of today’s international order prevent direct and costly confrontations between great powers, hybrid war allows for the manipulation of situations from afar to achieve desired outcomes, such as through Colour Revolutions. While the concept of hybrid war has been thoroughly researched in the context of foreign interventions in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, there is no substantial literature applied to the case of Hong Kong. This article investigates China’s claims that there was a ‘black hand’ behind Hong Kong’s protests – specifically the 2014 Umbrella Movement, 2019 Anti-elab protests, and 2020 nsl protests – determining the extent and role of foreign forces there. Using a set of theoretical propositions derived from a theoretical framework and a narrative explanation of how factors affect mobilisation in social movements, a macro-causal analysis about the role of external forces in Hong Kong is determined. Ultimately, this article alludes to the fact that the U.S. and other foreign forces are waging a hybrid war against China, utilising the Hong Kong social movements to achieve indirect regime change.