Urban Protest Research Articles

Demographic features or spatial structures? Unpacking local variation during the 2022 Iranian protests

Why do protests emerge and endure in some localities but not others? This study focuses on urban protests in the city of Tehran, Iran’s capital and largest city, during the 2022 uprising to explain why protests emerged and endured in some neighbourhoods but not others. Using an original geocoded dataset of 339 protest events at the neighbourhood level, I test two competing sets of demographic and spatial explanations. The results reveal that protests are more likely to emerge and persist in neighbourhoods with a higher percentage of educated citizens, closer proximity to university campuses and convenient access to metro stations. I provide theoretical explanations on how education boosts political awareness, university campuses act as networking hubs influencing surrounding areas and metro stations facilitate critical gathering points for protests. The findings remain consistent even when I control for a range of variables and use alternative specifications.

The urbanization of conflict? Patterns of armed conflict and protest in Africa

Abstract Is the geography of armed conflict in Africa becoming more urban? To answer this question, I link georeferenced data on the timing and location of armed conflict and protest events to continent-wide geospatial data on human settlement patterns. Comparing rates of conflict and contention in rural versus urban areas over time, I argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom, claims surrounding the ‘urbanization of conflict’ in Africa are premature. I find that the urbanization of conflict hypothesis only holds in North Africa, where armed conflict and protest are both increasingly urban phenomenon. In contrast, while the frequency of urban protest in sub-Saharan Africa has also increased substantially, conventional armed conflicts in rural areas have also risen over the same period. My study provides a quantitative summary of key patterns and trends in protest and conflict in Africa contributing to ongoing debates surrounding the frequency and character of violent and non-violent political contests on the continent.

7 - Disputas de e por espaços político-identitários: o rap e os movimentos sociais em Cabo Verde

Independent since 1975 and democratic since 1991, Cabo Verde has not escaped the waves of urban protests that plagued African capitals in the second half of the 2000s. Rap, perceived as the new expression of protest by urban youth, consolidates itself in the 2000s as one of the main actors in the Cape Verdean political scene and becomes an important vehicle for mobilizing and building an urban culture of resistance, amplifying these issues. This article, based on an ethnographic research in the cities of Praia (Santiago Island) and Mindelo (São Vicente Island), seeks to answer three questions: on how rap has shown the identity, social and urban contradictions; how it has articulated with other types of social movements; 3) what is the place of women in rap and street politics?

Conceptualising overlapping politics: Cross-class political relationships in urban Pakistan

Citizen-led activism to demand and secure adequate housing rights, infrastructure, and services in Islamabad forms part of a longstanding socio-political movement in Pakistan. This activism brings together different classes of urban residents. Drawing from qualitative research comprising of 129 interviews, this article reveals an emerging ‘overlapping politics’, defined as the political relationship between two (or more) distinct socio-economic classes of citizen(s) in response to any form of injustice or inequality. This (re)conceptualises everyday forms of urban political practice by countering existing assumptions that urban politics is rooted in class homogeneity. Inspired by the Islamabad case, I argue that ‘overlapping politics’ emerges largely as an alternative to, and progression from, clientelistic politics through four modes where ‘overlapping’ occurs across class lines: knowledge and information; networks and membership; support; and ownership and responsibility. The outcomes of ‘overlapping politics’ manifest spatially in the city, for example through increased interaction between urbanites, privately organised service provision, and urban protests. Although the practice of ‘overlapping politics’ has limitations, it provides an important new conceptual tool and language for understanding and analysing forms of politics that are embedded in cross-class relationships between urban citizens.

Whose Streets? Our Streets! . . . or Maybe Not? Legitimizing Racialized Gendered Policing in Modern Cities

“Whose streets? Our streets!” This special forum centered on The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification conjures this popular urban protest chant that may (or may not) be familiar to many readers. While the response—“our streets!”—is forceful, it is far from a clear-cut truism or uncomplicated declaration. Herein, Fischer and five interlocutors discuss the historical and spatial complexities regarding who has a right to define, navigate, and regulate urban spaces. They take up the questions—to whom do the streets belong—by considering regimes of police power at the nexus of sex, moral reform, and so-called “troublesome” terrains in three twentieth-century U.S. cities. They also engage how, as Fischer states, law-enforcement practices of sexual policing decriminalized white womanhood while criminalizing Black womanhood, and thereby expanded police authority, racialized gendered state violence, carceral feminism, gentrification, and spatialized racial and economic inequalities.

Urban social movements as extended class actors: struggles over reproduction in Buenos Aires, New York City and Hamburg

Along with a resurgence in urban social movements (USMs) since the Global Financial Crisis in 2007–08 has come renewed interest in what form(s) of social struggle these movements represent. This is because USMs cannot be straightforwardly explained by the contradiction between capital and labour, as they happened outside the workplace. With the aim of conceptualising USMs, a comparative and empirical case study was conducted on urban development and protest in New York City, Buenos Aires and Hamburg. Approaches ranging from spatial theory to urban sociology and political economy informed the theoretical framework. The study was empirically based on 47 interviews with activists, as well as the observation of participants at protest events and document analysis (both of publications by urban protest initiatives and urban development statistics). Emerging similarities regarding the relational and cognitive structures of investigated protests suggest that contemporary USMs are collective actors counteracting urban dispossession and are thus linked to the capitalist mode of accumulation. Therefore, the article argues for an understanding of USMs as extended class struggles over social reproduction in the city. This terminology is intended not only to highlight that USMs are expressions of the crisis of social reproduction in cities, but also to categorise the characteristic features of USMs – which represent struggles for the use value of a city. USMs can, moreover, contribute to social change, especially if they are able to provide alternative means of social reproduction through the appropriation of urban space.

Cities fight for autonomy: A view from an ongoing protest in Israel

In this commentary, I use the current protest movement in Israel as an entry point to discuss urban autonomy and social protest in an age of growing polarization between progressive cities and reactionary states. While the nationwide protest is not explicitly framed in urban versus national terms, it has a clear urban dimension. Tel-Aviv-Jaffa is not only the place where the protest movement is the strongest, but the municipality also leverages the protest to demand enhanced autonomy against the right-wing government’s illiberal agendas. I suggest that viewing urban protest through an urban autonomy lens is useful to fully unpack the current wave of protest and situate it within the larger political processes that shape it.

Cultural Policy Formation and State-Society Relations: Culture-led Urban Redevelopment of Enninglu in Guangzhou

Using the Enninglu redevelopment project as a case, this article examines how local governments in China pacify urban protests, consolidate the political legitimacy of urban agendas, and re-regulate state-society relations through cultural policy-making. The Enninglu urban renewal project has experienced three waves of social resistance since 2006. Accordingly, the government has made three rounds of urban policy changes, successively incorporating heritage preservation policies, creative economy policies, and public participation policies in response to different social demands. The case of Enninglu illustrates that cultural city-making in China is not merely “state-led,” but is assembled in a process of conflict between the state and society at the local level. This article argues for bringing the perspective of “state-society relations” to the study of Asian cultural/creative cities and further proposes a “legitimacy framework” to conceptualize the mechanisms of urban cultural policy-making in the context of social resistance.

Critical Junctures: Independence Movements and Democracy in Africa

AbstractWe show that current levels of democracy in Africa are linked to the nature of its independence movements. Using different measures of political regimes and historical data on anticolonial movements, we find that countries that experienced rural insurgencies tend to have autocratic regimes, while those that faced urban protests tend to have more democratic institutions. The association between the type of independence movement and democracy is statistically significant for the post‐Cold War period and robust to a number of potential confounding factors and sensitivity checks. We provide evidence for causality in this relationship by using an instrumental variables approach and a difference‐in‐differences design with fixed effects. Furthermore, we adjudicate between two potential mechanisms and find support for a behavioral path dependence hypothesis. Urban protests enabled participants to develop norms of peaceful political behavior, which provided cultural bases for liberal democracy. In contrast, armed rebellions generated behavioral patterns that perpetuated political exclusion and the use of violence as a form of political dissent.

Anatomy of an urban mobilization network

How can urban mobilizations move their cities towards democratic and sustainable governance structures? This question has been under discussion in theoretical urban studies since the 1980s. According to these studies, networks of successful urban mobilizations consist of (1) densely connected specialized groups of urban organizations and (2) bridging ties between these local groups. The bridging ties are essential for the emergence of place-based collective identities and pushing urban organizations beyond the confines of their local agendas to become agents of meaningful social change at a larger scale. In this study we test and advance these arguments empirically using theoretical and methodological tools from the field of network science. We use a novel urban protest event data set based on police records and local newspapers from Ankara, Turkey. Our analyses show that the observed network consists of specialized urban groups that are densely connected with each other but the number of bridging ties between these groups are insufficient. Using network regression, we illustrate that most organizations in the network tend to form ties with organizations that have similar characteristics to themselves. Further analysis of the urban mobilization network reveals that the limited number of organizations that facilitate the bridging ties between specialized sub-groups are mostly professional organizations (e.g., the Chamber of Architects). We explain the distinctive attributes of these organizations based on the political context of their historical origins and the characteristics of their membership base. Our paper concludes with some policy recommendations emphasizing the necessity of networked approaches when evaluating urban organizations' capacity for social change.

Ready to protest? Explaining protest potential in Russian regional capitals

ABSTRACT The 2021 urban political protests in Russia in support of Alexei Navalny have swept the country, beginning in the Far East and reaching Moscow. They, however, displayed large variation in the number of protesters taking to the streets in the country’s regional capitals. While the immediate driver of urban protests is usually a political event or a decision of authorities, the willingness to protest accumulates before that, creating protest potential. To explain why some Russian regional capitals accumulate protest potential while others do not, we perform Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 53 cases. It reveals that a high share of young and educated people and the presence of organized civil society, but not the Internet consumption or the performance of city authorities, are crucial for the accumulation of protest potential in Russian regional capitals. These findings advance our understanding of urban political potential in autocracies as well as of Russia’s political geography.

استراتيجيات الفعل الاحتجاجي لمقاومة السياسة الحضرية بالمغرب

This article aims to address the act of social urban protest. The light is shed on the protest strategy deployed by the dwellers of marginal neighbourhoods to decry the interference of the state in their lives. In order to address such a problem, we rely on observations and interviews to build up the corpus for such an exploratory survey. As for the theoretical framework we use theories and concepts deployed by the social studies concerned with marginal areas. Accordingly, the site and the infrastructure of “Bloc Mkhaznia” display a moral standard that instigates the protest which emphasises the institutional framework and a feeling of superiority as a strategy to decline the project of rehousing in the suburban site of ENNASSER in Casablanca.

The narrow margin of urban protest art: A comparative study of the role of street art in two neighborhoods of Barcelona and Madrid

ABSTRACT There is broad consensus regarding the fact that street art is a form of social, political and cultural protest and critique. However, rather than one single form, street art consists of a wide range of complex and contradictory styles featuring a diversity of interests, derivations and conflicts with underlying factors of both a structural and contextual nature. Taking as examples the cases of Pinacoteca a Cel Obert and Pinta Malasaña, in Barcelona and Madrid respectively, this article explores the production of urban art and notes how, as part of plans to revitalize neighborhoods, it assumes different versions in harmony with the characteristics and circumstances of the surrounding areas. Using a qualitative methodology, it explores the conception, development and results of both projects, revealing the heterogeneity of explanatory factors, the complexity of their implementation, and the role, which is not exempt from conflict and rivalry, of street artists in the urban space.

Population pressure, political institutions, and protests: A multilevel analysis of protest events in African cities

Why do some of Africa's urban areas experience higher rates of protest incidence than others? Numerous authors have highlighted the role of urbanisation and democratisation in determining cross-national variation in the rates of urban protest. Yet understanding has been hindered by failures to measure mechanisms at the appropriate spatial scale, analyse a sufficiently representative sample of urban centres, de-confound local and country-level factors, and consider what it is about specific urban centres that shapes variation in protest incidence. This paper presents new evidence on the determinants of protests in African urban centres by linking georeferenced data on urban settlements from the Urban Centres Database to the location of protest events taken from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset. Fitting a series of multilevel regression models with cross-level effects, we simultaneously estimate variation in protest incidence as a function of local- and country-level factors and the interactions between them. Our results indicate that variation in protest incidence between urban centres can be explained by a combination of local-specific and country-level contextual factors including population size and growth, regime type, civil society capacity, and whether an urban centre is politically significant. These findings advance our understanding of how political and demographic factors interact and influence protest incidence in urban Africa.

URBAN PROTESTS UNDER NEOLIBERAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN CENTRAL ASIA: FRAMING ANALYSIS

The advent of neoliberal reforms in Central Asia resulted in variegated economic, social, and political transformations. Although meant to encourage fast marketization of economy and empower the population, their adverse consequences seem to have spurred social mobilizations in the region. This paper seeks to provide an overview of theoretic frameworks for the analysis of urban protests as a form of activism in the region. Authoritarian neoliberalism accurately captures the roots of social activity in the cities which provide and reveal the scope and of neoliberal changes. Unlike those described in mainstream literature, local social mobilizations are grassroot in nature, occurring without the support of institutionalized actors.

Heritage from below in Latin America: Urban protests and the struggle for Human Rights

After the end of Latin American dictatorships, scholars closely analyzed the relationship between violence, memory and democracy. But these societies have continued to grapple not only with the legacy of authoritarian governments but with centuries of colonial power, with the result that many of the assumptions of earlier scholars are now being revisited. Intersectional questions of race, indigeneity and gender continue to refashion our understanding of memory and injustice. These questions frame this introductory article, in which we argue that Latin American contemporary social mobilisation that has denounced recent and long-term violence is constituted through intervention and creation of heritage from below. We propose that the interdisciplinary field of Critical Heritage Studies, that has burgeoned recently in the region, offers a means to understand how space, scale, and society interact to create meanings and work through violent pasts. The works of this Special Collection extend traditional conceptions of urban heritage as the mere conservation of cities’ landscape, towards the study of the relation between cultural geographies and the production of social mobilizations in Latin America. These geographies enable unique formulations of protest for activists, creating new capacities to contest recent and long-term human rights abuse. Resumen: Herencia desde abajo en Latinoamérica: Protestas urbanas y la lucha por los Derechos HumanosTras el fin de las dictaduras latinoamericanas, las/os académicos de la región analizaron de cerca la relación entre violencia, memoria y democracia. Pero estas sociedades han seguido lidiando con el legado de los gobiernos autorita-rios y con siglos de abuso colonial, por lo que muchos de los supuestos de estos primeros estudios ahora están siendo examinados. Preguntas sobre la interseccionalidad racial, indígena y de género continúan reformulando nuestra comprensión sobre la relación entre la memoria y la injusticia. Estas preguntas guían este artículo introductorio, en el que sostenemos que la movilización social contemporánea en Latinoamérica que ha denunciado las violencias recientes y de larga data se constituyen a través de la intervención y la creación de patrimonio desde abajo. Proponemos que el campo interdisciplinario de Estudios Críticos del Patrimonio, que ha florecido recientemente en la región, ofrece un medio para comprender cómo el espacio, sus diferentes escalas y la sociedad interactúan para crear significados y elaborar sus pasados de violencia y opresión. Los trabajos de este número especial amplían las concepciones tradicionales del patrimonio urbano como la mera conservación del paisaje de las ciudades, hacia el estudio de la relación entre geografías culturales y la producción y performance de movilizaciones sociales en la región. Estas geografías constituyen de forma única las protestas y sus significados, creando nuevas capacidades para luchar en contra de las violencias recientes y coloniales.

From the square to the shopping mall: new social media, state surveillance, and the evolving geographies of urban protest

ABSTRACT Despite the rise of social media as a major factor in protests since the early 2010s, scholars have documented the continued importance of urban space and “place-based networks” for social movements. However, the 2019–2020 Hong Kong Anti-ELAB protests saw a shift from occupying symbolic public space to a more variegated use of urban spaces in the city. Combining network analysis of Telegram channels and georeferencing of protest events, this study shows how new digital media platforms such as Telegram enabled a diverse array of protest activities, as well as a shift from formal centrally located civic spaces to a wider range of everyday spaces including malls, offices, and industrial buildings. This study also asks why this occurred, situating the shifting geography of protests as a response to several factors: new social media technologies, strengthening of state surveillance of physical and digital space, and collective learning from the perceived failures of past movements. The implications of these shifts for the future of urban social movements and the “public sphere” are discussed.

No privacy, no peace: Urban surveillance and the movement for Black lives

ABSTRACT In mid-2020, the movement for Black liberation reached a new stage after the murder of George Floyd generated unprecedented urban protests against racial injustice. Two years on, these appeals have not translated into widespread policy change. We analyze the movement’s relationship to the U.S. state, focusing on state surveillance of the movement. To grasp this, we consider four distinct but intersecting historical processes: first, the long-standing repression of Black people by the U.S.; second, a political shift in the management of urban protest after September 11, 2001; third, the rapid enhancement of technological means for surveillance; and fourth, the emergence of an evolved political form of authoritarianism since ca. 2009. The political economic conjuncture of these processes is not conducive to the movement for Black lives. This movement, and the campaign to reduce state surveillance, are therefore interdependent struggles for collective liberation.

Competing climate spectacles in the amplified public space

The climate change debate is finding new expressions through political protests and demonstrations, during which a plurality of climate narratives emerges. While protests such as Extinction Rebellion have had a strong physical manifestation, involving many people showing up in concrete locations, they have also been facilitated and mediated virtually. In this paper, we examine the spectacle generated when divergent discourses on climate change compete for attention in spaces that are simultaneously urban and virtual. The paper is based on empirical evidence from events surrounding London Fashion Week 2019, focusing on the political mobilization by Extinction Rebellion Boycott Fashion (XRBF) and other groups. Discussing this changing nature of urban protest spectacle, we point to the emergence of an ‘amplified public space’ shaped at the intersection of material and virtual spaces of the city. Both the fashion industry and XRBF employ techniques of spectacle in their strategies to advance their respective climate change and sustainability narratives. We argue that XRBF, in particular, has managed to influence the climate change debate by strategically staging spectacular protest events that are both facilitated and played out in virtual space.

Urban Protest. A Spatial Perspective on Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow

I boken Urban Protest: A Spatial Perspective on Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow utvecklas och testas ett teoretiskt ramverk för att kartlägga hur massprotester påverkas av den plats där de utspelar sig och den politiska kontexten. Modellen är gedigen och utan tvekan ett bra verktyg för att förstå hur en specifik plats bidrar till att möjliggöra eller begränsa protesters utveckling. Författaren borde nöjt sig med detta och inte strävat efter att modellen också ska förklara varför protester »lyckas» eller »misslyckas». En sådan kausalitet framställer, felaktigt, massprotester som någon slags demokratisk »quick fix» trots att politisk förändring i de allra flesta fall i stället är resultatet av en lång utvecklingsprocess. Urban Protest: A Spatial Perspective on Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow develops and tests a theoretical framework for mapping how mass protests are affected by the political context and the space in which they take place. This model provides a useful tool for understanding how a specific location contributes to facilitating or impeding a protest. However, the author should have stopped here, and not additionally tried to use the model to explain why protests 'succeed' or 'fail'. Such causality depicts mass protests as some kind of democratic 'quick fix – but, in the vast majority of cases, political change comes about as the result of a longer-term process.