Protest

Im Gegensatz zum internationalen Lobgesang über die soziale Wohnungspolitik in Wien, zeigt sich heute ein erschreckendes Bild: Die Mieten explodieren, günstige Wohnungen sind knapp und immer mehr Menschen können sich die Wohnungskosten nur mehr schwer leisten. Rassismus am Wohnungsmarkt und verschärfte Zugangsrichtlinien im sozialen Wohnbau machen es für viele Bewohner_innen dieser Stadt zusätzlich schwer, angemessenen Wohnraum zu finden.

While post-development theory is very concerned with the ways in
which development has impacted upon the countries of the Global
South, there has been relatively little written on post-development
theory from an African perspective. This paper identifies some of
the ways in which post-development theory fails to adequately
understand the African experience of development. In particular,
I explore the difficulty that post-development theory confronts
when faced with the continued desire on the part of many people
in Africa for development. In his introduction to the new edition of
The Development Dictionary, Wolfgang Sachs discusses this desire,
noting that despite development’s many failures, many still associate
the concept with self-affirmation and redress. He explains this
continued desire for development as being indicative of the need
for the decolonisation of the imagination. In this paper, I show some
of the problems with this explanation and present alternative ways of
understanding the persistence of the desire for development in Africa.

En partant d’une enquête ethnographique au long cours (2014-2017) portant sur le mouvement « sur la voie 96 » d’Imider, cet article interroge les modalités de politisation des communautés marginalisées. Située au sud-est du Maroc, Imider est une petite commune rurale connue pour abriter le plus grand gisement d’argent en Afrique. L’exploitation du gisement minier par le groupe Managem, filiale de la holding royale, fait face à une contestation forte de la part des communautés locales depuis ses débuts dans les années 1970. Ce faisant, c’est à partir de 2011, que les habitants d’Imider se sont organisés autour d’un mouvement « sur la voie 96 » pour revendiquer d’abord, un droit à l’eau, puis, de manière générale, une juste répartition des richesses. Les militants ont occupé le « Mont Alebban » et fermé, durant les neuf dernières années, la principale vanne de la pompe à eau ravitaillant la mine. En partant d’une description des manières dont le mouvement « sur la voie 96 » a réussi à s’imposer dans l’espace public et plus largement dans le champ politique, l’objectif visé par cet article est d’inscrire l’étude des mobilisations des communautés marginalisées dans une analyse politique plus globale. L’hypothèse défendue vise ainsi à montrer en quoi une étude qui prend au sérieux les ressorts politiques des mobilisations des marges peut aider à comprendre le processus de changement et de transformation socio-politiques en cours au Maroc depuis 2011.

Understanding how people engage in politics, and what motivates them to do so, has been an ongoing concern in the social science literature. Over the past decade, scholarly interest in boycotts and buycotts, which collectively comprise political consumerism—the deliberate purchase or avoidance of products for political or ethical reasons—has increased. However, these activities not been well conceptualized, and it is not clear what motivates people to engage in political consumerism. In this paper, I theorize that postmaterialist values increase the likelihood of engaging in political consumerism in the United States. To test this expectation, I use original, nationally representative U.S. survey data, and I find that postmaterialist values significantly increase the likelihood of engaging in political consumerism, while materialist values not, with controls in place for partisanship, ideology, and other democratic norms.

The massacre of almost 50 Maidan protesters on February 20, 2014 was a turning point in Ukrainian politics and a tipping point in the conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. This mass killing of the protesters and the mass shooting of the police that preceded it led to the overthrow of the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych and gave a start to a civil war in Donbas in Eastern Ukraine, Russian military intervention in Crimea and Donbas, and an international conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. A conclusion promoted by the post-Yanukovych governments and the media in Ukraine that the massacre was perpetrated by government snipers and special police units on a Yanukovych order has been nearly universally accepted by the Western governments, the media, and many scholars. The Ukrainian government investigation identified members of the special company of Berkut as responsible for killings of the absolute majority of the protesters, but did not release any evidence in support, with the exception of videos of the massacre.
              The question is which side organized the “snipers’ massacre.” This paper is the first academic study of this crucial case of the mass killing. It uses a theory of rational choice and a Weberian theory of instrumental rationality to examine actions of major actors both from the Yanukovych government, specifically various police and security forces, and the Maidan opposition, specifically its far right and oligarchic elements, during the massacre.
          The paper analyzes a large amount of evidence from different publicly available sources concerning this massacre and killings of specifics protesters. Qualitative content analysis includes the following data: about 1,500 videos and recordings of live internet and TV broadcasts from mass media and social media in different countries(some 150 gigabytes), news reports and social media posts by more than 100 journalists covering the massacre from Kyiv, some 5,000 photos, and nearly 30 gigabytes of publicly available radio intercepts of snipers and commanders from the special Alfa unit of the Security Service of Ukraine and Internal Troops, and Maidan massacre trial recordings. This study also employs field research on site of the massacre, eyewitness reports by both Maidan protesters and government special units commanders, statements by both former and current government officials, estimates of approximate ballistic trajectories, bullets and weapons used, and types of wounds among both protesters and the police. This study establishes a precise timeline for various events of the massacre, the locations of both the shooters and the government snipers, and the specific timeline and locations of nearly 50 protesters’ deaths. It also briefly analyzes other major cases of violence during and after the “Euromaidan.” This study includes two video appendixes.
            This academic investigation concludes that the massacre was a false flag operation, which was rationally planned and carried out with a goal of the overthrow of the government and seizure of power. It found various evidence of the involvement of an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland. Concealed shooters and spotters were located in at least 20 Maidan-controlled buildings or areas. The various evidence that the protesters were killed from these locations include some 70 testimonies, primarily by Maidan protesters, several videos of “snipers” targeting protesters from these buildings, comparisons of positions of the specific protesters at the time of their killing and their entry wounds, and bullet impact signs. The study uncovered various videos and photos of armed Maidan “snipers” and spotters in many of these buildings. The paper presents implications of these findings for understanding the nature of the change of the government in Ukraine, the civil war in Donbas, Russian military intervention in Crimea and Donbas, and an international conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine.

Despite its ubiquity as the term, ‘student movements’ are not easy to build or sustain. This is because campus activism typically features a diversity of political views and tactical preferences, and is organisationally restricted by the constant turnover of graduating cohorts. This chapter uses the 2010/11 UK student protests to explore some of the challenges students face in building a wider student movement. United initially by a common grievance of rising tuition fees, students responded quickly with a multi-repertoire mass campaign. Yet its tactical breadth generated diverging collective experiences and identities, and once the fees were passed by Government these identities proved difficult to unite as an overarching movement.

Symposium der HFBK Hamburg in Kooperation mit dem Kursbuch (Murmann Verlag)

Die Frage »Was ist Kritik?« wird gegenwartig in verschiedenen Disziplinen intensiv diskutiert. Dabei steht die vermeintliche Krise der Kritik, der Verlust ihrer normativen Grundlagen oder die Suche nach ihren Bedingungen oft im Vordergrund.

Doch was bedeutet es überhaupt, Kritik zu üben? Wer übt Kritik? Was ist performative Kritik und wie kann Kritik in künstlerischen Aktionen Ausdruck finden?

Diese Fragen sollen im Rahmen des Symposiums »Kritik üben« von Akteuren aus Kunst, Philosophie, Kulturwissenschaften und Soziologie diskutiert werden. Dabei steht das Üben von Kritik in der populären Kultur, aber auch in politischen oder gesellschaftlichen Kontexten im Vordergrund. Ziel des Symposiums ist es, durch interdisziplinären Gedanken- und Erfahrungsaustausch zu einem besseren Verständnis von Kritik als Praxis beizutragen, und den gegenwärtigen Diskurs so zu erweitern.

This essay contributes to participatory critical rhetoric (PCR) by offering a Rancièrian
aesthetic approach to the rhetoric of social protest at the 2014 People’s Climate March
(PCM). Although the PCM has been praised for its democratic commitments to social
change, I argue that police reinforced a consensual aesthetic order that acquiesced with
the status quo by partitioning sensibilities of space and mobility. Demarcating acceptable
spaces for protest and requiring marchers to keep moving at all times enforced a
hierarchical aesthetic order that limited possibilities of dissensus. However, there was
one ephemeral moment of dissensus when all of the protesters stopped and observed a
moment of silence. This rhetorical performance temporarily ruptured dominant intelligibilities of police order and consummated new subjectivities, demonstrating the
radical possibilities of dissensus through silence for climate change advocacy.

Religion’s effect on individual tendency to engage in political protest is influenced both by the resources available to citizens at the individual level and opportunities provided to religious groups and organizations at the country level. Combining data from last two waves of the World Values Surveys with aggregate data on religious regulation, we show that private religious beliefs reduce an individual’s protest potential while involvement in religious social networks fosters it. At the country level, we find that government regulation of religion decreases individual tendency to protest, and has an especially detrimental effect on the likelihood of religious minorities joining peaceful protest activities. These findings are in line with opportunity structure theories that stress the importance of system openness for fostering political protest.

Why does the Chinese government—which is known for its strong-arm tactics—need or desire to use non-state actors to carry out coercion and social control? In this piece, I argue the government seeks to deploy non-state actors to perform coercive acts or exercise social control for a wide range of reasons, such as reducing the cost of repression and evading responsibility. These non-state actors range from ‘thugs-for-hire’, to profit-seeking brokers and even commercial enterprises.

Demonstrations which spill over into conflict have always required the police to distinguish between members of the public exercising their right to protest, and members of the public engaging in criminal activity, i.e. between ‘good protesters’ and ‘bad protesters’ (Waddington, 1999). Journalists who depended heavily upon official sources when constructing news narratives have historically reproduced these distinctions (Hall et al, 1978) and as a result images of violent protesters have frequently been used to delegitimize their claims (Juris, 2005).  However a number of high profile investigations into the policing of protest in the UK mean that police officers are also being subjected to distinctions made by inquiry panels between ‘good police officers’ and ‘bad police officers’. Thus a new trope is emerging in popular print and online news narratives in which the actions of the police rather than protesters are becoming the object of the public’s attention.

These dynamics will be explored with reference to the ways in which confrontations between protesters and police were pictured in the aftermath of Ian Tomlinson’s death. It will focus in particular on the way in which images highlighting acts of concealment became a significant strand in on and off line news narrative as they developed in the years between Tomlinson’s death in 2009 and the civil suit bought against PC Harwood in 2012. It will argue that images of police officers in militarized helmets and without identity tags become synonymous with the opacity that initially characterized the police forces response to the death of Tomlinson. It will conclude by suggesting that this lack of transparency contrasted with the extended visibility offered by mobile phone footage of the demonstration and contributed to the police’s inability to frame G20 protesters as violent agitators.

In September 2019, the third Global Climate Strike organized by the Fridays For Future (FFF) protest campaign mobilized 6000 protest events in 185 countries and brought 7.6 million participants out onto the streets. This report analyses survey data about participants from 19 cities around the world and compares it to data from an international survey conducted in 13 European cities in March 2019. Both surveys collected data following the well-established “Caught in the Act of Protest” survey methodology in order to generate representative samples. What makes FFF new and particularly interesting is the involvement of schoolchildren and students as initiators, organizers and participants in climate activism on a large scale. The September mobilizations differed from the March events in the explicit call for adults to join the movement. Although older age cohorts were more strongly represented in September, young people continued to make up a substantial portion of the protestors – alm...

Sexualized naked protest using young and attractive women’s bodies have long featured in
the repertoire of protest tools for interventions in public space. Antirape feminist groups
and nonhuman-animal rights activist groups, in particular, have mobilized these bodies to
attract attention to their causes. Contemporary debates have suggested that these sorts of
protest are objectionable, and that they are entwined with contemporary rape culture. This
article complicates these accounts by considering what happens when the naked body is
presented as a grotesquery in the service of these apparently emancipatory politics.
Analyzing two instances of naked protest as case studies, this article examines what
happens to naked protest when the bodies protesting are “ugly” or are rendered so. The
analysis suggests that naked protest featuring bodies that are “ugly” harbors the possibility
of mobilizing a transgressive politics beyond contemporary rape culture. This article has
implications for better understanding how to mobilize protest in a way that is transgressive
and bold without further enshrining rape culture as the normative background against
which it takes place

The Syrian conflict has transformed the economy of Jordan’s northern border region. The changes have been painfully felt in Ramtha, 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) away from the Syrian city of Daraa. Ramtha was a prime destination for Syrian goods imported formally or informally. Petty cross-border trade, especially informal trade, was not only the basis of the city’s economy but also the foundation of an implicit contract between the authorities and locals. The state allowed such trade because it supplemented local revenues, enhancing social stability. This saved the state from investing resources that would have been needed to create jobs. By undermining this understanding, the Syrian conflict provoked growing local discontent.

The first time I saw one of the sewn fabric masks that have now become so popular during the coronavirus pandemic was not in the United States, where I currently live, but in Venezuela. It was March 2020. My mother-in-law had just gotten internet in her home in a small city in the Venezuelan Andes, and my partner and I were able to have our first video call with her. She told us how a public health official had come to her home, reminding her to get tested at the local clinic free-of-charge, while her neighbor had sewn masks for the entire block. The cloth mask hid her expressions of concern as she asked about our health and the rates of infection in the United States. At that point, my partner was still leaving home to go to work, and I had just been asked to move from in-person to online teaching in the middle of the semester. I immediately developed an upper respiratory infection and dry cough, which was diagnosed as a presumptive case of Covid-19 (presumptive because no testing was available). In Texas, we had been unable to find thermometers, masks, or antiseptic in any nearby pharmacies. While Venezuela faced an ever tightening economic and military blockade by the United States that made no exceptions for medical supplies, masks and tests were already reaching my mother-in-law in her remote town. Why was the response to a public health crisis in the United States, the leader of a global capitalist empire, more uncoordinated and less effective than in a country whose food and medical supplies had been severely compromised?

The answer leads us away from the material facts of medical supplies or national wealth and into the realms of the sacred.

Building on research analyses of Black Lives Matter media portrayals, this inquiry uses a two-wave panel survey to examine the effects news coverage has on the evaluation of the core ideas from the Black Lives Matter social movement agenda. Results show that conservative media use increases negative evaluations; models suggest this relationship works as a multidirectional feedback loop. Mainstream and liberal media consumptions do not lead to more positive views about Black Lives Matter’s core ideas.

Over the past several decades, the neoliberal paradigm has dominated global economics and has marked a period of privatization, the supremacy of finance capital and the centrality of unaccountable global financial organizations. Since 2011, the world witnessed an increase in protests across the globe, as citizens have expressed their discontent with the political structures and policies that led to inequalities and the erosion of democratic institutions. Together with millions of people from Ecuador, Colombia, Lebanon, Brazil, Hong Kong or France, different groups of civilians also participated to mass-gatherings in Chile since October 2019 to nowadays. In this paper, I will try to elaborate on how protesters are answering to global challenges through local cultural resistance in order to build counter-identity. By tracing the history of Cueca, a traditional Chilean dance, this article aims to understand how the performance of these cultural practices had been submitted to various levels of re-constructions and re-appropriations of meanings, becoming both an instrument of politicization and a form of activism. Transversally, this analysis will examine how new political actions are shaping the dynamics of protests by different actors and instruments of propagation, specific to post neo-liberal societies:  the dominant role of youth, the absence of political parties as main organizers and the widespread use of social media as means of political action.

This chapter describes framing processes of the 15M or Indignados Movement in Spain. We explore the framing processes that underlie mobilization in social media from a framing perspective. Dynamic network analysis of tweets referring to the Indignados from May 2011 and during the following events in 2012 and 2013 provides a description of framing processes which illuminates the mechanisms for collective action without conventional organization structures.

När de politiska partierna tappar medlemmar tycks medborgarna söka andra vägar för att uttrycka sitt politiska engagemang. Medan sociala medier och internet erbjuder kanaler för politisk påverkan och opinionsbildning som inte fanns innan den digitala informationstekniken, har demonstrationer använts som ett sätt att uttrycka sitt missnöje eller påverka politiken i mer än två hundra år. Det som är relativt nytt med demonstrationsdeltagandet är att dess former, betydelse och omfattning har förändrats under senare årtionden. Medan en del varit positiva till dessa förändringar har det samtidigt funnits de som menat att de nya formerna av engagemang främst mobiliserar grupper som redan har tillgång till samhällsdebatten och att befintliga klyftor därmed förstärks. Andra har menat att partisystemet fortfarande är bättre på att representera folket i sin helhet och ge röst åt flertalet, än de alternativa formerna av politisk påverkan är.
I denna artikel undersöks vilka uttryck det politiska engagemanget tar sig i dagens Skåne, utifrån enkätdata från en undersökning genomförd av SOM-institutet. I vilken utsträckning ägnar sig skåningarna åt alternativa sätt att påverka politiken, som att demonstrera och skriva politiska inlägg på internet, och hur stor andel är i dag medlemmar i politiska partier? Vilka grupper är det i dag som främst försöker påverka samhällsdebatten? Och är det medborgarnas politiska värderingar eller deras sociala bakgrund som främst påverkar deras benägenhet att demonstrera, bedriva politik på internet eller vara partimedlemmar?