Diversity and Dynamics in Protest Movements: a Comprehensive Analysis of the Citizenship Amendment Act Protests in India

Abstract

The dissertation analyzes how protester composition and diversity influence contentious political movement dynamics through large-N comparative analysis and case studies. It focuses on protest actions in India, particularly the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) protest movement. It examines the diversity of participants, motivations, and tactics that characterized the CAA protests, and explores the factors that contributed to this campaign. The second chapter provides an overview of the theoretical and conceptual framework for understanding social movements, with a focus on the CAA protests. It discusses theories related to collective identity, regionalism, economic grievances, and protest strategies and offers a framework called regional identity- based theory of revolution to qualitatively analyze the diversity and dynamics within the CAA protests. The second chapter employs a comprehensive text analysis of over 3,000 English news articles covering the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests and the Farmers' protests in India. It uses topic modeling to map the underlying narratives, motivations, and fault lines within and across these two protest campaigns. The analysis aims to provide insights into the factors driving the unity and fragmentation of protesters, as well as the complex interplay of factors such as shared identities, grievances, leadership, and framing processes. The fourth chapter introduces a novel approach to measuring protest campaign fragmentation using Google Trends data. By utilizing Google Knowledge Graph, it identifies relevant search queries and topics related to specific protest campaigns. The study offers a behavior-based measure by providing a single score for the campaigns based on their unification and fragmentation. This approach aims to address the limitations of traditional methodologies and provide a scalable and comparable tool for analyzing the internal dynamics of social movements. The dissertation contributes to the literature on social movements and contentious politics by offering a contextualized understanding of protest dynamics in diverse societies across the world