Negotiating the Resistance: Catch 22s, brokering and contention in Occupy Safer Spaces Policy

In the post 2008 financial crisis climate we have seen a plethora of protest movements emerge globally with one of the most recognisable, particularly in the western context, being that of the Occupy movement, which sought to contest the global accumulation of wealth by the few, at the expense of the many. Such protest movements have paved the way for old and new, often contentious, dialogues pertinent for a variety of disciplines and subject matters. Drawing upon both emerging narratives from the movement within the published literature and the authors own empirical interview data with participants at a variety of Occupy sites, this article discusses to what extent the Occupy movement negotiates its existence with the hegemonic state-corporate nexus through its Safer Spaces Policy. The paper concludes that the counter-hegemonic endeavours of resistance movements can be compromised, through the coercion and consent strategies of the powerful working in tandem, resulting in a movement that both opposes and emulates what it seeks to contest. Such discussion can ultimately contribute to the longevous discourses pertaining to how hegemonic power operates not just on but through people

The history of Serbia’s youth protests illustrates the importance of learning and adaptation in protest tactics

In the wake of the Arab Spring, it is clear that protest movements can be a viable means to affect change on a national level. In this light, Olena Nikolayenko looks at the development of the Serbian youth protest movement, Otpor, from its antecedents in the early 1990s to its role in the electoral defeat of the President of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. She writes that the protest movement owes much of its success to its ability to learn from its own experiences and those of protest movements in other countries

Book review: protest: a cultural introduction to social movements

Protest: A Cultural Introduction to Social Movements shows why we can’t understand our world at all without grasping the profound impact of protest. Gurpinder Lalli think this book is particularly suited to activists who appreciate the dedication towards social movements and also those who are involved in policymaking

'Don't get arrested!' Trust, miscommunication, and repression at the 2008 anti-G8 mobilization in Japan

Transnational coordination and communication have become increasingly important themes in scholarship on social movements. The alterglobalization movement is one of the most globally networked movements in recent history. As part of its repertoire, every year thousands of people travel from around the world to protest the G8, the gathering of the world's eight most powerful leaders. When the G8 came to Japan in 2008, local activists decided to organize a mobilization similar to those previously held in Western Europe and North America. The shift from Europe to Japan, however, proved more difficult than anticipated. I explore three factors that together hindered the mobilization: trust, miscommunication, and state repression. Through an analysis of action planning meetings, I explore how interpersonal trust combined with dynamics of individual and collective risk to shape relations of inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy. I describe the interplay among trust, miscommunication, and repression to show how interpersonal trust undermined the movement's own goal of prefiguring more horizontal political structures and, paradoxically, expanded the impact of state repression by creating an individuation of responsibility that implicated movement actors themselves in narrowing the forms of protest available

The Diffusion of Contention in Contemporary China: An Investigation of the 2014-2015 Wave of Teacher Strikes

The article examines a wave of teachers’ strikes that spread across China during the fall, winter and spring of 2014-2015. Looking at event data and social media coverage of the wave, it discusses how social media enabled protesters to carry out media-savvy campaigns that involved both online and offline tactics, draw inspiration from claimants in faraway protest sites, and emulate tactics, slogans and symbols from other locations. The episode indicates that claimants in contemporary China are utilizing new media to break the geographic bounds of localized protests, and while falling short of nationally coordinated protest movements, are able to generate widespread, cross-regional protest waves that place greater pressure on subnational authorities to give in to protester demands. These cross-regional protest waves present a third category of “widespread” protests in China that are distinct from parochial/localized protests and national protest movements

How European Protest Transforms Institutions of the Public Sphere - Discourse and Decision-Making in the European Social Forum Process

Against the background of the alleged democratic deficit of EU institutions, this case study explores how politicization and emerging transnational public spaces in European protest movements innovate existing practices of discursive or grassroots deliberative democracy in national social movements. I studied the European Social Forum (ESF) process, a transnational participatory democracy platform created by civil society groups and social movement organizations. I explored discourse and decision-making in the small-scale European Assemblies in which hundreds of activists have met six times a year since 2002 to organize the ESFs, and form campaigns on issues such as global and social justice, peace, climate change, migration, health, or education. Comparing activists’ democratic norms and discourse practices in these frequently occurring European Assemblies with social forum assemblies at the national level in Germany, Italy and the UK, I arrived at a surprising result: European Assemblies reflect a higher degree of discursive inclusivity, dialogue and transparency in decision-making and discussion compared to national social forum assemblies. In this paper I discuss structural, strategic and cultural changes that occur in the process of a Europeanization from below, that is, when social movement activists work together transnationally across a certain time period. I argue that European protest as a form of contentious Europeanization has developed new social practices and actors that innovate existing practices of participatory democracy at the national level, showing the relevance of social movements to democratize European integration.democracy; integration theory; democracy; European Public Sphere; Europeanization; Europeanization

Articulating dissent: protest and the public sphere

Articulating Dissent analyses the new communicative strategies of coalition protest movements and how these impact on a mainstream media unaccustomed to fractured articulations of dissent. Pollyanna Ruiz shows how new coalitions such as Occupy, anti-war movements and anti-cuts groups, as well as older movements such as the anti-globalisation and Women's movement, are dismissed in mainstream politics and the media for not communicating ‘unified positions’. She argues that it is in the nature of these modern protest movements that they represent very different protest traditions, such as those dedicated to non-violent direct action and those who advocate more confrontational forms of intervention. Articulating Dissent investigates the ways in which this diversity, so inherent in coalition protest, effects the movement of ideas from the political margins to the mainstream. In doing so this book offers an insightful and original analysis of the protest coalition as a developing political form