Search results

American Catholics witnessed a wave of radical Catholic action during the Vietnam War. Many Catholics protested the war by burning draft cards and destroying draft files. Radical Catholic action continued into the 1980s with the Plowshares actions, protests in which religious activists attempted to damage nuclear weapons and facilities. The response of ordinary Catholics to such protests, gleaned from Catholic editorial letters, was mixed. Some Catholics drew on a tradition in American Catholicism that emphasized patriotism and sought to keep religious and secular matters separate. Others supported the protests on biblical grounds and found justification in church tradition and teaching. Response to Vietnam-era Catholic protests tended to focus on the propriety of Catholic protests and the changes wrought by the Second Vatican Council, rather than the war itself. By the 1980s, however, American Catholics had become more comfortable with Catholic public protest and focused their editorial debate on the morality of nuclear weapons. Adapted from the source document.

When Google announced, in October 2018, that it would not pursue its plan to open a Google Campus in Berlin-Kreuzberg, the local anti-gentrification protesters were triumphant. The retreat was widely seen to be the result of a 2-year-long fight between the tech company and local activist groups. Next to the usual gentrification issues, the protests had additionally addressed what Google as a company stands for and focused on their data policies and the underlying (economic) rationale. The article asks what role this additional critique played in the protests. It will begin with a brief introduction to the key concepts before retracing the history of the planned Google Campus in Berlin as well as of the protests against it.

Previously rare events, mass protest movements have become popular vehicles for those seeking political, economic, and social change. How do we evaluate movement success? Most studies addressing movement outcomes are grounded in the goal attainment approach, where movement success is dependent upon fulfilling one's stated demands. The models derived from this approach heavily rely on visibility and transparency in the policymaking process. These offer limited analytical utility for scholars studying movements in authoritarian states, where policymaking is shrouded and media is state-controlled. Evaluating movements solely on their fulfillment of mission goals is highly problematic, as movements produce more outcomes than their intended goals. Movements also produce unintended benefits: concessions unrelated to the movement's mission. These include negative consequences, or societal costs. Since movements produce both positive and negative unintended outcomes, any evaluation of a movement should also incorporate the costs associated with new gains. I argue a cost–benefit approach improves scholarly conceptualization and measurement of protest success. I conceptualize protest success as multidimensional and comprised of protest gains and societal costs. I develop a 21-point scale of protest success using Mokken Scale Analysis. AISP diagnostics indicate gains and costs comprise separate subscales, which are collapsed to produce total sum scores. I score 34 nonviolent movements in authoritarian states between 2002 and 2013 on an additive scale. Protests in authoritarian settings attain considerable accomplishments; however, those gains come with significant cost. Most total success scores are negative, indicating considerable backlash is common during and immediately after the demobilization of movements in authoritarian states. Success scores improve upon the canonical binary measure by: (1) offering improved discrimination between movements, (2) identifying cases of regime 'ignoring', and (3) pinpointing misclassified cases. By incorporating negative consequences into our evaluations, we advance our understanding why movements deemed successful by scholars are disappointments to their home publics.

Cognitive liberation is often treated in the social movements literature as a mediating factor through which political opportunities and mobilizing structures generate protest. This paper unpacks multiple dimensions of cognitive liberation and finds that they may operate in tension with one another. Building on scholarship that focuses on subjective factors in social movements, the paper examines the case of the Korku, an oppressed indigenous community in central India, who choose not to protest despite the presence of several dimensions of cognitive liberation. Rather than engage in collective political action, the Korku's grievances are deflected toward depoliticized religious goals. The Korku seek communal improvement through Hindu piety in a context of the Hindutva cultural-nationalist ideology, rather than protest against the encroachment of this ideology on their community.

What role does horizontal social inequality play for political protest in middle-income countries? We argue that public social service provision is an important driver of state perceptions. When a state fails to deliver services in an equitable manner, trust in institutions erodes and protest becomes more likely. We use a mixed methods design to investigate this argument in South Africa. First, we combine police event records with census data to estimate correlations between service inequality and protests. Second, we draw on an opinion survey with 27,000 respondents to investigate the suggested mechanism linking social inequality to protest through political attitudes. Third, we focus on qualitative protest accounts in two areas identified by a matching approach to assess the plausibility of our quantitative findings. Throughout these analyses, we document a robust association between horizontal social inequality and protest.

Abstract
Why does the scale and intensity of protest vary so widely across Russian cities? This article answers this question by disaggregating political opportunity structures to consider the interaction between formal and informal political factors through a paired comparison of two similar Russian cities during the turbulent 1990s. Drawing on archival documents, interviews, and an analysis of local media, I argue that the observed variation depends on elite strategies for social control and local governmental institutions. Specifically, when a city's institutions and political elite strategy match, either with undemocratic institutions and a closed political elite strategy, or with democratic institutions and an open political elite strategy, protests are likely to be small and insignificant. In contrast, when the institutional architecture and political elite strategies mismatch, protests are more likely to be large and intense because there is an opening for protest, but not institutionalized paths for participation.

AbstractThis research examines the impact of human rights protests on human rights abuses in seven Latin American countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. I find that protests focused broadly on human rights are associated with significant declines in human rights abuses, controlling for important factors from previous studies. Furthermore, I argue that it is important to distinguish political repression (abuses that target political activists) from coercive state oppression, which has nonpolitical targets. These two types of abuses respond to different factors, but broadly focused human rights protests are found to decrease both types of abuses. I argue further that a strong human rights movement, indicated by frequent human rights protests, discourages the police abuses associated with oppression by raising the likelihood of accountability for such abuses, including by improving the likelihood of reforms to the criminal justice system.

"The icon of the female protester and her alter-ego, the female superhero, fills screens in the news, in theaters, and in digital spaces. The female protester who is Muslim, though, has been subject to a legacy of discrimination. Superheroes in the Streets: Muslim Women Activists and Protest in the Digital Age follows the stories of both famous and grassroots Muslim female protestors, bringing careful attention to protest modes and online national icons. US Muslim women have long navigated public and digital spaces aware of the complex and nuanced histories that trail them. Given the pervasive influence of mainstream feminism, Muslim women activists are often made out to be damsels in distress. Even when mass media turns its attention to the activism of Muslim women, persistence of these false narratives demeans their culture and hypersexualizes their bodies. Following the stories of US Muslim women activists, author Kimberly Wedeven Segall shows how they have been reinventing the streets and remaking racialized codifications. Segall highlights their creativity in crafting protest media of posters, rap rally songs, and digital images of superheroes, carving public spaces into inclusive and digital territories. Each chapter teases apart the complexities of public banners and digital activism"--

How do politicians make sense of situations in which they may find themselves caught up in between opposing loyalties, for example, party loyalty on the one hand and loyalty to neighbours and friends or ideological convictions on the other? Based on interviews about a rural occupation in protest of a political decision in a small community in Northern Sweden, this paper explores the approaches of local politicians to the protest and to the people involved in it. The results show how discourses of geographic space and party-political loyalty structured the negotiated responsibility for the situation, affected the politicians' descriptions of the occupation as such, and made support for the protest become more or less difficult.

Abstract
Despite their significance, life-course dynamics are rarely considered as consequences of social movements. We address this shortcoming by investigating the relationship between protest and marriage formation in Ethiopia. Building on scholarship in social movements and insights from family demography, we argue that exposure to protest delays marriage formation. To test our theoretical arguments, we created an original panel dataset using georeferenced data from the 2016 Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey. We combined the marriage histories of 4,398 young women with fine-grained measures of exposure to local protests that we compiled from two conflict datasets covering events between 2002 and 2016. Using discrete-time event history analyses, we find that protest delays first-marriage formation. Additional analyses suggest that political uncertainty and disruptions in interethnic marriages cannot explain this effect. Instead, we provide tentative evidence that protest delays marriage formation by preoccupying large segments of the marriageable population, rendering them unavailable for this critical life-course transition. Our findings pave the way for scholarship on the demographic outcomes of protest and contribute to understanding marriage patterns in a country where the timing of marriage has far-reaching social consequences.

During 1970–1985, South Africa vacillated between reform and reaffirmation of the repressive regime known as apartheid. Did these reforms slow the pace of protest, or did they facilitate protest, by intensifying discontent? Using event-history data on anti-apartheid protest we suggest that passage of reforms will increase the pace of protest while state repression will dampen it. We further hypothesize that the nature and scope of each reform would differentially affect protest by each of three official racial populations: Black Africans, Coloureds, and Asian Indians. As expected, reforms that integrated housing and jobs and reforms that legitimated the rights of black labor unions propelled protest by Black Africans against apartheid, but so did reforms that excluded Black Africans from citizenship. In contrast, relatively few reforms affected the rate of protest by Asian Indians and Coloured population groups. Finally, we found that repression decreased rates of protest significantly for all three groups.

AbstractDuring the mid-1990s, Brazil experienced a rapid intensification of protest for land reform. Official land reform efforts also accelerated, and the issue became a central topic of public concern and debate. This article seeks to account for the abrupt intensification of collective action and to explain its relationship to the other changes, focusing on the political impact of two massacres of landless protesters in 1995 and 1996. These incidents forced authorities to accelerate land reform and to exercise somewhat greater caution in repressing the movement. The shifts in state behavior then helped to accelerate collective action. This argument lends weight to the idea that state repression against a social movement can sometimes serve to engender even greater protest. It also identifies a previously undescribed causal mechanism, political opportunity, linking repression to protest.