How Large-Scale Land Protests Succeed in China: the Role of Domestic Media

Land protests account for a large proportion of all protests in China, but existing scholarship on the topic does not explain the conditions under which large-scale land protests succeed or fail. Focusing on the role of domestic media in four of the largest land protests in China from 2012 to 2017, we argue that protests are more likely to succeed –i.e., to accomplish some or all publicly stated goals—when the domestic media side with villagers; conversely, if the domestic media adopt the government’s framing of the events or if they do not report on them, protests are less likely to accomplish their goals. This article makes two theoretical contributions to the literature on media and protests: first, we show that domestic media may function as catalysts or watchdogs in protest outcomes in authoritarian states; and second, we differentiate between short-term and long-term protest outcomes, highlighting how initial short-term concessions are often reversed or followed by repression some months or years later, after unrest dies down.

     

Gezi Park Protests in Turkey: A Party Politics View

One year on from the widespread protests in Turkey, the question of why small environmental protests against the building of a shopping mall on Gezi Park in the centre of Istanbul turned into the biggest example of mass civil movement in the republic's history remains unanswered. This article suggests that one can easily detect signs of instability and social unrest in the country long before these mass demonstrations took place. By analysing the evolution of the Turkish party system over the past decade, I argue that the political upheaval in the country is the result of a crisis of representation. This has two aspects: a high degree of polarisation has left certain segments of society unrepresented, while the AKP government has ceased to maintain the balance between responsiveness and responsibility.     

Traditions of protest and the high‐school student movements in Spain and France in 1986–87

This article explores the social circumstances that nurture social movements in advanced capitalist societies by examining the Spanish and French high‐school student movements of 1986–87. Attention is given to the influence of unemployment, outside organisers, the political education of community leaders, and past protests that provided examples for movement participants. The article proposes that future research on European social movements focus, first, on organisational prerequisites, and, second, on the social and psychological processes by which people derive lessons from past political events.     

Occupations,mediations, subjectifications: fabricating politics

The revolutions and protests that have spread across the globe since 2008 have been seen as a watershed moment. In this article we examine the relationships between urban space and politics that have emerged across these events. We draw upon the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière to provide a framework to understand some events of this period as political moments and, in addition, attempt to build upon Rancière's work to trace out the geographical dimensions of politics. The paper concludes with a consideration of the counter-revolutionary projects enacted by current social orders.     

Spying on Nasser: British Signals Intelligence in Middle East Crises and Conflicts, 1956–67

This article examines British signals intelligence on Egypt during the 1956 Suez Crisis, the 1958 Middle East Crisis and the Egyptian intervention in the Yemen. It explains the production of signals intelligence and reviews the evidence that GCHQ could read Egyptian and other Arab communications. It then identifies some of the intelligence provided by GCHQ and considers its influence on British policy.     

The politics of social assistance in South Africa: How protests and electoral politics shape the Child Support Grant

Since the 1990s, South Africa, like many other countries from the Global South, has provided extensive social assistance for the poor. The literature on these policies, however, is largely dominated by structuralist accounts, and it largely overlooks political factors. We conducted quantitative analyses regarding the South African flagship Child Support Grant (CSG) program and investigated how contentious and electoral political dynamics jointly shape the provision of this program. Based on a logistic regression analysis, we measured the effect of protest participation, voting preference, and their interaction on the likelihood of CSG receipt. Our analysis showed that CSG receipt is much higher among “uncontentious supporters” of ANC and “contentious nonsupporters,” as well as those who join violent protests. This lends support for our argument that CSG is being used as a tool for electoral politics and containment of unrest, providing fresh evidence for political mediation theories of social policy.     

Protests against Welfare Retrenchment: Healthcare Restructuring in Sweden

The ‘new politics’ perspective in welfare state research holds that class‐based parties and unions have lost some of their influence and that they have been replaced by client organizations that are capable of resisting retrenchment pressures. However, scholars within the ‘power resource tradition’ contend that class is still fundamental and that client interests are weak in corporatist countries with a strong labour movement. It is argued in this article that scholars within the power resource approach have focused too much on social insurance programmes and traditional forms of political participation, and that this has made them blind to client protests. An empirical study of political efforts to close down nighttime emergency surgery in Swedish hospitals is presented. The Swedish counties planned to close down emergency surgery in 17 hospitals in the period 2003–04. The political proposals to close down emergency departments were met with strong protests from client groups, and politicians often withdrew their proposals of closures. In this case study, politicians claim that it was client protests that made them withdraw a decision to close the emergency surgery. This result suggests that client protests are politically important and diverges from the expectations deduced from the power‐resource approach but lends credibility to the theory of the new politics of the welfare state.     

An assessment of reasons behind service delivery protests: A case of Greater Tzaneen Municipality

This article aimed at assessing the underlying factors behind municipal service delivery protests at Greater Tzaneen Local Municipality. South African municipalities also form part of concerned public entities in terms of service delivery backlogs and protests behind service delivery. Over the past few years, South Africa has experienced a large number of protests against poor and insufficient service delivery across most municipalities in various provinces. An increase in service delivery protests in South African municipalities, as regularly seen in various media platforms such as newspapers, television, and social media, makes it necessary for policymakers, government practitioners, and scholars to understand the underlying factors behind service delivery protests. This paper is also intended to assess if whether community members protest due to poor or sufficient service delivery. It is quite evident that some people take advantage of the protests to their best interests rather than protesting for better service delivery. To accomplish the aim of this paper, a desktop research approach was applied to validate the argument and to uncover the underlying factors of service delivery protests. From the literature perspective, it is learnt that poverty, political instability, corruption, nepotism, and lack of public participatory are underlying factors behind service delivery protests. Despite some of the success of the post‐apartheid South African government, the country still faces serious challenges of high unemployment, poverty, inequality, and political instability. These are some of the key factors that culminate in citizens on streets protesting or expressing their dissatisfaction over the problem of poor service delivery.     

Unruly Practices: Gezi Protests and the Politics of Friendship

In 2013, Gezi Park housed perhaps the most significant democratic protest of the Turkish Republic’s history. The Gezi protests have drawn the attention of many democratic theorists since then. What is surprising about these theorists’ commentaries on Gezi is that in none of them is it possible to find an account of political practices that enabled actors with such different interests and worldviews to act in concert during this moment of popular action. This article argues that to attend fully to the unique features of events such as Gezi, we need to develop an alternative conceptualization of democratic action that brings to light such mediatory political practices. To develop that alternative, I turn to Aristotle and creatively appropriate his notion of “political friendship.” Interpreted as an ethico-political notion, which refers to a set of mediating practices, political friendship becomes a rich conceptual resource that lays bare the dynamics of democratic popular action.     

Identity,Culture and Democratization: The Case of Egypt

This article seeks to present an alternative approach to understanding the failure of democratization in the Arab world by locating the problem of democracy-building within the logic of the process of reproducing national identity and culture. The conceptual framework draws on the writings of Antonio Gramsci and postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said. Taking Egypt as a case study, I examine a series of events surrounding a human rights report about police brutality in Egypt to illustrate how the struggle to reproduce Egyptian national identity impacts upon the practice of democracy. In the course of searching for an “authentic” Egyptian identity, uncorrupted by Western influences, a critical mass of Egyptian civil society participates in producing a political consensus in which civil and political freedoms may be legitimately sacrificed in the name of national unity and security. This is despite attempts by some Egyptian activists to challenge dominant conceptions of national identity and culture in order to open up democratic spaces.     

Spatial and Temporal Proximity: Examining the Effects of Protests on Political Attitudes

This article utilizes data from the Latino National Survey (2006) to analyze temporal and spatial variation in the effects of the immigrant rights marches in 2006 on Latino attitudes towards trust in government and self‐efficacy. Using a unique protest dataset, we examine the effects of proximity and scale by mapping respondents’ specific geographic location against the location of the marches as well as size of the protests using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). We find that local proximity to small marches had a positive impact on feelings of efficacy, whereas large‐scale protests led to lower feelings of efficacy. The results shed light on the role localized political events can play in shaping feelings towards government, the importance of conceptions of space and time to the study of social movements, and the positive outcomes that can result from contentious politics.     

Immigrant protest: an introduction

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of ‘immigrant protests’, political mobilizations by irregular migrants and pro-migrant activists. This special issue on ‘immigrant protest’ has emerged in response to this rise in the visibility of immigrant protests, and its central aim is to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on migrant resistance movements and to consider the implications of these struggles for critical understandings of citizenship. This introduction maps out some of the central issues and themes emerging from the contributions to this issue, exploring the tensions between integrationist and autonomous approaches and theories of migrant activism and resistance and between migrant and activist strategies of invisibility and visibility. By bringing immigrant protests to the heart of debates about citizenship, we hope to further extend discussions about the limits and the possibilities of citizenship as the material and conceptual horizon of critical social analysis and political participation and practice today.     

Naked protest: the maternal politics of citizenship and revolt

This article explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers against global oil corporations in the Niger Delta. Woven together from activist materials, news reports, interviews, documentaries and historical data, I recount and mobilise these protests to think about ‘the scaling of bodies’ (Marion-Young 1990) and citizenship under neoliberalism, and the routes through which motherhood is mobilised as a site of political agency and resistance to processes of disenfranchisement. I argue that these maternal protests challenge the ‘catastrophic functionalism’ of Agamben-inspired accounts of ‘bare life’, and offer an alternative lens through which to perceive the ethical and political claims made by abject populations (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, p. 198). In thinking through and with these naked protests, this article reframes the sexual politics of citizenship and brings questions of maternity and natality to bear on citizenship studies.     

Learning More from Political Communication Experiments: Pretreatment and Its Effects

Research on political communication effects has enjoyed great progress over the past 25 years. A key ingredient underlying these advances is the increased usage of experiments that demonstrate how communications influence opinions and behaviors. Virtually all of these studies pay scant attention to events that occur prior to the experiment—that is, in “pretreatment events.” In this article, we explore how and when the pretreatment environment affects experimental outcomes. We present two studies—one where we control the pretreatment environment and one where it naturally occurred—to show how pretreatment effects can influence experimental outcomes. We argue that, under certain conditions, attending to pretreatment dynamics leads to novel insights, including a more accurate portrait of the pliability of the mass public and the identification of potentially two groups of citizens—what we call malleability reactive and dogmatic.     

The Counterrevolutionary Campus: Herbert Marcuse and the Suppression of Student Protest Movements

Abstract

With the recent surge of college protests against various forms of economic, political, social, and racial injustice, there have been persistent and pernicious reactions from other students, administrators and public figures that function to undermine the emancipatory impulses animating these demonstrations. The reactions are often justified under the banners of tolerance, chastising students to listen instead of protest. This article, focusing on Marcuse’s concepts of repressive toleration and counterrevolution, evaluates the reactionary responses to these events, as well as the critical potential of this fledgling student sensibility, a burgeoning refusal represented by protest events at American universities. We maintain that many of the calls for tolerance are actually demands for silence and belong to a wider counterrevolutionary phase of late capitalism observed by Marcuse. Bedrock liberties are dialectically inverted whereby speech and toleration are repressively deployed against demands for justice. This article concludes by arguing that it is crucial to the success of this resurgent sensibility for justice—and progress toward a radical socialist movement that coincides with the emancipatory vision of Herbert Marcuse—that the counterrevolutionary character of the responses are demystified.     

The “Digital Revolution” Reconsidered – NPS Christian Bay Best Paper Award APSA 2015, San Francisco,CA

This article responds to the 2014 American Political Science Association Annual Conference’s theme of “Politics After the Digital Revolution.” It first gives a brief assessment of how the discipline of political science has reacted to the digital revolution. It then seeks to couch the putative revolution in Thorstein Veblen’s theory of a “machine process” in order to recast it less as a discrete phenomenon to be dealt with by the discipline, but instead as part of an evolutionary process of social change that instils habits of mind of those who are subject to it, and who in turn, influence the machine process itself in a co-determinant manner. This article offers the synthesis of Veblen and the Frankfurt School to theorize how the digital revolution might be critically assessed in its evolutionary framework, and speaks towards an evolutionary critical theory for analysing political society beyond discrete events.     

Unwanted children: Political violence and the cycle of protest in Italy, 1966–1973

Abstract. The article focuses on the cycle of protest that developed in Italy during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some hypotheses on the evolution of the repertoires of action are tested with the aim of explaining the emergence of political violence during a cycle of protest. Newspaper-based data are presented on the proportional presence of violent forms of action, on the social and ideological groups involved in political violence, and on the grievances expressed during violent protests. The widespread political violence that developed in Italy in the early 1970s is explained as an internally differentiated strategic adaptation within the social movement sector, during a cycle of protests that was disorderly but far from violent.     

Priming the Parish Pump

Abstract

In this article we argue that the almost exclusive focus of political communications research on national political actors and agencies has led to an inadequate understanding of the functioning, the relevance, and the influence of local political communications strategies. This paper seeks to redress this neglect through exploring political marketing strategies of national political actors and agencies which have implications for local political communications; and political marketing strategies of local political actors and agencies and their implications for local political communications, with specific reference to the local newspaper coverage of the local campaign in the 2001 UK General Election. Drawing on a unique and extensive analysis of local newspapers' election reporting, combined with detailed interviews with journalists, editors, politicians and their agents, we argue that news management strategies enacted at a local level were characterised by an exchange relationship in which, although parties traded information for editorial space, the local news media retained a dominant role. Thus, although parties were, to differing degrees, successful in securing coverage of their candidates and policies, this success was always achieved in the context of local newspapers setting the broader agenda.     

South Korean Presidential Politics Turns Liberal: Transformative Change or Business as Usual?

The impeachment of President Park Gyeun‐hye on 10 March 2017 saw South Korean politics enter a period of crisis. Her removal from office, the result of an unprecedented mass movement of citizen protests, provided a springboard for the subsequent success of the liberal candidate, Moon Jae‐in, in the presidential election of 9 May 2017. This article suggests that political change in South Korea is only possible if actors move beyond the politics of personality, and tackle the structural reasons for the policy failures of recent times. Further, if democracy, a humane economic system and responsive political institutions are going to be developed and nourished, the country's ‘imperial presidency’ needs to be reformed. In particular, the current ‘winner‐takes‐all’ politics, with the presidency as the main locus of power, needs to be reformed in ways that promote a more balanced political system, increasing the influence of other actors and institutions.     

Strange Fruit: Homophobia,the State,and the Politics of LGBT Rights and Capabilities

A tide of oppression against sexual minorities disturbs current theories explaining the globalization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights. But unlike the turn in race theory exploring rights as an outgrowth of marginalization, research on LGBT rights still focuses on structural changes or the influence of Western LGBT forms. This article argues that a powerful new and globalizing state homophobia is a convenient tool for state actors threatened by structural adjustment mandates from above and demands for greater opportunity from below. In such contexts, state actors and allies import ready-made LGBT identities as bogeymen, but in an unintended consequence, organizing among sexual minorities refracts those identities in transformative ways. From research in France, Uganda, and Egypt, this article concludes that some contexts, where the state targets LGBT rights claims as hostile, are better served through a politics of social and political capabilities over rights and identities to allow space for sexual minorities to develop.