Protest Publics: Toward a New Concept of Mass Civic Action

Description

This book examines the waves of protest that broke out in the 2010s as the collective actions of self-organized publics. Drawing on theories of publics/counter-publics and developing an analytical framework that allows the comparison of different country cases, this volume explores the transformation from spontaneous demonstrations, driven by civic outrage against injustice to more institutionalized forms of protest. Presenting comparative research and case studies on e.g. the Portuguese Generation in Trouble, the Arab Spring in Northern Africa, or Occupy Wall Street in the USA, the authors explore how protest publics emerge and evolve in very different ways – from creating many small citizen groups focused on particular projects to more articulated political agendas for both state and society. These protest publics have provoked and legitimized concrete socio-political changes, altering the balance of power in specific political spaces, and in some cases generating profound moments of instability that can lead both to revolutions and to peaceful transformations of political institutions. The authors argue that this recent wave of protests is driven by a new type of social actor: self-organized publics. In some cases these protest publics can lead to democratic reform and redistributive policies, while in others they can produce destabilization, ethnic and nationalist populism, and authoritarianism. This book will help readers to better understand how seemingly spontaneous public events and protests evolve into meaningful, well-structured collective action and come to shape political processes in diverse regions of the globe. Front Matter ....Pages i-xii Self-Organized Publics in Mass Protests: An Introduction (Nina Belyaeva, Victor Albert)....Pages 1-5 Front Matter ....Pages 7-7 Exploring Protest Publics: A New Conceptual Frame for Civil Participation Analysis (Nina Belyaeva)....Pages 9-31 “Shoulder to Shoulder Against Fascism”: Publics in Gezi Protests (Ekim Arbatli)....Pages 33-47 Emergent Protest Publics in India and Bangladesh: A Comparative Study of Anti-corruption and Shahbag Protests (Arnab Roy Chowdhury, Ahmed Abid)....Pages 49-66 The Grammar of Protest Publics in Skopje, Macedonia, May 2015 (Rastko Antić)....Pages 67-82 Retracing Protest Publics in Portugal: A Generation in Trouble (Cristina Montalvão Sarmento, Patrícia Oliveira, Patrícia Tomás)....Pages 83-100 Justification in Protest Publics: The Homeless Workers’ Movement in Brazil’s Crisis (Victor Albert)....Pages 101-116 So Strong, yet So Weak: The Emergence of Protest Publics in Iceland in the Wake of the Financial Crisis (Jón Ólafsson)....Pages 117-136 Five Stars of Change: The Transformation of Italian Protest Publics Through Grillo’s Blog (Giuseppe Mastruzzo)....Pages 137-154 Front Matter ....Pages 155-155 Cross-National Comparison of Protest Publics’ Roles as Drivers of Change: From Clusters to Models (Dmitry G. Zaytsev, Anastasia I. Galina, Anna A. Sokol)....Pages 157-182 Protesters as the “Challengers of the Status Quo” in Embedded Democracies: The Cases of Iceland, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Nikita Shmaltsev, Dmitry G. Zaytsev)....Pages 183-201 Protest Publics as the “Watchdogs” of the Quality of Democracy in the Polyarchies of the Global South (Sanjay Kumar Rajhans, Sambhavna Biswas)....Pages 203-231 Protest Publics as the “Triggers” of Political Changes in Hybrid Regimes: The Cases of Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt (Artem Uldanov, Łukasz Jakubiak, Hamid ait El Caid)....Pages 233-257 Protest Publics as Democratic Innovators in Authoritarian Environments (Artem Uldanov, Tatiana Davtyan, Fedor Alekseenkov)....Pages 259-276 The Transforming Role of Protest Publics in Processes of Sociopolitical Change in the Global South and Southern Europe: From Occasional Challengers to Institutionalized Watchdogs (Sanjay Kumar Rajhans)....Pages 277-296 Conclusion: The Common Features and Different Roles of Protest Publics in Political Contestation (Nina Belyaeva, Victor Albert)....Pages 297-306