This book looks at new developments in the growth and spread of popular protests from a local to a global scale.

Which elements do the Arab Spring, the Indignados and Occupy Wall Street have in common? How do they differ? What do they share with social movements of the past? This book discusses the recent wave of global mobilisations from an unusual angle, explaining what aspects of protests spread from one country to another, how this happened, and why diffusion occurred in certain contexts but not in others. In doing this, the book casts light on the more general mechanisms of protest diffusion in contemporary societies, explaining how mobilisations travel from one country to another and, also, from past to present times. Bridging different fields of the social sciences, and covering a broad range of empirical cases, this book develops new theoretical perspectives.

Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of social media, protestors have been able to create an alternative space for people to engage with politics that is more inclusive and participatory than traditional politics. This volume focuses on the role of visual culture in a highly mediated environment and draws on case studies from Europe, Thailand, South Africa, USA, Argentina, and the Middle East in order to demonstrate how protestors use aesthetics to communicate their demands and ideas. It examines how digital media is harnessed by protestors and argues that all protest aesthetics are performative and communicative.

This is an open access book. The start of the 21st century has seen the world shaken by protests, from the Arab Spring to the Yellow Vests, from the Occupy movement to the social uprisings in Latin America. There are periods in history when large numbers of people have rebelled against the way things are, demanding change, such as in 1848, 1917, and 1968. Today we are living in another time of outrage and discontent, a time that has already produced some of the largest protests in world history. This book analyzes almost three thousand protests that occurred between 2006 and 2020 in 101 countries covering over 93 per cent of the world population. The study focuses on the major demands driving world protests, such as those for real democracy, jobs, public services, social protection, civil rights, global justice, and those against austerity and corruption. It also analyzes who was demonstrating in each protest; what protest methods they used; who the protestors opposed; what was achieved; whether protests were repressed; and trends such as inequality and the rise of women’s and radical right protests. The book concludes that the demands of protestors in most of the protests surveyed are in full accordance with human rights and internationally agreed-upon UN development goals. The book calls for policy-makers to listen and act on these demands.

During the last two decades Europe has experienced a rise in transnational contention. Citizens are crossing borders to advance alternative visions of Europe. They spread protest concepts and tactics and explore new ways of organizing dissent. Far from being a recent phenomenon, transnational protest is obviously more salient in a world of international corporations and global political interaction, compounded by electronic communication and cheap travel. The transnational condition permeates all aspects of protest organization and dynamics-from individual biographies to activist networks to cycles of contention. The contributors offer insight into this multi-faceted condition by combining rich empirical evidence with reflections on the problems of transnational research.

It is widely recognized that social movements may spread - or 'diffuse' - from one site to another. Such diffusion, however, is a complex and multidimensional process that involves different actors, networks, and mechanisms. This complexity has spawned a large body of literature on different aspects of the diffusion process, yet a comprehensive framework remains an elusive target. This book is a response to that need, and its framework focuses on three basic analytical questions. First, what is being diffused? Second, how does diffusion occur? Finally, what is the impact of diffusion on organizational development and shifts in the scale of contentious politics? This volume suggests that diffusion is not a simple matter of political contagion or imitation; rather, it is a creative and strategic process marked by political learning, adaptation, and innovation.

Over the past decade, there has been an unprecedented mobilization of street protests worldwide, from the demonstrations that helped bring progressive governments to power in Latin America, to the Arab Spring, to Occupy movements in the United States and Europe, to democracy protests in China. This edited volume investigates the current status, nature and dynamics of the new politics that characterizes social movements from around the world that are part of this revolutionary wave. Spanning case studies from Latin America, North and South Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and North America, this volume examines the varied manifestations of the current cycle of protest, which emerged from the Global South and spread to the North and highlights their interconnections – the globalized nature of these social movements. Analytically converging around Sidney Tarrow’s emphasis on protest cycles, political opportunity structures and identity, the individual chapters investigate processes such as global framing, internationalization, diffusion, scale shifts, externalizations and transnational coalition building to provide an analytic cartography of the current state of social movements as they are simultaneously globalizing while still being embedded in their respective localities. Looking at new ways of thinking and new forms of challenging power, this comprehensive volume will be of great interest to graduates and scholars in the fields of globalization, social movements and international politics.

Migrant protest has proliferated worldwide in the last two decades, explicitly posing questions of identity, rights, and equality in a globalized world. Nonetheless, such mobilizations are considered anomalies in social movement studies, and political sociology more broadly, due to 'weak interests' and a particularly disadvantageous position of 'outsiders' to claim rights connected to citizenship. In an attempt to address this seeming paradox, this book explores the interactions and spaces shaping the emergence, trajectory, and fragmentation of migrant protest in unfavourable contexts of marginalization. Such a perspective unveils both the odds of precarious mobilizations, and the ways they can be temporarily overcome. While adopting the encompassing terminology of 'migrant', the book focusses on precarious migrants, including both asylum seekers and 'illegalized' migrants.

Eight years after the Arab Spring there is still much debate over the link between Internet technology and protest against authoritarian regimes. While the debate has advanced beyond the simple question of whether the Internet is a tool of liberation or one of surveillance and propaganda, theory and empirical data attesting to the circumstances under which technology benefits autocratic governments versus opposition activists is scarce. In this book, Nils B. Weidmann and Espen Geelmuyden R d offer a broad theory about why and when digital technology is used for one end or another, drawing on detailed empirical analyses of the relationship between the use of Internet technology and protest in autocracies. By leveraging new sub-national data on political protest and Internet penetration, they present analyses at the level of cities in more than 60 autocratic countries. The book also introduces a new methodology for estimating Internet use, developed in collaboration with computer scientists and drawing on large-scale observations of Internet traffic at the local level. Through this data, the authors analyze political protest as a process that unfolds over time and space, where the effect of Internet technology varies at different stages of protest. They show that violent repression and government institutions affect whether Internet technology empowers autocrats or activists, and that the effect of Internet technology on protest varies across different national environments.

This collection is designed to offer a comparative analysis of street-level protest movements, setting them in international, socio-economic, and cross-cultural perspective in order to help us understand why movements emerge, what they do, how they spread, and how they fit into both local and worldwide historical contexts.