Book chapter
The multitudes of the invisibles and the revitalization of the Indian Democratic space
This paper tries to examine the recent wave of protests in India, specifically the case against corruption and the Delhi rape case with the very diverse constituents mobilizing together for the common ethical demands (e.g., dignity and the demand for the basic obligations of the state). This paper tries to understand the unique convergence and the incidental coalescing of diverse sections of society with the motley of social and spiritual organizations lock-stepping and underpinning this assertion of the invisible multitude, thus substituting the previous actors of sociopolitical mobilization along with a major shift in the modus operandi and repertoire of the protest movement.
In book
In this paper there is analysis of motives, wheels and conditions that led to a wave of mass protests against authoritarian rulers in Arab states of Near East and Maghreb. It is shown that corruption in the state power system served as the main incentive for mass protests, and their major wheel was represented by the youth as the most educated, informed and oriented at postindustrial development models part of society. Social networks based both on postindustrial technologies, and on the traditional for the Arab world “technique” of a Friday prayer became an organizational and communication ground. Position of the army serves as a factor influencing “toughness” and duration of resistance in a determinative way. This study was carried out within “The National Research University Higher School of Economicsʼ Academic Fund Program in 2013-2014, research grant №12-01-0150”.
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.
The article focuses on people who took part in opposition rallies during the winter 2011– 2012 in Moscow and on language that they used to create protest signs and slogans. Who were the protesters? Whom did they address? What were they going to say and how? The research is based on the database that includes more than 1500 slogans containing verbal or nonverbal protest signs from mass opposition rallies. The article also includes information on “authors” (people who held placards, their age, and gender proportion), describes the “frames” which they used with a reference either to a precedent text or a precedent case, and explores the occurrence of different frames. Slogans with quotes, frequency of citing the authorities or mass culture texts, and the usage of pun are considered. Finally, the addressees of slogans are described.
This chapter aims to examine how mass protests affected processes of socio-political changes in Russia and China in the case of Hong Kong and Turkey. All three countries (with certain exceptions in the case of Hong Kong) are characterized as authoritarian states where blast of mass protests happened during the period 2011-2017. In each case, the situation with authoritarian rule has different aspects: Russia slowly moves from a democratic hybrid regime to authoritarianism since 2003 under control of president Vladimir Putin; In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is trying to unite the nation around his figure and changing political regime to achieve undisputed power; Hong Kong was under British rule till 1999 and returned into China on a particular agreement that the political regime established during the “colonial” period, which will not be reduced to all-China conditions. Nevertheless, different pathways led to similar results – shrinking space for independent political institutions and violations of fundamental rights and freedoms are not tolerated by the part of society in all three countries. Without working mechanisms to launch policy change, citizens choose protests as a way to show authorities their disagreement and anger over the authoritarian manner of policy-making.
Pro-Putin rallies before the 2012 presidential elections became campaign venues in which the Kremlin used political symbols—woven into a narrative of nationalism and tradition—to define and activate core voters across the Russian Federation.