Book chapter
Measuring Alertness: The Readiness of a Social Group to Participate in Protest Activity
In this paper, we propose a theory-based measure of alertness, the ability of a protest event to facilitate further contentious activity and attract higher numbers of protesters for further events. Our measure allows to pinpoint key features of contentious events and distinguish protest that leads to political instability. We use political protest in Ukraine as an empirical example to demonstrate our measure’s sensitivity to protest scale, activity and the nature of protesters’ demands
In book
The capter is dedicated to the description of the fragmentation of the Russian media-based public sphere, in particular - to the dymanics of media use of the participants of the 'For fair elections' political protest movement in Russia of 2011-2012. Authors counclude that: 1) socio-economic divisions in today's Russia are mirrored in the media use patterns; 2) traditional textocentricism of Russian intelligentsia shows up and shapes media preferences and opinion leading: 3) changes in political behavior online (weakly) correlates with differences in online media use patterns; 4) a nation-wide public counter-sphere has formed in the Russian big cities. A prediction is made that fragmentation of the Russian public sphere will be deepening.
Alongside the Arab Spring, the 'Occupy' anti-capitalist movements in the West, and the events on the Maidan in Kiev, Russia has had its own protest movements, notably the political protests of 2011–12. As elsewhere in the world, these protests had unlikely origins, in Russia’s case spearheaded by the 'creative class'. This book examines the protest movements in Russia. It discusses the artistic traditions from which the movements arose; explores the media, including the internet, film, novels, and fashion, through which the protesters have expressed themselves; and considers the outcome of the movements, including the new forms of nationalism, intellectualism, and feminism put forward. Overall, the book shows how the Russian protest movements have suggested new directions for Russian – and global – politics.
In this conclusion we provide a summary of the chapters and consider the benefits of applying the protest publics’ conceptual lens to the waves of protest that have broken out across the world in recent years. More specifically, we focus on the features of protest publics that were outlined in the introductory theoretical chapter and the extent to which these features can be found in the different country cases presented in the volume and how they help to understand local sociopolitical contexts. In this volume we argue that protest publics are a new phenomenon, though one that is variably connected with existing forms of social activism, and it allows for new kinds of collective civic engagement: protest publics, even though loosely organized and in certain circumstances can provide only modest immediate political results, still can be perceived as a collective actor that is capable of bringing about social and political change. As protest publics are often fluid and dynamic, at least compared with other, more institutionalized social and political actors, it is important to examine and thematize the dimensions of this fluidity. Further, the application of the protest publics framework in different political regimes will have strengths or limitations depending on the different functions that protest publics perform, which also needs to be specified. Finally, as this volume urges a renewed focus on protest studies, we will conclude with some principle questions that can be pursued in future research.
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.
Samuel A. Greene, one of the leading British experts on Russia and post-Soviet space, presents a thoughtful and comprehensive study of the evolution of Russian civil society in Moscow in Movement: Power and Opposition in Putin’s Russia. Greene’s book presents a noteworthy reflection on Russia’s political regime, elite strategies, and social movement organization. It balances theoretical speculations on the nature of the Russian political regime with a new, refreshing perspective on the acute problems of state-society relations, explored through several case studies.