Introduced by Veronica Anghel*.

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic calmed street protests from Hong Kong to Iraq to the US or Chile. Mass protests seemed indefinitely on hold, as activists reimagined ways to dispute government policies. However, when faced with resilient injustice such as US police brutality against black lives, protesters are still asking for immediate retribution in the streets. So are Hong – Kongers, in their last - and probably final attempt - to resist Chinese total political take-over.   In this special issue, the goal is to draw parallels between manifestations of popular contention at different times and places and to invite future considerations into the complexities of protest movements. We rediscover insights from G&O articles published as the 1960s student riots unfolded, through the recent post-communist colour revolutions and the Arab Spring.

For this collection, we draw inspiration from recent instances of popular activism. In Poland, protesters stood two meters apart holding placards or hung posters on bikes and posted videos online in a virtual protest against legislation to ban sexuality education and further restrict abortion rights. Hong Kong pro-democracy activists continued to stage physically distanced protests while careful not to form groups of more than four, under the watchful eye of the authorities. Climate activists organised digital strikes and live-streamed speakers. Other human rights activists reworked their campaigns around messages aimed at officials, and phone-banking, in which they telephone en masse. Celebrity singers have lent their voices to human rights campaigns and performed at online events streamed worldwide. The US is witnessing a rise of anti-government protest comedians who gather weekly huge audiences even as they moved their studios at home. Anti - lockdown protesters also proved their social media savvy by spreading their message among internet subcultures. Some US citizens used powerful visual tools such as guns and full military gear to attract attention. The brutal death of George Floyd sparked angry riots throughout the US. This amplified the legacy of the 1992 LA riots in several US states, echoing this article by Desmond King where he warns of the consequences of absent federal civil rights activism.  Through social media, the video of a black man being suffocated by the police spread like wild-fire and turned a local story in world-wide news.  Armed with smart phones, people can now provide real time visual evidence of systemic injustice and activism. These look very different from the Hollywood manufactured images of a highly homogeneous US society.

Already a big part of contemporary activism, the vital role of technology and digital communication has been reinforced. Militants intensify online efforts to get their messages across and stage low resource - high impact - flash protests in public places that they can subsequently popularize online. But in many ways, popular protests encompass similar practices through time, on and offline. Media presence and visibility is highly important, with structural factors often amplifying the efforts of a relatively small group of activists. Consider the student revolts of the 1960s and the power asymmetry such movements confronted.  When Seymour Martin Lipset wrote about the radical activities of American university students in the 1960s he also observed that opposition to the Vietnam War and celebrated events such as the Berkley student revolt were the workings of a minority. Enrique Tierno Galván carried a similar analysis in the case of Spanish student revolts to notice the more complex structural factors that led to some voices being heard during the Franco dictatorship, albeit their underwhelming numbers. Kurt Sontheimer highlights how important media presence was to make the efforts of West German student revolts stand out, despite these rather being inner-university affairs. The wide shadow of 1968 also fomented student anarchic movements in Japan. In this article written at that time, Chushichi Tsuzuki observes how echochambers of activism can form under conditions of ideological radicalization. 

Contemporary online activism also entails similar risks of repression and self-censorship. Evin Ong shows how in some societies, the expected costs of online political expression can outweigh its benefits and lead to self-censorship. Similarly, Yao Li uses the case of China to confirm that activists tend to avoid direct confrontation with the authorities and limit their challenges. This result shows that popular contention does not feature in zero-sum games exclusively. It also confirms that the absence of visible protest is not the absence of discontent in segments of the civil society. The discovery is not new. As far back as 1968, H. Gordon Skilling also identified the emergence of political tendencies that can be called ‘oppositional’ in unlikely places such as communist Eastern Europe. In 1972, David E. Powell wrote an account of ‘open, vigorous and frequent’ popular dissent in the USSR. Their influence on regime change was not immediately obvious, but as communist regimes weakened, civil society proved highly influential in producing the revolutions of 1989.

Much is expected of transgressive protests such as revolts or civil unrest. Nevertheless, Carrie Rosefsky Wickham cautions against placing too great a causal burden on protests as the route to achieve democratization. Through a comparison of the Post-Communist Colour Revolutions and 2011 Arab Uprisings, Steve Hess identifies the structural factors that made autocrats more resilient in the face of such regional protest waves.  The effects of such puzzling events continue to unfold, highlighting the multivalent nature of change as well as its non-linearity. More research is also warranted on the actors that have constructive roles during times of civil unrest. In this article written in 1971, Charles McCarthy observes the practical politics and ideology of the Trade Union Movement in Northern Ireland, which refused to take sides in the violent conflict between Catholics and Protestants.

In ‘Fight the Power’: The Politics of Music and the Music of Politics, John Street draws our attention to the study of music to improve our understanding of political thought and action.  ‘A change is gonna come’, wrote Sam Cooke in 1964. So far, scholarship has shown that change is a constant. The study of protest movements can bring us closer to better understanding the diversity of the agents of change and of the structural and contextual factors that facilitate or constrain that change

- All articles in this collection are available free of charge until the end of July 2020

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*Veronica Anghel is a Government & Opposition Fellow, find out more about the new fellowship program here.