Protest Campaigns Media And Political Opportunities

Explores protest groups, their aims and protest tactics, and investigates the affect their decisions have on press coverage and political debate.

The Occupy movement and the Arab Spring have brought global attention to the potential of social media for empowering otherwise marginalized groups. This book addresses questions like what happens after the moment of protest and global visibility and whether social media can also help sustain civic engagement beyond protest.

The Tea Party. The Occupy Movement. Idle No More. Around the world, popular social movements are challenging the status quo. Yet most democracies are seeing a decline in voter turnout. Protest and Politics examines this shift in political participation, as well as the blurring of social movements and mainstream politics, through the lens of the social movement society thesis. Analyzing historical and contemporary social movements in Canada in comparison to those in the US and in the transnational sphere, the authors argue that our understanding of the boundaries between politics and protest needs to evolve.

Although grass-roots social movements are an important force of social and political change, they quite often fail to achieve their lofty goals. Similarly, the inability of research to systematically explain the impact of such movements stands in sharp contrast to their emotional appeal. Protest, Opportunities, and Mechanisms attempts to rejuvenate current scholarship by developing a comprehensive theory of social movements and political change. In addition to reviewing the existing literature on the political outcomes of social movements, this volume analyzes the examples of the American civil rights movement and anti-nuclear energy efforts in eighteen countries to forge a new understanding of their momentous impact.

Explains the character of contemporary protest politics through a micro-mobilization analysis of participation in street demonstrations.

For 79 days in 2014, Hong Kong became the focus of international attention due to a public demonstration for genuine democracy that would become known as the Umbrella Movement. On the surface, this movement was not unlike other large-scale protest movements that have occurred in recent years. However, it was distinct in how bottom-up processes evolved into a centrally organized, programmatic movement with concrete policy demands. This book analyzes how traditional mass media institutions and digital media combined with on-the-ground networks in such a way as to propel citizen participation and.

Commercial social media platforms have become integral to contemporary forms of protests. They are intensely used by advocacy groups, non-governmental organisations, social movements and other political actors who increasingly integrate social media platforms into broader practices of organizing and campaigning. But, aside from the many advantages of extensive mobilization opportunities at low cost, what are the implications of social media corporations being involved in these grassroots movements? This book takes a much-needed critical approach to the relationship between social media and protest. Highlighting key issues and concerns in contemporary forms of social media activism, including questions of censorship, surveillance, individualism, and temporality, the book combines contributions from some of the most active scholars in the field today. Advancing both conceptual and empirical work on social media and protest, and with a range of different angles, the book provides a fresh and challenging outlook on a very topical debate.

Contains an Open Access chapter.With chapters spanning from the Russian Revolution to the present day, this book considers how art, media and communication technologies have been operationalised to connect, mobilise, organize and inspire the masses in particular national, political, and economic contexts.