Riots And Political Protest

The years 2008 to 2013 saw a new generation of political protestors take to the streets. Riots disrupted many Western cities and new protest movements emerged, keen to address a bleak context of economic collapse and austerity politics. In this groundbreaking new study, Winlow, Hall, Briggs and Treadwell push past the unworldly optimism of the liberal left to offer an illuminating account of the enclosure and vacuity of contemporary politics. Focusing on the English riots of 2011, the ongoing crisis in Greece, the Indignados, 15M and Podemos in Spain, the Occupy movement in New York and London and the English Defence League in northern England, this book uses original empirical data to inform a strident theoretical critique of our post-political present. It asks: what are these protest groups fighting for, and what are the chances of success? Written by leading criminological theorists and researchers, this book makes a major contribution to contemporary debates on social order, politics and cultural capitalism. It illuminates the epochal problems we face today. Riots and Political Protest is essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of political sociology, criminological theory, political theory, sociological theory and the sociology of deviance.

This book probes three issues about the linkage between political protests and social change. First, why do individuals participate in protest activities, including nonviolent movements and revolutions? How do cultural beliefs, sociopolitical structures, personal attitudes, motives and perceptions shape the decision to participate? Second, why do participants choose certain tactics? Protesters use different types of tactics: violent vs. nonviolent, public vs. covert, organized vs. spontaneous and confrontation vs. accommodation with other groups, political parties, and government agencies. Most activists view a particular tactic as a useful means to attain their policy demands. Third, what policy consequences emerge from the activities of protest movements? The book explores the impact of protests on social change and on the distribution of political power, particularly greater access of subordinate groups to government policymakers. A theory of political opportunities helps explain these issues about the origins, activities, and outcomes of protests.

In this collection, leading international scholars examine riots and protest in a range of countries and contexts, exploring the major social transformations of rioting and the changing dynamics, interpretation and potency of unrest in a globalised era.

The politics of the twenty-first century is marked by dissent, tumult and calls for radical change, whether through food riots, anti-war protests, anti-government tirades, anti-blasphemy marches, anti-austerity demonstrations, anti-authoritarian movements and anti-capitalist occupations. Interestingly, contemporary political protests are borne of both the Right and Left and are staged in both the Global North and South. Globally, different instances of protest have drawn attention to the deep fissures which challenge the idea of globalisation as a force for peace. Given the diversity of these protests, it is necessary to examine the particular nature of grievances, the sort of change which is sought and the extent to which localised protest can have global implications. The contributions in this book draw on the theoretical work of Hardt and Negri, David Graeber and Judith Butler, among others, in order explore the nature of hegemony, the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, the responses of authorities to protest and emotion and public performance in, and representation of, protest. The book concludes with David Graeber’s reply to reviews of his recent The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement. This book was published as a special issue of Global Discourse.

This volume of cutting-edge research comparatively analyzes violent protest and rioting, furthering our understanding of this increasingly prevalent form of claim making. Hank Johnston and Seraphim Seferiades bring together internationally recognized experts in the field of protest studies and contentious politics to analyze the causes and trajectories of violence as a protest tactic. Crossnational comparisons from North America, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Iran, Thailand, and elsewhere contribute to the volume's theoretical elaboration, while several case studies add depth to the discussion. This title will be of key importance to scholars across the social sciences, including sociology, political science, geography and criminology. Johnston and Seferiades's exciting book is a significant contribution to the study of rioting and violent protest in the contemporary neoliberal state.

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.

This book examines how movements from below pose challenges to the status quo. The 2010s have seen an explosion of protest movements, sometimes characterised as riots by governments and the media. But these are not new phenomena, rather reflecting thousands of years of conflict between different social classes. Beginning with struggles for democracy and control of the state in Athens and ancient Rome, this book traces the common threads of resistance through the Middle Ages in Europe and into the modern age. As classes change so does the composition of the protestors and the goals of their movements; the one common factor being how groups can mobilise to resist unbearable oppression, thereby developing a crowd consciousness that widens their political horizons and demonstrates the possibility of overthrowing the existing order. To appreciate the roots and motivations of these so-called deviants the author argues that we need to listen to the sound of the crowd. This book will be of interest to researchers of social movements, protests and riots across sociology, history and international relations.

This book is the essential guide for understanding how state power and politics are contested and exercised on social media. It brings together contributions by social media scholars who explore the connection of social media with revolutions, uprising, protests, power and counter-power, hacktivism, the state, policing and surveillance. It shows how collective action and state power are related and conflict as two dialectical sides of social media power, and how power and counter-power are distributed in this dialectic. Theoretically focused and empirically rigorous research considers the two-sided contradictory nature of power in relation to social media and politics. Chapters cover social media in the context of phenomena such as contemporary revolutions in Egypt and other countries, populism 2.0, anti-austerity protests, the fascist movement in Greece's crisis, Anonymous and police surveillance.