Mary into Combat: Marian Devotions and Political Mobilizations during the European Culture Wars

During the 1870s, thousands of Catholics headed for old and new European shrines in mass national pilgrimages. The rise of mass pilgrimages as political demonstrations was the result of new devotional cultures and the long-term politicization of Catholic devotions. Pilgrimages were seen by participants as acts of reparation for the secularizing legislation implemented during the European culture wars and also as a way to increase Catholicism's presence and visibility in the contested public sphere. Likewise, the capture of Rome and the Roman Question fostered displays of solidarity with the Pope, contributing to the emergence of this new mass devotional culture. Finally, the convergent aims of Legitimists/monarchists and intransigent Catholics rapidly expanded these new mass religious demonstrations. This article seeks to re-evaluate the multi-faceted European crisis of the 1870s and the meanings of mass Catholic mobilizations in Europe by analysing the rise of mass pilgrimages in Spain.

Choice and Transformation of Public Space in Toronto: a Case Study of Tamil Protests 2009

The 2009 Tamil demonstrations in Toronto challenged the preconceptions of public space and the legitimacy of transnational politics within a ‘multicultural’ city. This paper explores the impact these demonstrations had on Toronto’s ‘public spaces’, especially how they were able to transform the city. An analysis of secondary data sources, including, media coverage and participant-observations reveal that even though the political demonstrations organised by the Sri Lankan Tamil-Canadians were ‘tolerated’, they were not necessarily ‘accepted’ by many Torontonians. This observation raises numerous interrelated questions, particularly related to the rights of immigrants and refugee groups to the city.

Choice and Transformation of Public Space in Toronto: a Case Study of Tamil Protests 2009

The 2009 Tamil demonstrations in Toronto challenged the preconceptions of public space and the legitimacy of transnational politics within a ‘multicultural’ city. This paper explores the impact these demonstrations had on Toronto’s ‘public spaces’, especially how they were able to transform the city. An analysis of secondary data sources, including, media coverage and participant-observations reveal that even though the political demonstrations organised by the Sri Lankan Tamil-Canadians were ‘tolerated’, they were not necessarily ‘accepted’ by many Torontonians. This observation raises numerous interrelated questions, particularly related to the rights of immigrants and refugee groups to the city.

Saint Mark’s Square as Contested Political Space: Protesting Cruise Tourism in Venice

Saint Mark’s Square is unquestionably the most famous tourist attraction in Venice, a piazza characterised by its complex history, unique aesthetics and many allusions to power (given its proximity to the Doge’s Palace and Saint Mark’s Basilica). This square is the largest open space in the city and while it is routinely crowded with tourists from all over the world, political demonstrations have been prohibited since 1997. This article explores Saint Mark’s Square as a contested political space by focusing on the many local struggles against cruise tourism in Venice and its lagoon. Instead of constituting an ‘apolitical’ space, the preferred uses given to the square by local authorities and tourism stakeholders are manifestly ‘political’, producing a space of leisure and consumption that benefits the economic logic behind the ‘normal’ functioning of the piazza. Other alternative social and political uses of the square are not only discouraged but banned, which brings into discussion the Lefebvrian notion of the right to the city: who has access to the centre as a (political) privileged space? The article examines protest acts undertaken by the collective No Grandi Navi, particularly the political events that took place after the MSC Opera collision with another tourist vessel and the dock in June 2019.

Activists in Red Capes: Women's Use of The Handmaid's Tale to Fight for Reproductive Justice

This paper examines women’s use of the notable red and white handmaid costume from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale at political demonstrations following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Drawing on ten in-depth ethnographic interviews with women who participated in handmaid chapters, my study finds that interviewees began to wear the handmaid costume at political protests because they increasingly saw parallels between the United States and Gilead—the totalitarian society in Atwood’s novel—as a result of the 2016 election. Participants viewed the costume as a feminist symbol that enabled them to increase awareness about women’s issues, particularly related to reproductive justice. Additionally, interviewees saw the anonymity of the costume as a way to represent all women, especially those who were unable to participate in such protests. This study extends existing scholarship on social movements and women’s activism in the United States by exploring women’s reasons for involvement in this new form of protest and their use of dystopian popular culture as the basis of their performance activism.

A Lei Antiterrorismo brasileira e a circulação internacional de regimes jurídicos punitivos

The Brazilian Anti-Terrorism Bill (no. 13.260/2016) was drafted and approved in the context of the street demonstrations to have occurred from 2013 to 2015 and the state violence to have erupted in their wake, linked to the major sporting events held over the period. An examination of the process by which this legislation was implemented prompts a debate over its constitution as a legal mechanism able to justify extraordinary measures within a formal democratic regime. It is based on this premise that an exploratory and explanatory analysis is provided of the social, political, and historical phenomena raised by the question debated in the article. Such an approach thus seeks to demonstrate how legal uncertainty – transmitted through the use of vague expressions – allows the state power to endow the Brazilian State with the capacity to act freely and to selectively frame social and political demonstrations as acts of terrorism.

The geopolitics behind the routes data travel: a case study of Iran

In November 2019, in the wake of political demonstrations against the regime, Iran managed to selectively cut off most traffic from the global Internet while fully operating its own domestic network. It seemingly confirmed the main hypothesis our research had led us to, based on prior observation of data routing: Iran’s architecture of connectivity enables selective censorship of international traffic. This paper examines, through the case of Iran, how states can leverage the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as a tool of geopolitical control and what are the trade-offs they face. This question raises a methodological question that we also address: how the analysis of BGP can infer and document these strategies of territorialization of cyberspace. The Internet is a network of networks where each network is an autonomous system. Autonomous systems (ASes) are independent administrative entities controlled by a variety of actors such as governments, companies and universities. Their administrators have to agree and communicate on the path followed by packets travelling across the Internet, which is made possible by BGP. Agreements between ASes are often confidential but BGP requires neighbouring ASes to interact with each other in order to coordinate routing through the constant release of connectivity update messages. These messages announce the availability (or withdrawal) of a sequence of ASes that can be followed to reach an IP address prefix. In our study, we inferred the structure of Iran's connectivity through the capture and analysis of these BGP announcements. We show how the particularities of Iran's BGP and connectivity structure can enable active measures, such as censorship, both internally and externally throughout the network. We argue that Iran has found a way to reconcile a priori conflicting strategic goals: developing a self-sustaining and resilient domestic Internet, but with tight control at its borders. It thus enables the regime to leverage connectivity as a tool of censorship in the face of social instability and as a tool of regional influence in the context of strategic competition.

Demobilization Processes

There is abundant literature on individual-level characteristics that encourage citizens to participate in political demonstrations. However, empirical studies on demobilization and factors that prevent people from joining protests remain scarce. In this paper, I zero in on the perceived risks of political participation. Two questions are examined: first, how protest willingness is shaped by perceived risks, and second, what political and socio-economic factors explain risk perception. I answer these questions using the representative sample of 800 Hungarian university students from the Active Youth Survey (2019). Hungary has a special position in Europe because it is defined neither as a liberal democracy nor as sheer autocracy, but an ‘illiberal regime’. In non-democratic illiberal societies the state does not apply overt repressive techniques against dissident groups, although protest participation is still not a riskless form of political action, as regarded in developed democracies. I apply logistic regression models to predict both protest willingness and perceived risks of protest. Results confirm the importance of risks in extra-parliamentary protest politics, since almost half of the university students see their participation in demonstrations as somewhat risky. Regression models show that perceived risks are to some extent politicized, but risks have their own significant role in explaining protest (un)willingness.