Social media and state repression: The case of VKontakte and the anti-garbage protest in Shies, in Far Northern Russia

This article analytically describes the digital technologies-embedded repression practices developed against a local grassroot environmental protest in Far Northern Russia. Unlike urban political opposition that uses United States-based social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter), grassroots movements mainly use VKontakte, the Russia-developed dominant social network in the country. They use it despite the potential privacy and security risks this platform has posed to users since 2014. By means of an ethnographic approach, this article focuses on government responses to online protest activities and counter-practices formulated by activists to circumvent limitations. Inhabitants have been fighting since July 2018 against a waste landfill project designed to ship vast quantities of garbage from Moscow to a remote site called Shies. A protest camp was set up and maintained to physically preserve the site, joined by people from all over Russia. This article shows that, even as it became a target of government surveillance, VKontakte remains a crucial tool for local activism.

Policing the Pedal Rebels: A Case Study of Environmental Activism Under COVID-19

Australia, along with nation-states internationally, has entered a new phase of environmentally focused activism, with globalised, coordinated and social media–enabled environmental social movements seeking to address human-induced climate change and related issues such as the mass extinction of species and land clearing. Some environmental protest groups such as Extinction Rebellion (XR) have attracted significant political, media and popular commentary for their sometimes theatrical and disruptive forms of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience. Drawing on green and cultural criminology, this article constitutes an autoethnographic account of environmental protest during the final stages of the initial COVID-19 lockdown in NSW, Australia. It takes as a case study a small protest by an XR subgroup called the Pedal Rebels. The article explores the policing of environmental protest from an activist standpoint, highlighting the extraordinary police resources and powers mobilised to regulate a small peaceful group of ‘socially distanced’ protesters operating within the existing public health orders. It places an autoethnographic description of this protest in the context of policing practice and green and cultural criminology. Additionally, it outlines the way in which such policing is emboldened by changes to laws affecting environmental protest, making activism an increasingly risky activity.

Representations of environmental protest on the ground and in the cloud: The NOTAP protests in activist practice and social visual media

This article advances knowledge on activist technosocial practice by studying the realities and representations of on-the-ground environmental resistance and their intersections with visual representations of protest on Twitter. It does so by focusing on the case of resistance to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline, commonly known as TAP, in southern Italy, and on mixed methods for data collection, including ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews and an AIassisted visual ethnography of a large collection of computationally collected and categorised images posted on Twitter. By comparing online and offline representations of protest, the study demonstrated that only a partial overlapping existed between them, thus adding a nuance to the digital criminological literature premised on the existence of blurred boundaries between online and offline experiences of injustice. Themes overlapped in their representations of protest, with images of on-theground visual resistance being used on Twitter to extend and amplify the contestation of everyday spaces and to support offline and online initiatives to stop the pipeline. Differences in the recurring themes were instead reconnected to the inherent secrecy of some of the protest’s strategies and to the typical ways in which Twitter tends to be used by social movements.

Road Traffic and Aircraft Noise as Drivers of Environmental Protest?

This article investigates whether and to what extent unfavorable local environmental conditions furnish an important motivator for environmental protest. We do so using individual-level data on objective and subjectively perceived residential road traffic and aircraft noise pollution, pertaining to the cities of Mainz (Germany) and Zurich (Switzerland). By referring to fine-grained noise data, we are able to test the predictive power of grievances and self-interest in explaining protest participation more stringently than has been the case in most previous studies. Theoretically, our study is inspired by Klandermans’ socio-psychological framework of political protest, the pressure-response approach, the self-interest perspective, and the collective-interest model. Our empirical findings only partially confirm the grievances assumption that unfavorable local environmental conditions in the form of residential road traffic and aircraft noise stimulate environmental protest. Noise caused by airplanes seems to be more “protest-inducing” than that produced by road traffic. It is not so much the objectively measurable noise level as its subjective perception and evaluation that are deciding factors. However, in line with Klandermans’ protest framework and other theories of political protest, there are more influential drivers of environmental protest, such as environmental concerns and a left-wing political ideology. Thus, the effects of residential road traffic and aircraft noise turn out to be relatively moderate. Ultimately, this means that our tailored measures of grievances corroborate a relatively well-established finding of protest research.

Globally Visible Environmental Protest: A Cross-national Analysis, 1970–2010

We examine the global rise of environmental protest events reported in major news outlets from 1970 to 2010, based on a new cross-national dataset. The paper addresses conventional arguments regarding resources and political opportunities, but focuses principally on the international dynamics that affect local protest and its visibility. World society theory as well as scholarship on transnational movements and advocacy networks suggests that international organizations and institutions play an important role in bringing resources, opportunities, and global media attention to local movements. We argue that international forces will be especially important in nondemocratic countries. Cross-national quantitative analyses suggest that nations with strong organizational ties to the international community have more protests that get covered in international media, and that the effects of international forces are stronger in less democratic societies.