Do Internet Penetration and Online Censorship Levels Affect Long-Term Repression Success in Street Protest Prevention?

This research paper aims at learning whether Internet penetration and online censorship affect repression against civil society organization (CSO) capacity to prevent street protest events and/or reduce protest participant numbers in the long term. Although there is a large corpus of studies on the consequences of the Internet and social media development for street protest mobilization, there is little empirical research on whether offline CSO repression works in the age of the Internet and whether this new repression impact is modified by attempts to organize online censorship. I tried to solve this problem with large-N cross-national datasets on protest participation, CSO repression and online censorship as well as on the share of Internet users from 1990 to 2018. I propose a set of hypotheses claiming that repression has a negative unconditional effect on street protest probability and protester numbers, that the Internet penetration makes repression effect less negative or more positive, and that online censorship transforms repression impact into more negative and less positive. I test these hypotheses with pooled linear and logistic regressions weighted by inverse probability of loss to follow-up. The results demonstrate that when the repression effect exists, an uncensored Internet makes the weak repression effect positive and transforms highly severe repression effects from negative to null. Online censorship at a high level of Internet use only removes the positive effect of weak repression. Acknowledgments: The reported study was funded by RFBR and EISR, project number 21-011-32120.

Fighting Every Crisis in the Wake of Covid-19: Shifting Grounds for Mobilization among Fridays for Future Protesters in Germany

In upending much of what is usually taken for granted about politics in everyday life, the Covid-19 pandemic is re-animating several puzzles in the study of protest participation. Here we conduct a case study of Fridays for Future (FFF) global climate strike mobilization in Berlin to shed light on the profile of activists who sustained protest mobilization in pandemic contexts. Comparing data from field surveys of protesters at the September 2020 global climate strike with data collected at the pre-pandemic strikes in September and November 2019, we examine the profile of FFF demonstrators along multiple dimensions, including socio-demographics, motivations, political engagement, and institutional trust. Our preliminary results suggest that younger, more politically engaged, and less politically-cynical climate activists joined the street protest under pandemic conditions. Beyond the large turnout of the already-committed, findings also suggest that protesters were more confident in the ability of action and policy to make a difference with climate change but also galvanized by the loss of attention to the issue in the wake of Covid-19.

We will be back to the street!: Protest and the empires of water in Nairobi

Chapter 8 in the book Refractions of the National, the Popular and the Global in African Cities.

Protest, Internet Activism, and Sociopolitical Change in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa has been the scene of a sizeable wave of social and political protests in recent years. These protests have many aspects in common, while at the same time there is a certain historic continuity connecting them to previous protests, with which they also have much in common. What makes them new, however, is a hybrid nature that combines street protest and online action, making them similar to protests occurring in other parts of the world during the same period. Based on a literature review and field work on three countries, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this article addresses some of the main features of what some authors have called the “third wave of African protests.” The study points out how the digital environment is galvanizing a new process of popular opposition and enabling both greater autonomy for actors promoting the protests and greater interaction at the regional level. With the sociopolitical impact in the short and medium term still uncertain, the third wave of African protests is giving birth to a new political and democratic culture in the region as a whole.

Aliaa Elmahdy, Nude Protest, & Transnational Feminist Body Politics

Women’s bodies represent a particularly contested symbolic terrain, especially within the political contexts of nationalism, globalization, revolution, occupation, and decolonization. Karina Eileraas Karakus asks how we might read women’s naked bodies in protest movements relative to gender and sexuality issues raised within the “Arab Spring” and transnational feminist praxis. By focusing on the “nude Egyptian blogger” Aliaa Elmahdy, who has deployed her naked body as a tool of resistance in cyberspace and on the streets, she argues that Elmahdy’s nude protest marks a moment of transition in the evolution of feminist protest. Within this shifting landscape, this chapter shows how the theater of feminist protest is both expanded and challenged by a new generation of feminists who navigate between conventional street protest and novel modes of cyber-attack while contributing new perspectives to longstanding debates about women’s artistic and political agency and the empowering potentials of female nudity.

Urban Formalism

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.