Mbembe’s Matrix and the Matri-Archive

Achille Mbembe shows how the West’s denigrating projections on Africa as a chaotic void perpetrated a founding epistemic violence. The matrix of Black Reason, Blackness, and The Black worked systematically to justify colonialism and undermine African subjectivity. By maintaining its grip over the psyche, the postcolonial commandement effortlessly and indefinitely sustained subjugation. This is its ‘little secret’. Mbembe suggests that liberation may be possible by appealing to an archive from the ‘underside’ of African history to retrieve a self that is not constituted by toxic colonial projections. Drawing on my work An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa, I argue that the traditional appeal by postmenopausal women to their ‘bottom power’ is just such a living matrix – a ‘matri-archive’. Performing this ritual in the context of public protest, the ‘Mothers’ deploy their own ‘little secret’ with the capacity to break the hold of the postcolony’s spell.

Gradient Boosting Machine to Assess the Public Protest Impact on Urban Air Quality

Political and economic protests build-up due to the financial uncertainty and inequality spreading throughout the world. In 2019, Latin America took the main stage in a wave of protests. While the social side of protests is widely explored, the focus of this study is the evolution of gaseous urban air pollutants during and after one of these events. Changes in concentrations of NO2, CO, O3 and SO2 during and after the strike, were studied in Quito, Ecuador using two approaches: (i) inter-period observational analysis; and (ii) machine learning (ML) gradient boosting machine (GBM) developed business-as-usual (BAU) comparison to the observations. During the strike, both methods showed a large reduction in the concentrations of NO2 (31.5–32.36%) and CO (15.55–19.85%) and a slight reduction for O3 and SO2. The GBM approach showed an exclusive potential, especially for a lengthier period of predictions, to estimate strike impact on air quality even after the strike was over. This advocates for the use of machine learning techniques to estimate an extended effect of changes in human activities on urban gaseous pollution.

Role and Features of Youth Political Online Activism in Modern Russia

The presented article is a study dealing with the role and characteristics of youth political online activism in modern Russia. The relevance, main aspects and criteria of the effectiveness of youth policy in the field of communication are considered. There are following basic steps suggested: to improve the effectiveness of such communication associated with a clear articulation of the needs of various groups of people through competent socio-political monitoring with independent quantitative and qualitative research. Building a constructive dialogue to promote positive, constructive and conventional activation of the political behavior of youth groups; work to overcome the apolitical and absentee tendencies of young people, as well as the expansion of the political and managerial concept of Electronic state not only formally, but also substantively, are among these steps. Further, the study analyzes the structure of protest behavior, distinguishes several levels of protest consideration, each of which has its own specifics and features for the analysis. This is the level of deep reasons and specific motive for the emergence of a public protest; the level of the dominant style of public manifestation of any protest moods, which has its basis in the predominantly psycho-emotional sphere; and, finally, the level of peculiarities of political behavior with very specific tactics and strategies of protest behavior. It draws attention to the fact that youth as a social group is heterogeneous and it seems appropriate to divide its age structure into three stages (from 14 to 20, years old, from 21 to 24 years old, and from 25 to 30 years old). The final part of the article deals with the models of virtual protest behavior. The model of a complete unstructured protest is highlighted; activity-target co-optation; proactive-loyalist; adaptation and frustration; politicized civil and local models. The results obtained to date make it possible to record the essential features of online mobilization, both based on the features of the functioning of the virtual space, and from the point of view of the main object of research: youth and the specifics of its identity and algorithms of political behavior. All this allows us to speak about the relevance of the constructed classification models for various mobilization mechanisms, which determines the practical significance of the study.

‘It’s Too Easy to Say that Institutions are Decolonizing’: An Interview with Senate House Library’s Richard Espley and Leila Kassir

In 2020, as public protest against anti-Black police brutality surged globally, institutional public statements in support of the Black Lives Matter movement proliferated. Universities, libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions rushed to deplore racist violence and express their commitment to anti-racist and decolonial practice. Rather than release a statement of their own, staff at Senate House Library – the central library for the University of London and the School of Advanced Study – chose instead to pursue and embed a fledgling piece of reparative archival work, the Collections Inclusion Review, alongside their continuing efforts to improve the inclusivity and accessibility of their collections, particularly of literatures in English. This interview is a transcribed and edited version of a conversation with the two Senate House Library staff members leading this work: Richard Espley, now Head of Collections (and formerly Head of Modern Collections), and Leila Kassir, Academic Librarian for British, Irish, USA, Latin American, Caribbean, and Commonwealth Literature. The discussion ranged across issues of provenance, archive description, library layout, and the future of English as a discipline, urging attention to and amelioration of the exclusionary aspects of library practice. While critiquing institutional approaches to the legacies of colonialism, past and present, both interviewees expressed reservations about widespread claims to have ‘achieved’ decolonization, stressing that such calls are contingent on surrounding structures and processes, and suggesting that such radical dismantling remains a long-term aspiration, rather than a quick-fix solution.

Protest as an act of love

In a world filled with "ambient violence", public protest is a vital signal of shared discontent. The essential compulsion at the heart of protest, however, is conventionally not recognised for what it is: solidarity with those suffering injustices. Despite this overabundance of discourses, it often remains unclear what protest, at heart, constitutes. That is, what are we talking about when we talk about protest, and why does this question matter? In this paper I consider the constituent parts of protest formation in the abstract, including grievances, gestures, and tactics, among other. Developing these constituent parts reveals protest to be, first and foremost, a manifestation of a nonhegemonic ethical commitment to justice, requiring courage and coordination, and whose outcome is always contingent, that is, an act of love. I also reflect on the nature of protest as a direct political action that sits on a continuum that ranges from opposition politics to civil war. This continuum offers a graded view ranking expressions of discontent by severity of outcome.

Enacting Citizenship

In June and July 2015, a group of Syrian asylum seekers and local refugee supporters organised a protest camp in Dortmund, Germany. For 53 days, about 50 protesters at a time slept under open tarps on the pavement in front of the city’s main train station, demanding a quicker asylum review process and reunification with their families. This article focusses on the refugees’ interactions with different state actors on the municipal and state levels, and illustrates how the Syrian refugees were able to enact citizenship subjectivities. Through sustained and well-organised public protest, refugees claimed their place within the host community. Importantly, they became active contributors to the debate over Germany’s response to the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ and proved that political activism can help promote political and legal change.

Bodies That Still Matter

The question of how best to name those who are most vulnerable to precarity and exploitation is both a conceptual and political one. It has been tempting in recent years to consider vulnerability as the foundation for a new politics, but that is an error. Vulnerability cannot be isolated as a new ground for politics. It is always contextual since it belongs to the organization of embodied and social relations. Vulnerability can neither be isolated from the constellation of rage, persistence, and resistance that emerges under specific historical conditions, nor can it be the basis for a new humanism. Rather, the differential exposure of bodies to abandonment, illness, and death, belong to a sphere of power that regulates the grievability of human lives, linked to the climate crisis and the demand for a new political vocabulary that moves beyond anthropocentrism. The differential scheme that governs the grievability of lives is a central component of social inequality at the same time that it belongs to forms of institutional violence that target communities and establish their precarity, if not their dispensability. If and when a population is (or is treated as) grievable, they can be acknowledged as a living population whose deaths would be grieved if their lives were lost. To assert the grievability of human life under conditions in which those lives have already been abandoned is to make a political claim against abandonment, for sustainable infrastructure, and for both the grievability and value of those lives. Mourning is thus linked with public protest, Vulnerability is the possibility of injury, but also of responsive and radical politics, one that asserts continued bodily existence as a form of persistence.

Battling over Social Media: Public Protest and State Responses to Dr Li Wenliang’s Death in China

This article discusses the state and public reactions on the internet to the death of Dr Li Wenliang, the whistle-blower who warned of the COVID-19 outbreak in China. Contrary to findings in existing literature, this study argues that the society–state interaction over the internet is far more dynamic and complex, and that autocratic states have the capability and resilience to manage and even control the internet. While the internet could help rally waves of public outpourings and protests, the state, in response, broadcast its tactical concessions to ease widespread public anger. However, the state has been able to portray its overall highly effective control of the epidemic, thereby claiming political credits and legitimacy for governance.

Corruption and its Impact on Protest Activities in Post-communist Europe

Corruption is a phenomenon that affects societies. It lowers trust in public institutions, lowers trust among people, undermines economic development, undermines democracy, and has implications for political participation. This article contributes to current debates on the impact of corruption by looking at other possible consequences of corruption. Specifically, this article looks at the impact of the perception of corruption on the approval of public protest meetings and demonstrations because, if corruption leads to these non-institutionalized forms of political participation, this may lead to security problems or a direct outbreak of violence. This study analyses this relationship by using seven post-communist countries that have undergone specific developments in terms of corruption. These developments were largely due to large-scale privatizations, politicized state administration, and the linking of politicians to the private sector. This research was conducted with individual-level data. The module ‘The Role of Government V’ from the International Social Survey Programme was used. Descriptive charts have revealed that in six out of the seven countries, most respondents considered politicians to be very corrupt. Around 80% of respondents in all seven countries approve of the organization of public protest meetings. Around 70% of respondents in all seven countries approve of demonstrations. Regression analysis revealed that there is a relationship between the perception of corruption among politicians and the approval of protest activities. Specifically, the more politicians are corrupt, the more people approve of holding public protest meetings and demonstrations.