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Recent studies point to the relevance of situational factors in the emergence of violence. This paper applies these insights to a systematic analysis of how and why peaceful protest marches transform into violent clashes. It focuses on the micro-situational patterns and emotional dynamics during protests. The exploratory study compares 20 peaceful and violent protests of the Global Justice Movement in the United States and Germany. It employs a triangulation of visual data with document data. The study relies on in-depth qualitative analysis, based on the principles of process tracing. Findings suggest that in those protests where violence emerges, a prior micro-situational pattern is systematically visible. The discussion of exemplary cases shows that two emotional phases precede the outbreak of violence. These phases emerge in a specific temporal danger zone of 1–3 h after the start of a protest. Further, specific triggering moments seem to prompt the outbreak of violence, like the breaking-up of police–protester lines, actors being outnumbered, or falling down. The emotional dynamic between protesters and officers during a protest likewise influences the intensity of violence and how violent situations end. Consequently, the paper suggests that actors need to go through a confrontational micro-situation in a demonstration in order to be able to use violence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent wave of occupations highlighted how closely space and social movements are related. While this revived scholarly interest in the role of space during protests, little attention so far has been paid to the role of space in protests' long-term internal effects. Bringing together the literatures on transformative effects and space in social movements, the paper examines the role of protests' spatiality in their transformative effects, drawing on a narrow approach to space. The analysis focuses in particular on effects on collective identity building in social movements. Based on interviews and focus groups with activists in 2011, the paper examines the long-term effects of an incisive protest event of the Global Justice Movement (GJM) in Europe, the protests against the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001. The paper shows that this event's spatiality plays a crucial role in building movement identity several years later: it provides activists with interpretational devices to delineate the GJM's internal and external boundaries. The paper thus underlines that research on transformative effects can considerably profit from considering spatiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the political opportunity structures which facilitated the creation of sites of interaction and protest against the Asian Development Bank during the Bank's Annual General Meeting in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2000. The factors which facilitated the coming together of Thai social movements and their regional and international counterparts are mainly their shared critique of the neo-liberal paradigm and its adverse effects on their respective countries. The strategies they used to highlight these effects enhanced their sites of engagement and confrontation with the Bank and included dialogue with Bank officials, demonstrations, and the use of the media to highlight their concerns. Importance was also placed on the manner in which they were able to mobilize resources for the anti-Asian Development Bank campaigns and the process by which they framed their issues to gain the sympathy and support of the public. The 1997 Asian financial crisis, which highlighted the shortcomings of the Bank's development paradigm, as well as the ongoing democratization process in Thailand during that period, provided the impetus in fostering the anti-globalization alliances of local and transnational social movements in a common venue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines protests targeting Multilateral Economic Institutions (MEIs), namely the WTO, IMF, and World Bank from 1995 to 2018 across a large sample of countries using data drawn from media reports. We consider conventional social movement arguments regarding domestic and international resources and political opportunities, as well as economic threats, integration into the global economy, and the effects of international lending. Hypotheses are evaluated using negative binomial panel regression models of annual country protest counts. Results are consistent with several arguments. Recessions and high unemployment are associated with the number of anti-MEI protests, and countries that receive large IMF loans also tend to have more protests. Moreover, we observe a globalization of the political landscape itself. International sites, such as the locations of WTO, IMF, and World Bank summits, serve as powerful magnets for protest. Finally, we note a decline in anti-globalization protests in recent years. We suspect that this reflects the weakening of MEIs, which have seen their influence wane amidst diminished enthusiasm for globalization. As the neo-liberal agenda stalls, MEIs lose salience and social movements have shifted their attention elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article suggests that focusing on situational, interactional space provides a fruitful addition to understanding protest dynamics and the emergence of violence in protests. It suggests connecting insights from social movement research and violence research to examine what happens spatially during a protest. Examining how space can be conceptualized situationally, the article then employs document and visual data, participant observation, and interviews in a qualitative analysis and cross-case comparison of protest marches. Situational space is studied in peaceful and violent marches during three social movements (Global Justice Movement, New Social Movements, 1960s student movement). Findings suggest that a clearly defined, transparent concept of situational space during protest marches can be useful in understanding the unfolding of protest events and that situational space is of particular relevance for the emergence of protest violence. Space is not only a common comfort zone, but for protests, territory also consists of implicit power relations. Thus, spatial incursions by police officers or protesters during protests into space assigned to the other group drastically change dynamics during protest marches, lead to mistrust and rising tensions, and form a crucial bedrock for violent eruptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sunil Yapa’s politically engaged first novel vindicates the massive pacific protests that occurred during five days in Seattle in November-December 1999. These protests were summoned against the World Trade Organization summit. The novel responds to the wish to inscribe in the history of fiction a crucial event which would inspire and inflect the later anti-globalization movement and protests, and which according to some has not yet received the attention it deserves by media or criticism. This article discusses Yapa’s work in the light of the Ethics of Care, and develops an exegesis, which, incorporating elements of Hardt and Negri’s ideas about the Multitude, understands the novel mainly as a reflection of the crucial preoccupation that humans have for other human beings, and the innate wish to actively take care of the Other and improve his or her life conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses the concept of multitude relating to the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protest in Seattle, Washington as narrated in the book "Multitude" by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, and the emergence of populism. Topics discussed are influence of the uprisings in shaping the anti-globalization movement, resistance of the working class to global capitalism and oppression as a strategy for representation and identity, and populism as an expression of American democracy.

This article examines the masculinities of Ultras football fans during and after the January 25th Egyptian revolution, within the interlocking systems of power of neoliberalism, militarism and Islamism. The Ultras' anti-corporate masculinities were strengthened through protests against satellite TV and the Egyptian Football Association, while they also developed anti-militarist masculinities as they protested business elites, Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and Central Security Forces. The Ultras developed martyrdom masculinities due to their shock over the Port Said stadium massacre and subsequent retribution protests. The Ultras may be reiterating hegemonic masculinities operating within the same patriarchal logic of the three regimes. Their grief and shock may be limiting their self-reflexivity and capacity to build coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution offers a view on social struggles as epistemic struggles to critically engage with the Activism 2010+ debate. Our core idea is that social struggles that stand up against depoliticization, economic exploitation and cultural alienation cannot be adequately understood through the same rationality that underlies the processes that they are breaking with. We invite a reading of social struggles as open questions to the dominant ways of thinking and ordering of the real. Our way of doing this is by developing a view of the Zapatistas uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, and the Battle of Seattle, USA, as political events that have challenged the epistemic hegemony of modernity, its instrumental rationality and its chronological temporality. In so doing, we establish a relation between the political ideas of Hanna Arendt and those of decolonial thought, as a means to connect traditions of critique that belong to different genealogies (Western critical thought and Latin American decolonial thought) and which correspond to different conceptions of modernity and social justice. Bringing together these different traditions of critique is a key analytical step to move beyond one-sided universalisms into forms of argumentation that are built on the possibility of dialogue across a plurality of epistemic locations. This is a modest move in the much-needed search for epistemic justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-globalization protest is analyzed as a function of ideological opposition to social hierarchy and identification with the social movement. Demonstrators ( N = 145) at the Summit of the Americas in Québec City in April 2001 completed measures of social dominance orientation (SDO), social identification with the anti-globalization movement, and the likelihood of engaging in various protest behaviors. Results supported the hypothesis that social identification mediates the link between SDO and inclinations toward 2 forms of collective action (anti-globalization protest and indirect protest), whereas non-normative protest tended to be endorsed most strongly by male demonstrators. These relationships inform theoretical perspectives on politicized collective identity and the social psychology of social movement participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses qualitative in-depth interviews to examine journalists' attitudes and decisions about social protest coverage in the wake of (a) journalists' own use of the internet and (b) the use of the internet by social movement organizations. Interviews were conducted with journalists who covered protests that formed part of the movement for democratic globalization in US cities and in Canada during 1999 and 2000. Although regarded as major success stories for the role of the internet in political communication, mobilization over the web seems to have had little impact on journalists. The in-depth interviews revealed skepticism, not early adoption, of web resources in the coverage of these protests. This study provides an exploratory model for the sustained study of journalists' internet use and their attitudes toward social movements and protest as the internet age evolves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Battle of Genoa has become an iconic sign of wanton destruction, evoking images of tear gas, burning cars, and black clad protestors hurling stones and Molotov cocktails at advancing lines of heavily militarized riot police. In this article, I explore the complex relationship between performative violence and mass-mediated constructions of violence during the anti-G8 protests in Genoa. Performative violence is a specific mode of communication through which activists seek to produce social transformation by staging symbolic rituals of confrontation. Young militants enact performative violence in order to generate radical identities, while producing concrete messages challenging global capitalism and the state. At the same time, dominant media frames reinterpret the resulting images as random acts of senseless violence, undermining activists more generally. I further argue that the prevailing 'diversity of tactics' ethic reflects the broader networking logics associated with anti-corporate globalization movements themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]