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Social protests present democracies with a dilemma because their governments must balance respect for citizens’ right to free expression against maintenance of law and order. Drawing on litigation ...

The use of the corporeal female body in social protest has a long and complex history, particularly in anti-gender based violence movements. From early 20th Century suffragists in international coa...

Although outsiders have played an important role in social protest in the U.S., outsiders’ role in the U.S. labor movement has been the focus of spirited debate. Debate about outsider organizers, in particular, reached a fevered pitch in the late 1990s, and continues today. This paper scrutinizes two of the core assumptions of this debate: that insider and outsider organizers operate differently on union recognition campaigns, and that workers respond to them differently in these settings. We analyzed 153 in-depth interviews with workers and organizers conducted at the height of the debate, in order to answer two questions: What is the role of outsider organizers during private sector union recognition campaigns, and how do outsider organizers secure workers’ consent in these settings? All of the organizers in our data-set were graduates of the AFL-CIO’s Organizing Institute, and 64 of them were outsiders. The outsider organizers in our data-set confronted barriers that insider organizers did not,...

The attempt to occupy the London Stock Exchange and the subsequent camps established at St Paul's Cathedral and other locations bordering the City of London have created new dynamics in social protest. Museums and other public collecting institutions face major challenges in preserving both the material culture and the social experience of this movement, which are often ephemeral in form or difficult to record in a rapidly changing environment. The danger of oversimplifying or misrepresenting meanings within this protest culture is ever-present. Yet, this danger has been mitigated by the self-chronicling and archiving tendencies of the Occupy movement itself, particularly its extensive use of social media and web-based resources.

The spring 2010 mass demonstrations in Greece, against the austerity plans imposed by the national government, point to certain new features of collective action for trade-union mobilizations. Here, we profile the conditions and the content of these mobilizations, and analyse the latter, aiming to show that they are forms of social protest which Tarrow calls a ‘mobilization phase of a cycle of contention’. We argue that these forms have enabled social movement actors to overcome – even temporarily – the historically rooted basic weaknesses of organization, collaboration and co-ordination in the Greek trade-union movement.