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How have activists responded to the COVID-19 pandemic? While there have been many anecdotal reports of the pandemic's impact, there has been little to no cross-national comparative research examining how movements discouraged from protesting on the streets because of the risk of infection have or have not continued their activities through the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper we present findings from a survey of 550 activists in 27 countries, reporting on how the pandemic has affected their perceptions of tactical adaptation, public interest, and long-term strategic planning. We also present results from a survey experiment testing the impact of COVID-19 risk and pandemic lockdown policies on activists' willingness to join a street protest. We find that while the pandemic has posed significant challenges for activists, activists believe they have been able to respond with tactical adaptation and innovations, primarily with a shift to digital activism. Most activists also perceived an increase in public interest for their movements across various issue areas and were optimistic about their movement's ability to advance its goals in the future. These findings speak to the long-term impact of COVID-19 on the potential for social mobilization and the short and projected long-term effects of the pandemic on political stability., INTRODUCTION A wave of nonviolent movements emerged in 2019, as activists took to the streets en masse in places such as Chile, Iraq, Hong Kong, Ecuador, Iran, and Lebanon to [...]

A key challenge to understanding the eruption of globalization protest since the late 1990s is the lack of data on the protesters themselves. Although scholars have focused increasingly on these large protest events and the transnational social movements that play a role organizing them, information about the protesters remains scant. We address this research gap by analyzing survey data collected from a random sample of protesters attire globalization protests in three countries. By disaggregating protesters from the local area and protesters who traveled to the protest event, the role that organizations play becomes clear: SMOs mobilize non-local participants and coordinate travel to protest events. These data also suggest answers to the broader questions that have emerged about global civil society. In contrast to the expectations in recent scholarship, we find very few protesters came from outside of the countries in which the protests were taking place. Instead, we conclude that SMOs use the Internet to connect domestically grounded activists to transnational struggles and to mobilize them to participate in large-scale protest events. In other words, organizations do, indeed, matter in the globalization movement and have significantly expanded the protesting population beyond local citizens.