On 16 August 1819 on St Peter's Field, Manchester, a peaceful demonstration of some 60,000 workers and reformers was brutally dispersed by sabrewielding cavalry, resulting in at least fifteen dead and over 600 injured. Within days the slaughter was named 'Peter-loo', as an ironic reference to the battleground of Waterloo. Now the subject of a major film, this highly detailed yet readable narrative, based almost entirely on eyewitness reports and contemporary documents, brings the events of that terrible day vividly to life. In a world in which the legitimacy of facts is in constant jeopardy from media and authoritarian bias, the lessons to be learned from the bloodshed and the tyrannical aftermath are as pertinent today as they were 200 years ago. Film director Mike Leigh has defined Peterloo as 'the event that becomes more relevant with every new episode of our crazy times'.

What are protest politics and social movement activism today? What are their main features? To what extent can street citizens be seen as a force driving social and political change? Through analyses of original survey data on activists themselves, Marco Giugni and Maria T. Grasso explain the character of contemporary protest politics that we see today - the diverse motivations, social characteristics, values and networks that draw activists to engage politically to tackle the pressing social problems of our time. The study analyzes left-wing protest culture as well as the characteristics of protest politics, from the motivations of street citizens to how they become engaged in demonstrations to the causes they defend and the issues they promote, from their mobilizing structures to their political attitudes and values, as well as other key aspects such as their sense of identity within social movements, their perceived effectiveness, and the role of emotions for protest participation.

Digital and social media are increasingly integrated into the dynamics of protest movements around the world. They strengthen the mobilization power of movements, extend movement networks, facilitate new modes of protest participation, and give rise to new protest formations. Meanwhile, conventional media remains an important arena where protesters and their targets contest for public support. This book examines the role of the media - understood as an integrated system comprised of both conventional media institutions and digital media platforms - in the formation and dynamics of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. For 79 days in 2014, Hong Kong became the focus of international attention due to a public demonstration for genuine democracy that would become known as the Umbrella Movement. During this time, twenty percent of the local population would join the demonstration, the most large-scale and sustained act of civil disobedience in Hong Kong's history - and the largest public protest campaign in China since the 1989 student movement in Beijing. On the surface, this movement was not unlike other large-scale protest movements that have occurred around the world in recent years. However, it was distinct in how bottom-up processes evolved into a centrally organized, programmatic movement with concrete policy demands. In this book, Francis L. F. Lee and Joseph M. Chan connect the case of the Umbrella Movement to recent theorizations of new social movement formations. Here, Lee and Chan analyze how traditional mass media institutions and digital media combined with on-the-ground networks in such a way as to propel citizen participation and the evolution of the movement as a whole. As such, they argue that the Umbrella Movement is important in the way it sheds light on the rise of digital-media-enabled social movements, the relationship between digital media platforms and legacy media institutions, the power and limitations of such occupation protests and new "action logics," and the continual significance of old protest logics of resource mobilization and collective action frames. Through a combination of protester surveys, population surveys, analyses of news contents and social media activities, this book reconstructs a rich and nuanced account of the Umbrella Movement, providing insight into numerous issues about the media-movement nexus in the digital era.

In the past decade, South Africa's "miracle transition" has been interrupted by waves of protests in relation to basic services such as water and electricity. Less visibly, the post-apartheid period has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure, including the nonpayment of service charges, the bypassing of metering devices, and illegal connections to services. Democracy's Infrastructure shows how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the post-apartheid present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters, Antina von Schnitzler examines the techno-political forms through which democracy takes shape. Von Schnitzler explores a controversial project to install prepaid water meters in Soweto--one of many efforts to curb the nonpayment of service charges that began during the antiapartheid struggle--and she traces how infrastructure, payment, and technical procedures become sites where citizenship is mediated and contested. She follows engineers, utility officials, and local bureaucrats as they consider ways to prompt Sowetans to pay for water, and she shows how local residents and activists wrestle with the constraints imposed by meters. This investigation of democracy from the perspective of infrastructure reframes the conventional story of South Africa's transition, foregrounding the less visible remainders of apartheid and challenging readers to think in more material terms about citizenship and activism in the postcolonial world. Democracy's Infrastructure examines how seemingly mundane technological domains become charged territory for struggles over South Africa's political transformation.

Why do vote-suppression efforts sometimes fail? Why does police repression of demonstrators sometimes turn localized protests into massive, national movements? How do politicians and activists manipulate people's emotions to get them involved? The authors of Why Bother? offer a new theory of why people take part in collective action in politics, and test it in the contexts of voting and protesting. They develop the idea that just as there are costs of participation in politics, there are also costs of abstention - intrinsic and psychological but no less real. That abstention can be psychically costly helps explain real-world patterns that are anomalies for existing theories, such as that sometimes increases in costs of participation are followed by more participation, not less. The book draws on a wealth of survey data, interviews, and experimental results from a range of countries, including the United States, Britain, Brazil, Sweden, and Turkey.

In 2011, the world watched as dictators across the Arab world were toppled from power. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, ordinary Arab citizens mobilized across the region during the Arab Spring to reinvent the autocratic Arab world into one characterized by democracy, dignity, socioeconomic justice, and inviolable human rights. This unique comparative analysis of countries before, during and after the Arab Spring seeks to explain the divergent outcomes, disappointing and even harrowing results of efforts to overcome democratic consolidation challenges, from the tentative democracy in Tunisia to the emergence of the Islamic State, and civil war and authoritarian retrenchment everywhere else. Tracing the period of the Arab Spring from its background in long-term challenges to autocratic regimes, to the mass uprisings, authoritarian breakdown, and the future projections and requirements for a democratizing conclusion, Stephen J. King establishes a broad but focused history which refines the leading theory of democratization in comparative politics, and realigns the narrative of Arab Spring history by bringing its differing results to the fore.

The 2011 Arab Spring is the story of what happens when autocrats prepare their militaries to thwart coups but unexpectedly face massive popular uprisings instead. When demonstrators took to the streets in 2011, some militaries remained loyal to the autocratic regimes, some defected, whilst others splintered. The widespread consequences of this military agency ranged from facilitating transition to democracy, to reconfiguring authoritarianism, or triggering civil war. This study aims to explain the military politics of 2011. Building on interviews with Arab officers, extensive fieldwork and archival research, as well as hundreds of memoirs published by Arab officers, Hicham Bou Nassif shows how divergent combinations of coup-proofing tactics accounted for different patterns of military behaviour in 2011, both in Egypt and Syria, and across Tunisia, and Libya.

When students at Oxford University called for a statue of Cecil Rhodes to be removed, following similar calls by students in Cape Town, the significance of these protests was felt across continents. This was not simply about tearing down an outward symbol of British imperialism - a monument glorifying a colonial conqueror - but about confronting the toxic inheritance of the past, and challenging the continued underrepresentation of people of colour at universities. And it went to the very heart of the pernicious influence of colonialism in education today. Written by key members of the movement in Oxford, Rhodes Must Fall is the story of that campaign. Showing the crucial importance of both intersectionality and solidarity with sister movements in South Africa and beyond, this book shows what it means to boldly challenge the racism rooted deeply at the very heart of empire.

A long-term resident and expert observer of dissent in Hong Kong takes readers to the frontlines of Hong Kong's revolution. Through the long, hot summer of 2019, Hong Kong burned. Anti-government protests, sparked by a government proposal to introduce a controversial extradition law, grew into a pro-democracy movement that engulfed the city for months. Protesters fought street battles with police, and the unrest brought the People's Liberation Army to the doorstep of Hong Kong. Driven primarily by youth protesters with their 'Be water!' philosophy, borrowed from hometown hero Bruce Lee, this leaderless, technology-driven protest movement defied a global superpower and changed Hong Kong, perhaps forever. In City on Fire, Antony Dapiran provides the first detailed analysis of the protests, and reveals the protesters' unique tactics. He explains how the movement fits into the city's long history of dissent, examines the cultural aspects of the movement, and looks at what the protests will mean for the future of Hong Kong, China, and China's place in the world. City on Fire will be seen as the definitive account of an historic upheaval.

In the wake of the Arab uprisings, al-Nahda voted to transform itself into a political party that would for the first time withdraw from a preaching project built around religious, social, and cultural activism. This turn to the political was not a Tunisian exception but reflects an urgent debate within Islamist movements as they struggle to adjust to a rapidly changing political environment. This book re-orientates how we think about Islamist movements. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with grassroots activists of Tunisia's al-Nahda, Rory McCarthy focuses on the lived experience of activism to offer a challenging new perspective on one of the Middle East's most successful Islamist projects. Original evidence explains how al-Nahda survived two decades of brutal repression in prison and in social exclusion, and reveals what price the movement paid for a new strategy of pragmatism and reform during the Tunisian transition away from authoritarianism.

Protest Politics in the Marketplace examines how social media has revolutionized the use and effectiveness of consumer activism. In her groundbreaking book, Caroline Heldman emphasizes that consumer activism is a democratizing force that improves political participation, self-governance, and the accountability of corporations and the government. She also investigates the use of these tactics by conservatives. Heldman analyzes the democratic implications of boycotting, socially responsible investing, social media campaigns, and direct consumer actions, highlighting the ways in which such consumer activism serves as a countervailing force against corporate power in politics. In Protest Politics in the Marketplace, she blends democratic theory with data, historical analysis, and coverage of consumer campaigns for civil rights, environmental conservation, animal rights, gender justice, LGBT rights, and other causes. Using an inter-disciplinary approach applicable to political theorists and sociologists, Americanists, and scholars of business, the environment, and social movements, Heldman considers activism in the marketplace from the Boston Tea Party to the present. In doing so, she provides readers with a clearer understanding of the new, permanent environment of consumer activism in which they operate.

This book tells the story of the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado, an emblematic grassroots social movement of peasant farmers, who unusually declared themselves 'neutral' to Colombia's internal armed conflict, in the north-west region of Uraba. It reveals two core narratives in the Community's collective identity, which Burnyeat calls the 'radical' and the 'organic' narratives. These refer to the historically-constituted interpretative frameworks according to which they perceive respectively the Colombian state, and their relationship with their natural and social environments. Together, these two narratives form an 'Alternative Community' collective identity, comprising a distinctive conception of grassroots peace-building. This study, centered on the Community's socio-economic cacao-farming project, offers an innovative way of approaching victims' organizations and social movements through critical, post-modern politics and anthropology. It will become essential reading to Latin American ethnographers and historians, and all interested in conflict resolution and transitional justice. Read the author's blog drawing on the book here: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2018/06/07/colombias-unsung-heroes/

How does protest become criminalised? Applying an anthropological perspective to political and legal conflicts, Carolijn Terwindt urges us to critically question the underlying interests and logic of prosecuting protesters. The book draws upon ethnographic research in Chile, Spain, and the United States to trace prosecutorial narratives in three protracted contentious episodes in liberal democracies. Terwindt examines the conflict between Chilean landowners and the indigenous Mapuche people, the Spanish state and the Basque independence movement, and the United States' criminalisation of 'eco-terrorists.' Exploring how patterns and mechanisms of prosecutorial narrative emerge through distinct political, social and democratic contexts, Terwindt shines a light on how prosecutorial narratives in each episode changed significantly over time. Challenging the law and justice system and warning against relying on criminal law to deal with socio-political conflicts, Terwindt's observations have implications for a wide range of actors and constituencies, including social movement activists, scholars, and prosecutors.

"In this small but elegant book, Professor Walters approaches the interpretation of antislavery from a fresh vantage point . . . he asks new questions of old sources and comes up with novel and convincing interpretations . . He] has allowed us to see antislavery as an organic outgrowth of American values and institutions." Gerda Lerner, New York Historical Society Quarterly

"Penetrating insights are sprinkled generously throughout, and monographic studies of abolitionism should take a new turn, now that Walters has shown how to perceive it in terms of symbols, perception, culture in general." Aileen S. Kraditor, Journal of Southern History

"A masterful picture of the milieu in which antislavery] operated." Robert V. Sparks, New England Quarterly

" A] wide-ranging, scintillatingly written analysis of abolitionist thought, perception, and feeling. Like all highly original, interdisciplinary ventures in scholarship, The Antislavery Appeal is bound to provoke controversy even as it stimulates thinking in many new directions . . . . All scholars] will thank him for enlivening and enriching the study of pre-Civil War reform." James brewer Stewart, Wisconsin Magazine of History"

This widely-praised book identified peaceful struggle as a key phenomenon in international politics a year before the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt confirmed its central argument. Civil resistance--non-violent action against such challenges as dictatorial rule, racial discrimination and foreign military occupation--is a significant but inadequately understood feature of world politics. Especially through the peaceful revolutions of 1989, and the developments in the Arab world since December 2010, it has helped to shape the world we live in.
Civil Resistance and Power Politics covers most of the leading cases, including the actions master-minded by Gandhi, the US civil rights struggle in the 1960s, the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, the 'people power' revolt in the Philippines in the 1980s, the campaigns against apartheid in South Africa, the various movements contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989-91, and, in this century, the 'colour revolutions' in Georgia and Ukraine. The chapters, written by leading experts, are richly descriptive and analytically rigorous.
This book addresses the complex interrelationship between civil resistance and other dimensions of power. It explores the question of whether civil resistance should be seen as potentially replacing violence completely, or as a phenomenon that operates in conjunction with, and modification of, power politics. It looks at cases where campaigns were repressed, including China in 1989 and Burma in 2007. It notes that in several instances, including Northern Ireland, Kosovo and Georgia, civil resistance movements were followed by the outbreak of armed conflict. It also includes a chapter with new material from Russian archives showing how the Soviet leadership responded to civil resistance, and a comprehensive bibliographical essay.
Illustrated throughout with a remarkable selection of photographs, this uniquely wide-ranging and path-breaking study is written in an accessible style and is intended for the general reader as well as for students of Modern History, Politics, Sociology and International Relations.

'An illuminating portrait of Baltimore ... Readers will be enthralled' Publishers Weekly A kaleidoscopic account of five days in the life of a city on the edge, told through eight characters on the front lines of the uprising that overtook Baltimore and riveted the world. When Freddie Gray was arrested for possessing an 'illegal knife' in April 2015, he was, by eyewitness accounts that video evidence later confirmed, treated 'roughly' as police loaded him into a vehicle. By the end of his trip in the police van, Gray was in a coma from which he would never recover. In the wake of a long history of police abuse in Baltimore, this killing felt like the final straw - it led to a week of protests empowered by the Black Lives Matter movement, then five days described alternately as a riot or an uprising. New York Times bestselling author Wes Moore tells the story of the five days through his own observations and through the eyes of other Baltimoreans: Partee, a conflicted black captain of the Baltimore Police Department; Jenny, a young white public defender who's drawn into the violent centre of the uprising herself; Tawanda, a young black woman who'd spent a lonely year protesting the killing of her own brother by police; and John Angelos, scion of the city's most powerful family and executive vice president of the Baltimore Orioles, who had to make choices of conscience he'd never before confronted. Each shifting point of view contributes to an engrossing, cacophonous account of a moment in history with striking resemblances to far more recent events, which is also an essential cri de coeur about the deeper causes of the violence and the small seeds of hope planted in its aftermath.

Activists Forever? explores the consequences of political involvement on an individual's life. While much of the research in this area has focused on the motivations of entire protests groups, the editors of this volume propose an approach that focuses on actors. This book examines political involvement's socio-biographical effects, or the ways in which political commitment generates or modifies dispositions to act, think, and perceive, in a way that is either consistent with or in contrast to the results of previous socialization. The contents explore what political involvement leads to rather than what causes involvement. Using a variety of case studies, this collection of essays provides global coverage with a focus on participation in major protests in the 1960s and significantly broadens our understanding by looking outside the United States. These essays look at the lasting effects of activists' knowledge, connections, and symbolic capital on their future participation in politics, as well as their personal and professional lives.

**Winner of the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose** 'A devastating front-line account of the police killings and the young activism that sparked one of the most significant racial justice movements since the 1960s: Black Lives Matter ... Lowery more or less pulls the sheet off America ... essential reading' Junot Diaz, The New York Times, Books of 2016 'Electric ... so well reported, so plainly told and so evidently the work of a man who has not grown a callus on his heart' Dwight Garner, The New York Times, 'A Top Ten Book of 2016' 'I'd recommend everyone to read this book ... it's not just statistics, it's not just the information, but it's the connective tissue that shows the human story behind it. I really enjoyed it' Trevor Noah, host of Comedy Central's 'The Daily Show' A deeply reported book on the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement, offering unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America, and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it In over a year of on-the-ground reportage, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled across the US to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. In an effort to grasp the scale of the response to Michael Brown's death and understand the magnitude of the problem police violence represents, Lowery conducted hundreds of interviews with the families of victims of police brutality, as well as with local activists working to stop it. Lowery investigates the cumulative effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with constant discrimination, failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs. Offering a historically informed look at the standoff between the police and those they are sworn to protect, They Can't Kill Us All demonstrates that civil unrest is just one tool of resistance in the broader struggle for justice. And at the end of President Obama's tenure, it grapples with a worrying and largely unexamined aspect of his legacy: the failure to deliver tangible security and opportunity to the marginalised Americans most in need of it.

Iconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History surveys the origins, uses and manifestations of iconoclasm in history, art and public culture. It examines the various causes and uses of image/property defacement as a tool of political, national, religious and artistic process. This is one of the first books to examine the outbreak of iconoclasm in Europe and North America in the summer of 2020 in the context of previous outbreaks, and it examines the implications of iconoclasm as a form of control, censorship and expression.

Mass protests have raged since the global financial crisis of 2008. Across the world students and workers and environmentalists are taking to the streets. Discontent is seething even in the wealthiest countries, as the world saw with Occupy Wall Street in 2011. Protest Inc. tells a disturbingly different story of global activism. As millions of grassroots activists rally against capitalism, activism more broadly is increasingly mirroring business management and echoing calls for market-based solutions. The past decade has seen nongovernmental organizations partner with oil companies like ExxonMobil, discount retailers like Walmart, fast-food chains like McDonald s, and brand manufacturers like Nike and Coca-Cola. NGOs are courting billionaire philanthropists, branding causes, and turning to consumers as wellsprings of reform. Are career activists selling out to pay staff and fund programs? Partly. But far more is going on. Political and socioeconomic changes are enhancing the power of business to corporatize activism, including a worldwide crackdown on dissent, a strengthening of consumerism, a privatization of daily life, and a shifting of activism into business-style institutions. Grassroots activists are fighting back. Yet, even as protestors march and occupy cities, more and more activist organizations are collaborating with business and advocating for corporate-friendly solutions. This landmark book sounds the alarm about the dangers of this corporatizing trend for the future of transformative change in world politics.

Social movements throughout the world have been central to history, politics, society, and culture. Observing Protest from a Place examines the impact of one such campaign, the global justice movement, as seen from the southern hemisphere. Drawing upon a collective survey from the 2011 World Social Forum in Dakar, the essays explore a number of vital issues, including the methodological problems of studying international activist gatherings and how scholars can overcome those challenges. By demonstrating the importance of the global justice movement and the role of nongovernmental organizations for participants in the southern hemisphere, this volume is an important addition to the literature on community action.

Why do democracy protests emerge in some countries at certain times, but not in others? Why do governments accommodate these protests, undertaking sweeping reforms in some cases, and in others find ways to suppress protests? In Democracy Protests, Brancati highlights the role of economic crises in triggering protests. She argues that crises increase discontent with governments, and authoritarianism in particular, and also increase support for opposition candidates who are more likely to organize protests, especially during election periods. Economic crises are also shown to create chances for opportunists to capitalize on anti-regime sentiment and mobilize support against governments. However, if crises are severe and protests concomitantly large, governments are likely to be compelled to make accommodations with protestors, regardless of their likelihood of retaining office. Brancati's argument rests on a rich statistical analysis of the causes and consequences of democracy protests around the globe between 1989 and 2011, combined with qualitative case studies.

What role has the 'graduate with no future' played in the global wave of unrest that gripped 2011? What connects 'digital natives' and the 'remainder of capital' in struggle? What role will ideologies play in future upheavals and why have some memes resonated, others not?

In February 2011 BBC Newsnight economist Paul Mason sought to explain the motivations, of those taking to the streets in a blog post entitled '20 Reasons Why its Kicking off everywhere.' These interventions shed light on to the growing movements arising in opposition to state solutions to the crisis facing capital and the prospects for a new democracy. The essays in Occupy Everything further elaborate or take inspiration from Mason's '20 Reasons.'

Contributors include: The Free Association, Andre Pusey and Bertie Russell, Deterritorial Support Group, David Robertshaw, Rohan Orton, & Will Barker, Antonis Vradis, Ben Lear & Raph Schlembach, Thomas Gillespie & Victoria Habermehl, Federico Campagna, Emma Dowling, Camille Barbagallo & Nicholas Beuret, Tabitha Bast & Hannah McClure.

Presenting a new framework for the study of revolutions, this innovative exploration of French, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, Iranian, South African, and more recent Arab revolutions, provides a theoretically grounded and empirically comprehensive demonstration of how revolutions mean more than mere state collapse and rebuilding. Through the examination of multiple historical case studies, and use of extensive historical examples to explore a range of revolutions, Mehran Kamrava reveals the range and depth of human emotion and motivations that are so prevalent and consequential in revolutions, from personal commitment to sacrifice, determination, leadership ability, charisma, opportunism, and avarice.

If Civil War battlefields saw vast carnage, the Northern home-front was itself far from tranquil. Fierce political debates set communities on edge, spurred secret plots against the Union, and triggered widespread violence, such as the New York City draft riots. And at the heart of all this turmoil stood Northern anti-war Democrats, nicknamed "Copperheads." Now, Jennifer L. Weber offers the first full-length portrait of this powerful faction to appear in almost half a century. Weber reveals how the Copperheads came perilously close to defeating Lincoln and ending the war in the South's favor. Indeed, by the summer of 1864, they had grown so strong that Lincoln himself thought his defeat was "exceedingly likely." Passionate defenders of civil liberties and states' rights - and often virulent racists - the Copperheads deplored Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, his liberal interpretation of the Constitution, and, most vehemently, his moves toward emancipation. Weber reveals how the battle over these issues grew so heated, particularly in the Midwest, that Northerners feared their neighbors would destroy their livestock, burn their homes, even kill them. Indeed, some Copperheads went so far as to conspire with Confederate forces and plan armed insurrections, including an attempt to launch an uprising during the Democratic convention in Chicago. Finally, Weber illuminates the role of Union soldiers, who, furious at Copperhead attacks on the war effort, moved firmly behind Lincoln. The soldiers' support for the embattled president kept him alive politically in his darkest times, and their victories on the battlefield secured his re-election. Disgraced after the war, the Copperheads melted into the shadows of history. Here, Jennifer L. Weber illuminates their dramatic story. Packed with sharp observation and fresh interpretations, Copperheads is a gripping account of the fierce dissent that Lincoln called "the fire in the rear."