Chapter 9 reveals that the circular patterns of norm renegotiation manifest at the national level in India’s broader women’s movement. It describes the history of this movement and then use ACLED data on all women-led protest events in India from 2016 to 2021 to illustrate the breadth of women’s collective mobilization and the range of demands raised. Women most often come together to protest more explicitly gendered issues, such as gender-based violence. However, many women-led protests focus on other demands, including improved government accountability and service delivery. The nature of women’s demand-making suggests possibilities for both gender equality and improved governance with their political inclusion. Finally, it documents broader patterns of resistance to women’s collective action at the national scale, documenting a range of explicit instances of violent backlash and summarizing the rise of the men’s rights movement in India. This provides further evidence of male coercion and suggests conditions under which women’s collective action can succeed.

This chapter presents a micro-sociological re-theorization of nonviolent resistance as shaped by dynamics of rhythms, destabilization of domination, energizing and de-energizing repression, and emotional feedback loops. The chapter shows how an occupying power can be understood as a tightly organized musical ensemble with dominating interactions and rhythmic coordination, and how nonviolent resistance can disrupt the rhythmic coordination and domination by a regime; hence, de-stabilizing and potentially challenging the power relation. The chapter discusses how concrete nonviolent actions can defy domination and the degree to which they can be useful for challenging violent repression. In conflicts of nonviolent resistance, the battle is determined by whether the protesters or the regime are able to dominate the situation and challenge the tight, rhythmic coordination and unity of the opponent. If neither party is able to dominate, the situation will escalate. Finally, the chapter discusses how nonviolent resistance can foster long-term change.

This chapter is a practical guide for navigating international environmental conferences, focusing on what there is to these events beyond the negotiations. It sensitizes readers to the existence and specificities of conference spaces and practices such as side events, the corridors, and civil society protests, first touching upon spaces within conference venues before zooming out to consider how conferences manifest outside and beyond their dedicated venue. Building on this scene-setting, the chapter outlines the distinction between using the various conference spaces as sites for data collection and treating them as research objects in their own right. It especially underscores the need for comparative research across processes, notably by providing novel insights on the side-event phenomenon. The chapter makes explicit much of the implicit knowledge that enables seasoned participants to smoothly navigate these events and aims to stimulate scholarship that advances our understanding of the multifaceted nature of these conferences and their constitutive parts.

The chapter examines everyday citizenship among youth respondents from the angle of their relationship to the state or as citizenship-from-above. Youth respondents initially defined citizenship in terms of legal obligations to the state. Afrobarometer findings that indicate high levels of support for obeying the law and paying taxes echo those responses, though respondents provide nuance to the Afrobarometer data. Legalistic views of citizenship are closely connected to the building and maintenance of strong relations at the local level and, for some, notions of morality. Few youth defined citizenship primarily in terms of voting, though Afrobarometer findings indicate large percentages do participate in elections. Even fewer youth respondents described citizenship as engagement in activities such as joining with others to advocate or protesting to hold governments accountable, a finding that aligns with the survey data. For these few youth, it is their everyday relationships with friends and neighbors and communal experiences of marginalization that motivate actions. Protest examples from South Africa and Uganda show that citizenship-from-above and citizenship-from-below blur and that everyday citizenship manifests in creative and agentic ways.

This introductory chapter describes Chile’s recent and unprecedented wave of protests starting in late 2019 to situate this book within a broader socio-political context and academic debate. The book’s core contribution is the notion of mobilizational citizenship, which adds to the literature on social movements and citizenship studies. It explains how and why communities at the urban margins are able to sustain collective action over several decades and become prepared to support large-scale protests leading to a democratization process. To develop this theoretical argument, this book tells the story of two very similar urban communities founded in eastern Santiago in 1970. They have a similar socio-demographic configuration and location, their histories coincide, and grew as highly politicized and mobilized communities. Remarkably however, while one of the communities followed the pattern of demobilization observed across the country in the wake of its transition to democracy, the other is a counterexample of enduring mobilization. I studied this puzzling contrast through an ethnographic approach that included observations, interviews, and archival research.

To test the hypothesis of policing as a function of regime type, this chapter focuses on the evolutions of political policing in light of recent Thai political developments – as only political policing is expected to be affected by democratization. Indeed, whether in times of full-fledged military dictatorship or in times of electoral democracy, routine service-oriented, law-enforcement type of policing remains relatively constant. This chapter argues that post-1970s democratization in Thailand had minimal effects on the entrenched practices of authoritarian policing. Democratization did not put an end to these practices but instead correlated with their legalization through the enactment of a set of empowering legislations. This empirical finding invites reconsideration of the hypothesis of a covariation of regime type and policing practices.

This chapter describes the historical backdrop against which mobilizational citizenship developed in Chile’s urban margins from the 1960s onward. It offers parallel accounts of developments across Chile’s urban margins, as well as in the communities used as case studies in this book: the Lo Hermida and Nuevo Amanecer neighborhoods. While descriptive in nature, the chapter makes several key steps. First, it addresses key moments of collective action occurring in underprivileged urban communities before the coup d’état in 1973. Second, the chapter describes the powerfully disruptive impact of the dictatorship in communities at the urban margins. Third, it chronicles the wave of anti-dictatorship protests that occurred in the 1980s. Fourth, the chapter describes the dynamics of mobilization and civil society in poblaciones after the democratic transition in 1990. Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of social groups have been demonstrating over social rights in Chile and highly disruptive, large-scale protests erupted in late 2019. The chapter demonstrates the responsiveness of active communities in the urban margins and shows how they provided the organizational structure requisite for protest diffusion.

Questions about dress and undress are charged issues. Past and present in Zambia, nudity and degrees of undress have been contentious issues when performed in public rather than when subject to the private gaze. Body baring events sexualise different body parts, making the body surface a highly charged site and turning dress and undress into powerful matters with bearing on questions about the constitution of society and women’s and men’s places in it. Spontaneous or organised by individuals or groups, bare body demonstrations have complicated implications, some protest oriented and others celebratory as illustrated in episodes from the late colonial period and more recent events. Throughout this period, the shame frontier shifted from the baring of breasts to the wearing of bras.

Chapter 1 shows that economic liberalization is contested in France in multiple ways. Liberalizing reforms are routinely met with strikes and demonstrations; they are often defeated by protest movements; and, in some cases, the leaders who launch such reforms lose their capacity to govern or subsequent elections as a result. The chapter demonstrates that economic liberalization – as measured by indices of fiscal policy, labor market policy, and business competition – has made less headway in France than in the leading European political economies. It also demonstrates that this limited liberalization is not the byproduct of a well-functioning alternative to the liberal economic model. Chapter 1 presents and critiques three explanations of French resistance and contestation of economic liberalization, centered on economic culture, political leadership, and the character of the welfare regime respectively. It then presents the central argument of the book, which is that the pervasive contestation of economic liberalization in France can be traced to the policy, party-political, and institutional legacies of France’s postwar statist or dirigiste economic model. Although the dirigiste model was largely dismantled decades ago, the legacies of this model continue to shape the politics of economic liberalization in the present day.

Between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century the context for petitioning changed. The number of public petitions addressed to the House of Commons declined, and commentators and politicians increasingly regarded petitioning as redundant in an era of mass electoral politics ushered in by the Third Reform Act (1884–85). Yet, as this chapter shows, petitioning did not decline but was rather reinvented in this period. Campaigners increasingly addressed singular mass petitions to a range of different authorities, including the monarch and Downing Street, in ways that emphasised the performative presentation of petitions to maximise coverage in the mass media. High-profile examples, such as petitions organised by the militant suffragettes or the Ulster Covenant and Declaration (1912) associated with Unionist opposition to Irish Home Rule, were part of a broader reimagining of petitioning with the UK’s nascent democracy. Finally, contemporaries also considered petitions to be a mechanism for calling referendums, as shown in a number of bills of the time, and also in the numerous mass petitions from Unionists and others to the king calling for Home Rule to be referred to the people via referendum or general election. As this chapter shows, while the practice of petitioning changed during an era of rapid democratisation it retained an important place within UK popular politics and political culture.