Participation in social movements is a multifaceted phenomenon. Indeed, there are many different forms of movement participation. Two important dimension to distinguish forms of participation are time and effort. Some forms of participation are limited in time or of a once-only kind and involve little effort or risk—giving money, signing a petition, or taking part in a peaceful demonstration. E...

For a long time after the end of large-scale student unrest in 1970s Japan stood out by comparatively low level protest. Yet spectacular waves mass-protest returned with anti-nuke mobilizations following 2011 Fukushima meltdown and other ‘post-2011’ movements. In this paper I develop an analytical framework inspired multi-level perspective transition studies to illuminate two questions: how can...

There has been significant recent interest in the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in social movements protesting against authoritarian regimes. Much of the literature on this topic can be framed in terms of dualities: seeing either technology or (less often) society as the cause of impacts characterised as either liberation or repression. This paper seeks to move beyon...

Over the last few years protest movements such as the Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignados movement, and the Occupy protests, have cascaded through the Middle East and the rest of the world.1 All of these were portrayed as ‘Internet Revolutions’, or at least as having been accelerated by the communicative capabilities of the Internet (Hamdy 1The Arab Spring is also named ‘Arab Uprisings’ by some...

Abstract This integrated overview of a dynamic field study covers two main areas. The first half concerns the internal dimensions protest movements- their scope and variability, ideational foundations, dynamics, including leadership resource base. second places these movements in context interactions with public authorities, introduces certain key literatures, “contentious” politics “exit, voic...