There is perhaps one assessment on which observers of contentious politics of late would agree. There has been a flurry of political protest engulfing both democratic and authoritarian regimes; a cascading upsurge of âacts of public defiance and rebellionâ (Biekart and Fowler 2013, p. 528; Gerbaudo 2013). Protests were prompted by either the policy of public austerity in the wake of the latest economic crisis, closely coupled with a deeper-seated disgruntlement with capitalism (epitomised by the Indignados and Occupy Movement and more recently the UK Peopleâs Assembly against Austerity); or a revolutionary fervent against authoritarianism in North Africa and the Middle East (i.e. The Arab Spring). The apparent transnational wave of vocal disaffection has been the source of renewed deliberation surrounding the diffusion of contention1 marked by a persistent preoccupation with networked communication (Christensen 2011; Castells 2012; Biekart and Fowler 2013; Gerbaudo 2013). Far from new, the interest in the degree to which the distributed communication architecture of new and now social media is propping up collective action is as popular and divisive as ever among academics (see the work of Lance Bennett 2003; Bennett and Toft 2008; Howard and Parks 2012; Bennett and Segerberg 2013; Earl et al. 2013; Neumayer and Rossi 2015 for an overview of the research area; Theocharis 2015) and media pundits alike (Gladwell 2010).
It is into the latter arena that I step with this volume. Going down this route, one immediately notices that substantial attention is paid to ramifications for democratic participation derived from the embracement of social media by variegated protest actorsâboth individual and collective (Earl and Kimport 2011; Bimber et al. 2012; Gerbaudo 2012; Bennett and Segerberg 2013). Notably, democratic citizenship and its attainment through practice (Biesta 2007) have piqued interest as street protests attract substantial numbers of followers who prime and narrate their involvement or reflect on the claims and the implications of collective action on social media platforms (Caren and Gaby 2011, p. 12; Papacharissi and Fatima Oliveira 2012; Gleason 2013). Furthermore, a boost has been observed in the coordination capacity of actors that lack the organisational resources of erstwhile bureaucratic movement organisations (Bimber et al. 2005; Flanagin et al. 2006; Bennett and Segerberg 2012; Castells 2012; Thorson et al. 2013, p. 3). The networked communication of contention on social media is thereby portrayed as a levelling force that overcomes geo-spatial and temporal specificities (van Laer and van Aelst 2010; Lievrouw 2011). Equally, it stands accused of converting singularities of place and time into mere props in a political âspectacleâ of âhyper-visibilityâ (Shah 2012). Yet other commentators have argued that networked communication is necessarily rooted in place-based complexitiesâof time, strategy or organisation to name a few (Mattoni and TrerĂ© 2014)âthat moderate or even belie its instrumentality for collective action (Gerbaudo 2013; Kaun 2015). In this book, I seek to tie these debates together and weave them into the larger fabric of the scholarship on civic participation. I contemplate civic or non-electoral participation (Hickerson 2013) within the field of contentious politics.
Contentious politics are an articulation of disenchantment with the practice and institutional configuration of the liberal-democratic polity. The concept sutures three fundamental areas of social movement research: the politics (the structural opportunities for group-based attempts to usher social change, Tarrow 1998); the contention (the framing of the divisive issue prompting the collective response, Benford and Snow 2000) and finally, collective action (the orchestration of and form taken by group efforts at social change, Olson 1965; McAdam et al. 1996; Flanagin et al. 2006). In Tilly and Tarrowâs words (2007, p. 4), contentious politics designates a set of âinteractions in which actors make claims bearing on someone elseâs interests, leading to coordinated efforts on behalf of shared interests or programs, in which governments are involved as targets, initiators of claims or third partiesâ. Contentious politics encompass a potentially indefinite spectrum of forms of collective action from revolutions to social movements, strikes or lockouts (Tilly 1997, p. 56).
Contention pertains to claims-making or the expression of a demand with various degrees of forcefulness by one party or subject and addressed at another, namely the object of the claim. If, on any level, either directly or indirectly, the claim involves the government, the contention can be regarded as political. Accordingly, contentious politics represent a contest for power to effect or prevent the change envisioned in the demand (Tilly and Tarrow, 2007 p. 5). Resting on this premise, the collective action I pore over in this volume is steeped in claims that engage governments by various means, both extra (e.g. demonstrations, petitions) as well as inter-institutional (e.g. lobbying, litigation). This is an important disambiguation to undertake so as to highlight that my primary interest will not be to elucidate the methods claim-makers adopt as they mount their contentions. Consequently, the often tenuous distinction between institutionalised and non-institutionalised politics (van Deth 2014) may be side-stepped.2 This is a necessary condition for two reasons. Firstly, because contentious politics may thus be distinguished as a mode of voluntary participation by citizens, on an equal footing with other participatory practices (van Deth 2014, p. 357, including institutional ones such as public consultations or voting).3 Secondly, one may conceive of collective action that might not meet all criteria required for it to qualify as a social movement.
The preference for contentious politics over social movements as the conceptual centrepiece to this book is informed by the contrast drawn between the two by Tilly and Tarrow (2007, p. 8). In their analysis, social movements are defined by sustained effortsâelapsing over extensive periods of time and carried out repeatedlyâto effect social change by means of varied repertoires of action (including marches, demonstrations, public meetings, petitions or lobbying etc.). To this end, movements rely on social movement bases (emphases added), namely an organisational and social network infrastructure that is generative as well as being the vessel of traditions and ties that foment collective action. As I will go on to show in the following chapter, not all the collective actors I have studied meet all these criteria, all at once. Whilst this is reason enough to foreground the notion of contentious politics, the observation also alludes to a possible transformation in the character of collective action which I will try to evidence whilst duly acknowledging the fact that the intellectual process has already been set in train by Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg (2013) in their theorisation of connective action.
One indication that contentious politics are due a revisitation is the by now commonplace notion that the legitimacy of liberal democracy is eroding. The most cited symptom for this ailment is a documented withdrawal from the conventional politics of organised participation in parties or civic associations (Putnam 2000; Dalton 2006; Rosanvallon and Goldhammer 2008). We have, however, been advised that this malaise has begun to be offset by what Manuel Castells (1997, 2012) called âinsurgent politicsâ. The term refers to the ground-up mobilisation of a spectrum of actorsâchief among which are social movementsâseeking civic alternatives to current political institutions.4 At this point, I would only note that considerable angst exists about the democratic credentials of social movement actors themselves (della Porta and Diani 2006). Many movements are an assorted collection of stakeholders, lacking a visible leadership structure and recognisable organisational infrastructures. In recent mobilisations, those structures have been substituted by a contingent horizontality of public assemblies matched with multi-faceted communication reinforcing them on social media (Juris 2012; Gonzalez-Bailon et al. 2013; Bastos et al. 2015). The Spanish Indignados and the Occupy Movements (Bennett and Segerberg 2012; Chomsky 2012; Graeber 2014; Kreiss and Tufekci 2013) are cases in point.
In this and the following chapters, I proceed to an evidence-based disentanglement of the networked communication that foreshadows the physical enactment of contentious politics. I have developed this line of inquiry across several empirical studies to which I now return with a critical eye and the benefit of hindsight. In doing so, I cross a number of analytical boundaries. I draw on multiple insights, which often do not speak to each other to unveil the fertile ground that contentious politics are for civic participation. I bridge the two research fields with an overview of how networked communication has seeped into the collective action of aggrieved groups, the controversies fuelled by this process. By the end of this introduction, I lay out the hypotheses that I go on to deliberate in the coming chapters for why the networked communication of contention may help reassess and revitalise democracy.
My intention is to unravel aspects of networked communication that precedes or runs alongside physical manifestations of contentious politics such as protest camps and demonstrations. In this undertaking I have been guided by Hannah Arendtâs conceptualisation of the relationship between action and speech (1958), which I tie together with her concept of preparation (1977). Arendtâs theory of action evinces the human capacity to begin, to instigate the unique project th...