From the popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East in early 2011, via the Spanish indignados and Occupy Wall Street to the Gezi Park protests in Turkey and the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong, in recent years different parts of the world have seen major instances of popular contestation. These were not isolated events; they influenced, shaped, and in some cases triggered each other. Together, they arguably form a new, global protest âcycle â (Della Porta 2016), ârevolutionary waveâ (Weyland 2012) or âregime-change cascadeâ (Hale 2013) .
It is worth considering how the various terms usedâcycle, wave, cascadeâhighlight different elements at play when protests spread beyond national borders. The image of the cascade foregrounds the way in which individual contestations follow upon each other in stages, with each subsequent stage taking from and building on the previous one, accumulating force in the process. The metaphor of the cycle usefully indicates how unexpected transnational proliferations of protest are not unique, but reoccur over time and therefore inevitably involve âremobilization â alongside âinnovationâ with regard to their âorganizational structuresâ and âstyles of activism â (Della Porta 2016, 1â2). The idea of recurrence is also accommodated by the figure of the wave, but with greater emphasis on its unpredictability (waves are not regularly spread) and its association with difference (waves can be of different magnitudes and durations). In addition, the wave evokes not just an intensifying force (as it builds toward the shore), like the cascade , but also the subsequent discharge and fading (as it breaks) that characterizes each protest surge and, conceivably, each specific protest within it. This indicates a momentum quite different from a cyclical return to the beginning, one that is vulnerable to counter-measures (wave breakers or breakwaters) and subject to highly variable outcomes; the wave may fizzle out, but it may also overwhelm and alter the landscape or cause profound damage, as in the case of a tsunami, to which the Arab Spring has been repeatedly likened, mostly by those framing it as a failure (Freudenstein 2011; Bradley 2012; Gartenstein-Ross and Vassefi 2012; Haseeb 2012) . Finally , the wave , through its capacity to travel across vast distances, connotes geographical expansion more readily than the cycle (associated with circumscription) or the cascade (invoking the vertical movement of a waterfall). 1
Conceiving the global swell in popular contestations of the 2010s as a far from unitary waveâwhich, in addition to taking inspiration from earlier protests, accommodates distinct âsub-waves â (Gerbaudo 2013) and produces, to the present day, ripple effects as it continues to inspire new and ongoing contestations in various, sometimes surprising waysâallows us to consider it in terms of sameness and difference, continuity and discontinuity, action and counter-action, build-up and fall-off, concentration and diffusion. Thus, on the one hand, we see the protests making up this wave and those influenced by it as different from each other in many respectsâunfolding in specific national and local contexts, and contesting a variety of issues from divergent political perspectives. On the other hand, we consider how certain elements of the mobilized âcollective action frames and identities â (Della Porta and Tarrow 2005) were actively passed on from one protest to the next, most notably a framing of the protests as expressing a desire for bottom-up, direct, or participatory democracy on the part of those feeling oppressed or ignored by autocratic regimes , or disenfranchised in parliamentary democracies , and as defining themselves against an indifferent, self-serving elite (Gerbaudo 2013, 90).
The protests also borrowed from each other in terms of their âorganizational structureâ and ârepertoires of action â (Della Porta and Tarrow 2005). Regarding their organizational structure, what has been particularly striking is that these protests were, for the most part, not initiated or directed by traditional social movement organizations (although these sometimes became involved or took over in later stages), but appeared to be spontaneous political movements âfrom below.â Their repertoires of action, moreover, showed a shared reliance on: (1) the sustained or repeated occupation of public space (Butler 2015; Göle 2013; Feigenbaum et al. 2013; TrerĂ© and Mattoni 2016) ; (2) the establishment of alternative forms of sociality and civility in these spaces (Celikates 2015; Yaka and Karakayali 2017); (3) the extensive use of social media (Castells 2012; Juris 2012; Poell and van Dijck 2015) ; and (4) creative branding through the use of colors (as in the so-called Color Revolutions ), catchy slogans (such as the Egypt Revolution âs âErhalâ [Leave], Occupy Wall Street âs âWe are the 99%â or the French anti-gay marriage movementâs âManif Pour Tousâ [Protest for Everyone]), and quirky symbols (from umbrellas in Hong Kong to penguins in Turkeyâs Gezi Park protests) (Bennett and Segerberg 2013; Beraldo 2017; Poell et al. 2016).
While we agree that there is reason to celebrate progressive contemporary movements for their spectacular occupations of squares, streets, and buildings, their creative online tactics, and the new prefigurative political imaginaries they introduced, we also acknowledge that these movementsâ long-term efficacy and sustainability have been called into question, with several (most insistently the protests in Egypt, Libya, and Syria) labeled as eventual failures (Bayat 2013; White 2016; Dean 2015; Elbadawi and Makdisi 2016).
With this volume , coming out of the 2015 Global Cultures of Contestation conference organized by the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS), we seek to move beyond positions that generalize across the different popular contestations making up and influenced by the protest wave to present a singularly celebratory or dismissive account. We do so by presenting detailed analyses of particular contestations from a durational perspective that allows us to consider not only obvious and immediate outcomes, but also more subtle, deferred, or displaced effects. These analyses, moreover, focus on delineating the specific âculture of collective action â (Maurer 2011; quoted in Della Porta et al. 2015, 16) or âculture of contestationââin the sense of the forms of material and symbolic production (Williams 1988) through which the non-dominant âadduce opposing testimonyâ to the dominant (Lombardi-Satriani 1974, 104)âinto which common elements were assimilated in each specific protest. Thus, each protest is approached in terms of both its specificity and its tendency, in a context of advanced globalization and digitization , to connect to, learn from, or influence other protests elsewhere.
The eleven contributions that make up the volume come from scholars across the humanities and the social sciences who analyze particular contestations in terms of how they unfolded, what inspired them, and how their afterlives have taken shape in Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, the UK , Spain, Greece, Poland, Russia, Hong Kong, and Australia, as well as on a transnational scale, as with the NSA -leaks and illegal border-crossings by migrants around the world. Combining perspectives from the social sciences and the humanities enables this volume to take into account the political and social causes and consequences (direct and indirect, immediate and delayed) of the various protests making up the global wave or following in its wake, as well as the aesthetic dimensions of protest communication and mobilization, online and offline.
It is important to note that this volume is concerned neither with âtransnational collective action ,â defined as âcoordinated international campaigns on the part of networks of activists against international actors, other states, or international institutionsâ (Della Porta and Tarrow 2005, 2â3), nor with global movements that âidentif[y] both a common identity âthe âusââand the target of the protestâthe otherâat the transnational leve...
