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Focusing on critical discourse analysis, this paper aims to propose a framework for analysing the way activist anti-tourism groups construct their social action of protest. The authors argue that activist groups use different narrative strategies to construct and legitimise their discourse of protest to convey social meanings for social action practices. This study represents an attempt to explain how anti-tourism activist groups have the agency to build different paradigms of protest rooted in particular views of tourism.

As a result of the lack of research in this area, this study used a comparative case study methodology drawn on four case studies in the field of anti-tourism protest. Case study is deemed adequate to explore a complex social phenomenon, how activist groups differ from each other, in a specific socio-economic context. A critical discourse analysis method is used to study primary (interviews) and secondary sources (reports, websites and online campaigns documents) of information, which express the activist group motivations and objectives to protest against tourism.

This study’s findings provide evidence in how discourse differs among the protest groups. Three narrative paradigms of protest are identified, which guide their agency: scepticism, based on a global and ecological approach; non-interventionist transformation, rooted in local community issues; and direct transformation, based on a sectoral problem-solving approach. These differences are interpreted as the consequences of the emergence and the development of different paths of protest according to specific social contexts and power relations in which anti-tourism groups are embedded.

This paper provides a contemporary approach to anti-tourism activism within the context of social movements. This case study may be of interest to practitioners and international destination managers interested in gaining a better understanding of anti-tourism protest strategies, new anti-tourism narratives following COVID-19 and the opportunities and challenges for opening a dialogue with those involved in activism and social urban movements as part of sustainable tourism governance. Our results can also help activists to rethink how they integrate differences and particular strategic positions to avoid hindering collective action. This knowledge is especially useful for managers and authorities seeking to develop more accurate collaborative governance practices with local activists, and especially those interested in fostering participative action without marginalising the diverse range of local community perspectives.

Using an ecological model of child participation and drawing on newsletter data from schools across the United States of America (USA), this chapter statistically explores five state factors linked with school protests against gun violence: (1) children’s neighbourhood opportunity; (2) race/ethnicity; (3) voter preference for either a Republican or a Democratic president; (4) child participation policies; and (5) gun laws/violence/ownership. The chapter explores factors linked to both student participation in protests and student nonparticipation in protests that take place at their schools. Three factors were found to be associated with participation and nonparticipation: children’s neighbourhood opportunity, voters’ preference, and participation policies. Findings suggest that Democratic-voting states, mediated by education opportunity, predict the frequency of student protests against gun violence. In Republican-voting states, where education opportunity does not mediate the frequency of school protests, students still organised and participated in protests but to a lesser extent. In addition, states with high overall children’s neighbourhood opportunity and voting student education board members are highly likely to have non-protesting students in schools with protests. The chapter presents five conclusions from these results for the positive and negative exercise of child participation rights and considers what further multilevel explorations can be done to further test the framework employed for this analysis.

We are long overdue for a conversation about ethical treatment of student researchers. Ethical treatment of research participants has been carefully defined through decades of public conversation, and ethical practices have been institutionalized through mechanisms like mandatory ethics trainings and Institutional Review Boards. Student researchers deserve the same level of consideration. While there are many types of ethical violations of student labor in research projects, there are two that are of particular concern to social movements researchers: use of volunteer labor without clear academic or professional benefits, and failure to ensure the safety of student researchers. The first of these ethical violations is especially common in social movements research because of the emergent nature of protests: new rounds of protests begin and researchers seek to rapidly collect data on a tight timeframe, making grant funding to pay student researchers challenging. The second situation emerges when faculty researchers do not consider the ways students' race, gender identity, or other characteristics, or the nature of the protests themselves might create potential risks for students.

In this paper, I propose using the Belmont Report principles to create guidelines for ethical treatment of student researchers. While these principles were developed for the purposes of protecting research participants, the principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice help us to clarify the risks and benefits for student researchers, to find ways to maximize the benefits of student research participation, and to understand and address the inequalities that plague graduate student training.

Social movements are made up of organized groups and individuals working together to accomplish shared objectives. Under what circumstances do active groups build and break their coalitions? Five conditions have been identified in the literature as influencing coalition formation: common identity, resources, organizational structure, historical connection, and institutional setting. Whereas coalition dynamics within a movement wave are best understood in terms of institutional opportunities and threats, further research is needed to determine how and to what extent these contextual elements influence coalitions. This chapter examines how threats posed by indiscriminate and selective repression affect the shape and structure of interorganizational coalitions during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protests in Hong Kong. The analysis relies on an original political event dataset and an organization-event network dataset. These datasets were produced utilizing syntactic event coding techniques based on Telegram posts, which Hong Kong protesters used to distribute information, plan future actions, and crowdsource news. Furthermore, Telegram provides detailed information about state activities, event-level coalitions, and violent groups, which is difficult to access from other sources. This study investigates the coalition networks across the movement's four stages, each of which was marked by a particular type and degree of repression. The findings indicate that indiscriminate and selective repression have varied effects on coalition networks. A wide coalition disintegrates as a result of indiscriminate repression. Selective repression, however, leads to the formation of coalitions around activist groups targeted by repression.

Social movement scholars use protest events as a way to quantify social movements and have most often used large, national newspapers to identify those events. This has introduced known and unknown biases into our measurement of social movements. We know that national newspapers tend to cover larger and more contentious events and organizations. Protest events are furthermore a small part of what social movements actually do. Without other readily available options to quantify social movements, however, big-N studies have continued to focus on protest events via a few large newspapers. With advances in digitized data and computational methods, we now no longer have to rely on large newspapers or focus only on protests to quantify important aspects of social movements. In this paper, we use the environmental movement as a case study, analyzing data from a wide range of local, regional, and national newspapers in the United States to quantify multiple facets of social movements. We argue that the incorporation of more data and new methods to quantify information in text has the potential to transform the way we both conceive of and measure social movements in three ways: (1) the type of focal social movement organization included, (2) the type of tactics and issues covered, and (3) the ability to go beyond protest events as the primary unit of analysis. In addition to demonstrating ways that the focus on counting protest events has introduced specific biases in the type of tactics, issues, and organizations covered in social movement research, we argue that computational methods can help us extract and count meaningful aspects of social movements well beyond event counts. In short, the infusion of new data and methods into social movements, peace, and conflict studies could lead us to a substantial shift in the way we quantify social movements, from protest events to everything that occurs outside of them.

Measuring the diffusion of protests, or more generally, the diffusion of events, is an ongoing task in social sciences. This paper proposes an inter-event approach to study what types of protests tend to diffuse or decline. We develop a standardized, five-step procedure to measure what we define as “event diffusion momentum” (EDM): (1) employ event-based data containing information on the time, location, and features of each protest; (2) define the temporal and spatial ranges of interest; (3) for each observation, count the number of events before and after it within the defined ranges; (4) predict the numbers of post-event and pre-event protests with appropriate count models; (5) calculate the ratios of predicted values for each predictor and confidence intervals using the delta method. The ratio is the EDM. Applying this method to Dynamics of Collective Action (DoCA) data, we identify several micro- and macro-level factors associated with protest diffusion in the United States, 1960–1995. We conclude with the implications and generalizability of the proposed method.

This research explores how protest events can change and develop over time, through an analysis of stakeholder perceptions of the EXIT festival in Serbia. In doing this, it builds on previous research into protest events from a critical events studies perspective and has implications for the management and understanding of events linked to social movements.

This research took a neo-institutionalist perspective and is based on 18 stakeholder interviews, which were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Purposive sampling in the highly-networked city of Novi Sad, Serbia, allowed for the inclusion of diverse participants from politics, NGOs, media and the festival itself.

The findings reveal that the EXIT festival has departed significantly from its original protest roots. Although it is now perceived as part of the dominant political culture in Serbia, it still has the potential to campaign on issues of relevance to the region, which is unrealised. This research demonstrates that the neo-institutionalist perspective can offer fresh insights for research into protest events. Taking this perspective suggests practical implications for the managers of events with protest roots and for social movements seeking to use protestival-style methods to achieve social change.

This paper provides a new theoretical perspective on protest events and proposes a new model that can be used in future research into protest events that persist over time. It also suggests implications for the management and development of protest events within social movements.

This paper aims to examine the cycle of labour protests in Sweden, comparing the contentious actions of trade unions in public and private sectors over 40 years. Prior studies have focused on industrial conflicts or labour protests, but a long-term perspective on the broad protest repertoire across sectors is lacking. The goal is to test the argument of diversification of action repertoire and differences between the public and private sectors.

The authors apply the grievance and political opportunity theories of social movement research for explaining the cycles of labour protests and differences between sectors in Sweden over 40 years (1980–2020). The unique protest event data are combined with the official strike statistics. The research period includes the globalisation of the economy and two economic crises.

Although unions in both sectors have decreased protest mobilisation over time, private sector unions have resigned the most, whereas public sector unions continue to mobilise a diverse set of protest actions. Swedish unions have not replaced strikes with other protest repertoires. The open opportunities have allowed them to use various protests as part of “routine” operations.

Protest event data are derived from newspapers, leading to an over-representation of large events in the urban areas. Future studies should combine data from newspapers with data about online protests.

By thoroughly examining all protest events mobilised by all trade unions in different sectors over 40 years (1980–2020), the paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the cycles of labour protest. The findings should interest industrial relations and social movement scholars.

Social movements, justice campaigns and civil activism have gained recent scholarly attention among non-Western democracies since the end of the Cold War. Yet the meaning and practical implications of civil activism remain contested especially in contexts linked to militarised democracy and the criminalisation of civil activism. Importantly, the broader political terrain within which militarised democracy is situated is increasingly changing, bringing new challenges to its understanding. This chapter builds on liberal democratic theory and discusses militarised democracy in Nigeria to critique state-centric notion of criminology. It draws on two case examples, namely the proscription of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) in 2017 by the federal government against its organised protests for self-determination and the state repressive response to the nation-wide protest against police brutality of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) known as the #End SARS protest in 2020. Both provide on-the-ground evidence of the criminalisation of civil activism. In the alternative, this chapter reflects on how transforming democracy can redress state repression and offer a better understanding of civil activism, which can strengthen developing democracies, including addressing questions of political marginalisation, distributive justice, police brutality, inequality, repressive state response and unequal state structure accounting for organised protests.

The popular uprising (Aragalaya) combined a protest movement with a movement towards commons or a solidarity economy. The popular uprising from March to August 2022 was a reaction to the authoritarian heteropatriarchal Rajapaksa regime, which drained public revenues instigating an economic crisis. The Aragalaya was based on non-violence, independence from political parties, participatory democracy, collective leadership, politico-aesthetic strategies (art activism) and collective learning. While there were multiple contradictions, along with state repression, the Aragalaya expressed new forms of solidarity, strengthening struggles for democracy and citizenship.