Explores protest groups, their aims and protest tactics, and investigates the affect their decisions have on press coverage and political debate.

The Occupy movement and the Arab Spring have brought global attention to the potential of social media for empowering otherwise marginalized groups. This book addresses questions like what happens after the moment of protest and global visibility and whether social media can also help sustain civic engagement beyond protest.

Although grass-roots social movements are an important force of social and political change, they quite often fail to achieve their lofty goals. Similarly, the inability of research to systematically explain the impact of such movements stands in sharp contrast to their emotional appeal. Protest, Opportunities, and Mechanisms attempts to rejuvenate current scholarship by developing a comprehensive theory of social movements and political change. In addition to reviewing the existing literature on the political outcomes of social movements, this volume analyzes the examples of the American civil rights movement and anti-nuclear energy efforts in eighteen countries to forge a new understanding of their momentous impact.

Explains the character of contemporary protest politics through a micro-mobilization analysis of participation in street demonstrations.

Commercial social media platforms have become integral to contemporary forms of protests. They are intensely used by advocacy groups, non-governmental organisations, social movements and other political actors who increasingly integrate social media platforms into broader practices of organizing and campaigning. But, aside from the many advantages of extensive mobilization opportunities at low cost, what are the implications of social media corporations being involved in these grassroots movements? This book takes a much-needed critical approach to the relationship between social media and protest. Highlighting key issues and concerns in contemporary forms of social media activism, including questions of censorship, surveillance, individualism, and temporality, the book combines contributions from some of the most active scholars in the field today. Advancing both conceptual and empirical work on social media and protest, and with a range of different angles, the book provides a fresh and challenging outlook on a very topical debate.

Protest Politics in the Marketplace examines how social media has revolutionized the use and effectiveness of consumer activism. In her groundbreaking book, Caroline Heldman emphasizes that consumer activism is a democratizing force that improves political participation, self-governance, and the accountability of corporations and the government. She also investigates the use of these tactics by conservatives. Heldman analyzes the democratic implications of boycotting, socially responsible investing, social media campaigns, and direct consumer actions, highlighting the ways in which such consumer activism serves as a countervailing force against corporate power in politics. In Protest Politics in the Marketplace, she blends democratic theory with data, historical analysis, and coverage of consumer campaigns for civil rights, environmental conservation, animal rights, gender justice, LGBT rights, and other causes. Using an inter-disciplinary approach applicable to political theorists and sociologists, Americanists, and scholars of business, the environment, and social movements, Heldman considers activism in the marketplace from the Boston Tea Party to the present. In doing so, she provides readers with a clearer understanding of the new, permanent environment of consumer activism in which they operate.

Digital and social media are increasingly integrated into the dynamics of protest movements around the world. They strengthen the mobilization power of movements, extend movement networks, facilitate new modes of protest participation, and give rise to new protest formations. Meanwhile, conventional media remains an important arena where protesters and their targets contest for public support. This book examines the role of the media -- understood as an integrated system comprised of both conventional media institutions and digital media platforms -- in the formation and dynamics of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. For 79 days in 2014, Hong Kong became the focus of international attention due to a public demonstration for genuine democracy that would become known as the Umbrella Movement. During this time, twenty percent of the local population would join the demonstration, the most large-scale and sustained act of civil disobedience in Hong Kong's history -- and the largest public protest campaign in China since the 1989 student movement in Beijing. On the surface, this movement was not unlike other large-scale protest movements that have occurred around the world in recent years. However, it was distinct in how bottom-up processes evolved into a centrally organized, programmatic movement with concrete policy demands. In this book, Francis L. F. Lee and Joseph M. Chan connect the case of the Umbrella Movement to recent theorizations of new social movement formations. Here, Lee and Chan analyze how traditional mass media institutions and digital media combined with on-the-ground networks in such a way as to propel citizen participation and the evolution of the movement as a whole. As such, they argue that the Umbrella Movement is important in the way it sheds light on the rise of digital-media-enabled social movements, the relationship between digital media platforms and legacy media institutions, the power and limitations of such occupation protests and new "action logics," and the continual significance of old protest logics of resource mobilization and collective action frames. Through a combination of protester surveys, population surveys, analyses of news contents and social media activities, this book reconstructs a rich and nuanced account of the Umbrella Movement, providing insight into numerous issues about the media-movement nexus in the digital era.