Popular Protest, Political Opportunities, and Change in Africa PDF Download

Author: Edalina Rodrigues Sanches
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000569101
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

View

Book Description
This book offers a fresh analysis of third wave popular protests in Africa, shedding light on the complex dynamics between political change and continuity in contemporary Africa. The book argues that protests are simultaneously products and generators of change in that they are triggered by micro-and-macrosocial changes, but they also have the capacity to transform the nature of politics. By examining the triggers, actors, political opportunities, resources and framing strategies, the contributors shed light onto tangible (e.g. policy implementation, liberal reforms, political alternation) and intangible (e.g. perceptions, imagination, awareness) forms of change elicited by protests. It reveals the relevant role of African protests as engines of democracy, accountability and collective knowledge. Bringing popular protests in authoritarian and democratic settings into discussion, this book will be of interest to scholars of African politics, democracy and protest movements.

Author: Adam Branch
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1780329997
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

View

Book Description
From Egypt to South Africa, Nigeria to Ethiopia, a new force for political change is emerging across Africa: popular protest. Widespread urban uprisings by youth, the unemployed, trade unions, activists, writers, artists, and religious groups are challenging injustice and inequality. What is driving this new wave of protest? Is it the key to substantive political change? Drawing on interviews and in-depth analysis, Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly offer a penetrating assessment of contemporary African protests, situating the current popular activism within its historical and regional contexts.

Author: Awino Okech
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030463435
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

View

Book Description
This book brings together conceptual debates on the impact of youth-hood and gender on state building in Africa. It offers contemporary and interdisciplinary analyses on the role of protests as an alternative route for citizens to challenge the ballot box as the only legitimate means of ensuring freedom. Drawing on case studies from seven African countries, the contributors focus on specific political moments in their respective countries to offer insights into how the state/society social contract is contested through informal channels, and how political power functions to counteract citizen’s voices. These contributions offer a different way of thinking about state-building and structural change that goes beyond the system-based approaches that dominate scholarship on democratization and political structures. In effect, it provides a basis for organizers and social movements to consider how to build solidarity beyond influencing government institutions. Chapters 3, 5, and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Author: Lisa Mueller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108423671
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

View

Book Description
Looking at protests from Senegal to Kenya, Lisa Mueller shows how cross-class coalitions fuel contemporary African protests across the continent.

Author: William Beinart
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1868149439
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

View

Book Description
An examination of post-apartheid politics This volume explores some of the key features of popular politics and resistance before and after 1994. It looks at continuities and changes in the forms of struggle and ideologies involved, as well as the significance of post-apartheid grassroots politics. Is this a new form of politics or does it stand as a direct descendent of the insurrectionary impulses of the late apartheid era? Posing questions about continuity and change before and after 1994 raises key issues concerning the nature of power and poverty in the country. Contributors suggest that expressions of popular politics are deeply set within South African political culture and still have the capacity to influence political outcomes. The introduction by William Beinart links the papers together, places them in context of recent literature on popular politics and 'history from below' and summarises their main findings, supporting the argument that popular politics outside of the party system remain significant in South Africa and help influence national politics. The roots of this collection lie in post-graduate student research conducted at the University of Oxford in the early twenty-first century.

Author: Gabriel Ondetti
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271047844
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

View

Book Description
Brazil is a country of extreme inequalities, one of the most important of which is the acute concentration of rural land ownership. In recent decades, however, poor landless workers have mounted a major challenge to this state of affairs. A broad grassroots social movement led by the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) has mobilized hundreds of thousands of families to pressure authorities for land reform through mass protest. This book explores the evolution of the landless movement from its birth during the twilight years of Brazil&’s military dictatorship through the first government of Luiz In&ácio Lula da Silva. It uses this case to test a number of major theoretical perspectives on social movements and engages in a critical dialogue with both contemporary political opportunity theory and Mancur Olson&’s classic economic theory of collective action. Ondetti seeks to explain the major moments of change in the landless movement's growth trajectory: its initial emergence in the late 1970s and early 80s, its rapid takeoff in the mid-1990s, its acute but ultimately temporary crisis in the early 2000s, and its resurgence during Lula's first term in office. He finds strong support for the influential, but much-criticized political opportunity perspective. At the same time, however, he underscores some of the problems with how political opportunity has been conceptualized in the past. The book also seeks to shed light on the anomalous fact that the landless movement continued to expand in the decade following the restoration of Brazilian democracy in 1985 despite the general trend toward social-movement decline. His argument, which highlights the unusual structure of incentives involved in the struggle for land in Brazil, casts doubt on a key assumption underlying Olson's theory.

Author: Sabine C. Carey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113409552X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 151

View

Book Description
This volume investigates the relationship between protest, repression and political regimes in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Considering how different political regimes use repression and respond to popular protest, this book analyzes the relationship between protest and repression in Africa and Latin America between the late 1970s and the beginning of the twenty first century. Drawing on theories, multi-method empirical analyses and case studies, the author of this volume sets out to investigate the reciprocal dynamics between protest and repression. Distinctive features of this volume include: quantitative analyses that highlight general trends in the protest-repression relationship case studies of different political regimes in Chile and Nigeria, emphasising the dynamics at the micro-level an emphasis on the importance of full democratization in order to reduce the risk, and intensity, of intra-state conflict Focusing on political regimes in different areas of the world, Protest, Repression and Political Regimes will be of vital interest to students and scholars of conflict studies, human rights and social movements.

Author: Jacob Mwathi Mati
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000023060
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195

View

Book Description
This book analyses the emergence, strategies, and outcomes of the struggle to embed democratic governance and constitutional order in Kenya, showcasing both the power and the limits of citizen agency in the struggle to transform a postcolonial African state. Utilising data from primary interviews, media, and existing literature, this book analyses the emergence, diffusion, operational strategies, and outcomes of Kenyan constitutional reform struggles with a view to highlighting both the power and limits of social movement in transforming a postcolonial African state. It engages intersections of social movement and theories of democratisation to probe the production, operations, and outcomes of the disruptive yet creative power of the movements at the centre of the struggle to transform the Kenyan constitution. The book also appraises the "meanings" of, and developments after, the promulgation of the 2010 constitution with a view to illuminating the prospects for a transformative democratic political order in Kenya. This book is a useful tool in understanding the struggles specific to Kenya, but also offers insights into other democratic struggles on the African continent and beyond. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of social movements and political change in Africa in general and Kenya in particular.

Author: Merouan Mekouar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131707422X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

View

Book Description
Why and how do some acts of protest trigger mass mobilization while others do not? Using the cases of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, Mekouar argues that successful mass mobilization is the result of a surprise factor, whose impact and exceptionality is amplified by the presence of influential political agents during the early phase of protest, as well as by regime violence and unusual media coverage. Together this study argues that these factors create a perception of exceptionality, which breaks the locally available cognitive heuristic originally in favor of the regime, and thus creates the necessary conditions for mobilization to occur. This book provides a unique dialectical picture of mobilization in North Africa by focusing both on the perspective of those who mobilized against their local regimes and members of the security forces who were responsible for stopping them. Moreover, it offers a first-hand account of the tumultuous days preceding authoritarian collapse and explains the mechanisms through which political change occurs.

Author: Isabel Ortiz
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030885135
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

View

Book Description
This is an open access book. The start of the 21st century has seen the world shaken by protests, from the Arab Spring to the Yellow Vests, from the Occupy movement to the social uprisings in Latin America. There are periods in history when large numbers of people have rebelled against the way things are, demanding change, such as in 1848, 1917, and 1968. Today we are living in another time of outrage and discontent, a time that has already produced some of the largest protests in world history. This book analyzes almost three thousand protests that occurred between 2006 and 2020 in 101 countries covering over 93 per cent of the world population. The study focuses on the major demands driving world protests, such as those for real democracy, jobs, public services, social protection, civil rights, global justice, and those against austerity and corruption. It also analyzes who was demonstrating in each protest; what protest methods they used; who the protestors opposed; what was achieved; whether protests were repressed; and trends such as inequality and the rise of women’s and radical right protests. The book concludes that the demands of protestors in most of the protests surveyed are in full accordance with human rights and internationally agreed-upon UN development goals. The book calls for policy-makers to listen and act on these demands.