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I am very pleased to participate in this dialogue on the effect of collective protest on social spending in Latin America, which initiated when the editors of LAPS invited me to review the research note titled "Organized Labor Strikes and Social Spending in Latin America: The Synchronizing Effect of Mass Protest." Dongkyu Kim, Mi-son Kim, and Cesar Villegas engage with my paper, published in Comparative Political Studies (Zarate-Tenorio 2014), which analyzes the effects of organized labor strikes and mass protests on social security and welfare, health and education spending in Latin America, 1970–2007.

AbstractNew centrist anti-establishment parties (CAPs) are successful competitors in Central and Eastern Europe. Due to their emphasis on anti-establishment rhetoric and a moderate ideological platform, their breakthrough is usually explained by voters' dissatisfaction with existing parties. However, little is known about the ideological component of their support. Expectations on the impact of ideology on vote choice in the protest voting literature range from 'pure protest voting', which denies any impact of ideology, to a more moderate approach, which combines protest and ideological considerations. Using survey data, I confirm that CAPs attract voters with lower levels of political trust, but ideology also matters. The degree of ideological sorting, however, varies. While some CAPs mainly attract voters from one side of the political spectrum, others attract voters from the left to the right more equally. The differences in the initial composition of their electorates have implications for the parties' future.

In a democratic country like South Africa where the Constitution is the supreme law, governance entails enforcement of the basic principle of public participation. In practice, though, public participation appears to have remained a pipe dream, especially in the sphere of service delivery. Hence, the service delivery protests are increasingly linked to the apparent voicelesness of people in the decision-making processes. Theoretically, the fierce and often violent service delivery protests could be prevented or avoided by enforcing meaningful public participation in decisions about municipal priorities. This paper makes a theoretical argument about the association between public participation and service delivery in order to insinuate that public anger breeds on the sense of voicelessness among community members. Additionally, the paper draws empirical evidence of the recent violent protests across South Africa to affirm the locus of violence in the lack of public participation within municipal decision making about service delivery priorities. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n9p148

Acknowledgments -- Introduction: conceptualizing generations and protests / Mark Muhannad Ayyash and Ratiba Hadj-Moussa -- Forms of protest and the production of generations -- Palestinian youth in Israel : a new generational style of activism? / Mohammad Massalha, Ilana Kaufman and Gal Levy -- From student to general struggle : the protests against the neoliberal reforms in higher education in contemporary Italy / Lorenzo Cini -- Lawyers mobilizing in the Tunisian uprising : a matter of generations / Eric Gobe -- Genealogies of generational formations -- A turning point in the formation of Syrian youth / Matthieu Rey -- Together, but divided : trajectories of a generation of Egyptian political activists (from 2005 to the revolution) / Chaymaa Hassabo -- The Gezi protests : the making of the next left generation in Turkey / Gokboru Sarp Tanyildiz -- Memory, history and the "new generation" -- "Freedom is a daily practice" : the Palestinian youth movement and Jil Oslo / Sunaina Maira -- The double presence of southern algerians : space, generation and unemployment / Ratiba Hadj-Moussa -- "We are not heiresses" : generational memory, heritage and inheritance in contemporary Italian feminism / Andrea Hajek -- Echoes of Ricardo Mella : reading twenty-first century youth protest movements through the lens of an early twentieth-century anarchist / Stephen Luis Vilaseca

This chapter will focus on the use of comic slogans and imagery as part of modern-day political protest. Particular attention will be paid to the use of comedy within contemporary feminist activism against the erosion of women's rights at the #LassWar protest (February 2017), Anti-Brexit protests (specifically those of March 2019), and marches against the state visit of Donald Trump to the UK (July 2018). Humour has been theorised in relation to the relief it can provide to individuals and communities. This relief is achieved through the public acknowledgement of a taboo subject within joking. Additionally humour and joking are affiliative and can operate as a cohesive force, enabling people to (temporarily) experience a sense of a collective identity (Medhurst, 2007). In the current environment humour therefore plays a central role in galvanising political resistance and airing challenging aspects of debate. Protest in the current context is no longer only about disrupting and claiming the physical spaces of society but finding ways to insert the protest into the feeds of the online space. The circulatory aspects of joking (the need to share the humorous image or quip) is a key tool to achieving this broader disruption beyond the physical space. The function of humour within protest has been particularly relevant to recent activism by feminist and women's groups, as they have long been subjected to stereotypes that positions them as humourless. Both Brexit and Trump are symptoms of a male-dominated return to nationalist populism, and humour gives women an opportunity to articulate resistance to movements that arguably affect them the most (for example in the form of continued austerity or the threat to reproductive rights). This chapter will analyse the use of comic phrasing, cartoons and images within the signs and banners used during these recent public marches in the UK. The mediation of protest signs and slogans, and the commodification of women's anger in these instances will be considered

Beginning in 2018, youth across the globe participated in protest activities aimed at encouraging government action on climate change. This activism was initiated and led by Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg. Like other contemporary movements, the School Strike 4 Climate used social media. For this article, we use Twitter trace data to examine the global dynamics of the student strike on March 15, 2019. We offer a nuanced analysis of 993 tweets, employing a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Like other movements, the primary function of these tweets was to share information, but we highlight a unique type of information shared in these tweets—documentation of local events across the globe. We also examine opinions shared about youth, the tactic (protest/strike), and climate change, as well as the assignment of blame on government and other institutions for their inaction and compliance in the climate crisis. This global climate strike reflects a trend in international protest events, which are connected through social media and other digital media tools. More broadly, it allows us to rethink how social media platforms are transforming political engagement by offering actors—especially the younger generation—agency through the ability to voice their concerns to a global audience.

This discourse analysis of audience reception examined journalistic response to the May 1, 2006, immigrants' rights protests in mainstream newspapers, niche news and opinion outlets in the United States. The organizers of the protests faced a particular rhetorical challenge: to craft a message that would be well received by both hostile and friendly audiences. In addition to attracting significant media coverage, the actions sparked both celebration and criticism in public commentary. Three key themes were identified based on primary texts from protest organizers and existing research on media coverage of political protest: economy; policy/rights; and law/order. Linguistic representations of these themes were constructed and keywords were searched across a corpus of newspaper front pages and television transcripts to identify general trends. These trends were then analyzed at the level of sentence and utterance. Our findings illustrate the particular challenges of polysemy for social movements that seek to use mass media to advance their political goals in an increasingly fragmented media environment, as well as the persistence of some aspects of the "protest paradigm" in media coverage.

ARUPJYOTI SAIKIA, A Century of Protests: Peasant Politics in Assam Since 1900 (New Delhi: Routledge), 2014, pp. 480.