Social media has emerged to be a popular platform for people to express their viewpoints on political protests like the Arab Spring. Millions of people use social media to communicate and mobilize their viewpoints on protests. Hence, it is a valuable tool for organizing social movements. However, the mechanisms by which protest affects the population is not known, making it difficult to estimat...

This paper looks at the impact of Left victory and Left party alliance on the protest behavior of popular movements, based on an original dataset of protest in Mexico City, Brasilia, and São Paulo. I ask, first, whether Left victories reduce levels of protest, and second, whether party alliances constrain protest. My findings suggest that neither hypothesis is systematically correct. Organizati...

Having incorporated the characteristics of Chinese politics, this article puts forward an exploratory analytic framework for understanding protest success and points out how political opportunities and protest frames can explain protest success. Political opportunities not only include direct intervention by the central government but also support from state-sponsored media and favourable polic...

Legalistic discourse, lawyers and lawyering had minor representation during the 2011 summer protest events in Israel. In this paper we explore and analyze this phenomena by employing content analysis on various primary and secondary sources, among them structured personal interviews with leaders and major activists involved in the protest, flyers, video recordings made by demonstrators and song...

This paper attempts an analysis of the popular mobilizations in Chile from the perspective of the problem of transition from a military regime to democracy. It begins with some general reflections on the role of social mobilizations under military regimes, distinguishing among various regime phases and types of mobilizations, and goes on to outline changing state/societal relations in Chile in ...

The use of systematic and organized violence to effect political change is a generalized phenomenon around the world. Singer and Small (1994) put at 137 the number of civil wars that killed at least 1,000 during the period from 1820 to 1990. The death toll from civil wars fought after World War II has been estimated at a minimum of 16.2 million (Fearon and Laitin 2003). According to the data ga...

Forrester Blanchard Washington (1887-1963) was an African American social work pioneer recruited to the first New Deal administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as director of Negro Work in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. This role gave Washington a platform from which to object strenuously to the development of social policies that were predisposing African Americans to chronic ...

Following the 2011 wave of political unrest, extending from the Arab Spring to the UK riots, the formation of a large consensus around Internet censorship is underway. The present paper adopts a social simulation approach to show that the decision to “regulate”, filter or censor social media in situations of unrest changes the pattern of civil protest and ultimately results in higher levels of ...