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Protest in Democracies and Autocracies: Crisis, Conflict, & Repression

Thu, September 10, 2:00 to 3:30pm MDT (2:00 to 3:30pm MDT), TBA

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

How can we understand protest in the aftermath of crisis, conflict, and/or past protest failure? This panel proposes papers which seek to investigate the presence and practice of and motivation to protest by focusing-in on the above-mentioned contextual factors. The papers in this panels each answer the call to innovatively examine the role of context in protest mobilization. First, Plantan in her paper (based on original qualitative data) assesses what motivates ordinary citizens to continue the practice of protest after a failed protest wave and asks what if anything have they learned from past ‘failures.’ Next, Grewal and Cebul examine how the opposition assesses military loyalty and whether this influences the mobilization process. Onuch et. al. (employing a unique multi-sited panel survey) examine different push factors present in crisis contexts to explore individuals’ motivation to stay and fight (protest) or to flee (migrate) their home country. Finally, in a highly innovative paper, Berman, Clarke and Majed seek to answer how subnational patterns of violence during civil war shape dynamics of protest mobilization in the post-conflict period.

Because we believe that a comparative approach is important for the development of generalizable theories, we have specifically sought out scholars who are researching trends of mass mobilization in different regions (eastern Europe, Latin America, and MENA). The authors have also been asked to consider their cases in comparative perspective and to ask what is unique about their selected case and methodological approach and what aspects may indeed travel across cases and contexts.

We feel that this panel is a perfect fit with APSA’s 2020 theme of “Democracy, Difference, and Destabilization” as papers deal with countries cases which are highly “polarized”, “on the cusp of” or in aftermath of “civil war”, and deal with questions about “democracy’s [or there lack of] efficacy”.

Finally, our proposed panel has an excellent mix of PhD students, early-career, mid-career, and senior scholars and has a good gender balance. And the panel also features the work of scholars based across Europe, North America and MENA.

This panel incorporates members of the "Competitive Authoritarian Protest Research Network” (CAPRN) - a new research network dedicated to advancing comparative investigation of empirical, methodological and theoretical questions around protest mobilization in competitive authoritarian, autocratic, and democratizing contexts. CAPRN brings together leading scholars in the field in of both contentious politics and comparative politics who have developed international acclaim for their study of protest and actively seek to support a new generation of scholars dedicated to studying contentious politics in comparative perspective.

This panel will not only be of great interest to a variety of scholars attending APSA but also will help develop new research agendas in the study of mass-protest in political science and beyond.

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