Contention

During the 2000 Canadian federal election, members of the Edible Ballot Society (EBS) protested what they considered to be the “futility of electoral politics” by eating their ballots. This article argues that these actions, while illegal, were performances of citizenship intended to produce a creative rupture in the given definition of the Canadian state and electoral process. The analysis is informed by critical scholarship on protest and humor, and draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival and Engin Isin’s framework of “acts of citizenship” to situate the EBS protest as a form of prefigurative politics that is embedded in and yet challenges neoliberal discourse. The EBS action attempted to highlight the Canadian state’s refusal to accept its own emergence as an ongoing political project rather than a static entity, and was pushback against the proscribed voting process designed to open up new spaces for democratic reform.

This article considers social control mechanisms that targeted public protest at a particular summit, the Brisbane G20, first by examining the management of previous gatherings (Miami and Toronto), and then by looking at the more specific, nuanced techniques deployed in Brisbane in 2014. Despite its violence, the Toronto G20 added a few legal and policing innovations, including designated free speech zones, controlled areas of movement, and, albeit unsuccessfully, the extensive use of public relations. The lessons of Toronto were directly incorporated into the security architecture of Brisbane’s policing and social control effort. Brisbane witnessed one of the more successful efforts at limiting and arguably shutting down social protest in its entirety. Protest narratives were fastidiously managed and shaped by the Queensland Police Service and affiliated agencies. As a response, alternative protest techniques, including counter-summits, were ostensibly fashioned to circumvent such a restrictive security architecture, but were marginalized in doing so.

This article analyzes an atypical case of anti–wind farm contention at Marden in southeast England. anti–wind farm campaigns have typically sought to resist developments through planning institutions. Although it focused on planning, the Marden campaign successfully pursued a “private politics” strategy, pressuring businesses (e.g., developer, investors, landowner) to withdraw their support and commitment. Drawing on ten semi-structured interviews with stakeholders and extensive documentary analysis, this article describes and explains this atypical case. Marden’s private politics involved strategic framing that aligned with businesses’ claims to corporate social and environmental responsibility. Although direct attempts to persuade companies on these terms failed, when the campaign “went public” economic actors withdrew support. Marden’s trajectory and outcome are explained via resources and context particular to the case, and the potential reputational damage associated with its framing strategy. The article ends by noting interesting relationships and parallels between private politics and state-focused local contention.

Those aged 18 to 25 are frequently cited in political rhetoric and scientific literature as one of the most apathetic demographics in Britain. They simultaneously constitute the prime users of new digital media. The assumption of apathy is based on traditional conceptions of political engagement—attendance at rallies, membership in political parties, and voting—that don’t consider a phenomenon like political consumerism, which is estimated to account for 22 to 44 percent of political engagement in the United States and Europe. This article explores youth involvement in politics by drawing on a series of interpretative phenomenological analysis interviews regarding social media usage and its suitability as a medium for facilitating political and civic mobilization. It argues that social media enables people to obtain political knowledge and generate feelings of solidarity, and illustrates how internal belief systems act as predictors of trust in the existing political structure and the media systems surrounding it.

Framing processes concern how movements communicate with members and the public, defining what they stand for and articulating grievances and solutions. I extend the literature on framing processes to include an online-only movement of the Right with no formal movement organization. I performed a content analysis of 435 memes posted on the Men’s Rights subreddit, concluding that three main frames appear in their discourse: men as victims, antifeminism, and denial of gender inequality. Men’s rights activists (MRAs) accomplish a global transformation of the feminist frame using rhetorical strategies to deny gender inequality exists, simultaneously asserting men are victims of inequality and sexism. “Attack frames” provide MRAs with a common definition of feminism. This understanding contributes to building a collective movement identity centered on a narrative of men as victims. The attack frames can be deployed to sustain affective processes such as anger, which motivate a countermovement against feminism.

John Dunn, FBA, is emeritus professor of political theory at King’s College, University of Cambridge. His work on revolution began in 1972 with the publication of his landmark volume, Modern Revolutions: An Introduction to the Analysis of a Political Phenomenon. A second edition was published in 1989, and the volume has since been translated into several foreign languages. Alongside revolution, Dunn’s thought has examined questions of regime collapse, reconstruction, the political trajectories of modern states, and the emergence and significance of democracy. His work lies at the intersection of history, political theory, and sociology. In the interview, Dunn offers a categorization of revolution as a distinctly bounded historical phenomenon that has not persisted into the twenty-first century. “The Epoch of Revolution,” he argues, begins with 1789 and had definitively ended by 1989. After the Epoch of Revolution, Dunn argues, we now confront a more enduring and generic phenomenon: regime collapse.