Contention

Even amid a global pandemic, contention never ceases. Despite governmental restrictions on public assembly in countries across the globe and the societal fears of transmission, the COVID-19 pandemic has nonetheless been a period of widespread contentious action. The Black Lives Matter protests in the United States sparked a host of antiracist protests worldwide, in the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, Ireland, Australia, South Korea, and elsewhere. In May, after a brief lull, the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong resumed street action. In August, thousands amassed in Minsk to oppose the result of the Belarussian presidential election, alleged by many to be fraudulent. Days later, large crowds of demonstrators gathered in Bangkok calling for reformation of the Thai monarchy and the dissolution of Prayut Chan-O-Cha's government. At the time of writing, the environmentalist group Extinction Rebellion appears poised for mass action in Westminster to call for a political response commensurate with the scale of the climate crisis to be passed into UK legislation. All this is to say that even when societies lock down, opportunities for contention most certainly remain open.

The COVID-19 pandemic raised questions about reconciling health priorities with the exercise of certain liberties and rights. Public safety has come into conflict with matters of mobility, freedom of expression, and the right to protest. How can the threat of viral transmission be reconciled with the urgency of political protests, such as in the Black Lives Matter movement? This article discusses various approaches, referring to debates in the United States and Australia, where law enforcement authorities and politicians warned against protest marches, generally citing the protection of public health as a qualifying exception. Numerous epidemiologists, while acknowledging risks, argued that a calculus of risk be deployed, citing public health as a variegated, multilayered concept. A similar balancing act was deployed in Australian courts. Such reasoning led to accusations that public health science had been politicized. Striking the balance remains a pragmatic approach to holding such gatherings during times of pandemic.

Political opportunity structure (POS) refers to how the larger social context, such as repression, shapes a social movement's chances of success. Most work on POS looks at how movements deal with the political opportunities enabling and/or constraining them. This article looks at how one group of social movement actors operating in a more open POS alters the POS for a different group of actors in a more repressive environment through a chain of indirect leverage—how United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) uses the more open POS on college campuses to create new opportunities for workers in sweatshop factories. USAS exerts direct leverage over college administrators through protests, pushing them to exert leverage over major apparel companies through the licensing agreements schools have with these companies.

This article seeks to explain the emergence of a local protest movement against an asylum seeker center (“asielzoekerscentrum” or AZC in Dutch) in the Beverwaard neighborhood in the city of Rotterdam (NL). Based on the contradictory evidence found on the connection between material conditions and anti-immigration mobilization, this article seeks to expand the literature by viewing materiality through the lens of storytelling. Through a qualitative analysis of twenty-eight interviews with inhabitants, local politicians, civil servants, and social workers in 2017, this article illustrates how storytelling about territorial stigmatization and material deprivation played a role in mobilizing inhabitants against the establishment of an AZC in their area two years prior, in 2015. Overall, this article argues that it is not materiality per se but inhabitants’ reading of materiality through practices of storytelling that informed collective mobilization against the arrival of an AZC in a relatively deprived urban community.

This article compares environmental movement engagement in energy and tourism development in Norway and Iceland by bridging the social movement societies (SMSoc) and the players and arenas perspectives. Results are based on field observation and interviews, as well as web-based textual analysis and a preliminary online survey. Results show that Norway is an institutionalized and multi-level social movement society with a mix of professionalized and grassroots local, national, and international organization. Iceland, by contrast, is a national and episodic social movement society where movement players operate at a national scale and engage in project-specific collaboration or opposition in tourism or energy development arenas. This analysis demonstrates the value of bridging the SMSoc and players and arenas perspectives for international comparative social movements research.