Protest Publics: Toward a New Concept of Mass Civic Action

This book examines the waves of protest that broke out in the 2010s as the collective actions of self-organized publics. Drawing on theories of publics/counter-publics and developing an analytical framework that allows the comparison of different country cases, this volume explores the transformation from spontaneous demonstrations, driven by civic outrage against injustice to more institutionalized forms of protest. Presenting comparative research and case studies on e.g. the Portuguese Generation in Trouble, the Arab Spring in Northern Africa, or Occupy Wall Street in the USA, the authors explore how protest publics emerge and evolve in very different ways - from creating many small citizen groups focused on particular projects to more articulated political agendas for both state and society. These protest publics have provoked and legitimized concrete socio-political changes, altering the balance of power in specific political spaces, and in some cases generating profound moments of instability that can lead both to revolutions and to peaceful transformations of political institutions.

The authors argue that this recent wave of protests is driven by a new type of social actor: self-organized publics. In some cases these protest publics can lead to democratic reform and redistributive policies, while in others they can produce destabilization, ethnic and nationalist populism, and authoritarianism. This book will help readers to better understand how seemingly spontaneous public events and protests evolve into meaningful, well-structured collective action and come to shape political processes in diverse regions of the globe.

Nina Y. Belayeva is a Professor of Public Policy at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. She received her PhD in Law and Public Policy from the Institute of State and Law of the Russian Academy of Science. Her current research focuses on civil society and protest publics as global phenomena. She is teaching on civil society's influences on policymaking from a comparative perspective at Bologna University, the University of Turin, Science Po Grenoble, and at the European Regional Master Program in Human Rights and Democratic Governance (ERMA) at the University of Sarajevo. Her recent publications were on global citizenship and global identity, mass protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Bolotnaya protests in Moscow. nbelyaeva.hse@gmail.com

Dmitriy G. Zaytsev is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. He is also a senior research fellow at the International Laboratory for Applied Network Research at the same university. He received his PhD in Political Science from the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Science. His current research focuses on think tanks and analytical communities, as well as protest publics as drivers of socio-political change. He has published numerous chapters in books and edited volumes. zaytsevdi2@gmail.com

Victor A. Albert is an Associate Professor at the Public Policy Department, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. He received his PhD from La Trobe University (2013) with a dissertation on: The Promise of Participation, the Practice of Power: an ethnographic study of participatory institutions in Santo André, São Paulo. He is also the author of The Limits to Citizen Power: participatory democracy and the entanglements of the state (Pluto, 2016). victoralbert@gmail.com