Chapter 6 looks at how sectoral networks propelled the Anti-Extradition Movement. By focusing on religious groups, legal professionals, and medical practitioners, we demonstrate how social identities informed protesters what roles to take up during a spontaneous movement, and how these sectoral networks provided expertise and resources to facilitate the movement’s organizing efforts.

Chapter 7 examines how secondary school action groups, established by students in their respective schools, played a crucial role in mobilizing teenagers against the extradition bill by tapping into and leveraging their latent social capital. Utilizing Instagram as a platform, these groups facilitated connections among students within and across schools, often by capitalizing on their schools’ identities and leveraging various sources of social capital tied to those identities. This enabled loose and fragmented social networks can be mobilized in social movements, provided that they can activate their latent social capital.

The introduction chapter critically reviews the existing literature and introduces a theory of mediated threat, which explains how perceived threats to civic freedoms and institutional autonomy can motivate the masses and reshape the relational structure of the democratic opposition. Our basic proposition is that threats do not instantaneously provoke protests; rather, they require perception and socialization among citizens to potentially trigger mobilization. Different groups of citizens may perceive the same threat in disparate ways, leading not only to varied mobilizational responses but also the formation of new organizations and groups. This alters the relational dynamics of the opposition through which new threats are assessed.

The concluding chapter discusses the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious politics within the global context of democratic backsliding and spontaneous mass mobilizations. We highlight the contributions of our theoretical framework and the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious pathways for hybrid regimes and beyond.

Chapter 9 investigates the emergence of political consumption as a protest tactic in the later stage of the movement. We examine how this innovative tactic, encompassing boycotting and buycotting, emerged by utilizing the market logic. We also highlight the significance of political consumption as a movement consequence.

Chapter 5 elucidates how the Anti-Extradition Movement erupted despite the lack of political opportunities in the post-Umbrella period. We demonstrate how abeyance networks from previous mobilizations and an online petition campaign transformed the idea of extradition into a widely perceived existential threat, galvanizing popular support for the movement and leading to the confluence of the masses.

Chapter 10 delves into the process of tactical radicalization observed in the 2019 movement. By adopting a relational approach, we analyze radicalization as a result of dynamic interactions across multiple arenas. We explore how discursive negotiations among protesters served as both the driving force and the limit to radicalization. It induced moderate protesters to extend tacit support to their more militant counterparts while acting as a restraint mechanism to curtail excessive measures.

Chapter 8 expounds on how the Anti-Extradition Movement was organized and sustained in the absence of a centralized leadership. We illustrate how protesters, networked in both online and offline realms, collaborated on a spontaneous, horizontal, and many-to-many basis to generate a continuous stream of actions – a process we term “peer collaboration.”

Chapter 3 examines the emergence and evolution of a new cycle of contention during the mid 2000s. We highlight how the deepening threat perceptions resulting from the regime’s state-building advances spurred mass mobilizations. Meanwhile, we underscore how the creation of new civil society groups and the normalization of new repertoires of contention contributed to changes in the mode of protest mobilization.