This book argues that in the antebellum US South, enslaved people developed their own emotional ideologies, styles and practices to refuse, resist and survive the institution of slavery. In response to the devastating experiences of sale and separation, enslaved people created their own affective value system to aid them in maintaining familial relationships in the face of enslavers’ attempts to decimate them. The Epilogue emphasises that racialised ideologies surrounding Black emotion and white people’s attempts to restrict Black people’s emotional expressions have not ended, evidenced by the epidemic of violence against Black Americans in the twenty-first century. In resistance to such violence, activists centre emotions such as rage, anger and joy within their protest movements. African Americans’ investment in their own understandings and expressions of joy, love, hope, anger and grief in their resistance strategies ultimately has roots in enslaved people’s responses to the violence they had to endure.

This chapter draws together the findings from the connected analytical pieces and relates them to other cases and research from the fields of social movements studies and scholarship on the far right. As borne out by the case studies as well as by most of the cases covered in the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), far-right demonstration campaigns are not typically mobilised around short-term rationales but instead are intended to endure. Since modes of institutionalisation are less open to far-right, particularly extreme-right movements, regular demonstrations are a convenient tool to maintain mobilisation and movement cohesion. The chapter highlights key findings of the study, including that counter-mobilisation by anti-far-right social actors is typically an indispensable factor in bringing about the demobilisation of far-right collective action.

This chapter introduces the book’s examination of the dynamics of far-right demonstration campaigns and their demobilisation. The chapter summarises the importance of these campaigns within the broader context of far-right movements and why they are illuminating cases for the study of demobilisation. It previews the book’s conceptual framework for understanding demobilisation, providing a theoretical basis for subsequent analysis. The chapter provides an overview of the empirical context for the study, drawing cases from Germany, Austria, and England between 1990 and 2020. Then, the chapter introduces the mixed-methods research design that is employed, combining both qualitative comparative analysis and process tracing to investigate these cases. The chapter concludes with the plan for the book, summarising the different chapters.

Chapter 5 examines path dependencies in Slovakia and Poland, where postcommunist junctures produced powerful illiberal reactions in the 2000–20 period. It does so by unpacking political and societal dynamics and emphasizing how illiberal forces reaped considerable electoral benefits. In both countries, mainstream leftist parties embraced the neoliberal agenda and (eventually) failed, with many of their former supporters becoming available for subsequent populist mobilization. As the Left’s failures occurred amid the rising salience of economic concerns, adaptive illiberals gained at the ballot box. While it stresses key similarities in terms of the core mechanism linking postcommunist junctures and illiberal electoral outcomes, the chapter also identifies important distinctions between reactive sequences in Slovakia and Poland. Indeed, bait-and-switch tactics may have defined junctures in both cases, but political configurations featured more nuanced distinctions specifically in terms of agency, which, in turn, conditioned important differences between illiberals in the two countries. Overall, whereas the patterns of similarity substantiate the book’s core theory linking early market reform legacies and illiberal electoral outcomes, the differences suggest that the critical juncture framework can be further refined – to which I return in the book's final part.

Literature in the legal humanities has begun to turn toward performance as a new site of analysis: as source, representation, and intervention. From Law and Performance (2018) to Law as Performance (2022), this belated comparison has garnered increasing traction. But methods from dance and performance studies, those wayward disciplines where corporeality supersedes the literary, still make only passing appearances. The repercussions, however, exceed the methodological toward the most material. This chapter underscores the consequences for this absence by centring the lone figure, “Naked Athena,” as a femme body in protest whose choreographic aesthetic of whiteness allowed particular flexibility under the law. Through her balletic performance of resistance, themes of discipline, elegance, and decorum swirl against the indecent, vulgar, and obscene labels afforded other protesters in the same scene. Motivated by this framing, I focus us toward identification of the publicly exposed body as righteously revealed or promiscuously pornographic, an aesthetic distinction theorized within art history as the difference between nakedness and nudity yet left ambiguous in legal terms.

This chapter reflects on the book’s exploration of drama and performance that reveal the entanglements of natural phenomena and human behaviours in society, each shaping one another in dynamic interplay. The book concludes by considering how artists continue to want to make work about anthropogenic ecological change. We suggest here that performative actions of dissent can offer shared optimistic moments. This chapter looks at the tactics of tactics of artists and activists who perform actions to physically resist, slow or block ecological damage, attempting to hold big corporations and politicians to account and keep urgent ecological issues under public scrutiny.

Grounded in comparative politics, this chapter presents new theory in comparative political economy: First, it argues that, in the context of technological transition, a legal system that facilitates reassignment of property rights, making certain rights less secure, plays an important and under-theorized role in promoting economic development. It focuses on China’s technological transition from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, industrial one to highlight the relationship between technology change, reassignment of land rights, and transformative economic growth. The chapter reinterprets England’s post–Glorious-Revolution reassignment of land rights, using enclosure, estate, turnpike, and other parliamentary acts, in light of China’s rise. It also identifies the problem of state misallocation of land resources in the Chinese case. Second, it argues that the authoritarian state also invests in the formal legal system in order to manage conflict over changes in land rights and to legitimate the state. It revisits England’s eighteenth-century use of law, including the Riot Act and Black Act, to contain protest over dispossession and compares it to China’s embrace of authoritarian legality to repress conflict. The chapter defines liberal and illiberal law in both form and content and locates the analysis in the context of the law-and-development movement.

Chapter 4 introduces the second section of the book by situating the theoretical framework of protest brokers within the South African context. Often referred to as the “protest capital of the world,” South Africa offers a rich and complex setting for studying protest dynamics and the role of intermediaries. The chapter begins by justifying the choice of South Africa as the primary case study location, highlighting its history of protest from the apartheid era through the democratic transition and into the present day. It provides a concise historical overview of protest in South Africa, emphasizing how evolving political conditions have shaped the forms, frequency, and actors involved in collective action. The chapter also outlines the empirical foundation of the book, detailing the case selection process and introducing the twelve communities at the heart of the study, as well as providing an overview of the data collected. This groundwork sets the stage for the chapters that follow. By anchoring the study in South Africa, this book demonstrates the value of contextually grounded research in developing and testing new theoretical insights.

This chapter advances three arguments about the politics of company creation regulation in Saudi Arabia in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. First, the liberalization of these regulations was rent-conditional. The formation and implementation of these policies occurred during periods of rising or high oil rents, but were absent during the downward trend in oil prices between June 2014 and January 2016. Second, relative to earlier periods, the ability of business and religious elites to veto economic reforms was diminished. Third, in light of this shift, the threat of popular unrest to regime stability had a non-trivial, causal effect upon the pursuit and pausing of company creation liberalization. Non-elite pressure on the Al Saud’s rule reached an unparalleled fever pitch during the Arab Spring. Record-breaking transfer payments to appease discontent were feasible in 2011, allowing regulatory liberalization to continue. However, when the fiscal realities of the 2014 oil price slump became apparent, liberalization and public munificence were sacrificed to inhibit the development of economic power outside the regime’s coalition and to maintain comparatively high military spending. Only once oil rents recovered would the reform agenda be revived.

Wartime controls ended in 1950, allowing New Zealanders to look forward to an era of postwar growth and change. The 1950s and 1960s are often recalled as a ‘golden age’. In many respects they were, for the baby boomers born from 1945 to 1961 who enjoyed a childhood unburdened by depression and war, and for the parents responsible for their upbringing. Broadly, however, the internal dynamics of the Pacific region were in flux. Playwright Bruce Mason captured the mood in The End of the Golden Weather (first performed in 1960), his dramatic solo performance about a summer in a boy’s childhood.

This chapter explores the impact that participation in bureaucratic corruption has on citizen activism in an autocracy. Using an original survey of Russian adults (N = 2350), we find that when citizens feel extorted, they are most likely to engage politically – likely, because they resent having to pay bribes. Yet we also find that Russians who give bribes voluntarily are also more politically active than those who abstain from corruption. To explain this finding, we focus on social relationships within which corruption transactions occur and embed them into political structures of an autocracy. Our analyses reveal that, relative to citizens who abstain from corruption, personal networks of bribe-givers are more extensive, mobilizable, and strong. Such networks, we argue, sustain meaningful encounters among “birds of a different feather,” facilitating citizen collaboration across social cleavages. In unfree societies then, corruption networks build a structural platform that can be utilized for collective resistance.