This chapter considers how Australian poetry of the 1970s participated in major social changes that were fuelled by a range of factors, including greater access to higher education, the sexual liberation movement, a drug subculture and Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It traces how Australian writers turned to America for influence and were able to utilise new technologies to generate a vibrant small press culture. The chapter outlines the surge in collaboration, collectives and overlapping literary circles. It also examines a series of anthologies that sought to feature new energies and voices, with some seeking to demarcate such poetry from earlier or more traditional forms. Lastly, it analyses the significance of the poetry workshops based at Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre, little magazines, and the development of small presses that produced poetry collections during the decade of the 1970s.

This chapter explores the ways in which hunger in World War I altered existing political structures. Civilian populations engaged in a complex politics of provisioning by contesting state and local authorities and governments’ management of food. In the face of hunger and starvation, civilians across Europe and the Middle East gradually and to various degrees called their governments’ legitimacy into question. Civilians gave voice to their demands through petitions, food riots, and, in some instances, rebellion and revolution. Women, in particular, appealed collectively to officials, evoking the urgent need to feed and care for their children. Food became central to politics as political parties competed in demonstrating their ability to bring food to hungry populations. Recognizing the crucial role of hunger to salvaging any popular support for continuing the war, governments responded by regulating food and suppressing, even violently, public protests demanding provisioning. The ability to supply food became an avenue to political success. The chapter introduces the Ottoman experience and provides a comparative discussion of the politicization of hunger. We explore how that process varied across and within the warscapes of Ottoman and European societies, and how hunger, as a catalyst, altered existing political structures and gave rise to new forms of political organization in response to demands by both elite and non-elite groups. Finally, we ask how political parties and organizations used food procurement and provisioning of civilians amidst hunger as an avenue to achieve, expand, or preserve political significance.

This chapter examines the relationship between the king and his ‘ordinary’ subjects and asks whether such a thing as ‘public opinion’ evolved over the period to play a role in politics. For medieval historians, ‘the public’ used to be synonymous with the nobility and gentry. They were the section of the population that had some formal role in governance and had time outside of the demands of labour to devote to political questions. However, recent scholarship has emphasised that most if not all people in later medieval England had access to texts, could hear them read aloud and discuss their contents. This has led to a reappraisal of the later medieval public, towards an expansionist view that includes people below the ranks of the gentry as politically aware and engaged.

A liberal reformist core dominated antiwar activities through the end of 1966. That year the movement maintained a predominantly decentralized orientation, both lacking and resisting true national coordination. Primarily through grassroots activity, the movement incorporated new constituencies and provided alternative sources of information that challenged the government’s credibility. Antiwar activists pursued change largely through the established political system, but also in coalition building for mass demonstrations and draft resistance. Dissent within the government became more visible, which gave wartime dissent a degree of respectability. Protesting napalm production signified an early economic challenge, and the case of the Fort Hood Three exemplified cooperation between active-duty military and civilian antiwar activists. Despite continued growth and some impressive achievements, the movement also faced more significant government and right-wing opposition, and the war’s continued escalation left many activists feeling frustrated and alienated.

In this chapter we apply the theoretical model we introduced earlier to the behaviour of leaders to find out what alarms them, and under what conditions they are able and willing to order repression. We do not argue that we can accurately predict and explain every act of violence and repression. But we show how it helps us understand empirical patterns of repression. This model can inform our assessment of when we are most likely to observe human rights violations. To explain how context shapes human rights violations, we concentrate on why political regimes influence leaders’ threat perceptions and why democracies have the best human rights records, and why they do not always guarantee the protection of everyone’s basic rights. We outline the influence of mass dissent and of socio-economic factors. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how context shaped respect for human rights in six countries.

Freedom to protest is important for similar reasons to freedom of expression, it is, after all, a core form of political expression. Yet while protest is important, protests can also be disruptive, annoying, offensive, harmful and violent. In a rights-based system we thus have to consider where lines should be drawn between competing rights and interests and by whom. This chapter examines how the domestic and ECtHR case law reflects these tensions, with some cases leaning towards a more deferential approach and others establishing a more robust role for the courts. This chapter primarily examines Article 11 the right to freedom of association and assembly, but it also highlights the ways in which many of the other Convention rights safeguard the freedom to protest. In respect of domestic law, this chapter observes that the post-HRA period has also seen the enactment of far wider legislative restrictions than existed previously. There are also concerns about the growing use of surveillance, police brutality and increased restrictions on access to land.

This chapter analyzes the popular dimensions of Egypt’s 2013 counterrevolution, using an original dataset of protests during the post-revolutionary transition. It shows that Egypt’s revolutionaries were unable to consolidate the social support of the revolution, and that this failure allowed counterrevolutionaries to channel broad disaffections with revolutionary rule into a popular movement for restoration. The dataset covers the final eighteen months of the transition and includes approximately 7,500 contentious events sourced from the major Arabic-language newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm. These data reveal, first, the extent to which social mobilization persisted after the end of the eighteen-day uprising. The transition period was awash with discontent and unrest, much of it over nonpolitical issues like the deterioration of the economy, infrastructure problems, and unmet labor demands. Second, statistical analyses show that this discontent came to be directed against Mohamed Morsi’s government. The earliest and most persistent anti-Morsi protests emerged in places where the population had long been highly mobilized over socio-economic grievances. Later, they also began to emerge in places with large numbers of old regime supporters. Ultimately, these two groups – discontented Egyptians and committed counterrevolutionaries – came together to provide the social base for the movement that swept the military back to power.

There is a long history of forest activism in Finland, including both contentious protest like blockades and more conventional actions like negotiation. There is a new generation of activists stemming from Extinction Rebellion and other environmental groups, who have extended occupations beyond logging sites to company headquarters and pulp mill entrances. This chapter focuses on this latest generation of resistance and the ways those involved have approached forestry activism in Finland. The protests against state-sponsored logging in different parts of Finland are used as examples to unpack the current contentious politics of forests and especially the sentiments of these rising youth activists. The overall actions of several Finnish forest movements since the 1980s have contributed to more and more people starting to defend forests, questioning the forest industry’s story that clearcutting is a sustainable way to interact with the forest. This chapter is based on extensive interviews with experts and activists and the author’s lived experiences and many years of ethnography in Finnish forests, especially in the most heavily logged forestry frontiers in the southeastern part of the country.

The second political service provided by firms is to supplement the state’s societal control efforts. When public grievances arise over a project, infrastructure, or plant, the state may politicize the associated firms by demanding their assistance in managing social unrest. Firms play two distinct roles in societal control: serving as allies when the state employs suppression strategies against protesters or acting as scapegoats when the state opts for appeasement strategies.

Private firms are more suited to serve as scapegoats, while SOEs, particularly large and powerful ones, are stronger allies. This distinction arises from differences based on ownership and extent of political capital available to firms. Private firms typically have narrower and more limited sources of political capital than SOEs. In sectors where protests become increasingly frequent and intense, suppression strategies often replace appeasement, leading to a decline in the standing of private firms as large SOEs gain dominance.

Using comparative case studies, process tracing, and in-depth interviews, this chapter builds on Chapter 6 to examine the mechanisms connecting protests, societal control strategies, and outcomes for firms in the solid waste treatment sector. Process tracing is first applied to Wuxi, a city with multiple incineration plants, to illustrate how escalating protests gradually shifted the city government’s strategy from appeasement to suppression. This shift in strategy made private firms less effective in providing societal control services, leading to the transfer of the city’s incineration plants into the hands of SOEs.

Next, a most-similar case study compares an incineration plant in Wuxi with another in Qinhuangdao, highlighting how differences in political capital, linked to firm ownership, influence the outcomes of societal control efforts. The weaker political capital of private firms means they are less equipped to assist local governments during protests, making them less favorable. This comparison sheds light on how Chinese local governments perceive protests and firms, explaining why SOEs increasingly dominate a sector as protests within it become more frequent and intense.

After President Lydon Johnson announces a massive increase in US troop levels in South Vietnam, American Catholics become more deeply engaged in debating the war, particularly in terms of morality. The radical Baltimore protest attracts attention to the Catholic antiwar movement.

The twelve months leading up to the Tet Offensive witness more defections among Catholics from the pro-intervention camp. The result is greater division within the American Catholic community. In addition, Lyndon Johnson – a great admirer of popes – finds himself in conflict with Paul VI on the issue of peace. Tet helps to drive Johnson from the race, and the Catholic Robert F. Kennedy emerges as a strong contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.