Memory work is important for far-right movements and parties but defies systematic scholarly analysis. I theorize that, depending on the electoral aspirations of far-right actors, their memory work involves not only the contestation but also the appropriation of the past, through hybrid memorial strategies, tactics and repertoires. I leverage original evidence from a unique dataset of party events and party archives as well as from in-depth interviews and event observations to demonstrate the mechanics of memory work undertaken by the far right in Cyprus. Using this empirically significant case, I show how the hybridity of the far right's memory work permits it to dispute the memory ownership of other actors (contention) while legitimating its place in memorial politics (convention). I also show that this hybridity is more than a transitory phase towards normalization – it is a strategic choice of far-right actors with growing electoral aspirations.

This article examines contemporary expressions of human to more-than-human interaction through the lens of technoenvironments, understood as evolving networks that bind non-animate and animate life together, shaped by mutual agency, care, and resistance. We relate technoenvironments both to multinatural cosmologies recounting mythical origins of human society in Southeast Asia through the union of mountains and the sea, and to modern approaches derived from contemporary feminist political ecology. We explore performative practices which express and shape understandings of the co-becoming of humans and more-than-humans at case studies in Indonesia and Vietnam. The first analyses an art performance in Yogyakarta Indonesia, where participants from different classes, genders, and educational backgrounds co-create mandalas articulating their imaginaries of organic agriculture. Beans, plantlets, soil and plastics became actants in their own right. The second case studies performative protests by diverse citizens of Hanoi - students, families with children, artists, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community - in response to plans to fell more than 6,000 trees. This challenged the hegemony of science-based discourse by affirming the mutual affective relationships between humans and trees. In both cases, living matter such as trees, plants, seeds, and soil becomes agents in the performative representation of people’s entanglements with their more-than-human environment. We compare the performativity of environmental protest and art along the dimensions of 1) representation, 2) creative expression, and 3) multispecies relations. To conclude, we reflect on how the cosmologies of Southeast Asia inform current multispecies relationships in the context of technoenvironments both in Indonesia and Vietnam.

Previous research conducted in closed autocracies indicates that government propaganda can deter opposition, shift political attitudes, and influence emotions. Yet the specific mechanisms and contextual factors influencing how and when propaganda works remain unclear. We theorize how power-projecting government propaganda works differently for government supporters and opponents in polarized electoral authoritarian regimes, focusing on emotional reactions, sense of societal belonging, and downstream effects on contentious political behavior. Through two preregistered surveys in Turkey (N = 6,286), we find that supporters exposed to propaganda videos feel a greater sense of belonging and are more susceptible to engage in pro-government activities. Opponents report heightened anger and anxiety and seem deterred from protesting. However, the latter effect weakened during the highly contested 2023 electoral campaign. These results indicate that propaganda can help electoral authoritarian regimes deter anti-government action and encourage pro-government action, but that its deterrent effects may weaken during periods of high mobilization and contention.

In the contemporary ‘age of participation’, referendums are often celebrated as cornerstones of democratic engagement. Yet political parties sometimes take the seemingly paradoxical step of calling for referendum boycotts, urging citizens to abstain from direct democratic processes. This paper investigates the conditions under which such boycott calls occur and the motivations behind them. While previous research has largely focused on single cases or experimental designs, we offer the first comprehensive, comparative study of party-led referendum boycotts across Europe since 1972. Drawing on a novel dataset of 223 referendums in 37 countries, we combine quantitative and qualitative methods to explore how regime context, institutional design, and issue type shape boycott behavior. Our regression analyses show that turnout quorum requirements, lower levels of democratic maturity, and sovereignty-related referendum issues significantly increase the likelihood of boycotts. To complement these findings, we qualitatively analyze boycott justifications and develop a typology of six motivation types: legitimacy-based, procedural unfairness, instrumental, tactical, minority interest, and ideological boycotts. These results reveal a complex interplay between democratic institutions and political strategy, challenging the assumption that referendums are universally inclusive tools. Our findings have implications for the design, interpretation, and normative evaluation of direct democratic practices across diverse political systems.

When a country sees multiple mass mobilisations over time, what accounts for variation in where protest occurs across the different protest waves? This article examines the case of mass protests in Ukraine 1990-2004, exploring how the emergence and development of activist networks aligns with changes in the geospatial dispersion of protest over time. It draws on archives and interviews with activists made available by The Three Revolutions Project, and newspaper reports from Ukrainska Pravda, Korrespondent.net and Radio Svoboda, utilising protest event analysis, along with QGIS software to visually represent findings. The article presents novel empirical findings on the geospatial scope of protest events across Ukraine from 1990 onwards, and demonstrates some of the ways in which regional activist networks expanded, developed, and sought cross-cleavage collaboration, aiming to facilitate increasing nationwide mobilisation. It provides valuable context for understanding subsequent Ukrainian mobilisation, such as the 2013-14 Euromaidan protest, and ongoing resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion.

This essay considers how the rural and tribal have been obscured from prevailing scholarly accounts of unrest and protest in the years since the Arab Uprisings of 2010–2012, and what this might mean for wider scholarly theorizations of protest and revolution. It draws on fieldwork in central Jordan, especially with Hirak Dhiban, where historical circumstances render visible dynamics also significant elsewhere. It takes as a heuristic binary two broad discursive modalities of seemingly dissimilar collective action that in fact reference and relate to each other in various revealing ways: on the one hand the politically populist and self-consciously leftist Hirak protest movements, prominent in the waves of protest since 2011, and on the other hosha—"tribal clashes.” It considers how contestations over the legitimacy, revolutionary potential, and moral valence of protests often hinge on discursive claims that, in a sense, Hirak is hosha, or hosha, Hirak. It engages with anthropological theories to interpret protest as a generative and affective process, rooted in local histories and imaginaries, even while responding to wider events. It calls for a broader reappraisal of where revolutionary potential is located and how it is recognized in anthropological and historical scholarship.

The economic crisis that started in 2008 has negatively affected European nations to different degrees. The sudden rise in demonstrations particularly in those countries most hard hit by the crisis suggests that grievance theories, dismissed in favour of resource‐based models since the 1970s, might have a role to play in explaining protest behaviour. While most previous studies have tested these theories at the individual or contextual levels, it is likely that mechanisms at both levels are interrelated. To fill this lacuna, this article examines the ways in which individual‐level grievances interact with macro‐level factors to impact on protest behaviour. In particular, it examines whether the impact of individual subjective feelings of deprivation is conditional on contextual macroeconomic and policy factors. It is found that while individual‐level relative deprivation has a direct effect on the propensity to have protested in the last year, this effect is greater under certain macroeconomic and political conditions. Both significant results for the cross‐level interactions are interpreted in terms of their role for opening up political opportunities for protest among those who feel they have been most deprived in the current crisis. These findings suggest that the interaction of the contextual and individual levels should continue to be explored in future studies in order to further clarify the mechanisms underlying protest behaviour.

What explains far‐right mobilisation in the protest arena? After decades of growing electoral support and policy influence, the far right is experiencing an increase in grassroots mobilisation. Scholars of social movements and political parties have devoted little attention to the determinants of far‐right protest mobilisation in Europe. In this article, we bridge previous research on the far right and social movements to advance hypotheses on the drivers of far‐right protest mobilisation based on grievances, opportunities and resource mobilisation models. We use an original dataset combining novel data on 4,845 far‐right protest events in 11 East and West European countries (2008–2018), with existing measures accounting for the (political, economic and cultural) context of mobilisation. We find that classical approaches to collective action can be fruitfully applied to the study of the far right. Cultural grievances, notably concerns about immigration, as well as the availability of institutional access points in contexts characterised by divided government increase far‐right protest mobilisation. But far‐right protest mobilisation also rests on the organisational resources available to nativist collective actors, that is, the network in which they are embedded, their visibility in the media and elected officials. These findings have important implications to understand far‐right success in advanced democracies. They show that far‐right mobilisation in the protest arena not only rests on favourable circumstances, but also on whether far‐right actors can profit from them. More broadly, the study links party politics and social movement research to grasp the far right's modes of political contestation, locating research on this phenomenon at the intersection of political sociology and comparative politics.

Despite the voluminous literature on the ‘normalisation of protest’, the protest arena is seen as a bastion of left‐wing mobilisation. While citizens on the left readily turn to the streets, citizens on the right only settle for it as a ‘second best option’. However, most studies are based on aggregated cross‐national comparisons or only include Northwestern Europe. We contend the aggregate‐level perspective hides different dynamics of protest across Europe. Based on individual‐level data from the European Social Survey (2002–2016), we investigate the relationship between ideology and protest as a key component of the normalisation of protest. Using hierarchical logistic regression models, we show that while protest is becoming more common, citizens with different ideological views are not equal in their protest participation across the three European regions. Instead of a general left predominance, we find that in Eastern European countries, right‐wing citizens are more likely to protest than those on the left. In Northwestern and Southern European countries, we find the reverse relationship, left‐wing citizens are more likely to protest than their right‐wing counterparts. Lessons drawn from the protest experience in Northwestern Europe characterised by historical mobilisation by the New Left are of limited use for explaining the ideological composition of protest in the Southern and Eastern European countries. We identify historical and contemporary regime access as the mechanism underlying regional patterns: citizens with ideological views that were historically in opposition are more likely to protest. In terms of contemporary regime access, we find that partisanship enhances the effect of ideology, while ideological distance from the government has a different effect in the three regions. As protest gains in importance as a form of participation, the paper contributes to our understanding of regional divergence in the extent to which citizens with varying ideological views use this tool.