While this study addresses the question of democracy’s importance to urban protest, it still leaves a number of questions and implications which I address in this chapter. Firstly, why should cities be interested in engaging with unruly protests? Moreover, given that I argue that democratic transitions played an important role in facilitating traversion, is each city’s prospects of improving citizen engagement already predetermined? Furthermore, what are some of the limits of a contentious politics that centers around nationalist history? Additionally, I look at the prospects for future unruly protest and for large-scale government subsidy programs, many of which have increasingly experienced reforms. Lastly, I explore potential ways autoconstruction and traversion can be utilized in different contexts.

Does democracy matter for urban protest? Citizens across different African cities have deployed a variety of contentious strategies to advance demands for basic goods like housing, electricity, sanitation, or food. This includes more unruly, or insurgent tactics like riots or illegal occupations. Scholars, political leaders, and global organizations have long promoted democracy’s capacity to enhance, even transform, citizen participation. But does democracy’s impact extend to these sorts of urban protests as well? In order to answer this question, this study traces three examples of similar urban protest over time: bread protests in Cairo, Egypt, fuel protests in Lagos, Nigeria, and housing protests in Johannesburg, South Africa. All three of these cases emerged under autocracies in the 1970s to 1980s. Yet by the 2000s, the cities had experienced contrasting outcomes with democratization. For these protesting communities, does democracy make a difference? I find that democracy did not significantly change the forms of protest (e.g. tactics, demands) over time. Yet despite similar tactics, I find that greater levels of democracy in each city has led to significant differences in the outcome of the protests today.

This chapter examines young people’s political participation across Latin America in four areas: gender/LGBTQ+ rights, student movements, Indigenous struggles, and cyber-activism. Youth led massive feminist mobilizations (#NiUnaMenos, “Green Wave”), defended public education against neoliberal reforms, and championed Indigenous cultural revival. They blend traditional repertoires with digital innovations, using social media for recruitment and counternarratives. Youth activism varies by context: in horizontal discontent countries (Brazil, Argentina), movements maintained closer institutional ties during the commodity boom, while in vertical discontent contexts (Chile, Guatemala), they operated autonomously. Gender movements achieved cross-regional diffusion, student protests defended public goods, and Indigenous youth combined urban aesthetics with traditional demands. Cyber-activism proved crucial for coordination but had limitations reaching beyond urban middle classes. These movements demonstrate continuity with historical activism while innovating through new technologies and intersectional agendas.

This chapter examines the political consequences of organized criminal violence in Latin America, focusing on its impact on democratic discontent. Drawing on cross-national and subnational data, as well as qualitative interviews from Mexico City, the authors show how both direct victimization and ambient violence influence perceptions of insecurity, civic and electoral participation, and political attitudes. While direct victims often become more politically engaged, broader local violence tends to discourage participation, erode social trust, and foster disillusionment with democratic institutions. The chapter also reveals that perceptions of insecurity do not always align with actual crime rates, influenced instead by media and political messaging. Citizens increasingly support authoritarian responses, such as “iron fist” policies and strongman leaders, reflecting vertical discontent with democracies perceived as elitist, corrupt, and ineffective. The authors argue that criminal violence generates a fundamental tension between the desire for security and the preservation of democratic norms, and call for multilevel, localized research to understand these dynamics more fully.

In November 2022, Curtis James Jackson, Aubrey Drake Graham, and 100 other hip-hop artists signed an open letter on change.org, “Art on Trial: Protect Black Art,” denouncing the use of defendant-authored rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials. The petition was a direct response to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s public announcement that her office would seek to admit the rap lyrics of Jeffery Lamar Williams (a.k.a. Young Thug) as proof of criminal intent in his RICO prosecution.

Japanese society is subject to centrifugal forces that tend to promote diversification in structural arrangements, lifestyles, and value orientations, while a range of centripetal forces drives it towards homogeneity and uniformity. This chapter endeavors to recapitulate these two forces in the context of Japan’s civil society, focusing on five key areas.

The first four investigate various aspects of centrifugal forces: the fragmentation of social relations, a significant development affecting the foundations of Japanese society over the past few decades; the rise of social movements in the 2010s despite this trend; the quiet growth of volunteer activities and the role of NPOs and NGOs as a backdrop for dissenting protests, and the shifting landscape of interest groups overall; and the viability of an emic notion similar to citizenship in analyzing the Japanese context.

The final section aims to establish an analytical framework for various forms of centripetal control and to synthesize their diverse characteristics as ‘friendly authoritarianism’ permeating Japanese society.

In contrast to liberal democracy, which translates constituent power into processes and institutions of representation and government, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri place a premium on constituent power: inspired by social movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, they argue that the constituent power of a multitude should not be translated into the constituted powers of a state. Doing so would deprive the multitude of its revolutionary and radically democratic potential. Pure constituent power seeks to repeat in perpetuity the exception of the revolutionary founding moment of democracy. That Hardt and Negri rely on increasingly theological models in their account of constituent power and revolution highlights the antidemocratic tendency of their conception of “constituent governance.” A political theology that seeks to make the exception permanent is not compatible with democracy. The enactment of pure constituent power in the democracy of the common inevitably leads to what Carl Schmitt described as “sovereign dictatorship.” Hardt’s and Negri’s “constituent governance” is an arbitrary form of governance without any checks and balances.

I present a case study in this chapter to illustrate the importance of moral psychology, fairness, and relative deprivation. There was little civic discontent in Ireland when the economy collapsed but, when Ireland had the fastest-growing economy in Europe, people took to the streets and ultimately voted the sitting government out of power. I detail a series of studies, mostly using ethnographic and qualitative methods, that revealed some of the historically ingrained cultural and moral reasons why Irish people passively accepted economic hardship and austerity during the downturn, only to protest en masse when the government introduced a bill charging citizens directly for the water they consumed. The water charge served as a symbol of injustice, and people took to the streets because they felt unfairly treated and deprived relative to others who were seen as benefitting during the economic upturn. It is not objective economic indicators, but rather people’s subjective understandings of these systems, that determine whether they are seen as fair.

Sociological engagement with human rights can be traced back several decades. This historical relationship has grown into a field known as the sociology of human rights, which focuses on rights claims and the contexts in which they are created, the language used to construct them, and their resulting social impacts. Given that social movements are central subjects in sociological and human rights scholarship, social movement research provides significant insight into the interplay between sociology and human rights. This chapter discusses the development of this link and considers how the study of social movements serves as a bridge that connects the discipline of sociology and human rights by exploring the emerging area of mobilizations for racial justice. This examination serves as a springboard for offering human rights-informed pedagogical possibilities for sociology programs in higher education. The purpose is to illustrate how drawing from the reciprocal relationship between sociology and human rights with social movements as one of their main ties can provide transformative learning opportunities in sociology.

Celeste Montoya examines the role that gendered mobilization has played in US electoral politics, both historically and in the recent elections. She provides a conceptualization of gendered mobilization that emphasizes the importance of looking at the role that gender (often at the intersection of race and class) plays in a wide array of US social movements. She provides a historical overview that demonstrates the various ways in which gendered mobilizations have influenced the development of US democracy and the evolution of its electoral politics. Montoya focuses specifically on the mobilizations surrounding the 2024 election, outlining the mobilization of the MAGA movement around restricting transgender rights and opposing critical race theory, gender studies, and DEI. She identifies race-gendered mobilization among progressives in 2024 as well, emphasizing the role of intersectional coalitions in advocating for racial justice and reproductive rights among other issues. Gendered mobilization has been a significant part of efforts to expand political participation and representation, as well as those to restrict it. It has shaped party platforms and electoral coalitions. The patterns of the past help explain the current political moment and what may be at stake.

Chapter 2 turns to the second betrayal. This chapter scales down into the personal accounts of test veterans post-service lives, when emergent illnesses eluded explanation and social recognition, and private shame and debility stalled their lives. I show how unsettled memories and unsettled illnesses coalesced with the slow-moving invisibility of radiation in ways that negatively impacted their families and their well-being. Claim-making thus began as prefigurative struggles driven by delegitimating encounters with medical actors, and the accumulating acts of sharing service memories in veteran spaces. This chapter charts how in these practices test veterans and their family members became claim-makers, a collectivity that produced the possibilities for political and legal action.