According to the social movement literature, democracies provide a number of protections, rights, and institutions that incentivize certain forms of contentious action and organization over others. So why might we see similar forms of protest across vastly different regime types? I argue that across the three cases in this study, one can note, over time, a composite of newer forms of participation “layered” on top of established, popular practices. One might expect a phasing out of the unruly forms of protest developed under autocratic regimes. Instead, communities that have experienced increasing democratic institutions have combined established repertoires with newer, contrasting ones. To capture this ad hoc, layering of different practices I use the metaphor of autoconstruction, that describes the do-it-yourself (DIY) process that urban residents across the global south rely on to build homes in informal settlements such as shacks, favelas, and barriadas. Similarly, I use autoconstruction to describe how communities have built on popular contentious practices of citizenship over time.

Despite all three utilizing unruly protest to fight for basic goods, the urban communities in Cairo, Lagos, and Johannesburg have had significantly different outcomes. In Cairo, the fragmented protests have done little other than maintaining the status quo. In Nigeria, there have been some limited concessions gained through negotiations between a well-organized civil society and the federal government. In Johannesburg however, the fragmented community protests have had the most success in terms of outcome. While the difference between Cairo and Johannesburg is perhaps less surprising, how do we understand the difference between Johannesburg and Lagos? I argue the answer lies in the ability of protesters to traverse between contentious action and formal engagement with the state, or what I describe as traversion. If one understands this politics over basic goods taking place in both a field of contentious politics and in another field of formal, institutionalized politics, then traversion captures the way urban communities have been able to use various openings between the two fields.

Building on Chapter 3, one would expect that free and fair elections, as well as expansive democratic citizenship would translate to considerably different strategies and claims making in Johannesburg, South Africa. Yet, on the contrary, urban communities in Johannesburg have been engaging in housing protests using unruly tactics and populist claims that are surprisingly similar to the tradition of bread uprisings in Cairo. In this case, residents have drawn on the history of township protests developed in the fight against apartheid, as well as the legacy of Nelson Mandela and the ANC. Using archives and interviews, I trace the history of popular rights to housing developed alongside a set of insurgent practices of riots, boycotts, and land occupations. They have formed a foundation that still informs housing protests in the township today, with communities combining unruly protest with electoral and legal mobilization. More broadly, this chapter challenges assumptions about what politics in a democracy is supposed to look like.

In January 2011, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians descended on Tahrir Square in Cairo demanding democracy under the slogan “Bread, Freedom, Social Justice.” For some, these protests represented a new, emboldened democratic spirit. Instead, I argue that the claims to democracy and the contentious practices of the Revolution drew on a longer tradition of “bread uprisings” that have been used to articulate demands of citizenship and basic dignity for decades. In this chapter, I trace this history of bread protests in Egypt. I show how the legacy of populist president Gamal Abdul Nasser was appropriated by the Egyptian people. It was later repurposed to articulate rights-based claims to food subsidies, and to justify popular revolt. This same popular tradition of protest was invoked during moments of electoral liberalization in the 2000s, during the 2011 Arab Spring, and even after the introduction of constitutional rights to food in 2014. To the extent that newer practices of participation have been introduced, they have often been combined with the established repertoire of the bread uprising.

What counts as a protest – and what sets it apart from a riot? This chapter introduces these as the key questions animating the book and specifies why they are especially urgent ones for the historically marginalized. It presents the book’s core argument, explaining that our ordinary ideas of protest see it as the material, affectively rational act of a political collectivity and proposes that public audiences make sense of a gathering based on these criteria of materiality, collectivity, and affect. While criterial conventions are the terms of protest and interpretation, however, they cannot determine a gathering’s political legibility. The chapter suggests that legibility is also a matter of relation and mutual attunement between those gathered and their audiences. The chapter distinguishes Unruly Acts from recent scholarship in political theory, explains why its performative framework is appropriate for the questions under consideration, and outlines its critical engagement with J. L. Austin and Judith Butler’s performatives. After describing the reconstructive approach the book adopts, the materials it analyzes, and the instances of public gathering under analysis – the 1992 Los Angeles Riots/Uprising and the 1994 anti-Prop. 187 march in the same city – the chapter concludes by summarizing the book’s plan.

Chapter 9 presents a selection of cases that fall under the category of post-Njemanze cases without the Maputo Protocol. These cases are chosen based on two criteria: first, those involving similar subject matter to the post-Njemanze cases with the Maputo Protocol, which were discussed in detail in earlier chapters. The analysis particularly focuses on comparing the Court’s reasoning to identify any notable similarities or differences in jurisprudence when the Maputo Protocol is cited and when it is not. The second criterion includes cases selected for their diversity, specifically involving other groups of intersectional women’s identities not covered in previous chapters, such as women in protest, working women, women in customary marriages, and extradited women. The purpose of examining this second group is to demonstrate how references to the Maputo Protocol could have influenced applicants’ legal arguments. The analysis underscores the comprehensive and distinctive nature of the Maputo Protocol as the Bill of Rights for African women, emphasising its importance in all cases concerning women’s rights in Africa. It also highlights certain gaps within the Protocol.

This chapter explores the role of protest and disruptive protest in the animal movement. The chapter identifies the failure of the literature to distinguish clearly between disruptive messages and disruptive protest tactics. Overall, the literature suggests that common claims that disruptive protests lead to counterproductive backlash may be overblown.

Empirical Animal Law examines the animal protection movement through the lens of social science, testing the assumptions that have guided legal reform, criminal enforcement, litigation strategy, protest, and public messaging. Rather than prescribing a single agenda, the book asks a foundational question: Which animal law strategies measurably reduce suffering, and which rest on untested intuition? Across original empirical studies and interdisciplinary review, the authors investigate whether incremental welfare reforms pave the way for structural change; how cognitive biases shape moral concerns for animals used for food; whether the movement’s punitive turn reproduces the inequities of the broader criminal legal system; and whether litigation losses, protest tactics, and moral framing advance or undermine public support. The findings complicate conventional wisdom. Incremental reforms may catalyze further change; carceral strategies carry social costs without clear evidence of animal benefit; and persuasive success depends less on legal outcomes than on how facts are framed and moralized for diverse audiences. The book argues that animal law’s credibility and effectiveness depend on becoming empirically self-correcting – routinely measuring impact, revising strategies, and integrating insights from psychology, criminology, and social movement theory. It offers a framework for evidence-based advocacy aimed at durable, system-level change for animals.

Protest is politics at its most primal, its most emotional, its most exciting, and sometimes its most consequential. But, at its core, protest is a learning process, one in which people “at the top” and people “at the bottom” struggle to discover where the real power lies and how it can be used. In Russia, protest has been an integral part of the dramatic and often traumatic processes of social and economic transformation. Protest has taken many forms under Vladimir Putin, from labor and social mobilization to environmental, nationalist, feminist, and explicitly political or antiwar protest. This chapter reviews the history and the contemporary landscape of protest in Russia and asks what is being learned – and who is doing the learning – when Russian citizens take to the streets.

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.

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.