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Occupy Protest Movement(S) As a Challenge to Social Theory Panel

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Occupy Protest Movement(S) As a Challenge to Social Theory Panel Occupy Protest Movement(s) as a Challenge to Social Theory Panel : T04P03 - Mass protests of new millennia as a challenge to social theory Co-author : Korhan Ozan Agbas Social movements’ studies, as a sub-field of political sociology, have extensively been reshaped with fruitful work of two respectful scholars, Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, whose attempts to bring an order and deeper understanding to this discipline have been crowned with their last book “Contentious Politics”. In the light of numerous social and political protests taking place nowadays, comprehensive studies of social movements and, even more, protest publics have passed a point of being appealing to academic community and became a necessity. It has now been almost four years from the initial glide of a protest called “Occupy Wall Street” in the USA. The most recent protest labelled as “Occupy”, however, occurred less than a half a year ago in Hong Kong. Between these two events, which were far more than ordinary citizen unrests aimed to show the anger and dissatisfaction of the revolted masses, thousands of different, yet somehow similar protests labelled as “Occupy” have been witnessed across the globe. “Occupy” became a brand and one could “fill in the blanks for a potentially infinite number of user-generated sub-brands.” (Bierut, 2012) However, even though branding all these spontaneous protests around the globe as “Occupy” is suggesting some between them, it is of the most value to search into the real similarities and differences of the protest publics (re)appearing. “Repetition, according to Hegel, plays a crucial role in history: when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding.” (Žižek, 2011) Thus comes the will and the need to research deeper into “Occupy” in more depth: could it be said that in order to understand the true significance of “Occupy” one must look beyond single protests’ success or failure, and try to look at the protest public’s repertoires, identities and the possibility of one protest being an overture to those that followed? Even more so, the necessity to look into the change the protest brought about in regard to its participants (protest public) and in regard to the public discourse and political process is recognised by this paper. The title of this paper - Mapping the Occupy protest publics - is puzzled precisely with the issue of exploring possible similarities and differences between separate “Occupy” protest movements and putting them in the adequate perspective of political change. The main research question put forward, thus, is to which extent “Occupies” are connected/related and what their relevance is as the actors of political change. In order to find an answer to this question, case study is found to be the most suitable research design due to several reasons. “A case study design should be considered when: (a) the focus of the study is to answer “how” and “why” questions; (b) you cannot manipulate the behaviour of those involved in the study; (c) you want to cover contextual conditions because you believe they are relevant to the phenomenon under study; or (d) the boundaries are not clear between the phenomenon and context.” (Baxter & Jack, 2008) The next choice to be made was whether to build a research as a single (holistic) case study with embedded units or to opt for a multiple-case studies design. Bearing in mind that the overall goal is precisely enquiring into relations between “Occupies”, in order to avoid distorting with research results by presuming the wholeness of “Occupy protest movement” multiple-case study design (also found as “collective case studies”) is favoured. “A multiple case study enables the researcher to explore differences within and between cases. The goal is to replicate findings across cases. Because comparisons will be drawn, it is imperative that the cases are chosen carefully so that the researcher can predict similar results across cases, or predict contrasting results based on a theory.” (Yin, 2003) Acknowledging the fact that number of “Occupies” by far exceeds the number of cases one in-depth qualitative research can cover, some limitations must be set to ensure that cases remain reasonable in scope. This research will consist of five case studies regarding separate cases of “Occupy”: “Occupy Wall Street”, “Occupy London”, “”Occupy Brazil, “Occupy Gezi”, and “Occupy Central” (Hong Kong). These will from now on be referred to as “chosen Occupies.” The reasoning behind the carefully thought extraction of precisely these five examples is the idea to cover different continents and thus more or less diverse political cultures in the research, at the same time covering as disparate as possible goals these cases have set, strategies that have been used, successes that were achieved and circumstances of protests’ rise. Additional criteria for choosing cases was based on the intention to describe diversity of Occupies, increase explanatory power to the greatest possible extent, exploring multiple practises of Occupy and how they were occurring, provide a structural representation that adequately responds to the purpose of the study (agenda, participants, ideas, mechanisms, motivation etc.). The choice as also influenced by a motive to cover as diverse as possible practice environment (political cultures), specific practices in operation (usage of violence or peaceful protests), not having the environment, conditions of occurring or any other features of a protest case that obviously fully corresponds with the other. Finally, mapping of the “Occupy” protest movement(s) will be conducted with a help of three analytic techniques suggested to be suitable for a multiple-case study design: pattern matching (pattern setting will regard the first major case, “Occupy Wall Street”), explanation building and cross-case analysis and synthesis. (Baxter & Jack, 2008) Exploiting these, this paper will try to: Identify, compare and contrast goals, strategies, methods used, (political) motivation of protesters and other relevant features of chosen Occupies; Examine external conditions that have influenced chosen Occupies and make each of them distinct from others; Put the findings about similarities and differences of chosen Occupies in a perspective of their relevance as the actors of a political change; To try recognise and label a common ground of (political) motivation of protesters involved in Occupies, both prior and after the protests. The main argument in favour of the significance of Mapping the Occupy protest publics is the topicality of the issue. “The Protestor” is said to be the 2011 ‘person of the year’ by Time Magazine, and it seems that the importance of this worldwide engaged actor in formulating local, national and international social and political agendas has not subsided since. It must be admitted, though, that “Occupies” do not stand alone, but are in a long string of protests shaking and shaping our world and contributing to the popularity of “the Protestor”. Even though a quest to explain the essence of those protests and their influence on “Occupy” exceeds the purpose of this paper, the connection between “Occupy” beginnings (precisely “Occupy Wall Street”) and those protests it drew the inspiration from - and much beyond that - must be touched upon before any linkages regarding the protests labelled as “Occupy” between themselves are made. Public self-immolation of a young street peddler Mohamed Bouazizi as an act of protest against police corruption in 2010, sparked a vast protests in Tunis, which were only a tinder to mass protests igniting Egypt’s Tahrir Square and many other Middle East countries a year later, which are altogether colloquially know as Arab Spring. Seemingly separately from these, massive protest known as “Indignados”, triggered by financial crises and government’s and banks joint failures to address it, made the scene in Spain. "Massive and effective street protest" was a global oxymoron until - suddenly, shockingly -[…] it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a makerof history.” (Andersen, 2011) The emergence of “Occupy Wall Street” was found to be highly influenced by these, and the whole cycle of protests, due to their numerous analogies among which the legitimacy crisis at the core of representative democracy stands out, was marked by some scholars as a “real democracy movement.” Although emerging from such a wave, Occupy protest publics require being put in a different conceptual framework and a starting point in this quest was found in the concept of contentious politics, precisely what luminaries of social movements’ studies, McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, call transgressive contention: “Transgressive contention consist of episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants. (c) at least some parties to the conflict are newly self-identified political actors, and/or (d) at least some parties employ innovative collective action. (Action qualifies as innovative if it incorporates claims, selects objects of claims, includes collective self representations, and/or adopts means that are either unprecedented
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