Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education Mass Protests from a Spatial Perspective Discontent and Urban Public Space in Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow Arve Hansen A dissertation for the degree of Philosophiae Doctor – November 2019 Front page: Protesters in front of Maidan, 22 January 2019 Photo: Arve Hansen Acknowledgements First of all, my deepest gratitude goes to my main supervisor, Yngvar Steinholt. You have made the process of writing both this doctoral thesis and my previous master’s thesis a thoroughly enjoyable experience, and I have learned a lot from you. I also greatly appreciate the academic and personal support of my co-supervisor, Andrei Rogatchevski. Without the two of you and your readiness to facilitate my work, it would have been absolutely impossible to realise this project. You have pushed me forward, connected me with people, and improved my writing. For this I am grateful. A big thank you goes to my colleagues in the RSCPR research group and at UiT, especially Svetlana Sokolova and Kari Aga Myklebost, who have read, commented, and followed my progress every step of the way. Thanks also to Kirsty Jane Falconer for proofreading; Ferenc Leskó and Polina Gladkaya, for your seemingly unlimited hospitality and friendship; Janet Handley (our media correspondent), for your delicious food and interesting conversations; and Andrei Krasniashchikh, for everything you have done for me and our research group. Thanks are also due to Torgeir Alvestad, Petter Bauck, Harald Hoff, and David-Emil Wickström. My project has also put me in touch with people across the world, at seminars, PhD courses and study groups at UiT, NaUKMA and UiO; as well as among the audiences for the papers I have presented in Cambridge, Chernivtsi, Kassel, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Lund, Lviv, Mannheim, Oslo, San Francisco, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Södertörn, and Tromsø. Thank you for giving me valuable feedback, recommendations, and for pushing me in directions I did not expect to go. I would further like to thank all respondents and interviewees for contributing to this thesis. Your accounts have been invaluable. Lastly, I wish to thank my family for believing in me and helping me forward. Particularly Marina Dyshlovska, my loving and patient wife and friend, who at every step of the way has supported me with advice, provided language help, and given me practical support (such as food) when needed. My brother Hartvig, for all those rehearsals. And Denys, for reminding me that, even if there’s a deadline approaching, there’s always time to play a bit of Minecraft. Arve Hansen, Oslo, November 2019 i ii Abstract Mass protests have been an important part of the political environment in Eastern Europe for more than a century. Since the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, people have turned to urban spaces to make their opinions heard and to demand change, with varying degrees of success. This was most notably the case during the 1960s; and from the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, through a wave of what are commonly referred to as colour revolutions in the 2000s, to the Ukrainian Euromaidan revolution of 2013–2014. Contention in urban spaces continues to affect politics in the region. How are such mass protests affected by the urban public space in which they occur? Based on a contextualisation of protest space and a review of the academic literature on protests and urban space, this article-based thesis identifies a gap in the literature and then goes on to describe the development of a theoretical model to analyse city spaces, based on the use of theories from political science, urban planning, and sociology. The approach consists of a mapping of the causal mechanisms between spatial elements, the political environment, and their combined effect on protests. This mapping is applied to three case studies—a prestudy of Kyiv, a transitional study of Minsk and the main test-study of Moscow—written for three different academic journals at three different periods in the study’s development. In addition to the spatial perspective model, this thesis provides new insights as to how the interactions in space occur, and demonstrates how geography can create limitations and opportunities in a large variety of ways. It also contributes a language and a typology for use in the studies of opposition movements and collective actions. Keywords: Collective action; Colour revolution; Demonstration; Geography; Mass protests; Political environment; Public space; Urban contention; Urbanism. iii iv Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. i Abstract ................................................................................................................................. iii Contents .................................................................................................................................. v Appendices ............................................................................................................................ vi List of figures ....................................................................................................................... vii Abbreviations ........................................................................................................................ ix A note on language ................................................................................................................ xi 1 Starting point ...................................................................................................................... 1 2 Space in context ................................................................................................................. 5 2.1 Complexities of urban contention .............................................................................. 7 2.1.1 Form ....................................................................................................................... 8 2.1.2 Motivation .............................................................................................................. 8 2.1.3 Waves ..................................................................................................................... 9 2.2 Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia ................................................................................... 12 2.3 Relevance ................................................................................................................. 14 3 Mapping the field ............................................................................................................. 17 3.1 Protests ..................................................................................................................... 17 3.1.1 Repertoires ........................................................................................................... 19 3.1.2 Nonviolent contention .......................................................................................... 21 3.1.3 Colour revolutions ................................................................................................ 22 3.1.4 Non-spatial factors ............................................................................................... 28 3.2 Space ........................................................................................................................ 29 3.2.1 Public space .......................................................................................................... 30 3.2.2 Physical space ...................................................................................................... 33 3.2.3 Contested spaces .................................................................................................. 37 3.3 The gap ..................................................................................................................... 38 4 Definitions and research questions ................................................................................... 41 4.1 What is a mass protest? ............................................................................................ 41 4.2 What is urban public space? ..................................................................................... 42 4.3 Research questions ................................................................................................... 44 5 Theorising and development ............................................................................................ 47 5.1 Approaches to theorising .......................................................................................... 47 5.1.1 Field work ............................................................................................................ 50 5.1.2 Respondents ......................................................................................................... 52 5.1.3 Mapping ............................................................................................................... 56 5.2 Ethical considerations .............................................................................................. 56 5.2.1 Interview ethics .................................................................................................... 57 5.2.2 Practical utility ..................................................................................................... 59 5.3 Geographical determinism ......................................................................................