Since late 2018, a global wave of mobilization under the banners of Fridays For Future (FFF) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) has injected new energy into global climate politics. FFF and XR took the world by storm, but have now been forced into (partial) latency as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. We believe this moment presents an opportunity for reflection. In particular, FFF and XR have been depicted as 'new' forms of climate activism. However, we argue that the extent to which these campaigns represent 'new' forms of climate activism is really a matter for closer investigation. In this Profile, we therefore reflect on the distinctiveness of the 'new climate activism' as compared to previous climate campaigns. Reviewing previous studies and our own research, we find that there are both elements of change and continuity in who participates and how, and that the main change appears to be the use of a more politically 'neutral' framing of climate change that is directed more strongly at state than non-state actors.

Protests at and around climate summits attract media attention, but it has been assumed, rather than demonstrated, that such protests attract similar kinds of actors who share a common "climate justice" agenda. To test such assumptions, we analyze the patterns of participation in demonstrations around the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, centered around the Fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-15). Attended by 190 national delegations, with over 30,000 registered participants, 1 formal negotiations among political leaders were surrounded by meetings and seminars involving politicians, scientists, and representatives of a wide range of NGOs. The summit also prompted extraordinary mobilizations of demonstrators, both in Copenhagen and elsewhere. Although, as many of the demonstrators expected, the summit ended without agreement on an effective regime to address global climate change, it provided an important opportunity for networking and mobilization with potentially enduring consequences for the development of a transnational climate movement.The events surrounding COP-15 provided an opportunity to explore the demographic characteristics and political goals of demonstrators mobilized around the most compelling transnational environmental issue of our timeclimate change. By surveying different demonstrations related to a single transnational summit, we examine collective action addressing climate change from the perspective of rank-and-ªle participants, and so provide an important complement to the images conveyed by the slogans and rhetoric of the social movement organizations (SMOs) engaged with climate change.We analyze data on participants in the three largest European climate 1. Fisher 2010, 12.

This article explores the social composition of participants in anti-austerity protests taking place in Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK between 2010 and 2012, based on over 3000 questionnaires distributed to protest participants according to a standardized method. Employing a distinction between three types of mobilizations, we compare protests anchored in the traditional 'old' labour movements, protests by smaller radical leftist unions and parties, and the ostensibly newer kinds of mobilizations in the form of Indignados and Occupy protests. Although easily forgotten, we argue that the two former types of anti-austerity protests deserve equal attention from researchers. We conclude that there are significant differences between the protest categories in terms of socio-demographic characteristics of their participants, but the participants nevertheless appear to maintain surprisingly similar political values across demonstration types. Class identification also differed. The participants in the Indignados/Occupy protests had a markedly lower degree of identification with the working class -regardless of the 'objective' labour market position and controlling for country differences. These aspects relate to the classic distinction between 'old' and 'new' social movements, but we argue that it risks obscuring a more complex pattern of similarities and differences between different anti-austerity mobilizations.

This article maps mechanisms by which online social media activities may contribute to right-wing political violence. High-impact studies on the wave of right-wing and racist violence in the 1990s and early 2000s established that mass media discourse on immigrants and previous violent incidents had a significant influence on the prevalence of radical right violence. This link was captured by Koopmans's and Olzak's notion of discursive opportunities. However, this was before the dominance of online social networks and social media, which changed the media landscape radically. We argue for broadening and refining the operationalization of the concept of discursive opportunities in social movement studies as well as including in our theoretical models new mechanisms brought about by the new online media. In relation to radical right and anti-immigrant mobilizations in Sweden in the 2010s, we elaborate and exemplify three mechanisms through which activities on social media may affect the incidence of violence: a) having an increasingly coproduced discursive opportunity structure, b) making inter-group dynamics in movement groups and networks trans-local, and c) sharing (rare) practical information and coordinating activities.

This article sheds light on mechanisms by which online social interactions contribute to instigating far-right political violence. It presents an analysis of how violence against ethnic and religious minorities is motivated and legitimized in social media, as well as the situational conditions for such violent rhetoric. Online violent rhetoric in a Swedish public far-right social media discussion group was studied using a combination of machine-learning tools and qualitative analysis. The analysis shows that violent rhetoric primarily occurs in the context of narratives about criminals and crimes with (imagined) immigrant perpetrators and often particularly vulnerable victims, linked to a social problem definition of a corrupt and failing state as well as the alleged need to deport immigrants. The use of dehumanizing and infrahumanizing expressions both legitimizes political violence and spurs negative emotions that may increase motivation for violent action.