Objectives This article examines cross‐national variation in interreligious favorability across the globe. We develop and test several hypotheses linking globalization to attitudes toward the religious other through mechanisms of religious belonging and contact. Methods Utilizing cross‐national data in 20 countries from the Pew Global Attitudes Surveys (2011), we run a series of multilevel and logistic regression estimations to test our hypotheses about global contact, religious identity, and interreligious favorability. Results We find that global contact has a positive effect on interreligious favorability, whereas holding religious identity increases negative sentiments toward religious outgroups. We also find that increased levels of globalization inhibit the negative impact of religious belonging and threat perceptions on favorable views of the religious other. Conclusion Although globalization increases the salience of religion as an exclusive identity category at the expense of decreased interreligious favorability, individuals become more conducive to interreligious tolerance thanks to frequent social contact at higher levels of globalization.

Based on fieldwork carried out from 2017 and 2018, this article examines various attempts to both organize publicly and disrupt such attempts during the Iranian protests during that time. It argues that interference with spatial realities influenced the social coalitions built during the protests, impacting the capacity of actors to build such coalitions. The post-2009 adaptation of the state inhibited cross-class coalitions despite being challenged, while actors used spatial phrasing indicating they perceived spatial divisions to emulate political ones. Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the December 2017 protests, further attempts to control protest actions impacted not only those who would be able to participate in such events in the future, but also those who felt represented by them and who would be likely to sympathize with them. Based on the spatial conditions under which coalitions form, I argue that asymmetrical contestations of spatiality determined the outcome of the December 2017 protests and may contribute to an understanding of how alliances in Iran will form in the future.

Since the 1990s, there has been a raft of case studies inquiring into the relation between space and protest in the field that has come to be known as social movement studies or social movement theory, whether it be resource in protesters’ tactical repertoires, a terrain that sets policing strategies, or an actant that influences movement-building. So why produce a special section on “the spatiality of protest” now? The first reason lies in what William Sewell observed almost 20 years ago, which is that “most studies bring in spatial considerations only episodically, when they seem important either for adequate description of contentious political events or for explaining why particular events occurred or unfolded as they did” (2001: 51). Despite efforts from within the field to push social movement studies further around the spatial turn (e.g., Martin and Miller 2003; Wilton and Cranford 2002), it appears as though little theoretical work about the spatiality of protest has been generated in the past 15 years.1 Within the field of social movement studies, the core concepts of opportunity structures, resources, and frames are far from “spatialized.” Curiously, the seemingly marginal theoretical interest in space is set against the fact that recent methodological and conceptual advances in social movement studies call for what is essentially a scalar analysis of protest (Nulman and Schlembach 2018).

Iran has a long and storied tradition of protest and revolution. This tradition has been characterized by a range of diverse oppositional activities. The "Tobacco Protests" of the late nineteenth century, for example, brought together a successful alliance of clergy and bazaaris against the state (Moaddel 1994). Similarly, the beginning of the twentieth century saw a mobilization of socialist, feminist, and ethno-political groups as well as regionalist and nationalist politicians (Cronin 2007; Najmabadi 2007; Sharifi 2013; Atabaki 2003). The 1979 Iranian revolution once again brought the diversity of these opposition forces to the surface when a diverse alliance, united in its desire to see the end of the regime, proved capable of overthrowing the Shah (Foran 1994; Kurzman 2004). During the first years after the revolution, this oppositional diversity was reproduced within the political elite. This soon became a problem for the new rulers, and groups that differed from the new state ideology were quickly persecuted and marginalized (Schirazi 1998). Nevertheless, the Iranian political elite continues to be characterized by pluralism, as do opposition groups beyond state institutions. Successive waves of protest since the 1990s have revealed myriad oppositional positions. These target a diverse range of issues, including socioeconomic problems, the liberalization of public

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