Protests Revisited: Political Configurations, Political Culture and Protest Impact

Abstract

Migration and asylum issues are an important and contested policy field (van der Brug et al. 2015;Cinalli 2016). Migratory movements affect the issue of state sovereignty as much as they change societies. The modes of contestation and politicization, however, vary and change through cycles of attention and within different national and local contexts. This book brings together new empirical research on a set of three protest types: first, solidarity protests, second, refugee self-organized protests and third, mobilizations against newly arrived refugees in three countries, Austria, Germany and Switzerland. By looking at supportive, self-organized, and counter movements, we expect to provide a nuanced portrait of contemporary bottom-up mobilizations and contestations in the field of refugee and migration policies. In line with social movement studies, this study on political protest takes as its starting point the assumption that grassroots activism, civil disobedience, resistance, lobbying efforts, and more traditional forms of claims-making and politics together constitute an important policy field and are co-constitutive for an adequate understanding of modern democratic governance. However, it is not easy to decipher how such co-constitutive processes work and whether and how bottom-up mobilizations have an impact (Giugni et al. 1999) on societal debates, the governance in the field of asylum, migrant and refugee reception, and their inclusion. In order to investigate these and other issues with the necessary thoroughness, the volume's contributions