On Protest:
Latin America in Comparative and Transnational Perspective
A Proposal for a LASA-Mellon Seminar Grant
15 September 2013
Submitted by
Sonia E. Alvarez
Leonard J. Horwitz Professor of Latin American Politics and Society and
Director, Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies,
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
soniaa@polsci.umass.edu
Barbara R. Cruikshank
Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
cruiksha@polsci.umass.edu
and
Charles R. Hale
Professor of Anthropology and of African and African Diaspora Studies and
Director, Teresa Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies,
University of Texas at Austin
crhale@mail.utexas.edu
Executive Summary
Mass mobilization and protest politics have become normative in Latin America in recent years
and protesters have deployed an array of “repertoires” that find echo in those enacted by
participants in Arab Spring, the Spanish indignad@s, anti-austerity mobilizations across Europe,
U.S. and global Occupy processes, and most recently, nationwide protests in Turkey and Brazil.
Growing out of a “cross-area,” interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, and collaborative research
initiative launched in 2011, our proposed Mellon-LASA seminar and related two-panel session
for LASA 2014 would bring together scholars who study movements and contentious politics in
diverse world regions to explore the contested meanings of the current global surge of protest
and to theorize patterns/resemblances and local specificities. The products of our proposed
Mellon-LASA seminar, to be held at UMass-Amherst in October 2014, would be an edited book
collection and related web portal “On Protest” and a joint proposal to NSF to hold an open-call
international conference at UT-Austin in the spring of 2015.
Research Problem and Objectives
The mass protests and uprisings that have captured the popular imagination and commandeered
unprecedented media attention since 2011 continue to introduce new actors to political life, new
tactics and counter-tactics to protest, and new challenges for research on protest. Extraordinary
worldwide upheaval and the enormous size of street protests in places as diverse as Chile, India,
Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, and elsewhere are generating sharp challenges to existing scholarship on
protest.
The Latin American region offers a provocative set of experiences for theorizing protest. The
region arguably witnessed the first rumblings of what some now see as a new global “protest
cycle”1—dating back at least to the 1989 anti-austerity protests in Caracas and the massive
Indian Uprising that took Ecuador by surprise in 1990, from the 1994 Zapatista revolt to the late
2001 protests that brought the De la Rua government in Argentina to its knees and the Bolivian
Gas and Water Wars of the early 2000s. Spanning novel forms of activism among women,
immigrants, indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples to translocal processes of organizing against
mining, agro-industry and other neo-developmentalist capitalist encroachments, protest in Latin
America today continues to bring into view an impressively broad array of non-State actors
displaying a kaleidoscope of innovative and “renovative” cultural and political practices.2
While the vast scholarship and sophisticated activist knowledge produced in and on Latin
American protest over the past couple of decades have much to contribute to comparative efforts
to apprehend the contested meanings of post-2011 uprisings across the globe, the Latin American
literature remains virtually unknown to theorists and practitioners of contemporary protest
1
Berkeley Journal of Sociology 2011; Castells 2012; Juris 2012; Juris and Razsa 2012; Occupy
Movement 2012; Season of Revolution 2012; Tejerina et al. 2013; Welty et al. 2013.
2
On recent mobilizations in the region, see especially Adamovsky 2007; Alvarez et al.
forthcoming; Hoetmer 2009; Hoetmer, Vargas and Quintanilla 2011; Silva 2009; Stahler-Sholk,
Vanden, and Kuecker 2008; Svampa 2008; Zibechi 2010, 2012.
2
politics in other parts of the world.3 The current outpouring of theorizing on protest in those
other world regions, especially elsewhere in the Global South (including the peripheries of
Europe), in turn, has much to contribute Latin American understandings of protest politics.
Our proposed seminar is unique in bringing these parallel but until now largely separate
conversations into fruitful theoretical dialogue. The activities we propose here form part of an
on-going collaborative, interdisciplinary research effort to produce comparative, transnational,
and theoretical scholarship on recent protests—one that is unusual in its cross-area scope, its
transdisciplinary engagement, and its attention to the antecedents and comparative dimensions of
protest mobilization in Latin America and other regions of the Global South. The unprecedented
“inter-area studies” theorizing on protest made possible by our proposed workshop, web portal,
edited volume, and intended NSF-sponsored open-call global conference thus responds directly
to the Mellon-LASA call for projects that “incorporate into Latin American Studies researchers
whose primary geographic focus is on other regions of the world, thus adding comparative or
connective dimensions to Latin America-related work and/or introducing to the field
methodological or analytical perspectives that have typically been applied elsewhere.”
Research Questions
Our proposed Mellon-LASA workshop would build on collective research activities launched in
the fall of 2011 by a cross-area, multi-disciplinary group of UMass and Five College4 faculty
anxious to make sense of the surge of global mobilizations seemingly unleashed by the Arab
Spring. The Latin American(ist)s among us were quick to point to the stark parallels we
perceived between the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the Indignad@s protests in
Europe and the Occupy movements then flourishing in the US, on the one hand, and the swell in
movement activism and anti-neoliberal mobilization that has swept across Latin America since
the 1990s and helped usher in the current “Left Turn” in the region’s governance, on the other.
The parallels, and the equally stark differences, prompted us to convene a research group that
today encompasses faculty and graduate students, with diverse disciplinary and area studies
expertise, from UMass-Amherst, UT-Austin, the Five Colleges, Boston University, Northeastern
University, UNC-Chapel Hill, UC-Santa Barbara, Hunter College, Cornell University, Unicamp
and UFSC (Brazil), San Marcos (Peru), CUNY Graduate Center, and NYU, among others, and
seeks to incorporate activist-intellectuals from throughout the Americas and across the globe.
The activities of our now well-established research network have included a highly productive
and provocative reading group, a year-long graduate seminar on “Comparative and Transnational
Perspectives on Protest,” held at UMass-Amherst in 2012-13, along with a fall 2012 lecture
series, “On Protest,” that brought specialists from other campuses into conversation with our
project. In April 2013, the third PI on this proposal, Charles R. Hale, joined our collaborative
analytical efforts during a two-day research symposium that presented original research on
3
On this point, see especially Sitrin 2012.
UMass-Amherst forms part of a Five College Consortium with Amherst College, Hampshire
College, Smith College, and Mt. Holyoke College.
4
3
protest and inspired the more focused research agenda and more expansive network that our
proposed Mellon-LASA project now seeks to nurture.
Early discussions in our research group confirmed a shared sense that existing concepts and
theoretical frameworks in the social sciences are inadequate to the task of apprehending the
diverse modalities of activism unfolding across the globe. The wide range of mobilizations,
protest actions, and encampments did not fit neatly into prevailing definitions of social
movements, for instance, yet they were certainly more than “fringe” protests or “mob actions,”
as conservative pundits would have it. Borrowing from Adbusters, the anarchist
magazine/movement whose original call to “Occupy Wall Street” on September 17, 2011, asked
“Are You Ready for a Tahrir Moment?,” we began to group these diverse phenomena under the
label “Tahrir Moments,” as a kind of analytical place-holder, if you will, until we collectively
devised a more apt conceptual apparatus.
Between fall 2011 and spring 2013, during the first phase of our collective research, we explored
basic social science questions regarding the continuities and ruptures between Tahrir Moments
and mobilizations of earlier decades, the interplay of “uncivic” and civic politics in diverse
protest experiences, and the resemblances, differences, and translocal connections among them.
Our collective findings to date are at once too extensive and too preliminary to permit an
adequate summary here. We will publish partial research results from our April 2013
symposium in journal form in the near future and have posted papers and video of our research
on our blog “On Protest: Theorizing the Tahrir Moments Research Group & Allies”
(http://blogs.umass.edu/protest/). We restrict ourselves here to highlighting some of the
preliminary findings that will be further explored during this second stage of our collective
research and will guide debates during our proposed LASA 2014 two-panel session and a
subsequent seminar “On Protest: Latin America in Comparative and Transnational Perspective,”
to be held at UMass-Amherst in October 2014, with co-sponsorship from the Teresa Long
Institute for Latin American Studies (LLILAS) at UT-Austin.
A first example of the lines of research we hope to further develop through our proposed MellonLASA project center on crafting a conceptual apparatus adequate to the task of understanding
contemporary protest. During the first stage of our collective research, we identified a set of
approaches that seem to offer promising entry points for further comparative inquiry, including
complexity and assemblage theories, social network analysis, de- and post-colonial studies, and
ontological, relational, and cultural politics approaches. Our proposed Mellon-LASA seminar
would now provide an opportunity to pull together elements of those varied approaches into a
systematic reflection on Activist Theorizing/Theorizing Activism— examining the theories,
concepts, languages and knowledges formulated by contemporary protestors/activists and how
such “activist theories” resonate with or challenge existing academic theories of protest and
collective action. Relatedly, since prevailing approaches to social movements are typically
derived from the study of Anglo-American and European experiences, our seminar would
explore how diverse “Epistemologies of the South,” such as postcolonial and decolonial
theories, might shed new or different light on Tahrir moments.5
5
On epistemologies of the Global South, see especially Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007;
Flórez-Flórez 2010; Moraña, Dussel, and Jauregui 2008; Souza Santos 2010.
4
On the topic of ruptures and continuities, to offer another necessarily brief example, our
collective findings suggest that “new” post-2011 mobilizations both innovate and renovate
discourses and practices of protest. Contemporary protests are replete with older “repertoires”—
aka discourses, performances, slogans and practices—that amply attest to their oftenconsiderable debt to earlier moments of mobilization. The much-remarked “finger tinkling” and
professed horizontalism of Occupy and similar movements were adapted from the antiglobalization movements of just a decade ago, and those, in turn, derived some of their
“trademark” participatory, non-hierarchical practices from the civil/human rights, feminist,
LGBT, anti-racist, and environmental movements of still earlier decades. But diverse protest
actions in the wide range of local and national sites examined by our network also have vested
such translated historic practices with renovated meanings—the “same old” horizontalism and
“assembly-ism” of yesteryear, for example, is today cross-cut by a complex mix of antigovernment, anti-Left/party, anti-establishment, anti-neoliberal, even anti-last-decade-antiglobalization-movement sentiments that vary, often dramatically, from “moment” to moment,
the derivations and variations of which our collective project seeks to better apprehend.
Innovation and renovation in protest, then, will be key themes of our proposed Mellon-LASA
seminar.
Three final examples will serve to further illustrate how our proposed seminar would expand on
questions that have animated our collaborative research thus far. In theorizing global/translocal
connections among Tahrir Moments, for example, our research findings suggest that
understanding current protest politics in Latin America and elsewhere calls for transnational
analyses that conceive of space in a less fragmented fashion than do traditional case studies.
New research to be presented during LASA 2014 and debated during our proposed seminar
would further interrogate the concept of transnational diffusion, which tends to be confined to
a short time span and to demarcate local and transnational politics based on collective actions’
targets. Our new research would pay particular attention to the language used to characterize
the time or times of protest, focusing especially on the weather and disease metaphors that are
widely used in social science, security discourses, and popular media to characterize the
emergence of recent transnational protests, e.g., a crashing “wave of protest;” another “surge,”
“swell,” or turn in the “cycle” of protest; and “contagion.” Such metaphors encourage us to
think of protest as arising naturally—uncontrollably—under certain circumstances, implying that
history makes protest rather than protest making history. By exploring how protest makes
history, we would develop an understanding of protest as a continuous rather than an
episodic phenomenon. Finally, in thinking about the present and future dynamics of
contemporary protest, our research suggests that the meanings of Tahrir Moments become ever
more disputed with the passage of time, as contending social and political forces, national and
international, compete with one another over the significance of particular protest actions; the
same set of practices can be conveyed as “radically democratic” or conservative, even fascistic,
“heroic” or “violent,” for instance. The political and theoretical dispute over and about
protest, especially as enacted in the policing of protest, then, is a further node in our evolving
collective conceptual apparatus, to be deepened and expanded during our proposed MellonLASA seminar. This final topic has the additional dimension of requiring us to turn the analytical
lens back on ourselves, the academy-based theorists, monitoring which analytical frames we
5
privilege or downplay, and tracing the influence of this academic work on broader perceptions
and processes of the movements themselves.
Proposed Mellon-LASA Activities and Outcomes
By integrating scholars and activist-intellectuals working in/on other world regions and
promoting collaboration among scholars based in a range of disciplines, our proposed two-day
working seminar speaks directly to the stated objectives of the Mellon-LASA grant competition.
Drawing on the vast webs of contacts of our established network members, we plan to bring
together Latin American(ist)s expressly interested in engaging in cross-area, transdisciplinary
research and social theorists and comparativist analysts of contemporary protest specializing in
other areas of the world who wish to engage in productive dialogue with their Latin
American(ist) counterparts. The seminar also would incorporate members of the exceptionally
large and vibrant area studies and interdisiciplinary Five College scholarly communities in
structuring our seminar’s inter-area conversations—thereby expanding the comparative range of
our effort at little to no additional monetary expense. We also plan to include 8-10 graduate
students from UMass, UT, UNC, NYU, and other institutions participating in our network, and
to incorporate younger scholars and activist-intellectuals from Latin America and other world
regions. To promote dialogue across traditional activist-academic divides, the seminar would
feature one or more videoconference sessions involving our Amherst seminar participants in
conversations with activist-intellectuals and scholars engaged with activism and research on
protest in other regions of the globe. Mellon-LASA funds would underwrite travel and lodging
for some non-local participants, with matching travel funding provided by UT-Austin’s LLILAS
and other participating institutions.
Our proposed project will result in an edited volume, a related web portal, and an interinstitutional grant proposal to NSF. The ten papers to be presented at LASA 2014, together with
essays by our LASA chairs and discussants and scholars joining us at Amherst in October 2014,
will be “workshopped” during the second, closed working-session day of our proposed MellonLASA seminar. Funding from Mellon-LASA would enable the translation of selected essays for
publication and matching funding would underwrite conference assistance, the preparation of our
edited volume, and the design of a cross-area web portal “On Protest,” on which our network’s
research findings and other resources for scholars and practitioners would be regularly posted.
Drawing on two days of debate on the findings of this second stage of our collective research, the
three PIs on this project, along with a representative from each of the other U.S. and Latin
American institutions involved, would meet for a third day to draft an NSF proposal for a major
open-call international conference which would launch a third and final stage of our cross-area,
interdisciplinary collaboration.
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Works Cited
Adamovsky, Ezequiel. 2007. Más allá de la vieja izquierda: Seis ensayos para un nuevo
anticapitalismo. Buenos Aires: Libros Prometeu.
Alvarez, Sonia E., Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Agustín Lao-Montes, Jeffrey W. Rubin, and Millie
Thayer. forthcoming. Beyond the Civil Society Agenda: Social Movements, Civic
Participation, and Democratic Contestation. Draft manuscript.
Berkeley Journal of Sociology. 2011. “Understanding the Occupy Movement: Perspectives
from the Social Sciences,”
http://bjsonline.org/2011/12/understanding-the-occupy-movement-perspectives-from-thesocial-sciences/; accessed 13 August 2012.
Castells, Manuel. Castells, Manuel. 2012. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in
the Internet Age. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Castro-Gómez, Santiago and Ramón Grosfoguel, eds. 2007. El giro decolonial: Reflexiones
para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre
Editores, Universidad Central, Instituto de Estudios Sociales y Contemporaneos, and
Pontífica Universidad Javeriana.
Flórez Flórez, Juliana. 2010. Lecturas emergentes: Decolonilidad y subjetividad en las teorías
de movimientos sociales. Bogotá: Pontífica Universidad Javeriana.
Hoetmer, Raphael, ed. 2009. Repensar la Política desde América Latina: Cultura, Estado y
Movimientos Sociales. Lima: Programa Democracia y Transformación Global; Universidad
Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.
Hoetmer, Raphael, Virginia Vargas and Mar Quintanilla, eds. 2011. Movimientos Sociales:
Entre la Crisis y Otros Saberes. Lima: Programa Democracia y Transformación Global,
Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2011.
Juris, Jeffrey J. 2012. Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and
Emergin Logics of Aggregation. American Ethnologist 39, 2: 259–279.
Juris, Jeffrey J. and Maple Razsa. 2012. Occupy, Anthropology, and the 2011 Global Uprisings.
Cultural Anthropology “Hot Spot number 6” http://culanth.org/fieldsights/63-occupyanthropology-and-the-2011-global-uprisings; accessed 11 November 2012.
Moraña, Mabel, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui, eds. 2008. Coloniality at Large: Latin
America and the Postcolonial Debate. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
“OccupyMovement.” 2011. Possible Futures: A Project of the Social Science Research Council,
http://www.possible-futures.org/category/occupy-movement/
“The Season of Revolution: the Arab Spring and European Mobilizations.” 2012. Interface: a
journal for and about social movements, Special issue,
http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/ ; accessed 11 November 2012.
Silva, Eduardo. 2009. Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Sitrin, Marina. 2012. Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Latin America.
London: Zed Press
Souza Santos, Boaventura and Maria Paula Meneses, eds. 2010. Epistemologias do Sul. São
Paulo: Editora Cortez.
Stahler-Sholk, Richard, Harry E. Vanden, and Glen David Kuecker. 2008. Latin American Social
Movements in the Twenty-First Century: Resistance, Power, and Democracy. Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield.
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Svampa, Maristella. 2008. Cambio de Época: Movimientos Sociales y Poder Político. Buenos
Aires: CLACSO; Siglo Veintiuno Editores.
Tejerina, Benjamín, Ignacia Perugorría, Tova Benski and Lauren Langman 2013. From
Indignation to Occupation: A New Wave of Global Mobilization. Current Sociology 61:
377-392.
Welty, Emily, Matthew Bolton, Meghana Nayak, and Christopher Malone, eds. 2013.
Occupying Political Science: The Occupy Wall Street Movement from New York to the
World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Zibechi, Raúl. 2012. Territories of Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social
Movements. Oakland: AK Press.
______. 2010. Dispersing power: social movements as anti-state forces. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
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Seminar Participants

Social Theorists, Global Studies Scholars, and Specialists in Other World Regions
 Paul Amar,* Associate Professor of Global Studies, UC-Santa Barbara (Egypt, Middle
East and North Africa [MENA], Brazil, feminist and sexuality studies)
 Gianpaolo Baiocchi,* Associate Professor of Sociology, Gallitin-NYU (Brazil, Europe,
US)
 Amrita Basu, Professor of Political Science, Amherst College (India, South Asia,
feminist studies)
 Asef Bayat, Professor of Sociology, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign (MENA)
 Angélica Bernal, Assistant Professor of Political Science, UMass-Amherst (Political
Theory; Andean Studies)
 Barbara Cruikshank,* Associate Professor of Political Science, UMass-Amherst
(Contemporary Political Theory, feminist studies)
 Omar S. Dahi, Assistant Professor of Economics, Hampshire College (MENA)
 Jodi Dean, Professor of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Political
Theory, feminist studies)
 David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center (Social
Theory, Global Studies)
 Justin Helepololei,* Ph.D. student, Anthropology, UMass-Amherst (Europe, U.S.)
 Julie Hemment, Associate Professor of Anthropology, UMass-Amherst (Russia, feminist
studies)
 Jeffrey Juris,* Associate Professor of Anthropology, Northeastern University (Global
Studies, Spain, Mexico)
 Alyssa Maraj-Grahame,* Ph.D. student, Political Science, UMass-Amherst (Europe,
Scandinavia)
 Maya Mikdashi, Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow/Director of Graduate Studies at the
Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, NYU (MENA)
 Cathy Schneider,* Associate Professor, School of International Service, American
University (Europe, U.S., Chile)
 Jillian Schwedler,* Associate Professor of Political Science, Hunter College and CUNY
Graduate Center (MENA)
 Marina Sitrin,* Research Associate, Center for Place, Culture and Politics, CUNY
Graduate Center (Global Studies, Latin America)
 Jaqueline Urla, Professor of Anthropology, UMass-Amherst (Europe, Basque Country)
 Alper Yagci,* Ph.D. student, Political Science, UMass-Amherst (Turkey, Brazil,
Argentina)
 5-7 additional faculty researchers from Five College area studies and global studies
programs
 Three Ph.D. students and two junior faculty from the UNC-Chapel Hill Social
Movements Research group, to be selected.
 One junior researcher/activist-intellectual from Southern Europe or MENA, to be
selected.

Indicates paper presenter, discussant or chair on our proposed two-panel LASA 2014 session.
9
Latin American(ist) Participants
 Sonia E. Alvarez,* Professor of Latin American Politics and Society, and Director,
Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies, UMass-Amherst
 Martha Balaguera,* Ph.D. student, Political Science, UMass-Amherst
 Michele Bigenho, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Hampshire College
 Marisol de la Cadena, Professor of Anthropology, UC-Davis
 Ivelisse Cuevas, Ph.D. student, Political Science, UMass-Amherst
 Arturo Escobar,* Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill
 Margaret Cerullo, Professor of Social Science, Hampshire College
 Martha Fuentes-Bautista, Assistant Professor of Communication, UMass-Amherst
 Charles R. Hale,* Professor of Anthropology and of African and African Diaspora
Studies and Director, Teresa Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies,
University of Texas at Austin
 Raphael Hoetmer, research scholar, Programa Democracia y Transformación Global,
Universidad Nacional San Marcos, Lima, Peru
 Ben Leiter,* Ph.D. student, Political Science, UMass-Amherst
 Elva Orozco, Ph.D. student, Political Science, UMass-Amherst
 Jeffrey Rubin, Associate Professor of History, Institute for Culture, Religion, and Work
Affairs, Boston University
 Robert Samet, Visiting Assistant Professor of Legal Studies, UMass-Amherst
 Ana Claudia Teixeira,* social scientist and independent researcher/Unicamp/Pólis,
Campinas/São Paulo, Brazil
 Millie Thayer, Associate Professor of Sociology, UMass-Amherst
 Wendy Wolford, Professor of Geography and Development Sociology, Cornell
University
 Three Ph.D. students and three faculty affiliated with the Teresa Lozano Long Institute at
UT-Austin.
 Two junior researchers/activist-intellectuals based in Latin America, to be selected.
10