Introducing the Dataset on International-Oriented Social Mobilization (2010-2020)
P9-S221-1
Presented by: Agnes Yu
In a globalized and hyperconnected world, individuals may perceive ‘politics elsewhere’, for better or worse, as entangled with ‘politics at home.’ An (re)emerging political manifestation of this has been the rise of international-oriented protests, which are defined as instances where individuals are explicitly advocating on behalf of another peoples, where a specific policy or issue in the country abroad is being challenged by the protest. Recent instances of this include Roe v. Wade protests in France, BLM protests in Hong Kong, and Anti-Ukraine Invasion protests in Chile. What are broader patterns that underlie this form of political action, that may be consistent or varying across different contexts? Why might 'everyday' people protest on behalf of populations abroad, where the concessions/benefits of such protests may not be directly felt at home? This paper introduces a dataset-in-progress that tracks instances where populations have explicitly protested on behalf of other populations abroad between 2010-2020 (by country-event-year), and presents some preliminary findings. Key dataset variables include the issue being protested on and its ‘home’ country, whether citizens or governments of the ‘home country’ respond to the protests, repression abroad, the time lag (in days) for a protest to occur in response to the issue abroad, regime and issue-types, and alliances/shared IO memberships on the country-level. This project contributes towards examining large-N patterns of international protest, an increasingly prominent political phenomenon, empirically differentiates 'international' protests from 'transnational' ones, and expands notions of individual-level agency on the level of global politics.
Keywords: Protest, International Mobilization, Dataset construction, Social movements, Repression