Graeme Hayes

• Aston University

The protest trial has distinctive features and should be governed by what we term the ‘integrity principle’: it should respect the moral consistency of the defendant; justifications, not excuses, should be privileged; and the ‘remorse principle’ should not apply. As such, the trial should enable effective communication where the defendant is held t...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

In Thacker and ors the Court of Appeal overturned the convictions of the ‘Stansted 15’ due to a misdirection on the substantive offence. However, the court rejected their necessity defence, following Jones, as their actions were political, outweighing a desire to avoid a risk of death or serious injury; in a ‘functioning democratic state’ their cla...

We bring Foucauldian and Goffmanian frameworks into dialogue to show how repressive and disciplinary power operate in the criminal trials of social movement activists. We do so through an ethnographic account of the trials on terrorism-related charges of a group of anti-deportation direct action protesters known as the Stansted 15, complemented by...

Compiled by academics at three UK universities, this report presents a profile of participants in Extinction Rebellion’s (XR) mass civil disobedience actions in London in April and October 2019. The report is compiled from three datasets: a protest survey of participants in each of these two XR actions, with 303 short face to face interviews and 23...

This book questions the complex relationship between social movements and violence through two contrasted lenses, first through the short-lived radical left wing post '69 revolutionary violence and secondly in the present diffusion of civil disobedience actions, often at the border between non-violence and violence. This book shows how and why viol...

Breaking Laws: Violence and Civil Disobedience in Protest questions the complex relationship between social movements and violence through two contrasted lenses; first through the short-lived radical left wing post ’68 revolutionary violence, and secondly in the present diffusion of civil disobedience actions, often at the border between non-violen...

This chapter discusses ongoing debates over tactical choice and change, from Tilly's action repertoires model and protest event analysis to more recent actor‐centred approaches stressing the importance of identity and taste. It argues that while contentious politics approaches capture the macro‐level of analysis well, it is at the cost of a persuas...

In the UK, there is evidence of a recent increase in anti-abortion activism outside clinics. In response, abortion service providers have called for the introduction of ‘buffer’ zones to protect women from ‘harassment’ while accessing abortion services. Drawing on two datasets – extensive ethnographic fieldwork, and a content analysis of clinic cli...

This article discusses the European wave of contention catalysed by the financial market crash of 2008/9 and the subsequent imposition of austerity measures by governments across the continent. It develops two central arguments. First, it argues that we need a clearer and more sharply differentiated understanding of the operation of austerity as a...

This book is an urgent and compelling account of the Occupy movements: from the M15 movement in Spain, to the wave of Occupations flooding across cities in American, Europe and Australia, to the harsh reality of evictions as corporations and governments attempted to reassert exclusive control over public space. Across a vast range of international...

Tilly's famous claim that 'Britain created the social movement' (Tilly 1982) might lead readers to assume that scholarship on social movements would be firmly established as a central field of British social science. That is not the case. Or, rather, it is not the case in relation to the dominant approach to studying social movements as it has deve...

In this short rejoinder, I briefly contextualise and discuss the implications of Poulson, Caswell and Gray's article for Social Movement Studies.

La désobéissance civile, à la différence de la lutte armée, s'inscrit dans la vie ordinaire des individus, qui l'utilisent pour marquer leur opposition à la force de la loi. Au XXe siècle, Gandhi et Martin Luther King en ont fait un instrument privilégié de protestation non violente.À l'origine inspirées par des convictions religieuses ou philosoph...

This article analyzes the role of expert witness testimony in the trials of social movement actors, discussing the trial of the “Kingsnorth Six” in Britain and the trials of activists currently mobilising against airport construction at Notre Dame des Landes in western France. Though the study of expert testimony has so far overwhelmingly concentra...

Investigating the recent direct action campaigns against genetically modified crops in France and the United Kingdom, the authors set out to understand how contrasting judicial systems and cultures affect the way that activists choose to commit ostensibly illegal actions and how they negotiate the trade-offs between effectiveness and public account...

Les publications qui traitent de la « radicalité » en politique concentrent généralement leur attention sur la question des formes violentes d’action collective, comme le terrorisme, le fanatisme ou les émeutes urbaines. Dans ce numéro, nous proposons une approche à la fois plus large et plus précise de l’analyse des liens entre « radicalité », « r...

This article compares the tactic of trashing genetically modified crops in activist campaigns in Britain and France. In Britain, most crop trashing was carried out covertly, while in France most activists undertook open, public actions. In seeking an explanation for this, the article shows that the analysis of political opportunities, dominant in c...

French industrial relations were shaken in the spring of 2009 by a series of labour struggles which featured the forcible detention of company managers and threats to commit major acts of sabotage. In this article I focus on the first of these two types of action, placing industrial sequestration in the context of the pattern of collective negotiat...

On 24 March 2008, at Olympia, the site of the ancient Olympic Games in Greece, a ceremony was held to mark the quadrennial ceremonial lighting of the Olympic torch. The event itself promised added value as a media spectacle for reasons beyond the symbolism of Olympic pageantry. The Olympic host nation, China, was subject to widespread criticism for...

On 6 July 2005, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), meeting at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, announced which of the five shortlisted cities would host the 30th Olympic and 14th Paralympic Summer Games in 2012. Moscow, New York and Madrid had already been eliminated in the first three rounds of voting, leaving the final choice between Paris...

Sports mega-events are interesting to us because of the excitement they create: they capture the popular imagination, provide a platform for individual and collective feats of skill and dedication. To treat them as purely sociological or political phenomena is to miss their symbolic significance; it is also to miss the pleasures they generate. But...

This is an electronic pre-publication version of an article later published in the Abstract This article compares the tactic of trashing genetically modified crops in activist campaigns in Britain and France. In Britain most crop trashing was carried out covertly, while in France most activists undertook open, public actions. In seeking an explanat...

There is a disconnection between the top-down, elite, nature of sports mega-events and the ostensible redistributive and participatory sustainable development agendas staked out by BINGOs (Business-based International Non-Governmental Organizations) such as the contemporary International Olympic Committee (IOC). Focusing specifically on the London...

Civil disobedience has hitherto enjoyed only a relatively marginal place in the repertoires of French social movements, but has recently emerged as a key rallying frame for social mobilization, especially among environmental and counter-globalization movements. This paper examines the theory and practice of civil disobedience in the French context...

The emergence of the counter-globalisation movement in France has been accompanied by an apparent diversification of social protest repertoires. Protest events carried out by groups associated with a wide array of issues have been remarkable for their use of spectacular and novel actions, while civil disobedience campaigns have been prominent featu...

The development of multiplex cinemas has reinvigorated film exhibition and cinema attendance in France. Yet in the wake of the exception culturelle, multiplexes also stoked corporatist fears over the Americanization of French cinema, and in 1996 the state introduced a regulatory procedure for multiplexes modeled on the loi Royer. Regulation has not...

Twenty years ago, Hayward (1982) famously identified the key to policy implementation in France to be ‘the mobilisation of private interests in the pursuit of public objectives’. Yet the picture apparent from the preceding case studies is somewhat different: ultimately, it is the mobilisation of subnational interests, both public and private, which...

Since the late 1980s, there has been a significant resurgence in the scale and breadth of environmental protest in France. For those familiar with much of the exisiting literature on the French Green movement, this observation may seem surprising. This is because some of the most widely known – and often, indeed, best – accounts tend to confine ext...

List of Tables List of Figures Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: Political Opportunities and Environmental Protest in France Environmental Protest in France Political Opportunities and Policy Communities: Developing a Network Approach to State-Group Relations Institutional Change and the Fifth Republic Water Resource Management a...

This article focuses on the relationship between masculinity and national identity in Lucie Aubrac. It argues that, despite the narrative’s ostensible focus on the exploits of Lucie Aubrac, both Lucie’s actions and the Resistance activities undertaken by women in France in general during the Occupation are marginalised in Claude Berri’s film, which...

Studies of environmental protest in France have tended to emphasise the great difficulties experienced by groups in gaining positive policy outcomes. One set of explanations offered is that the ‘political opportunities’ available to such groups are highly limited given the strength, centralisation, and concentration of power in the French state. Ye...

In the 1990s, at the same time as political and intellectual debate in France has focused on the extent of collaboration in the Vichy period, a number of films have produced contrasting examinations of complicity and resistance during the German Occupation. This article concentrates on the construction of national identity through a reading of one...

Des Verts de Toutes les Couleurs by Jean‐Luc Bennahmias and Agnes Roche. Paris; Albin Michel, 1992. pp. 192; no index. 92 Ffr. ISBN 2 226 05659 9Génération Verte by Raymond Pronier and Vincent Jacques le Seigneur. Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1992. pp. 334; no index. 110 Ffr. ISBN 2 85616 623 7Dessine‐moi une planète by Antoine Waechter. Paris...