Social Movements and Contentious Politics
We examine a broad range of social movements and contentious politics and how they are shaping and shaped by societal transformations and processes of peace and conflict.
About the Theme
We work across multiple disciplines and focus on a diverse range of social movements and contentious politics e.g., grassroots campaigns to large-scale social movements; pro-democracy and women’s movements; campaigns around racial and environmental justice; far right activism and conspiracy-based movements.
Through our research, we aim to advance social justice, and enable social movements to support the growth of democratic and resilient communities worldwide.
Theme Leads
Leah Bassel
Theme Lead
Professor Bassel is a political sociologist who researches migration, intersectionality and citizenship. Her projects on the activism of women of colour in Europe, the politics of listening, and naturalisation policies have been funded by the British Academy, Economic and Social Research Council, Leverhulme Trust and Open Society Foundation. Before pursuing an academic career, she was an emergency outreach worker in Paris where she provided emergency assistance to asylum seekers and created a circus camp project for refugee youth.
Ali Jones
Theme Co-Lead
Dr Jones is a cultural historian and political philosopher who studies the histories of radical left-wing movements ‘from below’. Her work relies on archival documents and extensive interviews with participants to represent these fringe voices and ideologies. She uses a method of ‘empathetic phenomenology’ to record and reflect the voices and histories of participants, in order to trace and record these important micro-histories in a fair scholarly way that is strictly detached from security or extremist approaches.
Publications
The members of the Social Movements and Contentious Politics Theme regularly publish articles, monographs, book chapters, and other media on this multidisciplinary subject. For the most recent publications, please see outputs on the Coventry University Pure page.
PublicationsProjects
The members of the Social Movements and Contentious Politics theme lead and collaborate on a number of research projects and additional projects are available on the Coventry University Research Portal.
ProjectsFeatured Projects
Becoming the Terror: Foucault on Violent Politics
This project investigates Michel Foucault’s unpublished conversations about political violence in relation to the Red Army Faction and the 1977 German Autumn, and contextualises these in the work and correspondence of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
Bulgaria’s Political Turmoil as a Democratisation Event?
This research project will address whether Bulgaria’s current phase of political turmoil, evident through street-based mobilisations and five elections in just two years, can justifiably be considered a positive phase in the country’s path to democratisation.
Imagining the Future: Engaging young people on environmental challenges to create new and sustainable livelihoods in Algeria
This project draws on a network of Algerian youth researchers to explore youth visions of the future, activism and engagement in the environmental sector and how the massive peaceful mobilisation of the hirak movement in 2019 has contributed to this.
Women of Colour Resist
This is a six-nation comparative research project that examines how women of colour activists in the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Spain strategise, organise and mobilise in illiberal Europe (co-principal investigator: Professor Akwugo Emejulu, University of Warwick).
'Hot periods' of anti-minority activism and the threat of violent domestic extremism: Towards an assessment framework
This project will generate new policy- and practice-relevant insight about the pathways towards and away from violence during ‘hot periods’ of anti-minority activism, understood as those periods in which anti-minority groups intensify their efforts to influence policy and public opinion and capture media, policy and public attention.
The Internal Brakes on Violent Escalation
This project seeks to develop a descriptive typology of the ‘internal brakes’ on violent escalation – the practices through which members of militant groups themselves contribute to limit their use of violence.
