The thesis addresses the legal regulation of the freedom of assembly in the Czech Republic, aiming to analyse the current version of the Assembly Act, point out certain problematic aspects and suggest improvements de lege ferenda, critically assess the relevant case law and provide a comparison with legal regulations in some other countries. Part Two analyses the meaning of the freedom of assembly and the term "assembly", summarising and assessing different opinions on what constitutes an assembly. It addresses the constitutional principle that no permission may be required for organising public assemblies and its implication for so called "accesory activities" during assemblies. Part Three examines the requirement to notify the council about planned assemblies. The time requirement prescribed by the Czech law is compared to the requirements in 30 other - mostly European - countries. The formal requirements of the notifications are analysed in detail. Part Four concerns the power of the council to prohibit an assembly in advance. A considerable part is devoted to the critical evaluation of the case law regarding prohibition of assemblies and the issue of large-scale false notifications, where both constitutionally conform interpretation and amendments of the law are suggested. Conditions under which the...

The criminal warrant represents a specific form of decision in criminal matters and a type of simplified procedure as well. A single judge can issue a criminal warrant without trying the matter in the main trial if the facts are substantiated by reliable evidence. The criminal warrant has the nature of a convicting judgment. This type of simplified procedure is enacted under provisions § 314e to § 314g of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The criminal warrant is used in practice very often for its fastness and economy. In 2012, single judges by means of a criminal warrant, decided on 54,64 % of criminal cases (accused) before the District Courts within the whole area of the Czech Republic. The purpose of the thesis is to analyse the criminal warrant in all its aspects. The thesis is composed of nine chapters. Chapter One describes the history of the criminal warrant from 1918. Chapter Two focuses on relations between the criminal warrant and the basic principles of criminal procedure. Chapter Three describes the criminal warrant as a specific form of decision in criminal matters, procedure and conditions for issuing a criminal warrant, the penalties that can be imposed by means of a criminal warrant and the position of a victim. Chapter Four concentrates on the criminal warrant as a special method of...

Master of Arts / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Lisa Melander / Okinawa, Japan has a long history of struggle with Japan and the United States of America. Okinawa was annexed by the Japanese during the Shogunate, mistreated by Imperial Japan during World War II, destroyed during the Battle of Okinawa, and occupied by U.S. military. Okinawa hosts some of the largest U.S. military bases outside of the Continental United States. Since Okinawa has been occupied by the U.S. military since World War II, it also has a history of contentious politics and protests against the occupation. Okinawa’s economy and cultural identity within the domestic and international spheres with the U.S. military and the Government of Japan has shaped its political protest identities. The “Okinawan Struggle” has evolved and into a new form, but often seen as a long lasting and unified struggle. This thesis explores Okinawa’s different protest episodes during different governing administrations and different economic structures.

Magister Artium - MA / The legacy of apartheid is one that has left traces of racial oppression and inequitable distribution of state resources across the landscape of the country. Cape Town in particular is a city of many contrasts with grand residential estates often tucked far away from decaying townships and forgotten slums outside of the CBD. One particular domain that epitomizes the continuing inequality between racial groups is that of education. Even though South Africa officially achieved independence in 1994, little is known about changes in the status quo at many formerly white schools. The all-girls high school of Sans Souci Girls High School (SSGHS) in Cape Town recently came to light as a site of conflict and tension with learners taking to Twitter to voice their anger towards what they deemed as unfair and racialized practices at the school. This thesis investigates the protest of young black learners at SSGHS, with particular focus on the languages used, videos and images uploaded as well as the complementary and contradictory online press releases. The study further explores the ways in which racialized and gendered practices are resemiotized and (re)contextualised through the protest. The use of online platforms such as Twitter and the emergence of protests at institutions across South Africa has become a regular feature of South African media reports. Under the banner of decolonizing education, many of these anti-establishment movements have become quite effective in getting their voices heard, both locally and internationally. Of interest to this study is whether and how the protest at Sans Souci fits into a larger paradigm of decolonizing education and furthermore, what these protests contribute to a larger conversation regarding gender, racial tensions and naturalised racialized discourses and practices at formerly white schools. It is hoped that a multimodal discourse analysis of images, videos and comments online will provide much-needed information about the semiotics of protest and transformation at the school as they emerge on the internet.

This dissertation examines the significance of the politics of classification to how we have come to understand and study practices of protest and dissent. I trace the politics of classification in the history of political thought, and highlight how the categories of thought often most deeply associated with the promises of the Euro-modern Enlightenment constitute both aspirations and limits to questions of dissent and political transformation. These modern aspirations and limits, I argue, have tended to fall into one of two traditions – a Kantian/Foucauldian tradition and a Hegelian/Marxian tradition. While the Hegelian/Marxian tradition involves a specific, progressivist theory of the subject, lines of thought associated with this tradition tend to be reductionist. By contrast, the Kantian/Foucauldian tradition is not reductionist in the same way as the Hegelian/Marxian, and involves both an ontological and an epistemological theory of classification, but is constrained by its own constitutive limits. I apply these theoretical insights to a study of how a range of sympathetic, progressivist commentators – from journalists, to activists, to academics – have attempted to explain the 2009-2013 wave of global protests. Examining commentaries that discuss and link events ranging from the Syntagma Square and indignadas protests in Greece and Spain, the Occupy Wall Street movement and the summer 2013 protests in Brazil, Turkey and Bulgaria, I show that these commentaries claim novel politics but ignore the politics of classification within which their own work operates. This lack of attention paid to the politics of classification by both participants and commentators in progressive politics is symptomatic of a hegemony of the particular classificatory practices and categories I have identified. I suggest that explanations of protests often clustered around three key issues – or three ways that commentators claimed something was changing – claims to novelty, claims to the emergence of new forms of subjectivity, and claims around changing structures of authority. To take seriously the question of dissent, I conclude that we must take into account the epistemological inheritances within which our claims about practices of dissent are located. / Graduate / 2020-08-20

In this thesis, I examine the ways in which a growing number of Indigenous artists in the United States and Canada are using hip hop not only as a form of artistic expression, but also to vent frustration about and to draw attention to contemporary issues affecting their communities. These artists participate in a tradition of politically conscious performance that has influenced and been influenced by Indigenous social movements across North America. Indigenous hip hop serves to affirm and redefine twenty-first century Indigenous identities, disrupting and reinterpreting stereotypical representations of Native Americans in a process which I describe as an “authenticity loop.” By utilizing artistic choices and strategic representations of indigeneity, the artists I examine have firmly established that they along with their communities are not remnants of the past, even as they maintain a continuity between previous generations and the present day.

Why after almost a decade of silence and "successful" crackdowns of contention during the 1980s has Iran witnessed once again waves of increasing popular protest? What are the processes and mechanisms behind the routinization of collective actions in Iran since the early 1990s, which continue despite state repression? Why and under what circumstances does a strong authoritarian state that has previously marginalized its contenders tolerate some forms of contention despite the state's continued repressive capacity? And finally, to what extent are available social movement theories capable of explaining the Iranian case? In "State, Dissidents, and Contention: Iran, 1979-2010" I engage theories of social movements and contentious politics in order to examine the emergence, development, and likely outcomes of popular contention in contemporary Iran. My study is the first project of its kind to focus on elite factionalism and its impact on popular mobilization in contemporary Iran. Although other scholars have extensively written on elite factionalism in postrevolutionary Iran, they have not analyzed the implications of the inter-elite conflict for the emergence and development of social protests against the Islamic Republic. While this study primarily utilizes political process and resource mobilization models, it acknowledges the importance of economic, ideological, and breakdown approaches for the interpretation of the emergence and development of popular mobilization in contemporary Iran. Drawing on data gathered from census figures, public policies, state and oppositional newspapers, and interviews with dissidents and state officials, this study shows that collective actions against the Islamic Republic emerged gradually due to institutional changes, limited electorate competition, social and educational expansion, and, more importantly, the intellectual transformation of a significant segment of the elites and their action-intended discourse. I demonstrate that the political opportunity structure is not a unitary national opportunity but rather varies by social groups, demands, and contexts. I make this argument by exploring the political environment for collective mobilization in contemporary Iran in four key contexts: 1. the period of consolidation, war, and repression (1979-1988, the Khomeini era); 2. the period of postwar reconstruction and economic liberalization (1989-1997, the tenure of President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani); 3. the era of reform and political opening (1997-2005, the tenure of President Seyyed Mohammad Khatami); and 4. the period of mobilization in the context of increasingly violent repression (2005-present, the tenure of President Mahmood Ahmadinejad). By examining social protests within these different contexts, I conclude that regimes that use force to restrict political rights after a long and sustained period of opening risk eliciting resistance from dissidents who have already gained organizational resources to challenge the state's violent closing.

This dissertation examines Coxey’s Army of 1894 and the subsequent impact the organizers and march had on American politics. A handful of monographs have examined this march on Washington D.C. but all of them have focused specifically on the march itself, largely examining the few weeks in 1894 when the march occurred. By extending the period study to include the long life and activism of Jacob Coxey what historians can see is that although the march was an expression of anger and concern over general inequality in American society, Coxey’s Army was also protest for specific demands. These two demands were specifically a program of public works and a desire for fiat currency for the United States. By examining the life Jacob Coxey we see that both of these demands grew out of longer issues in American social politics and reflect Coxey’s background in the greenback labor movement.<br><div><br></div><div>The question over currency— whether the economy should rely on a gold, silver, or fiat standard— has largely been untouched by historians, yet reflects one of the most interesting aspects of the march, namely that it was an instance in a broader movement to drastically change the U.S. state and establish a socialistic commonwealth, or commonweal, for American society. Coxey fit into this broader project by arguing specifically that the U.S. should maintain a market-based economy but do so through a kind of socialistic currency backed by the state. By organizing various marches throughout his life, Coxey attempted to achieve this goal by direct organizing of the masses and in so doing contributed to the long history of American social reform movement’s various efforts to reshape and redefine the concept of “the people.”<br></div><div><br></div><div>This dissertation makes four major arguments. First that the concept and phenomena of American Populism is a broad based, elastic movement with no essential political character. Attempts to define Populism as either reactionary or radical miss the broader issue that Populism could take on various political flavors depending on how it positioned itself in opposition to various actors in the state, economy, and civil society. Second, Coxey’s Army shows how the first march on Washington D.C. was part of a longer legacy of direct political action, and that although this march did make a contribution to the overall political debate of the time, it was not as a communicative act that the march was most significant. Instead Coxey’s Army was significant in the way it led to a reconceptualization of “the people” and therefore reimagined what legitimate democratic action entailed. Third, the concept of the commonweal, although largely taken for granted in previous historiographies, was part of a much deeper and intellectually rich fight between various activists and thinkers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At stake in how a movement or party conceptualized something like the commonweal was what type of social, economic, and political order should be fought for and advanced by organizations of working class people. In this regard the currency question, far from being simply a side issue, was in fact central to how activists envisioned the role of the market and state in a more equitable society. Finally, this dissertation looks at the understudied career of Coxey after the march, specifically his short tenure as mayor of Massillon, Ohio. His failure as mayor raises further questions for historians to think about the promise and limitations of American Populism as both a protest movement and political force.<br></div>

Does the Internet facilitate anti-regime dissent within authoritarian states? I argue that the Internet fosters dissent mobilization through three factors: distance, decentralization and interaction. First, the Internet fosters dissent mobilization by allowing protesters to communicate relatively cheaply and instantaneously over great distances. While other communication mediums also reduce distance costs, the second factor, decentralization, allows dissenters to use the Internet to evade state controls and reduces the state's ability to restrict information flows. Third, the Internet's Interactive nature allows users to both become consumers and producers of information. Interactivity also fosters trust between users that can evolve into offline action. However, the empirical record consists almost entirely of open sourcenews reporting and qualitative studies, and there are few clear theoretical links between the traditional dissent and repression literatures and recent Internet mobilization theories. My goal in this project is to place a generalizable theory of Internet-mediated dissent within traditional mobilization context and more recent communication, computer science and legal literatures. I frame my theory of Internet mediated dissent through three components. The first component is Internet access as a mobilizing structure, in which I posit that Internet access creates conditions for social mobilization that are difficult for regimes to counter. The second component is the effect of Internetcensorship on Internet-facilitated dissent. For the third theoretical component, I assess that despite the type of censorship, increased Internet use eventually overwhelms the regime's capacity to censor information. I test my theoretical components through a series of large N cross national time series negative binomial regressions spanning 1999-2010. In the first test, I find that increased Internet access increased the likelihood of protest in non-democratic states. Results of the second tests are mixed: technical censorship has no effect on protest, soft controls decreased incidence of protest, and combined technical and soft programs increase the likelihood of protest, albeit the substantive effect is slight. In the third test, I hypothesize that Internet use eventually crosses a user threshold after which censorship is no longer effective. The results of the third test suggest that censorship is not effective regardless of Internet access levels. However, the influence of Internet use on protest tapers off once a specific threshold is reached. The dissertation proceeds as follows: in Chapter 2, I present literature review that frames my research question within previous empirical work. Next, in Chapter 3 I propose and illustrate my theory of Internet-mediated dissent. In Chapter 4, I test whether or not incidents of anti-regime protest increase as Internet use increases inside non-democratic states. I build on these results in Chapter 5, in which I test whether technical filters, soft controls or a combination of methods decrease the likelihood of protest inside non-democratic states, followed by a test for whether increasing Internet use overwhelms censorship programs. Finally, in chapter 6 I summarize my findings, discuss data complications, offer ideas for future research, and discuss the implications of this project.

Begreppet Whistleblower (Visselblåsare) avser en person som internt eller externt uppmärksammar missförhållanden eller andra oegentligheter på sin arbetsplats och som i vissa fall löper risk att drabbas av negativa konsekvenser för detta. Vi vill belysa detta utifrån ett svenskt perspektiv, med inriktning på lärare inom privat- och offentlig sektor. Syftet med denna studie är att skapa en förståelse för hur svenska lärare upplever att de blir bemötta vid framförd kritik om missförhållanden på arbetsplatsen. Vi vill även få en inblick i lärares uppfattningar av vad som krävs för att de ska känna större trygghet i att framföra kritik gentemot sin arbetsgivare, samt hur de ställer sig till en svensk whistleblowing-lagstiftning. För att undersöka detta har vi använt oss av en kvalitativ metod, i form av intervjuer med både lärare och en regional ombudsman. Resultaten analyseras huvudsakligen utifrån Alvessons teori om organisationskultur, Hirschmans teori om sorti, protest och lojalitet, samt Goffmans teori om stigmatisering. Resultatet visar att lärare känner stor rädsla för att framföra kritik riktad mot arbetsplatsen då det ofta leder till repressalier i form av lägre lön, sämre arbetsförhållanden eller kyligt bemötande. Intervjupersonerna uppvisar en positiv inställning till en svensk whistleblowing-lagstiftning. Samtidigt ställer de sig skeptiska till att en lag skulle resultera i att fler lärare vågar ta steget att “blåsa i visslan”. Andra faktorer, såsom organisationskultur och normer upplevs väga tyngre när det gäller lärares benägenhet att framföra kritik på arbetsplatsen.