The People, Power, Politics podcast

00:00:01 Intro Jingle

Welcome to the People Power Politics Podcast, brought to you by CEDAR, the Center for Elections, Democracy, Accountability, and Representation at the University of Birmingham.

00:00:14 Nic Cheeseman

So welcome everyone to another episode of the People Power Politics Podcast, and I'm particularly pleased today because we welcome Zoe Marks, who's going to talk to us about her fantastic new article in the Journal of Democracy, ‘African popular protest and political change’, and this is part of a new collaboration between the People Power Politics Podcast and the Journal of Democracy that hopefully will bring you some of the best insights from the journal in a more conversational form over the next few months. Now Zoe Marks is the lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Oppenheimer faculty director at the Center for African Studies. She's also one of the co-authors of a forthcoming book, ‘Bread and Roses: Women on the front lines of revolution’, and maybe we'll touch little bit on that, Zoe, at the end of today's conversation.

00:00:57 Nic Cheeseman

But the article that we're here to start talking about actually is in many ways, I think one of the biggest challenges to preconceived ideas about African politics that I've read for the last couple of years. And that's one of the real reasons we wanted to bring you on. It challenges ideas about the nature of protest in Africa in terms of the composition of the protesters, in terms of the successfulness in terms of the frequency of those protests, and it also, in a way gives us an alternative history, I think, of African politics over the last 60-70 years. This is, of course, a particularly topical piece now, because we have the protests in Kenya and echoes and ripples of those protests in countries like Uganda and Nigeria. But you obviously conceived of this well before the recent series of protests, so I think it would be great to start with why you thought this was such an important issue and why you wanted to challenge some of those received wisdoms.

00:01:50 Zoe Marks

Thanks, Nic. It's great to see you. It's great to be here. I'm really excited to talk with you about this today. The honest answer is this emerged from teaching my students. I teach a course on Africa and global politics at the Kennedy School. I've taught it for many years and I've always had a lecture on social movements in Africa, but I couldn't find good trend data and so I ran the numbers the first year and there was a a short piece that I ended up writing with a couple of co-authors that was like, wow, there's all of these protest movements, they seem to be successful. As my research has evolved to kind of try to unpack why movements succeed, I went back to the data and tried to just sort of interrogate like, how are we doing in Africa? What are what are the sort of regional dynamics there when it comes to the key ingredients for success, and I found that African protest movements, nonviolent mass movements, are more successful than in most other regions of the world.

00:02:44 Zoe Marks

They have some of the highest levels of youth participation, which won't surprise any of the listeners who are familiar with African demographic trends and politics. But also really large numbers of female participation. And so I was, as enthusiastic as I am about nonviolent protest democracy and African politics, I was stunned to find out that Africa was topping the league tables because it just wasn't a story that was being told. The success of the movements I felt was missing from our sort of common understanding of of how change is happening in the region.

00:03:16 Nic Cheeseman

Absolutely. Let me just read for our readers a couple of the sentences from the book that really stood out to me that I think will communicate some of you know that that perhaps surprise that you had and surprise that I had reading some of this. So: ‘Africa stands out globally as the region with the largest number of nonviolent campaigns, both in the 1990s and since 2010’ - interesting. ‘Not only are African social movements among the most gender inclusive in the world, they're also particularly youthful,’ and I think as you said, most people would assume the youthful part of that, but not the gender inclusive, which doesn't fit with the picture we often have of the struggles women face within African politics to gain representation and so on. You also have, I think, really interesting, you know findings in here about what makes protest movements successful, nonviolent movements are more successful when they are larger and more demographically representative of the population.

00:04:06 Nic Cheeseman

So a lot of really important findings here. Maybe we could start with that, you know, question about having explained that trend in the paper, what drives the fact that there were so many nonviolent protest movements. And then may be a sort of two parter, why do you think actually African protest movements turn out to be much more inclusive of women than we might have expected?

00:04:27 Zoe Marks

Yeah, great question. So I'm going to, I'm going to add a second part 2 to the first question, which is not only why there's so many, but why don't we know because I think those two questions are related. One reason why I think there are so many protest movements and the sort of nonviolent campaigns is, and I I walk through this in the in the paper is the legacy of nonviolent organizing, is actually quite rich. And it's not just rich in the sort of conventional places like post-apartheid South Africa, where there was a almost multi generational campaign against apartheid governance. But there were mass nonviolent movements throughout the colonial era. There are these campaigns that have been well documented in Nigeria, because the women were organizing across the region and they were organizing across ethnic groups across linguistic divides, and that was part of kind of how colonialism fell was actually a grassroots campaign, not just the sort of elite politics of Pan-Africanism that gathered the headlines.

00:05:24 Zoe Marks

And I think you know I I feel this is a history that's very well documented in African Studies and African history, but it's not necessarily something that we think of as a contemporary phenomenon. And it's this sort of deep embeddedness in organizing in this popular politics that was the engine for independence that has also been the engine for democracy, and it continues to be the sort of driver of accountability from elites that themselves are echoing some of the colonial governance structures that concentrated elite power in the capitals, that disempowered sort of popular voice.

00:05:59 Zoe Marks

And so we still see these tensions and dynamics and it's part of the broader political system, not just the, you know, kind of strength of civil society existing in a vacuum. The reason I think we don't know this necessarily, is also important though, because I think where I was most surprised by the data and we can talk about the data in a bit, but where I was most surprised by the data was the story of the 1990s, which, as we know from the Journal of Democracy, some of the most foundational essays at that time were published there from colleagues like Rakner and van de Walle, talking about what the kind of grassroots origins of democracy in the 90s were. And yet most of my research has been in conflict studies and civil war and the civil war and conflict narrative so overtook the democracy narrative of the 90s that I and I think a lot of other observers of African politics kind of missed how important and persistent nonviolence was as an engine for change, even throughout the post Cold War era that this wasn't a sort of a time where ethnic conflict or resource wars overtook the real nature of political competition on the ground. The real nature of political competition continues to be a struggle between the people and the elites.

00:07:09 Nic Cheeseman

And one of the things you say in the paper which which brings this out really nicely, is that despite the international attention to armed conflict and nonviolent movements have consistently been more successful than armed rebellions at achieving regime change, and I think you're arguing in the paper delivering a more stable kind of regime that follows, although that's far from inevitable. We can discuss that in a minute. What is it about the nonviolent movements that enables them to be more effective?

00:07:32 Zoe Marks

The most important thing is that when you're not engaging in lethal violence exponentially more people participate and so the the size of the campaigns makes them on face value seem more legitimate. It makes them more inclusive. And it also can, if they're persistent and they're durable and resilient to police and military repression, they become a greater threat to the state because they begin targeting the moral compass, but also sometimes the the kind of material interests of the supporters who uphold the regime, whether that's the military, whether it's financiers and business people, customary elites, religious leaders, as you have a broader and broader coalition throughout the country, rural and urban, then those popular protest movements that are nonviolent and are going to be able to persuade people for longer. And they don't require external support, they're not going to run out of ammunition, the ammunition is just showing up in the streets or staying home from work and boycotting goods and services.

00:08:33 Nic Cheeseman

I agree, and I think there's an important thing sort of follow on from that in terms of what happens during transitions, right, because there's two things follow from that in a sense. I mean, one is you've got more people on the streets, so you potentially can mobilize more people, not always, but potentially if the transition goes sideways, which is a sort of way of trying to prevent the transition being subverted. But also I think one of the things you're doing by following the rules in terms of non violence is you're implicitly demanding in a sense that the rule of law is followed by not breaking it yourselves. And that seems to me to be a kind of strategy that reinforces and strengthens existing institutions.

00:09:12 Nic Cheeseman

And so one of the things I've argued in some recent work is you know that the the nature of the transition has a path dependency run on what comes next. If you take power through a coup, as we know from all sorts of literature, you are making the country more likely to have a coup in future. There's more susceptibility to that pathway. If we see actually a process of protest that brings down the government in a rule following way, I think we have more chance of those rules and those institutions being strengthened and followed in future. So I think there's multiple sort of advantages to that nonviolent pathway. But as you explain really well in the paper and I think this is one of the best discussions in the paper, a lot of the time, those nonviolent movements are ultimately taken over. People who are listening might be thinking about Sudan, where of course we had a people's revolution that was essentially subverted by the military. There are obviously other cases. What are the main problems for nonviolent movements, not when they take power, but when they dislodge governments in terms of preventing the kind of goals of their movement being subverted, and actually another form of authoritarianism taking over?

00:10:19 Zoe Marks

Yeah, I think there are a few key considerations. One, and this is one that I talk about a lot because I think it's pretty widely overlooked is there is no international or even regional playbook for what should happen when a government is forced from power through a popular protest movement. So when we have an armed conflict, the international community comes in, there's a coalition between the United Nations and the African Union, or regional bodies, and they say we're going to force a sort of pacted transition, we're going to have these, like, free and fair elections. It's going to be well observed. You're going to protect human rights, and we're going to infuse money into this broken economy. When there's a nonviolent movement, nothing like that happens. And so the the respect for sovereignty kind of creates a power vacuum where the leader has stepped down and all that's left is the elite apparatus that used to support an authoritarian regime. And so what ends up happening is either a direct competitor or more often than not, a kind of contemporary of the dictator steps into that vacuum.

00:11:18 Zoe Marks

So this is a sort of two-part problem. One is that usually a revolution can decapitate the state, but it's not going to transform the system unless it can really, really sort of strengthen institutions that it has also simultaneously exposed as previously corrupted, and that requires institutional reform that goes beyond the timeline of of a transition usually and to kind of create a coalition of of external leverage because the domestic leverage has been historically weakened. And so I think that that that dynamic is rarely in place, but not never in place. And where we see this, the success cases happening is where there's a strong enough civil society apparatus or opposition movement, even if it's been in the shadows, that it can step into power with elites that have some legitimacy from the campaign.

00:12:07 Zoe Marks

And and I think this is like the the kind of last piece, I'll I'll say on this question, we can dig into it deeper, is the fact that so many movements today, especially youthful movements, prefer to be leaderless, that they kind of sacrifice the space that would be occupied in a transitional government. They sacrifice the kind of leader of a alternative vision, a spokesperson even, because they say that we're, we're just the people, we're not these elites that are engaging in politics. So the the comparison I like to make is Senegal and Burkina Faso, where we had these two youthful movements, lots of representation amongst hip hop artists. We had participation even from the formal civil society and labour movements that had historically been activated. But in Senegal, it organized and cohered into party politics and in Burkina Faso it did not. And so what ended up happening was, as you mentioned, the sort of path dependency of previous transitions played out in Burkina Faso, where last kambora was ultimately replaced by a military ruler who was himself overthrown by another military ruler, and now in Senegal, we have one of the youngest presidents on the continent.

00:13:13 Nic Cheeseman

That leads to two thoughts. I mean, one that we need to maybe do a follow up conversation on what happens when when democratic opposition leaders take power and how often they actually turn out to disappoint us but also I think that's a really interesting point for people who have been thinking about the protests in Kenya because one of the key things that, you know the protesters in Kenya have been emphasising is, you know, we're not like the older people, we're not ethnic. We're not doing this in the way it was done in the past. It's not structured, it's not led by clear opposition leaders. And we're not presenting ourselves as alternative politicians and as you say that's great to have those principles and in a sense it keeps the movement more pure and therefore it enables it to bring in more support. But the risk is that you then find it hard to have a seat at the table. And of course, what we've seen recently in Kenya, is President Ruto has announced a broad based government which is effectively bringing back old corrupt figures connected to Raila Odinga and others and not actually creating a seat at the table for the young people who are forced to change.

00:14:16 Nic Cheeseman

And I think that kind of tension of do you get involved or do you stay out and do you sacrifice a seat at the table and create a vacuum that others can feel is a really good point that people are looking at current protest movements can learn from your article. The other thought I had, you know, taking off from what you were just saying, where you were talking a bit about the role of international actors in all of this is whether international actors played a role in the balance between violence and non violence in a different way. I mean, we know, for example, that one of the things that sustained violent conflict in parts of Africa, like the Horn, was the role of countries like the United States and the Soviet Union and fighting proxy wars and arming countries, that hasn't been a major feature perhaps since the end of the 1980s, beginning of the 1990s, I wondered whether you thought the kind of role of international actors, the availability of weapons and other factors also shapes what's happening? I should say for listeners also know the article isn't a very long one. You haven't been able to go into all of this in the article, but it struck me that some of those international factors might also be shaping what's feasible and hence what protest movements end up doing.

00:15:18 Zoe Marks

I think that's true to an extent, but I do think that people broadly prefer nonviolence when they believe it's possible to achieve their goals and there there is some role modeling. It's it's far from like a contagion effect, which is how some people are talking about Nigeria and Uganda after Kenya's protests earlier this summer. But it's more role modeling. That ohh well they're actually getting concessions. The government seemed to be listening, and that means that governments in, you know, my region or my home country may listen to us as well. So I think there's a success effect. I wouldn't say that proxy dynamics aren't still at play just because of what's happening in Sudan. I think that that's such an important case where we saw, totally unexpected success in the overthrow of Bashir and a very predictable emergence of competing military and paramilitary powers that are now being sort of fueled and sustained by regional actors in the Middle East. And so there are some kind of new proxy dynamics that I think do continue to make armed conflict a viable alternative.

00:16:20 Zoe Marks

I think we need to continue to watch and better understand the role of Russia or the Wagner Group in making coups a viable alternative, that actually military juntas need an outside kind of creditor, if you will, to support them, to validate them to legitimate them. And then they can say no to all of their neighbors, right? So one of the things that's happened in the Sahel is that you've had these sort of popular coups where there's youthful protests, lots of dissent, and then the military, it turns out, is more upset than anyone. And they're the ones that come in and are kind of the first mover in toppling the government. They're not bowing to ECOWAS because they, they feel they have more powerful friends on the outside and so I think there's some sort of shadow proxy dynamics that keep violent transitions still a very kind of live wire in the region and make it all the more impressive when nonviolent movements are ascendant and predominant.

00:17:13 Nic Cheeseman

I think, also a good point. I think that's completely true. I guess it's all, I think two things are perhaps true though. One, you're completely right. We need to recognize the extent to which those ties and those drivers are still there, but perhaps two, perhaps they're slightly less common than they were and perhaps also they're slightly less likely to deliver actual hardware and weapons to opposition movements, as opposed to to people in the government who can provide access to resources. And perhaps that's a kind of a slight difference as well. But that's that's a very good point. Now one of the things that you mentioned earlier is that of course, all of these arguments are based on data. The the paper has great graphs and figures showing trends over time for lots of different things. And those of us who try and work in these areas and don't have that data and know how hard it is to get some of that data are particularly impressed by that. And the first thing that struck me is ohh, where does this data come from? And of course the second thing, because I'm also, you know, a cynical political scientist is, well, how good is the quality of that data? So tell us a little bit about how you put the data together and and what you think it might also be able to tell us beyond this paper in your broader research agenda.

00:18:23 Zoe Marks

Yeah, great question. I use two different data sources, one that I'm responsible for and one that I'm not responsible for in the in the paper. So the first, the one that I'm not responsible for is the ACLED data on conflict location event data and that is the protest counts. And we actually don't have a very long band of that data. So it shows some really striking trends that the number of protest events in Africa has increased sixfold in the past two decades, this is it's interesting. It's exciting. It's surprising. I always worry when we see event data increasing, that we're actually just picking up better reporting of event data because of the spread of mobile devices, the spread of internet, the kind of expansion of the media sphere in Africa in most places.

00:19:10 Zoe Marks

But I think it's good enough data to know that it's not, I don't think it's an order of magnitude of of incorrect. So that's the event data that says protest numbers are growing, but the data that I'm really relying on to draw my conclusions is the women in resistance data set that I've been building with Erica Chenoweth. It draws on the NAVCO data, Nonviolent and Violent Conflict Onset data is what that stands for, but those are also publicly available, so I should say that people can download the ACLED data as long as they register, the women in resistance data or the wire dataset is available in the Harvard dataverse. We've only published it through 2014 and the one I'm using is through 2020, so it's more contemporary, but it finds the same trends and so you can kind of probe it with the older data and that data looks at campaigns to overthrow governments, so these are the what are called maximalist campaigns, or to secede. And so it's like the highest level of demand that could come from the people to the regime.

00:20:11 Zoe Marks

And we see it as a hard test for understanding the the plausibility of a movement’s success, and what I'm measuring as success here is whether or not the regime is actually toppled. And so again, this is another place where it's not so much that the data quality is is dicey. We're using historical data to look at campaigns over time, anywhere from a week to decades, the Polisario Front continues to wage a nonviolent campaign with the violent wing, and we're observing whether or not the movement is inclusive of people of both genders, if it's youthful, whether it has violence within it, whether it is experiencing violent repression outside of it, all of this data is available online and what's really important to me about this piece is actually just telling the story of the data and actually describing these historical trends because it hasn't been written before.

00:21:02 Nic Cheeseman

Absolutely. We should say for people listening who are interested, you can get the ACLED data at acleddata.com. So go do play around with it for yourselves. It's a really great resource and I'm sure people will be checking out all of those datasets after this. Now, one of the questions I had was, you know exactly how we code and we separate, you know, the difference between kind of movements that are led by the elites, movements that are led by the military movements that are led by civil society. So give you just one example. The paper mentions very briefly the case of Zimbabwe and my sense is that what what really happens in Zimbabwe Is we have mass popular resistance, but essentially that fails because actually what we see is high levels of repression, a lot of the movements like This Flag essentially you know dwindle after having quite initial success. And then what we have is actually a military coup that's done like a lot of the military coups we've seen in West Africa, predominantly actually to protect military interests because certain military figures thought they would be arrested or thought that they would be removed from their positions. And the military then actually facilitates a mass popular protest against Mugabe after moving against him to legitimate what it wanted to do, so in this case to me it's more the case that the military kind of lulls people into popular support.

00:22:20 Nic Cheeseman

And then this gets interpreted as a kind of popular movement that led to a transition. And I have similar suspicions about some of the West African cases where I think if we look and do a sort of process trace of what happens, you can see, you know, certain leaders were about to be removed or have corruption accusations against them and then launched the coup and then retrospectively seemed to be able to mobilise mass support in the capital city and you know all of a sudden people find Russian flags from nowhere. And so one of the sort of questions I I wanted to raise is I fully take on board your argument and I think the trends are really fascinating. Is there a bit of a risk though that in some cases the causality is the other way around and actually it's the military or senior factions within the regime that are kind of the puppet masters of the public protest rather than simply responding to an organic protest movement in the in the country?

00:23:10 Zoe Marks

I'm so glad that you brought this up. This is really why I wrote the paper as opposed to just giving lectures about the data in my class is I wanted to try to interrogate this sort of sinking suspicion I had that actually, it's all about the military that the military is sort of the beginning and the end of the story. And, you know, I went through all the cases. I tried to kind of like gnaw on this because this isn't and the data can't resolve this question for us. The fact is that military power and military interests predate the onset of the protests. Most of the protests are also not targeting the military, right. In many African countries, the military, when it steps into power, is seen as a sort of heroic alternative, even if the military is not particularly trusted in society. And in most societies it's more trusted than the government. So there's a a dynamic here at play, which is that people don't seem as suspicious of the military as perhaps they should be, given that it's been backing a corrupt regime that they're trying to overthrow. And then this is the rub is that for a mass movement, a mass nonviolent movement to succeed the military has to capitulate. They have to defect from the incumbent regime. Otherwise it's almost impossible for a nonviolent campaign to overthrow a loyal military that's as powerful as as African militaries have been made to be in almost all states.

00:24:30 Zoe Marks

And so success hinges not just in Africa, but globally to some extent on military defections, or at least the military laying down its arms and saying we're not going to use live ammunition. We're not going to break up protests. We're not going to do mass arrests. And so because of this, we see this dynamic where the people and the military kind of have to be in a in a dance together in order for the movement to succeed. And then your question is, well, was it the military all along that's kind of calling the shots or kind of fomenting a legitimating protest that's inauthentic or hollow? And I think in most cases, the military is emboldened to turn against the leader that they've otherwise depended on for their success, for their wealth, for their security, for their stability, because they see that the popular opinion has turned.

00:25:15 Zoe Marks

And so without popular opinion, I would say those military coups wouldn't have taken place or they wouldn't have succeeded because other military elites who are equally competitive for power, equally protective of their interests wouldn't allow what would in that case be an attempted putsch or mutiny to succeed in taking power of the country as a whole, and so I agree that it's the military is acting often in its own interests. But the military is also of the people, right. And so I think that this dichotomy between the military and the people in countries where the military is fairly bloated even if it's kind of pacted with an unrepresentative ethnic group in society or something like that. It's still responding to popular sentiment and then using that as its launchpad, not the other way around. I don't I don't think militaries can animate protests on the scale that we've seen in most countries, and some of the exceptions are places like Niger where I do think that the protest kind of followed the coup and people are very happy that it had happened, but it wasn't like there was a massive campaign running for years in advance that inspired the Nigerian military to take power.

00:26:24 Nic Cheeseman

No, absolutely. But I I wonder also whether this is something we may see in the future, the military in other countries that may be considering coup, will have seen what happened in West Africa, they will have seen what happened in Zimbabwe. They now have a playbook potentially to try and follow this option. Right. And and I agree with you everything you just said, but I wonder if all of a sudden much like you were talking earlier about the Kenyan protest giving a role model effect, whether there's a little bit of that that we want to watch out for and I think you know, for example, in the case of Zimbabwe, you know, there was quite a lot of creativity of what the military tried to do. They, you know, kept Mugabe under house arrest, allowed him to go out and actually perform some of his functions, while trying to get him to do a deal to basically leave power at the barrel of the gun, while organising protests in which they put on buses and printed ‘Mugabe must go’ banners and handed them out to people.

00:27:11 Nic Cheeseman

Now as you say this had come after years and years and years of struggle. This has come after the MDC has risen against Mugabe's own PF and actually won an election that they were denied by electoral fraud. It’s come after, you know, big trade union mobilisation to remove Mugabe. So it's not to say in any way that all of that protest and mobilisation was instigated by the military. Of course it wasn't. It was bottom up. But at the last minute, the military was quite good at recognizing that, as you say and co-opting it and turning it into something that then legitimated the coup against Mugabe. And of course, the new Mnangagwa dispensation, which, as we now see, is just as repressive as what it replaced.

00:27:50 Nic Cheeseman

Final thing I wanted to ask you a little bit about and and this perhaps would lead us a little bit to your next book, ‘Bread and Roses’. If so, if you want to tell us anything about that that would be great, but one of the things that you're arguing here is not just that, you know, it's it's good to have women in protest movements because we want inclusive protest movements, but actually those protest movements may have certain advantages over other ones and that's kind of I think a nice thing to end on because it brings in inclusivity, but it's also about inclusivity being good, you know, not just as it were kind of in principle, but actually to succeed. So tell us a little bit more about that and I'm sure the readers would love to know what you're looking forward to doing with ‘Bread and Roses: Women on the front lines of revolution’.

00:28:30 Zoe Marks

So the the argument that I make in the in the article that we've been talking about today is sort of a potted version of this broader book project where we have global data that shows repeatedly regardless of region, that movements with moderate to extensive levels of women's frontline participation, so this is 25 to 50% of the participants out in the streets or participating in strikes are women and girls, those movements are much more likely to succeed by an order of magnitude and, and in fact it's it's a kind of complicated story to tell because so many movements do have women participants, but movements that are more male dominated are much less effective. They're much less successful. And there are a couple of reasons for this and they are consistent with why nonviolent mass campaigns succeed generally, but it's actually driven in part by their inclusivity.

00:29:20 Zoe Marks

So one is that movements with female participants are like 4 times larger than male dominated movements. So it's not just that they doubled the size of the participating population, but they actually quadruple it by orders of magnitude because of the social network effect, because it indicates that there might be families participating, friend groups that it is expansive and multiplicative. The second piece is that female participation on the front lines tends to make movements more disciplined, so they're more likely to maintain nonviolence, which again kind of corresponds with political legitimacy, the likelihood of movement durability and the extensiveness of popular participation from across the citizenry.

00:29:59 Zoe Marks

And then the third argument is that we actually see there's more tactical innovation from inclusive movements, and so this one, it's a little bit harder to get the data. We rely a lot on case studies here, but when women are participating in mass campaigns on the front lines, they're more likely to facilitate things like some of the sit-ins that we've seen in Sudan. They're more likely to correlate with alternative modes of protest. So street protest alone is rarely enough to really change the political calculus of elites across the spectrum. We see boycotts as more effective, sit-ins, strikes, all of these things make movements more successful in the long run. And then finally, a lot of the campaigns in Africa have seen really violent repression from the government. And when women are participating at the front lines, that repression is seen is much more likely to be seen as overreach, and so there's a backlash effect from the rest of the society that has maybe been sitting on the sidelines, maybe is kind of sympathetic to the incumbent regime.

00:30:56 Zoe Marks

If you start arresting or shooting at mothers, grandmothers, children, then it it kind of it shows that the emperor has no clothes. And so part of that is also a gendered story, and it's particularly important that women are there because we have, Erica Chenoweth, my co-author on ‘Bread and Roses’ and I have done some research on youth and we see that youth protest movements are likely to receive violent backlash from the government, even if they're particularly nonviolent, even if they're totally disciplined and there's no observed violence from the protesters. And so, you know, having female participants, it really changes the tenor of the legitimacy. And without that, movements are much less likely to succeed.

00:31:35 Nic Cheeseman

Great. I think that's a really good note on which to end. So just to remind everyone, this was Zoe Marks talking about her great article ‘African popular protest and political change’. And Zoe, thanks for coming and we look forward to having you back to discuss ‘Bread and Roses’ when it's published.

00:31:50 Zoe Marks

Thank you so much Nic.

00:31:51 Outro Jingle

Thank you for listening to the People Power Politics Podcast brought to you by CEDAR, the Center for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham. To learn more about our centre and the exciting work that we do on these issues around the world, please follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham and visit our website using the link in the podcast description.