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The recent evolution of environmental protest in Spain is considered against the background of the consolidation of the environmental movement and the institutionalization of an environmental policy domain. The chapter analyses environmental protest events reported in El País between 1988 and 1997. The first section introduces the protest event data, briefly outlines the characteristics of the source and the problems of selection bias confronted by media event analysis, and comments on the evolution over time of the level of protest and volume of participants. The second section deals with the issues that have proved most conflictual during these 10 years, while the third focuses on the main features of the political repertoire of protesters and the scenarios of conflicts. In the final section, the actors are introduced into the analysis, and special attention is paid to the main characteristics of the organizational network of protests, and the features of the leading environmental movement organizations.

Analysis of 579 environmental protest events in Greece, reported in Eleftherotypia during 1988–97, showed an uneven decline of protest during the decade, an overrepresentation of urban environmental claims, and the prominence of nature conservation, pollution, urban, and industrial claims made by both formal and informal environmental groups. Claims involving the health effects of environmental degradation declined, due to a steeper reduction in the reported incidence of grassroots environmental activism. In general, there was limited variation in the tactics used, with conventional protest predominating, followed by confrontation and demonstrations, and rarely by violence. Community activists tended to opt more often for confrontational or violent actions than did formal NGOs. The observed patterns are influenced by the changing political and economic opportunity structure associated with economic liberalization, the pattern of newspaper coverage, and the organization of social space.

This chapter examines foothills forró as a form of environmental protest, voiced through the strategic use of nostalgia, through dancing bodies and occupied spaces, and through explicit requests aimed at the government and the Brazilian populace alike. Much scholarship on foothills forró understands the genre as either a kitschy regional caricature or as an authentic channel from the city to the backlands. Instead, this chapter considers it a deliberate effort to generate sympathy and aid for northeasterners, for whom it also offered comfort and a musical space-time of their own.

The chapter engages with the notion of ‘political refrain’, adapted from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to offer some reflections on the strengths and limitations of protest camps in the action repertoire available to social movements. In the present study, ‘camping’ was a recurring thematic for British environmental protest, especially in the mobilisations of the Camp for Climate Action. Camps played more than a simple organisational role and signified a desire to prefigure alternative social and ecological configurations. The camp-form, however, took on a logic of its own, locking the protest movement into repertoire dependency, which signified the problematic tension between organisational continuity and tactical innovation. Unable to resolve this tension, and with British climate activism so fundamentally tied to the imaginary of the protest camp, the emergence of a new political praxis was prevented.

This chapter traces the evolution of Japan’s cabinet system in the first years of the “1955 System,” during which time a seniority system for cabinet ministers became established. Because Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmakers monopolized ministerial portfolios, appointment to a cabinet post became simply another wrung on the perpetually ruling party’s internal promotional ladder. And yet because the LDP was, in essence, a “federation of factions” united for purposes of campaign and legislative strategy, rather than a unified national party, Machiavellian machinations played a role in deciding the party’s president, who doubled as prime minister. Yet, under the surface, differences in style and outlook pitted rival camps of “ex-bureaucrats” and “career politicians,” and the need to maintain balance among intraparty factions dictated frequent cabinet changes, and often, the appointment of ministers with dubious qualifications. At the same time, the autonomy of cabinets in executive affairs was called into question by the actions of an activist government bureaucracy and a hegemonic party that preapproved all major policy departures. Meanwhile, prime ministers and cabinets were forced to respond to challenges produced by high-speed economic growth and dissatisfaction with institutional arrangements put in place during the American-led occupation.

This chapter examines the dynamics of Turkey’s policies of urban development. It shows that within the changing urban landscape there are politics not limited to those of ownership of public spaces and environmental concerns, but also a political-patrimonial relationship between the AKP, big businesses and the residents of poorer neighborhoods which stand to gain much from Turkey’s construction boom, despite its discontents. In order to understand this, the nature of the gecekondu (squatter) settlements must be understood and explained and how developing areas such as Gezi Park and planning “mega projects” became a political tool.