Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Historical Analysis of Mexican Popular Contention in the Age of Globalization

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The objective of this doctoral dissertation research is to examine how economic and political liberalization have transformed the principal actors, targets, goals, and forms of popular protests in Mexico, and what conditions have made some protests become transnational, others national, and others remain local. We hypothesize that when actors (1) are embedded in sustained networks of activists and organizations beyond their locality, (2) generate goals that are interpretable in multiple ways, and (3) innovate a new form of action, then popular protests are able to exploit a new global arena of politics opened by the processes of globalization and, thus, make an effective appeal to multiple audiences beyond their national territory. The project examines this argument through systematic historical analysis of protest events in Mexico from 1960 to the present. Protest events reported in Reuters, Excelsior, Uno mas Uno, La Jornada, El Imparcial, and El Imparcial de Oaxaca will be gathered and coded by using a linguistic approach, and social network analysis will be applied to the coded data. This research permits us to consider new relations among global market, state, and citizens.