Life Goes on (Even as We Protest): Online Protest Movements in South Africa and Zimbabwe

这项研究调查了在南非和津巴布韦针对经济不平等，社会不公正和政治压迫的民众骚乱增加的背景下的在线抗议活动。它认识到，尽管种族隔离制度正式结束，影响到两国的种族隔离制度，以及宪政民主的引入，但这两个国家的社会正义运动正在扩散。一个新的研究框架，提出不平等，伤害和不公正可以与他们假定的对立面，如民主和发展并行不悖。这种肩并肩的关系，被称为“睦邻友好”，表现在社会运动和抗议活动如何与他们寻求结束的不公正一起蓬勃发展。这项研究通过一个关键的种族隔离研究概念“压迫率”（ROp）来解释这一矛盾，该概念认为种族隔离将被压迫者的世界分割成碎片，这是抗议活动倾向于遵循的模式，因此存在不同的压迫表现形式。因此，本研究为社会运动理论的建构提供了一个创新的理论框架和一个来自全球南方的有基础的实证研究。来自南非和津巴布韦的五个抗议标签将被研究，以展示和解释破坏在线抗议世界的裂缝，以及这对社会运动意味着什么。该研究将探索和识别抗议标签的形式，关系，意义，轨迹和影响，唤起和体现为在一个破碎的在线抗议宇宙中存在的片段。随后将对南非、津巴布韦和英国的活动人士进行采访，同时探索南北国际的相似之处，以阐明在线抗议者的生活经历。这将揭示抗议和社会运动的矛盾、悖论和复杂性。

This research investigates online protests in the context of increased popular unrest against economic inequality, social injustice and political repression in South Africa and Zimbabwe. It recognises the proliferation of social movements for social justice in the two countries, despite the official end of apartheid, a system of segregation on ground of race which affected both countries, and the introduction of constitutional democracies. Apartheid Studies (AS), a new framework which proposes that inequality, harm, and injustice can exist side by side with their putative opposites such as democracy and development without conflict is employed. This side by sidedness, referred to as 'good neighbourliness', finds expression in how social movements and protests thrive alongside the injustices they seek to end. The research explains this contradiction through a key Apartheid Studies concept, 'Rate of Oppression (ROp)', which posits that apartheid breaks the world of the oppressed into fragments, a pattern which protests tend to follow, such that there are differentiated manifestations of oppression. The research therefore contributes an innovative and novel theoretical framework, and a grounded empirical study from the global South to the advancement of social movement theory building. Five protest hashtags from South Africa and Zimbabwe will be studied to demonstrate and explain the fractures that characterise the online protest universe and what this means for social movements. The research will explore and identify the forms, relations, meanings, trajectories, and effects protest hashtags take, evoke, and embody as fragments subsisting in a fractured online protest universe. Interviews with activists in South Africa, Zimbabwe and the UK will follow, while exploring south-north international parallels, to illuminate the lived experiences of online protestors. This will shed light on the contradictions, paradoxes and complexities of protests and social movements.