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

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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.