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

本研究调查了在南非和津巴布韦，针对经济不平等、社会不公和政治压迫的民众骚乱日益加剧的背景下，网络抗议活动。它承认，尽管种族隔离制度（一种影响两国的基于种族的隔离制度）已经正式结束，并引入了宪政民主，但争取社会正义的社会运动在这两个国家仍在扩散。种族隔离研究（AS）是一个新的框架，它提出不平等、伤害和不公正可以与民主和发展等假定的对立面并存，而不存在冲突。这种并行不悖的关系被称为“睦邻友好”，体现在社会运动和抗议活动如何与他们寻求结束的不公正并存。该研究通过种族隔离研究的一个关键概念“压迫率（Rate of repression, 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裂成碎片，这是抗议活动往往遵循的模式，因此压迫有不同的表现形式。因此，本研究为社会运动理论建设提供了一个创新的理论框架，并为全球南方国家的社会运动理论建设提供了有根据的实证研究。来自南非和津巴布韦的五个抗议标签将被研究，以展示和解释网络抗议世界的特征，以及这对社会运动的意义。该研究将探索和确定抗议标签的形式、关系、意义、轨迹和影响，并将其作为碎片存在于一个破碎的在线抗议世界中。随后将采访南非、津巴布韦和英国的活动人士，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.