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

这项研究调查了南非和津巴布韦针对经济不平等、社会不公正和政治镇压的民众骚乱加剧的背景下的在线抗议活动。它承认，尽管种族隔离制度正式结束，种族隔离制度对两国都产生了影响，并引入了宪政民主制度，但两国社会正义运动激增。种族隔离研究(AS)是一种新的框架，它提出不平等、伤害和不公正可以与它们假定的对立面共存，例如民主和没有冲突的发展。这种并肩而立的关系，被称为“睦邻关系”，体现在社会运动和抗议活动在寻求结束不公正的同时蓬勃发展。这项研究通过种族隔离研究的一个关键概念“压迫比率(ROP)”解释了这一矛盾，该概念假设种族隔离将被压迫者的世界分解为碎片，抗议活动往往遵循这种模式，因此存在不同的压迫表现。因此，本研究提供了一个创新和新颖的理论框架，并为从全球南方到推进社会运动理论建设提供了一个扎根的实证研究。来自南非和津巴布韦的五个抗议标签将被研究，以展示和解释在线抗议世界的特征以及这对社会运动意味着什么。这项研究将探索和识别抗议标签作为碎片存在于支离破碎的在线抗议世界中的形式、关系、含义、轨迹和影响。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真实经历。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.