Articulating Dissent

Book excerpt: Articulating Dissent analyses the new communicative strategies of coalition protest movements and how these impact on a mainstream media unaccustomed to fractured articulations of dissent. Pollyanna Ruiz shows how coalition protest movements against austerity, war and globalisation build upon the communicative strategies of older single issue campaigns such as the anti-criminal justice bill protests and the women's peace movement. She argues that such protest groups are dismissed in the mainstream for not articulating a 'unified position' and explores the way in which contemporary protesters stemming from different traditions maintain solidarity. Articulating Dissent investigates the ways in which this diversity, so inherent in coalition protest, effects the movement of ideas from the political margins to the mainstream. In doing so this book offers an insightful and original analysis of the protest coalition as a developing political form.