Professor Clare Saunders, University of Exeter.
The project was a wide-ranging and large-scale collaboration between over 30 researchers in nine countries. The project's website has a page featuring those principally engaged in the work.
A detailed account of this research is available on the project's website.
The project was assisted by the European Science Foundation / Science Europe.
Caught in the act of protest: contextualising contestation
Caught in the Act of Protest
This project's principal outcome was the creation of an international, inter-university network of research teams interested in examining the dynamics of collective action and protest.
Researchers in seven European countries studied protests to investigate how contextual variation - such as the nation or specific issue involved, or the techniques to mobilise employed - influences who actually participates in demonstrations.
The project generated valuable new insights because it was based on systematic comparison: standardised research design and measures, a common theoretical framework and by building a dataset to share for analyses by individual teams.
The project has helped societal actors understand and deal with protest’s changing dynamics; it did this by organising workshops and publishing articles to disseminate its results, as well as by archiving and making the data available to the wider scientific community.
This project officially came to a close at the end of July 2013.