Mass mobilization

Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War. During the Vietnam war, supporters and opponents of the war mobilized for protests. Social movements against the war were groups of students or veterans.[6] These groups did not believe the war was justified and that the United States had to pull out the troops stationed there. To counter these protests, president Richard Nixon addressed the 'silent majority',[7] the people who did support the war, to organize counter protests supporting the war.

Yellow vests movement is a social movement originated in Paris. The protests started when president Emmanuel Macron announced a fuel tax increase. Protesters saw this as a tax on the working class, the people in the countryside who have to drive to work.[8] At first, the movement was successful. A lot of people joined and a majority of the population supported it.[9] After the first weeks, the movement fell apart and some factions became violent. The number of protesters and support of the population decreased.[10]

Nazi Germany applied mass mobilization techniques to win support for their policies. The Nazi Party mobilized the population with mass meetings, parades, and other gatherings. These events appealed to the people's emotions.[12]

North Korea frequently employs mass mobilization to convene its people to publicly express loyalty around important events and holidays. Mobilization is also used to acquire workforce for tasks such as construction, farm work, keeping public places clean, and urgent disaster relief. Mass mobilization is also used to acquire hard currency. Participating in mobilization campaigns is mandatory and failure to appear may result in penalties. However, for some, it is possible to bribe themselves out of the duty.[13]

DARPA Network Challenge

Tag Challenge

The Arab Spring was a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests occurring in the Arab world that began on 18 December 2010. Rulers were forced from power in Tunisia,[18] Egypt,[19] Libya,[20] and Yemen;[21] civil uprisings erupted in Bahrain[22] and Syria;[23] major protests broke out in Algeria,[24] Iraq,[25] Jordan,[26] Kuwait,[27] Morocco,[28] and Oman;[29] with minor protests in Lebanon,[30] Mauritania, Saudi Arabia,[31] and Western Sahara.[32] Clashes at the borders of Israel in May 2011,[33] as well as protests by Arab minority in Iranian Khuzestan,[34] were also inspired by the regional Arab Spring.

The protests shared techniques of mostly civil resistance in sustained campaigns involving strikes, demonstrations, marches, rallies, as well as the use of social media to organise, communicate, and raise awareness in the face of state attempts at repression and Internet censorship.[35]

In his study of the wave of mass protests that took place in Italy between 1965 and 1975, Sidney Tarrow stated that “[i]n the final stages of the cycle, there was an increase in the deliberate use of violence against others. But this increase was a function of the decline of mass protest, not of its extension. Indeed, deliberate targeted violence did not become common until 1972-3, when all the other forms of collective action had declined.” All of which leads him to forcefully conclude that “organized violence was the product of demobilization.” [37] Donatella della Porta, in her comparative analysis of political violence and cycles of protest in Italy and Germany between 1960 and 1990, maintains that “when mass mobilization declined, the movements went back to more institutional forms of collective action, whereas small groups resorted to more organized forms of violence.” [38]

Mark R. Beissinger, in his study on cycles of protest and nationalist violence in the Soviet Union between 1987 and 1992, also detects this pattern, but in this case violence takes the form of ethnic communal conflict rather than terrorism. As he says, “the rise of violence in the USSR in significant part was associated with the decline of nonviolent mobilization contesting interrepublican borders.” [39]

During the 1870s, the “populists” or “nihilists”, the proponents of a Russian variant of anarchism, organized the so-called “pilgrimages to the people”, which involved small groups of members of the urban, petit bourgeois intelligentsia going into small villages to persuade peasants of the necessity of revolution. However, their efforts had little effect on the peasantry, and it was after this bitter experience that they made the momentous decision to adopt terrorist tactics.[40]