This chapter charts the evolution of social unrest in the streets of Prague from the war years to the end of 1920, a moment of heightened occupation of public space by crowds. Most of these protests resist clear-cut labels as socialist or nationalist. They must be considered in terms of the protesters’ relationship to the state, in the larger context of the Habsburg Empire’s collapse and the Czechoslovak republic’s difficult stabilization. Food supply deficiencies generated many riots, demonstrations, and strikes. The trajectories of protests, from suburban centers of local power to the city’s main squares, show declining trust in imperial institutions and increasing recourse to violence. Postwar demonstrations signal a shift in conceptions of citizenship and democracy, the streets becoming a forum for legitimate popular political participation. The housing crisis and evictions by crowds constitute a good case study of the willingness to resort to direct action to establish a new form of social justice.

Traditional scholarship on cities has ignored the impact of warfare, except insofar as cities have been totally destroyed, such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, or as they have been rebuilt, as Berlin was after World War II. These cities are usually treated in primarily nationalist terms, emphasizing their roles in the respective combatant nations. This chapter treats several global cities in transnational terms, noting how the effects of the specific military conflicts have secondary consequences that transgress geopolitical borders and permit us to recognize shared suffering by combatants from different nations by focusing on Camilo Mejía’s memoir of the Iraq War, The Road from ar Ramadi (2007), and Jason Hall’s film about Iraq War veterans, Thank You for Your Service (2017). Managua, San José (Costa Rica), Miami, Boston, al Ramadi, and Topeka have little in common as modern cities, but the US-led neoimperial wars in Central America and the Middle East bring all of these cities and their inhabitants together in terrifyingly similar ways. New scholarly studies of modern cities need to interpret just these transnational intersections.

Chapter 6 “Associationalism (1983–2013)” reveals the limits of RJ’s institutionalization, and further highlights the ambiguity and reciprocity of the IRI’s state-society relations and associational life. While many of RJ’s former revolutionary activists and war veterans were absorbed into the expanding bureaucracy, some of them established and joined volunteer groups and civic associations at the grassroots level. Though claiming to be politically and financially independent, these organizations were established with the encouragement and backing of the IRI’s factionalized elites. While appropriating RJ’s developmental and populist rhetoric, ideology, and practice, these organizations helped political elites in their efforts to gain popular legitimacy, political support, and electoral votes by mobilizing and socializing youth, students, veterans, villagers, and other citizens. As an unintended consequence, these organizations exerted bottom-up pressures and demands on the political elites whom they had supported for increased and improved public goods and social services, and, in the process, represented a seedbed of authentic and autonomous activism and lobbying.