Through a case study of the T’aegǔkki rallies beginning in late 2016, Chapter 6 examines why and how senior citizens took to the streets in large numbers to protest the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye and oppose the democratic and peaceful candlelight demonstrations. Analyzing the widespread emotions and narratives expressed by these older protesters, I argue that right-wing elites and intellectuals marshaled citizens by evoking historical experiences that aroused intense fear and outrage among older generations. In this chapter, I describe why the protests resonated so deeply with elderly citizens by focusing on their lived experiences during the Korean War and postwar industrialization and how the rise of new digital media inspired them to take to the streets on a large scale. Through grassroots organizing and by harnessing feelings of victimhood and fear among ordinary citizens, rightists cultivated a fertile ground for conservative mobilization.

Chapter 10 questions whether law should widen its lens to address general appearance discrimination too. Would a protected characteristic of appearance offer viable legal rights to the many millions of us who do not have a disfigurement but are less-than-beautiful in some way? For example, is appearance objective enough to be adjudicated in law? Is a clear distinction between mutable and immutable aspects of appearance important – or even possible given increasing medico-cosmetic opportunities to change the way our bodies look? Do we have an unobjectionable nomenclature to describe appearance and attractiveness in legal terms? And could we swallow well-meaning employers’ attempts to measure the attractiveness of their staff for the purposes of diversity monitoring? The discussion draws on examples of comparative laws in France and America. Both countries have adopted wider conceptions of appearance equality, and America’s laws have seen a recent period of growth, with Binghampton, New York, the latest to vote such a law onto its statute books in 2023. However, both sets of laws remain little used so far, despite evidence showing that appearance discrimination remains prevalent. How could we ensure that a protected characteristic of appearance in the UK avoided a similar fate?

This chapter explores a riot that erupted in 1782 against a permanent garrison of Spanish troops from the Savoy regiment, marking the Chuquisaca’s first popular revolt since its founding. Although violence was primarily executed by the lower classes, particularly militia members, it stemmed from tensions affecting the entire population and therefore garnered strong support from the patriciate through the cabildo. Sparked by the death of a patrician in a brawl with a soldier, the underlying cause of the unrest was the troops’ sexual misconduct and other acts of violence in the urban space. The advances made on the wives, sisters, and daughters of patricians and plebeians alike raised the question of whether European soldiers of low social status were deemed superior to noble creoles, and it placed the vindication of the masculine reputation of patricians and plebeians on the same footing. The assaults on the local population’s claims to honor thus undermined the self-representation of urban society as courtly society divided into Hispanic and non-Hispanic sectors. Without losing their distinctive group identities, the residents began to conceive of themselves as members of the same polity defined in opposition to metropolitan policies and their agents. They saw themselves as part of a full-fledged colonial society.

Any constitution holds the nation’s past, aspires to live the present, and promises to build a thriving future. Differentiating a nation’s collective identity from its constitutional identity is, thus, often difficult, or even impossible. This chapter shows that, at its founding moment, Bangladesh’s national identity and constitutional identity merged into one another, although the national Bengali identity was flawed and exclusionary. Bangladesh’s four-pronged constitutional identity – based on the principles of nationalism, secularism, democracy, and socialism – evolved through a revolutionary and popular process but has since remained ever contested. These four identity principles have been subject to multiple changes, signifying their contestation and contentiousness. One possible reason for the continuing contestation about constitutional identity is, arguably, the ignorance of the religious sentiment of the Muslim majority citizenry. An analogous argument has been that Bangladesh’s constitutional (or national) identity is fraught with an exclusionary or hegemonic approach to nationality.

Young Black changemakers take pride in their connection to Black communities of past and present. This strong and positive Black identity motivates their changemaking. Black identity intertwines with other identities – such as gender and social class positions – to inform experiences of oppression and changemaking in response. Commitment to and love for Black communities empowers young Black people to cope with and resist racism in ways that protect their personal identities from threat and draw on the strengths of their personal narratives. Young Black changemakers find civic purpose and power in the legacy of Black social justice leaders and lean into that history to honor their place in Black communities. The relationship between identity and changemaking is reciprocal. For these young people, pride and connection to being Black fed their desire to eradicate racism through changemaking. Engaging in changemaking for a better world for Black people also deepened their connections to Black people and Black communities.

This chapter details this book’s theoretical contribution. It develops the notion of mobilizational citizenship, which synthesizes an innovative framework that explains how and why mobilization endures over time in highly inhospitable conditions at the urban margins. This framework’s conceptualization of citizenship goes beyond traditional, liberal approaches. It relies on a more flexible and informal notion of political incorporation, which depends on the ways in which collectives build their identity and rescale community-building beyond the framework of the nation-state. In other words, it captures an alternative type of politicization that is often neglected in studies of collective action. Mobilizational citizenship involves the dynamic interaction between four components: agentic memory, mobilizing belonging, mobilizing boundaries, and decentralized protagonism. The chapter’s framework also outlines the barriers to mobilization in the urban margins. It explains how political institutions regularly withdraw and control political capital within urban communities in the aim of demobilizing them. When mobilizational citizenship fails to develop, local dwellers engage in political capital hoarding dynamics within their neighborhoods, which further deactivates collective action.

In a world in which civil society actors and their defiance of the institutional status quo are more prominent than ever, the scholarship on social movements has not provided enough insight into the mobilization of highly excluded groups. This concluding chapter synthesizes the novel framework produced in this book, called mobilizational citizenship, to explain how collective action survives over time in the urban margins under highly unfavorable conditions. This research involved examining how urban contentious politics and local organizing can endure with minimal influence from elite actors or political opportunities. The analytical components of mobilizational citizenship can be used to explain collective action in cases of Latin America beyond Chile’s urban margins, such as the enduring community organizing of El Alto, in Bolivia, the leftist territorial organizations of Villa El Salvador, in Peru, or the Piquetero Movement organizations still mobilizing in neighborhoods of Argentina. This book’s framework could also travel beyond Latin America to analyze movements that spread leadership and have strong collective identities, such as Black Lives Matter, the White Power Movement, and Extinction Rebellion.

This chapter explains how activists in the urban margins decentralize protagonism to transform a mobilizing collective identity into citizenship-building. It uses Gamson’s typology of micromobilizing acts to analyze their face-to-face interactions within three types of encounters: organizing, divesting, and reframing acts. Based on interviews and observations, it shows how activists conceive their collective identity of mobilization as political capital and consequently strategize to diffuse it. In other words, the activists teach each other the identity symbols and values that both promote and validate collective action locally. Within the local social movement community, political capital usually flows from informal leaders to younger, less experienced activists and potential challengers. This socialization process progressively certifies young local activists as community-builders, both individually and collectively. It also makes it more likely for individual leaders to be replaced by others once they decide to quit their role. In turn, this decentralization of protagonism promotes citizenship-building and enduring mobilization, thus creating mobilizational citizenship.

This chapter discusses the ways in which collective identity fuels mobilization in Chile’s urban margins. It looks at how activists’ cohesiveness and their differentiation from other social actors produce a mobilizing identity that advances contentious politics. The chapter draws on participant observations and interviews to outline the contents and dynamics of political consciousness production in Santiago’s urban margins. In their interactions, activists wield discourses of informality and marginality to strengthen a sense of pride in their neighborhood that is immune to hegemonic narratives of stigmatization. The thick boundaries that local activists use to promote mobilization depend on them dynamically differentiating between two realms of collective experience: the formal and the informal. On the one hand, the informal represents the protected sphere of confidence and close connections within neighborhood organizations. Activism works as a way of keeping the informal alive. The formal, on the other hand, is seen as a threat that motivates protective collective action. Finally, the chapter shows how activists’ reactive and defensive mobilization generates a sense of self-determination.

The introduction lays out the book’s conceptual framework. The point of departure is a performative concept of identity as lived and forever changing, so that multiple identities, including immigrant cultural identities, can coexist with German citizenship. After emphasizing that everyone’s ancestors crossed borders at some point, that we are all migrants, it proposes the term PlusGermans for more recent arrivals. It next sketches a concept of a collective national identity, a “New We.” The New We has two meanings: first, it designates all citizens without exception (there is no questioning of the Germanness of such “visible minorities” as Afro-Germans). Second, it proffers a symbolic celebration of this collective identity, the contents of which shall be determined – within the boundaries of the constitution, so that no one’s basic rights are violated – democratically. For instance, what should naturalization ceremonies look like? It ponders whether Germany is already postnational, but concludes that it is not on multiple levels, and that for progressives to avoid definining the civic nation, lest such defining end up in Nazism, leaves the field open to right-wing populists.

The introduction gives an overview of the book’s aim and the conceptual approach to its topic. The subject is the particular way in which the Greeks, in the context of their general project of understanding the world, have made sense of their past. That means it is about history as an element of Greek culture. The concept with which the subject is dealt with is that of intentional history, which is based on the theories of Maurice Halbwachs and Aleida and Jan Assmann on collective memory and social remembrance. With ‘intentional history’, I refer to that part of history that is relevant to the collective identity of social groups of all sizes. This concept allows statements to be made across cultures and epochs and thus makes it possible to draw a connection from antiquity to modernity.