In this paper we introduce the concept of serial activism to capture and extricate present-day transnational movement entrepreneurship through an examination of cross-national protest communication on Twitter. For the purpose of this investigation, we employed a mixed-methods design to a dataset of 20M tweets related to nearly 200 instances of political protest. We identified 100 users that were active across multiple instances of political unrest and held in-depth, semi-structured interviews to investigate the intricate interplay between political activism and social media usage. Our objective has therefore been to inquire into users’ personal and political lives, concerns, and struggles with institutionalized power. The results reported in this paper provide a baseline for scholarship grappling with the rapidly shifting architecture of political activism from a representative, hierarchical, and party-based system towards a decentralized, horizontal, and network-based mode of political engagement.
