“We’re going to do a Hong Kong!”: Diffusional Interactions between the 2019 Protests in Hong Kong and Catalonia

Studies on the diffusion of protests and social movements stress the necessity of geographical, historical, organizational or cultural proximities between countries as the factors that facilitate the spread of ideas, frames, identities and repertoires of collective action from one country to another. Yet in the last two decades, the explosion of various protests across the globe and their mobilizing impact on each other challenged this established view. The connection between the 2019 protests in Hong Kong and Barcelona was a remarkable example of this recent phenomenon: despite the absence of the abovementioned proximity factors, the protests in Hong Kong were referred to as an inspirational benchmark by a considerable number of Catalan protesters, as various tactics, repertoires and frames were adopted from Hong Kong during the protests in Catalonia. Designed as a case study that investigates this least-likely case of cross-national diffusion of protests and social movements, this study explores why and how protests inspire other protests in distant and diverse places. To address these questions, I employed Grounded Theory methodology by analyzing 1) twenty-five semi-structured in-depth interviews with activists who participated in the 2019 Protests in Catalonia, 2) textual data from online and offline documents published by the Catalan activist network Tsunami Democratic, and 3) the secondary sources that involve interviews with or releases from the organizers/spokespersons of Tsunami Democratic. The preliminary findings demonstrate that the national and transnational dimensions of contention were highly interconnected in this case, as the adoption of behavioral and ideational components of collective action from Hong Kong was accompanied by the dramatic changes in the political opportunities and emotional context in Catalonia since the 2017 Catalan independence referendum. The findings also indicate that perceived contextual similarities and moral shocks triggered by shared collective traumas may still enable protesters to identify themselves with other protesters in distant countries even in the absence of proximity factors and comprehensive knowledge about those distant groups. Consequently, this study aims at contributing to the recent debates on refining the theory of diffusion by exploring the role of cognitive and emotional processes in the spread of protests, which have been largely neglected in social movement studies, from an agential and cultural approach. Besides, the findings also shed light on the changing dynamics of the pro-independentist Catalan movement, as well as the debates about the radicalization of collective action.