Protest Meta-Communities: Linking Fields of Contention Within Regimes of Collective Action

Civil society comprises diverse collective actors that differ in their organizational structures, repertoires, and goals. These actors engage in various activities to promote their missions; some of them participate in political processes and public protest activities. When promoting their goals publicly, they become part of the specific fields of contention (Melucci, 1996; Crossley, 2002). In this paper, fields of contention are understood as meso-level relational arenas of collective action organized around shared issues, involving heterogeneous actors with divergent stakes and repertoires (Diani & Mische, 2017; Fligstein & McAdam, 2012). These stakes may relate to various issues and policies, such as the economy, environment, culture, security, and others. Over time, new structures of coordination in these fields emerge, are reproduced, or transformed, depending on changes in the political context (opportunities or threats). Some actors engage in contentious activities and participate in protest alliances, while others withdraw and isolate. Some actors withdraw from the original collective action field and start engaging in a new terrain, while others simultaneously switch among different arenas. These shifts establish new links through which different protest arenas become related to one another, while being institutionally nested within a broader national regime of collective action. These links provide communication channels through which new ideas, norms, repertoires, or goals may diffuse and through which meta-communities of contention may emerge. I define meta-communities of contention as higher-order relational configurations composed of sustained inter-field ties among collective actors. This paper aims to conceptualize and empirically map the embedding of fields of contention within broader (national) regimes of collective action (Tarrow, 2011; Balme & Chabanet, 2011). Applying a relational perspective to the study of collective action (Emirbayer, 1997; Diani, 2015), this analysis aims to examine interlinkages among different thematic fields of contention nested within a broader national regime of collective action. More specifically, it focuses on three interrelated problems: first, how do specific fields of contention differ in terms of their inner coordination? Specifically, what is the density and centralization of cooperation among their actors, and how has it evolved? Second, what are the differences between the embeddedness of specific fields of contention within broader (national) regimes of collective action? Specifically, what is the comparative intensity and extent of interactions between various fields and their environment, and how has it evolved? And finally, what is the structural relation between intra-field and inter-field interactions? Specifically, how relevant – in terms of actors and relations - are these interactions, and how does their relation change in time? The paper builds on the analysis of protest events in one country – Czechia - over the last three decades (1990-2022). The fact that the beginning of the data collection marks the emergence of a new pluralist, democratic polity enables us also to capture the emergence and evolution of the structures under study – both intra-field and inter-field interactions. The proposed paper will rely on a dataset of public protest events (1990-2022) in Czechia (N = 11558).