RESEARCH PROJECT
Moral shocks, backlash protest, and critical junctures
Examining the conditions and effects of transformative events
Research on the impact of transformative events on contentious dynamics shows that blatant acts of violence are often followed by moral shocks which raise such a sense of public outrage that formerly contention averse audiences take to the street in large numbers. These backlash protests can mutate into critical junctures with the ability to entirely reconfigure political arenas.
Despite abundant research on moral shocks, backlash, and critical junctures, attempts to conceptualize their interconnection and theorize their conditions of possibility remain limited. Studies of transformative events overwhelmingly concentrate on the properties of repression to explain backlash mobilization. However, the affective and discursive features of a whole range of events that are experienced as transformative remain understudied.
This project aims to address this gap through a range of contributions that relocate the focus of attention away from the structural features of violent events towards the competition over their meaning, as well as the cultural and temporal situatedness of backlash protest.
Articles in the frame of this project:
Grimm, Jannis, Ahmed, Myriam. 2025 (forthcoming). Moral shocks, backlash protest, and critical junctures: Examining the evidence on the conditions and effects of transformative events, Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest, 13(1).
Grimm, J., Ahmed, M., Sakar, I.D. 2025 (forthcoming). The Challenges of Mobilizing After Emergency Events: Linking Debates on Moral Shocks and Man-Made Disasters, Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest, 13(1).
Grimm, J. 202X. Inspiring Solidarity, Inhibiting Outrage: Bank Heist as Radical Direct Action in Post-Revolutionary Lebanon.
Grimm. J. 202X. Tracing the Contingency of Transformative Events: Combining Protest Event and Discourse Analyses in a Nested Research Design.
