Demand refers to the mobilizing potential in a society for protest; relating to the interest in a society in what a movement stands for. Is the movement addressing a problem people care for? Is there need for a movement on these issues? What personal grievances politicize and translate into political claims, and how? Usually, people who participate in a movement are only a small proportion of those caring about the issue. This is not necessarily a sign of weakness; for a movement to be viable, a large reservoir of sympathizers is needed to nourish its activists. We focus on the social-psychological core of the demand-side of protest, consisting of grievances, efficacy perceptions, identification, emotions, and social embeddedness. Protesters are aggrieved and openly contest established authorities, attempting to change existing power structures. They form the tip of larger masses who feel that their interests and/or values are violated. Indeed, passivity in the face of imperiled interests or violated values is more often the rule rather than the exception. Interestingly, passivity is mainly explained by the absence of theoretically renowned predictors, rather than theoretical approaches for non-participation. Special attention is devoted to theories on non-participation.

Chapter 9 is dedicated to three processes steering the cyclicity of protest, namely politicization, polarization, and radicalization. Simon and Klandermans elaborated on the dynamics of politicization of collective identity. A process of politicization implies support of third parties is sought and the environment becomes divided into allies and opponents. Polarization concerns distancing of the opposing camps. The more polarized the relationship becomes, the less deviation from the group’s opinions and actions is accepted and the more opposing opinions and acts are rejected. Eventually, this may result in radicalization. Also, in declining movements with many “exiters,” sustained participation can indicate radicalization. Take the violent Black Panthers, which played a short but important part in the civil rights movement, believing that Martin Luther King’s non-violent campaign had failed and any promised changes to their lifestyle via the “traditional” civil rights movement would take too long or simply would not be introduced at all. Hence, in light of the declining civil right movement, both disengagement and radical sustained participation were observed. To understand the social psychological correlates of the volatility of protest, politicization, polarization, and radicalization warrants elaborate investigation.

This chapter focuses on the transformation of approaches to ethnicity in China’s transition from empire to nation state. That is, how and why these approaches evolved from a maintenance-oriented strategy aimed at pacification and stability in pre-modern times to a transformative strategy aimed at classifying and engineering identities in the socialist era. Historically Confucian universalism provided a neutral and inclusive approach to ethnicity, but it could not accommodate the idea of the nation in modern times. After late Qing and Republican failures at nation building, the CCP accomplished this task through a mix of class universalism and state classification of identities. The new approach served to incorporate minority members as equal citizens in the new modern state by politicizing previously localized identities at the national level. The contradictions therein – promoting political incorporation but also ethnic identities to fit that goal – or centralization and ethnicization, created the first set of institutional dynamics for ethnic strife in contemporary times.