Explaining The Cycle Of Protest In The Reformed Russia Between 2011 And 2018

In 2011-2018 Russia experienced a significant increase in protest activity which happened along with changes in the government’s policies and a turn towards authoritarianization.This paper attempts to explore the dynamic factors that have caused the protest cycle during this period.The study employs the political opportunity theory which has been widely applied in the study of social movements within different regime settings.The influence of political opportunity structure on the overall picture of protest in Russia is also discussed.The research contributes to studying social movements in countries with higher regime fragility and introduces a different approach to analyze the causes of contention and its transformation in Russia.The author identifies the most eventful protests and uses several datasets to build a picture of social movements on the federal and regional scale with different levels of political opportunity structures.It is observed that protests in Russia occur in relation to certain events,and the government demonstrates the ability to suppress them.It is also shown that overall regional protest activity is related to political opportunities in which the absence or presence of certain dimensions seems to be relevant to the occurrence of collective action.Narrowing political opportunity structures correlate with the picture of protest both federally and regionally,although there were other factors that stipulated participation such as better access to resources and geographical proximity to the federal government in some regions.