What does history teach us about protest?

This book, edited by Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, features analytical case studies on non-violent action across the world, including Gandhi's India, the US Civil Rights Movement, Northern Ireland, Soviet East-Central Europe, South Africa, the Baltic States, Tiananmen Square, Georgia's Rose Revolution, Ukraine's Orange Revolution, and Burma. It explores key questions about the successes, failures, and interactions of civil resistance with violent action and state power. The 2011 paperback edition includes a new foreword addressing the Arab Spring.

Contested Commons offers positive as well as troubling lessons on how we protect the right to protest. The book tells the long history of contests over Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park, Cable Street and Kinder Scout, as well as sites in towns and rural areas across the country. Katrina Navickas reveals how protesters claimed these spaces as their own commons, resisting their continuing enclosure and exclusion by social and political elites. She investigates famous and less well-known demonstrations and protest marches, from early democracy, trade union movements and the Suffragettes to anti-fascist, Black rights and environmental campaigners in more recent times.