Having spent the last five years studying the organization and aesthetics of citizen protest against oppressive power structures in the Middle East and Africa, we find ourselves in agreement with the description of the protests as “staged.” But the criticism of such staging reflects a misunderstanding of the history and practice of civil protest, which...

Pinkwashing is "the attempt by a state or people to highlight its treatment of gays to show how progressive it is, in turn covering up human rights violations from which it wishes to detract attention‟ (Ryan 2012). It has repeatedly been used by western powers, for example, as a way to construct themselves as "superior‟...