Acknowledgements

This project is based on a simple premise—that protest is good for democracy. Traveling from conceptualization to publication, however, was no simple route. Discussion of this collaborative endeavor between the co-editors began in 2003 in Lima, Peru where Roberta was conducting field research for her dissertation and Moisés was serving as a visiting professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). We began the project in earnest in 2011 under the guidance and care of our editor, Jessica Gribble, at Lynne Rienner Publishers. Our original vision was something akin to a handbook of social protest and we counted on sixteen contributors and all manner of studies. We had our first inkling that perhaps we were overly ambitious in our vision during a panel presentation on the project at the 2014 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in Chicago, Illinois when one of the audience members stated: “I don’t get it. How are these papers related?” It was not long afterwards that our dear editor and friend, Jessica, left Lynne Rienner (we hope it was not because of our book project!) and our volume collapsed.

In 2015, when Roberta finally landed a tenure-track position, the idea of relaunching the co-edited volume resurfaced. This time we narrowed our focus to understanding the political consequences of the 2011 global protest cycle. Fortunately, a core group of our initial contributors were willing and able to stick it out with us and reshape their contributions to fit this new emphasis. All of the wonderful contributors to this current edited collection have been with us since 2011. We are eternally grateful for their patience and generosity. We also want to acknowledge the contributions to our ideas on protest and democracy of those initial contributors who were unable to wait such a long time to publish their work: Prakash Adhikari, José A. Alemán, Ronald A. Francisco, María Inclan, Cassilde Schwartz, and Susan Spronk. Our insights into the dynamic relationship between protest and democracy are that much richer for having worked with you.

We are very thankful to the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their helpful comments and recommendations. Their feedback has improved the manuscript a lot, yet all shortcomings remain our own. We would like to thank the University of Calgary Press for bringing this project to fruition. Special thanks to the amazing staff at the Press: Brian Scrivener, director; Helen Hajnoczky, editorial and marketing coordinator; Alison Cobra, marketing specialist; and Melina Cusano, graphic designer. Your words of encouragement and outstanding work ethic made all the difference. We are also grateful to the University of Missouri for providing copyediting and other support. Moisés would also like to thank the participants of several academic conferences where the papers of this book were shared. Roberta would also like to acknowledge the contributions to this project of the students in her POLI455 Protest, Rebellion and Revolution class at the University of Calgary for providing welcome feedback on all of the ideas in the book. This book is designed with them in mind.