Samenvatting

Recent scientific literature and media focus on new styles, rituals and instruments in the phenomena of social disorder and resistance. People fight for new issues, in changing in/out group settings, with social media as a means to an end that often is not so obvious from the start. The various, dynamic local contexts define how and why these new ambitions and techniques become trenchant.From a long term perspective patterns and appearances do change, but (perceived) distributive injustice and procedural injustice remain the key drivers motivating social disorder and resistance. Feeding on recent studies about the immediate aftermath of the Second World War (1945), the Arab Spring (2010-2011), and the British ‘Summer of Discontent’ (2011), this article reconsiders the question: what’s new?