Protest, kodanikuühiskond ja Gaza

The paper compares organized public demonstrating and petitions for ceasefire in Estonia and Finland during the first year of Israel’s most recent military intervention in Gaza, from October 2023 to October 2024. A difference in scale is partly due to a different public opinion in the two countries. Other variations are related to structures of perceived political opportunities, and to different strategies of resource mobilization. Making use of existing civil society organizations and networks, the Finnish strategy was to mobilize organization capital. The Estonian protesters aimed at engaging intellectuals and artists with some renown in society, thus mobilizing moral capital. The pattern of “moral civil society” has been previously discussed by analysts of the Central Eastern European post-socialist change as rooted in the limiting political opportunity structures during the previous regime. The model of “moral civil society” still has some influence in the region.