"Putin down protest": Is widespread mobilization possible in the shadow of the oil curse?

Under what conditions are protests more likely to occur? Social movement literature has traditionally been dominated by three frameworks: the framing process; resource mobilization; and political opportunity structures (McAdam et al. 1996, 7). These approaches attempt to explain the motivations behind protests and what form they take; however, what is seldom studied in the social movement literature is the role the resource curse plays in the likelihood of protests occurring. Some research analyzes how the resource curse affects the likelihood of civil war and other forms of armed violence, and it is plausible that this relationship between civil conflict and natural resources would extend to protest behavior as well (Fearon 2004; Lujala et al. 2005; Asal et al. 2016).In this paper I analyze the geographic variation of Russia's protests by overlaying Lankina and Voznayas' (2015) data set detailing protest events onto the PRIO-Grid's spatial data set (Tollefsen et al. 2012). While the results show that oil has no effect on the likelihood of protests, the presence of oil seems to have a negative effect on the number of protesters that participated. This indicates an interesting repression angle that can be an inspiration for future research and can be a worthwhile contribution to conflict literature