Protests

Category: Fields of research

What are Protests

Social protest refers to collective action that employs nontraditional methods to pressure institutional authorities to change existing conditions and respond to shared grievances. Protests exist along a broad continuum, ranging from small, localized groups mobilizing around specific and short-term issues to large-scale movements addressing widespread social problems and perceived injustices. These actions may include demonstrations, strikes, blockades, and other activities that disrupt the routines of public life. The purpose of social protest is to challenge perceived injustices, transform practices and ways of thinking, and redistribute access to social resources. Protests can target various centers of power, including governments and their institutions, corporations, religious organizations, universities, and schools. Although many protests do not achieve their overarching goals, they often initiate processes that lead to meaningful improvements for marginalized groups. Through these processes, protests help create new collective identities and generate shared meanings that shape politics, everyday life, popular culture, social practices, and institutional arrangements. Protest activity tends to be more common in societies where the right to protest is socially and politically accepted; in such contexts, protest-related conflict can play a constructive role in resolving disputes between challengers and those in power. In contrast, authoritarian societies may see fewer protests, but when they do emerge, they are often more intense and more likely to evolve into large-scale movements aimed at transforming the social order.

Many protests are explicitly political, seeking to influence public policy, alter government leadership, or reshape state structures. Through protest movements, governmental authority may be contested, transformed, reinforced, or resisted in different ways. To improve their chances of success, movement leaders often form coalitions with more powerful individuals or organizations that support the movement’s demands based on their own interests or values. When a protest movement mobilizes enough public support to achieve all or most of its objectives, governments may respond by legitimizing its goals through policy changes. This response can serve as a strategy to adapt to, co-opt, or reshape the movement’s challenge to existing political arrangements.

Even though protests can have multiple causes and goals, we can group them into several types. The first type of protests is caused by collective grievances, which are the result of economic and social problems that negatively impact the majority of the population: mass unemployment, inflation, war, hunger, political oppression, and loss of civil rights, etc. The goal of these protests is to force the government to eliminate or alleviate the hardship caused by those problems. The second type of protests is related to discrimination and oppression of some specific group – racial, ethnic, or religious minority, women, workers, etc. These groups' goals are to achieve better social status for themselves and a more equal distribution of economic and cultural resources. The third type of protest is based on the desire to transform or uproot the whole political and economic system, with the goal of creating a new and better one. Fourth type protests are those related to some specific grievances – specific law or policy that is or is going to be enacted, construction or infrastructural project that will negatively impact the environment, decision of the court that people deem unjust, etc. The goal of these protests is to stop or overturn decisions made by the government, company, or institution. The fifth type of protests is caused by companies that give unfair wages, put unsafe or strenuous work conditions, or don’t respect workers’ rights; with these causes giving rise to workers' strikes and other types of workers’ protests. The goal of these protests is to force companies or the whole industrial sector to increase wages and improve working conditions and workers’ rights.

Violence and Protests

Although most protest movements are largely peaceful, episodes of violence may occasionally occur. Nonviolent resistance—such as Gandhi’s campaigns against British rule in India—is a well-known form of peaceful protest. In contrast, violent protest can take the form of both organized, strategic actions and spontaneous crowd behavior. Such protests often focus on specific issues, but they may also emerge in response to severe repression or human rights abuses by authoritarian governments. Collective violence seeks to exert pressure by causing physical harm or damage, compelling targets to comply or weakening their capacity to resist change. Violence tends to heighten polarization by forcing observers and potential allies to take sides. However, violent protest almost invariably provokes repression or counterviolence, as authorities justify arrests or forceful responses in the name of maintaining “law and order.” Violence can also arise from opposition to protest movements, particularly when groups perceive their interests or ways of life to be under threat. In some cases, counterprotest movements employ violence in an effort to undermine or reverse successful social movements, such as attacks directed at abortion clinics and medical professionals.

Comparative Analysis of Protests

In The Strategy of Social Protest (1990), William A. Gamson examined fifty-three protest movements and classified their outcomes into four categories: full response success, cooptation, preemption, and collapsed failure. Of the movements analyzed, twenty-two were identified as collapsed failures, twenty achieved full response success, six were preempted, and five were coopted.

Trends in Protests Dynamics

In the United States and other contemporary urban mass societies, protest movements have increasingly become more professionalized over time, relying on greater resource mobilization to more effectively confront established interests. Advances in communication technologies, growing global economic interdependence, and the relatively low cost of moving large numbers of people across long distances ensure that future protest movements will be increasingly shaped by the interaction of ideas, participants, and organizational structures across multiple spheres of social life.

Theoretical Explanations of Protests

In The Contentious French (1986), Charles Tilly introduced the concept of contention to analyze protest activity in Europe since the eighteenth century. By expanding the notion of repertoires of action to include verbal forms of participation, or “collective speech acts,” contentious politics offers a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between protest and institutions. Within this framework, an adversarial stance is no longer seen as the sole defining feature of that relationship. Protest movements do not necessarily oppose institutions, and in many cases, institutions and movements work together, particularly when they frame political issues in moral terms and mobilize around shared causes. Tilly divides the types of collective protests in France by historical age. In the period from 1650 to 1850, the protests were local. The development of capitalism, urbanization, the proletarianization of labor, the increase of police and army, the development of official statistics, and the emergence of political parties and interest groups are the factors that led to collective protests becoming increasingly national and autonomous after 1850. The development of modern political and economic institutions and actors has led to an increase in the possibilities for the national organization of protests, but they have also led to the emergence of completely new collective interests.

Lucien Goldmann rejected the Marxist idea that the proletariat was a force that would achieve revolutionary liberation because workers, instead of revolutionary methods, turned to improve their position through political parties and unions. However, he contends that workers retain resistance to reification, that is, to becoming a commodity themselves. He views the protests and crises of 1968 in the context of the discontent of several groups: the old middle class, traditional workers, ethnic and racial minorities, students dissatisfied with universities, and the radical wing of technicians and intellectuals. It was these protests that gave him hope that social transformation was still possible. In his book, Divided Societies: Class Struggle in Contemporary Capitalism (1989), Ralph Miliband argues that, even though new social movements and their ideologies put identity politics at the forefront, class divisions remain the basic and key divisions in capitalism.

Anthony Oberschall is one of the main proponents of the "resource mobilization theory" applied to the study of social movements. He developed this approach in his book Social Conflicts and Social Movements (1973) and believes that the ideas and beliefs that social movements use when they are trying to fight for something through public protests already exist in the wider culture. If collective protests are centrally organized, then the mobilization of participants is very similar to the mobilization of soldiers within the army, and the management of protests is similar to a military organization. The key to a successful protest is the possession of the most important resources: organizational resources, money, skills, time, access to the media, and access to centers of power. Oberschall views the protests and their organizers and participants in the context of the logic of rational choice developed by the Neoclassical School of Economics. He believes that this model best explains the strategies and tactics of social movements and that the main unit of their analysis should be a group, not individual members.

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, in their book Poor People’s Movements (1977), focused on the social movements of this disenfranchised population. The focus of this research was on the factors that contribute to, or hinder, the success of these movements. Piven and Cloward believe that the social movements of the poor should not be focused on creating organizational resources, because that diverts energy from mass protests. The success of these movements depends on mass and radical expressions of dissatisfaction through demonstrations and the illegal occupation of buildings and other facilities owned by those being protested. Creating a formal organization of these movements can lead to these organizations becoming an end in themselves, and thus their struggle would lose its edge. They saw the psychological causes of the protest in the great frustration of the poor, and not in the rational approach to the problem through the creation of strategies. For these movements to succeed, the disenfranchised must perceive the situation in which they find themselves as unjust, yet also understand that it can change for the better. However, only during periods of great systemic crises did these movements manage to secure some concessions from the elite. The authors felt that poor movements had a positive impact on other movements, such as the African-American Civil Rights Movement.

In his study of Luddites and similar movements and riots that destroyed industrial machines, Eric Hobsbawm concluded that this type of protest was not directed at the machines themselves, but at the machines as tools of capitalist exploitation. Since there were no systematic and political ways of protesting, he called these types of protests "collective bargaining by riot." Even when the English Parliament declared the destruction of industrial machines a crime punishable by the death penalty, such protests did not stop.

Diffusion of Protests

The diffusion of protest refers to the process by which social protest, or particular elements of it, spreads among actors within a social system. A protest cycle describes a period of heightened conflict across multiple sectors of society, marked by the circulation of new tactics, identities, interpretive frames, and forms of action. Research on protest cycles often distinguishes between “early riser” movements, which initiate and shape the cycle, and subsequent movements that emerge as a result of diffusion from these initial protests. Protest diffusion may occur through direct network connections, as seen in the Civil Rights Movement, where existing organizational and personal ties enabled communication and the development of innovative forms of protest. It can also take place through indirect channels, including shared cultural norms or coverage in the mass media.

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