Protest Tactics Research Articles

Angry allies and fearful protesters: Communicating the right emotion during non‐normative non‐violent protests increases support for concessions among resistant high‐status group members

AbstractShuman et al. (2021) previously illustrated the effectiveness of non‐normative non‐violent protest tactics in gaining resistant high‐status group members' support for concessions. However, their focus on low‐status groups' tactics overlooks the real‐world complexities of protests, including emotional appeals and the presence of high‐status allies. Our research addressed this gap by examining emotion strategies in LGBTQ+ protests in the United States. Drawing on the concept of power‐congruent emotions (Kamans et al., 2014), two preregistered studies examined the impacts of anger and fear communication by heterosexual allies and LGBTQ+ protesters on resistant heterosexual audiences' support for concessions during non‐normative non‐violent protests. Study 1 (N = 1039) focused on how emotion communication by low‐status LGBTQ+ protesters influences support for concessions, while Study 2 (N = 1047) investigated the impacts of emotion communication by high‐status heterosexual allies. Our findings suggested that communicating actions out of fear by LGBTQ+ protesters increased support for concessions more than anger communication and the absence of emotion communication. Conversely, communicating actions out of anger by heterosexual allies increased support for concessions more than fear communication and the absence of emotion communication. These effects were evident among high‐status audiences resistant to change, but not among the progressive ones. Implications were discussed.

Quran Desecration Rallies in Scandinavia and the Netherlands: The Formation and Transnational Diffusion of an Anti-Muslim Protest Tactic

ABSTRACT Since 2019, Quran desecration rallies have proliferated across Northern Europe, leading to geopolitical tensions with Muslim-majority countries and domestic debates about freedom of speech. This article traces the diffusion trajectories of Quran desecration acts from their initiation in 2019 until November 2023 across Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Combining protest event analysis and process tracing based on mainstream media reporting and far-right social media, it shows how the desecration tactic spread from Denmark to remnants of the transnational Counter-Jihad Movement through a within-movement diffusion process involving both indirect and direct channels. Following Rasmus Paludan’s Quran-burning outside Turkey’s Embassy in Stockholm in January 2023, the tactic attracted massive international media attention. In Denmark and Sweden, the tactics’ repurposing toward geopolitical issues led to a spillover to actors unaffiliated with the far right, while in Norway and the Netherlands, the tactic hardly diffused beyond the anti-Islam activists. Drawing on far-right transnational diffusion literature, the article provides an empirically grounded and theoretically informed mapping of the recent wave of Quran desecration rallies, showing the various ways the same tactic spread throughout and into different domestic settings.

Communication, coordination, and surveillance in the shadow of repression

AbstractCommunication technology helps protesters organize, but also allows the government to monitor and repress their actions. We study this trade‐off in a model where protesters want to show up at the same time and place, but also want to avoid government forces. If leaders of a movement can send messages observed only by other protesters, they can successfully coordinate on a variety of sites and force the government to spread resources thin, helping the success of the movement. If the government always observes the messages too, protesters can do no better than always going to a “focal site” knowing that the government will send all resources there as well, and thus experience higher levels of repression for the sake of coordinating tactics. Intermediate cases where messages are partially observed generate dynamics where new technologies and media that are relatively known to other protesters and not the government are used until the government can reliably infiltrate them and the protesters move on to a new medium. When some protesters are more informed than others, the model can explain protest tactics observed in recent prominent cases like having smaller “parallel” protests at the same time but different location of the main gathering.

From Tactical Differentiation to Tactical Convergence. Trajectories of Healthcare Direct Social Actions and Their Impact in the Greek Healthcare Arena: 1983-2015

This paper traces the emergence, politicisation and spread of healthcare provision tactics by (contentious) collective actors in Greece between 1990 and 2015. Drawing on participant observation, in-depth interviews with relevant field actors (N=40), and documentary analysis, the paper develops a diachronic typology that analyses and compares; (1) the appearance of those tactics in the Greek context in the 1990s, (2) their appropriation by contentious actors after the December 2008 riots, and (3) their diffusion, and eventual modularisation over the course of the 2010 crisis and the cycle of anti-austerity contention. In so doing, the paper helps disentangle the dynamics of repertoire innovation through an understudied set of tactics. This is achieved through the reconstruction of the genealogy of healthcare Direct Social Actions (DSAs) – pace Bosi and Zamponi (2015) – in Greece, their transmutation from “consenting” to contentious tactics after 2008, and their wide diffusion among contentious milieus after 2010. In addition, the paper discusses the interplay between the contextual and strategic dimensions of those tactical preferences across actors and across time. To be sure, early utilisation of those tactics on the side of marginal players can be understood as attempts to tactically differentiate themselves vis-à-vis those traditional and hegemonic players in the arena who relied on indirect, protest tactics. The crisis, however, disturbed the seeming equilibrium of the healthcare arena thus prompting tactical convergence around healthcare DSAs among contentious actors, on the one hand, while reinforcing strategic convergence among some actors and strategic divergence among others.

Tactics and Targets: Labor Protest and State Response in China

ABSTRACT Repression has long been regarded as the main response of the state when encountering contentious actions. Although recent studies point out that repression may vary by regime types and state-level concerns regarding international reputation, few analyses to date have analyzed how movement dynamics and movement targets jointly shape state responses. In this article, I analyze over 7,500 episodes of labor protests in mainland China to advance scholarship on state responses to social movements. I develop a typology of state responses, from active coercion to accommodation and even tolerance. I then explore differences in state responses based on protest tactics and whether they are against private or state-affiliated targets. My results show that state responses differ based on the tactics that movements employ. Furthermore, these effects are moderated by whether activists target state-affiliated or private entities. This research offers important insights into the dynamic relations between state and social movement, the diverse ways highly bureaucratic governments use to manage social unrest, and the conflict between maintaining legitimacy and social control in both authoritarian and democratic contexts.

How institutionalisation of a movement fosters protest: The case of student protests in France

ABSTRACT This paper explains how institutionalisation can go hand in hand with the use of more disruptive tactics by social actors. Inspired by a feminist conceptualisation of the social movement institutionalisation process, we adopt a fluid definition of the state-society division and attend to show how institutional actors and groups negotiate their relationships at different scales of protest. To illustrate our argument, we take a closer look at the student movement in France. Based on the analysis of higher education policies between 2005 and 2016, and 16 semi-structured interviews conducted with key actors, we identify a process of partial institutionalisation whereby student organisations are regulated by different material conditions depending on the scale of protest. These material conditions, translated trough institutional arrangements, shape the ways in which student organisations build identity boundaries among them, thereby leading to the use of different tactics of protest.

Strike versus Boycott: discursive repertoires and contention in the 2012 Quebec student strike

ABSTRACT Protesting government tuition increases in 2012, Quebec university and college students participated in collective action that they contentiously characterized as a ‘strike.’ While oppositional actors insisted students were boycotting classes – not striking – student activists claimed legal and cultural justifications for their action. This paper asks: How did Quebec student activists discursively characterize and legitimize their protest tactic as a strike? How did this discourse – and opponents’ counter-discourse – structure the terms of the debate within higher education institutions? Using discourse analysis of student newspapers and organizers’ first-hand accounts of the strike, this paper argues that striking students developed a discursive repertoire constituted by two components: they linked their action to a collective identity with a historical legacy of striking and adopted collective action frames that characterized the action as disruptive and collective. While the debate within higher education institutions centred around legitimacy, it was deeply rooted in contestation over individualism versus collectivism and the ongoing neo-liberalization of higher education. Through the case of the 2012 student strike, I propose employing collective identity and collective action frames together in a dialogic framework of discursive repertoires, thereby providing analytical clarity to this concept for social movement scholarship.

When Latin American Feminism Shapes Psychoanalysis: Acts, Defiance, and Appropriations

ABSTRACT Research on psychoanalysis and politics has traditionally focused on the emancipatory potential of psychoanalysis. The relationship between activism and psychoanalysis has been less extensively studied. There is a gap in the literature regarding the impact of collective action on psychoanalysis, including its theories, institutional policies, and clinical practices. This article aims to address the gap by analyzing the impact of the recent wave of Latin American intersectional feminist mobilizations on psychoanalysis. Through a multi-sited ethnography conducted with psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic organizations in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina in 2022 and 2023, I argue that intersectional feminist mobilization has influenced psychoanalysis through acts of citizenship that are expanding the boundaries of the psychoanalytic field. This impact is evinced by collective acts of defiance, the diffusion of feminist protest tactics, and the adoption of reactivation practices that challenge, reframe, and reconfigure psychoanalytic concepts.

What is “heard” at a pipeline hearing?: The gerrymandering of aurality in British Columbia, Canada

AbstractThis article explores how sound technologies are deployed by government agencies to produce legitimacy in the struggle over oil pipelines in British Columbia, Canada. Activists seeking to stop the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain pipelines have mobilized noise and silence as tactics of protest and refusal. For example, one thousand demonstrators make a cacophony outside a Vancouver hotel in protest of the Northern Gateway pipeline. Communications technology, though, is deployed here by the state to compress and control. In one of the hotel's small, impregnable conference rooms, public hearings over the pipeline are taking place—only the public is not allowed inside: the proceedings are being livestreamed to a hotel two kilometers away. On unceded Coast Salish territory, the legitimacy of pipeline hearings is also contested because the continued existence of Indigenous legal orders represents a challenge to the pipelines in question. Technological mediation makes it possible to satisfy one requirement of legitimacy: democratically granted representative power. The challenge to the legal system highlighted by the continued existence of the Indigenous, though, is managed through audile techniques deployed as anthropotechnologies. The implications for a politics of sound must be considered in light of sound's mediation, which is never politically neutral.

By Any Means Necessary? How Black and White Americans Evaluate Protest Tactics in Response to a Police Killing

Abstract The majority of protests in support of racial justice are peaceful. However, since the racial reckoning of 2020, there has been debate about when and how exposure to violent or disruptive protest activities can shift public opinion towards a social movement. Using the Black Lives Matter Movement as a lens, we design a survey experiment to test the causal effects of different protest tactics on support for protesters and the movement itself among Black and white Americans. We include a control condition with no protest and manipulate the level of disruption in each treatment condition, ranging from a simple march in response to the police killing of an unarmed Black man to a protest in which participants set fire to an empty police headquarters. We use OLS regressions to estimate average treatment effects. Overall, we find that both Blacks and whites react negatively to more disruptive protests but whites tend to react more negatively than Blacks. Conversely, we also find that whites overall report more confidence in the ability of Black Lives Matter to facilitate racial equality after exposure to a protest, even when that protest employs disruptive tactics. We also test for the moderating effects of racial identity and racial resentment. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the broader literature on social movements and public opinion.

Absorptive Resisting Work: How the yellow vests deployed resistance to and through violence

Organizational research has increasingly recognized violence as an instrument for achieving compliance and maintaining the existing order. However, resisters tend to be portrayed as powerless in the face of this violence or engaging in hopeless acts of resistance. In comparison, by examining the context of violent protests, this paper discusses how activists can endure and use violence as part of their resistance. I build on a 15-month ethnography of the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement to illuminate the absorptive resisting work involved in deploying resistance to and through violence. This absorptive resisting work included reducing the repressive effects of violent protests and embracing those effects to generate symbolic and discursive resources against police violence, as well as including violent protest tactics in ways that regenerated those resources. Ultimately, my findings reveal that this absorptive work allowed resisters to withstand violent protests in the short term and reframe them in the long term. This paper thus contributes to studies on resistance to violence by showing how people can effectively and collectively catalyze violence to challenge it.

Locating DIY in the digital shift: Exploring grassroots activist responses to COVID-19 in Indonesia and the Philippines

This article explores opportunities and obstacles encountered by activists in Indonesia and the Philippines when forced to adapt to COVID-19 regulations. Although digital activism pre-dated the pandemic, mobility restrictions and social isolation have prompted a greater dependence on the virtual realm for protest tactics. The pandemic provides a unique temporal lens to highlight the role of DIY in activist communities in Indonesia and the Philippines, and the challenges of translating the material into the digital. Considering existing inequalities in the digital divide across the Global South and government responses to dissidents, the article critically interrogates the matters of digital literacy and surveillance risks in virtual activism. Findings throughout the article are supported by interview data from online fieldwork with activists in both Indonesia and the Philippines in 2021.

The military before the march: Civil-military grand bargains and the emergence of nonviolent resistance in autocracies

This article contributes to growing efforts to explain when nonviolent resistance campaigns emerge in autocratic regimes. Building from a novel framework for distinguishing civil-military relations in autocracies, it contends that regimes in which military and political leaders engage in a ‘grand bargain’ generate opportunity structures that are especially amenable to nonviolent resistance. Militaries in these regimes exhibit distinctive characteristics – they are corporate, cohesive institutions as opposed to fragmented in structure and also wield political influence in regime institutions. Consequently, these militaries are especially inclined to care about their societal reputations and to retain their institutional independence from the regime’s political leaders. These factors together can lessen expectations among activists that the military will repress protests and increase the odds of elite splits in the face of mass movements. They also render the military more receptive to nonviolent protest tactics. We operationalize the concept of grand bargains with indicators from three datasets on civil-military relations and autocratic regimes. We then test the argument quantitatively using data on the onset of nonviolent resistance campaigns, as well as events-level data on nonviolent resistance campaigns. The findings support claims that civil-military grand bargains make nonviolent resistance in autocracies more likely, contributing to scholarship on this vital topic.

The Moves of Civil Rights: Examining the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom

Abstract The catalog of the major marches held during the movement for Black freedom typically focuses on events of the 1960s: the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the 1965 March across the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, or James Meredith’s 1966 March against Fear. While the largest and best-remembered civil rights marches did indeed occur in the 1960s, the first national march of the movement took place in 1957 at an event held on the National Mall in Washington, DC: the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. To craft this demonstration, leaders invited activists to take up social, geographic, and spiritual movements, movements that relied on memory and prayer. This article analyzes the event through these three dimensions of movement and rethinks the significance of the Prayer Pilgrimage for rhetorical histories of civil rights and the march as protest tactic.

‘Violent protests’ in South Africa: understanding service delivery protests

ABSTRACT Violence is a crucial feature associated with service delivery protests in South Africa. The media and scholars have often referred to the rising violence trend in service delivery protests. However, the definition of violent protests is too broad; it fails to paint a correct picture of the violence. Previously, the general tendency was to classify these protests as either peaceful or violent – a simple dichotomy. Therefore, scholars have developed the 3-way formulation of protests as ‘orderly’, ‘disruptive’ and ‘violent’. Although the three-way formulation is the best so far, it conflates damage to property and injury to people as ‘violent protests’. Damage to property, however bad, should not be bracketed together with injury to people. Drawing on qualitative data from low-income communities in Cape Town, South Africa, I consider deliberately vandalising property as ‘vandalistic’ protests and attacks on persons as ‘violent’ protests. Building on the three-fold formulation of service delivery protests, I introduce a new category – the vandalistic protests. I, therefore, argue for a fourfold formulation of protests as ‘orderly’, ‘disruptive’, vandalistic and ‘violent’, which is often the normal order protests evolve. This analysis highlights the need for authorities to swiftly address communities’ grievances to avoid more radical protest tactics.

When Do Radical Flanks Use Violence? Conditions for Violent Protest in Radical Left-Libertarian Activism in Sweden, 1997–2016

ABSTRACT Descriptions of social movement factionalism are often based on the dichotomous conception of lawful moderates and violent radicals. In this article, we nuance this distinction by illustrating the complexity of radical flanks through an empirically grounded analysis of protest tactics, in which we ask under what conditions radical flanks are likely to use violent protest tactics. Exploring dominant explanations of political violence, the article shows the necessity of understanding the use of violent protest tactics as part of cognitive and relational processes. The use of violent tactics varies greatly across frames and protest issues, pointing to how different logics of protest are tied to different frames. Also, the use of violence is affected by the presence or absence of moderate allies; the likelihood of violence clearly decreases when radicals and moderates form coalitions when organising protests. The analysis is based on a protest event data set covering over 3,900 nonviolent and violent events by the Radical Left-Libertarian Movement in Sweden, 1997–2016. Notably, the results hold over this entire twenty-year period, suggesting that they are robust and provide a better explanation than historically contingent causes.

The juggernaut endures: protest, Potemkinism, and Olympic reform

ABSTRACT Mega-events like the Olympics and the Football World Cup routinely harm host cities and societies, largely due to their linkages with ambitious urban development agendas. Concurrently, resident protest has had only limited success in mitigating mega-event-related damages, notwithstanding the growth of resistance networks at local, national, and transnational scales. Contextualised within the broader processes of the Agenda 2020 and New Norm Olympic reforms, this paper explores the tactics of protest against the Summer Olympics in Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how the reforms have moderated some of the more egregious aspects of mega-event harm, while nevertheless preserving some fundamental problems with hosting, albeit in more diffuse or disguised forms. The paper makes sense of these processes through the notion of Potemkinism, conceptualised as a dynamic between the superficial and the substantive, and predicated on obfuscation or concealment. The paper also presents a taxonomy of tactics adopted by host city residents to counter the problems that persist in these processes of Potemkin reform.

Learning democracy through activism: the global climate strike movement and Belgian youth’s democratic experience in times of environmental emergency

ABSTRACT The climate protests are one of the most impressive social movements of this time and are historical in various respects: the global and widespread scale, the employed protest tactics, and its young demographic character. This study explicitly takes the position that the climate marches are opening new avenues of politization with a radical educational democratic potential. Building on the conceptual framework of social movement learning, the educational experiences of recurring participants of the protests are explored in terms of civic education. This contributes not only to the understanding of the possibility of the climate movement as educational spaces for learning about politics and democracy, but also to a better understanding of the educational potential of social movements in general. The research design consists of a single country case study with individual interviews and focus groups with frequent participants of the climate protests in Belgium. The findings indicate that the climate protests are an especially fruitful place for political engagement acting as a catalysator for politization. It fosters a process with reflections on individual agency, collective responsibility, current political structures, and the democratic ideals of our society.

Authoritarian Successor Parties, Supporters, and Protest: Lessons from Asian Democracies

AbstractAre authoritarian successor party (ASP) supporters more likely to protest? I propose that ASP supporters are less likely to protest in general. The post-democratization mobilization environment is shaped upon the pre-democratization mobilization basis. During the pre-democratization period, protest was organized around the democracy movement. Thus, protest tactics and networks were accumulated through it. As former authoritarian ruling party supporters, ASP supporters are less likely to have legacies of participating in the democracy movement, which prevents them from accessing the accumulated protest resources from the democracy movement. However, I argue that this negative association varies based on the ASP qualities and supporters’ age. Supporters of ASPs that maintain strong pre-democratization legacies are more likely to participate in protests than supporters of ASPs that do not strongly highlight their authoritarian legacies. Also, when the ASPs’ characteristics are considered, older ASP supporters are more likely to participate in protests than younger supporters. Using both single-level and multilevel statistical analyses, I examine four Asian countries with politically powerful ASPs and find evidence supporting my hypotheses. Lastly, I compare two South Korean mass movements, the Candlelight movement and theTaegeukgirallies to unpack the relationships between ASP supporters, protest resources, and mobilization. This study reveals authoritarian legacies among post-democratization citizens through ASP supporters’ protesting behavior.

Comparing Perceived Disruptiveness and Effectiveness of Protest Tactics

How do U.S. voters view the disruptiveness and effectiveness of social movement tactics? Strategically-used assertive tactics can enable movement success, though tactics considered too disruptive or violent may reduce public support. The authors investigate how U.S. voters perceive the disruptiveness and effectiveness of various protest tactics. In a representative survey experiment, 497 U.S. voters ranked the disruptiveness and effectiveness of 65 tactics. The authors find that tactics’ perceived disruptiveness and effectiveness exhibit an inverse relationship and a continuous character. The findings suggest that multiple, contextual factors influence public perceptions of protests.