Kris Coulter, Erin Evans, Kelsy Kretschmer, Eulalie Laschever, Lisa Leitz, Lindsey Lupo, Alex Maresca, Deb Minkoff, Nhu-Ngoc T. Ong, Christine Petit, Amanda Pullum, Ellen Reese, Daisy Verduzco Reyes, Rottem Sagi, Suzanne Staggenborg, Sid Tarrow, Nella van Dyke, and Nancy Whittier.
And I’m particularly grateful to my family, Margaret Coutts, Zena Meyer, and Jean Meyer, who continue to offer constant challenges wrapped in encouragement.
Introduction
People protest in all kinds of ways and for all sorts of reasons: they protest because they’re disappointed or angry; they protest because they want to connect with others who share their views; they protest because someone invited them. Most importantly, they protest because they want to have an impact on the world around them. They want to make the world better – or at least stop it from getting worse. This book is about how and why protest sometimes works. These are questions of critical importance in modern life, and ones people who protest and those who watch them are asking more and more.
An example: On the January day that Donald Trump took the oath of office for the American presidency, thousands of frustrated protesters staged a wide variety of events. Gay and lesbian activists staged a Queer Dance party outside incoming Vice President Mike Pence’s residence featuring a variety of music, costumes, flags, and a lot of glitter. More aggressively, hundreds of DisruptJ20 protesters launched unpermitted marches through the streets of Washington, DC, protesting US foreign policy, inequality, and discrimination. The demonstrators certainly had grievances with the incoming Trump administration, but importantly, planning for the demonstration had begun in July 2016, when it appeared that Hillary Clinton was sure to win.
As announced on an organizing site: “DisruptJ20 rejects all forms of domination and oppression, particularly those based on racism, poverty, gender, and sexuality, organizes by consensus, and embraces a diversity of tactics.”1 Organizers emphasized urgency and tactics rather than issues, proclaiming their ideological and tactical diversity, while promising not to help law enforcement maintain public order. A few worked hard to disrupt public order, using bricks to break the windows of a limousine and several storefronts, including the entrances to a Starbuck’s and a Bank of America. Police arrested more than 200 people for being in the streets amid the destruction, and the federal government lodged harsh felony charges for conspiracy to riot that could have resulted in decades in prison.2
The day after the inauguration and the DisruptJ20 events, much larger groups staged a Women’s March in Washington, with hundreds of thousands filling the national mall, and a much larger number animating sister marches across the country and around the world. Millions protested, and although they expressed many grievances, there was a unified focus on the unsuitability of Donald Trump as president of the United States.
Protesters could take some comfort in their commitment, their solidarity, their numbers, and their acumen in organizing such a large set of events so quickly. But Donald Trump didn’t resign, and immediately set about executing some of the policies that he campaigned on, policies that protesters found abhorrent. Does that mean that the various protests during the inaugural weekend were futile?
I start with an example from the United States because, as an American, I see them close up, sometimes in person, but more often in books and articles, and I hear stories told in classrooms. I see the impact of social movements in American history, and I understand the context in which they developed. As we work through this book, there will be more stories about social movements in the United States than in other settings, but I will show how the processes that we see in play can be translated to understand the politics of protest elsewhere, providing examples from social movements in very different contexts.
Protests against authority are hardly limited to the United States. In just the last few years, organized protests against authorities have erupted around the world. In Turkey, Iran, and Russia, recurrent campaigns for democratic reforms have dogged authoritarian leaders. Activists deployed umbrellas as a symbol of their commitment to democracy in Hong Kong. Citizens filled the streets in Tunisia, protesting against the cost of living and the government’s austerity policies – and this government had come to office in response to another set of protests in the Arab Spring movements just a few years earlier. Activists have lodged anti-austerity protests against left, right, and centrist governments in Greece since 2011, and Europe has been racked with disruptive protests targeting immigrants and immigration policy. Mass movements have surged in the capital cities of Thailand, Belarus, and Lebanon, in response to crises, political and otherwise. These protesters everywhere turn out because they see the failure or futility of more conventional political actions, and they think there’s at least a chance that protests might work.
But protests haven’t been limited to efforts to mount anti-systemic campaigns. Protesters routinely turn out to support or prevent changes in policy, sometimes in colorful and creative ways: Five scantily clad women representing People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and costumed as animals, marched outside a fashion show in Sydney, Australia, calling for animal rights.3 Actress Lucy Lawless, best known inhabiting the title role in Xena: Warrior Princess, brought global attention to an international group of environmental activists determined to challenge Norway’s efforts to search for new oil reserves in the Barents Sea. The activists boarded small rubber boats to block the path of much larger ships heading off on their exploration.4 An estimated 50,000 people marched in London to protest the United Kingdom’s planned exit from the European Union, a decision taken by referendum a year earlier.5 All these protests are dramatic moments in larger sustained movements animated by people who want to change the world.
Social movements of all kinds and sizes campaign for an extremely diverse array of goals: against hikes in university tuition, austere budget policies, taxes, corruption, immigration, and carbon emissions – to name only a few recent issues. In much of the world, social movements have grown into a virtually permanent presence in mainstream politics, often supported by state subsidies or tax preferences. National and transnational groups concerned with the environment or human rights advocate for their visions of justice, sometimes engaging in mass politics.
These are only a sampling of relatively recent examples of mass movements attempting to step into the political fray, redress wrongs, and change the world. When you read this, you will be able to find stories of even more recent protests and campaigns that are just as odd, interesting, appalling, or inspiring. There’s an excitement and a romance associated with regular people trying to step into history and change the world, but do their efforts matter? Would people turn out to protest if they thought they couldn’t make a difference?
Sometimes, they do.
We tell stories about movements that seem to play a critical role in affecting change. Gandhi’s Salt March is part of the Indian Independence movement’s success story. Similarly, Lech Walesa’s leadership of the Solidarity movement in Poland during the Cold War is seen as a critical factor in the end of Communism, democratization of Poland, and the end of the Soviet Union. In the United States, schoolchildren learn to celebrate historic protest moments, including the Boston Tea Party and the 1963 March on Washington, and their impact on making the United States what it became. But those histories often pull the moments out of the context of the larger movements of which they were a part.
Politicians and political activists certainly act as if social movements might matter, and scholars have been trying, for the better part of at least four decades, to figure out why, when, and how. Although we know more than we did previously, discussions about the origins and influences of social movements frequently retreat into competitive assertions about what mattered and what was irrelevant. Obviously, people who talk about social movements in general, and even more so, about particular social movements, often have a strong stake in valorizing or vilifying them. People often react to movements by creating heroes or villains. And the question of potential effectiveness
