Protests And Demonstrations Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Worldwide, protests against a state or a political entity, or in advocacy of a public cause, happen frequently, in a variety of ways, and are usually short-lived. The effectiveness of a protest can be measured and interpreted by a variety of factors, not all dependent on achieving the actual reform or cause the protestors seek, as the amount of support and attention a protest receives could be considered a type of achievement. The initial step for understanding protest is to examine the terms of a protest’s mobilization. Three major theories circulate about the concept of a protest’s mobilization.

First, cultural theories argue that local culture is vital and that protesters think. One problem with these theories is that numerous relevant cultures exist. Many may affect any given protest action and it is difficult to understand fully more than a few cultures at a time. Second, structural theories posit external causes for mobilization. For Theda Skocpol, the international capitalist pricing system is a prime mobilizer, while for Charles Tilly, maintained industrialization and urbanization lead to protest mobilization. Tilly considered leadership critical, but was otherwise a completely structural theorist because he felt individuals and their thinking was unimportant. Third, and in contrast, Mancur Olson created a rational theory that considers each person as an individual thinker with preferences. Olson’s theory focuses on clubs and interest groups, but not on conflict.

Mark Lichbach extended the rational theory to risk and conflict. He agreed with Tilly in believing leadership important, but created dozens of solutions to the mobilization problem and found four distinct categories: (1) market, by lowing costs and increasing benefits; (2) community, by using common knowledge; (3) contract, by making deals with other groups; and (4) hierarchy, by leaders ordering followers to act. In order to mobilize anyone for a successful protest campaign, it is necessary to combine at least two of these groups. Lichbach also incorporated many cultural norms in his theory.

Of these theories of mobilization, the rational one is ascendant. Structural theories ran into two difficulties. First, they could not tell how to bring one person out to protest without bringing all dissidents out at the same time. Second, their concept of political opportunity structure claimed dissidents act only when structural opportunities open. However, researchers found dissidents themselves could create such opportunities, and this lowered the value of the political opportunity structure. The apparent insanity of accepting personal risks challenges the rational theory of protest. Yet, the theory can be tested under risk because most people do not want to be arrested, injured, or killed, and thus find ways to elude or at least to minimize repression. For instance, with the Iranian presidential elections in June 2009, hundreds of thousands of Iranian citizens took to the streets to challenge the election results, claiming electoral fraud in defiance of Iran’s militant theocracy. Despite Iran’s security crackdown and censorship of the protests, Iranian citizens remained dissuaded from publicly demanding new elections, even after hundreds to thousands of protestors were arrested or killed by Iranian security forces.

Although demonstrations seem to be most frequent, there are many forms of protest. Of the 30,000 recorded protest events in the United Kingdom over a sixteen-year period, demonstrations accounted for 533. Demonstrations are simply the most public forms of protests and therefore receive the most media attention. Demonstrations that remain stationary are called rallies; those that move become marches. Typically, demonstrations last less than two hours and occur on workdays, avoiding weekends when free time would be consumed. According to recent studies, Muslim Albanians protest most frequently on Wednesdays, Belgians on Sundays, French on Thursdays, and Germans and British on Saturdays. A well-known coding project in Germany relied on Monday newspapers to collect protest data over the weekends, missing about 72 percent of all protests taking place during the full week.

In the United States, almost all demonstrations are nonviolent; when violence does occur, it stems from riots, especially when police leave the scene. European demonstrations begin calmly, but when they start to unravel, some persons typically organize rock throwing or car burning tactics, as this is an easy means to mobilize a violent protest. Recent, contemporary examples of international demonstrations, which gained considerable amount of media attention, were the 2009 G20 summit protests in London, then Pittsburgh in the United States. International protesters amassed in the thousands seeking increased economic oversight of the participating capitalist powers or proenvironmental reforms. While these demonstrations were to remain peaceful, some protestors did attempt to react violently against security officials.

Bibliography:

Jasper, James M. The Art of Moral Protest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Lichbach, Mark I. The Cooperator’s Dilemma. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
The Rebel’s Dilemma. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.
Rucht, Dieter. “The Structure and Culture of Collective Protest in Germany since 1950.”
In The Social Movement Society, edited by David S. Meyer and Sidney Tarrow. Latham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.
Skocpol,Theda. States and Social Revolutions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Tarrow, Sidney. Power in Movement. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Tilly, Charles. From Mobilization to Revolution. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978.

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