Why protest works

This weekend thousands of Icelanders joined to protest the ongoing genocide in Palestine. People gathered in public squares to demand an end to the atrocities and collectively called the Icelandic government to action.

Positive signs are that the government may listen to the protesters but what happens next is still uncertain.

Often, we hear criticisms of protests (and protesters): What is the point? Nothing will change. Who will listen? I’m only one person. These are all common responses that anyone who has been on a protest of any kind will have heard.

But change does happen.

Social movement scholars Laurence Cox and Alf Nielsen in their 2014 book described institutions as “the sediments of past struggles”. What this means is that often what is presented to us as fixed and unchangeable is actually far more fragile than we think. And protest can reset that sediment to something new.

We can look to history to see how protest has made a difference and brought about change. The end of Apartheid in South Africa is often used as an example for today’s global protests in support of Palestine. Protest movements in South America have played a crucial role in ending dictatorships and confronting corrupt and unequal economies. Even in Iceland, the pots and pans protests in 2008 saw off the worst of economic austerity that overtook the rest of Europe.

At the same time, we can list examples when protest hasn’t brought about change. When protests have ended in repression and failure – see the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

So, to understand why protest works we also need to understand what protest does, even beyond the most visible examples of institutional and social change.

First, protest disrupts. The act of protesting is, at its core, disruptive of the status quo. It stops the normal functioning of life to march in the streets of the city, to gather in a public square or in front of a major political building, or, in more extreme examples, to blockade or occupy symbolically important buildings or locations.

This physical disruption can have important consequences. It can prevent something from happening – blockading shipments and ports, for example – or it can make our actions visible to powerful decision makers who normally we would not be able to reach – anti globalisation protesters in the 1990s, for example, stopped the WTO.

Disruption is important because, at the same time, it reveals how that status quo operates. It shows us who is making the decisions that are affecting us and how these are being made. In doing so, it also produces a symbolic disruption to our collective understanding of what is – and what should be – normal.

Protest is a revelatory moment because it makes visible the processes and people making the decisions that maintain the normal functioning of our society. It unsettles the idea that politics is happening “out there” away from our grasp and shows that we can have a say in how things are done.

Political decisions often appear to us as necessary evils – the famous T(here) I(s) N(o) A(lternative) to neoliberalism or the public bailing out of the global banking sector after 2008 – but by stopping and saying no, we see how these are the outcomes of decisions being made, and decisions we can change.

But protest also works as more than just disruption. It is productive and creative. Protest offers hope for a different future. The collective calls made this weekend for peace and freedom for children and their families in Gaza by children and their families in Reykjavik is a hopeful vision of the future.

By coming together in this way, protest builds connection between those involved in these collective actions. These bonds are the foundation of solidarity and building community between individuals. Social movements and their momentum rely on this connection and solidarity formation to sustain themselves and to offer alternative visions that can challenge the status quo.

We see examples of this solidarity building in the occupation of public squares after 2010 that built activist communities, in trade unions that build grassroots solidarity among their members through collective action, or in mass protests by feminist movements around the world demanding rights to safe abortion.

Protest disrupts, reveals, builds community, and changes the world. Confronting the horrors facing the Palestinians in Gaza today means we need to do all these things. So now is the time to keep showing just how protest can work.

The author is currently based at the University of Akureyri with a PhD in International Relations and has an academic background of over 10 years researching, publishing, and teaching on social movements and trade unions. He is now researching trade unions and protest in Iceland.