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disruption
Disruptive Protest Tactics Are Crucial Part of Driving Social Change, Experts Say
"Whether we like it or not, the history of social change is also a history of political contestation and disruption," said one academic.
Jul 07, 2023
When two campaigners with the climate protest group Just Stop Oil threw confetti onto a tennis court at the Wimbledon championship in London on Wednesday, the action—like others by Just Stop Oil in recent months—sparked a renewed debate about the effectiveness of disruptive demonstrations.
"As always, Just Stop Oil's actions have done nothing to further their cause," claimed one public affairs consultant.
A new survey of 120 experts on social movements, however, found on Friday that nearly seven in 10 academics say disruptive protest tactics are "at least quite important" to the success of a movement, particularly if the protesters' demands—in the case of Just Stop Oil, climate action—already have widespread support.
Although interrupted tennis matches; stalled traffic caused by Just Stop Oil's "slow march" through London, which is now in its 12th week; and soup cans thrown at glass-covered art as in another high-profile protest by the group last year have befuddled and frustrated observers, the study by Apollo Surveys and the protest think tank Social Change Lab found that disruptive tactics do not, by and large, harm a group's ability to effect change.
"Disruption of everyday life is often the best way to receive media attention, generate visibility for a cause, and above all to push political and economic elites to compromise and accept change, if only to protect their own interests."
"We were really struck by the contradiction between what the public and media say about disruptive protests and what academics said," James Özden, director of Social Change Lab, told The Guardian. "The experts who study social movements not only believe that strategic disruption can be an effective tactic, but that it is the most important tactical factor for a social movement's success."
A poll by YouGov in February—four months after Just Stop Oil garnered international attention, including outrage, for its soup can protest—found that 78% of British people believed disruptive demonstrations make it less likely that protesters will be successful in their cause.
The new survey of experts shows that "we shouldn't take people's first reactions as the indicator of an effective protest," Özden told The Guardian.
The experts were also asked about factors that harm protests movements. More than 70% said that internal conflicts and infighting can hinder a group's ability to achieve its goals, and 67% said a lack of clear political objectives can harm the movement.
Only 36% said that objectives deemed "too radical" are harmful to a group's success, and 44% said an unwillingness to compromise can stand in the way of protesters' agenda.
"Whether we like it or not, the history of social change is also a history of political contestation and disruption," said Bart Cammaerts, a professor of politics and communication at the London School of Economics, in response to the survey. "Disruption of everyday life is often the best way to receive media attention, generate visibility for a cause, and above all to push political and economic elites to compromise and accept change, if only to protect their own interests."
The results suggested that a multi-pronged effort to effect change—including letter-writing campaigns, legal protests that have the approval of law enforcement, and disruptive protests like those of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion—are needed to push for climate action and other policy changes.
Both legal protests and disruptive actions were rated highly by the experts as tactics that have a positive effect on "movement-building" and sparking "higher salience in public discourse."
In response to the survey results, Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam recalled an interaction he had with an official at Kings College after he staged a disruptive protest to pressure the institution to divest from fossil fuels.
Others pointed out that highly-regarded, historic protest movements such as the fight for women's voting rights and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s had their own disruptive elements.
"There are two strands to civil resistance," James Skeet, a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil, toldThe Guardian. "One is disruption and the next is dialogue. Time and again, we see that public disruption is necessary to spark the conversations that result in much needed political pressure."
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Using Momentum to Build a Stronger Movement
Mar 02, 2016
When I taught at a small graduate school, we always looked forward to Saul Alinsky's annual visit. Alinsky was the terror of city hall bosses everywhere, and he told us colorful stories from his organizing experience. Our school was the Martin Luther King School of Social Change. The students could earn an M.A. in Social Change, which, when asked, I would explain stood for "Master's in Agitation."
This was the late 1960s, and most of our students were drawn from front-line communities where the struggles were hot. The students were famously direct and critical, and by the time Alinsky turned up, they would have read his "Rules for Radicals" and be eager to take him on.
"Where's your big picture?" they demanded. "How do all those stop-sign victories on a local level add up to larger institutional change?"
He challenged them right back. "What's your method of leadership development? What does empowerment mean if it's just about drama and a flash in the pan? Do the headlines grabbed by you romantics result in solid organizations that improve people's lives in the workplace or the neighborhoods where they live?"
The two great traditions -- mass protest and community/labor organizing -- continue to argue with each other to this day. In "This Is An Uprising" Mark and Paul Engler argue. Their book describes some of the foremost adversaries, including Alinsky himself and activist-sociologist Frances Fox Piven, and sets out their ideas fairly.
The Englers' book, however, could not have been written in the 1960s when Alinsky took on my students. Brothers Mark and Paul Engler shine much more light than we had available then. They draw ideas from the accelerating use of nonviolent struggle on local and national levels and the research that points out what did and didn't work to produce lasting change that affects people's lives.
Spoiler alert: The Englers propose a craft that makes the best of both traditions -- a craft they call "momentum." They don't pull this off by synthesis. They do it by calling everyone to a higher order of strategizing.
Born teachers, they show rather than tell. They show how momentum can work by sharing vivid glimpses from movements and campaigns as various as the DREAMers, Occupy Wall Street, ACT-UP, the Birmingham civil rights campaign, the Harvard 2001 student sit-in for a liveable wage, the LGBT movement, Tahrir Square and the campaign against Egypt's dictatorship, the overthrow of Serbia's dictator Slobodan Milosevic, and others.
Are we there yet? No, the craft is not yet fully embodied, but the Englers help us to see it emerging through the creativity and daring of activists in many places. They also bring to the conversation analysts like political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephen, sociologist/organizer Bill Moyer, civil resistance studies founder Gene Sharp, and others. (Full disclosure: I'm there, too. Plus, parts of the book first appeared on Waging Nonviolence.) All of this invites the reader to learn "how to combine explosive short-term uprisings with long-term organizing that can make movements more sustainable."
I've rarely seen movements described so intimately at their strategic turning points, supported with the comparative insights of scholars in the field. Reading the gripping stories alone makes the book worthwhile.
Framing our challenge as a skill-set
The Englers intend to help the reader become skillful in several ways: by "staging creative and provocative acts of civil disobedience," "intelligently escalating once a mobilization is underway," and making sure that "short-term cycles of disruption contribute to furthering longer-term goals."
They take the time to deconstruct the two traditions and show how the differences reveal strengths and weaknesses on both their parts. In the light of this book, Alinsky and my students were both right and wrong. Each side needed a creative leap to find ways of retaining their own strengths and borrowing the strengths of the others through a new theory and practice.
The craft does mean letting go of some assumptions held by both sides, and the Englers are frank about that -- again backing themselves up with the movements' own experiences. As I read, I imagined going through the wealth of campaigns in the Global Nonviolent Action Database to see more examples of people practicing aspects of the craft - or not.
An example of a questioned assumption from the mass protest tradition is: Disruption has the inevitable cost of getting backlash not only from the power holders but also the people caught in the middle. I remember surging with others into a center city street at the height of traffic on a Friday afternoon, for example, and shrugging off the cost to the jammed-up drivers who couldn't pick up their kids from school. The book points out that the political cost of disruption to the 99 percent can be offset by tactical choices in which the activists "put more skin in the game" through personal sacrifice. What I get from this is that creativity matters: It's time to drop the mindless reflex of blocking traffic to show we're indignant.
Another dubious assumption from the mass protest tradition is that sheer numbers win the day. I remember during the anti-Vietnam War movement, there were repeated marches down New York's 5th Avenue. The organizers rejoiced each time the number grew, but the Englers point out -- based on what works in getting change -- drama often trumps numbers. I contrast the "numbers obsession" with Alice Paul's choice to leave the woman suffrage organization's mass marches and start a campaign with smaller numbers and more significant drama -- and then win.
When analyzing what they call "the whirlwind," the Englers clearly describe a movement moment: "The defining attribute of a moment of the whirlwind is that it involves a dramatic public event or series of events that set off a flurry of activity and that this activity quickly spreads beyond the institutional control of any one organization. It inspires a rash of decentralized action, drawing in people previously unconnected to established movement groups."
We can see why mass protests worry some leaders of community organizations and unions - the loss of control. What those leaders miss is the opportunity for organizing that a whirlwind gives. The Englers recall Mine Workers union leader John L. Lewis' use of a whirlwind in the 1930s to organize more unions (membership organizations) and build the Congress of Industrial Organizations into a cohesive national force that gravely worried the 1 percent.
Some Occupy Wall Street leaders saw that kind of opportunity in the Occupy whirlwind, but as we know, the prevailing culture of Occupy prevented building a mass movement. Now I wonder if Occupy's resisters of growth might have been willing to play a bigger game if they had known about the craft of momentum-driven organizing.
In any case, now there's a new marker for us to go by in the Englers' book, and new reason for hope for effective outcomes of our work.
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Are You Ready to 'Disrupt'? Climate Movement Readies Global Mobilization
In less than two weeks, the 'Climate People's March & Mobilization' is set to make its mark on history. A new film explains helps explain where movement came from and where it's going.
Sep 08, 2014
On Sunday night, a new documentary film highlighting the intertwined story of the climate crisis and the growing social movement which has grown in response to it was released online for national screenings that took place in people's home and public meeting spaces.
At just under an hour long, the film--titled 'Disruption'--was produced with a stated goal to "galvanize a new wave of climate action and climate leadership" across the globe and comes just weeks before the 'People's Climate March' being organized for New York City that will take place on Sunday, September 21.
As Jamie Henn, a co-founder of 350.org--which is leading the organizing effort for the march and also produced the film--said to his organization's members in an email:
Here's the most exciting part of this story: it's not finished yet. The next act will be written in the streets on September 21st, when the People's Climate March takes over New York (and cities across the globe).
This is the history we'll tell the next generation -- about the end of fossil fuels, about how the world was in crisis, about how we started to turn it around together.
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