Preface

The last several years have seen a worldwide outpouring of protest, by citizens in North Africa and the Middle East, Tea Partiers and Wisconsin public employees in the US, the Indignados in Spain, Occupiers around the world, anti-austerity rioters in Europe, Iran's green movement, Istanbul's Taksim Square, Kiev's revolutionaries, and many others. But we should not forget, as we congratulate ourselves for living through an important moment in world history, that protest occurs every day, around the planet, and it always has. Most of the time we don't even hear about it - it is not dramatic or sustained long enough for the media to cover it. Protest is a fundamental part of human existence, and every period in history has the potential to bring about important changes.

Social movements are the form that protest takes most often in today's world. They give regular people an opportunity to explore, articulate, and live out their most basic moral intuitions and principles. Individuals join together to try to recruit, persuade, and inspire others, using all the tools they can find: money, media, stories, collective identities, jokes, cartoons, and sometimes weapons. Some participate casually and sporadically, while others devote their lives to a series of deeply felt causes.

In a cynical world, where we suspect self-interest behind the most seemingly altruistic actions, it might appear hard to understand people who give up material comforts, financial stability, time with family, a normal life, in favor of moral projects and risky tactics that seem to have a vanishingly small chance of success. Who are these people, who often provide such benefits for our society, while taking relatively few for themselves? What motivates them? How do they think about the world? What helps them win or makes them lose?

In recent years scholars who study social movements have come more and more to appreciate the cultural meanings and feelings that accompany protest, and the ways that people weave these together to make sense of their lives and advance their moral dreams. Protestors and those they engage "feel their way" through actions and decisions, expressing and creating their own goals and identities as well as sifting through a variety of tactics to try to get what they want. We can't understand social movements without understanding participants' points of view.

Looking at voluntary collective action for a cause is also a good way to see how culture works, because central to any social movement is the effort to create new meanings. Nowhere is the creation of culture, or its effects on the world we live in, more obvious. We need to appreciate culture to understand protest, but protest also helps us to understand where culture comes from.

Culture is meaning: how we make sense of the world, including how we understand our own actions and motives, how we signal them to others, how we understand the actions of others, and figure out who we are and who we wish to be. It is both in our heads and embodied in physical carriers such as a couple of words painted on a sheet to make a banner to carry in a march. It is both a continuous process and the occasional products of that process.

One aspect of culture consists of the many emotions that give cognitive understandings their power to attract attention or motivate action. Feelings are present in every stage and every aspect of protest, just as they are there in all human life. Once thought to be a source of irrationality, emotions can also aid us in making decisions and pursuing our goals. Indignation, an emotion that combines anger with moral outrage, is the heart of protest, the first signal that we feel there is something wrong in the world that must be fixed. It also gives us the energy to try to fix it.

Strategy is another cultural dimension of protest: decisions about goals and the means to pursue them; the creation of alliances and the identification of opponents; the mobilization of resources to enable the tactics we select. Strategic choices are rarely straightforward; there are innumerable puzzles and dilemmas that protestors must negotiate. For every choice, there are costs and dangers alongside the promises and benefits. As we proceed, I will identify some of the most common of these tradeoffs, because to understand how protestors do what they do (and whether they win or lose), we need to watch them struggle with these dilemmas. (Tradeoffs become dilemmas when decision-makers recognize and grapple with them.) We can't understand how they make strategic decisions except through the cultural meanings that they have available or which they invent. Even the most pedestrian choices are filtered through a cultural lens.

I will use three labels, social movement, protest movement, and protest, almost interchangeably. Most social movements are protest movements, focused on what participants find offensive in their world, even though they may also go on to develop positive proposals for alternatives. (Some do and some do not develop ways of doing things differently.) British citizens battling to stop new roads are a protest movement; those promoting craft ales over mass-produced lagers are a social movement. So protest movements are a subset of social movements.

But not all protest takes the form of protest movements: those with complaints may follow normal channels exclusively, satisfied with writing to their elected representatives or to their local newspaper; at the other extreme, some protestors form revolutionary armies instead of protest movements. Often, political parties channel protest without the need for distinct movements; the parties are the movement.

Individuals do not always wait for social movements in order to protest. Some find ways to protest all by themselves, in dramatic acts that others cannot ignore, such as hunger strikes or self-immolation. In 1953 India created a new Telugu-speaking state, Andhra Pradesh, in part because one man, named Potti Sreeramulu, starved himself to death to bring attention to this cause. (As I write, other Indians are setting themselves on fire in the hope of splitting a part of Andhra Pradesh off to form yet another new state, just as dozens of Tibetans have done the same to protest China's occupation of their nation.) But if individuals are going to coordinate their protest, they form movements.

At any moment thousands of social movements are active around the world. Even those readers who participate in one or two social movements will encounter most other movements by reading about them and seeing them on television. What should we ask about them when we read about them? How do we get beneath the biases of media coverage? How can we make sense of what they are up to? We need to approach them with a cultural lens.

I have taught graduate and undergraduate courses on social movements since 1987, and I have learned more from my students than they have from me. Many or most had been activists before taking my class, while taking it, or after taking it. The causes have changed, from AIDS and gay and lesbian rights in the early years to global justice and the Occupy movements more recently, but similar challenges and dilemmas have confronted them all. My students at the CUNY Graduate Center - itself a protected space that nurtures political activism - have been especially helpful as I have tried to figure out what happens during political engagement. I thank them all, and especially Kevin Moran, Marisa Tramontano, and Gabriele Cappelletti for their research assistance. The weekly Politics and Protest Workshop at the Grad Center gave me extensive comments, and Liz Borland and her students at the College of New Jersey generously did a test run of the manuscript and provided excellent feedback. Naomi Gerstel, A. K. Thompson, and Jonathan Smucker provided far-reaching commentaries on earlier drafts. I also thank the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Wassenaar, which provided food, lodging, fellowship, and a charming office where I wrote the first draft of Protest.

I try in this book to give an introduction to protest and social movements that highlights action and intention - the subjective - without ignoring structure and constraints. It covers the main kinds of questions that researchers have asked about social movements and related engagements in recent decades, presenting these in a style that I hope any reader can understand. To make the book classroom-friendly, I have placed in jarring boldface the concepts that I think a student should know after reading the book, using italics for lists and other normal kinds of writing emphasis. (Thus bloc recruitment is in bold, while music is italicized as part of a list of physical carriers of meaning. I don't think you need me to define music for you.) I have placed the most common dilemmas in sidebars. To make the book more readable I have been sparing in my use of citations, and apologize to all those scholars whose work I could have cited but did not.

Each chapter begins with a case that I then exploit for evidence to illustrate my themes in the remainder of the chapter. I have tried to mix important historical movements like "Wilkes and Liberty" and the women's movement with recent efforts like Occupy, as well as including one rightwing movement, the US Christian Right, and one attempted revolution, in Egypt. For those who would like to read more,...