In a political era marked by mass public gatherings – from school encampments to streets thick with crowds – why have some counted as protests, while others have been dismissed as senseless riots? Unruly Acts argues that common ideas of protest underestimate the crucial role that public audiences play in making sense of street gatherings and, as a result, misconceive the politics of protest. Drawing on original archival research about two controversial gatherings challenging police brutality and anti-immigrant nativism, Stacey Liou elucidates the agonistic dynamics by which a protest's meanings are created – in protesters' words and deeds, and by disagreements between protesters and audiences as well as audiences themselves. These public acts, interpretations, and disagreements, the book shows, are conditioned by material, collective, and affective criteria of protest. Unruly Acts is a timely examination of the politics of interpretation and the contested social relations that lie at the heart of protest.

‘Unruly Acts is a compellingly original contribution to political theory and contentious politics. Stacey Liou asks why some public assemblies are labeled riots while others are recognized as protests? Challenging essentialist accounts, Liou draws on performative theory to demonstrate how assemblies are interpreted through shifting public criteria of materiality, collectivity, and affect. Drawing on rich archival research from Los Angeles, Unruly Acts offers a major interdisciplinary contribution to debates on protest and political judgment.’

Jonathan Havercroft - University of Glasgow

‘Stacey Liou’s Unruly Acts teaches us how to read a protest - and how to read a riot as a protest. This book offers a brilliant new theory of political performativity and an incisive and capacious repertoire of interpretation, resistance, and revolt. It will be of interest to democratic theorists; social movement scholars; scholars of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots/Uprising, the immigrant’s rights movement, and our age of uprisings; and anyone interested in how to think politics from below.’

Sina Kramer - Loyola Marymount University

‘Arguing that the meaning of mass gatherings is never fully settled, Stacey Liou offers an incisive and timely study of the performative dynamics of protest. Moving deftly from the 1992 LA Uprising to the January 6 insurrection, Liou shows with rare clarity how materiality, affect, and collectivity shape whose anger gets heard as politics. Unruly Acts is essential reading for anyone thinking seriously about race, democracy, and the contested terrain of public dissent.’

Cristina Beltrán - New York University

‘The distinctions we draw between a democratic protest and a destructive riot, between the acts of the people and the acts of the mob, have themselves been continuous sites of political contestation. In bringing the often implicit criteria we use to make such distinctions into conceptual focus, Stacey Liou’s new book offers an innovative contribution to the growing literature on the democratic theory of popular assembly.’

Jason Frank - Cornell University