Bookended on one end by Occupy Wall Street and on the other by Hong Kong residents protesting police violence, the 2010s have been called the decade of global protest. The year 2020 is on track to eclipse the previous decade in terms of protests, from armed challenges to shelter-in-place orders, to health care workers calling for more personal protective equipment, to mass demonstrations that began in response to George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department—all in fewer than six months. The publication of Protest and Dissent: NOMOS LXII, edited by Melissa Schwartzberg, thus could not be more relevant to our contemporary political moment, and its 10 essays pose questions that encourage us to think carefully about some of the normative, strategic, and democratic nuances of the politics of resistance.
As to be expected from an interdisciplinary group of philosophers, legal scholars, and political theorists, the collected contributions approach a core set of themes from a variety of perspectives and reference points. Among these themes are the appropriate bounds of civil and uncivil dissent, considerations of systemic reform and radical transformation, the relation between the ends of protest and the appropriate means to achieve those ends, and the democratic significance of protest and dissent. As a collection of contributions that originated in conference proceedings in 2017, the published volume presents a lively and ongoing discussion between chapters, with many directly responding to or engaging with others.
One line of inquiry woven through the volume concerns the proper function of protest. Should it be understood primarily as a communicative endeavor, wherein participants aim to convey an existing injustice and seek change in public opinion and policy? Richard Thompson Ford’s provocative chapter “Protest Fatigue” suggests that protest is a persuasive activity that should aim to voice legitimate concerns about grave injustices. Today’s mass protests, he claims, are overused and misused, producing a disruptive to “needlessly irritating or downright counterproductive effect” (p. 164). As several other chapters contend, however, acts of protest—whether civil or uncivil—do not aim only or even primarily at communicative ends; they are also, for instance, expressive and constitutive activities. Both Amna A. Akbar, in “The Radical Possibilities of Protest,” and Susan J. Brison, in “‘No Ways Tired’: An Antidote for Protest Fatigue in the Trump Era” (a direct response to Ford’s essay), contend that moments of protest carry deep experiential significance for their participants. Such moments can express and make visible collectively shared feelings like grief, anger, and solidarity, just as they can also unite protestors or, in Akbar’s description of contemporary forms of radical protest movements, such as the abolitionist organization Critical Resistance and the immigrant justice organization Mijente, build an “alternative political community” (p. 68). Indeed, in “Disobedience in Black: On Race and Dissent,” Juliet Hooker reminds us that protest has been a way for African Americans to assert and affirm their individual and collective human dignity. Invoking African American political thought, Hooker in fact challenges an understanding of protest as primarily communicative, noting that the ability or willingness to hear dissent as a communicative act is mediated by the very injustices that dissent aims to surface.
But if audiences are unreceptive to protest, how to effectively challenge conditions of injustice? Sometimes, José Medina writes, in “No Justice, No Peace: Uncivil Protest and the Politics of Confrontation,” strategic confrontation is necessary to puncture the epistemic ignorance or “social blindness, apathy, and insensitivity” (p. 125) that sustain injustice and social violence. The decision whether to be more or less civil—that is, what constitutes the appropriate mode of confrontation—can only be assessed and interpreted contextually. But taking seriously Hooker’s rejoinder that the value of dissent exceeds its communicative potential might give us pause about prioritizing protest’s efficacy or distinguishing between its means and ends. We might instead follow Akbar in probing what alternatives are enabled by protest. What kinds of alternative social relationships, for instance, do acts of resistance enact? In “On the Strike and Democratic Protest,” John Medearis maintains that strikes not only require a collective but they also enact and are simultaneously exercises of that collective. Strikes are a form of protest that constitute and reproduce horizontal, egalitarian—democratic—relations among participants, illustrating the interdependence of means and ends. Karuna Mantena comes to a similar conclusion about this interdependence in reconceptualizing strategic nonviolence as disciplined action. In strategic nonviolence, participants perform a self-discipline and restraint to dampen the passions that fan political conflict, as well as to contain and learn from the contingent effects of their worldly acts. On Medearis’s and Mantena’s view, these acts of protest and dissent enact the ends they wish to see, imbricating means and ends. Resistance, here, is an iterative, processual, and experimental practice that retains and exceeds its communicative character.
Notwithstanding these compelling essays, an explicit discussion of what counts as protest or dissent would have helped clarify the object of discussion. These contributions do not all operate under the same assumptions about what counts as protest or dissent, as illustrated by the wide range of acts referenced—from the March for Our Lives to San Francisco’s pro-cyclist Critical Mass to Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing to chanting “Shame!” at former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen as she was dining at a Mexican restaurant. Some essays focus on collective action, whereas others make individual resistance a point of reference. But not all forms of collective or individual action are understood as protest or dissent: just as the Tournament of Roses Parade is generally not understood as a political demonstration, a one-person strike is no strike at all.
To evaluate a protest’s legitimacy or appropriateness, we need to consider the terms under which it is first intelligible as political resistance. Under what conditions does an act even appear to be an act of protest or dissent? We might ask whether the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville or, indeed, politicized refusals to wear face coverings in the midst of a global pandemic also qualify as protests. But these do not seem to be what the contributors have in mind. One assumption implicit here is that protest is and should be tied to emancipatory political ends. However, as the armed challenges to shelter-in-place orders reveal and as Ford acknowledges, protest as a tactic of resistance has been deployed by actors across the political spectrum—at times to decidedly illiberal and inegalitarian ends. My hunch is that a protest’s political intelligibility is as much a reflection of who interprets it as it is of participants’ actions: acts of resistance cannot escape their communicative, audience-engaging character even if they are not intended in this way. This brings us back to Medina’s contextualism. Contexts of interpretation change across time and across audiences, and those that had previously considered an act unintelligible as political resistance may later apprehend it as such. Although an act’s political intelligibility and its perceived legitimacy are deeply entwined, examining the conditions of the former would seem to be part and parcel of evaluating the latter.
Schwartzberg and the contributors to this volume provide a theoretically engaging and empirically grounded set of essays that contribute to current scholarly debates about political resistance. Leaving us with much to consider, these essays are a clarion call to think broadly and ethically about the possibilities and limits of protest and dissent.
