Does protest work?

By Julia Kassem

The Arab American News

Street protests are all the rage these days.

They’re also displays of a lot of rage.

Demonstrations, marches and the like never had a chance to become passe in systems of power unmitigated by oppression and wealth disparity.

Protest entered the Western discourse starting in 1215 with the codification of resentment and revolt through Magna Carta, which sought to bring legal protections to barons subjected by monarchy.

But before that, strikes in Egypt in King Ramses III’s 29th year of rule illustrated an early worker’s protest that far preceded industrial era labor laws.

From Brazil to Lahore to Moscow, technology and media validate the intransigence and ubiquity of a custom that knows no borders. Whether to call for protections, demonstrate against government or commemorate a notable death, demanding change is as much of a global phenomenon as it is a timeless practice.

In the Arab world, protests have actually produced regime change. The 2011 Arab Spring protests overturned governments in multiple countries.

Yet many of these changes in government failed to achieve their intended– and in many cases ideal– transfers of power by either descending into chaos, falling into the hands of equally repressive regimes or leaving power vacuums that became occupied by extremist groups.

Micah White, author of “The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution” and architect for the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, argues that street spectacles such as marches, rallies or demonstrations that aim to place pressure on officials or ignite social change are no longer effective.

“Street protest is broken,” White said. “We’ve been spending  years of doing these street protests that we see don’t work. We need to see start developing a way of seeing street protests as a way to gain sovereignty instead of just creating disruptions.”

The movement that he had been instrumental in creating, he admits, has failed, despite following in the steps of traditional protest.

“My main conclusion is that activism has been based on a series of false assumptions about what kind of behavior creates social change,” he said.

Optimism and transformative power

Ali Fadlallah, 27, is a doctoral student in California and a casual disciple of White’s work.

However, he believes that protests–through marches and rallies–are, in fact, “incredibly important if implemented as part of a broader strategy.”

Fadlallah emphasized that the aim of a protest must be an accomplishment of an economic, political or legislative change. Protest, “while [sustaining] the momentum of a movement… fails if not part of a broader contingency plan.”

The antiwar movements of the 1960s and 1970s are canonized as an era of opposition and demonstration at the crux of the civil rights, anti-war, women’s rights, environmental justice and gay rights movements. All these movements captured public attention, garnered awareness over national issues and incidences of social injustice and helped mobilize action and shape attitudes over key social and policy areas.

The widespread dissemination of technology and prevalence of leaderless movements have changed the dynamics of protest. In this new era, as White stresses, it is important to reinvent and reevaluate forms of protest that are obsolete.

This involves a departure from 1960s counterculture activism where fostering visibility and creating disruption was sufficient at taking disorderly shots at an ordinary system.

“The core insight is that revolutions happen when the weaker side uses unconventional methods,” White writes.

After the conservative, tough-on-crime Richard Nixon was elected, law enforcement was bolstered by the attitudes and measures he advocated, including crackdowns on protests iconized by, for example, the Kent State massacre on May 4, 1970.

With a police state adapted to the typical tactics of protestors under an administration that delivered its promise of “law-and-order”, traditional methods of demonstrating were threatened in terms of their ability to generate the outcomes they had in times of relative novelty.

Reconciling activism and change

“Litigation without activism produces nothing,” said attorney Noel Saleh of the Arab Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines activism as “a doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action, especially in support of or in opposition to a controversial issue.”

As a broader term and emphasizing a wide variety of action and praxis-based approaches, activism is a holistic concept that includes protest in its momentum, yet focuses on applicable social change in its greater method.

Sunday’s protests at airports across the United States in response to Donald Trump’s immigration ban successfully shut down San Fransisco’s international terminal as protestors demanded the release of passengers unlawfully detained.

Following Trump’s election, the ACLU has raised an unprecedented amount of money from donations. The week after Trump’s inauguration alone, the ACLU received more than $24 million in online donations from 356,306 people.

“What the ACLU accomplished this week, I would consider a successful protest,” Fadlallah said. “Just because it occurred within legal means does not mean it wasn’t a revolutionary act.”

People can win culture wars or win moral victories. In the outcome of the 2016 election, constituents banned together to do both.