Do Protests Work?
Yes, but rarely in the ways you might expect
As entrepreneurs, futurists, journalists, demographers, strategists, social innovators and leaders of companies and non-profit causes, we’re all witnessing a “movement moment” — a riptide of increased participation across civil society.
We’re also witnessing the biggest student protest movement on American soil in decades. College students across the country are demanding their universities divest from Israel to pressure an end to the war in Gaza.
Much like the protests in the 1960s, the mass protest happening now, in many ways, is just as messy, and just as fraught with some of the same problems most major movements experience. Said writer/commentator Anand Giridharadas, founder of The Ink, in a recent interview: “It’s important to be very clear that there is no place for hate speech, anti-semitism or violence at any time, but … we need to acknowledge that young people often tell jaded society something that society cannot hear. …We’ve been hearing from young people these past weeks who are having profound moral concerns about this war in Gaza, and they are of an age and generation that hasn’t seen the conventional methods of political participation work. They haven’t seen voting that delivers the fruits of what was promised. They should be curious about what they don’t know— and we should be curious about what we don’t see.”
To be sure, this post-pandemic era is one in which movements and protests and acts of civil disobedience are being waged on many issues, simultaneously.
“It’s as if water has reached places that have been dry since before the pandemic,” says veteran community organizer Marshall Ganz, a senior lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Suddenly, it seems, thousands of seeds that lay dormant have started sprouting.” Now, says Ganz, “more young people, especially, want to lead some of the action.”
The Basics
In recent days, especially, I’ve been getting asked by many of my former and current students at Columbia about what I think about all of this. As a journalist, I’ve covered dozens of protests—from the early Act Up demonstrations staged on the White House lawn during the AIDs crisis, to the pro-democracy protests in China and Cairo, and more recently, to the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements as they unfurled in New York, San Francisco and across the Midwest. I have observed, first hand, what’s made some protests effective and others short-lived.
But as an academic, I also know from dozens of research papers and polling over the last three decades that mass demonstrations rarely achieve 100 percent of what they originally demand. Even if a protest campaign can sustain itself over time, it can take a long while to achieve measurable results. It’s how a functioning democracy works. Change initiated by the grassroots—even if later aided by well-funded outside interests—most often happens incrementally.
Protest movements which have the best shot at long-term success share some basic characteristics, from the start.
Here are some of them:
(Spoiler alert: The student movement protesting the war in Gaza has, so far, achieved only some of these requirements for success.)
Size Matters
The most successful student demonstrations are those which have a large and growing number of participants. According to a report on protests recently released by the Social Change Lab, it takes both numbers and sophisticated management by protest leaders to wield a credible swell of attention from authorities and policymakers.
Columbia’s student movement began with an effective digital organizing strategy, which made it easier for leaders to coordinate and synchronize some of the actions of all campuses participating in the movement. Leaders created and distributed branded start-up guidelines to participants at Columbia and other universities, including how to design the tent encampments across the quad areas and when to assign key roles to student supporters. Social media have always been a big deal, but this movement has been one of the first to digitally document hourly movement updates, and to set up a central command center guided by AI-aided metrics, a running tally of the number of actions taken against students on each campus by police and AI tools to help shape and translate key messages and smartphone footage of the encampments, interviews with participants and public testimonials to share on TikTok.
“Authorities, whether government or university, are not afraid of empowered individuals,” says internet scholar and NYU technology professor Clay Shirky. “They’re afraid of coordinated groups.”
Political relevancy
It’s important to tap into pre-existing public opinion, cultivate supportive elites and access an engaged digital and mainstream media environment. Successful protests also need to be able to woo (and keep) a big chunk of public opinion on their side—and enlist political allies.
This spring’s student movement has been struggling to fully meet this requirement. On one hand, the movement has been benefiting from recent national poll data showing that a majority of American citizens oppose the war in Gaza. But the protests also have been operating in both a highly divisive political climate, with aggressive outside rabble-rousers co-guiding the way. The movement also has lost some political allies in the U.S. House and Senate—from both sides of the aisle—when Columbia protesters, and those elsewhere, began breaking into campus buildings and defacing university property. Just before police were called in by Columbia administrators to force the close of the protesters’ encampment on the Columbia quad, 21 House Democrats urged Columbia’s governing board “to act decisively” to stop the demonstration, or resign.
“Elite allies seem to be immensely important, because legislators are ultimately the people who drive the changes,” the Social Lab’s report says. “The reception that any student protest receives from elites may account for 80% of the variance in outcomes.”
Non-violent Tactics
Protests are signals, to message that a group is unhappy and won’t put up with things the way they are. But for protests to be taken seriously, protesters also have to show that they’re not easily bowed.
The student movement has been taken very seriously, and early decisions by movement leaders to strategically defy orders to voluntarily vacate their on-campus tent encampments helped them to meet this tactical requirement. But the outbreaks of violence on some campuses and an increase in hate speech crossed the line, according to Social Change Lab researchers.
“It is hotly debated within social movement circles whether activists should move towards using more violent tactics because the problems we face are so severe and progress can seem very slow,” the Social Lab report states. However, non-violent tactics are more likely to lead to successful outcomes for movements. Civil Rights protests in the U.S. in the 1960s found that states with non-violent protests delivered higher votes for Democratic candidates. States with more violent protests, by contrast, saw increased votes for Republican candidates who backed strong police efforts to keep the status quo by using aggressive law and order tactics. The research also indicated that non-violent protests are much more likely to persuade elected representatives to hold views closer to those of the people protesting.
The Black Lives Matter movement, for example, was high-risk, as some of its protesters got beaten up, while others lost eyesight to rubber bullets during otherwise peaceful protests. BLM protesters also faced many incidents of hate speech, but marchers remained mostly unified in their refusal to respond to it with anger in public settings. It worked well. By 2016, for example, 40 percent of Americans had reported supporting the BLM movement; by 2020, two thirds did and now, it is 73 percent, according to Pew Research. “People think we’re engaged with identity politics,” BLM co-founder Alicia Garza told The New Yorker at the start of that movement. “But the truth is we’re doing what the labor movement has always done—organizing people who are at the bottom.”
Strong Messaging
Memes are the world’s most viral messaging form—image-centric and easily shareable. Once thought to be only amusing pieces of visual communication shared on social media, memes have been evolving as ways for social movements to raise awareness, engage new supporters and strengthen common bonds among supporters.
The student movement’s core meme has become the keffiyeh, the traditional black-and-white scarf that is a symbol of Palestinian nationalism, cultural identity, resistance, existence and national identity. It has been distributed by some movement leaders to demonstrators, and to bystanders supportive of the movement’s call to action. “It’s a power play,” says scholar An Xiao Mina, the author of Memes to Movements. “Memes are images which have the capacity to convert something abstract, distant and complex into something concrete, proximate and simple.”
Other protest movements have used memes showcasing hats and headwear to successfully brand themselves visually, including the 2017 national women’s march on Washington which distributed pink hats to protest the election of Donald Trump, while Trump distributed red and white MAGA caps to his supporters. “Memes come from deep wellsprings in society,” says Mina, “and as more of society comes online, more memes of contention and disagreement appear to communicate cultural shifts visually.”
Clarity of Conflict
Changing the narrative about the protest issue is also a best practice, both to clarify the cause in simple, factual terms, and to challenge the legitimacy of those in power who are rejecting, or mis-characterizing the protest’s purpose.
Entering negotiations with those in power is another way to clarify conflict and work with policymakers to lay the groundwork for change in policies at odds with and organization’s mission. Brown University, Rutgers, Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota recently brokered agreements with student protesters. At Brown, for example, students agreed to dismantle their demonstration in exchange for a seat at the table during an upcoming meeting with the Corporation of Brown University. The students were informed that their demands for divestment could not be guaranteed but were told their inclusion at the meeting would represent a first step in a series of meetings on university policy, and would enable transparency on university investments for possible future action.
“The Soviet Union did not fall because it ran out of tanks to send to Eastern Europe when the people there rebelled in the late 1980s,” says Zaynep Tufekci, author of the 2018 book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. “It fell, in large part, because it ran out of legitimacy, and because Soviet rulers at the time, pre-Putin, had lost the will and the desire to live in their own system. Compared with Western democracies, the Soviet system wasn’t delivering freedom nor wealth, not even to the winners.”
Can this spring’s national student movement succeed?
In some ways, it already has. But to keep it going? That will be much harder.
Stay tuned.
NOTE: This story was updated Friday, May 3rd, to reflect recent developments.