Protests as World‐Making Projects

Abstract

On one common way of distinguishing forms of protest, civil disobedience is a communicative act that aims to achieve its goals through moral persuasion, whereas direct action has as its goal to directly obstruct or deter a perceived injustice. In this paper, we'll argue that this distinction does not do justice to a wide range of protest tactics, including encampments, riots, and strikes, that combine a symbolic element with an element of material contestation. Instead, we'll argue that, for a range of protest tactics we call “world‐making projects,” the communicative or persuasive value of the action depends on the parts of the action often deemed violent or uncivil. In particular, we'll suggest that actions that employ material contestation have the ability to undermine the justification for certain ideological beliefs by changing, even just temporarily and in small ways, what the world is like. We cannot accurately describe the function of these protests, evaluate their effectiveness, or assess their justification without first recognizing how their communicative function is bound up with the ways they intervene into public spaces.