Environmental protest, contention, and the law: conceptualizing the Public Order Act 2023

Peaceful protesters across Europe are facing increasingly punitive and intolerant legal frameworks. Why has the law become more repressive? How are new offences reshaping the boundaries of democratic participation and state control? Beyond their overt function of maintaining order, what do these laws reveal about power, politics, and contested civic values in liberal democracies? This article attends to these questions. Taking the Public Order Act 2023 as its focus – a statute frequently cited as emblematic of protest criminalization but not yet given close scholarly examination – the article conceptualizes the Act as emerging from, and integral to, what sociologists term a ‘cycle of contention’. Through this lens, the article identifies and develops two complementary accounts of law's relationship with protest, power, and contention: (1) functional and (2) deliberative. This analysis reveals protest law not simply as a tool of demobilization, but as a deeply expressive means through which competing visions of ‘public wrongs’ are defined, justified, and constituted within a political community.