Is Protest Dead?

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Review Is Protest Dead? Why global resistance movements have failed and where they go from here. February 21, 2025, 2:00 PM Comment icon View Comments ( 0 ) By Jan-Werner Müller , a professor of politics at Princeton University. Hundreds of people can be seen as they march down a street surrounded on either side by the bare branches of trees. Many hold up hand-lettered signs. Visible messages include “Real men serve their country, not themselves” and “Convicted felon? Not my POTUS.” Demonstrators participate in the “People’s March on Washington” in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 18. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images My FP: Follow topics and authors to get straight to what you like. Exclusively for FP subscribers. Subscribe Now | Log In United States North America South America On Jan. 18, a People’s March took place in Washington to protest Donald Trump ahead of the start of his second term. Tens of thousands of people showed up, but it was hard not to notice the contrast with the 2017 Women’s March after Trump’s first inauguration, when millions of Americans took to the streets in the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. While the new administration has already shown that it poses a far greater threat to U.S. democracy than Trump’s first presidency, it is unclear what shape any possible opposition movement will take this time round. In this moment of uncertainty, it’s worth turning to two historical analyses of protest movements published in recent years—one lamenting their widespread failures and political defeats, the other celebrating long-term cultural transformations—to understand the barriers to effective protest today, as well as the possibilities that resistance might still hold for societal change. On Jan. 18, a People’s March took place in Washington to protest Donald Trump ahead of the start of his second term. Tens of thousands of people showed up, but it was hard not to notice the contrast with the 2017 Women’s March after Trump’s first inauguration, when millions of Americans took to the streets in the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. While the new administration has already shown that it poses a far greater threat to U.S. democracy than Trump’s first presidency, it is unclear what shape any possible opposition movement will take this time round. In this moment of uncertainty, it’s worth turning to two historical analyses of protest movements published in recent years—one lamenting their widespread failures and political defeats, the other celebrating long-term cultural transformations—to understand the barriers to effective protest today, as well as the possibilities that resistance might still hold for societal change. Trending Articles What It Means for Europe to Go It Alone Europe and NATO are facing an existential crisis as the Trump administration aims a wrecking ball at trans-Atlantic… Powered By Advertisement What It Means for Europe to Go It Alone X An aerial view shows a giant crowd of thousands of people holding a huge green-and-yellow banner over their heads. The banner reads in part: “Impeachment.” Demonstrators rally for Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on March 16, 2016. Miguel Schincariol/AFP via Getty Images In If We Burn : The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution , journalist Vincent Bevins provides a sobering account of the period from 2010 to 2020, which serves as a cautionary tale to future activists. That decade, Bevins argues, saw more protests than ever before, but these mass mobilizations mostly failed to achieve their goals, and many even encouraged counter-revolutions. If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, Vincent Bevins, PublicAffairs, 352 pp., , October 2023 If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution , Vincent Bevins, PublicAffairs, 352 pp., $30, October 2023 Bevins’s prime example is Brazil, where he has worked as a foreign correspondent. In the early 2010s, young left-wing activists opposed fare increases in public transport and pushed the governing Workers’ Party to live up to its progressive program. Short of material resources, Brazilians from the “vegan punk” milieu relied on their creativity and courage to organize impressive mass demonstrations. Yet, Bevins writes, this discontent was eventually hijacked by well-financed forces from the right, as young Brazilians pushing a libertarian economic agenda copied some of the rhetoric and aesthetics of left-wing protestors. The right also succeeded in impeaching the president, Dilma Rousseff, in 2016. One lawmaker who endorsed Rousseff’s removal from office dedicated his vote to the very colonel who had tortured Rousseff during Brazil’s military dictatorship. That lawmaker’s name was Jair Bolsonaro. He ascended to the presidency less than three years later. This trajectory—or, rather, tragedy—from idealistic left-wing protest to Bolsonaro’s far-right regime illustrates Bevins’s main idea: that movements can shake things up, but unless they are well-structured and pursue long-term strategies for change, the vacuum they create will be filled by the better organized. The better organized are often simply the better financed—and in most countries, the money remains on the right. Bevins’s book surveys 10 major protest episodes; at least seven, he argues, turned out to be clear failures, and most hardly brought about fundamental change or achieved protestors’ aims. (Even Ukraine’s Euromaidan, he writes, was “a kind of draw” due in part to the failures of “de-oligarchization.”) To his point, the few success stories from that period look even more dubious after If We Burn’s publication. South Korea’s “candlelight revolution” against right-wing President Park Geun-hye ended with Park’s impeachment, but problems with the country’s democracy hardly disappeared. In fact, the politician who prosecuted Park and eventually became president—Yoon Suk Yeol—has now himself been impeached after his illegitimate declaration of martial law in December. Likewise, the political change sparked by Chile’s estallido social , or “social explosion,” has largely stalled. The mass unrest, initially prompted by a 2019 increase in public transportation fares, saw millions of Chileans take to the streets. It culminated in leftist Gabriel Boric, a leader in Chile’s 2011 student protests, winning the presidency in December 2021. Yet attempts to fundamentally change the system inherited from the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet have not succeeded. The estallido felt like a real rupture, and yet today, people are asking whether anything meaningful will come of it. To be sure, the concept of protest implies an affirmation of the powers that be. After all, protest entails addressing an adversary in a position of authority—and that adversary is meant to do something, rather than step aside. As Bevins puts it: “At its most basic level, a protest says, ‘I don’t like this—you fix it.’” Nobody would describe Vladimir Lenin as a “protest leader” aiming to put pressure on the Russian tsar to change policies. By contrast, Bevins yearns for revolution, or full-fledged societal transformation. He is largely dismissive of less tangible forms of change that protest can inspire. In particular, he rejects the supposed value of what social scientists call “prefigurative politics,” or the practice of demonstrating to large audiences—prefiguring—that a different world is possible. Occupy Wall Street is a prime example of prefigurative politics. The 2011 movement tried to showcase that anarchist ideals of free and spontaneous cooperation were not pipe dreams. What some observers considered cute communitarian details of encampments—the common kitchen, the free libraries, the drumming circles (the things that also appeared on campuses during last year’s protests against Israel’s war in Gaza)—in the eyes of others constituted the most important political message. Police officers in uniforms use batons to push back against a crowd of protesters, many of them in hoodies, hats, and coats, in a chaotic scene that is partly blurry with movement. Occupy Wall Street protesters clash with police in Zuccotti Park in New York City on Nov. 17, 2011. Allison Joyce/Getty Images The point of Occupy was not to ask politely for some technocratic fix to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Rather than recognizing the existing system by addressing demands to it, the movement sought to move outside of it altogether. As the late anthropologist David Graeber, a leading theorist of prefiguration who helped organize Occupy, wrote in 2002, the anarchist movement “is not opposed to organization. It is about creating new forms of organization. It is not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its ideology.” Bevins will have none of it. He dismisses, for instance, the 2011 encampment at Cairo’s Tahrir Square as “a carnival of prefiguration and structurelessness.” In his account, the absence of organization and leaders among the protestors partly explains why the Arab Spring turned into Arab Winter. He thinks there are distinct disadvantages to protests committed to “horizontalism”—or the idea that a movement should dispense with leaders and hierarchical organizations, and instead make decisions based on consensus, to prefigure a truly egalitarian society. In practice, according to critics like Bevin, the imperative of consensus gives small minorities veto power. Bevins’s conclusion is blunt: Movements that grow quickly in numbers but lack structure will fail, as will movements that have only one tactical move (for instance, taking a square and then sitting in it); notions of “spontaneity,” meanwhile, are considered naive because they assume that, once things are shaken up, something positive will emerge from the chaos. It’s a neat conclusion, and genuine political change does indeed require organization. But one should not assume that the success of movements is determined solely by their internal organization or the cleverness of their strategy. It is no longer news that 21st century autocracies are capable of learning and have become smarter in disabling protest. And there is reason to believe that meaningful transformations are still occurring, even when we can’t see them right away. In this black-and-white photo, protesters gather around what looks like a burning cardboard object built to resemble a cartoonish tank in the middle of a street lined with some brick buildings and some with columns. Other people are seen watching along the side of the street on either side, some with their hands in their pockets, others waving. Supporters of the Indiani Metropolitani movement during a demonstration in Milan, Italy, on March 18, 1977. Edoardo Fornaciari/Getty Images Revolution and counter-revolution are not the only possible outcomes in history. Historian Joachim C. Häberlen’s engaging book, Beauty Is In the Street : Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe , serves as a reminder of this. Häberlen seeks to offer a “microscopic” view of history that ranges from unruly teenagers in 1950s West Germany to sophisticated dissident philosophers in 1970s Czechoslovakia. Beauty is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe, Joachim C. Häberlen, Penguin, 512 pp., .99, April 2025 Beauty is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe , Joachim C. Häberlen, Penguin, 512 pp., $18.99, April 2025 It is hard to discern an overarching argument among the book’s many (and fascinating) details, but one point that stands out is that “ultimately, what people did is more inspiring than tangible results.” As Häberlen shows, many movements failed to achieve their stated goals, but, in the process, groups such as the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the United Kingdom built lasting relations of solidarity and, one might add, indeed prefigured a different world: The women did not succeed in removing nuclear weapons, but their camp proved inspiring for British feminists. What Italian radicals called stare insieme —being together, whether through squatting or engaging in “proletarian shopping” (that is, simply taking food from supermarkets)—changed everyday culture, according to Häberlen, even if the underlying revolutionary theories remained just that: theories. Häberlen uncovers what he sees as effective forms of protest that are very different from the super-organized and super-serious Leninism for which Bevins shows sympathy. In particular, he stresses the subversive power of laughter. The Dutch Provos’ election slogan in the mid-1960s was “Vote Provo for better weather”; Poland’s anti-communist Orange Alternative taunted the police by painting dwarfs everywhere and had people dancing in the streets in bizarre attire. Not every festival is a revolution, but, ideally, every revolution should feel like a festival, instantiating what the Indiani Metropolitani, an Italian far-left protest movement, called a politics of joy. Beyond people having fun, according to Häberlen, these practices undermined the authority of states whose representatives often proved helpless in the face of expressions of discontent not reducible to concrete demands or recognizable political doctrines. Häberlen does not gloss over the darker aspects of postwar European leftism, including the terrorist violence of the 1970s and the fact that many self-declared progressive movements had significant blind spots. For instance, male leftists in France declared that women voicing feminist demands were simply “under-fucked.” He is also alert to one of the smartest accounts of how protest can end up affirming established forms of power: As a seminal analysis by French social scientists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello showed, post-’60s capitalism managed to appropriate radicals’ critique of stultifying bureaucracy in major corporations; students demanding autonomy and creativity eventually gave us a freewheeling California-style work culture, one that allows employees to wear hoodies and get free espressos, but that is no less exploitative. Yet despite the movements’ flaws, Häberlen reminds us that postwar activism fostered and relied on important relationships among very different groups: At least in France and Italy, workers and students agitated together. That rarely happens today. The imperative to create broad coalitions—and have effective organization—remains valid for anyone thinking about resistance against Trump 2.0. The problem is that, as Bevins pointed out, protest often presumes that the existing political system is ultimately fine, and that it’s the job of one elite or another to “fix it.” That is one lesson we might take from the first Trump administration. In its final year, the United States witnessed enormous grassroots mobilization around Black Lives Matter, one of the largest sustained protests in the country’s history. But not enough work continued to advance the movement’s aims during the Biden years. In fact, the Democratic establishment often seemed ambivalent about too much grassroots activity and was hardly as determined to challenge oligarchic power as it should have been. True, the Democrats were only in power for four years. But time in politics is always short. Anyone reading these two books may want to take both of their lessons on board: Coherent organizing—as opposed to performative resistance—matters, but so does the patient, sometimes subversive, work of long-term transformation. Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page. Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University. His most recent book is Democracy Rules . Read More On Brazil | Donald Trump | North America | Public Opinion | South America | United States Join the Conversation Commenting on this and other recent articles is just one benefit of a Foreign Policy subscription. 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