From anti-war to Palestine Action: The way we protest is changing – so how did we get here?

If you think that protest might be looking a little different nowadays, it’s not just you. Protests have changed a huge amount since the turn of the millennium, and right now we are in the grips of another major transformation in how ordinary people challenge authority.  

It doesn’t seem like too long ago that when someone asked you to think of a protest, the image of large crowds marching peacefully through urban centres would spring to mind. But try and think of a typical protest nowadays, and you’re more likely to imagine people being hauled off into police vans for holding a placard.

I write, of course, not only of the recent solidarity protests held by supporters of Palestine Action, but of a major change in the substance of British protest in recent years. Let’s look at how we arrived here.  

In the early 2000s, Britain was firmly in an era of ‘demonstrations’: large-scale gatherings designed to visibly demonstrate public sentiment on a particular issue.

This was a method fit for an era in which governments were highly sensitive to ‘public opinion’, and often sought to probe it to determine their actions.

Protests against the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003 regularly took such a form, with as many as two million people (6% of all households in the UK) estimated to have attended a march through London on 15 February 2003. 

But demonstrations were effective only when governments were open to influence and required huge logistical support and awareness-raising to get started.

After more than a decade of peaceful demonstrations proved ineffective, activists sought to employ new tactics to capture public attention and challenge powerholders. One response was to stage disruptive mass protests.

Unlike the orderly marches of the early 2000s, these were characterised by spontaneity and a willingness to break rules – sometimes leading to clashes with police, property damage, and even riots (such as those in London in 2011).

Inspired by the Arab Spring, where disruptive mass protests and occupations felled regimes and pushed police off the streets, activists also began staging occupations of urban spaces to attract attention and draw in participants.  

The fusion of these tactics reached its zenith in Britain in April 2019, when the activist group Extinction Rebellion staged a series of mass occupations: large scale protests that occupied multiple sites. By effectively combining occupations with disruptive mass protest, Extinction Rebellion created eye-catching spectacles that attracted worldwide attention and simultaneously rolled out a street infrastructure capable of pulling thousands of new recruits into climate action in the process.  

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Just as activists seemed to have hit a winning formula, the Covid pandemic suddenly made disruptive mass occupations much more difficult to stage. In response, activist groups in the UK pivoted to smaller-scale disruptive direct-action spectacles carried out by hardcore devotees.

These sorts of actions were certainly not new (remember the eye-catching Fathers4Justice protests of the 2000s, some of which bear striking resemblance to Just Stop Oil protests of past years), but the absence of mass protests, they became a kind of emblematic representation of protest. While physical audiences were often relatively absent, the spectacle of these protests could be distributed at a global scale using social media platforms.  

After pandemic restrictions ended, groups such as Extinction Rebellion sought to once again organise larger scale protests. XR’s major, four-day effort, The Big One, was undertaken in April 2023, but attendance fell short of expectations. And so, back to direct action it was.   

Recent years have seen increasing public fatigue about disruptive actions – despite their efficacy at getting issues into the public eye. Harsher sentencing has also prompted activists to weigh the costs of their participation more heavily. Hence, recent instances of protest have taken the form of tactical direct actions, instances of protest which directly affect a group’s opponents, rather than seeking to influence the public or powerholders in a more roundabout way.

The most prominent group using these methods today is Palestine Action, a group which has directly targeted businesses and infrastructure that it has judged to be materially aiding the oppression of Palestinians.  

Meanwhile, the harsh targeting of other direct action groups such as Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain has led to protesters directly targeting the infrastructures of the justice system in order to try and ensure that the right to protest, and the right to a fair trial for one’s actions, are protected in a context where activists now risk criminal prosecution in order to see the change they believe in realised. This work has been spearheaded by a campaign named Defend Our Juries.  

The proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation has further bolstered this form of ‘activism about activism’, with Defend Our Juries recently declaring in a statement: “Democracy is over, the only thing left is to resist.” The group – alongside other participants in a campaign entitled ‘We Do Not Comply’ – plan to engage in mass breaches of terrorism laws (by endorsing Palestine Action), to undermine the government’s proscription efforts.

Amid harsher sanctions on disruptive protest, activism is now fighting to save itself, in a last-ditch effort to unknot the noose of state power before it tightens around their necks. 

But what’s next for protest? While an important fight is underway over the rights of protesters and their supporters, my view is that British activists may have abandoned mass disruptive protest a little too readily. Evidence from the United States suggests that – even during pandemic restrictions – disruptive mass protest proved effective in mobilising a large number of people following the murder of George Floyd.

Recent mass protests for Palestine in the UK also suggest that there is once again a public appetite for taking to the street. These protests have the benefit of generalising participation in a cause beyond a narrow set of committed activists to whom the public cannot always relate. If Britain’s activists wish to avoid marginalisation in the long run, they must bring the masses back in to political protest. 

Benjamin Abrams is a lecturer in sociology at University College London.

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