In a world filled with "ambient violence", public protest is a vital signal of shared discontent. The essential compulsion at the heart of protest, however, is conventionally not recognised for what it is: solidarity with those suffering injustices. Despite this overabundance of discourses, it often remains unclear what protest, at heart, constitutes. That is, what are we talking about when we talk about protest, and why does this question matter? In this paper I consider the constituent parts of protest formation in the abstract, including grievances, gestures, and tactics, among other. Developing these constituent parts reveals protest to be, first and foremost, a manifestation of a nonhegemonic ethical commitment to justice, requiring courage and coordination, and whose outcome is always contingent, that is, an act of love. I also reflect on the nature of protest as a direct political action that sits on a continuum that ranges from opposition politics to civil war. This continuum offers a graded view ranking expressions of discontent by severity of outcome.
South Africa remains beset by protest. Notwithstanding an impressive literature, quantifying protests remains problematic; most attempts extrapolate from samples or media-derived data sets. Applying machine learning to the world’s largest publicly available, single-country public-event database – the South African Police Service’s Incident Registration Information System – the article classifies 150,000 events into type and levels of ‘tumult’. The author provides the first holistic picture of all police-reported protest in South Africa over a given period (1997–2013), showing a count increase (partly confirming the ‘rebellion of the poor’ thesis), while more nuanced measures (i.e. protestors per capita) demonstrate a less urban and tumultuous phenomenon than previously theorised.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.