CfP: How Protests and Counterprotests Interact | ECPR Joint Sessions

Recent years have witnessed a surge in protests around the world. At the same time, the frequency of counterprotests, which oppose and challenge a protest, has also increased.

Counterprotests are not a new phenomenon. They have long been a force influencing a variety of issue areas, including abortion, migration, LGBTQ+ rights, disarmament and labour. But more recently, protest-counterprotest dynamics have intensified and become more common across the globe – reflecting a growing polarization of issues and political conflicts. Some examples of large protest events faced with counterprotests are the Black Lives Matter protests and protests against Covid-19-related measures.

This Workshop will examine the dynamic interaction of protests and counterprotests. Its goal is to systematize and deepen our understanding of how protests influence counterprotests and vice versa with regard to their collective identity formation, emotions, framing, repertoires of action and mobilization success.

We also seek to explore the context of such interactions, and identify the conditions and factors facilitating and shaping this interaction, in terms of the broader political and societal contexts (such as public opinion, media coverage or the legal environment), specific protest-related context factors (such as prior mobilizations), and movement characteristics (such as forms of organization and emotional registers).

The Workshop will contribute to existing research in three ways:

First, it will focus at the level of events. Existing research has, predominantly, examined interactions between movements and countermovements. Analyses of interactions of specific protest events and the counterprotests they may provoke, as well as the conditions affecting these interactions, have received less attention. Only recently have scholars started to analyze the more temporally and spatially bound interactions at the event level, that is assessing the causes and dynamics of protest-counterprotest interactions (Reynolds-Stenson and Earl 2018).

Second, the Workshop will explore how protests influence counterprotests and vice versa beyond effects on size. The majority of research both at the movement- and event-level focuses on such effects in terms of mobilization success. This shows that an increase in size and number of mobilization events by a movement leads to rising levels or size of counterevents staged by social forces opposing it. The effects on other dimensions of social movements, such as their strategic choices, collective identity formation, emotions, and frames are rarely examined (but see e.g. Shahin 2022 and some studies on the effects of radicalization on political violence).

Third, the Workshop will explore and compare the context conditions shaping protest-counterprotest interactions. Existing studies tend to focus on a small range of context conditions when seeking to explain the emergence of countermovements and their trajectories, in particular the role of political elites. This research, for example, points to the relevance of government actors in shaping movement-countermovement interactions – e.g. by providing concessions or backing one of the movements. Instead, this Workshop aims to analyze and compare different contexts of protest and counterprotest interactions – both in terms of broader political and societal contexts as well as specific context factors and movement characteristics.

We welcome scholars at different stages of their careers working on protest and counterprotest interactions. We seek to bring together empirical studies about protests and counterprotests across a range of issue-areas and (geographical) contexts. In particular, we seek Papers that address the three research gaps outlined above. Against this background, we welcome Papers dealing with one or several of the following aspects of protest-counterprotest interactions:

1. Processes of interactions and mutual adjustment and/or divergence between protesters and counterprotesters over time. Papers should address, in particular, one or more of the following dimensions of protest:
•    How do counterprotests affect the framing of the original protests and vice versa?
•    How far can we observe mutual adjustments in terms of action repertoires?
•    How (if at all) do the organizational structures mounting protests and counterprotests change over the course of interaction?
•    How do counterprotesters construct their collective identity in opposition to the protesters and how does the emergence of counterprotests strengthen (or weaken) protesters’ collective identity?
•    How do the emotional registers of protesters alter in reaction to counterprotests?

2. Examination of protest and counterprotest interactions from a comparative perspective – across different kinds of contexts, including different geographical regions, kinds of movements and issue-areas. Existing literature primarily analyses cases of protest-counterprotest dynamics in the US and – to a lesser extent – Europe. Therefore, we especially encourage empirical studies that (also) examine the above-mentioned dynamics and questions in the Global South.

3. How various dimensions of the societal/political environment affect the abovementioned interactions, contextualizing protest-counterprotest dynamics. Among other themes, Papers could focus on the influence of political elites, news media, social media, public opinion, mobilization histories or civil society structures. For example, we are interested in how far protest-counterprotest interactions are influenced by the degree of political polarization in a society.

Please submit paper proposals via the ECPR website (https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/Content?ID=1161&EventID=203)