Controlling protest: New directions for research on the social control of protest

Abstract

Work on repression within the social movements literature has largely focused on state-based and coercive repression, despite both the empirical importance of private and non-coercive forms of protest control and the theoretical leverage studying other forms of protest control could offer. This paper argues that scholars should shift from studying repression, which as a terminology carries connotations about state-based and coercive action, and instead focus on the “social control of protest.” The paper then manufactures a literature on private forms of protest control, culling existing work from disparate fields and literatures. These works are organized using a previously published typology of repressive forms that covers such diverse actions as vigilantism and countermovement violence. This organization reveals that empirical research has been done on private protest control even if it has not been named as such or been connected to a coherent body of scholarship on the subject. The paper then examines possible directions for future research that could facilitate the growth of scholarship on private protest control.