Who is that (wo)man in the street? From the normalisation of protest to the normalisation of the protester

Abstract

The time has long since passed that protests and demonstrations were regarded as the possible beginning of violent revolutionary ferment. Venting dissatisfaction or making demands in the streets has become commonplace in our ‘demonstration–democracy’. In this article we examine whether this normalisation of street protest also means that more heterogeneous groups of people take to the streets. Have citizens become potentially peaceful protesters or is protest politics still the domain of union militants, progressive intellectuals, and committed students? In answering these questions we will use the three research methods most commonly used for studying collective action: population surveys, protest event–analysis and interviews with protesters at demonstrations.