Protests are in part a rejection of traditional methods of registering opinion. Their increasing regularity indicates that people believe voting and calling their representatives are insufficient.

eople in left-leaning movements know full well that some of their own supporters are undermining message discipline and strategic imperatives.

Media attention flocks to the most radical and provocative elements and emboldens the voices on the fringes.

he Floyd protests did not materialize out of nowhere. The intellectual foundation had been laid by years of previous protests that created some organizational infrastructure and steadily increased the public’s support for the BLM movement until it surged upward in June 2020.

Another reason the BLM protests succeeded is that they were overwhelmingly peaceful

The Black Lives Matter protests during that period were different in part because they defied the caricature of protesters as radical college students with nothing but time. According to a study led by the Johns Hopkins economist Nick Papageorge, on factors such as gender and race, the demographics of the protests were actually more representative... See more

As the prominent sociologist Charles Tilly once wrote, a social movement is not unitary. It’s a “cluster of performances,” a “loosely-choreographed dance,” or even a “jam session with changing players”—all of which, he says, “have well-defined structures and histories, but not one of them is ipso facto a group, or even the actions of a single... See more

Mass struggles have come to rely too much on street protests, Chenoweth observes, and to neglect the “quiet, behind-the-scenes planning and organizing that enable movements to mobilize in force over the long term, and to coordinate and sequence tactics in a way that builds participation, leverage, and power.”

Yet seeking change through peaceful persuasion has also become less effective. Since 2010, Chenoweth wrote in a 2020 essay in the Journal of Democracy , fewer than a third of nonviolent campaigns, and just 8 percent of violent ones, have been successful—down from about two-thirds of nonviolent insurgencies and one-quarter of violent ones in the... See more