Disruptive Protest Isn’t Meant to Convince — It’s Meant to Break the Status Quo

When democracy fails us, or when it is undermined by racism and corporate power, protest can become the only option. Regardless of who is elected to lead our federal and state governments today, we should all be preparing for the necessity of disruptive protests in the coming years. As we do, a shared understanding of the purpose of such protests will be helpful.

In September, a group of Stop Cop City activists disrupted an Atlanta City Council meeting by throwing ping pong balls into the chambers. Chanting “you dropped the ball,” activists drew attention to Mayor Andre Dickens’s and the city council’s complicity in silencing public dissent against the proposed $90 million police training center in the middle of a green space in one of Atlanta’s Black neighborhoods. Each ball had the number 116,000 on it — representing the 116,000 signatories on a petition that would have put funding for Cop City on the ballot in November. City leaders have thus far prevented the referendum, citing bureaucratic fine print and fighting against the referendum in court, in spite of their promises to allow a democratic decision-making process over the controversial facility.

Fox News 5 and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution both described the demonstration as creating “chaos” at the council meeting. And there was, indeed, a moment of chaos. The city council president pleaded with protesters to quiet down and leave, and the livestream of the meeting was cut. After 20 minutes, demonstrators linked arms and left.

The protest didn’t produce immediate results. But it produced dozens of news headlines on the anniversary of the date the signatures had first been submitted.

While some will say protests like this only serve to polarize and alienate, strategic disruption serves a purpose that goes beyond persuasion. After all, the Stop Cop City activists’ argument was, in part, that the democratic process itself had been blocked from going forward. Their problem was not that people disagree with them; their problem was that people in power refused to listen.

This raises a larger point that is often missed in discussions of public protest actions — a point that will be important as we prepare to escalate our struggles in a heated and ever-hotter political environment. Disruptive protest — encompassing both civil disobedience and extralegal direct action — does not primarily aim to persuade or to make a message morally appealing to a broad audience. Rather, the intent of disruption is to advance political goals by interrupting, disturbing and creating tension within the status quo. Disruptive protest works not because it convinces a new audience of its messages, but because it produces discomfort, cognitive dissonance or material consequences for those who uphold dominant systems. It can also demonstrate power, showing that protesters have the ability to stop the gears of oppression.

Understanding the purpose of disruption is important on the left as the stakes of our demonstrations become ever higher: we are protesting the sources of climate catastrophe, the funders and apologists of genocide, and the profiteers and politicos who degrade Black life and denigrate trans and queer people and women for their own benefit.

These protests are not meant to convince — so critiques of their unconvincingness are moot. Rather, these protests are meant to afflict powerful people and systems with chaos, embarrassment and inconvenience. When this sort of disruptiveness is strategic, and even sometimes when it is not, the disruption has political impacts that cannot be replaced by permitted protests or political pleas.

Dramatic Action Draws Attention and Emphasizes Contrasts

Perhaps the most obvious purpose of disruptive protests is their ability to draw attention to an issue, and to emphasize contrasts and extremes in points of view. The purpose of many well-organized direct actions is simply to keep the issue in the news on the protesters’ terms. Whether or not this persuades, it has the power to reframe the conversation.

Even unplanned, disruptive action can produce an alternate history, shift reality and create chaos when order is causing inordinate harm.

The Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. is a prominent example of this effect. By drawing attention to — and carefully and consistently reframing — issues of police violence and racism, disruptive Black Lives Matter protests in 2014-2015 and again in 2020 pushed the problem of police murders into the news. But, as one study shows, they also pushed the framework of “systemic racism” into the news, shifted the national discussion from one about “diversity” toward one that acknowledges “white supremacy,” and popularized the use of “mass incarceration” to describe the racist U.S. prison system.

The Black Lives Matter movement also emphasized contrasts between its messages and those of its opponents, creating clear camps and inviting people to choose sides on an issue that had previously been deemed unimportant by many in power. Politicians in the 2016 and 2020 elections were forced to answer to activists on issues of police accountability and racism like never before. While public sentiment did shift in favor of Black Lives Matter during times of heightened protests, extensive media and social media attention gave the movement the power to make demands on politicians.

Demonstrations by a radical extreme can also produce the “radical flank effect”: they make moderate activists on their side more popular with the general public. A recent study that looked at a highway shutdown in the U.K. by the radical environmental group Just Stop Oil found that support for its moderate counterpart ticked up 3.3 percent immediately following Just Stop Oil’s action. While the radical flank effect doesn’t necessarily increase overall support for a movement, it can be tactical for producing certain short-term wins. Faced with the option to regulate big oil or shut it down completely, regulation starts to look reasonable to moderates.

Disruptive Protest Is Supposed to Make People Uncomfortable

In Durham, North Carolina, last November, a group of protesters with Jewish Voice for Peace blocked traffic on a major highway for several hours in protest of Israel’s expanding genocidal violence in Palestine. The message — and its target — were clear. The demonstrators were calling for a ceasefire, and they were calling on Durham’s representative in Congress, Democrat Valerie Foushee, to join this demand. While holding up traffic, protesters called Rep. Foushee repeatedly on the phone, insisting that the highway would remain blocked until Foushee agreed to speak with them. While Foushee didn’t speak to demonstrators that night, she did, in fact, call for a ceasefire a month later — making her one of just a few dozen Congresspeople to agree to that demand in 2023.

Durham demonstrators’ message was respectful, but it was not designed to make Foushee, or bystanders stuck in traffic, feel comfortable. On the contrary, blocking a highway intentionally produces inconvenience. The most immediate effect of that, of course, was that the demonstration and its strong message led the local evening news — keeping Palestine and the demand for ceasefire in the headlines on a day that was otherwise just another day. A few people were inconvenienced, but many thousands more saw the story on the news and were forced to confront their own role and stance on the issue.

And even vis-à-vis those who are inconvenienced by a disruption, there’s a benefit: actions that make people’s day-to-day more complicated can make oppression less beneficial for those who are complacent. This logic was an important piece of the Civil Rights movement strategy of prolonged economic boycotts — in addition to applying moral pressure, these actions and the public protests accompanying them intentionally produced financial and logistical discomfort for those who passively benefited from racial segregation. Segregation became less beneficial over time, and eventually was ended as a policy — not because of the power of moral suasion alone.

While shutting down traffic or interrupting council meetings doesn’t sit right with some, disrupting the status quo in the North Carolina case appeared to work. Without announcing a change in her moral or political stance, Rep. Foushee nonetheless gradually moved toward her constituents’ message in her actions, even boycotting a speech before Congress by Benjamin Netanyahu the following year.

And demonstrations like this around the country have in fact been a part of a steady shift in public sentiment in the U.S. about Israel’s violence in Gaza, with a majority now supporting the call for the U.S. to stop arming Israel. The actions may or may not have been persuasive in themselves, but by making people less comfortable in the status quo, they helped produce an environment in which people were forced to consider their views — and potentially change them.

Civil Disobedience and Direct Action Produce Cognitive Dissonance

At an anti-trans conference of lesbian, gay and bisexual advocates in London in October, trans youth activists released a box of crickets into a room of thousands. Many were offended and disgusted by the young people’s tactics — participants in the room screamed and crushed crickets in the dozens before taking to social media to complain of the “saboteurs” who destroyed their conference’s opening plenary.

The people in the room were likely not convinced to change their minds by a plague of bugs. But the action created a strong image of dissonance that was disseminated around the world.

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term that describes the discomfort of holding two conflicting views at once. The crickets embody exactly such a dissonance — this was a gathering of LGB activists so disturbed and disgusted by trans youth that they have aligned with the right in opposing what they call “gender ideology.” Their belief in and support of LGB identity is dissonant with their opposition to transgender rights. But that dissonance will not be experienced unless and until it is explicitly pointed out.

Part of the reason that even obnoxious or disturbing direct actions are so effective is because they can produce such cognitive dissonance — for those who agree with a message (for example, “protect trans kids”), and yet choose to do nothing (for example, push anti-trans forces out of political office), the discomfort of one’s own silence can become intolerable. The sound and image of “crickets” making noise into the void emphasizes that personal silence; the image of conservative LGB activists crushing and attacking them only added to the intentional dissonance as the story was disseminated in the news.

While some will resolve that tension by rejecting trans rights, others will resolve them by becoming more vocally in favor, a phenomenon I have witnessed even within my own family and community. My forthcoming book on “radical unlearning” will highlight the importance of both conflict and dissonance to processes of unlearning — showing that as dissonance becomes increasingly uncomfortable within us, we might choose to resolve it by changing our views.

Disruptive actions like this one pierce through silence to intentionally create tension. But the dissonance of oppression must be perpetually and at times aggressively emphasized; otherwise, it is too easy to continue ignoring the figurative crickets in the room.

To expect change without affliction belies an ignorance to how the process of change has always worked. Creating irritation and disgust can produce opportunities for transformative action — not necessarily in that moment, but as part of the larger movement.

Of course, not all disruption is as calculated as the trans youth activists’ cricket action, and some of the best disruptions arise from true grassroots sentiments of resistance. When the status quo is unacceptable, violent and unjust, people will disturb it whether or not their actions are strategic. People light fires and block streets because they are angry, or they have nothing to lose, or because they would be better off disobeying the law than continuing to abide by it. Even unplanned, disruptive action can produce an alternate history, shift reality and create chaos when order is causing inordinate harm.

When the status quo is unacceptable, disruption replaces silence with dissonance. Before you disparage a disruptive action from the sidelines, consider participating in one, large or small. Ask yourself: what are you willing to risk toward ceasing oppression — your own or others’? What needs to be interrupted for liberation and justice to prevail? Which version of history do you want to live in, and how can your own actions make that version louder and more real?