What is the point of political protest? The answer seems to be that it depends on the kind of protest. In different real-life cases, protestors often have different kinds of aims. Someone who engages in a die-in might aim to dramatize the cost of a policy, while someone who engages in tree sitting might simply want to prevent a tree from being cut down.
Philosophers writing about protest tend to take these differences seriously and to think that we should distinguish more broadly between kinds of protest that serve different aims. For example, civil disobedience is held to be a way of appealing to the democratic majority to change an unjust law or policy, while political rioting is thought to be a way of defying one’s political order to directly ameliorate one’s unjust treatment.
In some recent and forthcoming papers, I offer an account of a kind of protest that has received regrettably little attention—accountability-seeking protest. In this blog post, I want to sketch this account and to propose that accountability-seeking protest can be an important collective means for reinforcing the bonds of democratic community.
Let’s start with some examples. These are not hard to find: calls for accountability are widespread in protest. Environmentalist movements like Insure Our Future and student protestors on university campuses often highlight accountability in their messaging. Anti-corruption protests, like those that sprung up in Serbia this past year over the collapse of the Novi Sad railway station, are sometimes described in these terms, too. So too are certain pro-democracy protests and protests against police violence.
Protestors in these examples differ in their political causes as well as in their means of protest. Compare the planned demonstrations of the Insure Our Future campaign—involving pamphlets, costumes, and the reading of testimony—with the spontaneous disorder of the Novi Sad protests—involving blockades and clashes with police. Given the diversity of these examples, it might seem that the common language of accountability masks fundamental differences in the aims of protestors.
But in my view, this interpretation prevents us from seeing the shared communicative aims uniting these cases. We should take the language of accountability seriously, I contend, because these protests aim at holding others accountable.
To explain what I mean, I have to say something about what it means to hold others accountable. The most relevant sense of the phrase comes to us from the literature on moral responsibility. In brief, the idea is that we hold others accountable when we subject them to some adverse treatment in order to enforce a perceived moral requirement that they have failed to meet. I might hold you accountable in this way by criticizing you for breaking a promise to me, by publicly calling you out for spreading malicious rumors, or by giving you the cold shoulder for cheating on your partner.
In such cases, I am trying to send you a moral message: that you have done something wrong and ought to act differently. But my actions also involve a harm or sting—the sting of criticism, emotional flak, or embarrassment. And at least in some cases, that sting is supposed to carry the moral message. My giving you cold shoulder means something to you, and it means something that I may have not been able to communicate through words alone. In an important sense, my action symbolizes the wrong you have done me. I’ll refer to this way of holding others accountable (as I do elsewhere) as reproof.
In my view, the central expressive dimension of the examples above resembles reproof. This interpretation explains shared features of the cases, like the use of symbolic disruptive tactics, which resemble the sting of interpersonal reproof, and the targeting of specific alleged wrongdoers. It also accommodates the diversity of the cases. As my examples of reproof show, reproof can take many and various forms, from spontaneous verbal criticism to a planned distancing in our relationship. What is essential is just that the cases involve a sting intended to convey a moral message about a wrong to the wrongdoer.
Now, not all such protest will be justified. Our attempts to hold each other accountable interpersonally misfire with some regularity—we misidentify a wrong, direct our attentions to the wrong target, or else we overreact or underreact, muddying the moral message we mean to send. We should expect our attempts to reprove others via political protest to be susceptible to the same sorts of misfires.
In my view, this kind of reflection leads us to three main conditions that accountability-seeking protest must satisfy to be justified: that the protest responds to a genuine wrong; that the protest is well-formed as reproof; and that the protest is done in good faith.
The first two conditions rule out cases in which protestors are mistaken about the alleged wrong or in which their actions are so extreme and long-lasting that they cease to resemble reproof. Most (or all) cases of vigilantism, for example, seem to be off the table. And the good-faith condition rules out cases in which protestors act as outside agitators or agents provocateurs.
Nevertheless, many kinds of protest are, in principle, justifiable on this account, such as protests targeting banks for investments in development projects that harm Indigenous peoples, protests targeting judges for their rulings on particular cases, even spontaneous and unruly protests over the harsh treatment of other protestors. In these sorts of cases, justification will ultimately depend on the facts on the ground. But, if the account I have just sketched is correct, we can make a good start by asking: when are we justified in holding others accountable interpersonally?
As I hinted earlier, this account has downstream implications for our thinking about democracy. Here, I want to sketch out three.
The first is that some radical forms of protest may be more democratic than they seem. A common worry about protest is that it risks being undemocratic when protestors intentionally impose costs on their targets. Think, for example, of traffic blockades by environmental activists or the smashing of windows in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement. The concern is that, when protestors use violence or nonviolent tactics like blockades, their actions are a coercive means of bringing about their desired political outcome, regardless of what other people happen to think. Under certain limited circumstances, coercion might promote democracy—like when a group forces the democratic majority to reengage with an issue that it would rather ignore. But in general, the worry goes, coercive protest is undemocratic.
However, when we are held accountable for doing something wrong, we are not typically coerced, even if the experience is unpleasant. If I call you out for spreading rumors or give you the cold shoulder and you decide to mend your ways, I have not forced you to do anything. Rather, I have treated you adversely to send you a message about your conduct. This line of thought suggests that accountability-seeking protest can be uncoercive too, even when it uses forceful or violent means. And indeed, when windows are smashed or traffic is delayed for a few hours, it is hard to see how anyone has been meaningfully forced to do anything in a way that would undermine democracy.
Taking a step further, a second point is that accountability-seeking protest may promote democratic legitimacy. It is widely thought that the officials of a democratic society ought to be accountable, in some sense, to the citizens in whose name they govern. Elections are the most immediately recognizable mechanism for this kind of accountability: when an elected official fails to govern in a desirable way, voters can vote them out. Yet across the globe, our instruments for democratic accountability seem largely inadequate—indeed, the unaccountability of the powerful is increasingly a source of public concern. In turn, a lack of democratic accountability seems to threaten the moral credentials, or legitimacy, of the state.
When there is a shortfall of democratic accountability, accountability-seeking protest may work as a kind of extra-institutional mechanism to make up for it. My suggestion here parallels an influential line of argument about civil disobedience: that civil disobedience is a stabilizing device of a just constitutional order, albeit one that operates outside the boundaries of the law. In the same way, accountability-seeking protest may support the institutions of a democracy while operating outside of them. When officials fail to be held accountable by the relevant institutional mechanisms, accountability-seeking protest can make up for that failure, albeit perhaps only partially.
Finally, the third point is that even the messy and unpleasant parts of political protest may help to ensure that the citizens of a democracy are ethically well-related. The kinds of protest I have focused on, involving the intentional imposition of adverse treatment, might seem inherently adversarial, requiring protestors to view their targets as political enemies. Theorists of radical protest have tended to encourage this perception by focusing on tactics like covert action, subversion, sabotage, and defensive violence. In turn, it is reasonable to worry that this sort of protest can only inflame existing political divisions, undermining the possibility of civic friendship.
But if what I have said is correct, then accountability-seeking protest need not be inherently adversarial. Many have held that we blame others not because they are our enemies, but out of a recognition that they, too, are members of the moral community. If we are honest with ourselves, it is hard not to admit that being on the receiving end of blame is often for the better—even if unpleasant—since it helps us to better understand and respect the moral demands of others.
In the same way, when protestors are justified in holding others accountable, their actions seem to carry a recognition of their targets and to involve an attempt to reinforce shared norms of the moral community. In this way, reproving protest, like blame, has a socially constructive power, helping to ensure that wrongs are adequately addressed and to align the moral understandings of the members of the moral community. Far from subverting democracy, then, accountability-seeking protest may be a powerful tool for creating and sustaining the bonds of democratic community.
Henry Krahn
Henry Krahn holds a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Justitia Center for Advanced Studies, funded by the Alfons and Gertrud Kassel Foundation, Goethe University Frankfurt. His research focuses on what interpersonal morality can tell us about social movements, and vice versa.
