Conflict Competence

Protesters are “dissed and dismissed”

Date: 31 October 2007

An agency hires investigators to spy on Alberta landowners. China arrests people demonstrating for a free Tibet. Sydney fortifies when APEC leaders visit Australia. These are not reactions to alien invasions. Powerful policymakers deploy spies, police, and military to avoid or to control citizens whose viewpoints differ from official public policy. University of Calgary professor David Taras said, “Power comes through the ballot box.” Perhaps he was referring to traditional political power, but, as current events demonstrate, that is only one kind of power.

The news stories of protest power have become familiar: government/State on one side, protesters on the other side, with uniformed, armed men inside the frame. Protest is depicted as tense, messy, and expensive. After a dozen years studying protest, some patterns are discernible. In nature, of which humans are a part, everything is connected. Seeing patterns assists in understanding systems. Here are five interconnecting protest system patterns:

1. Protests are an emergent property of a policy system. Policies are an initial condition for a protest group to form, in order to influence changes in the policy they believe may harm them or the planet. Unlike special interest groups and lobbyists, who seek long-term access to policymakers, protesters may not stay active beyond the end of their particular policy conflict.

2. People have different risk tolerances. Each side brings forth experts’ reports, risk assessments, and information it claims is correct, and which discredits the other side’s reports, risk assessments, and information. Sincere belief about a policy’s risks spur people to action they see as participating in civic engagement to prevent policy mistakes. Policymakers are confronted with concerns about potential harm that they have not considered, think is a tolerable risk, or do not accept as possible.

3. Protesters and policymakers ‘diss [disrespect] and dismiss’ each other. Instead of addressing the interpretive differences about the policy’s risks, the sides demonize each other, mostly through the media. Policymakers see protesters as unelected, unrepresentative, and unaccountable malcontents. The policymakers dismiss protesters’ attitude as “counterproductive”, its claims “ridiculous”, its opinion “a minority”, and its analysis “irrelevant”. Protesters dislike being dissed and dismissed, but believe they are right, as do the policymakers, so both carry on.

4. Each side encourages democratic public participation. Policymakers prefer policy discussions within official public participation processes, such as town hall meetings, focus groups, opinion surveys, or open houses. They expect the public to attend, be orderly, listen to hired experts who manage technical information, and then give input for the policymakers to consider. Protesters also characterize their actions as democratic public participation. On occasion, more people in total attend a protest than go to the notably under-attended official public processes, making protest, they argue, as representative of public opinion.

5. Protest creates knowledge. The controversy of protest keeps everyone learning about alternative policy interpretations, and potential risks. Like news media, policymakers follow the noise. Policies, and their attendant protests, become Trojan Horses for other agendas, such as who is acting democratically, who speaks for the majority, ethics of governing, and how tax dollars are used. It generates research to prove/discredit each other’s policy interpretations. Policymakers consider more options as a result. Decisions improve through diversity of opinion. Protest groups freely give, and policymakers can accept, alternative knowledge and perspectives as part of policy formulation. The alternative knowledge stays in the policy system long after the protest about the policy ends.

Patterns reframe protest as a contribution to mutual learning participating in policymaking, rather than placing protest as a cost outside policymaking, or an attack on democratic institutions, or as group dysfunction. It is tempting to want to sort good guys from bad guys, and have the news media bring it to the comfort of our homes. However, maybe the option is to spot patterns that help understand protests with more depth than simply regarding protesters as rowdy people who represent no one, or government as a monolithic bureaucracy making policy for the few.