From Turkey to the Ukraine to Thailand, 2013 was the year of the protester. In each of these cases, mass street protests were rallied against their respective governments with the opposition demanding reorientations in policy.
In our societal milieu, we are often inspired and entranced by these bold expressions of civil society. But we must be careful not to automatically place halos on the protesters, and weigh the downsides of mass street protests against the purported abuses of their establishment opponents.
Our cultural repertoire tends to accentuate admirable examples of mass protest. We tend to immediately associate protesting with either opponents of authoritarian regimes, like the students of Tiananmen Square, or with decidedly progressive currents in democratic societies, like the US Civil Rights movement.
Civil society is an important factor in keeping governments in check between elections, but we must keep in mind that the facets of civil society most able to organize and mobilize are not necessarily truly representative of the people. The level of engagement needed to devote days of one’s life to congregating in political centres is high, and not an opportunity available to all citizens.
Using long-term disruption of public and private spaces to extract concessions from an elected agency is not okay.
On the other hand, when available, the ballot box can be a great political equalizer, giving voice to segments of society that are only mildly political, unwilling to actively engage in the more taxing burdens of participatory democracy.
In each of the aforementioned mass anti-government protests that emerged in 2013, however, protests were organized against governments that came to power in (relatively) clean elections on the backs of constituencies from their respective societies’ periphery.
In Turkey, after decades of political repression, Islamists have worked their way into power by appealing to the traditional values of peripheral Anatolian interior. In Ukraine, Yanukovich’s pro-Russian policies have gained traction with the aspirations of the country’s less developed east. And in Thailand, populist social welfare rhetoric gave the ruling Pheu Thai the support of the rural and impoverished north.
Yet for protesters in Taksim, the Euromaidan and Bangkok, the governments they challenged were not dictatorial specters, but the products of the political periphery found outside the confines of their cosmopolitan centres.
And while it may be perfectly fine to voice opinion, it is not okay to use the long-term disruption of public and private spaces as a weapon to extract concessions on the part of an elected agency — a tactic employed in all three cases.
When there does not exist an accessible way to change government direction at the ballot box, it is understandable that we look to assertive forms of participatory democracy — like the illegal occupation of public spaces — as an acceptable (and even admirable) way of challenging injustices of the status quo.
But we cannot automatically transfer the halos we don on those forces to those who coerce the products of the ballot box.
