How Protests and Counterprotests Interact: Mutual Influences and their Context Conditions

Recent years have witnessed a surge in protests around the world. At the same time, the frequency of counterprotests, which oppose and challenge a protest, has also increased. Counterprotests are not a new phenomenon. They have long been a force influencing a variety of issue areas, including abortion, migration, LGBTQ+ rights, disarmament and labour. But more recently, protest-counterprotest dynamics have intensified and become more common across the globe – reflecting a growing polarization of issues and political conflicts. Some examples of large protest events faced with counterprotests are the Black Lives Matter protests and protests against Covid-19-related measures. This Workshop will examine the dynamic interaction of protests and counterprotests. Its goal is to systematize and deepen our understanding of how protests influence counterprotests and vice versa with regard to their collective identity formation, emotions, framing, repertoires of action and mobilization success. We also seek to explore the context of such interactions, and identify the conditions and factors facilitating and shaping this interaction, in terms of the broader political and societal contexts (such as public opinion, media coverage or the legal environment), specific protest-related context factors (such as prior mobilizations), and movement characteristics (such as forms of organization and emotional registers). The Workshop will contribute to existing research in three ways: First, it will focus at the level of events. Existing research has, predominantly, examined interactions between movements and countermovements. Analyses of interactions of specific protest events and the counterprotests they may provoke, as well as the conditions affecting these interactions, have received less attention. Only recently have scholars started to analyse the more temporally and spatially bound interactions at the event level, that is assessing the causes and dynamics of protest-counterprotest interactions (Reynolds-Stenson and Earl 2018). Second, the Workshop will explore how protests influence counterprotests and vice versa beyond effects on size. The majority of research both at the movement- and event-level focuses on such effects in terms of mobilization success. This shows that an increase in size and number of mobilization events by a movement leads to rising levels or size of counterevents staged by social forces opposing it. The effects on other dimensions of social movements, such as their strategic choices, collective identity formation, emotions, and frames are rarely examined (but see e.g. Shahin 2022 and some studies on the effects of radicalization on political violence). Third, the Workshop will explore and compare the context conditions shaping protest-counterprotest interactions. Existing studies tend to focus on a small range of context conditions when seeking to explain the emergence of countermovements and their trajectories, in particular the role of political elites. This research, for example, points to the relevance of government actors in shaping movement-countermovement interactions – e.g. by providing concessions or backing one of the movements. Instead, this Workshop aims to analyse and compare different contexts of protest and counterprotest interactions – both in terms of broader political and societal contexts as well as specific context factors and movement characteristics.