Visualizing Political Protest and Discursive Strategies: A Comparative Analysis of Large Scale Romanian and East Asian Street Demonstrations

Political protest in the Digital Age is a label that covers a series of movements, usually directed against a specific policy or governmental decision, which take the shape of large scale street demonstrations and employ mostly digital tools to signal dissent. Colourful signs, I-Phone flash lights, electric light bulbs, projection of lights & messages on buildings are some of techniques in this new repertoire of protesting. The symbolism of the places in which huge rallies take place as well as their emphatic pro-democratic message are two other unifying traits of protests in countries as far apart geographically as Romania and South Korea. This paper takes stock of these new protest performances and attempts to trace their discursive regularities by focusing on the following research question: Is there a new, global grammer of political protest? Drawing on previous work in Post-Structructuralist Discourse Analysis, but also critical security studies (such as the work of Karin Fierke), I plan to unveil some of the commonalities at play in these new forms of civic dissent.