Summers of Discontent: the Evolution of Protest Dynamics Across Two Summers of Anti-Migrant Mobilisation in the UK

The summers of 2024 and 2025 were marked by some of the most widespread and, at times, violent anti-migrant protests to have been seen in the UK for many years. This paper first traces and compares the evolution of these two protest waves, focusing on triggers, tactics, coordination, and the narratives around which these waves of protest cohered. It then seeks to explain why the 2024 protest wave resulted in significantly greater violence than the 2025 wave, and what this tells us about the changing nature of anti-migrant protest in the UK, the changing social and political environment, and the relative strengths and limitations of existing theoretical explanations of protest-related violence escalation and inhibition