Urban Protest

2.3 Relevance

Since prehistoric times, people have related by necessity to the intricacies of physical and social space, to the associations and emotions such spaces evoke, as well as to the possibilities and obstacles they provide. Even though our environment has changed, our basic human instincts are still active and, as in the prehistoric era, people congregate to discuss, deliberate, interact, and—in times of trouble—struggle together to find a solution to the problem.

The small selection of collective actions mentioned in this chapter demonstrates that urban mass protest can be a means of changing society, used by people across the world. With the spread of social media, waves of protest can expand with increased speed, and the Internet has facilitated the extension of protest movements, such as the colour revolutions, the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and the Yellow Vests. However, although the Internet is available in and used by the majority of the world’s population, people still use physical space in order to protest. This is because the presence of a group of people assembled at a focal point of the city serves a number of purposes that are rarely served by collective online action. A physical protest shows that there is discontent in the city, and that people are willing to sacrifice time and effort to come out in support of their cause.

I do not wish to undermine the power of the Internet as a tool for mobilising people to protest. Social media outlets clearly have several qualities suitable for facilitating and/or organising mass protest (see for example Herasimenka 2016). Yet, for a collective action to be effective, it more often than not needs some form of physical manifestation. Urban protests occur where people are concentrated, and so are often hard to ignore. On one hand, citizens are forced to react to the protests as they obstruct movement and demand attention, and some might be inspired to join in. On the other, the authorities are also forced to react, and their reaction (whether by way of official statements, violence, or both) might further spread the news of discontent. Mass protest also represents a form of threat to the authorities. It might mean that people expect the authorities to change their ways, or else they will not vote for those in power again; and it might discourage others from doing so, too. It can also be a threat of violence, as a large group of discontented people has the potential of turning into a mob and removing the authorities by force.

Consequently, urban public space has both a historic and a contemporary relevance, and the ways in which people perceive and use space, especially at times of contention, still have an impact on local, regional, and global politics and society today.

How are mass protests affected by geographical urban space in modern cities? To answer this question, it is first of all necessary to consult the research literature to see whether such a spatial perspective exists. If not, how should such a model be structured?

1 This way of thinking about human nature has its roots back in the cognitive turn of the mid 1950s. At this time, sciences such as psychology, linguistics, and anthropology began distancing themselves from the traditional way of looking at the mind and body as separate entities; and the new cognitive sciences moved towards a more integrated interpretation of the human mind, which sees most aspects of the human body (and possibly the environment in which it moves) as interrelated (Miller 2003; Núñez and Cooperrider 2013; Thagard 2018).

2 The revolution erupted in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille, a symbol of monarchical oppression, and was fuelled by the poverty and sickness created in the overcrowded and unsanitary districts of Paris. Moreover, the insurgency was possible in no small part due to barricades raised in the city’s narrow and easily defendable streets and alleys (Doyle 1989, 178-191; Traugott 1993; Wilde 2018).

3 At its peak, in the 1960s and 70s, the Soviet Union covered a sixth of the planet’s landmass, controlled the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and dominated the Warsaw Pact military alliance. This alliance was created as a counterweight to NATO in May 1955 and consisted of the 15 Soviet Republics in the USSR as well as Albania (until 1968), Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. This group of republics and countries is referred to as the Eastern Bloc.

4 The Hungarian student protests turned into a revolution and triggered a Soviet military intervention the same year, resulting in “more than 3,000 dead and 13,000 injured as well as over 4,000 destroyed buildings. Actual losses were probably higher” (Hoensch 1984, 219).

5 1968 is a year famous for the amount of urban protests worldwide. In the West, public spaces were occupied by demonstrators in London, Madrid, Mexico, Paris, Rome, West Berlin and numerous other cities; and the social movements of that year showed that even seemingly stable democracies can burst into protests, riots, and even revolutions (see Kurlansky 2005.). While people in the West were largely protesting in the name of equality and socialism, the protests in the East demanded political freedoms and increased autonomy from the Soviet Union. When the Kremlin ordered the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to stop the Prague government’s new reform programme, thousands of Prague-dwellers took to the streets to protest. A number of demonstrations in support of the Czechoslovaks appeared in cities across the Soviet Union, too, including at Red Square in Moscow (Wojnowski 2018, 85; Bichof, Karner, and Ruggenthaler 2010; Kondrashova 2018).

6 In Eastern Europe, the 1990s are often known by the Russian term Likhie devianostye, which can be translated into English as the Wild Nineties. The period got this label due to the chaos that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse. The 15 newly born post-Soviet states had to reorient their economic models towards a new reality and create new political systems while struggling with severe scarcity of consumer goods and social security, explosive crime rates, rampant corruption, and uncontrolled privatisation. At the same time, wars and uprisings for independence broke out frequently in the Caucasus (notably in Abkhazia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South-Ossetia) and in the Transnistria Region of Moldova, triggering several, often unpopular, military interventions by Russia and other countries. Just when the economic situation started to recover, the 1997 financial crisis in Asia hit the former Soviet Union hard, particularly Russia and its trade partners Ukraine and Belarus. It should be noted that the Russian authorities support the use of the term Likhie devianostye, as it focuses on the negative aspects of the unstable decade between the Soviet Union (stability) and Putin (new stability), although for many Eastern Europeans, the decade was seen as one of freedom and possibilities rather than anarchy (see for example Rusin 2016; Boldyrev 2018; Osipov-Gipsh 2019).

7 In Russia in 2000, the presidency changed from the unpopular, ageing and sickly Boris Yeltsin to the comparatively young, reasonably sober and physically very fit Vladimir Putin, who for several reasons enjoyed high levels of popularity well into the mid-to-late 2000s (9.2). In Belarus, too, the economy had been growing since the early 2000s, and mass protests were mostly ideological (driven by Belarusian nationalists) or constitutional (against the policies of President Aliaksandr Lukashėnka). Yet none of these protests resulted in a colour revolution (8.2).

8 The 2006 protests in Minsk and the 2011–2012 protest movement in Moscow were suppressed so harshly that the opposition of both countries was effectively disabled for several years to come (8.3.2, 9). In both cases, the protesters were met with violence, hundreds of demonstrators were arrested, and the leaders of the opposition received long prison sentences.

9 The revolution has greatly affected both regional and global power politics. Russia has accused the EU and US of orchestrating what they perceive to be a coup d’état, and the Ukrainian revolution became Russia’s pretext for occupying the Crimean Peninsula and supporting the separatist movements in the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine. Thus, the revolution indirectly became one of the triggering events for the deteriorating relations between Russia and the West today.

10 Since 2014, protests in Ukraine have for the most part been aimed at the policies of President Petro Poroshenko (2013–2019) and President Volodymyr Zelenskyi (since 2019). In Belarus, little has changed, and protests are usually suppressed in much the same manner as before. In Russia, following the annexation of Crimea, a surge in patriotic sentiment led to members of the opposition being labelled traitors, and discontent has remained at low levels. Since 2016, there has been an upswing in public protests in the country. A variety of economic and social problems have motivated hundreds of thousands of Russians to participate in numerous collective actions in cities across the country (9.2.1).

11 The research group RSCPR (Russian Space: Concepts, Practices, Representations) “is engaged in a multidisciplinary study of Russian attitudes to their own and other people’s/nations’ spaces […] which can provide insights into the interdependence of Russian space and Russian identity, both at an individual and a state policy level” (UiT n.d.). Ukraine and Belarus are often (and especially in Russia) perceived as integral parts of a “Russian” world.

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