Protest is the bedrock of democracy. But why do people take to the streets, and how do protestors achieve change? At the Ash Center, we’re working to answer these questions.
From the Boston Tea Party and the U.S. civil rights movement to contemporary climate action demonstrations, civil protest is a fundamental tool for influencing political change. While protest movements are an indelible part of contemporary political life, little is often understood about what motivates people to take to the streets and how they achieve nonviolent political goals.
Our scholars analyze protest movements, learn from protestors themselves, and develop tools to help understand why some protests succeed and others fail.
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This is a guest post by Mason Holland, an undergraduate student at the University of Connecticut majoring in Political Science. He also serves as President of the Student Body.
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In this discussion, Ash Center Democracy Postdoctoral Fellow Johnnie Lotesta talked with leaders from the environmental justice, gun violence prevention, labor, and immigration movements about how they balanced these commitments in the course of their work.
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The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation hosted a book talk on Prisms of the People: Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America with co-authors Elizabeth McKenna and Michelle Oyakawa.
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So far, the Crowd Counting Consortium has logged just over 5,300 events since Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021.
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The Crowd Counting Consortium recorded more than 1,800 protest events in the U.S. in March 2021, with roughly 88,000 to 125,000 participants in the events.
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Since the Atlanta-area murders, we have logged 126 events focused on this issue, most of them this past Saturday and Sunday, March 20–21.
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So far, the Crowd Counting Consortium has identified 47 events honoring Taylor on the anniversary of her death in more than 30 localities.
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One issue has dominated environmental protest activity in the U.S. for at least the past four years, and that’s climate change.
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So far, we’ve recorded 980 protest events in the U.S. in February 2021, with about 29,000 to 35,000 reported participants in them.
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