Vol. 15 No. 29 (2024): Continuities and Transformations in Forms of Collective Action
Articles

The Privatization of Protest: Demobilization and the Emergence of Political Violence in the Aftermath of Local Protest Campaigns

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  • Mans Lundstedt
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/smp-15496

Published 2024-07-23

Keywords

  • political violence,
  • protest,
  • Sweden,
  • migrant

How to Cite

Lundstedt, M. (2024). The Privatization of Protest: Demobilization and the Emergence of Political Violence in the Aftermath of Local Protest Campaigns. SocietàMutamentoPolitica, 15(29), 37–48. https://doi.org/10.36253/smp-15496

Copyright (c) 2024 Mans Lundstedt

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The processual approach to political violence suggests a close link between nonviolent and violent tactical repertoires. Yet in doing so it excludes cases where violence appears to appear in the absence of public protest activity. This article traces how political violence emerges in the aftermath of local protest campaigns against migrant accommodation. Developing the concept of the privatization of protest, the article shows how the demobilization of protest contributes to a process where grievances are reframed into private frustrations rather than objects of political contention. Transformed as such, persistent patterns of intermittent political violence can sometimes grow out of private interactions, even in the absence of any consistent public protest. Applying the conceptual apparatus of frames, emotions, opportunities and to a paired process tracing of episodes of protest against Swedish migrant accommodation in 2007-2008 and 2012-2017, the article maps the causal mechanisms that create facilitative conditions for violence, sometimes long after the decline of nonviolent protest. Extending its discussion beyond the case of Sweden, it links the processual approach to adjacent discussions on the link between micro- and meso-level causes of political violence. 

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