THE PANDEMIC CROWD: PROTEST IN THE TIME OF COVID-19.

• Author: Gerbaudo, Paolo

INTRODUCTION

The COVID-19 pandemic would have hardly seemed to make for a fitting period for protest. Governmental responses to the spread of COVID-19 have entailed shelter-at-home and social distancing measures that seem to work against the basic logic of protest. Protests are typically based on precisely the opposite of social distancing. It traditionally entails the "contentious gathering" of large numbers of people in public space. (1) Protesters crowd together in order to demonstrate to the public their Worthiness, Unity, Numbers and Commitment or "WUNC," to use Charles Tilly's acronym. (2) Yet, similar to previous pandemics, including the 1918 Spanish flu, which combined with the aftermath of World War I was ensued by a mass protest wave, the era of the COVID-19 pandemic is proving to be a period of civil strife. (3) Since the COVID-19 contagion developed into a pandemic in early spring 2020, we have witnessed a powerful wave of mobilizations across the United States, Europe, and several other countries. They deserve close examination to understand the transformation in protest action in these troubled times and the new social anxieties and demands.

The forms of protest that have emerged during the COVID-19 crisis have admittedly been of the most diverse kinds. We have witnessed shows of solidarity towards care workers, which includes "clap for our carers" flash mobs, balcony solidarity demonstrations and impromptu demonstrations of doctors and nurses against cuts to the health sector, that seem to express a renewed sense of civic duty and social cohesion, and one of the greatest waves of protest in recent decades in the United States. The Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the United States, sparked by the killing of George Floyd, often met with violence by police and far-right counter-protesters. On the other hand, we have also seen protests with a marked reactionary component, such as the so-called "no-mask movement" against restrictions imposed by governments, often on the back of obscurantist conspiracy theories.

This surge of mobilization begs the question of whether these different streams of protests share a commonality reflecting the specificity of the pandemic as a common scenario for protest. Due to its nature as an exceptional moment of emergency, in which rules about everyday life are suspended and citizens are confronted with a gamut of pressing social issues, the COVID-19 emergency has had profound and disruptive effect that has led to severe economic consequences. COVID-19 has led to the closing of schools, forcing families to juggle childcare and work, and modified consumption patterns with people avoiding malls and restaurants for fear of contagion and cutting down on their purchases. Furthermore, it has led to a severe reduction in travel and mobility, and a plunge in international tourism and air travel. Finally, the pandemic has had a profound effect on the political arena, focusing the attention of the public on the pandemic, and engendering the sense that we live amid a state of exception, in which normal rules, expectations, and social routines are altered.

In this article, I explore how social movements have responded to this exceptional historical moment along with the grievances they mobilize, the repertoires of action they construct, and what they reveal about society's new fractures amid the COVID-19 crisis. My focus is on events in the United States and Europe, with some examples drawn from other geographic contexts, that draw on preliminary data available through news reports. Examining this wave of protests, I consider several questions: How are protest movements responding to the exceptional conditions of the pandemic? How do they reflect the new grievances and demands that have emerged or have been more blatantly revealed amid the wave of COVID-19 contagion? What do they tell us about society's emerging conflicts?

I posit a typology of different protest strands of pandemic protest as summarized in Table 1. I focus on (1) socially distanced protests, (2) anti-lockdown protests, and (3) pandemic riots, as different responses to the peculiar scenario ushered in by the COVID-19 emergency. "Socially distanced protests" is a term I use to describe civic protests which carefully comply with anti-contagion rules. "Anti-lockdown protests" instead refers to protests waged by right-wing groups that denounce the lockdown measures as authoritarian, often engaging in deliberate flouting of anti-contagion measures. "Pandemic riots," finally, is used to refer to spontaneous protest events that engage in non-conventional action, involving standoffs with police, as have been most notably often in the course of Black Lives Matter protests in the United States.

Despite their manifest differences, these protest strands project a return of crowd-like forms of protest reminiscent of pre-modern charivari protests. (4) From the toppling of statues, to wildcat protests of doctors in front of hospitals, and gatherings of anti-lockdown supporters, what is common across pandemic protests is a high level of local idiosyncrasy, spontaneity, and unpredictability. Many of these protests lack the structured and modular character often associated with modern protest as well as the national coordination offered by formal, social movement organizations. (5) Furthermore, due to the limitation of physical movement during the pandemic, protests tend to be similar to pre-modern protests in that they are also highly localized.

The article begins discussing notions of grievances and action repertoire in social movement theory as a framework to understand pandemic protests. In the empirical analysis, I will disaggregate the different protest strands to ascertain their specificity and common logic. The analysis concludes with some speculative arguments about the direction of protest movements in the present conjuncture.

GRIEVANCES AND REPERTOIRES OF ACTION

To understand pandemic protests, we need to consider the way social movements always reflect the peculiar historical circumstances in which they arise. The fact that social movements embody the "spirit of the times" ultimately derives from social movements' specificity and, because of their informal nature, they are often the first site in which society's emerging problems are aired. (6) To refer to French sociologist Alain Touraine's famous notion, social movements struggle over "historicity" namely the process of society's historical self-construction. (7) Hence, social movements are in a way always historically specific both in their origins and in their effects. Two aspects are particularly important to explore with respect to the historical specificity of social movements: the grievances, the social issues or problems that social movements raise and mobilize; and the repertoires of action, the historically layered practices through which these grievances are expressed. (8) Decisions about the issues to be mobilized inevitably carry considerations about priorities, values, and goals, which have immediate consequences for protest activity and the tactics or action repertoires that are deployed.

Studying grievances, namely the issues that social movements raise in their contentious actions, is key to understanding how social movements reflect social conditions, and how thev mobilize issues that deeply affect the citizenry, yet often do not find any established political actor who can represent them. Across the history of social movements, the most diverse range of issues has become the object of popular demands, social dissent and political contestation. Grievances orient the action of social movements. In a way they are the "origin" or "cause" of social movements. (9) The grievance is a problem deemed to have detrimental effects on individuals and society at large. (10) The...