The right to protest

The slogan ‘defend the right to protest’ has proved popular in recent years, connecting a wide variety of organisations, activists and institutional actors. But beneath this apparent agreement of left and centre-left groups, we find quite a significant difference of views over the meaning of the ‘right to protest’, and what activities it might protect. This article sets out to critically engage with the way that an institutional human rights discourse frames protest. It insists that a primacy is accorded to communication, to the exclusion of material forms of power. At the same time, the article shows that ‘violence’ becomes a meta-signifier for the jurisprudence on the right to protest, often rubber stamping the way that state violence is externalised onto protestors. The article uses these issues to understand how we might traverse rights, moving from a point where they hold an immense grip on the political imagination, to a point where that grip begins to loosen. In short, the article uses the right to protest to begin to think about what Santner calls ‘the far side of rights’.