“Building A Wall of Resistance:” Collective Action and Rationality in the Anti-Terror Age

Abstract

When people come together in protest, and especially when this protest threatens public order or the status quo, states often attempt to deter and suppress protest and restore order. A perennial question among social movement scholars is whether such repression is effective at chilling protest or instead backfires, spurring greater mobilization. Empirical studies attempting to adjudicate between these two possibilities have failed to create consensus, finding a wide array of empirical consequences for repression. I propose a new way of understanding the effects of repression that draws on and synthesizes insights from both rational choice and cultural traditions in social movement theory. I develop this explanation through analysis of in-depth interviews and observations with activists in Arizona who have experienced state repression, as well as qualitative content analysis of activist literature. These data demonstrate that how individual activists perceive and respond to state repression has little to do with the type or severity of repression they experience. Rather, protest groups fundamentally shape how individuals experience and consider the risks and rewards of participation in collective action, including those related to repression and, as a result, individuals react very differently to objectively similar experiences of repression. Specifically, I document three ways in which group practices and meanings alter how individuals think about and act in response to state repression. First, groups shape how individuals understand and experience the repressive situations they face by working to prevent and prepare for repression and by supporting those individuals who bear the brunt of these costs. Second, groups shape individuals’ orientations to repression by re-defining the goals of protest, effectively shifting repression from a cost to a sign of the importance of their actions and refocusing activists on the importance of protest as an activity, even if larger goals are hard to achieve. Finally, groups shape individuals’ dispositions by cultivating salient activist identities that render decisions to participate moot and make participation and repression taken for granted parts of an activist identity. My data show that all three processes help explain why some persist, while others disengage, following experiences of state repression and furthermore make clear that one can only understand these dynamics by bringing rational choice and cultural explanations together. More broadly, while research on social movements since the 1970s has largely been divided between studies built on rati