Protest movements should be judged against their own stated goals
Evidence
We will only look closely at specific phenomena: protests that became so large they shook the foundations of a nation’s political system, forcing it to be replaced or undergo rapid changes. Not all of them were failures, and even the failures contained small victories. For reasons that will become clear, all the cases chosen for serious analysis are outside the rich countries of the traditional First World. Since the legacies of 1789 and 1917 have served as reference points for so much revolutionary practice, it is important to trace the ways that intellectual history on the left has shaped contemporary protest, even if the desires expressed in recent episodes have fallen all over the political spectrum. In this book, I try to judge protest movements by their own goals. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 57
Categorization
- XREF: Judging actors by their own articulated standards rather than external benchmarks echoes a recurring epistemic commitment seen in the reader’s curated material on social movements and on the Frankfurt School’s immanent critique. — connects to: A protest’s media success can diverge from its organizers’ goals — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 393; Protest veterans give better lessons when asked to advise the global young; Political movements should be analyzed via mass content and balance of forces (+2 more)