Beyond peaceful protest: When non-participants support violence against the police

One of the most controversial issues related to protests is the use of violence by protesters. Although there is a strong social norm against protest violence, research has suggested that protesters’ endorsement of non-violent actions can change according to the legitimacy of police actions during protests. However, both non-participants’ support for protest violence and its relationship with authorities’ measures regarding protests have barely been studied. To address this, we interviewed 17 British undergraduate students with diverse previous experiences as protesters about their views on protest violence. For the interviews, we used vignettes to describe two fictional scenarios, one where the government and the police actively restrict the right to protest and another where authorities facilitate protesters’ actions. A thematic analysis incorporating elements from the ideological dilemmas approach was carried out to explore the range of arguments related to protest violence. We found that most participants articulated a variety of expressions that made up a recognisable cultural pattern: protest should be peaceful. However, when participants perceived that ‘the right to protest’ was threatened by state repression, those who earlier rejected protest violence argued that they would support the use of violence against the police as ‘self-defence’. Our findings suggest there are pervasive frameworks for interpreting and responding to real contexts of political openness and repression, and reflective of people’s ability to simultaneously hold contradictory views about the legitimacy of protest violence.