What does history teach us about protest?

The past 12 months have seen protests around the world make headlines and dominate social media feeds, but a recent report by the International Federation for Human Rights warned that the right to peaceful assembly and demonstration is under growing strain, even within liberal democracies. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Danny Bird speaks to historians Katrina Navakas and Timothy Garten Ash to explore how protest has both challenged and changed the course of history. The first question I want to ask is what defines a protest? What distinguishes it from, say, a revolution or a riot? Because it seems that these concepts are often muddled or can become conflated.

A protest quite often is defined by the law, and that's why it's a mutable term. And That term has changed over time. Certainly in England, Wales, our first definitions really come in 1714 with the Riot Act, which defines what a riot is, as opposed to a demonstration or other types of protest. So to be a riot in the 18th century you had to have 12 people.

Anything less than that was just a disturbance. And a riot obviously involves violence, it involves breaches of the peace. And the origins of the modern demonstration, as I see it, come in the nineteenth century with the rise of the democratic movement. So we think of protest as people out on the streets, as people making a claim, using collective action, using large crowds.

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