Introduction to the Symposium on Protest and Legal Mobilization

[Jeff Handmaker is an Associate Professor of legal sociology at Erasmus University.

Mikel Díez Sarasola is an Assistant Lecturer of constitutional law at the University of the Basque Country.

Sanne Taekema is a Professor of legal theory at Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University..

Michał Stambulski is an Assistant Professor of legal theory at Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University.]

Protests are non-formal expressions of discontent that challenge authority and demand change. They emerge when institutional politics fail, often provoking swift attempts at suppression by authorities. As reported by Amnesty International, the right to protest in Europe faces growing restrictions through limiting legislation, expanding procedural hurdles for organizing demonstrations, as well as excessive and racially biased policing and profiling. Despite these obstacles, protest continues to grow. According to a March 2020 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, mass protests increased by 11.5 percent worldwide between 2009 and 2019. Furthermore, the Allianz Political Violence and Civil Unrest Trend Report 2025 likewise shows that protest activity has stayed high worldwide, with around 160 major anti-government protests across more than 150 countries in 2024. What we see, however, is not only an increase in the frequency of protests but also their growing incorporation into legal discourse, prompting questions about the status of protest as a global political right and its relation to formal legal procedures and legal mobilization. Contemporary protests often erupt in response to planned legal changes, indicating the discrepancy between the legislators and the citizens. Legislative processes are public and, thanks to broad access to information via social media, can now be followed in real time. The digital sphere also enables amplification of dissent and collective mobilization, allowing public emotion to expand from screens to the streets. As a result, law itself becomes the object of contestation. Protesters recognize it as a locus of power and demand not only political change or abstract “justice,” but also the realization of values such as constitutionalism, human rights, and the rule of law. From Polish citizens carrying signs reading “Constitution” , Hong Kong people demanding “the rule of law,” and Malaysian lawyers marching for judicial independence, legal concepts are translated into civic imaginary of autonomy and dissent. This dynamic strengthens the connection between protest and other forms of legal mobilization, such as human rights claims, court cases or legislative counter-initiatives.

The aim of this symposium is to examine the right to protest from a global perspective through case studies that demonstrate the connection and interdependence of protest and legal mobilization, understood as the strategic use of legal procedures and institutions to facilitate social and political change. The symposium also explores both the creative forms of using legal mobilization to advance protest and the novel legal strategies aimed at governing and de-mobilizing it.

The symposium opens with contributions that situate the right to protest in specific temporal and geographical contexts, highlighting its close connection to the social and political imagination. Mikel Díez Sarasola reflects on how the hopeful wave of protests in the 2010s has given way to a climate where dissent is increasingly criminalized. He shows how experiments like Occupied Protests were reframed as failures and used by reactionary forces to strengthen their grip. His analysis connects these shifts to new laws in Spain, France, and the UK, illustrating how democracies themselves hollow out the rule of law. The duality of the relation between protest and law is also evident in Sanjana Hooda’s post. She turns to the Shaheen Bagh protests against India’s Citizenship Amendment Act, portraying them as both a site of state repression and constitutional imagination. She highlights how law operated simultaneously as “sword” through sedition charges and “shield” through the performative embrace of the Constitution. Her account connects protest art and mass readings of the Preamble to a broader legal consciousness among marginalized groups. Also highlighting the importance of social consciousness and imagination for legal mobilization, Cansu Bostan explores how the Yazidi diaspora in Sweden pursued justice after the genocide through both courtrooms and community practices. She notes that while prosecutions under universal jurisdiction brought recognition, they felt distant from survivors’ lived experiences. Her contribution shows how rituals, commemorations, and demonstrations intertwined with legal claims, turning protest into a transnational “just space” for memory and accountability.

The next posts turn to novel policing tactics and state repression of protest, both hard and soft. Maame Efua Addadzi-Koom and Richard Obeng Mensah show that creativity is not only a feature of protest action but also of state repression, which has become increasingly elaborate in constraining collective mobilization. They examine Ghana, where constitutional guarantees collide with the reality of heavy-handed protest policing. The authors describe tactics ranging from water cannons and arbitrary arrests to the new strategy of injunctions that pre-empt demonstrations. Their discussion situates Ghana’s experience within global debates about how states contain and demobilize dissent. Sithuthukile Mkhize and Omhle Ntshingila demonstrate how state administrative repression and policing make protest simultaneously a legally recognized right and a socially scarce phenomenon. They focus on South Africa’s mining-affected communities, where protest remains a vital but perilous tool. The authors recall the Marikana miners’ strike and detail how companies deploy SLAPP suits and interdicts to silence activists. Their argument links these practices to a deeper critique of transformative constitutionalism, showing continuities between apartheid-era exclusion and contemporary repression. Jeff Handmaker, Anya Topolski, Yolande Jansen, and Michiel Bot emphasize the close relation between protest and freedom of speech and show how this freedom can be weaponized against protest. They analyze the growing tendency to deploy accusations of antisemitism against pro-Palestinian activism. They show how governments in the USA, Germany, and the Netherlands target students and scholars by conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Their piece connects these measures to the contested the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, warning that they erode academic freedom and undermine democratic protest itself.

The symposium concludes with contributions that use protest to imagine new forms of legal knowledge and practice. Michał Stambulski argues that protest is emerging as more than a right — it is becoming a constitutional argument in its own right. Drawing on Georgian demonstrations against the “foreign agent law,” he shows how the Venice Commission incorporated mass mobilization into its rule-of-law assessment. His post situates protest as a constitutive element of constitutionalism, offering a counterweight to autocratic legalism. In the closing text, Sanne Taekema reflects on the different ways protest engages democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. She notes that while democratic and rights-based movements generate strong bodily and symbolic images, rule-of-law protests often struggle to find such resonance. Her reflections connect the symposium to broader debates on legal mobilization, framing protest as both political practice and engagement with constitutional values.

Taken together, the symposium show how protest and legal mobilization are deeply intertwined across diverse contexts — from India to South Africa, Ghana to Sweden, the Netherlands to Georgia, and beyond. They reveal protest as a practice shaped by law but also as a force that redefines constitutionalism, human rights, citizenship, and justice, by enabling citizens to influence these very ideas. What emerges is a paradoxical picture: law can empower collective struggles by recognizing the right to protest as an institution, yet it can also suppress them. Once institutionalized, protest becomes subordinated to other values, such as public safety and order, and is thereby exposed to restraining regulations and criminalization. As a result, protest remains both indispensable to democratic life and a perceived threat to everyday legal order. By tracing these tensions, the symposium highlights protest not merely as a reaction to failures of the political system, but as a constitutive element of civic agency, and therefore also of the rule of law. Looking ahead, the challenge for scholars, activists, and institutions alike is to understand how legal mobilization and protest can reinforce each other in the face of autocratic tendencies and shrinking civic space worldwide.