Symposium on Protest and Legal Mobilization: From the Rule of Law to the “Rude of Law”- Protesting in a World of Shrinking Freedoms

[Mikel Díez Sarasola is an Assistant Lecturer at the University of the Basque Country]

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, protests and demonstrations erupted worldwide, challenging an established order that had seemed unbreakable. The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia saw thousands take to the streets against a corrupt, oppressive regime, leading to the ousting of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in early 2011 and opening the door to long-awaited democratic reforms. This uprising ignited similar movements across the Arab world in what became known as the Arab Spring. In Egypt, the occupation of Tahrir Square led to the fall of Hosni Mubarak, while in Libya, civil war ended in the capture and assassination of Muammar Gaddafi. Not long after, protests spread far beyond the Arab world. In Kyiv, thousands filled Maidan Square to oppose President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to suspend an EU Association Agreement in favour of closer ties with Russia, triggering the pro-European Euromaidan movement. In the West, discontent took other forms. The Occupy Wall Street movement denounced growing inequality, corporate influence, and political unaccountability in the aftermath of the financial crash, echoing Spain’s 15-M Indignados movement, which challenged the legitimacy of political elites under the slogan “they don’t represent us.” Soon after, the Black Lives Matter movement emerged in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, rallying against police violence and systemic racism in the United States.

Despite their differences in context and form, these protests shared a common message: a call for truly democratic societies based on liberty, equality, and human dignity. They marked turbulent times, filled with powerful images and global headlines — but also charged with hope for those refusing to remain the perpetual losers of an unequal, unbalanced global order.

What Became of that Global Wave for Democracy and Social Justice?

As Vincent Bevins argues in If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, ironically, many of those emancipatory movements that called for a more just and democratic social order may not only have failed, but may have inadvertently laid the groundwork for reactionary forces that embody precisely what they aimed to combat. Today, we live in a world that would have seemed unimaginable a decade ago. The leading actor of what once was the liberal world order, the United States, is governed by a histrionic despot who wields power arbitrarily, stripping rights from and deporting “undesirable” immigrants, targeting critical artists, and financially suffocating and sanctioning dissenting universities and institutions. Meanwhile, Russia and Israel have indulged in violent and brutal territorial conquests, annexing neighboring lands with utter disregard for the zombie rules of international law. Europe, for its part, watches on in a weakened and powerless moment, holding its breath as illiberal governments and political forces spread within its borders, threatening its foundational values.

Where Have the Protests and Mobilizations of Yesterday Gone?

Identifying the precise reasons behind the apparent failure of the global protest wave that surged in the early 2010s is a complex task. Several interlocking explanations come up. On one hand, many of these movements fell short of transforming spontaneous and widespread mobilization into coherent political alternatives, projects capable not only of channeling indignation but also of governing the intricate realities of globalized societies. On the other hand, the weaknesses of these uprisings, their organizational fragility, internal contradictions, and at times utopian impulses, were rapidly exploited by reactionary actors who reframed the narrative and turned these very flaws into ideological ammunition. Perhaps the most emblematic case is the rise and fall of Seattle’s CHOP (Capitol Hill Occupied/Organized Protest) in 2020. Emerging in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, CHOP was imagined as a bold experiment in self-governance, a radical reclamation of urban space outside traditional political institutions. But the zone quickly descended into confusion, mismanagement, and episodes of violence, outcomes that critics seized upon to delegitimize the entire endeavor. For neoconservative ideologues like Christopher Rufo, CHOP became an allegory for the alleged dangers of progressive governance, especially those rooted in the ideals of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). Rather than a flawed but earnest attempt to reimagine democracy from below, CHOP was recast as a failed social experiment, a dystopian warning against the supposed excesses of leftist thought.

This rhetorical reframing has proven powerful. It has allowed opponents of social justice to consolidate support not by arguing against specific policies, but by invoking cultural fears and portraying progressive ideals as ungovernable, chaotic, and ultimately harmful. In this sense, the fate of CHOP illustrates a broader pattern: how moments of radical imagination, when left institutionally unanchored and strategically isolated, can be reabsorbed into reactionary narratives and used to justify retrenchment rather than reform. In this new landscape, the role and nature of protest as a political instrument has shifted significantly. First, events that once held great mobilizing power now often go unnoticed in Western societies that appear narcotized in the face of escalating assaults on the rule of law by Trump, Netanyahu, or Putin, rendering these leaders still more immune to public pressure. Second, the streets no longer belong solely to progressive movements: right-wing forces have also claimed them, as witnessed in the storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021. Third, the right to protest is increasingly constrained, sometimes even criminalized through laws passed by democratic parliaments.

The Role of Law in Shaping Protest

If the rule of law as a normative ideal is meant to empower citizens to control power and call out arbitrariness and abuse, what we are now witnessing in many countries is a reversal, a gradual weakening and hollowing out of the rule of law. The paradox is that this slow “eviction” of the rule of law is happening through laws passed by democratically elected parliaments. Spain’s controversial Organic Law 4/2015 on the Protection of Citizen Security, commonly referred to as the  “ley mordaza” (gag law), offers a striking example of how protest rights are being reconfigured within democratic frameworks (). Yet it is not an isolated case. France’s 2021 Global Security Law and the UK’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022 echo a similar legislative patterns and rationale.

Though these laws come from different national contexts, they reveal a strikingly convergent response to the global wave of protest movements. Across different democratic regimes, legal reforms systematically expanded administrative powers at the expense of judicial oversight, granting state agencies greater latitude to regulate and sanction public protest without meaningful judicial review. What unites also these legal regimes is a subtle, creeping criminalization of behaviors that were once within the bounds of lawful civic expression.  This is achieved not through outright bans, but via more insidious mechanisms: sharply increased fines for minor infractions, the imposition of new administrative authorizations for assemblies or demonstrations, and the frequent invocation of vaguely defined notions like “public order” or “security risk” to justify broad discretionary powers. The language of these laws is often intentionally ambiguous, relying on nebulous terms such as “disturbance,” “nuisance,” or “unjustified disruption”, thus creating legal grey areas that can be exploited to suppress dissent selectively and arbitrarily. This global pattern of incremental criminalisation was not incidental but represented a coordinated legalistic response to mass mobilisation movements of the early 2010s. Only after documenting this systematic legal turn can we understand how it gradually eroded the conditions for meaningful protest by normalising preventive repression and narrowing the legal space for civic mobilization.

Perhaps most paradoxically, these legal shifts are not the work of authoritarian regimes acting in defiance of popular will. Rather, they are being enacted through democratic procedures, passed by elected parliaments, and often enjoying significant public backing. In societies increasingly obsessed by insecurity, whether economic, geopolitical, or social, the promise of “order” and stability frequently takes precedence over the defence of individual liberties. This trend reflects a broader erosion of the normative consensus underpinning liberal democratic values, where notions of security, order, and risk prevention have risen to the top of political agendas. In this context, restrictive laws and discretionary executive powers are no longer presented as exceptional or temporary, but rather as necessary, pragmatic, and even technical responses to an increasingly unstable and unpredictable world. The result is the gradual normalisation of preventive repression within democratic systems, blurring the line between legitimate public order management and the systematic curtailment of dissent. Furthermore, citizens, anxious for stability, may not only tolerate but also actively demand the curtailment of protest rights in exchange for a sense of certainty and control. What emerges is a troubling new legal and political paradigm in which democratic legitimacy is instrumentalised not to expand civic space but to constrain it, where fear, even more than overt coercion, becomes the driving force for democratic backsliding. As a result, we may be witnessing the birth of a new kind of society, one governed not by the utopian promises of the rule of law, but by a dystopian legal order that might best be called “the rude of law”.

Photo attribution: “Tunisian Revolution” by Chris Belsten is licensed under CC BY 2.0