CONTENTIOUS EFFERVESCENCE:

THE SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF RIOTING*

Benjamin S. Case†

How do violent protests affect social movement participants? Riots are common in civilian
movements, but the effects of protester violence remain under-researched, in part due to an
association of civilian protest with nonviolent methods and an association of violent protest with
irrational chaos. Specifically, few studies have examined the experiences of rioters themselves.
I use theoretical analysis and qualitative in-depth interviews with activists from the United
States and South Africa to explore the subjective impact that moments of violent protest have on
participants. Activist accounts indicate that many experience what I call “contentious efferves-
cence,” a heightened state and sense of political empowerment amidst low-level violent actions,
with long-term effects that raise consciousness and deepen and sustain activists’ resolve. I
argue that examining the experiential and emotional effects of riots enhances our ability to
understand contentious politics from below.

How do violent protests impact social movement participants? In recent decades, mass civil
uprisings have threatened or overthrown regimes across the world. For the past decade, protest
events worldwide have grown and increased in size and intensity (Brannen, Haig, and Schmidt
2020). Even before, scholars had observed an increase in violent protests in the half century
prior (Gurr 2000). The vast majority of unarmed movements involve rioting (Abbs and
Gleditsch 2021; Case 2021), and existing research demonstrates the importance of incur-
porating violent protest into analyses of social movement trajectories and outcomes (Enos,
Kaufman, and Sands 2019; Ketchley 2017; Piven and Cloward 1978; Seferiades and Johnston,
eds. 2012). However, the experience of participating in violent protests remains understudied;
sociological research has all but ignored rioters as subjects. Most existing social science
research on riots focuses on explaining why or how riots occur (e.g., Collins 2008; Gale 1996;
Gilje 1996; Schneider 2014) or on short term outcomes (e.g., Abbs and Gleditsch 2021; Enos,
Kaufman, and Sands 2019; Wasow 2020). However, with sparse exceptions (e.g., Auyero 2003;
Meckfessel 2016), few researchers have asked rioters themselves about their experiences.
Instead, rioters are commonly associated with theories of mob mentality and crowd behavior.
Even in sophisticated analyses of violent protests (e.g., Collins 2008), participants appear to be
animated by exogenous forces derived from the crowd experience and approached as though
the acts of rioting reflect a lack of agency and subjectivity.
In this article, I advance a theoretical argument about the subjective experience of protester
violence by drawing from classical theories of collective effervescence (Durkheim 1915) and
violent social struggle (Fanon 1961). I put these theories in conversation with the notion of
“disruptive deficit,” which grows in contexts where nonviolent mobilizations take on the façade
of contention without contentious content (Seferiades and Johnston 2012: 6). Beyond the
material implications for movements, the disruptive deficit is felt by participants, resulting in a
subjective “loss of political meaning” (Seferiades and Johnston 2012: 6). In contrast to the dis-
empowering emotional effect of the disruptive deficit, I argue that participation in a violent

* Benjamin S. Case is an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst. Direct correspondence to [email protected].
† This research is the product of discussions with the forty-two people interviewed as well as countless other informal
conversations and dialogue with fellow organizers, activists, and scholars. I am especially grateful to John Markoff,
Mohammed Bamyeh, Gillian Goldberg, and Hatem Hassan for edits and suggestions on various drafts of this article.
Thank you also to Neal Caren and three anonymous reviewers for their very generative comments and feedback.

© 2021 Mobilization: An International Quarterly 26(2): 179-196

DOI 10.17813/1086-671X-26-2-179
180 Mobilization

protest can be an empowering experience that heightens and clarifies political meaning. Hannah
Arendt (1970: 18) observed that violence in protests tends to “coincide with a clash of tangible
group interests.” I suggest it also works the other way around—interests are most tangibly felt
during violent protests. To explore the experiential effects of rioting, I present two in-depth
interview studies with activists who participated in violent protest actions associated with
“black bloc” tactics in the U.S. and “Fallist” movements in South Africa.
The black bloc is an antisurveillance protest tactic primarily associated with anarchists, in
which participants dress in black and cover their faces, making it difficult for authorities to
distinguish between individuals in a group (see Dupuis-Déri 2010; Thompson 2010). These
formations often involve property destruction and physically confrontational protests. Public
attention to black blocs increased following the “Battle of Seattle” mobilizations against the
WTO in 1999, after the “J20” protests at Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, and more recently
during the 2020 racial justice uprising. The Fallist movement in South Africa refers to a series
of student protests in recent years against university fee increases, labor outsourcing, and
institutionalized racism (Chinguno et al., eds. 2017; Gillespie and Naidoo 2019). These move-
ments involved a variety of tactics, most prominently campus occupations and mass dem-
onstrations, in many instances involving property destruction and physical confrontations with
police and private security forces. Together, these cases involve two distinct social-
historical-political contexts with little or no crosspollination, both of which have involved the
recurring use of low-level violent tactics. Interviews with activists in both cases indicate that
there are distinct subjective effects reported from participating in physically confrontational
protest, in some cases with long-term impacts on political consciousness, movement parti-
cipation, and personal life trajectory. Specifically, many activists I interviewed describe
sensations that I liken to (1) a contentious form of what Durkheim labeled collective efferves-
cence during moments of violent protest, and (2) a corresponding feeling of empowerment in
the face of disempowering repression by authorities, for which I look to Fanon’s theory of
revolutionary violence for theoretical guidance. Interviewees not only describe their activist
experiences but were also highly reflexive about their political engagement and discussed
protest experiences alongside theoretical analyses, making them closer to co-researchers than
interview subjects. I likewise approach this study as a researcher but am guided by my own
experiences of activism and contentious political engagement.
Rising instances of protests which involve violence mean that more and more people across
the world are experiencing these dynamics. Understanding them is thus essential to under-
standing the social impact and long-term effects of contentious protest. This study advances a
subjective analysis of protester violence in contribution to broader understandings of social
movements and crowd behavior. Interviews from the U.S. and South Africa demonstrate that,
as I argue, unarmed violence plays an important role in these activists’ consciousness and long-
term political engagement, essentially keeping contentious politics contentious.

THE EFFERVESCENT RIOT

Sociological studies of movements in many ways emerged from the study of crowds and riots
(e.g., Hobsbawm 1963; Thompson 1963; Rudé 1959), and there was a surge of social science
attention to riots during and just following the urban uprisings of the 1960s (e.g., Connery 1968;
Eisinger 1973; Turner 1969). Riots have been a recurring feature of movement repertoires (Tilly
2006: 46), but since the 1970s, sociology has largely moved away from studying riots as part
of movements—often boxing violent protest out of legible movement tactics through emphasis
on formal organizations and processes, and via the language and framing of nonviolence (Case
2021; Meckfessel 2016; Piven 2012). This has left a gap in understandings of unarmed protester
violence (Bosi, Demetriou, and Malthaner 2014; Piven 2012).1 In recent years, there have been
a number of studies beginning to fill this gap by examining how or why riots occur (e.g.,
Kawalerowicz and Biggs 2015; Schneider 2014; von Holdt et al. 2012) or on strategic and sym-
Contentious Effervescence 181

bolic impacts of rioting for movements (e.g., Abbs and Gleditsch 2021; Case 2021; Enos,
Kaufman, and Sands 2019; Wasow 2020). In this article, I examine riots from an emotional-
experiential standpoint.
There is a wealth of research and theory on emotions in contentious movements (Benski
and Langman 2013; Flam 2005; Flam and King 2005; Jasper 2011). However, when it comes
to riots, archaic theories of collective behavior continue to guide the way participants are
commonly viewed. Most influential in the collective behavior tradition is the view of the crowd
as a mindless, chaotic, brutal assembly of bodies, contagious for those who join, resulting in
loss of agency and control. This view, classically associated with social-psychological theories
of Gustave Le Bon (1895) and Gabriel Tarde (1901), came to be referred to as crowd semantics
or crowd hysteria. Émile Durkheim challenged these ideas as lacking in methodological rigor,
and the debate would become formative for the then-congealing field of sociology (Borch
2012). Durkheim would go so far as to label the notion of crowd hysterics “imaginary” (Durkheim
1951: 142). Nevertheless, a similar phenomenon would later emerge in Durkheim’s own work,
though with more empirical grounding and less racism and sexism, in the form of effervescence.
Durkheim (1961: 247) describes effervescence as an electrifying sensation that results from an
assembly of bodies in one place for one purpose:
The very fact of the concentration acts as an exceptionally powerful stimulant. When they are
once come together, a sort of electricity is formed by their collective which quickly transports
them to an extraordinary degree of exultation. Every sentiment expressed finds a place without
resistance in all the minds, which are very open to outside impressions: each re-echoes the others
and is re-echoed by the others.

The effervescent experience temporarily transforms individuals’ subjectivity, and thereby

transforms their understanding of the objective world. When a person arrives at the collective
effervescent state, they “no longer recognize” themselves. Rather, a person feels dominated and
“carried away by some sort of an external power which makes him think and act differently
than in normal times. . . . It seems to him that he has become a new being” (Durkheim 1961:
249-50). This experience is temporary but its effect so powerful that Durkheim suggests col-
lective effervescence is the birthplace of religion. In this process, people take on a dual reality,
a “double existence”—one in their everyday lives and another in the effervescent realm—which
allows them to experience the spirit world first-hand, and thus be convinced of its existence
(Durkheim 1961). In other words, people need to see and touch the metaphysical world in order
to truly believe it, and effervescence is the conduit. The long-term emotional effects of the
collective effervescent experience are potent and can come to shape a person’s personality
(Collins 2005). As we will see, far from being mindless chaos in which individuals lose their
sense of self, experiences of rioting can generate a particular type of effervescence that can
enhance subjectivity and raise political consciousness amidst an otherwise routinized protest
environment where is difficult to tell contention from convention.
Effervescence is tied to collective action (Kearney 2018), and research on the micro-
sociology of violent interactions has brought elements of Durkheim’s theory to bear on the riot
(Collins 2008). However, this approach still examines the dynamics of riots as abstract forces
of their own that largely dictate the experiences of people who are subject to them more or less
interchangeably between contexts. Likewise, through this lens, rioters and police are subject to
the same effervescent dynamics of violent crowds in motion. Most notable among these is
Collins’s (2008) theory of “forward panic,” essentially the culmination of tension/fear in an
aggressive frenzy. Other studies have observed forward panic in analyses of riots as well (e.g.,
Ketchley 2014). We should expect a riot to generate an emotional response, but to explore it
we cannot rely simply on analyses of video and photo evidence, as Collins does, but must
consult participants. Indeed, contrary to Collins’s forward panic, the mix of intense “contra-
dictory or noncongruent emotions” (Benski and Langman 2013: 531, emphasis theirs) reported
in interviews I conducted with rioters point to an equally extraordinary yet far more subjective
and situated effervescent experience, directly tied to contentious resistance against authorities.
182 Mobilization

Among activists, particularly those attached to formal organizations and nonprofits, riots are
often viewed as emotional outbursts that might be justified but ultimately damage movements’
image and invite repression. Proponents of nonviolence thus argue for strategic “nonviolent
discipline” against these violent impulses to maximize movements’ efficacy (see Schneider 2012).
It is not so simple. When approaching emotions in social movements, it is important to ground
emotions in the macropolitical environment in which they take place—movements do not operate
in a vacuum (Flam 2005). Many emotional reactions to politics uphold the status quo, while
effective social movements use subversive “counteremotions” to persuade people to join the
struggle. Chief among these is anger (Flam 2005; Jasper 2014; van Stekelenburg and Klander-
mans 2013), and the ways anger is mobilized can vary by circumstance. To rouse people and
sustain participation, anger must be appropriately directed against a moral shock and paired with
action toward a positive vision for the future; what Jasper (2011; 2014) calls a “moral battery.”
Some have argued that there are two emotional-motivational routes to protest: “an anger route
based on efficacy leading to normative action and a contempt route . . . leading to nonnormative
protest” (van Stekelenburg and Klandermans 2013: 893). Normative action here is thought to be
“where efficacious people protest,” while violent actions are based on the feeling of contempt
overriding a sense of efficacy (van Stekelenburg and Klandermans 2013: 893). However,
emotions can also work to demobilize movements; for example, anger being redirected toward
other activists or an outsized presence of fear and despair among activists can destroy a movement
(Eyerman 2005; Jasper 2014).
Normative protests might appear to be contentious through their form, but actual “‘conflict’
is not possible unless protest is sufficiently pungent to disrupt the workings of the system: to exert
pressure on opponents, bystanders and authorities” (Seferiades and Johnston 2012: 5, emphasis
theirs). Not only are opponents, bystanders, and authorities impacted but also participants them-
selves. This view challenges the notion that normative protest is efficacious, not only materially
but also emotionally, and those who insist upon conventional action can ultimately contribute to
its breakdown, as participants’ frustrations with the feeling of disruptive deficit can boil over into
rioting (Seferiades and Johnston 2012: 5-6). I view the disruptive deficit Seferiades and Johnston
propose through a subjective lens, examining both the frustrations and the boiling over via the
experiences of activists who took part in violent protests.
Social movements move in large part by transforming identities and emotions (Eyerman
2005: 44). By physically manifesting anger against the symbols of domination, dominated
subjects are able to remake themselves into revolutionary subjects (Fanon 1961). Scholars
conceive of violence differently, for example as a tool that movement actors rationally select when
they have reason to believe it will help them accomplish their goals (e.g., Gamson 1975), as
strategically harmful to movement success (e.g., Nepstad 2015), as irrational crowd behavior
(e.g., Borch 2012), or as a series of microinteractions governed by more or less universal dynamics
(e.g., Collins 2008). Frantz Fanon (1961) approaches violence as a conduit to overcome the
insecurity complexes that dominated people are subject to. It is the visceral experience of fighting
back that is required to see oneself as a revolutionary subject, or in other words, as someone one
who is capable of transforming the world (Fanon 1961).
Of course, there is an accompanying moral dilemma in doing violence to overcome violence,
which Fanon (1961) himself discusses at length. In the interviews that follow, the experiences of
rioters recall Fanon, but notably, attached to collective actions that deploy minimal material
violence. If we view violence on a spectrum, the types of violent actions addressed in this study
are about as close as it gets to being not-violent: throwing projectiles at armed police, setting
property on fire, breaking windows, and relatively minor physical scuffles with security. Juxta-
posed with nonviolence, these actions are indeed violent, and many studies of riots (e.g., Collins
2008; Gamson 1975) and nonviolence (e.g., Nepstad 2015; Sharp 1973) would consider them
violent alongside violent conflict such as warfare. However, the “violence” of protests like those
addressed in this paper remains far closer to nonviolent struggle than those actions are to warfare
in terms of the participants, dynamics, casualties, and strategic approach. Yet there is something
distinct about the experience of a physical fight that imbues these actions with a particular heigh-
tened and empowering sensation.
Contentious Effervescence 183

EXPLORING THE RIOTER IN TWO CASE STUDIES

This study is informed by in-depth interviews with anarchist activists in the U.S. and student
activists in South Africa. The U.S. study focuses specifically on activists who participated in the
black bloc tactic. The black bloc is widely associated with anarchists and antifascists and involves
groups dressed in black and wearing masks, who often engage in confrontations with police or
political opponents during demonstrations (Dupuis-Déri 2010; Graeber 2009; Thompson 2010).
The collective willingness to destroy property and use force against authorities is a primary
characteristic of these formations.2 The practice of dressing alike and “masking up” is designed
to provide security through anonymity, but in addition, the aesthetic allows for the creation of a
temporary but empowering collective identity within larger protest actions (Avery-Natale 2010;
Spiegel 2015). Black blocs have periodically made frontpage news in the U.S. since the 1999
“Battle of Seattle” disrupted a World Trade Organization meeting and more recently, during
Trump’s 2017 inauguration, in various antifascist mobilizations, and in racial justice uprisings.
The South Africa study focuses on Fallist activists who participated in university uprisings in
2015-2016. Fallism refers to the collection of recent South African student movements, named
for their corresponding Twitter hashtags, calling for the fall of colonial policies and symbols at
universities, namely #FeesMustFall, #RhodesMustFall, and #OutsourcingMustFall (Gillespie and
Naidoo 2019). My interviews mainly focus on participants in FeesMustFall (FMF), which arose
in 2015 to protest proposed hikes to university tuition, but all three were intertwined.3 The FMF
movement temporarily defeated the fee increase after disruptive, and sometimes violent, protest
and campus occupations at universities across the country. When fees were raised the following
year, a second, smaller, and more politically radical wave of protest challenged the hikes again
but was unsuccessful this second time. FMF initially followed OutsourcingMustFall campaigns,
in which workers and student allies protested outsourcing of campus labor to private contractors,
and the RhodesMustFall campaign, which began with students at University of Cape Town
defacing and demanding the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes on their campus. All three
struggles were intimately connected, and each represented deeper, intertwined political goals,
mainly focused on class, race, and gender inequalities and the decolonization of higher education
in South Africa (see Chinguno et al., eds. 2017; Gillespie and Naidoo 2019; Naidoo, Gamedze,
and Magano, eds. 2017). RhodesMustFall in particular went global, with decolonization cam-
paigns targeting colonial symbols, institutions, and curricula at universities across the world (see
Rhodes Must Fall, Oxford 2018).
Why these two cases? The U.S. and South Africa represent two diverse countries that share
enough similarities and distinctions to provide a broad perspective; both are struggling but
established constitutional democracies with settler-colonial histories, deep racial tensions, and
legacies of internal conflict. They also represent widely differing contexts in other ways that may
produce differing conditions of struggle; the U.S. has been a longstanding polity that has evolved
in response to social movement pressure from below, while South Africa is a quarter century
removed from a democratic revolution at the hands of broad-based social movements and
international pressure. In both countries, movements are struggling to adapt to twenty-first century
sociopolitical conditions, but in very different local contexts. To be clear, I do not use the two as
comparison cases: the black bloc is a tactic, while FMF is a complex and multifaceted movement,
and in both cases I am interviewing activists regarding one aspect—experiences with violent
protest. Nor can either the black bloc or FMF be reduced to instances of violent collective action.
I choose black bloc participants in the U.S. and Fallists in South Africa because their participants
represent excellent, varied, contemporary, and relevant sources of qualitative experience relating
to physically confrontational protest.
In the U.S., I conducted interviews between 2015 and 2020 with activists who participated in
black bloc tactics. In South Africa, I conducted interviews in 2017 with activists associated with
Fallist student movements. I selected an in-depth, semistructured interview format based on the
method’s particular benefits for social movement research, especially related to contentious
activity (Blee and Taylor 2002). Interviewing activists about violent protest is tricky, especially
184 Mobilization

considering increased repression of such activities and surveillance of milieus within movements
considered likely to engage in them. I initially contacted interlocutors in both cases based on per-
sonal references within activist scenes and proceeded to make contacts through snowball sampling
or based on chance encounter in activist spaces. Being connected through trusted sources, as well
as my familiarity with activist scenes and my own activist history, helped make interviewees more
comfortable opening up given the sensitive nature of the topics being discussed. Out of an
abundance of caution, I encouraged interviewees to refrain from telling me what they or others
specifically did during relevant actions but rather to focus on how those moments felt.
While I did not seek out interviews based on prior knowledge of individuals’ protest actions,
there was an element of convenience to the U.S. sample, since black bloc formations are associ-
ated with physically confrontational tactics. Individuals who participate in acts of unarmed
collective violence are a difficult to reach subpopulation of protesters, and thus in many cases, are
only reachable through purposive sampling techniques. I did not select interviewees in either case
based on knowledge of their prior thinking on these subjects, but as will be clear in quotes I present
below, many had spent much time thinking about, studying, and debating issues of protest,
politics, and violence and often referenced social and political theory based on an understanding
of shared reference points. The argument I present is my own, but its theoretical development
builds on the intellectual work as well as the experiences of those I spoke to. While I am not aware
of a convention to fully attribute their contributions while maintaining interviewees’ anonymity,
many of those I spoke to should be recognized as co-researchers.4
All interviews were conducted in person, mostly in public locations such as cafes and parks,
as well as in several interlocutors’ homes or places of work, and ranged from forty-five minutes
to two-and-a-half hours in length. In order to address security concerns, information was only
recorded with pseudonyms, either via recording device or handwritten notes depending on inter-
viewees’ preference, with recordings stored on an encrypted drive until they could be transcribed.
Interviews were mostly with individuals, with three exceptions of groups who preferred to be
interviewed together: two couples in the U.S. and a group of three South African students. I atten-
ded relevant public talks and discussions and consulted activist-written literature, and the research
is supplemented by numerous informal interviews and interactions in activist spaces.
I disclose overall demographics and locations but obscure specific information that might
identify an interlocutor. The genders and pronouns I use are accurate, but names are artificial. In
the US, the twenty-seven participants interviewed were based in four cities in different geographic
regions. Thirteen black bloc interlocuters were men, ten were women, and four identified as
gender-nonbinary. The majority (twenty) identified as white, three were Black, two were Latino,
one was Asian-American, and one identified as multiracial. In South Africa, the majority of the
fifteen participants were based in Johannesburg, while four were based in Cape Town and one
was based in Pretoria. Demographically, eight South African interlocuters were women and seven
were men; eight were Black, four were white, two identified as “coloured” (mixed-race heritage),
and one was of Asian descent. I interviewed students and former students from University of the
Witwatersrand (Wits), University of Johannesburg (UJ), and University of Cape Town (UCT), as
well as one professor and one university worker at Wits who participated in FMF.

KEEPING CONTENTIOUS POLITICS CONTENTIOUS: ACTIVIST ACCOUNTS

Personal accounts of activists who participated in violence add necessary subjective insight to
understanding contentious politics. I do not establish hard timelines or detailed moment-to-
moment accounts of particular actions; rather, I draw out experiential meanings and affective
responses to participation in a variety of violent protest forms. I account for all respondents’
remarks in my analysis, but this text focuses on the words of several individuals in each case. I
first discuss the black bloc case, focusing on the accounts of three women in different cities. Two
participated in protester violence and in nonviolent actions during their activist careers, including,
for one of them, at the first black bloc action in the U.S. in 1990. The third partook in black bloc
Contentious Effervescence 185

actions that destroyed property but did not identify with violent action herself. I then discuss the
Fallist case, focusing on the accounts of two student activists at UJ and two student activists at
Wits, all of whom took part in both violent and nonviolent FMF actions. Through these narratives,
we gain insight into how participants make sense of violent protest through their own experiences,
as well as how participation in those actions affected them and their political outlooks.

THE BLACK BLOC IN THE US

In the late 1980s, Zi was an activist with the Youth Greens, then a radical wing of the Green Party
before the organization’s move into electoral politics. Zi was part of an affinity group5 that
participated in what she and several other interlocutors described as the first black bloc in the U.S.
on Earth Day of 1990. Prior to that, she describes her frustration and growing disgust at the in-
action that characterized the protests she participated in. For example, she describes peacefully
counterprotesting an antiabortion march, an issue on which she felt strongly, leaving her feeling
disheartened. “It was super depressing! I just didn’t feel like it was an effective style of resistance
to what we were being confronted with. . . . I felt pretty defeated, on the protest front.” In another
instance, she discusses how even the appearance of being angry was policed by “the nonviolence
people” in conventional protests:

I would go to these protests . . . and they were so boring. Like this one time, me and my friend, we
baked a cake to feed the protesters, and the cake said, “Fuck you George Bush” [laughs], and this
lady who was part of the protest comes up to us and is like, “That’s violence.” To our cake! It was
so depressing.

Exposure to conventional protests that did not feel powerful led Zi to seek out people
interested in “actually doing something.” She was inspired upon hearing about the black bloc
tactic in Germany, which was being popularized among anarchists as a method to physically de-
fend squatted residences against the police: “It didn’t sound boring, it sounded serious.” Zi’s group
decided to organize a black bloc action at a major city’s Earth Day march in 1990. The plan was
to break off from the large, permitted march and cause chaos to highlight the seriousness of
climate change and the need to treat it like the crisis it is. She describes arriving that morning:

It was kind of scary . . . when we got there, the black bloc was meeting up a little before the big
march was convening. And they had lit a dumpster on fire and pushed it into the street . . . and it
was like, “Oh shit, there’s a fire in the middle of the street!” And in that moment, it felt like the
tables had turned, you know? I mean, this isn’t a “Fuck-you-George-Bush” cake anymore—this is
fire in the street. I remember being scared but also enlivened.

Then the black bloc started moving:

It felt cohesive. Which I guess I had never really felt before. You know, when I had gone to protests
before, it was usually with one friend of mine. And it was just us standing around feeling alienated,
you know? This was like—we’re all in a group, and the adrenaline is going. It felt like we were
one cohesive unit, all moving together, but all doing our own things.

The intense and noncongruent emotional responses are notable. “Scared” is combined with
“enlivened” and “adrenaline” with “cohesive.” In describing these riotous moments, Zi and many
black bloc participants I interviewed frequently used words like “exciting” and “thrilling” in close
proximity to “scary” and “terrifying”—in most cases, with distinctly animated affect during the
interview. More than one articulated the feeling as “euphoria.” Zi related a coincidence that
juxtaposed her previous, alienated experience with conventional protest and the adrenaline-fueled
excitement of the bloc. While her black bloc was moving from one target to another, they were
passing by the main Earth Day march when she happened to see an old friend from her hometown.
The two had been close until a falling out when Zi began radicalizing.
186 Mobilization

And she was standing there, watching the protest go by on the other sidewalk. And she was crying.
Just watching the protest and crying at how awful the world was or something. . . . And I was just
like, fuck that—just crying in response to this crisis we’re in. Because . . . a couple years ago I
would have been there too. I would have been on the sidelines right next to her, feeling over-
whelmed and hopeless and crying. But instead I was in a cohesive unit, energized and running
down the street trying to change things in a different way.

It bears emphasis that Zi, like most interviewees, acknowledged outright that this action itself
did not directly achieve any material goals. (Those I spoke to who did believe protest violence
achieved tangible goals still tended to acknowledge how minimal they were in the grand scheme,
i.e., the costs imposed on a multimillion dollar company to clean up minor damage, temporary
loss of business, etc.) Even knowing that, the sensation of participating in a viscerally violent
collective action had lasting effects for Zi, who reports recalling the feeling of such moments as a
source of inspiration, even decades later.
Another respondent, Em, also found her way to black bloc tactics as a result of unsatisfying
experiences with conventional protest: “There are so many experiences of disempowerment.
Including in movement organizing. I didn’t personally feel like I had power in any of the political
protests I saw and was part of.” She focused on the experience of being violently attacked by
police while protesting nonviolently: “It’s not like we were smashing windows or setting fire to
their cars, it was like, I’m standing here and not there, so then it becomes like just the pure
experience of authority.” Being physically attacked by police despite not representing a threat-
ening presence—“the pure experience of authority”—created both frustration and a feeling of
disempowerment. However, Em reports feeling invigorated when entering the contentious space
outside of nonviolent protest. In describing this feeling, she quotes another activist from the
“Battle of Seattle” protests at the World Trade Organization in 1999.6
There’s this guy on a megaphone, and it’s this really intense moment, there’s teargas raining down,
and he said: “I know you think that’s fear in your chest right now, but it’s not—you’ve just never
felt freedom before.” I still have a hard time saying those words, it’s so powerful.

She describes identifying that feeling during a subsequent action:

It was absolutely terrifying, but it also had that feeling! You know, once you crack open that
understanding of, “am I allowed to do this and that?”—once a fissure opens in that, there is a whole
other range of possibilities before you, and it’s so beautiful. It’s thrilling . . . like, oh my God, the
world is so much more interesting, and there is so much more to be done. . . . And I thought of that
quote and I was learning to examine that particular adrenalized experience, you know? And do I
know how to handle the sensation of freedom? And when have I ever had the opportunity to try?

Again, we see the close connection between seemingly incongruous emotional descriptors:
“terrifying,” “beautiful,” “adrenalized,” and “freedom.” For Em, these sensations emerge when
the repressive sense of obligation to authority is “cracked open.” Many scholars who have ex-
amined the dynamics of riots observe that the violation of private property laws and refutation of
police authority represent the political core of this form of collective action (Connery 1968; Piven
2006; Schneider 2014). But few theorists who have not interviewed participants (or participated
themselves) may have envisioned the accompanying feeling as “beautiful.”
Em goes on to describe how the “sensation of freedom” deeply affected her perspective:
I think there are aspects of my personality that have been formed by those breakthrough moments.
. . . There is an aspect to radicalism that says, “better things are possible,” and that gives you the
ability to predicate other things on that assumption, and that isn’t always tangible to you if you
haven’t had those concrete experiences. . . . Sometimes that ends up being institutionalized and some-
times it ends up being a high you chase, and in my case it’s more just been like I am not afraid to
demand that the world be different, because I’ve seen the potential for other things. And I take a
lot of comfort from that. I don’t anticipate that I’ll be able to see the changes I envision in my life
or my child’s life, but just understanding that power structures as they are now are not fossilized
and not permanent, I feel like all of these things can be broken and transformed, and I think that’s
a real gift.
Contentious Effervescence 187

The distinct, heightened sensation that combines fear, excitement, and empowerment, in
some cases described as freedom or euphoria, recalls Durkheim’s collective effervescence but dis-
plays important differences. Zi and Em, like many rioters I interviewed, describe a heightened,
electrifying sensation in the riot, but contrary to Durkheim’s effervescence, which is a product of
purposive bodies in space, these activists’ experiences are inherently connected to the contentious
power dynamics of their particular type of assembly. The feeling they describe appears to come
from the experience of embodied political struggle against authority, a contentious effervescence,
which at once grounds the subjective experience in opposition to identified material oppressions
and at the same time offers a feeling of freedom from them—what some interviewees described
as a glimpse into a liberatory world.
Despite earlier critiques of crowd theory lacking in empirical rigor, Durkheim’s (1897)
effervescence ultimately reflects many of the same flaws. In particular, the notion that people
become wholly susceptible to outside influence and that “the passions released are of such an
impetuosity that they can be restrained by nothing” (Durkheim 1915: 247) reflect the least
empirically grounded aspects of Le Bon’s crowd hypnosis, i.e., that crowds are irrational,
impulsive, and devoid of judgment (Le Bon 1895). For Durkheim, social boundaries and in-
dividual discernment break down in the wake of the effervescent experience (1915). This idea is
closely connected to the widespread view that riots are expressions of wanton violence. Even
updated sociological approaches to violence that draw from Durkheim (i.e., Collins 2008) end up
portraying the rioting crowd as being prone to violent excesses through dynamics of the crowd
itself. At the same time, a number of studies have found rioters to be highly selective in their
tactics and targets (Simiti 2012; Tierney 1994). In this case, despite the effervescent feeling repor-
ted by Zi, Em, and others, the main targets in these events were corporate or public property, and
no opponents were seriously injured. That the black bloc generated the feeling that “we were one
cohesive unit, all moving together, but all doing our own things” is itself evidence that the conten-
tious effervescence Zi felt was both a heightened collective experience and also one in which the
individual retained her sense of self and autonomy. The self might be altered in that moment (some
participants, like Em, reported self-awareness of this alteration in real-time) but nevertheless
remains a discrete self—connected yet distinct from the group. This account challenges the
underlying supposition common to Durkheim’s crowd effervescence, Le Bon’s crowd hypnosis,
and Collins’ forward panic—that the self is lost in the overwhelming trance of the crowd experi-
ence in a slide toward violent action.
The sensations described by Zi, Em, and others were ephemeral, not lasting beyond the action
itself. However, interviewees frequently associated these feelings with lasting shifts in political
consciousness, personality, and worldview. Zi describes the lasting subjective alteration she ex-
perienced during her first black bloc, specifically after her participation in an “unarrest”—the act
of physically wresting a comrade out of police custody:

I felt really empowered by being part of a group like that. And that was something I wanted people
to know was possible. And the unarrest, you know? That we didn’t have to just go along with the
power over us. That we could physically remove ourselves from that kind of power and violence
and control, feeling really just a fundamental shift in my capitulation to authority. I was in kind of
an abusive relationship at that time, and it was the end of my tolerance for that. It just seemed like
a lot more was possible.

Zi’s experience here shows how the subjective experience of rioting can constitute a newly em-
powered subject, manifested not only in subsequent movement participation but also in personal
relationships and identity.7 The subjective influence of protester violence in this case impacts
society even beyond the sphere of social movement contention (itself already a constructed
abstraction within a social whole) via the production of altered subjects, characterized by lower
obedience to authority, lower tolerance for abusive power dynamics, and embodied knowledge
that “more is possible” in the world.
Nearly every interviewee in this case relayed experiences involving what can be called an
effervescent sensation during riots. One person for whom it was less pronounced was Owe. Owe
188 Mobilization

participated in black bloc actions for years, including many which were violent. However, unlike
most other interviewees, she had been inspired to radicalism by the Congress of Racial Equality
and other Civil Rights groups and was a believer in nonviolent strategy (though recent political
events changed her mind). However, comrades in her crew engaging in violence during protests
had not dissuaded Owe from black blocs:

Well I think at the time, I did not smash a window and I was not interested in that, but I also felt
like if somebody in my group is smashing the window of a multinational corporation to draw
attention to it being a problematic place, then maybe it’s misguided but I don’t see it as the biggest
sin [laughs].

Owe personally did not partake in violent actions, but she understood why others did and was
happy to take the streets alongside them. She did briefly discuss excitement during black bloc
actions, along with feelings of unity and empowerment, but she did not speak of these moments
with the palpably excited affect others did.

I definitely remember that it was exciting. You know? It definitely made us feel a sense of unity.
There were nerves because we could get arrested or beat up, but also me and the folks I was with,
all of us had gotten arrested and beaten up before. . . . It did feel like we were with like-minded
people who were all fighting for the same kind of vision of radical social change.

Owe felt a sense of unity from this type of crowd experience, noted by other studies on black
blocs (e.g., Avery-Natale 2010), but with less emphasis on sensations of contentious efferves-
cence. As we will see, interviewees who participated in crowds in which others threw rocks or
scuffled with police, but did not engage in violent action themselves, still experienced a similar
emotional high as those who did. It is possible that sensation was muted in Owe’s case because
she personally believed in nonviolent strategy. However, the sample in this study is too small to
make a more definitive claim, and there was not a sufficient number of interviewees who believed
in nonviolence at the time to compare.
These activists’ experiences validate theories of collective effervescence but also add a
crucial element. Activists in this study do not find an effervescent feeling in conventional protest
crowds but rather frequently report its opposite. In this case, it is not collective action as such, but
a particular kind of contentious political action that is the source of the effervescent moment and
its lasting effects. That a collective action contains at least the potential for violence or property
destruction, violating the rules of private property and police authority and thus representing a
core political fight, appears integral to the sensation, as in: “This isn’t a ‘Fuck-You-George-Bush’
cake anymore—this is fire in the street.” At the same time, the sensation is not solely derived from
violent actions either; it is an embodied connection between those actions and political struggle
participants see themselves as part of.

Em: I think some people go seeking that [high], and I don’t think you always can. I don’t think you
can always will those circumstances, I think they’re emergent in struggle. But you have to be
willing to put yourself in the place to have that moment. And I think those moments are really
magical.

The “magical” sensation Em describes is for her both deeply connected to political orientation
and to the willingness to cross a line of disobedience, symbolized in this case by property destruc-
tion. Interviewees disagreed on the material efficacy and broader political significance of property
destruction, but nearly all remembered clearly the effervescent feeling of the collective actions
themselves. This feeling constituted for many an emotional and cognitive “breakthrough,” im-
buing them with an enhanced sense of political possibility, lower tolerance for authority, and the
visceral understanding that politics is a fight.
Contentious Effervescence 189

THE FALLISTS
The South African FMF movement emerged from student solidarity with workers’ campaigns to
resist outsourcing at universities across the country. Through a campaign-oriented lens, FMF was
sparked by tuition hikes at major universities and its demand was a retraction of fee increases.
Similar to the U.S. case, the disruptive tactics of the Fallist movements often drew participants
who were disillusioned by conventional protest. One Wits student reports hearing about a protest
at the university gates, and asking, “Was this another one of [the elected student government’s]
frivolous ploys to seek attention from the university management?” Upon discovering that
students were forcibly barricading the gate to protest tuition hikes, he states, “Without second in-
vitation I joined the blockade” (Moyo 2017: 51).
Domestic and international media focused on protests at Wits, a prestigious and historically
white university, where students occupied and shut down campus in 2015. However, many other
universities rose up as well, and from activists’ perspectives the struggle was not limited to fees
but was intertwined from its inception with national politics, the struggle for workers’ rights, and
the struggle to decolonize higher education. The Fallist movements in many ways represent a
stage in the evolution of discontent from the left over ruling African National Congress (ANC)
political stagnation, mismanagement, and corruption. While in the US, the 1990s represented a
time of political torpor for left social movements, in South Africa that decade marked a time of
radical possibility. After the fall of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela, the ANC
government enjoyed great popular support and, for a few years, a honeymoon period during which
movements largely demobilized and petitioned their concerns to the state from within the system
(Ballard, Habib, and Valodia, eds. 2006).8 The consolidation of democracy in this decade also
came with a turn toward a neoliberal economic program and the exacerbation of social justice
grievances (Madlingozi 2007). The 2000s saw unrest escalate across the country (von Holdt
2013), and the Fallist movements codified this growing discontent.
While there was some tension among Fallists between those who emphasized the tangible
need to remove fees and those who emphasized the cultural-political struggle to decolonize the
university system, most participants agreed that both were integral aspects of the movement. The
larger political tension9 appeared between those who believed the ANC government could ulti-
mately be pushed to continue their revolution and those who saw Fallism representing a new
revolutionary movement. This latter position was referred to by multiple interlocutors using the
part-literal, part-figurative reference: “Burn it down.” This tension was exacerbated by the re-
sources and clout that ANC-backed student government officers wielded, at times, according to
some interviewees, intentionally working to demobilize the movement.
A common thread in both positions described above, though more pronounced in the “burn
it down” contingent, was the language and politics of decolonization, a term that was ubiquitous
in interviews and activist publications alike. Decolonization in this context calls to deconstruct
and dismantle the colonial legacy of apartheid and European colonialism, manifested in every-
thing from stark and persistent racial wealth disparities, to faculty composition at universities like
Wits and UCT, to Eurocentric curricula and material. Decolonization theory centers Fanon’s
work, which is also famously associated with the prescription of political violence for colonized
people to reclaim dignity and agency, and Fanon was frequently referenced by participants.
As in the U.S. interviews, many Fallist activists I spoke with used words like “adrenaline,”
“energized,” “fear,” and “beautiful” to describe moments of physically contentious protest.
In addition, there was a specific emphasis among many interviewees on feelings of empowerment
and humanization. Ess, a graduate student activist at UJ during the uprising, recalls a protest in
which she did not personally engage in violent actions, but where the presence of protester vio-
lence inspired a sense of empowerment. In this case, police had violently dispersed a student road
blockade near campus, prompting some students to throw rocks at the police.
It was necessary! We needed that. Because they’re treating us like animals, like people without
rights, like nonbeings. And I think when we throw stones, it’s a way of reclaiming our humanity
again. You know, to say we also have some form of agency in the fight. . . . It gave me courage to
see that.
190 Mobilization

Ess uses “we” to refer to the stone-throwers even though she was not a stone-thrower in this
particular moment. Here, the presence of rock throwing counters feelings of dehumanization
and enhances the subjectivity of a member of the crowd who did not directly participate,
indicating the affective power of the tactic extends beyond the individual actor to a group
experience. Ess’ experience is further evidence against theories of collective behavior which
hold that the rioting crowd imbues participants with a contagious urge to violent behavior.
Scholars have noted the comparative minority of rioters who directly engage in violence
(Collins 2008; Simiti 2012), but in this instance, we see a positive affective experience from an
individual who does not herself throw rocks.
Ess describes a similar feeling in a subsequent action she participated in. During a night
march that included students, parents, and community members, the police opened fire and dis-
persed the demonstration:

The police start firing rubber bullets at us. . . . People have been shot in the back, they’re laying
there, and people are hiding out, the cops are walking around with their guns . . . like a warzone.
And it’s so intense, and we are so broken. It feels like there’s no hope. So at that point a bus shelter
was burnt. And we all thought it was beautiful. To see the fire. Because it’s what Fanon mentions,
it’s kind of like a therapy for us. We needed it in that moment. We needed the roads to be blocked
and we needed the stones.

Feeling defeated in the face of repressive police violence, a physically assertive response is des-
cribed as therapeutic, rejuvenating, and emotionally necessary in that moment. Studies of con-
tentious mobilizations in South Africa have referred to the relatively commonplace presence of
low-level violence in protest repertoires, specifically in the form of burning street barricades as
a signal to authorities to take grievances seriously—i.e., “the smoke that calls” (von Holdt et
al. 2012). In this case, a participant discusses the fire as signaling to protesters themselves, and
perhaps to allies. In other words, for some the smoke of a riot may be meant to call authorities’
attention to the site of protest, but for others this smoke is meant to strengthen the resolve of
participants who are already there. Protester violence here does not reflect the “quest for
political meaning” that Seferiades and Johnston propose (2012: 6), but rather the production
and communication of political meaning—perhaps to opponents and onlookers, but most of all
to participants themselves.
The political meaning was both embedded in the sensory experience of rioting and also
grounded in material struggle. Many interviewees discussed strategy and emotion in such
intertwined ways it is impossible to pull them apart. For example, one noteworthy instance of
property destruction during the FMF movement occurred when radicals raided a student govern-
ment election site and destroyed the ballots. As Bede, another student activist at UJ, relayed it:
Management was very worried that this Wits thing [the FMF campus occupation] would spread.
Of course, some of us were working very hard to make it spread, but without any success because
the main student organizations were caught up in the SRC [Student Representative Council]
elections. . . . Nobody was brave enough to risk the elections, because if only one group pulls out
then their opponents would win. . . . They were all at that stage too tied up in getting power through
getting onto the SRC, which at UJ is quite in with the management. So this is a theme of the
FeesMustFall experience at UJ, the kind of way management tried to manipulate student
organizations and how it failed at some point when, finally, some students disrupted the elections…
just went and tore down the tent where the ballots were and threw all the ballot boxes around and
tore them up. And at that point one group, the independent ticket if you like, they abandoned the
elections. They were abandoned already you understand, but at least at that point they said it. Then
we could focus on the struggle. . . .

Bede describes the emotional impact of that action as allowing activists to admit that elections
were irrelevant at that point, generating the bravery to abandon them in favor of more militant
action. Ess had described the effect of this disruption in a similar way. Here, the disruptive
deficit created by the persistence of representational politics which generated no power for
students led to an outburst that opened new possibilities for struggle.
Contentious Effervescence 191

Notably, both the Black and white interviewees reported similar emotional descriptions of
actions like stone throwing. Abee, a white student activist at Wits described how he typically
refrained from throwing rocks due to “race and gender issues” (by which he meant it might be
frowned upon by fellow protesters because he is a white man). He would, however, try to
support “as a body” by positioning himself as a human shield between rock throwers and police.
However, Abee describes one occasion during which he did engage in rock throwing:

Abee: It was after a long march around campus when we went to meet at Solomon House and
security blocked the doors and beat us away from the steps. We were tired, hot, and just wanted to
meet and relax and talk together in our place.10 And they blocked us for no reason. We just wanted
to meet, you know, and the university was closed, so it wasn’t getting in anyone’s way. So that
was one time I picked up rocks and threw them with everyone.

BC: Did it work?

Abee: Yes. It was an emotional release and it was a way of registering that they are doing
something we don’t accept. For them and also for ourselves. It didn’t get us into Solomon House
that day, but the goal also shifted. When something happens that isn’t right, you have to show your
discontent, you have to show them, and, you know, show yourself that you are not okay with this.
Rock throwing does a great job of registering your discontent.

He went on to paraphrase a sentiment that had been shared with him by a Palestinian comrade
who had studied in South Africa, speaking about throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers at home:
“We know it’s not likely to hurt anyone,” Abee quoted this activist as saying, “but all the hurt,
pain, frustration, anger, you have to release it somehow. And sometimes yelling isn’t good
enough. Rock throwing humanizes you in the face of a dehumanizing situation.” Here Abee
draws from the experience of a comrade from a colonized society (as well as explicitly from
the writing of Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin) in commenting on rock throwing, but he also
describes a similar feeling when he engaged in that action himself.
Fanon discusses the different insecurity complexes developed by colonizer and colonized;
complexes which both must be overcome through action if a just future involving people who
come from both groups is possible (Fanon 1961). In this case, the experience of a white protester
in South Africa throwing rocks at Black security guards in solidarity with Black comrades is
instructive. Without discounting the possibility that there is something else going on here on a
subconscious or unspoken level, Abee’s sensory reaction of catharsis as an aggrieved party sub-
stantially aligns with experiences of Black Fallists, pointing toward something distinct about
experience of the type of action in question. While certainly not contradicting arguments around
the importance of anticolonial violence for historically oppressed peoples, this experience
indicates that the collective engagement in violent protest may contain its own experiential
power dynamics for those who are subjected to repressive authority.
Fallist interlocutors had varying opinions on the effectiveness and political meaning of
physically destructive tactics. Only one student activist from Wits I spoke to, Aye, applied a
strategic nonviolence framing to protest actions, arguing that the “rock-throwing brigade” was
not composed of real organizers but hooligans and trouble-makers—perhaps even agent
provocateurs. In fact, there were several activists who supported and participated in rock
throwing that also made degrading comments about the so-called rock-throwing brigade. Aye
herself spent most of our interview speaking to the importance of nonviolence, but, remarkably,
at one point she paused and added: “okay, maybe I even picked up a rock once or twice—but it
was because I was angry!” Aye’s admission to throwing rocks out of anger in a protest that she
felt close to and a great deal of ownership over reflects both the relative accessibility of rock
throwing as a tactic in South Africa and also the emotional importance of that action during
contentious protests.
192 Mobilization

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

I presented interviews with activists from the U.S. and South Africa who participated in violent
protest. Their experiences point toward distinct subjective alteration during and after participating
in violent protest. Interviews reveal that taking part in physically confrontational action, and in
some cases simply being present for it, involves a sensation that I call contentious effervescence,
an emotionally heightened collective experience that enhances subjectivity and imbues activists
with courage and a sense of political possibility.
For many activists I interviewed, the limited application of low-level violence was em-
powering in the face of police repression of popular protests. While these findings add weight to
previous studies of effervescent crowds (e.g., Collins 2008; Borch 2012), they also contradict two
ideas that have been central to theories of crowd behavior: (1) the idea that participation in a riot
leads to the dissolution of individual subjectivity and autonomy, and (2) the idea that raucous
crowds contain their own dynamics as such, distinct from social or political context.11 As other
theories of collective effervescence have noted, the feeling itself lasts only as long as the action,
but in many cases it has profound and lasting impacts on participants’ political outlook and future
participation in movements. Likewise, my findings support the idea that participation in protests
generates collective empowerment and leads to further participation (Drury and Reicher 2009;
van Stekelenburg and Klandermans 2013), but also complicates it. Here participation in certain
kinds of protest—i.e., routine or performative nonviolent protest—felt disempowering. But rather
than leading to demobilization, such feelings pushed some to engage in more physically con-
frontational action.
The empirical analysis in this article is of course limited to the two cases I present, and to an
extent the individuals I interview, but I draw from readings, interactions, and informal interviews
for robustness. While most interviewees had similar affective responses to talking about rioting,
not all did—two interviewees in the U.S. case and two in the South Africa case did not relate ex-
periences that readily resemble effervescence. The tone of the effervescent experience varied
slightly by case, with feelings of euphoria and freedom more pronounced among U.S. activists
and feelings of empowerment and catharsis more pronounced for South African activists, though
both themes were present in both cases. The racial composition of the respondents in the two cases
might play a role in this difference, as might the comparative irregularity of protester violence in
the U.S. A unifying theme, however, is the emotional high derived from the visceral feeling of
being in a fight with a repressive authority. For these activists, actions like rock throwing, burning
vehicles, street barricades, and unarresting people from police custody break through the disrup-
tive deficit of conventional protest tactics into the realm of embodied contentious politics.
Low-level violent tactics can be subjectively important to participants and, through the im-
pacts these experiences have on participants, are important for understanding contentious politics.
Having said that, the heavy emphasis that movements and commentators today put on nonviolence
inevitably leads to the question: what about disruptive nonviolent protest? Can nonviolent actions
generate a similar contentious effervescence as riots? Matthew Kearney (2018) has argued that
nonviolent protest gatherings generate collective effervescence, but his study is based on a weeks-
long protest occupation during which participants reported a distinctly enlivened feeling. While
not discounting the “collectively effervescent moral community” Kearney (2018: 251) observes,
the contentious effervescence that emerges in this study appears to be a different phenomenon—
shorter-lived and bearing more intense and incongruous emotions.
The majority of interviewees in this study often used words like “exciting,” “adrenaline,”
“energizing,” and “enlivened” in conjunction with “scary,” “afraid,” and “terrifying,” and a sig-
nificant amount across both cases referred to these same moments as feeling “beautiful.” Several
individuals used the words “euphoric” and “magical” in describing the sensation of riotous actions.
Beyond the words, there was a distinct enthusiasm in interlocuters’ retelling of riotous moments,
marked by faster speech patterns, more pronounced physical gesticulations during descriptions,
and visible excitement in facial expressions and tone of voice. Not only did interviewees not relate
empowering, humanizing, or magical feelings to nonviolent actions they had participated in, many
related feelings of disappointment, dejection, and depression resulting from nonviolent protests
Contentious Effervescence 193

that felt insufficiently conflictual. Some interviewees did describe empowering emotions related
to participation in movements (as opposed to particular actions), for example Occupy Wall Street,
that align with Kearney’s findings. However, at the action level, this study indicates there is a
difference between the sensations of an avowedly nonviolent protest and those which at least
contain the possibility of physical contention. While this study’s methods do not allow further
comparative purchase on this question, Fanon’s theory of decolonial violence might help explain
this effect, and why it is important for social change despite the common suggestion that riots hurt
movements’ ability to achieve short-term goals (e.g., Abbs and Gleditsch 2021; Wasow 2020).
For Fanon, decolonization is about remaking oneself and one’s people through struggle, and
violence is a crucial component (Fanon 1961). The violence here is not instrumental in the sense
of being used as a tool to achieve a concrete goal. Rather, it is the experience of physically fighting
back against the forces of domination which Fanon argues is a necessary experience for the
dominated person to become a liberated subject—a transformation that itself is necessary for long-
term change. Protester violence can be instrumentally important for movements too, but even
when it is, those actions “are most effective when they succeed in persuading numbers of people
to defy some of the rules that ensure cooperation in institutionalized social life” (Piven 2012: 26).
A significant part of that persuasion, I argue, is in the experience itself.
Some have attempted to read physical violence out of Fanon’s account, arguing that when
assessing Fanon’s work, references to “violence” could simply be replaced with nonviolent
“radical and uncompromising action” (Deming 1971: 197). Indeed, the actions described by par-
ticipants in this study barely qualify as violence, and are entirely civilian-based, incomparable to
the scale or strategic organization of violence in armed warfare. As Owe put it, “black blocs are
like infants with a rattle compared to the state violence around us.” But the collective willingness
to engage in physically confrontational actions, including property destruction and physical
altercations with police, appears to imbue participants with an extraordinary, heightened sensa-
tion. In the U.S. case, where several activists were being interviewed about actions they took
decades ago, many interlocuters identified riotous moments as being transformational in ways that
would impact their political engagement thereafter. Based on this study, whether nonviolent
actions are capable of generating a similarly visceral sensation of being in a material fight is
unclear. What is clear is that protest actions that broke the bounds of nonviolence in the U.S. and
South Africa generated a contentious effervescent experience for many participants. And aside
from how those actions related to movements’ short-term goals, the sensations associated with
them are interwoven in processes of social change through the people who experience them.
While modest in its scope, this study examines the emotional experiences of rioters as few
previous studies have done. In the experiences of many activists I interviewed, participation in
unarmed collective violence against repressive authorities and symbols of domination clarified
political antagonisms, raised consciousness, and enhanced participants’ liberatory visions for the
future. The experience was so powerful for some that it represented the birth of new political
subjects. Accounts from anarchists in the U.S. and student activists in South Africa demonstrate
how examining the experiences of physically destructive collective actions contributes to our
understanding of the contentious dynamics involved in social and political change from below. In
a twenty-first century context, in which conventional protest often strays into performativity and
ineffectualness, riots keep political action squarely in the realm of contentious politics.

NOTES
1
This is at least the case for scholarship in English. Abbs and Gleditsch (2021), Gilje (1996), Meckfessel (2016), Piven
(2006; 2012), Schneider (2014), and Seferiades and Johnston (2012) are notable exceptions, in addition to comparative
or case studies of specific riots, such as studies of the 1992 Los Angeles riots by Abu-Lughod (2007) and Gale (1996).
2
While the image of black blocs is popularly associated with protester violence, many black bloc formations do not
engage in property destruction or violence (see Graeber 2009).
3
FeesMustFall as an identifiable movement began at Wits, a prestigious and historically white institution, and quickly
spread to other schools. However, protests and riots against tuition (and other issues) are common at historically Black
technical colleges, most prominently at Tshwane University of Technology (TUT). While a deeper discussion of the
relationship between activists at these different universities is important, it is outside the scope of this article.
194 Mobilization
4
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for guiding me in this articulation.
5
Autonomous cluster of activists with trusted personal ties who operate together during an action.
6
The activist Em is referring to quotes himself as having said: “that’s really not fear in your gut or in your throat, that’s
really your first taste of freedom.” See the documentary, This Is What Democracy Looks Like (2000: 26:45).
7
Other studies have likewise noted an empowering personal evolution following participation in a riot (see Auyero
2003: 170).
8
One of the editors of this volume, Adam Habib, was Vice Chancellor of Wits during the FMF uprising, and according
to students and workers, he represented a personified target of protests at that university. According to interviewees,
students at one point essentially held Habib hostage in a general assembly, forcing him to call university board members
on the phone to relate student grievances (reportedly, Habib said he was not held but rather elected to remain at the
general assembly). In any event, that Habib is an academic authority on protest in post-apartheid South Africa and also
was the target of one of the defining post-apartheid movements should not go unmentioned. See Leopeng (2017).
9
Other major tensions within the movement included gender, leadership, and representation in the struggle (see
Chinguno et al., eds. 2017).
10
He refers to the concourse in Solomon Mahlangu House, a large indoor space in a main campus building where
student meetings typically took place. It had previously been called “Senate House” and was renamed following FMF
for a martyr from Umkhonto we Sizwe, the militant wing of the ANC during the antiapartheid struggle.
11
From Durkheim to Collins, scholars who have theorized effervescence have surmised that larger crowds lead to
enhanced effervescence. While this study is unable to empirically contradict this claim, it does provide a challenge, as
many of the riot events described by participants were not particularly sizeable as protest crowds go, and the size of the
crowd did not factor into many interviewees’ accounts.

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