Protest Violence and Solidarity: Comparing the United States and Hong Kong

• In Event: Democracy and Discontent

Abstract

Protest violence can weaken intra-movement solidarity and induce fragmentation, which hampers the success of social movements. While scholars have examined the effects of protest violence on public support, scant attention has been paid to the impact of protest violence on intra-movement solidarity. What are the conditions under which movement solidarity can be sustained amid protest violence? The cases of the United States Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement in 2020 and the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) Movement in 2019 offer unique opportunities to study the conditions of movement solidarity in a comparative perspective. Both movements adopted a decentralized organizational form and saw the emergence of violent tactics. But they also differ critically in their political-institutional settings and state-society relations. We first advance a more nuanced theory of solidarity by distinguishing between tolerant and affirmative solidarity. We distinguish between protestor’s private and public preferences toward violence: protesters can conceal their moral evaluation toward violence, which is of private nature, and choose to publicly denounce or stand with the violent flank. Given this distinction, we argue that protesters demonstrate tolerant solidarity by restraining themselves from publicly denouncing protest violence despite having negative evaluations in private, or affirmative solidarity if they privately favor and publicly endorse protest violence. Using factorial survey experiments in Hong Kong and the United States, we examine and compare the effects of different factors in conditioning the protesters’ likelihood of showing tolerant solidarity: types of property being damaged, racial groups of the investigators, degrees of exposure to state violence, and degree of political elites’ influence in mobilization. This study puts forward a more nuanced typology of solidarity, and facilitates the cross-movement comparison necessary for developing a more generalizable theory of intra-movement solidarity.

Authors

• Dennis Young, University of Washington

• Brian Leung, University of Washington