Mobilizing Leaderfully: The Organizational Process of Hong Kong’s Freedom Summer

• In Event: 2019: Year of Revolutionary Potential

Abstract

Since 2019, a new wave of leaderless protests has swept across the world, emerging in places like Hong Kong, Chile, Belarus, United States, Lebanon, Thailand and Myanmar. Although their claims vary, these mass mobilizations shared a similar playbook: spontaneous, decentralized, and guided by ordinary citizens rather than traditional leaders and organizations. Different from an earlier wave of leaderless protests in the early 2010s which mostly manifested in the form of peaceful occupation of public spaces, the post-2019 movements often rejected stationary protest forms but prefer fluid and formless actions that are more unpredictable in the eyes of their targets. However, without a centralized leadership and a static protest space, how do leaderless movements organize sustained protest actions, make tactical decisions and maintain solidarity among decentralized protesters? This article focuses on Hong Kong’s Freedom Summer in 2019 and conceptualizes “leaderful activism” as an organizational process that gave rise to its particular form of mobilization. We identify three primary action logics that are central to leaderful activism: 1) networked collaboration, which decentralize and distribute leading tasks among a wide range of protest participants; 2) tactical experimentation, which generate innovative tactics through trial-and-error in multitudinous nodes of action; and 3) solidarity brokerage, which leverage pre-existing social identifications (e.g., professions and alumni) and facilitate the creation of new norms to induce commitment and solidarity among individuals who are connected only by weak ties. We argue that these action logics are enabled not only by digital communication tools, but also by the activation of latent networks in the political and civil society. Our findings generate insights that advance the understanding of the emergence, dynamics and outcomes of the recent leaderless protests around the world.

Authors

• Samson Yuen, Hong Kong Baptist University

• Edmund W. Cheng, City University of Hong Kong