I was wrong about why protests work

Growing up in Turkey, with my childhood under the shadow of heavy censorship, I was fascinated by what new technologies would mean for the world and especially for free speech and dissent. I got into a graduate school in the United States, hoping to study how the internet and the digital transformation were affecting society. I was especially curious about the relationships among technology, dissent and protests.

However, the George W. Bush administration’s reaction to 9/11 changed how I spent my time.

After 2001, I found myself a fullfledged participant in the movement to stop a misguided war, cast as a response to horrific acts of terrorism. Being from the region, I had no delusions about Saddam Hussein’s brutality. But I also thought a big war and the military occupation of a major Middle Eastern country, based on wobbly accusations and flimsy evidence – which seemed to be accepted in a wave of groupthink – would be catastrophic.

I spent a lot of time trying to organize against the looming war and joined the protests. After a wave of smaller demonstrations in early 2003, a global day of protest was held on Feb. 15, 2003. I traveled to New York City for it, along with hundreds of thousands of others. And that protest was just one of hundreds around the world.

It was a bright day with great visibility. I climbed to a high point to try to get a sense of the protest’s size, as I often used to do when researching demonstrations. (This was before drones provided such images.)

The crowd seemed to go on and on, down First Avenue, then spilling into Second and Third. Researchers described the day as the largest protest event in human history.

Just three days later, Bush was asked about the protests and specifically their size and global nature. He dismissed them as irrelevant, comparing the social movement with a “focus group” that wasn’t going to influence policy.

Surely, I thought, this couldn’t hold. Surely, this big protest wave – possibly the largest in history – would help stop the relentless march toward this ill-advised war. We all know how that went. But how? And why? It took me years of study to figure it out.

The first question I had was why I, and so many others, had expected that protests would inevitably influence the government’s decisions. It seemed like common sense, but what would be the mechanism for translating people power into policy change?

I know that people like to say correlation doesn’t imply causation, but in fact, it does imply it; it just doesn’t prove it by itself. If one thing follows the other regularly, it’s not a bad first guess to think the first might cause the second. Why did we think big protests reliably brought about social change? Because it seemed to be the case in the past. Just look at the civil rights movement or how millions taking to the street on Earth Day in 1970 preceded the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. But in the case of the Iraq invasion, something hadn’t worked as well.