Protests in Europe: Is violence the answer? : A comparative case study on protest violence and success in democracies

Abstract: This thesis has empirically investigated the relationship between violent protest and concession in democracies. Previous research has focused on maximalist movements that aim to overthrow sitting governments using violent methods. This thesis has instead examined whether smaller-scale protests achieve greater success in receiving concessions than their non-violent counterparts. This paper has examined this relationship by conducting a qualitative study on the 2017 Labour reform protest and the 2020 Police security bill protest in France. The theory that has been tested is that violent protest receives more media attention than non-violent protests. This added media attention will pressure the government to act, producing higher chances of the violent protest becoming successful in terms of concessions. The result shows some covariation with the proposed relationship and causal mechanism. However, multiple alternative explanations, such as the BLM movement, Covid-19 and the personal incentives of President Macron, became evident during the research process and thus weakened the theory. Because of this, the theory and method would need to be altered following the alternative explanations in future research to test this hypothesis thoroughly.