‘Activist’ identity as a motivational resource:
Dynamics of (dis) empowerment at the G8 direct actions, Gleneagles, 2005
Dermot Barr & John Drury1
Department of Psychology
University of Sussex
Abstract
This paper describes a study which examined processes of (dis)empowerment across
and between different groups of protesters at the G8 protests, Gleneagles, Scotland,
2005. A recent survey of experiences of different protest events by Drury et al. (2005)
found that protesters’ failure either to unify or to impose their collective identity
against a powerful outgroup can mean subjective disempowerment. However, Drury
et al. also hypothesized that, as a function of their social identities, experienced
activists have available to them certain strategies and other cultural resources that can
be used to counter this disempowerment and hence provide motivation for continued
involvement. The G8 direct actions in Gleneagles provided an opportunity to study
such dynamics of (dis)empowerment in situ, for two reasons. First, protesters would
be bringing to the events a range of levels of experience and political identities.
Second, it seemed unlikely that protesters at Gleneagles would not have the same
success in imposing themselves as at previous anti-capitalist events, such as J18,
Seattle, Quebec and Genoa.
A cross sectional, longitudinal, ethnographic study was carried out covering
the duration of the Gleneagles events, including interviews with 40 participants
before, during and after involvement. The two key findings were as follows.
1
Contact details: Dr John Drury, University of Sussex, Department of Psychology,
School of Life Sciences, Pevensey 1 Building, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK.
Tel: +44 (0)1273-872514
Fax: +44 (0)1273-678058
j.drury@sussex.ac.uk
http://drury.socialpsychology.org/
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First, there was little unification across the protest group as a whole, and there
was no agreed definition of success. Consequently, feelings of empowerment and
disempowerment varied systematically across the sample. Those who reported overall
disempowerment held a political ideology of reform not revolution, and sought
positive attention not direct action. These participants also had the least well formedactivist identities (less time involved and less organizational involvement). In
evaluating the protest actions, they used family and friends unconnected with the
movement as their reference points. Those participants who reported overall
empowerment were the ones with a more complete activist identity (i.e., many years
involved as both organizers of and participants in protests). They placed their
experiences at Gleneagles in a historical narrative (e.g. ‘just one battle in a wider
war’) or emphasised the issue of the right to protest, rather than focussing on the
immediate and apparent ineffectiveness of particular actions.
The second key finding concerned the importance of the Stirling campsite.
The campsite was originally intended as a base from which the direct actions were to
be launched. Those participants without a well-established activist identity found the
camp to be cliquey and full of fear. However it eventually came to be seen by the
experienced activists as one of the most important achievements of the event as
whole, as it served to instantiate their activist identity; in its communal practices, it
was a glimpse of a possible future alternative world.
Thus, as predicted, for experienced activists, identity operated as a resource
allowing them to treat events which were potentially interpretable as (disempowering)
defeats as (empowering) successes. First, their activist identity entailed access to sets
of arguments, knowledge of the history of movements, and, importantly, discussions
or ‘debriefs’ with comrades, all of which allowed the ‘particular’ to be placed in a
wider political context. Second, there was evidence of a strategy of sustaining
motivation through transforming the aims of the event: the nature of the direct activist
identity allowed ‘means’ (the activist campsite) to become elevated into an ‘end’ in its
own right. In both cases, empowerment wasn’t simply ‘read off’ from particular
experiences, but varied and developed over time within the activist group. All these
points will be illustrated with direct quotes from participants.
The paper will argue in conclusion, however, that some activist strategies to
enhance empowerment and sustain motivation, while appearing to be based on the
most radical position, can operate as a break on escalation. Specifically, the
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translation of means into ends in cases such as the present one could potentially entail
a retreat into lifestylism or an activist ghetto, cementing rather than challenging the
disunity observed at Gleneagles between the different protest groups.
Introduction
Theoretical background
The Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM) of collective action (Drury & Reicher,
2000; Reicher, 1996a, b, 2001; Stott & Reicher, 1998) suggests that empowerment is
the fulcrum by which crowd events can escalate and become social movements.
According to the ESIM, empowerment may take place in crowd events following
outgroup (e.g. police) action against a crowd ingroup which is perceived by crowd
members as (a) illegitimate – violating ingroup definitions of proper practice - and (b)
indiscriminate – affecting or threatening the crowd as a whole. Under these
conditions, crowd members shift psychologically from seeing themselves as a
disunited or fragmented aggregate of small groups and individuals to a single, much
more unified entity within a common antagonistic relationship to the outgroup. This
in turn entails expectations of support and mutual aid, encouraging people to take
action against the outgroup.
The ESIM suggests that such action against the outgroup will be in line with
the definition of social identity shared by crowd members, and will thus serve to
instantiate the social identity tangibly in the world. The new-found congruence
between an otherwise subordinate identity and the social world – the overturning of
existing power-relations whereby the normally powerful outgroup is at least
temporarily deposed – is experienced as joyful and exhilarating. Following Marx’s
(1844) theory of labour, Drury & Reicher (2005) refer to this process of imposition of
self-definition and its emotional correlates as collective self-objectification (CSO).
Feeling part of a wider group, expectations of support from others when taking
action, and CSO each make participants more ready and confident to get involved in
future actions and generalize the issues. Indeed, repeated experiences of
empowerment could in theory take the form of a virtuous cycle (Drury, 2004), feeding
into processes of social as well as psychological change.
The present paper
A corollary of the concept of CSO is that failures to change the world in line with
one’s identity will feel disempowering. A study by Drury et al. (2005) of participants’
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experiences of a number of collective action events found that failure of CSO was a
key predictor of disempowerment and discouragement.
However, this study raised the question of how it is that, given such
experiences, activists continue to get involved in protests. Observations of the No
M11 Link-Road direct actions and post hoc interviews with other activists have
suggested a number of possible strategies for maintaining motivation for activism in
the face of experiences potentially interpretable as ‘defeats’.
First, since, according to the ESIM, identity is not simply a cognitive
representation of self but rather a project of action – or a definition of proper and
possible practice within a concrete ‘ensemble of social relations’ (cf. Marx, 1845, p.
122) – it is hypothesized that experienced activists have available to them certain
cultural resources that can be used to counter the de-motivating effects of
disempowerment arising from (apparent) failure of CSO. Specifically, it is suggested
that activists are able to place experiences in a wider context (e.g. ‘just one battle
within a long-term war’) by referring to their (sub-)culturally-given knowledge of the
history of struggles (‘some you win, some you lose’), or to understand particular
defeats as ‘learning experiences’ from which they and their struggle could develop.
Being an ‘activist’ means not only having certain knowledge and arguments, but also
knowing how to access such resources from others (i.e., in meetings, groups, social
centres, publications etc.). This strategy of ‘long-term perspective’ would not be
available to political neophytes and those not socialized into the activist culture, who
would not have these resources to draw upon, and hence might therefore feel defeated
when experienced activists feel philosophical over the same events (Drury et al.,
2005).
Second, it is suggested that the very definition of events as ‘successes’ or
‘defeats’ – i.e. the very aims of struggles – are not givens but change and are
themselves struggled over (Drury & Reicher, 2005). Indeed, in some struggles,
participants’ means or forms of protest action, including the ‘right to protest’, become
foregrounded and valued as ends in their own right, to the extent that they are defined
as highly identity-congruent (Drury, 1996).
Both the affordances of identity as a source of strategies for countering longterm disempowerment (and hence sustaining movement participation) and the
transformation of aims can be understood as forms by which shared identity operates
as a resource to provide continued motivation. Moreover, both processes can be
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understood as involving the role of discussion and argument amongst participants,
since both illustrate the point that the definition of an event is not given but
potentially open to multiple interpretations.
The direct actions against the G8 summit of world leaders in Gleneagles,
Scotland, in 2005, afforded an opportunity to study these dynamics of empowerment
and disempowerment in collective action, in situ and longitudinally.
First, given the variety of people – in terms of political ideology, background,
and experience – expected to be attending the event, it was predicted that there would
be different identities and hence definitions and expectations of success amongst the
different activists initially arriving at the events.
Second, given the decline in the anti-capitalist movement after the high points
of J18, Seattle, Quebec and Genoa, it was expected that the chances of impact on the
same scale as previous G8 events were unlikely. In which case, at least some people
might experience the Gleneagles events as disempowering.
Finally, the form of the protest – a rolling series of parallel direct actions
around Gleneagles supported by an ongoing camp at Stirling – meant that there would
be ample opportunity for discussion and argument among protesters about the
meaning of events across the course of the protest, and thus the possibility of studying
collective strategies of countering disempowerment longitudinally and in situ.
Method
A cross-sectional and longitudinal ethnographic study was carried out, covering the
duration of the G8 direct actions in Gleneagles. Interviews were carried out with
people before, during and after the events, and soundtrack recordings were made of
discussions amongst activists during actions and at the camp. Political self-definitions
of those interviewed more than once are given in Table 1 (below). Material was
gathered from 40 participants in total. The material was analysed thematically in line
with the research questions outlined above.
Participant Position on
political
Interested Active
(Years)
Involvement Perceived
(Years)
action as
spectrum
N
Unaligned, Anti
successful?
10 years
Authoritarian
7
years
5
Organiser
Yes
SD
Apathetic Left,
8 years
Alliance of Social
3
Organiser
Yes
Organiser
Yes
Organsier
Yes
Participant
No
years
Environmentalists
SO
Marxist
5 years
2
years
A
Environmentalist
5 years
Anarchist
2
years
Feminist
D
Concerned Citizen
3 years
3
years
SA
Slightly left of
3 years
1 year
Participant
No
10 years
9
Organiser
Yes
centre
O
Marxist Social
Environmentalist
years
Table 1: Political self-definitions of participants interviewed more than once
Analysis
As expected, a variety of identities and motivations were evident amongst those
arriving at the protest. Despite conflicts with the police, there was little evidence that
the different protesters unified as a superordinate ingroup. Indeed, throughout the
events the variety of participants was stressed by those we spoke to:
D: How would you describe the people that are protesting, going up now and
have gone up recently?
I think it’s a fairly mixed bag, you’ve got people here who are protesting
against G8, I suppose you’ve got your kind of anarchists and the anti-capitalist
movement, and you’ve got things like Make Poverty History which is going
up to kind of just reform as opposed to completely over-rule. So it’s quite
mixed, and it is in ages as well, mixed ages, completely mixed bag of people.
Time 1 T1S2I2 So
Obviously most people here are probably anti-capitalist, especially for the G8
demonstrations now rather than the demo before on the second,
T1S2I4 People
6
There’s this pretension about being like a whole collective,
Time 2 T3S2I4
the protest has changed to what happened before at the other G8 meetings, it’s
more that you have a kind of official tolerated protest, this Bob Geldorf kind
of thing, which you know is a meeting with, you know, making a conscious
decision between protesters and basically the G8 and but that takes away the
you know it really takes away the voices of the people who are really
protesting here.
T3S1I1
Reflecting the variety of identities and objectives within the crowd, there were
different definitions of success and failure:
D: So what is the most important thing that you could achieve today?
Significant disruption to the G8 conference is key.
T3S1I1
D: What would you hope to achieve from this kind of action?
Well, ideally blocking the road,
(TIME 2)T3S2
D: What would you consider our failure today, if today was to be a failure,
what would that be?
A failure would be if they succeed more and more in dividing the protest.
T3S1I1
D:
What would you hope to achieve by going on marches and
demonstrations?
Male: I mean, long term change obviously we’d like you know, regular
campaigns and that, but with something like this it’s more like just messing up
their big symbolic occasion,
TIME 2 T3S1I2
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D: And what would you hope to achieve by going on this protest?
Raising awareness of the fact that the G8 hold the power to change. I don’t
think that it will change an awful lot, except possibly a raised awareness.
T3S2I1 SD
D: What would you consider a failure of today, if the protest was a failure,
what would that be?
A failure would be severely sanitised like regulated demonstration where
we’re going to like demonstrate between ten o’clock and twelve o’clock
against babies dying, global warming, hundreds of billions of animals being
killed you know, and we’re going to demonstrate for two hours, that would be
a failure, if we just did what the police wanted us to do really.
T3S2I6
As expected, not all the protest actions went ahead in the ways initially hoped for or
expected. Hence events were potentially interpretable as unsuccessful and
disempowering. Thus the initial response of some to specific actions was to see them
as unpleasant and disappointing:
Obviously the thing on Wednesday morning was possibly the lowest point in
the week, we just trudged through the wilderness overnight for quite a
significant distance, it was cold, it was wet, we hadn’t really slept, we were all
very aggravated, and had been routinely intimidated through the night by the
police, and in a very bad psychological state of affairs.
T4S1I7 N
However, the interpretation of success or failure wasn’t simply a given but was
discussed and argued over across time, leading some to change their definitions of
events:
D: Do you think that it achieved what you hoped it would achieve?
P(N): I think in a lot of ways I regarded the actions that I was most interested
in going to which were the carnival for full enjoyment and the blockade of the
conference centre as being largely quite symbolic actions therefore to say that
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they’ve achieved something is (), they’re symbolic because of the nature of
trying to achieve intangible things its difficult to measure that achievement.
But I would say subjectively, yes they achieved what they set out to achieve.
With regard to the other events that I attended I would say that they achieved
exactly what they wanted to achieve.
Judging from participants’ comments, feelings of empowerment were indeed
found to vary both across people and over time, and these variations were found to
relate to the content of identity, as predicted:
D: Do you feel that these kind of actions are empowering?
Yes.
D:
How would you say that they’re empowering, I mean why are they
empowering? Is it numbers of the crowd, is it unity, is it . .
I don’t know, yes, it’s just
Female: It’s no good just giving a donation and waiting for someone else to
do it, we’re just here saying this has to be changed, here and now.
Male: You just know that you’re doing the right thing, and no matter what,
even if you’re with the crowd or you’re not with the crowd, you’re just doing
the right thing.
Am yeah it made me just really excited and well a little bit scared having
doing, doing something new I think and not really know what we were getting
into but now I just ah wanna be doing that sort of stuff everyday, it makes me
feel incredible like nothing else I’ve ever done before
In particular, participants used their social identity as a lens for the evaluation
of the events they participated in. Some utilised the historical narrative of activism or
activist reference groups to (re)assess the activities. In this way, events experienced
immediately as unsuccessful, unpleasant and disempowering became re-evaluated in
the light of discussions which put them in the context of the whole protest, where
different small direct actions were taking place simultaneously, arguably with some
overall success.
9
I think this is the main issue for me to come here, I think the main political
issues. But also the protest, the culture of protest, as well because we should
not forget what happened in Genoa and what happened to the protesters and
where we went from Seattle so that’s a global protest going on all over the
world
T3S1I1
I mean there’s a saying by a philosopher called ????? who said on one
thousand wars there’s only one revolution.
even if your ultimate goal isn’t achieved right now the purpose that you set out
to do which was perhaps have a strong demonstration that caught peoples
attention and know that collectively you’d managed to achieve that. Then
that’s quite empowering so its either a case of having an immediate goal that
you can see or knowing that you can work, that you’ve got people that you’re
unified with that you can work together to have an eventual goal that might be
sometime in the future.
SO
These participants drew upon the accounts of others in the movement to contextualize
their own actions:
Then back to Stirling after blockading the road felt extremely
disenfranchising, but then in the evening talking to other people and really
getting an idea of the picture of what had been going on, through working in
the media centre and receiving calls and looking through the timeline the logs
of what had been happening, I saw that actually we had been very effective
There was stuff going on in Edinburgh, I believe, you know, through our
wonderful network of communications, it seems that they managed to achieve
quite a lot, but, and keep it going for quite a long time.
T3S1I2 A
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Other participants, however, used family and friends unconnected with the
protests as their reference points, and continued to view events as disappointing.
according to my dad, it’s, we’re being presented as a bunch of bloody idiots.
P(D): Dunno yeah it was just very one sided press I don’t really know like I
just know from like my friends back home people from people I talked to
afterwards, my parents, they saw what we were doing as a really like a bad
thing that we weren’t doing it for a purpose as such we just wanted to kind of
cause havoc. I don’t think the real reason got across to everyone.
D After
Int: What did you think of the idea of affinity groups
Sa: I didn’t really have one
D: Do you find these type of events empowering?
Not at the moment. Not right now. Generally, yes.
D: Why not right now?
Because we’ve been, all power’s been taken away totally from us at the
moment.
but to be honest I don’t know whether to feel more empowered or less
empowered, because it’s a kind of weird space we’re in because we don’t
really know what’s happened today. And we don’t know how much we’ve
achieved and how much it’s going to be perceived by the outside world as a
positive or negative thing, so I feel a little bit in between at the moment, a little
bit disillusioned, a little bit tired, and little bit delusional.
T3S1I3
A second key finding, related to the variation in feelings of (dis)
empowerment, was the transformation for some people of what their own actions
were about. Thus the protest itself became re-evaluated such that it was deemed to be
about such things as inclusive decision-making processes, building the movement and
the right to protest itself (rather than about simply stopping the G8). In these terms,
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the protest as whole could be seen as a success, even though they failed ultimately to
stop the G8 meeting:
D: Yes. So is it the effectiveness of the action that would give you the . .
Not really the effectiveness, but what we’re basically essentially trying to do
here is like trying to create like a new way of making decisions that will
involve people but so far it doesn’t work all the time, it rarely works,
T3S2I4
D: Why do you take part in things like this?
Because I believe that everyone’s got civil rights.
(TIME 2) T3S2I5
I’m not here exclusively for anti-poverty, I think that’s been hijacked by
Brown and Geldof and all the rest of it. And once you get here and get started
getting treated like shit by the police you get reminded why you’ve come here
in the firs place.
T3S2I6
in Britain yeah people think we’ve got loads of civil rights, but you only
realise like how few you’ve got when you start trying to use them.
It’s just good that we’re here, you know. People will ask in future, how come
these people just did nothing, you know, when the environment was being
destroyed, children dying in Africa, like every day in Africa three babies die,
and people will say how come these people did nothing, well at least we’re
doing something, it might not seem that logical or whatever, but at least we’re
trying to do something.
T3S2I6
Before they were just this kind of nasty presence that I didn’t really think they
did any good but they’ve sort of almost become the enemy sometimes more
than the 8 men sitting in that building, hotel. Yeah it almost became a struggle
12
between us and the police, us and the state, yeah it was a much bigger bigger
thing I think than maybe like us against the G8
I felt that the main reason why we were there was to sort of, to show them that
no matter where they go, no matter where the G8 goes, we’re just going to be
able to follow them there, you know, people who are going to be putting them
to task you know and shouting abuse at them and everything else, you know.
The hope is obviously that as the movement grows then it encourages other
people to join in and maybe give them the confidence to maybe take this sort
of action, so that it will all end up hopefully overthrowing the sort of
oppressive system, you know.
(A after)
D: Do you think then that it achieved what it hoped to achieve
P(S): No. I don’t think it really did. In terms of getting groups, one of the
things that I think is the best thing about that kind of thing is that it got groups
together. Groups that are working on the same kind of issues with the same
ideas and different groups from around the UK especially. So it was a very
good way of networking and seeing other people were doing exactly the same
things in their own areas.
Sophie After
Then that’s quite empowering so its either a case of having an immediate goal
that you can see or knowing that you can work, that you’ve got people that
you’re unified with that you can work together to have an eventual goal that
might be sometime in the future.
Relatedly, for some, the protest campsite came to be seen as the main
achievement of the event when it was set up originally as simply to support the roadblocking direct actions. This strategy of redefinition again varied across participants –
experienced ‘direct activists’ were the ones who made this re-definition, since they
could see the camp as an instantiation of their activist identity - or a glimpse in the
present of an alternative future world:
D: How important do you think the campsite was for the protests
13
P(S): I think it was very important. I think it was actually like the very central
part of the G8 protests. Because actually what it did was allow activists to
network with each other to understand each others kind of ideas and opinions
but it was also it gave you quite a sort of sense of power cause actually you
could see that you weren’t standing alone that you were standing with how
ever many other people in one area.
D: The camp at Stirling, how important do you think that was.
P(N): I think that was very important. The temporary autonomous zone, the
zone that the camp took up, the area that the camp occupied becamae a, the
small little island of sanity amongst our world, you really got to see an
example of how society could be organised. So that made the ideals of what
you were fighting for somewhat more tangible and therefore more real,
because you had this little example of an alternative way of working.
The whole kind of anarchist organised only donations, no [prices], this is
important to show, that five thousand people or ten thousand people can live
together for a few time, can make actions together,
T3S2I3
And it was such a brilliant buzz on camp to see that we were living this kind
of I don’t know anarcho-syndiclist dream.
Those participants without a well-established activist identity found the camp
to be cliquey and full of fear, however:
D: And what did you think of the atmosphere there and how did that make you
feel?
P(D): It was quite on guard all the time, probably cause the police were
obviously around all the time and there was quite a lot of am very like groupy
very kind of cliquey different groups kind of planning different actions am so
it made you feel like part of it if you were in your own group I guess but if you
weren’t you felt kind of like on the outside
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There was a lot of fear within the camp which was unnecessary and it seemed
like more people spent their time worrying than taking any action.
Conclusions and implications
The dynamics of (dis)empowerment at the 2005 G8 direct actions were in line with
the suggestions of the ESIM on the strategies used to continue motivation in the face
of ‘defeat’, by showing how identity can operate as a collective resource for
experienced activists. In particular, the use of historical and contextual narratives
offset immediate feelings of defeat arising from apparent failure of CSO, while the
transformation of aims involved a refocusing away from actions interpretable as
failures to those which could be experienced instead as CSO.
However, this kind of evidence also shows how an ‘activist’ identity can
potentially operate as a break on escalation. More specifically, the translation of
means into ends – such as the elevation of the campsite to an achievement in its own
right - could in certain contexts mean a retreat into lifestylism or an activist ghetto,
cementing the very fragmentation between ‘activists’ and ‘others’ that need to be
superseded if isolated crowd events are to develop into social movements.
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