By social protest we mean the performances that have an explicit social purpose, that direct their audience to social action. We assume that social protest performances emerge solely from marginalized peoples and oppositional struggles. Social protest performances function as counter hegemonic strategic through which underrepresented groups challenge the dominant social order and agitate for change. The representational apparatus of the social protest performance serves to reinforce, re-imagine and rearticulate the objectives of social and political resistance. I use the term social protest performance to indicate that these performances actively protest against very specific and urgent causes of social need. Social protest performance is an ever-evolving genre appearing wherever oppressed people assert their subjectivity and contest the status quo.

On occasion, of course, everybody resistance turns into open revolt or into some other form of ‘social movement’. This term came into use among sociologists and political scientists in the United States in the 1950s, and has remained popular ever since (Tilly 1978; Tarrow 1994; Melucci; 19996). A possible weakness in primitive Rebels is its broad use of the term to include anything from a riot lasting only a few hours to Permanent organization, from the carbonari to the mafia. On the other hand, the value of Hobsbawm’s study and of the term ‘social movement’ more generally, is to direct attention to characteristics which are shared by religion and political movements, previously studied in isolation from each other. Some of these movements may be described as ‘activeve’, taking the initiative in the pursuit of precise aim such as national independence, the abolition of slavery or votes for women. 

We must also analyze three critical questions about social movements:

1. In the first place, who is moving? What kind of person leads, and what kind of person follows? Many movements, religious and political alike, have leaders of the kind that Max Weber defined as ‘charismatic’, from St Francis or Martin Luther to Napoleon or Lenin. Weber defined charisma as a quality by virtue of which an individual is treated as ‘endowed with supernatural, superhuman or at least specifically exceptional power or qualities’ (1920). Weber has been criticized for overemphasizing the qualities of the leader, rather than the expectation of the followers who ‘impute’ these qualities (Shils 1975:126-84; B. Anderson 199: 78-93). One might ask whether there are kinds of follower who are particularly susceptible to charismatic leaders, the young for example. The young are often prominent in social movements, perhaps because their capacity for spontaneous action has not yet been dulled by routine, and because they have been to lose than their elders in the event of failure and repression.
2. In the second place, what means are adopted to achieve the collective goals? A recurrent conflict within social movements is between participants who are prepared to use violence in pursuit of their goals and those, such as Gandhi in the movement for Indian independence, who reject the use of force and attempt to find alternative, from peaceful demonstration to the boycott of foreign goods.

We may speak of the different movements. A recurrent element in peaceful movements is the signing of a petition and its presentation to the authorities. Another is the hunger strikes, use by the suffragettes and the IRA alike to demand the status of political prisons. Even riots, however spontaneous in origin, draw on repertories such as ritual which are familiar in a given culture, rituals which both legitimate popular actions by presenting it as a procession or pilgrimage and also make it more persuasive by giving it dramatic from. Alternatively, they refer back to other riots by adopting traditional symbols such as the hanging of unpopular figures in effigy or placing a loaf or a spear as a protest against the price of bread.

3. In the third place, what makes some social movement more successful than others? A useful concept coined by social theorists is that of the successful ‘mobilization’ of resources such as arms, money and, above all, people (Tilly 1978:69-84; Oberchall 1993; Melucci 1996: 289-312). One of the keys to mobilization is charismatic leadership, but another is the creation of organization. In the nineteenth century Ireland for instance, support for independence, or ‘Home Rule’, was mobilized by the creation of The Home Government Association, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, The Irish National League and even the Gaelic Athletic Association. Subscription from members not only helped to finance the movement, but also encouraged loyalty by the ‘investors’.