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1 Protest Public As a Social Actor Protest Public as a Social Actor: from mosaic of "issue-based groups" to the unity of "the other world possible" Abstract This paper is an attempt to address a methodological problem of defining the origin, the structure and social foundations of massive and lasting peaceful street protests, that had appeared spontaneously and almost simultaneously at the beginning of new millennia in the countries with very different level of public wealth and socio-political structure - from US and UK to Turkey, Brazil and Bulgaria, lately involving similar protest events in Russia and Ukraine. Been driven by different reasons, addressing different targets, those mass street actions have a lot of common features, that allow to consider them as one phenomena, which we define as a new type of social engagement, distinguished both from civil society organizations and social movements. This type of engagement is characterized by formation and activities of protesting publics, which can have deep and lasting impact on both society and policy process, including various fields of social policy, by transforming the public sphere through changing dominating public discourses. Such activities are largely based on common demand of ethical nature, that can bring together many diverse social groups and mini-publics, focused on issue-based protests. Paper is exploring theoretical foundations of perceiving self-organized publics as collective social actors with their unique features and capacities. It also seeks to develop a conceptual frame for protest events analysis as manifestations of protest publics, which allows to identify the type of specific public assembled for each event , its “qualities of actorness” and its transformative potential. This conceptual frame is then applied to reconstruct Bolotnaya actions, protests against construction of Gazprom office tower in St. Petersburg and current protests of medical workers against implementation of health reform, which allow to compare the types of publics, that were involved in those protests. The results include suggestions on understanding and interpretation of protest actions based on qualities of protesting publics. Key words : public sphere, the public, social actor, social movement, protest public, ethic-based protest 1 1. Mass protests of new millennia as a challenge to social theory Civil society structures, NGO's, social movements and protesting public The need for the new analytical instruments often comes all over sudden, when some unexpected social events are happening and analysts are trying to explain it with the theoretical concepts and research frameworks they had used to apply before and they realize, - if they are honest with themselves - that those old instruments do not fully explain what is going on. This is exactly how it happened right after the beginning of the mass public protests in Russia. Though, similar mass protest events were already happening it many places before - in Arab World -Tunizia, in Egypt, in Libia, and in Europe, like in Bulgaria and first Maidan in Ukraine, as well as in post-Soviet Asia, like in Kyrgizia or Kazakhstan, almost each time it happened in such a place, that as a environment for mass rallies was unthinkable before the events actually took place. All those events then develop so quickly that it does not give much time to analysts to develop new research instruments by the time they may disappear – and the new events, even more hard to conceptualize, would appeared in the same place. Similar puzzle seem to had happened in Moscow at the end of 2011, when the excitement with really massive, peaceful and cheerful, smiling and civilized mass meetings and rallies, that were organized by volunteers using innovative crowd-funding technologies and proclaimed purely democratic demands “for free and fair elections”, seem to overshadow far less civilized spontaneous rallies of young football fans, that happened on 7 December 2010, led by right- wing aggressive nationalists, calling to commemorate the death of Egor Sviridov, killed on 6 December by a Dagestani national, that were able to assemble about 5.000 young nationalists at Manezhnaya square in Moscow, right beside the Kremlin wall, on 11 December . This exited and aggressive gathering had quickly turned into riots with brutal violence against ethnic nationals, randomly spotted around the center of Moscow , with many injuries and at least one casualty reported1 Both the police and the society were shocked by those Manezhnaya events, as there was no visible organizer of those rallies, and this was claimed - the new "fascist face" of Russian civil society. This led many analysts to re-think what is the true meaning of the term ' civil society', as the nationalist gathering was clearly falling under all the 'classic' definitions of civil society organizations : non-governmental, spontaneous, voluntary, almost ‘grass-roots’. The major surprise was a number of the people assembled in Manezhnaya, contrasting to relatively modest number of devoted ‘members’, of various nationalistic organizations in Moscow, closely monitored by SOVA Center. According to their findings, there are hardly more than few 1 http://www.svoboda.org/content/article/2247186.html 2 hundreds, who clearly identify themselves with ideology and ‘regular activities’, but when it comes to the participants in public rallies known as ‘Russian Marches” attendance can reach several thousands2. So, the most reasonable explanation is, that angry crowd in Manezhnaya can be seen as a 'special type of public', that could be easily assembled in response to a particular ‘troubling message’ of what was interpreted as ‘ethnic killing’, which is possible because of the ‘corrupt law-enforcement’. A vision of ‘certain public’ that can suddenly emerge ‘out of nowhere’ as a response to a message, that all those people want to react to by presenting themselves collectively in a public space, can also be applied to different kinds of mass gatherings, as they come together in masses for a common purpose, like a call to collective prayer. Speaking of ‘Moscow publics’ as those of supporters to TV Rain, or Alexey Navalny, one should also keep in mind existence of completely other publics, that are able to manifest themselves in much more impressive quantities, like those who responded to the call for public prayer on major Muslim Holiday Kurbam Bairam on 16 november 2010, when there was reported 80 thousand people participating3, and in 2011 – more than 170 thousands, when only around the Great Mosque in Moscow at Vipolzov pereulok,7, there were reported more than 80 thousand of Muslims collectively praying together on 6 November, 20114 In this view, the December, 2011 mass rallies in streets of Moscow in support of free and fair elections can also be seen as a ‘certain public’, united in a common action by a response to a message, but at that time the expectations of emerging of a “new mass democratic movement” was so strong, that even first mass rally on 10 December from Square of Revolution to Bolotnaya Square, gathering about 50 thousand participants, was immediately referred to as the "true civil society". But the attempts to explain what kind of civil society this was and what civil society organizations had contributed to bringing people out into the streets, happened not to be easy to answer, as there were very few of the established NGO's seen as organizers, besides the names of some political opposition leaders, while the majority of the names of speaker at the first rally were mostly from artistic and journalist professions. Since the very first mass meeting, there were many attempts made to somehow define, ‘who were all those people’, when protesters were first called 'angry citizens', but it was not too clear, angry with what, as the protest was clearly shifting its focus, as the first polls had reported a significant number of wealthy people involved, growing protest events were called ‘middle – class uprising’ or even 'fur-coat revolution', but this was not adequate either, as there were 2 http://www.sova-center.ru/racism-xenophobia/publications/2013/03/d26655/ 3 http://www.sova-center.ru/religion/discussions/how-many/2010/11/d20290/ 4 ttp://www.gazeta.ru/news/lenta/2011/11/06/n_2084270.shtml 3 many people with quite low income among protesters, finally, recognizing high level of education among protesters, all the participants were referred to as "creative class', but this also happened to be only part of the truth, so the question “who are all those people”, participating in mass protest during winter 2010-2011, still remains open. In approach this question, there are two conventional theoretical models, that seem to be most adequate to be applied : civil society concept and social movement theory, but the claim of this paper is, that none of them can fully grasp the nature of those mass protest. Civil society concept initially seemed to be most natural to be applied, because of several visual similarities of Moscow events with peaceful democratic ‘velvet revolutions’ in East Europe in the end of 80-es, when former ‘Soviet Block’ countries were liberating themselves from communist regimes through consolidated and coordinated protests actions , led by broad political and civil coalitions. During those events citizens expressed their deep mistrust in political elites, pushing governing regimes either to peaceful transformation through a dialogue with protesters, like in Poland, or led to its total collapse, like in Romania. In most of those cases, democratic transformation was attributed to the ‘victory of civil society’ (Arato, Cohen 1992). In case of Russian protest of 2010 it proved to be not adequate for both theoretical ground and for practical reasons. Theoretical concept of ‘civil society’ presupposes an intense and long-lasting organizational work for societies prior to common action, as the ‘civil society ‘itself is commonly understood as ‘space between family, market and the state,’ (Salamon 2004) but filled with plethora of multiple voluntary associations’, which in practical sense of most research projects is reduced to ‘organized society’, or studying of NGO’s (Heinrich 2004; Aleskerov F., Belyaeva N.
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