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POL0010.1177/0263395720960297PoliticsCurato

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Politics

Interruptive protests in
2021, Vol. 41(3) 388­–403
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DOI: 10.1177/0263395720960297
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Nicole Curato
University of Canberra, Australia

Abstract
The field of deliberative democracy has long recognised the role of interruptive protests to make
polities more sensitive to good reasons. But how exactly interruptive protests enhance deliberative
systems remain an open question. ‘Non-deliberative acts may have deliberative consequences’ is
a crucial line of argument in the deliberative systems literature, but the precise character of these
consequences is yet to be spelled out. In this article, I describe three ways in which consequences
of interruptive protests enhance the deliberative system. I argue that interruptive protests can
redistribute (1) voice and visibility, (2) attention, and (3) deliberative agency which, in turn, can lay
bare the weaknesses of a dysfunctional deliberative system. The arguments I put forward are based
on interpretive case studies focusing on protest movements in the Philippines and Puerto Rico in
the aftermath of record-breaking hurricanes. Overall, this paper seeks to clarify the relationship
between deliberative politics and protest action, by identifying the distinctive contributions of
interruptive protests in redistributing power in dysfunctional deliberative systems.

Keywords
deliberative democracy, deliberative system, disasters, protests, social movements

Received: 3rd April 2020; Accepted: 17th August 2020

Public deliberation is rarely a smooth process, and when things go smoothly, the process
is suspicious. Whether in carefully designed forums or the unstructured public sphere, the
practice of deliberation is far from its caricature as genteel exchange of reasons among
peers. Deliberative theorists have long recognised the role of interruptive protests as part
of the repertoire of communication that allows polities to be sensitive to good reasons and
considerations (Dryzek, 2010; Mendonça and Ercan, 2015; Polletta, 2015 also see Della
Porta and Rucht, 2013). To uphold inclusiveness, deliberation needs the intrusion of mar-
ginalised actors when there are overt or innocent exclusions in the public sphere. To
pursue the goal of epistemic fruitfulness, deliberation needs to break pathological path
dependencies in collective will formation that constrain the horizon of argumentation (see

Corresponding author:
Nicole Curato, Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra,
11 Kirinari Street, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia.
Email: Nicole.Curato@canberra.edu.au
Curato 389

Dryzek and Pickering, 2019). Sometimes, protesters need to put a break to an emerging
consensus when some discourses have yet to secure a fair hearing.
While deliberative theory has increasingly become hospitable to interruptive protests,
questions remain about the consequences of protest action that enhances a deliberative
system. Non-deliberative acts may have deliberative consequences is a crucial yet under-
theorised line of argument in the deliberative systems literature (Stevenson and Dryzek,
2014).1 While this theoretical development prompts deliberative democrats to imagine
creative ways in which deliberative systems can be enhanced, the question about what
counts as ‘deliberative consequences’ demands further theoretical refinement in light of
empirical investigation.
In this article, I argue that interruptive protests have productive consequences to the
deliberative system because they can redistribute (1) voice and visibility, (2) attention,
and (3) deliberative agency. I use the term ‘redistribute’ purposively to underscore ine-
qualities of voice, attention, and agency in the deliberative system. In cases where mar-
ginalised political communities have no assured voice, assumed audience, and capacity to
express their views in their own terms, interruptive protests can renegotiate the terms of
engagement in the public sphere by creating conditions for equal and pluralistic delibera-
tion. The arguments I put forward are based on empirical cases of protest movements in
the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the aftermath of record-breaking hurricanes. These
‘extreme’ cases of ‘dysfunctional’ deliberative systems demonstrate how interruptive pro-
tests disrupt the course of public deliberation about disaster response and rehabilitation
and promote virtues of equality and pluralistic discourse that can shape the procedural
outcomes of deliberation.
I present these arguments in four parts. First, I chart recent developments in deliberative
theory that situate the role of interruptive protests in the deliberative system. Second, I
provide an overview of normative approaches that assess the deliberative quality of inter-
ruptive protests. For the most part, protests have been assessed based on the deliberative
credentials of their enactment (procedure), but more can be done to theorise the delibera-
tive quality of its consequences (outcomes). I argue that current normative debates can
benefit from empirically informed reflection on how precisely interruption can generate
positive outcomes for the deliberative system. In the third section, I examine the cases of
post-disaster Philippines and Puerto Rico and reflect on the legacies of interruptive pro-
tests in the deliberative system where asymmetries of power are most pronounced. The
concluding section reflects on the implications of these arguments to the trajectory of nor-
mative deliberative theory, and social movements, and democracy studies more broadly.

Dysfunctional deliberative systems

The impression that public deliberation is about the unhindered exchange of reasons is
not unfounded. After all, deliberative democracy’s account of legitimacy, at least in some
of its early conceptualisations, emphasises ‘rationally-motivated consensus’ as the ideal
outcome of free and reasoned argumentation among equals (Cohen, 2003: 347). When
appreciated in this manner, deliberation does give an impression that it takes place in a
‘disinfected argumentative operating theatre where the sealed air conditioning vents stop
any everyday fluff floating down infecting the sterilised truth’ (Gordon-Smith, 2019: 3).
This leaves agonistic democrats critiquing deliberative democracy’s ideals as fetishizing
order at the expense of messy confrontation, focusing on reasonable consensus than pas-
sionate disagreement. Deliberative democrats, argues Chantal Mouffe (1999: 45), fail to
390 Politics 41(3)

recognise ‘the impossibility of establishing rational consensus without exclusion’.

Consensus is always an expression of hegemony or ‘crystallisation of power relation-
ships’ that imposes constraints on the scope of public debate (Mouffe, 1999: 49). For
deliberative democracy to be truly democratic, its account of communication must go
beyond the calmly rational form of communication and embrace speech styles that ‘gen-
erate hope, negotiate fears, mediate memories, and facilitate community soul-searching’
(Fischer, 2010: 415).
The literature has moved on from these debates. It has almost been 20 years since John
Dryzek observed that ‘the ideal of consensus has long been rejected by most deliberative
democrats’, although the theory’s critics ‘have not always noticed’ (Dryzek, 2001: 661).
The conclusion of deliberation is not the end of disagreement, for there are legitimate
(procedural) outcomes of deliberation beyond consensus. Clarifying the nature of con-
flict, generating workable agreements or forging metaconsensus are some examples
where procedural outcomes of deliberation can result to binding decisions, whether it is
in the form of laws, policies, or regulations, while participants maintain their different
value commitments (see Dryzek and Niemeyer, 2006; Manin, 1987). Deliberative theo-
ry’s procedural orientation makes it possible for continued cooperation despite disagree-
ment when participants think ‘they have contributed to and influenced the outcome even
when they disagree with it’ (Bohman, 2000: 33).
In terms of process, the notion that deliberation is only about dispassionate reason-
giving has also long been addressed. Today, many deliberative democrats take the view
that ‘there is no Platonic ideal of good deliberation’ (Bächtiger et al., 2018: 8). Deliberation
is a dynamic enterprise whose ideals are constantly ‘subjected to critical scrutiny, exam-
ined for unintended implications, opened to revision, revised and subjected again to con-
test and further scrutiny’ (Bächtiger et al., 2018: 8). This is part of deliberative theory’s
turn to ‘deliberative systems’, which recognises that deliberative virtues are not realised
in a single site of deliberation. Instead, these virtues are distributed across a range of sites,
whether in formal political institutions or informal spaces of discourse (Mansbridge et al.,
2012). One can imagine a scenario where ‘poor deliberative quality in one place (say, the
legislature) may be compensated by, or even inspire, higher deliberative quality in another
location (say a flourishing informal public sphere)’ (Dryzek, 2010: 13–14). In this
approach, what matters is the integration of different components to create a well-func-
tioning system. A functional deliberative system is one where one site can take up and
respond to the discourses in another to arrive at epistemic, ethical, and democratic out-
comes (see Mansbridge et al., 2012).
Meanwhile, a dysfunctional deliberative system takes shape in various ways. On one
extreme is a ‘tightly coupled’ deliberative system where different sites of deliberation are
too coordinated, and their discourses invariant, thereby rendering the deliberative system
vulnerable to co-optation and ‘intellectual monocropping’ (Evans and Finnemore, 2001:
11). This poses problems for the epistemic quality of the deliberative system, for familiarity
inhibits learning and reflexivity. Global finance is an example of a tightly coupled delibera-
tive system, where shareholder value serves as undisputed vocabulary that justified merg-
ers, downsizing, and massive layoffs. Karen Ho’s (2009: 112) ethnography of Wall Street
finds that the field of finance capitalism is composed of an exclusive club of Ivy League
graduates who work together based on a ‘tightly shared paradigm’ of ‘money meritocracy’.
Without mechanisms to challenge their filter bubbles and very few incentives for the fat cats
of Wall Street engage in robust deliberations, global finance, as a tightly coupled delibera-
tive system, is prone to shocks and crises of unmitigated proportions.
Curato 391

On the other extreme is a ‘decoupled’ deliberative system where discourses simply do

not intersect or ignore each other (see Mansbridge et al., 2012: 23). This takes place when
reasoning in one part of the deliberative system fails to relate to other parts, either because
of institutional domination or mutual resistance from engaging with opposing reasons.
Jane Mansbridge et al. (2012) identify global climate governance as an example of a
decoupled deliberative system where some legislators and interest groups refuse to
engage the global scientific community. The result is an impasse on creating a mutually
acceptable policy agenda. Both tightly coupled and decoupled deliberative systems may
appear stable on the surface, either because the sites are well in agreement as in the case
of a tightly coupled system or experience a normalised impasse as in the case of a decou-
pled deliberative system where discourses do not intersect at all.
There are many ways in which protests can serve as correctives to dysfunctional delib-
erative systems. Protests may expose taken-for-granted realities in deliberative systems,
particularly how their component parts construct, stabilise and sustain insidious inequali-
ties (Mendonça and Ercan, 2015). They could also prompt reflection for the deliberative
system to identify their shortcomings and reform the terms of deliberation (Holdo, 2020).
They can challenge emerging consensus built on exclusions and create space for new per-
spectives to flourish. But one could also imagine the converse. Interruptive protests can
hijack deliberations in favour of parochial interests. ‘Rage-baiting’ on Twitter or physical
violence in the streets may divert deliberations from an orientation towards understanding
to inflaming divisions. One could make a case that the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville
is an attempt of white supremacists to move out of their enclaves in the dark web, assert
their presence in the public sphere, and draw attention to their anger and grievances.
While there are intuitive reasons to criticise the ethics of these interruptive protests,
deliberative theory, for the most part, remains ambiguous about how exactly such inter-
ruptive protests can be appreciated. Thus far, deliberative theory offers two ways in which
the quality of interruptive protests can be assessed. The first one is in terms of procedure,
the second is in terms of outcomes. The former is more developed in deliberative theory,
while the latter – which is the focus of this article – needs to be further sharpened by
investigating its applications in empirical realities.

Assessing interruptive protests

In terms of procedure, deliberative theory has gained inroads in characterising the delib-
erative quality of interruptive protests. Archon Fung sets the groundwork for this
research agenda. For Fung (2005: 399), widespread inequality and failures of reciprocity
‘can justify non-persuasive, even coercive, methods for the sake of deliberative goals’.
When choosing non-persuasive forms of communication, deliberative activists must
consider four principles: fidelity, charity, exhaustion, and proportionality. Deliberative
activists’ interruption of public deliberation is justified if their loyalties first lie in delib-
eration (fidelity) and assume that their would-be interlocutors are good faith deliberators
until proven otherwise (charity). Deliberative activists must also take all reasonable
efforts to persuade interlocutors to engage in deliberation and only when all these
attempts fail must they engage in non-deliberative action (exhaustion). The use of non-
deliberative action, however, must be commensurate to the extent of opponents’ rejec-
tion of the norms of deliberation (proportionality). ‘The greater their [would-be
interlocutors’] rejection’, Fung (2005: 403) argues, ‘the more the deliberative activist is
at liberty to conduct politics by noncommunicative means’. Through this theoretical
392 Politics 41(3)

development, Fung demonstrates that it is possible to practice deliberative democracy in

the face of hostility without being a political fool.
While Fung describes interruptive protests as ‘non-deliberative’ action, other delibera-
tive theorists argue that interruptive protests are not automatically ‘non-deliberative’, and
may in fact exhibit deliberative qualities. William Smith (2016: 165), for example, intro-
duces the concept of ‘deliberative disruption’ which refers to protest acts that are ‘con-
ducted as reflective, respectful, and dialogic contributions to public deliberation’. This is
contrasted to ‘non-deliberative disruption’, or protest acts that are not designed to contrib-
ute to reflective, respectful and dialogic deliberation. The difference between the two is
that deliberative disruption uses deliberative norms as constraints to their conduct, while
non-deliberative disruption is not subject to these constraints. To illustrate this point,
Smith draws on the work of Pollyana Ruiz (2014) on the occupation of Starbucks.
Activists dressed as inmates in Guantanamo, wearing orange overalls and black hoods,
went in the café, knelt in silence, as activists read statements against Starbucks’ policy to
sell coffee to US military stationed in Guantanamo. Disrupting the apolitical space of
Starbucks aimed to provoke reflection among customers. The interruption of a ‘typical
day’ in Starbucks jolted customers out of their habits and transform their experience as
consumers in a café to actors in the public sphere. Put another way, the site of consump-
tion is disrupted to link or ‘couple’ it to the site of political contestation. Like Fung, Smith
argues that normative constraints distinguish deliberative disruption from other forms of
disruptive political action. Following this analysis, one could argue that it is the lack of
normative constraints that makes the Charlottesville white supremacist rally non-deliber-
ative. Protests were not oriented to norms of dialogic deliberation and instead were
‘intended to provoke and engage in street battles with those they perceived as their ene-
mies’, as the US Attorney’s Office put it.2
The procedural quality of interruptive protests could also be assessed based on
how protesters govern their own organisations or networks. Ricardo Mendonça and
Selen Ercan’s (2015) work on protests movements in Brazil and Turkey in 2013
finds that protest movements followed norms of deliberation as far as they have inter-
nal procedures for reflexivity and self-criticism. They also take a deliberative stance
towards the public by offering reasons for their positions, instead of focusing their
protest repertoire to making demands. Shen Yang’s (2020) research on Occupy
Central takes the analysis even further, by critically narrating the role of ‘Deliberation
Days’ in establishing the legitimacy and coordinating the functions of a fragmented
pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. Taken together, this line of research dem-
onstrates the compatibility of interruptive protests and deliberation in procedural
terms, by emphasising the overlaps in their value commitments.
The second and less developed way in which interruptive protests are theorised is in
relation to outcomes or consequences. Non-deliberative acts may have deliberative con-
sequences is one of the most important yet under-theorised claims of contemporary delib-
erative theory (Stevenson and Dryzek, 2014). It is a controversial line because it seems
like anything and everything has deliberative potential. Dryzek (2010: 82), for example,
uses the case of Australian populist Pauline Hanson who in her maiden speech in the
Senate declared that Australia is being ‘swamped by Asians’ and that Muslims ‘are promi-
nent in organised crime’. Hanson’s speech does not in any way fulfil the normative crite-
ria put forward by Fung and Smith. For Dryzek, however, we cannot right off the positive
systemic effects of Hanson’s rhetoric. She may have interrupted the norms of political
correctness in parliamentary discourse, but she also provoked the countermobilization of
Curato 393

multicultural discourses. Sometimes, as Dryzek puts it, ‘political theory has to give way
to history’.3
This account is surely provocative, but it calls for further clarification. If one were to
follow this logic, then the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville could claim to have
deliberative consequences down the line. This protest, after all, prompted a nationwide
deliberation on the historical politics of Confederate memorials (Samuels, 2019).
However, to argue that ‘good outcomes’ may eventually emerge from non-deliberative
forms of action creates a slippery slope for deliberative theory’s account of interruptive
protests. Stretching the range of political practices that counts in the repertoire of delib-
eration blunts the theory’s normative force. Deliberative theory needs a critical account
by which consequences of interruptive protests can be examined, if it were to retain its
normative bite and resist the temptation of thinking in terms of silver linings.

Redistribution via interruption

My proposed solution to this dilemma is twofold. First, I propose to place power at the
centre of analysis. To assess the deliberative outcomes of interruption, we need to enquire
into how protests challenge exclusionary power structures that hold the deliberative sys-
tem together. Placing power at the centre of analysis begins with the definition of inter-
ruptive protests. I define interruptive protests – used interchangeably as interruption in
this article – as political practices that break the continuity of dominant patterns of behav-
iour. I emphasise the term ‘dominant’ to place the normative quality of interruption in the
foreground. Interruption has a critical quality for it can expose exclusionary or unfair
practice. Nicole Doerr’s (2018) ethnographic work, for example, demonstrates how com-
munity organisers disrupt instead of boycott community meetings to draw attention to
power imbalances that skew the direction of deliberation. Interruption can also have a
constructive quality for interruption can redistribute resources necessary for public delib-
eration. The constructive quality of interruptive protest is akin to Donatella Della Porta’s
(2008: 48) concept of ‘eventful protests’ which generate ‘highly relevant, cognitive, rela-
tional and emotional impact on participants and beyond participants’. The spectacular
quality of protests creates ‘moments of exchange of ideas’ or an arena where citizens can
produce effects on authorities or dominant modes of thinking. My premise is that a delib-
erative system underpinned by a system of power – a set of taken-for-granted assump-
tions that serves as baseline understanding for public deliberation to take place. A
deliberative system operates within structures of power that determine who should speak
and who is to be heard, the spaces where particular styles of communication are legible
and the spaces where they do not make sense, what counts as relevant discourse and what
is merely noise (see Curato et al., 2018).
When a deliberative system overly relies on familiar or ‘sensible’ practices of argu-
mentation, it gives the impression that politics is ‘exaggeratedly stable’ (Goodman, 2018:
274). Protests are interruptive as far as they challenge the stability of the deliberative
system. They denaturalize the political order by problematising what holds the delibera-
tive system together. For interruption to be deliberative in consequence, it must redistrib-
ute voice, attention and agency that disproportionately benefits a dominant group while
diminishing marginalised groups. Without this, marginalised communities will continue
to face barriers in meaningful deliberation and discourage others from seeking to engage
in a public sphere where their inputs are not valued. Undisrupted deliberative systems
may also signal tacit approval towards status hierarchies and dominant speech cultures.
394 Politics 41(3)

Ultimately, interruptions that serve deliberative democracy’s ends are those that promote
equitable and pluralistic contestation of competing discourses.
One challenge for examining the deliberative impact of interruption through the lens
of power is determining which group is dominant and which one is marginalised. This
may seem straightforward in some contexts, as in the case studies I will present in the
latter part of this article, where politicised discourses of disaster survivors were sup-
pressed by dominant discourses of humanitarianism and neglect. But there are cases
where status hierarchies are not as clear. One can imagine horizontal conflicts where, for
example, marginalised communities have competing interests. This is evident in cases of
community-driven development programmes using deliberative procedures where par-
ticipants embody different layers of marginalisation (see Sanyal and Rao, 2018). Mothers
make a case to allocate the village budget to create childcare facilities so they can take
part in economic production while peasants argue for a bridge so their produce can reach
the market in time, while ethnic minorities question the preferential treatment of other
communities in development programmes. How these arguments are received, silenced,
and acted upon in the deliberative system depends on the broader cultural and micropo-
litical contexts in which they are made. Indeed, social realities pose different experiences
of marginality and dominance, with intersections on gender, ethnicity, class, and others
(Wojciechowska, 2019). Determining a priori standards of domination and marginalisa-
tion are untenable for the purposes of the analysis I am proposing.
Instead of proposing pre-defined parameters by which dominant and marginalised dis-
courses can be identified, my second approach in addressing this challenge is to examine
these mechanisms empirically. Markus Holdo and Lizzie Öhrn Sagrelius’s (2020) work
on deliberation and marginalisation is a constructive starting point. Their investigation on
the Stockholm riots in 2013 led them to identify five dimensions of discursive marginali-
sation based on interpretive methodology. They applied a ‘decentred’ approach by exam-
ining how communities affected by the riot experienced marginalisation through (1)
imposition of existing narratives, (2) inclusion of locally dominant actors, (3) discursive
distancing, (4) reliance on social markers, and (5) paternalistic conflict avoidance, all of
which affect the shape of public deliberation (Holdo and Sagrelius, 2020: 5–6). In this
approach, the theoretical insights are based on an empirical case, but these insights find
resonance in broader questions of marginalisation deliberative theorists face.
I take inspiration from this approach in the succeeding sections. Methodologically, my
investigation started with comparing two cases – the Philippines and Puerto Rico – two
countries that suffered from record-breaking hurricanes in 2013 and 2017 respectively.
These cases were selected as part of a broader research project to understand the role of
deliberation in the aftermath of disasters (Curato, 2019). In this project, I mapped the dif-
ferent ways in which political claims in key sites of discourses, including sites of formal
politics such as congressional enquiries and extra-parliamentary sites of political conver-
sation including social media and protest action. I conducted an inventory of political
action including protests, online campaigns, and celebrity humanitarianism, among oth-
ers, to understand the character of discursive contestation in the aftermath of a tragedy. I
coded my data using the components of the deliberative system as provisional categories
and revised them as themes emerged.
One of the main findings of this study is that the Philippines and Puerto Rico formed
two very different deliberative systems after the disaster. The Philippines demonstrates a
case of a ‘tightly coupled’ deliberative system where the states, international organisa-
tions and the global public sphere have forged a ‘humanitarian consensus’ where the
Curato 395

aftermath of the disaster is defined as a moment for global compassion. The Puerto Rican
case, meanwhile, illustrates a political system ‘decoupled’ from deliberations happening
in the mainland United States. With this characterisation, I further examined the data to
understand the implications of these ‘dysfunctional deliberative systems’ to the distribu-
tion of power in public deliberation and examine how these systems are interrogated,
denaturalised, and contested. The role of protest movements emerged as a resonant theme,
which, in turn, prompted me to understand the precise mechanisms and consequences
of protests that shaped the deliberative system. Through an interpretive approach, I argue
that interruption redistributes resources for public deliberation. First, it redistributed
voice and visibility in the public sphere. I focus on the Philippine case to flesh out this
argument. Second, I find that interruptive protests redistributed attention. This argument
is empirically grounded on the case of Puerto Rico where hurricane survivors at risk of
being neglected insist on remaining on the national agenda. Finally, interruption redistrib-
uted deliberative agency in a highly unequal political environment. This observation is
based on both cases. These three are not the only contributions of interruptive protests to
the deliberative system. For this article, however, I focus on these three consequences
based on empirical cases.

Voice and visibility

There are instances where deliberative inequalities mask as communicative triumphs.
While media bias or underrepresentation of minorities in parliament are observable ine-
qualities, there are inequalities that are insidious and capable of feigning an impression of
a healthy deliberative system.
Take the case of the Philippines in 2013. In the aftermath of world’s strongest storm that
made landfall in recent history, the global public sphere immediately responded to the suf-
fering of distant others. The affordances of social media such as Facebook groups and
Twitter hashtags coordinated disparate audiences’ discourses of shock and sadness to the
plea of the Philippine government and humanitarian organisations to contribute to relief
operations. The smooth conduct of global discussions paved the way for the emergence of
a humanitarian consensus. Discourses of the public and decision-makers – from Pope
Francis to pop star Harry Styles to UNICEF to @typicalgirl (an ‘ordinary’ citizen from
Australia) – are linked by the vocabulary of care. This is evidenced by the textual analysis
of online discourses I conducted in the first 100 days of the disaster where themes of unity
and compassion overwhelmingly set the global agenda on post-disaster relief and rehabilita-
tion (see Curato, 2017). Meanwhile, those who attempted to challenge the global moment
of unity were silenced by stigmatising their poor behaviour. ‘We haven’t even buried the
dead yet’, was a common response to statements that called out the Philippine government’s
failure to prepare for a mega-disaster. Others were disparaged for being callous, opportun-
istic, and tasteless for raising issues of climate justice at time for grieving.
Viewed this way, post-disaster Philippines is an example of a tightly coupled delibera-
tive system where consensus is achieved through depoliticised discourses of compassion.
Voices that challenge the humanitarian consensus are not only undermined but delegiti-
mised by invoking the moral obligation of care (Fassin and Pandolfi, 2010). This moral
obligation may seem benign but, in this context, it was an insidious performance of dis-
cursive power by shrinking spaces for meaningful contestation. It promotes a depoliti-
cised response to tragedy which prioritises ‘conformist action devoid of meaningful
critique’ (Kapoor, 2012: 113).
396 Politics 41(3)

A protest movement interrupted this tightly coupled deliberative system. One hundred
days after the tropical cyclone devastated one of the Philippines’ poorest regions, disaster
survivors organised a protest march in Tacloban City which is the ground zero of the
typhoon. The protesters called themselves People Surge. The name is a word play on
‘storm surge’ – the 21 feet of water that ploughed through the city and left over 7000
people dead.
People Surge interrupted the humanitarian consensus by redistributing voice and vis-
ibility in the public sphere. They did this in two ways. First, People Surge interrupted the
dominant portrayal of disaster-affected communities in global conversations online.
People Surge asserted their voice not as victims who deserve compassion but as citizens
who demand justice. With over 12,000 protesters marching downtown, People Surge
reclaimed their voice from celebrity humanitarians and government officials who claimed
to speak for them. They expressed anger for experiencing a second order disaster brought
about by the government’s slow and ineffective response. They raised issues of corrup-
tion by squarely laying blame to government officials who selectively distributed aid to
political allies. The tonality of protests used a combination of grief and indignation, effec-
tively challenging the moral consensus of grieve first, politics later. Instead, People Surge
demonstrated that sorrow and justice go together. This is reflected in their protest reper-
toire. People Surge politicised a mass grave by laying wreaths and candles wrapped
around white ribbons printed with the phrase ‘Justice from government neglect’. Such
imagery interrupted the portrayal of disaster-affected communities as too traumatised and
too miserable to speak. That this protest took place in a site of grief adds layer to the pro-
test’s interruptive capacity to transform the meaning of the mass grave as a space for
mourning to become a space for demand-making.
Second, People Surge interrupted the tightly coupled deliberative system by problema-
tising relationships of power. They enquired into who is responsible for people’s suffering
and set the agenda for deliberation between the public and decision-makers. Aside from
disrupting spaces of grief, they also disrupted spaces of power. They protested in the gates
of Malacañang (the Presidential Palace) in Manila and even the President’s family home.
Asserting presence in the capital allowed protesters to secure a seat in television talk
shows and academic forums, and even get an audience in church activities – an influential
discursive space in Roman Catholic Philippines.
Today, more than 5 years after the disaster, the narratives of the typhoon in mainstream
media as well as government’s directives reflect the discourses of People Surge. The offi-
cials that disaster survivors blamed for their misery were held accountable in the ballot
box, as reflected in the poor electoral performance of the party in power during the
typhoon in the 2016 national elections. Despite the change in administration, People
Surge continued to demand better treatment from the state, and, in some instances, have
secured the ear of high-level officials in delivering much-delayed financial assistance.
These examples, among others, demonstrate how interrupting the humanitarian consen-
sus through disruptive political action reset the language of post-disaster governance,
from one that uses the depoliticised vocabulary of misfortune and compassion to a politi-
cal language of state neglect and accountability.

Attention
There is an uneven distribution of attention in both the public sphere and sites of decision-
making. There are no guarantees that political claims, no matter how compelling, will
Curato 397

secure a fair hearing. Organised denial and institutional deafness are barriers for a plural-
ity of discourses to be seriously considered in the deliberative system (see Bickford,
1996). These deficits are more in pronounced today’s multimedia saturated societies,
where power lies not in who has the loudest voice or the best reasons, but who gets to hold
audiences’ fleeting attention spans. Interruptive protest is one way to redistribute atten-
tion through creative and sometimes sublime forms of speech (see Goodman, 2018). If
successful, interruption can transform ‘baited’ attention to sustained and consequential
deliberation where marginal claims can take part.
Puerto Rico’s case demonstrates this point. On 20 September 2017, Hurricane Maria
hit the Caribbean island wiping out 80% of the territory’s agriculture and reached over $8
billion worth of damage. The US government pegged the death count to 64 people. As the
waters receded, Puerto Ricans continued to die, and many blamed the Federal Emergency
Management Agency’s (FEMA) poor disaster response. Public health experts from
Harvard University estimated the death toll to reach as high as 4600 people because of
delayed medical care (Kishore et al., 2018). A month after the hurricane, 80% of the
population did not have electricity, making Puerto Rico the case of the longest blackout
in US history.
Puerto Rico is an example of a deliberative system ‘decoupled’ from the rest of coun-
try. As a US territory, its status is ‘a colony in all but name’ (Wolffe, 2018). It has no
representation in US Congress, no vote in Federal elections, and therefore have no formal
mechanisms to influence deliberations in sites of decision-making. While the more than
3000 deaths in 9/11 attacks triggered a series of congressional hearings and investiga-
tions, a similar number of deaths in Puerto Rico only resulted to two hearings with FEMA.
Investigative journalists found that President Donald Trump ‘reacted far more aggres-
sively to Hurricane Harvey than to Maria’. While Trump visited Houston twice within the
first 8 days of the disaster which killed over a hundred people, he waited for 13 days
before making an appearance in Puerto Rico (Vinik, 2018). Others lament the treatment
of Puerto Ricans as second-class citizens. A poll found that only 54% of Americans know
that Puerto Ricans are US citizens. Those that did not know they are citizens are less
likely to support government aid to Puerto Rico (Morning Consult, 2017).
Aside from issues of poor delivery of aid, Puerto Ricans observed that the media
quickly lost interest in covering the disaster. After broadcasting footage of flooded streets
and collapsed power lines, journalists parachuted out of the disaster zone to cover the next
mass shooting and sex abuse scandals. Activists worried that as attention moves away
from the disaster zone, it is convenient for mainland United States to ignore suffering in
the island. Indeed, despite the negative coverage of Trump’s handling of the disaster,
this did not make a dent on his approval rating, unlike the case of President George W.
Bush after Hurricane Katrina.
Two months after the hurricane, a ‘Unity March for Puerto Rico’ brought thousands
of protesters to march throughout Washington DC. Organisers demanded the cancella-
tion of Puerto Rico’s $70 billion debt, the permanent repeal of the Jones Act which
delayed aid efforts, and the creation of a council that will serve as liaison between Puerto
Rico and the Trump administration. The protest interrupted the ‘decoupled’ deliberations
between Puerto Rico and mainland United States. Unlike the Philippine case where pro-
tests interrupted the overwhelming and unified discourse of compassion, protests in the
United States addressed the disconnection and the lack of attention paid to the suffering
in Puerto Rico by linking the struggles in the territory to the struggles of the rest of the
country.
398 Politics 41(3)

Protesters worked to redistribute attention through their message and strategy. In

terms of message, the protest appealed to unity, ‘to stand in solidarity’ with ‘one voice’
against injustices.4 Organisers were clear to state that the march is not about the future
status of Puerto Rico to placate suspicion that the protest is a prelude to calls for inde-
pendence. Other organisations that joined the protest like Collective Action for Puerto
Rico took a non-confrontational approach, saying that they are present ‘to uplift voices’
of Puerto Ricans and tell stories about people who died in the storm and its aftermath.
These messages invite a particular kind of attention, one that responds to calls for ‘fel-
low Americans’ to show solidarity. They disrupt the portrayal of Puerto Rico as America’s
colonial other by being present in the capital, just like those who participated in the
Women’s March earlier in the year. Placards that say, ‘If you’re not angry, you’re not
paying attention’ were visible, alongside signs that say, ‘Puerto Rican lives matter’.
Appropriating Black Lives Matter’s slogan was particularly timely. Instead of compet-
ing for attention with the NFL protests against police brutality – one that has caught the
attention of the President on Twitter, and therefore in mainstream media – the unity
march latched on the struggle for racial justice. The presence of Hispanic celebrities in
the march reinforced this, with Lin-Manuel Miranda and celebrity chef José Andres
leading the march from the Capitol Building to Lincoln Memorial. Unlike People Surge
that created a distinct register of voice to set them apart from celebrity humanitarians,
the Unity March cashed in on the power of celebrity presence to establish a cultural
bridge across different yet connected issues.
That the protest generated thousands of people in the streets was not an easy feat.
There was little to no news coverage about the forthcoming march, unlike other major
protests in Washington DC. It is precisely this limited attention or apathy granted to
Puerto Rico’s suffering that the protest interrupted. Disruptive protests in sites of power
forged intersectional solidarities that insist on Puerto Rico’s recovery to be taken up in
federal and congressional deliberations. Less than 2 years after this march, Puerto Ricans
were back again on the streets, this time to demand the resignation of Governor Ricardo
Rosselló after the leak of group chat messages that made disparaging jokes about the
disaster-related deaths. These interruptions, among others, ensured that Puerto Rico
remains on the national agenda, though the level to which attention can be sustained
remains to be seen.

Deliberative agency
Deliberative agency refers to actors’ engagement in public deliberation ‘with the aim of
influencing the exercise of political power in accordance with their conception of com-
mon good’ (Ebeling and Wolkenstein, 2018: 636). While redistributing voice and atten-
tion are necessary to set the terms of public deliberation – what is being said and who is
being heard – redistributing deliberative agency is about citizens taking part in the prac-
tice of justifying their demands to others. It is deliberative agency that transforms the
relationship of care and empathy bestowed by privileged spectators to suffering commu-
nities to a political relationship defined by contestation, scrutiny, and judgement
(Chouliaraki, 2013).
Crucial to the deliberative consequences of interruption is the way shared perspec-
tives are generated. Martin Ebeling and Fabio Wolkenstein are correct to argue that one
blind spot of the deliberative systems approach is its tendency to lose sight of ‘the con-
nection between deliberative agency and personal autonomy’ such that ‘deliberative
Curato 399

engagement of citizens is no longer a central concern’ (Ebeling and Wolkenstein, 2018:

636). Using a systemic approach, one could argue that it is good enough for the delibera-
tive system that disaster-affected communities have discursive representatives who
could give voice to their grievances in the public sphere and connect these grievances to
sites of decision-making. After all, mobilising in the aftermath of a tragedy is a cogni-
tively and emotively demanding undertaking and so one could argue that this is a perti-
nent time for representation. The empirical cases presented above demonstrate the
dangers of being comfortable with this approach. It is in the autonomous act of interrup-
tive protests – of disaster-affected communities being present, reclaiming the public
sphere, and resetting the terms of deliberation – where dominant assumptions that hold
the deliberative system together are challenged. People Surge demonstrated this by
mobilising their personal experiences of suffering to challenge the depoliticised dis-
course of compassion. March for Unity interrupted the impression that Puerto Rico is a
distant territory which deserves little attention in national deliberations. Through perfor-
mances of grief and indignation, disaster-affected communities communicated their
demands and forged solidarities using their own voice, on their own terms, which essen-
tial achievements in reclaiming esteem and dignity in the aftermath of a tragedy (see
Curato, 2019).
Beyond the expression of autonomy, however, is deliberative agency’s orientation to
the common good. People Surge provided the opportunity for disaster-affected commu-
nities to transform their personal experiences of suffering to public demands for justice
by linking seemingly discreet struggles to a shared experience of neglect. Meanwhile,
Puerto Rico’s march for unity connected disaster survivors’ demands to intersectional
struggles of racism. These strategies of interruption present vulnerable communities’
other-regarding orientation. It is a kind of orientation that makes an argument (e.g. we
demand better response from the government) that secures response not because of pity
but because there are reasons to do so for the common good (Chouliaraki, 2012).
Providing justifications for their demands allows claims of interruptive political actors
to be scrutinised as equals, and, in the course of this scrutiny, defend alternative visions
as to how post-disaster politics can be better governed.
In Puerto Rico, for example, interruptive protests resulted to organisations that ask
questions about how their post-disaster society can be transformed. JunteGente
(PeopleTogether) is an example of a coalition that hosted meetings across the archi-
pelago to coordinate outcomes of small group deliberations to generate a coherent plat-
form for the island’s recovery. Activist Naomi Klein (2018: 78) describes this as the
‘battle of utopias’. Local communities challenged the ‘invasion’ of crypto-currency
investors claiming to help revive the island by taking advantage of its tax structures.
There is a battle of utopias not because disaster-affected communities left the delibera-
tions about their future to representatives who embody politics as usual or stayed com-
placent with their status as victims deserving of compassion. As political actors with
deliberative agency, JunteGente put forward arguments about ways forward – how to
reject privatisation policies, what to do with debt, how to achieve food sovereignty, and
more. What emerged, therefore, is a counter-public that not only interrupted the domi-
nance of market-oriented discourses but also provided a proposal that engages on-going
deliberations in post-disaster rehabilitation. This example demonstrates the value of
interruptive protest in creating moments of deliberative agency where disaster survi-
vors take the role of political actors who can make a case for their arguments and not
just subjects of sympathy.
400 Politics 41(3)

Lessons for deliberative democracy and protest politics

The cases of the Philippines and Puerto Rico offer important lessons for deliberative
democracy and protest politics. First, these cases illustrate the ‘necessary place within
settled institutions for unsettling and uncanny speech’ (Goodman, 2018: 268). By offer-
ing this argument, I hope to have provided clarity on the precise consequences of inter-
ruptive protests that can expose and subsequently mend a dysfunctional deliberative
system. Deliberative democracy is a political ideal committed to virtues of discursive
contestation, listening across difference, and transformation of personal experiences to
mutually justifiable collective political claims. Interruptive protests have many forms and
functions, but interpreting their deliberative consequences needs precision beyond silver
linings thinking.
Second, these cases challenge advocates of deliberative democracy to broaden the
focus of analysis beyond the formal and structured spaces of contestation that underpin
the deliberative system. ‘Tightly coupled’ and ‘decoupled’ deliberative systems may
seem functional on the surface but exclusionary in practice, rendering the streets – among
others – as possible sites of deliberative democratisation. These cases serve as a reminder
that absence of disagreement does not signal success of deliberation. In some cases, lack
of conflict demands an eventful encounter to surface grievances and demands that can set
public deliberation in motion. A deliberative system is held together by a distribution of
power and it is this redistribution of voice, visibility, and agency that interruptive protests
can challenge and change. The demands of protesters may not always be met, but, as the
empirical cases demonstrate, they have the discursive power to identify the gap and shift
the trajectory of public conversations that affect their lives. These are not insignificant
achievements especially in contexts notorious for inequalities in power and status.

Conclusion
The literature on deliberative democracy has long acknowledged that the ‘tension
between protest and deliberation is overrated’ (Polletta, 2015: 223). In this article, I
sought to extend this conversation by demonstrating the precise ways in which interrup-
tive protests can have positive consequences for deliberative politics. Doing so is not an
attempt at denying the difference between protest and deliberation as forms of political
practice. Indeed, there are critical differences and tensions between the two. Activists
may reject the deliberative virtue of open-mindedness when, on principle, they refuse to
engage the other side. Meanwhile, advocates of deliberation may choose to disregard the
participation of activists when they consider intransigence as an undesirable disposition
in collective decision-making. It is not article’s intention to resolve these tensions.
Rather, this piece offers an empirically informed theoretical clarification of the delibera-
tive consequences of interruptive protests. I argued that interruptive protests result to
productive effects for the deliberative system if they redistribute resources necessary for
public deliberation. These resources are voice and visibility, attention, and deliberative
agency. At stake in redistributing these resources is the democratic quality of delibera-
tion and decision-making, especially in a context where there are glaring inequalities in
discursive power.
While the empirical lessons offered by the interruptive protests are situated in post-
disaster Philippines and Puerto Rico, these insights can be applied to other contexts. As
scholarly attention today is directed at overt forms of anti-democratic action – from
Curato 401

digital disinformation to authoritarian resurgence to curtailment of civil liberties amid

public health emergencies – this article hopes to serve as reminder to examine insidious
dysfunctions in deliberative systems. This article is also an invitation to explore interrup-
tive protests in grey areas, those that take place in situations of less asymmetrical power
relations, where it is unclear whose voices are dominant, which forms of suffering need
to draw more attention, and whose deliberative agencies need to be built. Today’s deeply
divided times are defined by claims of exclusion made on different axes, where various
groups lay claim to multiple forms of oppression. This is a task for both normative theory
and empirical research, to understand how multiple expressions of interruption can
deepen deliberative action.

Author’s note
An early draft of this paper was presented at the Political Studies Association conference in Nottingham in 2019
and the European Consortium for Political Research General Conference in Wroclaw in 2019. The draft was
improved based on feedback from Hans Asenbaum, John Dryzek, Amanda Machin, and Matt Ryan, and the
anonymous reviewers of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article: The author is the recipient of the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career
Research Award entitled Building Back Better: Participatory Governance in a Post-Haiyan World
(DE150101866).

ORCID iD
Nicole Curato https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0269-0186

Notes
1. Stevenson and Dryzek (2014: 32–33) made this claim in their book Democratising Climate Governance:
‘non-deliberative acts or practices may have consequences that are positive for the deliberative qualities of
the system as a whole’. They use the example of ‘uncompromising partisan activism’ that forces delibera-
tions about neglected issues on the agenda.
2. US Attorney Thomas Cullen cited in the Department of Justice Press Release, published in 19 July 2019.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdva/pr/three-members-california-based-white-supremacist-group-sen-
tenced-riots-charges-related
3. Personal correspondence.
4. Statement from Evelyn Mejil, the National Chair for the Unity March for Puerto Rico.

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Author biography
Nicole Curato is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at
the University of Canberra. She is the author of Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedy to
Deliberative Action (2019, Oxford University Press) and Power in Deliberative Democracy: Norms, Forums,
Systems (2018, Palgrave, with Marit Hammond and John B. Min). She is the editor of the Journal of Deliberative
Democracy (formerly Journal of Public Deliberation).