Meredith Weiss | Activist Adaptations: Sustaining Protest as Liberalism Wanes

The Moynihan Institute's Study of Global Politics series presents Meredith Weiss from the University at Albany, SUNY.

Abstract: As democracy falters, protest movements across the globe face not only mounting repression but also pervasive volatility in political opportunities and risk. We explore how activists recalibrate their strategies under such conditions. Drawing on cases from across Asia, we argue that what distinguishes contention under democratic decline is not repression alone, but the uncertainty that shifting and opaque rules of engagement generate, regarding both the pace and scope of change. In such contexts, activists cannot rely on prior experience or institutional memory, whether of pre-transition authoritarianism or of liberal democracy, to guide tactical decisions. Instead, they adopt what we call hedging strategies—sectoral, scalar, and spatial—that help mitigate risk, preserve social capital, and sustain mobilization, even if inadequate to forestall or reverse illiberalization. These strategies reflect a longer-term logic of survival, improvisation, and adaptability. We conclude by outlining a research agenda for studying protest under such transitioning regimes, emphasizing the need for frameworks that account for risk perception, regime fluidity, and the strategic ambiguity that defines life on democracy’s precipice.

Article co-authors: Alexandre Pelletier (Université Laval, Canada)

Meredith Weiss is professor of political science and founding director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium. She has published widely on social mobilization and civil society, the politics of identity and development, electoral politics and parties, institutional reform, and subnational governance in Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Malaysia and Singapore. Her latest books are The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2020) and the co-authored Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2022).