On the Ends and Endings of Protest

The ending of a protest is a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of the dramaturgy of politics. Retrospectively, a movement’s ending is what allows for an evaluation of what it has achieved. In this way, how a movement ends correlates, sometimes obliquely, with its ends. In this paper, we ask how a performance analysis of endings might help us re-evaluate protest and its afterlife. We examine three protest movements that ended in different ways: the sharp decline of the summit-hopping global justice protests of 1999 to 2001, the repression of the Istanbul protests against sexual violence of 2019 and the late afterlives of the Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s. Each offers a different way of reading the relationship between the ends of a movement and its ending. From the heighted affective terrain of what Alain Badiou describes as “the intense time of the riot” to the subtler time of subterranean movements, our analysis of the ends of these movements aims to discover ways to build social movements that might sustain themselves overtime.