Health and the justification of protest

Ryan Essex, Institute for Lifecourse Development, University of Greenwich and Caroline Miles Visiting Scholar

In any given year throughout the world there are tens of thousands of protests including actions such as marches, strikes, sit-ins and civil disobedience. Such actions often have important health implications, they also utilise health in other ways, in the claims made by protesters and some of the performative elements of protest, just to name a few. Despite this, the issue health as it relates to protest has received little attention from bioethicists. During my time as the Caroline Miles Visiting Scholar at Ethox, I had the opportunity to explore some of the issues related to health and protest, considering how we could incorporate health and wellbeing into existing conversations about the justification of protest.

Perhaps it is worth first clarifying what is meant by protest and why it matters for health. In the literature, discussions about protest and similar forms of political action (i.e. activism or resistance for example) have spent quite some time focused on the concepts themselves. For someone who is just approaching this literature, the short explanation is that things can get relatively messy, as each of the above terms – protest, activism and resistance – are umbrella terms that refer to a range of actions that at least to some degree, overlap. While some of the more traditional forms of protest, like marches, strikes and sit-ins more conformably sit as forms of protest (or resistance if you prefer), there are also more contested forms of actions, those which are hidden and may be carried out with little or no intent; everyday acts that in some way undermine or oppose. The point here is that when we talk about protest, we are speaking about a broad range of actions.

The next question that could be asked is what protest hast to do with health? While this is an issue that has received little attention from bioethicists, we can find answers throughout the broader literature. I have argued elsewhere that health and protest intersect in several ways and to see why one matters for the other we only need to look to history to see the important role that protest has had to played when it comes to health. We can look to the agitation and activism the demanded clean water and better sanitation throughout the Europe in the 1800’s to more recent actions that has demanded greater research and funding for breast cancer research. Beyond these examples, we can find evidence that speaks to the impact that protest has on health and how health can be leveraged in protest, in hunger strikes for example. Protest, health and wellbeing are in facto so closely linked, it has been argued that protest is in fact a natural responses to oppression, a response that can be  empowering and enhance self-respect, providing a sense of agency and purpose.

One further issue however relates the justification of protest. While the few examples I provided above are what we might consider to be ‘progressive’ protests, not all protest is progressive. There have been several examples from recent history of protest that has made questionable claims or that has likely had negative consequences for health and wellbeing. The broader literature here, that has largely been developed by political theorists largely discusses what I would label the democratic or political merits of protest, that is, how protest redistributes things like voice, visibility, agency, largely overlooking health.

Finding a place for health within this discussion is important for a number of reasons, but perhaps mainly because protest can have important implication for health. However, introducing health into this conversations also raises several difficulties. For example, how we measure the impact of protest on health and wellbeing, who gets to decide (and on what criteria) whether a protests claims are just or otherwise and how we might judge other aspects of protest in relation to health, like how issues are framed or how health is utilised in the performative elements of protest for example. My time at Ethox helped immensely with working through some of these issues, thank you to all who made this possible.