ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals activist citizenship as protest and as critique and addresses the relationship of each to violence and exclusion. Activist protests occur in spaces not designed for protest, and challenge legal rules and law enforcement. Critique itself can be considered as activist when it challenges and endangers the system, its ideological structure and concrete functioning, or is perceived as doing so by the system. The chapter also reveals the complex features of activist citizenship as emancipation and, finally, discusses whether insurrection is its inevitable consequence. Activist citizenship as emancipation involves concrete attempts by citizens to emancipate themselves from the existing political and socio-economic system they criticise and protest against. Activism can evolve into emancipatory projects and then into insurrections, but there is also, as in co-optation and coexistence cases, a complex dynamic between space, top-down military and party structures and their relationship to citizens' assemblies, and deadly conflict with the regime.
