ABSTRACT
This chapter will foreground two theoretical concepts of disagreement and dissensus as the starting point to understand public protests and political dissent. The chapter will then analyse the presence and absence of the ‘public’ in public protests. After doing a brief historical survey, the chapter will locate two different kinds of public protests (leadership centric movements and leaderless movements) while pointing to the possibility of a new public in the culture of protests. At the same time, the chapter will highlight the nature of contemporary global protests. The chapter will also narrate one form of public protests that are organised against individual political dissent and will try to analyse why such public protests are targeted against such political dissent. Finally, this chapter will deal with the presence of autonomy of public protests in our times while locating the absence of hegemony of such public protests that helps to make an analytical distinction between movement and mobilisation.
