Organising protests and risk assessment [tactical activity]

Guide a group of people who are planning a protest into reflecting about and addressing the risks and threats that they may face. This activity can be applied for protests that are offline or online as well as protests that have offline and online components.

Introduction

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This activity is about guiding a group of people who are planning a protest into reflecting about and addressing the risks and threats that they may face. This activity can be applied for protests that are offline or online as well as protests that have offline and online components.

This is not a protest planning activity but rather a risk assessment activity for a protest. It is assumed that before this activity is held, the group has already done some initial planning for what the protest will be about and its main strategies, tactics and activities.

Learning objectives

Through this activity, participants will learn to:

This activity is useful for a group of people (organisation, network, collective) who have agreed to plan a protest together.

The group should have had initial planning about their protest, so the main strategies, tactics and activities have been discussed and agreed upon prior to this activity.

Time required

This activity will take a minimum of four hours.

Resources

Mechanics for a workshop for a group planning a shared protest

This activity has three main phases:

Phase 1: Assessing where risks can come from

This phase has a few levels of participation and interaction in order to assess where the risks for the protest may be coming from. To make the mechanics clearer, the different levels have been marked as “exercises”.

Prepare a sheet of flip chart paper for each of the following:

Exercise 1: Naming the who and what of the protest

Give the participants time and space to fill in each of these sheets of flip chart paper with sticky notes with their responses. Alternatively, they can also just write directly on the flip chart paper.

Facilitation note: To do this in a more organised way, especially if the group is made up of more than seven people, break the participants into four groups. Each group will work on one sheet of flip chart paper first. One can start with “Organisers of the protest”, and another group can start with “Supporters of the protest”, and so on. Give them time to fill in their answers for their sheet of flip chart paper, then ask them to move to the next sheet until all groups have had time with each one. This is usually called the World Cafe methodology.

Exercise 2: Unpacking organisers, supporters and adversaries

After all the sheets of flip chart paper are filled with answers, get the participants to break out into two groups:

The flip chart paper on Activities will be left in the common area for everyone’s reference.

Each group will have their own set of guide questions to start unpacking where the risks are in their focus areas.

For organisers and supporters, the guide questions are:

For adversaries, the guide questions are:

Facilitation note: Most protests these days will have online and offline components. The questions above are applicable to both online and offline scenarios, protests and contexts. But, if you observe that the participants are focusing too much on offline contexts, then perhaps prompt them with questions about the online contexts of their organisers, supporters, and adversaries. If they are tending to focus on the online factors, then prompt them with questions about offline contexts. Prompt them on how the online activities or events can impact on offline activities or events, and vice versa.

The group discussion should take about 45 minutes to one hour.

At the end of the group discussion, each group will share back their discussion results. For the share-back, each group should focus on the following questions:

For the organisers/supporters group:

For the group that worked on adversaries:

It is also a good idea to ask the groups to be as specific in their share-backs as they can be.

Exercise 3: Reflecting on possible failure

This exercise is about surfacing some of the possible ways that the protest can fail.

After this, all the participants will be given some time to reflect on this question: What do you NOT want to happen in this protest?

To further unpack this big question, you might want to raise these questions to prompt the group:

Ask them to reflect on the discussions they’ve had and the share-backs they’ve listened to. Ask them to write down their answers on separate sticky notes and then have them post them up on the wall after a few minutes of reflection.

Cluster the responses to come up with general themes to discuss further.


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Phase 2: Planning mitigation strategies and tactics

Exercise 1: Group work to mitigate possible vulnerabilities and failure

Based on the clusters from Exercise 3 of Phase 1, divide the participants into groups.

Each group will discuss the following questions:

By the end of the discussion, each group should have a list of approaches and strategies as well as security protocols (rules) in relation to the negative outcome. These should be listed down on flip chart paper and/or documented electronically. Organise these according to the different stages of the protest: before, during and after. Each group will present their lists to the rest for discussion.

The role here of the trainer-facilitator is to provide feedback on the approaches and strategies, suggest improvements (if needed), and find common strategies among the groups.

Exercise 2: Discussion about roles

In the big group, have a discussion on the roles necessary to mitigate negative outcomes, adhere to security protocols, and manage secure communications – before, during and after protest activities. It would be important for the group to finalise these roles and who will fill them.

Phase 3: Communicating securely

Here, the trainer-facilitator can present options for secure communications for the group as they carry out the protest.

Then, the group can spend time installing and making sure that they are able to communicate with each other through the chosen channel.

To help you plan this, read Alternative Tools for Networking and Communications and the Mobile Safety module.

Security note: One of the ways that you can exercise these tools is to make sure that the people who are documenting are able to share copies of their notes and documentation via secure communication channels.

Adjustments for a general workshop

In general, risk assessment activities are more effective when they are done with groups that have common goals, contexts and risk scenarios (i.e. organisational risk assessment interventions, or risk assessment for a network of organisations). Therefore, this activity was designed for a group of participants who are already planning to carry out a protest together and have done some initial planning about their shared protest. But the activity can be adjusted for a more general digital security scenario of individuals from different contexts who are thinking about organising their own protests with their groups.

In order to adjust this activity for more general use, having a sample protest will be a good way to get the participants to practice this activity, and learn lessons that they can bring back to their groups/networks/collectives so that they can assess the risk of their actual protests.

Some guidelines about creating a sample protest:

The key in creating a sample protest is to try to simulate as much as you can a real protest scenario. Again, risk assessment activities are most effective with specifics.

You will also need to find ways and adjust your timing so that the participants can learn and absorb the sample protest. You can share the sample protest details before the training, but don’t assume that everyone has had time to read before the workshop. You can present the sample protest at the start of the workshop and give the participants hand-outs so that each group will have the information available to them as they go through the phases and exercises of this activity.




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Revision #5
Created 18 April 2023 04:21:10 by Kira
Updated 28 July 2023 14:51:35 by Kira