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Unarmed Militancy: Tactical Victories, Subjectivity, and Legitimacy in Bolivian Street Protest

Moments of intense physical confrontation between protesters and security forces have become iconic parts of political protest. These asymmetrical tactical encounters have been pivotal to successful Latin American revolts against neoliberalism and regime-displacing protest movements. Based on ethnographic engagement and oral history interviews with Bolivian activists in Cochabamba and La Paz, this article characterizes an overlooked tactical stance: unarmed militancy , which I define as the use of forceful, combative tactics that are nonetheless qualitatively less damaging than those of their (usually state) adversaries. Unarmed militants complicate the binary of violence and nonviolence often used to strategize and analyze protest. Unarmed militants claim some of the moral purity of nonviolence and of those victimized by state repression. Yet they also physically fight back to hold physical space and interrupt daily life. Neither provocateurs nor extremists, unarmed militants collaborate in achieving the tactical and strategic goals of mass mobilizations. This article examines the material processes of on-the-street collaboration, the subjectivity of demonstrators, the narratives surrounding protest, and the moral understandings of just and unjust uses of force as elements that can make unarmed militancy effective. [ political legitimacy, tactics, protest, repression, revolution ] This article examines the tactical approach of protests like this one, which combine peaceful expressive activity and forceful confrontation with security forces. In Bolivia and elsewhere, there is a zone of overlap within this apparent binary, which I will term unarmed militancy . I define unarmed militancy as the use of forceful, combative tactics—such as barricades, property destruction, hands-on pushes, and thrown projectiles—in political mobilization to serve symbolic, tactical, and strategic goals. This article offers a picture of unarmed militancy based on observation of space-claiming protests, oral history interviews with protest participants, and tactically aware historical research on moments of conflict. I conducted one year of fieldwork in urban Bolivia in 2010–2011, along with several shorter visits between 2008 and 2015, to describe and explain how mass protest affected the existing balance of power, reshaping relations of class, race, and authority (Bjork-James 2013, 2020). This work built on my prior engagement with Bolivian movements through the movement against corporate globalization. In North America, my activism has included participating and training others in nonviolent direct-action protest and participating in mass protests—such as at the 2003 FTAA summit in Miami—where protesters and police engaged in prolonged street confrontations. In Bolivia, fierce, confrontational, property-destroying and property-repurposing forms of mass action coexist within a larger strategy of mass mobilization against a more violent state adversary. Narrative understandings of militancy and repression, the subjectivity of demonstrators, material processes of on-the-street collaboration, and moral understandings of just and unjust uses of force are all part of the social field that makes unarmed militancy effective. The first two sections but power‖ disciplined that predominated Eastern European antineoliberal revolts century