Are Public Protests Worth It?

Public protests are one of the most disruptive forms of activism. That disruption is often the point. When thousands of people in Valencia took to the streets in November 2024 after record-breaking floods killed hundreds, they were not simply expressing grief. They were demanding accountability in a way that nothing else had managed to produce. The disruption was the message.

But the Valencia protests also blocked highways and government offices, disrupted daily commutes for around 2.5 million people, and cost an estimated 100 million euros in economic losses. Those are real costs borne by people who had nothing to do with the failures being protested. Whether those costs are justified is not a straightforward question.

Protests have done things that other forms of advocacy could not. They push issues that governments would rather ignore into public view. They generate media coverage for grievances that would otherwise stay local. And when every other option has been tried or simply does not exist, they are sometimes the only thing that actually works.

But that same disruptive quality is also what turns people against them. When things turn violent, the coverage stops being about the cause. And the economic costs tend to fall on people who had nothing to do with the original problem. At some point, the public starts resenting the protest more than the cause.

Honestly, whether a protest is worth it comes down to a few things. How urgent is the demand? Whether other channels even exist. And whether the people behind it have thought carefully about the costs they are passing on to everyone else.