Protest expresses relatively overt reaction to events or situations: sometimes in favor, though more often opposed. Protesters may organize a protest as a way of publicly and forcefully making their opinions heard in an attempt to influence public opinion or government policy, or may undertake direct action to attempt to directly enact desired changes themselves.^[1]

Self-expression can, in theory, in practice or in appearance, be restricted by governmental policy, economic circumstances, religious orthodoxy, social structures, or media monopoly. When such restrictions occur, opposition may spill over into other areas such as culture, the streets or emigration.

A protest can itself sometimes be the subject of a counter-protest. In such a case, counter-protesters demonstrate their support for the person, policy, action, etc. that is the subject of the original protest.

Unaddressed protest may grow and widen into dissent, activism, riots, insurgency, revolts, and political and/or social revolution, as in:

• Northern Europe in the early 16th century (Protestant Reformation)
• North America in the 1770s (American Revolution)
• France in 1789 (French Revolution)
• The Haymarket riot, 1886, a violent labor protest led by the Anarchist Movement
• Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a key moment in the Civil Rights Movement
• SOS (Save Our Sons) where moderate middle class women who would hold silent protest vigils-founded in 1965
• The Stonewall riots in 1969 protesting the treatment of homosexuals in New York City
• The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
• The many ACT-UP AIDS protests of the late 1980s and early 1990s
• The Seattle WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999 protest activity against the World Trade Organization
• Anti-globalization Protests in Prague in 2000
• Feb. 15, 2003 Iraq War Protest - 6-10 million in 60 countries

Commonly recognized forms of protest include:

Some forms of direct action listed in this article are also public demonstrations or rallies.

• Protest march, a historically and geographically common form of nonviolent action by groups of people.
• Picketing, a form of protest in which people congregate outside a place of work or location where an event is taking place. Often, this is done in an attempt to dissuade others from going in ("crossing the picket line"), but it can also be done to draw public attention to a cause.
• Street protesters, characteristically, work alone, gravitating towards areas of high foot traffic, and employing handmade placards such as sandwich boards or picket signs in order to maximize exposure and interaction with the public.
• Lock-downs are a way to stop movement of an object, like a structure or tree and to thwart movement of actual protestors from the location. Users employ various chains, locks and even the sleeping dragon for impairment of those trying to remove them with a matrix of composited materials.
• Die-ins are a form of protest where participants simulate being dead (with varying degrees of realism). In the simplest form of a die-in, protesters simply lie down on the ground and pretend to be dead, sometimes covering themselves with signs or banners. Much of the effectiveness depends on the posture of the protesters, for when not properly executed, the protest might look more like a "sleep-in". For added realism, simulated wounds are sometimes painted on the bodies, or (usually "bloody") bandages are used.
• Protest song is a song which protests perceived problems in society. Every major movement in Western history has been accompanied by its own collection of protest songs, from slave emancipation to women's suffrage, the labor movement, civil rights, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movement. Over time, the songs have come to protest more abstract, moral issues, such as injustice, racial discrimination, the morality of war in general (as opposed to purely protesting individual wars), globalization, inflation, social inequalities, and incarceration.
• Radical cheerleading. The idea is to ironically reappropriate the aesthetics of cheerleading, for example by changing the chants to promote feminism and left-wing causes. Many radical cheerleaders (some of whom are male, transgender or non-gender identified) are in appearance far from the stereotypical image of a cheerleader.
• Critical Mass bike rides have been perceived as protest activities. A 2006 New Yorker magazine article described Critical Mass' activity in New York City as "monthly political-protest rides", and characterized Critical Mass as a part of a social movement;^[2] and the UK e-zine Urban75, which advertises as well as publishes photographs of the Critical Mass event in London, describes this as "the monthly protest by cyclists reclaiming the streets of London."^[3] However, Critical Mass participants have insisted that these events should be viewed as "celebrations" and spontaneous gatherings, and not as protests or organized demonstrations.^[4][5] This stance allows Critical Mass to argue a legal position that its events can occur without advance notification of local police.^[6][7]

Written evidence of political or economic power, or democratic justification may also be a way of protesting.

• Petitions
• Letters (to show political power by the volume of letters): For example, some letter writing campaigns especially with signed form letter

Any protest could be civil disobedience if a “ruling authority” says so, but the following are usually civil disobedience demonstrations:

• Public nudity or topfree (to protest indecency laws or as a publicity stunt for another protest such as a war protest) or animal mistreatment (e.g. PETA's campaign against fur)
• Sit-in
• Raasta roko (people blocking auto traffic with their bodies)

• Peace camp
• Formation of a tent city
• Camp for Climate Action

• Riot - Protests or attempts to end protests sometimes lead to rioting.
• Self-immolation
• Suicide
• Hunger strike

• Nonviolent resistance
• Occupation

• Tax resistance
• Conscientious objector
• Flag desecration

• Port Militarization Resistance - protests which attempt to prevent military cargo shipments.

• Bully pulpit
• Judicial activism

• Strike action
• Walkout
• Work-to-rule

During a sporting event, under certain circumstances, one side may choose to play a game "under protest", usually when they feel the rules are not being correctly applied. The event continues as normal, and the events causing the protest are reviewed after the fact. If the protest is held to be valid, then the results of the event are changed. Each sport has different rules for protests.

• Lockout

• Rent strike

• Boycott
• Consumer Court

• Informative letters, letter writing campaigns, letters to the editor
• Teach-in
• Zine
• Soapboxing

• Samizdat (distributing censored materials)
• Protest Graffiti

• Culture jamming

• Recusancy

A study of 342 US protests covered by the New York Times newspaper in the period 1962 and 1990 showed that such public activities usually had an impact on the company's publicly-traded stock price. The most intriguing aspect of the study's findings is that what mattered most was not the number of protest participants, but the amount of media coverage the event received. Stock prices fell an average of one-tenth of a percent for every paragraph printed about the event.^[8]

One feature of new social movements is their concern with democracy from below or ’direct democracy’, which differs from ‘representative democracy’. Whereas the ‘old’ labour movement made its demands and aired its grievances via the apparatus of the state, new social movements question this mode of political organization and interest intermediation, aiming at ‘the creation of a new conception of democracy’ or a new model of democracy.^[9]

New social movements are then protest that has gathered support and ingrained itself in a rather significant proportion of society. One such example of these new social movements then is the “Anti-Capitalist Campaigns in Global Civil Society.”^[10] This movement is a result of the modern globalization and because the “nation-states are losing their authority as, towards the top of the system, planetary interdependence and the emergence of transnational political and economic forces shift the locus of real decision making elsewhere, while, towards the bottom, the proliferation of autonomous decision-making centres endows the ‘societal’ level of present-day societies with a power they never knew during the development of the modern state.”^[11]

• The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present, ed. by Immanuel Ness, Malden, MA [etc.]: Wiley & Sons, 2009, ISBN 1405184647

• OSCE-ODIHR Guidelines on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly
• Slideshow of pictures from the Amnesty International denounce torture rally at Portland, Oregon.
• Essay examining ICTs and protest
• High-tech protest at the 2004 Republican National Convention
• Parenting Versus Protesting: Are They Mutually Exclusive?
• Is There A Legal Age for Political Dissent? Teens at Protests!
• Important Protests Mapped on Platial.
• Why public demonstration is a useless form of activism Criticism of protesting from the libertarian think tank, the Prometheus Institute.
• Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict
• Police accused of misusing terror laws against peaceful protests