Agonistic Conflict as a Distinct Type of Contentious Politics: Learning from Protests For and Against Asylum Seekers in Israel

This paper focuses on a particular form of protest that emerges in what this paper calls an ‘agonistic environment'. It defi nes the latt er as a form of contentious politics within deliberative democracies in which concurrence rather than estrangement is more likely to defi ne the relationship between citizens and the state. It then asks what is the nature of confl ict in such environments, and will activism in the sett ings be more or less likely to generate change. Finally, it considers whether protest in agonistic environments produces a form of shared knowledge among parties to the confl ict, particularly with respect to the possibility of change and how best to achieve it? In exploring these questions, the paper focuses on the political dynamics in Israel associated with the wave of African asylum seekers who arrived from 2010 to 2012, most of whom originated from Eritrea and Sudan. Using a quantitative approach, the paper analyses this agonistic environment focusing on two dimensions: (a) protest events; and (b) state policy and juridical decisions as well as legal initiatives aimed at challenging state policy and relevant court decisions. By highlighting the scalar mismatch between protests focused on delimited urban spaces and responses of authorities at the scale of the nation - in this case, legal rulings - the paper further advances our understanding of agonistic confl ict and how it produces change.