Protest Brokers in Practice

Chapter 5 transitions from theory to practice, offering in-depth empirical evidence of protest brokers in action within South Africa. Drawing on over 26 months of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and surveys, this chapter shows that protest brokers are not only real but central to the organization of protest at the local level. It introduces the 37 brokers at the heart of this study, detailing who they are, why they act as intermediaries, and how they use their local knowledge, trust, and networks to mobilize communities on behalf of socially distant elites. The chapter also illustrates significant variation among brokers – reflecting the typology developed in Chapter 3 – and shows how these differences influence the brokers’ roles, scope of influence, and strategies. It also explores the dual relationships brokers maintain: with elites and with the specific communities they mobilize. Brokers emerge as highly skilled actors who manage reputations carefully, possess intimate knowledge of their communities, and selectively mobilize based on tightly defined social boundaries. By grounding the theoretical framework in rich qualitative and quantitative data, this chapter establishes protest brokers as indispensable actors in collective action processes.