Legitimization of volunteers’ protest participation

Abstract

The article is a continuation of the work published in the second issue of the Monitoring of Public Opinion (No 2, 2015) which reconstructs non-protest apolitical ethos of the volunteer participation denying the compliance between the volunteer’s role and the protest activity. The article considers an alternative point of view allowing the co-existence of the volunteering and the protect participation. The purpose of the study is to reconstruct the categorical framework of the volunteering protest ethos using the interviews with volunteers which admit protest participation as part of volunteering. The reconstruction represents five derived dimensions formed by the dichotomically opposed meanings of the protest volunteering. There are two ways to legitimize the protest participation of the volunteers in the protest ethos: either to speak in favor of the «essence of the volunteering», or to speak in favor of the «object of preoccupation»: each argument has its limits and scope of tasks posed for the protest action as well as different meanings of the volunteerism and protest actions.