‘Institutions of governance are all corrupted’: anti-political collective identity of anti-lockdown protesters in digital and physical spaces

During the COVID-19 pandemic, loosely affiliated protesters came together around the slogan ‘freedom’ in the online and physical places of anti-lockdown protests. These protesters held shared grievances against official health advice and social distancing measures. Although the slogan freedom emotionally validated protesters, they articulated a diverse set of interrelated motivations, identifications, and beliefs with this slogan. This paper studies the ways the collective identity of the anti-lockdown protests in the UK was formed, relying on 33 go-along interviews and ethnographic observations in London anti-lockdown protests. The findings, first, show that protesters came together around an anti-political identity, which reflected a larger political alienation from the political system. Their strong emotions of anger and ressentiment towards official health advice and social distancing measures and their distrust towards elites, political institutions, and mainstream media created a shared sense of ‘we-ness’. Second, the paper uncovers how the feeling of solidarity amongst protesters in London did not only originate from online platforms despite the increase in Internet use during the pandemic, but it was also materialized in local neighbourhoods, which fed larger anti-lockdown protests in physical spaces and online publics.