Student Protest Participation and Citizenship Development: An Overview

Abstract

There is a growing tendency among students to take part in protest activism in both developing and developed countries. The student protest movement has remained the subject of attention for scholars of the sociology of higher education, political science, and other subfields, including social movement and resistance studies. The existing scholarship shows a keen interest in studying contentious student protest, highlighting the detrimental consequences of student activism, including violent forms of protest. Yet, little is known about the developmental outcomes of student protest participation. This paper addresses this underexplored relationship by examining the linkage between protest participation and citizenship development. It aims to understand how protest activism may contribute to student learning about and the practice of citizenship, helping them to explore the student political world. The article focuses on student citizenship and investigates how student involvement in protest activism can constitute a practice that involves the development, enactment, and negotiation of citizenship. The article examines protest participation as a potential practical ground for developing citizenship qualities.  Building on this argument, this article employs a descriptive literature review method to examine the linkage between protest participation and citizenship development. The article, therefore, does not consider protest activism and student citizenship as two different fields of study but as interconnected areas in which student citizenship is cultivated and lived. The findings suggest that instead of viewing citizenship only as legal status, student citizenship is also expressed through claim-making politics in non-institutional channels. Based on the review, we argue that students' protest participation is associated with civic learning and citizenship practices, which in turn may contribute to their development as active citizens.