The Limits of Protest-Based Resistance: Embodied Rhythms and Movement Longevity

This paper examines how spatial conditions shape the sustainability of political movements by analysing the relationship between embodied musical practice, burnout, joy, and communal support. Drawing on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork with two self-organised musical communities in Estonia: a self-managed punk venue (Kaos) and a local chapter of Rhythms of Resistance (RoR), a transnational network of percussion-based protest band, I explore why one community expanded while the other gradually declined, despite overlapping membership, shared political commitments, and transnational connections. Both groups enact resistance through embodied rhythm. In street demonstrations, RoR’s drumming produces intense moments of collective joy, solidarity, and defiance. Rhythm coordinates bodies in motion and transforms public space into a site of audible political presence. Yet such experiences are episodic and tied to volatile political cycles. As protest frequency declined in Estonia, rehearsals increasingly felt disconnected from purpose. Members reported fatigue and emotional depletion, not as a loss of political conviction, but as burnout generated by the high-intensity, event-based nature of protest. When resistance is concentrated in exceptional moments of confrontation, solidarity can be powerful but difficult to sustain. In contrast, the punk venue functioned as a durable spatial infrastructure embedding resistance within everyday social life. Joy here was not confined to dramatic public events but reproduced through repetition: concerts, rehearsals, cleaning days, informal gatherings, and touring exchanges. The venue accumulated embodied memory and offered continuity independent of shifting protest cycles. Crucially, communal care practices: maintaining the space, repairing equipment, preparing for events, distributed labour across participants and across time. This spatial stability fostered mutual support, reduced concentrated stress, and enabled resistance to become a lived social practice rather than an episodic mobilisation. I argue that protest-based resistance, while affectively powerful, is structurally vulnerable to burnout due to its dependence on unstable public space and fluctuating political urgency. Durable autonomous spaces, by contrast, function as infrastructures of resilience that sustain embodied practices through repetition, care, and collective joy. In contexts of escalating repression, shrinking public space, and fluctuating protest cycles, movements that lack such infrastructures risk fragmentation and exhaustion. By distinguishing between protest-based and infrastructural forms of resistance, this paper contributes to Resistance Studies by arguing that resilience depends on spatial environments, capability of distributing labour, sustaining joy, and preventing burnout over time.