Protests for transformational change: Analysis of Ghana's #OccupyFlagstaffHouse (2014) and #FixTheCountry (2021) protests

In recent times, the African continent has experienced many protest actions, but these protests have attracted few academic studies, with their impacts less explored. The few attempts at evaluating these protests have labelled them failures due to the lack of tangible evidence of transformational change in the countries where they occurred. Some scholars have, however, criticized this approach to analyzing protest impact as narrow. This study assesses the impacts of #OccupyFlagstaffHouse (2014) and #Fixthecountry (2021) protests that occurred in Ghana, focusing on the perspectives of the protest organizers. The study finds that elements of the protests, such as their non-partisanship nature, non-hierarchical leadership structures and uses of social media, significantly impacted the protests in more distinctive ways than previously observed in studies of other contemporary social movements. The protest organizers stated both tangible and less tangible outcomes of the protests. The tangible outcomes include the emergence and impactful actions of the civil society organization Occupy Ghana from #OccupyFlagstaffHouse (2014), and the legal re-enforcement of citizens' right to protest as a result of the #Fixthecountry (2021) protest. The less tangible outcomes include feelings of empowerment among people to demand accountability in other protests and enhanced political consciousness of the population. The study indicates that tangible outcomes may not directly come from the protest itself, and intangible outcomes of protests are equally important. Thus, although the protests did not cause direct changes to most of the concerns that triggered them, their impact on Ghana's political development cannot be overlooked. As such, this thesis agrees with Sanches's (2020) call for a more open and flexible conceptualization of "transformational change" to ascertain a protest's success or failure.