Why Do People Disobey the Law? Emotions and Reasons in the Protest Against the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline

The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the literature on disobedience and protest by exploring motivations for participating in collective actions of disobedience through an analysis of emotions in protest. Applying an emotion-based approach to the study of disobedience, the chapter explores the messiness of individual processes of political activation, and in so doing, it questions the apparent homogeneity of the political collectivities emerging from acts of disobedience. The chapter considers the protest developed in the Apulia region (Italy) against the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline as a case study and asks how emotions intervene between the perception of unjustness and the decision to disobey. After presenting the current debate on the role of emotions in protest, the authors introduce the case study of the No TAP protest movement and the main features of an ethnography conducted on the movement between 2018 and 2019. The analysis then explores the role that emotions have in explaining why people decide to disobey the law despite risks, sanctions and defeats.