In The Art of Moral Protest, James Jasper integrates diverse examples of protest - from nineteenth-century boycotts to recent antinuclear, animal-rights, and environmental movements - into a distinctive new understanding of how social movements operate. Jasper highlights their creativity, not only in forging new morals but in adopting courses of action and inventing organizational forms.

The work examines the role of individuals, both as lone protesters and as key decision-makers, and it emphasizes the open-ended nature of strategic choices as protesters, their opponents, their allies, and the government respond to each other's actions.