Deliberation and protest have usually been understood as two mutually exclusive ways of practicing democracy. It has been argued that protests, due to their adversarial nature, and orientation towards conflict, rather than consensus, would hinder, rather than enhance, the prospects for deliberation. The recent cycle of protests, including the Arab Spring, Indignados and Occupy Wall Street, has however shown that contentious politics do not necessarily stand in opposition to the idea and practice of deliberative democracy. On the contrary, these protests feature important deliberative qualities. In this article, we seek to identify the deliberative dimension of the recent wave of demonstrations. We do so through a close analysis of the theoretical approaches that underpin deliberation and protests (i.e. deliberative democracy and agonism) and by drawing on the 2013 protests in Brazil and Turkey. We show that deliberative democracy is not antithetical to conflicts and agonism generated by protests. In fact, protests constitute an integral part of public deliberation, especially when the latter is understood in systemic terms, in terms of a broad public conversation that occurs in multiple sites of communication. We substantiate this claim by drawing on the 2013 protests in Brazil and Turkey. We argue that the deliberative dimension of these protests is manifested in: (i) the way they were organized; (ii) how they were carried out, especially in terms of the type of collective action they generated; and (iii) their public consequences.