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Violent Protest,
Contentious Politics,
and the Neoliberal State
Preface
xviii
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associations and networks. Behind the scenes is the role that new technologies
play (websites, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, instant messaging), and how
these technologies blend with conventional media. How do they allow protesters
to transcend traditional means of social control?
Fourth, what can be said about how narrative and discursive dimensions shape
violent protest? How do participants frame their demands and construct their
narratives of blame, mobilization and personal participation? How do established
political forces interpret violent protest and use their natural advantages regarding
access to the mass media? Have the ontological narratives adopted been premised
on some genuine frame transformation or have they, despite appearances, relied
on traditional understandings?
Finally, through which causal mechanisms did our national cases diffuse to
help shape protest in other countries? Did significant shifts in scale occur such that
mainstream political discourse was affected? Has violent protest had any tangible
results, and how are we to assess it? Does violent action tell us something about
the challenges and opportunities inherent in transnational collective action?
These questions, of course, constitute a tall agenda, and it is an exaggeration
to claim that all have been answered in the chapters that follow. But, then again,
these topics are extremely important. Even more than the theoretical and empirical
contributions that this volume makes, we present these chaptersabove allto
whet appetites for further debate.
Hank Johnston, San Diego
Seraphim Seferiades, Athens
SECTION I
Theoretical Perspectives
Chapter 1
Distinctive among all other forms of contentious politics, violent protest evokes
contradictory responses. Apparently easy to initiate (as it bears comparatively
little logistic and organizational cost), violence is simultaneously the most visible
and sensational variety of collective action as well as the most difficult to sustain.
This is hardly a paradox. The literature detects a macrohistorical trend towards
declining violent forms as states' coercive capacity has increased and 'negotiated'
alternatives have developed. Brawls, vindictive attacks and machine breaking
have been consistently giving way to petitions, peaceful demonstrations and
negotiations. Collective violence, however, persists and as of lately proliferates:
the French banlieue outburst of 2005, the Greek eruption of December 2008, the
huge, class-based 'red-shirt' movement in Thailand in May 2010 being recent
large-scale actions. But more specific to our argument, and as we write these words,
more circumscribed but unexpected - by many observers - student militancy in
Italy, France, the UK, Ireland and Spain confirms the significance of our topic.
What is its political significance; how do we conceptualize the varieties of this
underspecified phenomenon; and how are we to appraise its outcomes as protest
repertoires challenging existing forms of democracy? Why and how do people
used to living with their categorical boundaries shift rapidly into insuiTectionary
action and then (sometimes just as rapidly) shift back into relatively peaceful
relations? Is violent protest perhaps the way contentious politics is changing in
times of crisis?
Starting off from the observation that our overall thinking and analytical
tools - though useful - are ultimately insufficient to provide satisfactory answers,
this volume approaches violent collective action from a comparative-theoretical
perspective. The topic is, of course, normatively and politically charged. Most
accounts continue to perceive violent action through ideological lenses, approvingly
idealizing it or, more often, castigating it as notorious psychopathological
dysfunction. Yet the most perspicacious research to date indicates that it is best
understood as a function of the interaction between contenders and their institutional
environment, involving both rational negotiation and strategic creativity. Aspiring
to understand the recent violent upsurge in its historical specificity and crossnational distinctiveness, we also seek to further conceptual and theoretical debate
- assessing, verifying or refuting extant approaches.
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the subject to move into a different space, and tlierefore to get beyond the earlier
situation of emptiness, loss and lack'.
But in order to fully appreciate the particulars of this variety of violence,
one has to counteoise it to alternative, less than fully political forms, often
combining with it. Though this is still a rough sketch of concepts remaining to
be fully stabilized, we venture to suggest that politically alienated individuals or
groups may also turn cynical, callous or passive. Cynicism and callousness refer
to basically reactive violence without any recognizable quest for meaning - the
former seeking temporary (if meagre) material or symbolic gains within a grim
world (e.g., looting), the latter haphazardly setting out to destroy it without caring
much about the 'next day' (e.g., symbolically and instrumentally irrelevant arson).
Passivity, finally, may be construed as 'internalized violence' - violence directed
towards oneself: a truly pathological state of affairs where the collectivities or
individual subjects in question do little more than make painful amends to systemic
- neoliberal - violence. Violence directed against unprotected immigrants and
other typically anomic behaviours are obvious cases in point.
Claiming that politically consequential violence may represent a quest for
meaning owing to estrangement from official politics, however, leads our thinking to
two key themes in the study of collective action: emotions and the relational nature
of all protest. Although in later sections of this chapter we will have the chance
to further amplify our argument, we think it is important to stress three important
aspects that also frame our discussion as a whole.
The first concerns the ubiquitous nature of emotions in all militant protest. In so
arguing we concur with Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta (2001) who, over a decade
ago, complained about the failure of political process approaches to seriously deal
with (let alone theorize) emotions, even in cases where their importance was more
than palpable. As they pointedly put it, 'Mobilising structures, frames, collective
identity, political opportunities - much of the causal force attributed to these
concepts comes from the emotions involved in them' (p. 6). Political alienation,
indignation, outrage - the very stuff of violent protest - are, first and foremost,
emotional states. This, however, does not mean that they are also 'irrational' states.
This leads us to our second point.
Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, these social science giants, have also
burdened us with the stark dichotomy of reason versus emotions. Over the years,
the polarity has taken on a variety of forms ('affectually determined behaviour vs.
rational action', in the case of Weber (1978 [1922]); 'instrumental vs. expressive
action', in the case of Parsons (1968 [1937]); 'cognitive vs. emotional conduct'
in much else that followed), but the idea is fairly straightforward: emotions
are not part of rational action and vice versa. Along with Goodwin, Jasper and
Polletta, we disagree: not because we want to conflate, let alone liquidate, the
two dimensions, but because we think that the polarity qua polarity is misguided.
As the preceding analysis indicates, we treat the alleged opposition between
rationality and emotions as a possibility, a claim in need of logical substantiation
and empirical documentation, not as an assumption. In other words, although it
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is clear that we cannot rule out the possibility of a genuine discrepancy between
the two (not all that is emotionally laden is also 'rational' - e.g., what we might
label callous violent action), we are nonetheless inclined to argue that whatever
is politically significant in the violent political universe as well as more generally
in protest politics is both emotional and rational. Differently put, we claim that
rational action involves underlying commitments that are best rendered through
an emotional lens and vice versa - that emotionally charged acts are often
premised on cognitive-rational assessments of the sociopolitical environment.
Rational day-to-day social-movement activity, for example, is not possible unless
the emotional world of the membership is tapped and the obverse. As already
argued, ostensibly emotional acts such as meaning-questing
violence may be the
product of hopelessly blocked institutional expressive channels and disruptively
deficient 'protest'. In such circumstances, acting out 'against the odds', far from
being necessarily irrational, may well be eminently strategic. In this connection,
however, it is important to remind ourselves that violent protest (as well as protest
in general) is never undertaken in a relational vacuum. This is our third key point.
Rebutting the facile essentialism that is so prevalent in much of contemporary
social science, Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly (2001) have
argued for a relational approach in the study of social and political phenomena.
Sociopolitical entities (and the phenomena their action brings about) are not
eternally fixed, but are, rather, in a process of continuous 'becoming' - a function
of the relations in which they are embedded. McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly suggest
that, instead of focusing on 'individual minds as the basic, or even unique, sites
of social reality and action', we are well advised to seriously ponder the fact that
'social transactions have an efficacious reality that is irreducible to individual
mental events'. This means that, for purposes of explanation, we are well advised
to look beyond individual 'decisions and their rationales' (typical of rational choice
and phenomenological approaches) and focus 'on webs of interaction among
social sites' (p. 23). In applying this perspective to the study of collective violence,
Charles Tilly (2003) suggested that there exist three ways of thinking about (and
dealing with) collective violence. Pending a fuller account of his argument at the
end of this chapter, he claimed that we can approach it as exclusively rational
(the product of ideological thinking and/or cost-benefiit analysis - the practice of
'idea people'); as exclusively 'irrational' (a result of passions and impulses - the
practice of 'behaviour people'); or as relations ('relation people').
Our analysis so far indicates that we subscribe to the relational persuasion.
We think that violence does not so much reflect preset beliefs or the play of
autonomous motives, pro tempore urges or ossified opportunity structures, but
rather the interaction between contenders and authorities. In Tilly's (2003: 6)
words,
collective violence [...] amounts to a kind of conversation [...] Relation people
often make concessions to the influence of individual propensities but generally
insist that collective processes have irreducibly distinct properties. In this
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Waddington and King's chapter in this volume traces the effects of non-violent
police strategies in several volatile situations in the UK and France. Also, the
process of obtaining permits for marches and demonstrations, which became more
formalized about the same time, tended to moderate the potential for violence on
both sides of the police-protester divide. Protesters provided plans, routes, times,
and even made concessions about the control of 'unruly behaviour' in exchange
for police guarantees regarding routing, traffic management and public safety.
This approach of protest policing, labelled the negotiated management model,
seemed to be a trend not only in the US but also in some Western European states
(della Porta and Reiter 1998). Researchers have noted that one of the principles
of this model was that violent groups had to be separated somehow from the rest
of the demonstration - and 'self-policed' if possible - to ensure the safety of the
peaceful ones and easy containment of the radicals (see Waddington and King's
Chapter 9). As argued, however, to the extent that the negotiated model contributed
to the accumulation of a disruptive deficit (by forcing upon claimants an exclusively
conventional repertoire), it may have well contributed, however inadvertently, to the
political void eventually conducive to violent outbreaks - not only by 'sworn radicals'
(increasingly cast aside and demonized), but also more generally.
Moreover, it is questionable whether the model really works. As 'civilized'
as its principles sound, events on the ground are much more fluid and often crash
against the bounds of negotiated plans. As much as movement adherents can be
caught up in the excitement and passion of a protest (when strategic calculations
may well be placed in abeyance), so too can the police lose sight of the negotiated
management model in the heat of the moment. Earl and Soule (2006) have studied
violent protests from a police perspective, and identify two factors that seem to
strongly predict police violence. First, at the street level, police officers are highly
concerned with loss of control over the situation. Large numbers of protesters
increase the odds of this, as does the presence of counter-demonstrators, which,
in turn increases the pressure on the police to control the circumstances. Second,
when there are impending threats to personal safety of police officers, violence
is more likely in a protest event. Thus, when radical groups are present or when
confrontational tactics are likely, it is common that the police are there in force.
Should the throwing of stones, bricks, or Molotov cocktails occur. Earl and Soule
observe that police violence is likely.
In the protest studies field, most analyses of police repression assume that the
forces of social control, whether they are the police, military, or semi-official or
private militias (in non-democratic regimes), act at the behest of political elites to
protect their power. This is indeed so. And, as in the past, police violence is often
proactive, seeking to raise the cost of participation in disruptive protest before any
occurs (Seferiades 2005). Earl and Soule's study (2006) is important, however,
because it acknowledges that there are also situational, on-the-ground factors in
police violence that originate among the police themselves. Moreover, members
of police forces and the military are subject to the same emotional responses that
we discussed earlier regarding protesters. Fear and anger may act reflexively to
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spur police to violence when they perceive threats. Long-term emotions such as
hatred and resentment also are factors because the esprit de corps of rank-andfile soldiers and policemen is often premised on an intense animosity against
specific strata of the population such as the youth and students. For example, the
brutal police repression of a peaceful student rally in Mexico City, October 1968,
which led to the death of over 40 students and injuries to hundreds, partly was a
reflection of class animosity against middle-class students. The brutality of the
Tlatelolco massacre, as it was called, was such that many observers mark it as
the beginning of the end of Mexican authoritarianism; yet its poignant and farreaching effects may have resulted largely from the emotional responses of the
young grenadieros who took part in the repression - observers reported a shooting
frenzy that night (Poniatowska 1971) - rather than from the miscalculations of the
political elite. The same class resentment no doubt fuelled some of the brutality
directed against Iran's pro-democracy (and middle-class) students by the Basij
Militia and Revolutionary Guards, who typically come from the lower classes (see
Goldstone's Chapter 8).
Finally, there is a social-psychological element that is closely linked to police
repression and too frequently in evidence when negotiated-management protesting
becomes more militant and impassioned. We have in mind police behaviour that
might loosely fall under the category of Philip Zimbardo's 'Lucifer Effect' (2007)
and that - cast in terms of police action - takes the form of a sadistic embrace of
inflicting injury once confrontation is initiated. Certainly, this is not a universal
reaction among police and military, but it is fair to say that it can be a strong
tendency under the right circumstances. Although it may occur on both sides of the
conflict -police and protesters - it has special significance among those who are
heavily a m e d and have licence to inflict injury. Finally, these primitive reactions
are compounded by military and police socialization-emphasizing themes that can
easily lead to violent reactions: honour, machismo, pride, aggressiveness, physical
prowess and sacrifice for 'comrades in arms'. The extent to which these values
take hold is, of course, variable among the police and military. Conscripts into the
army may be kids who just want to go home or may ferociously embrace these
values as part of their identity. Special forces and paramilitary units that receive
more training and develop an esprit de corps may be especially aggressive. Polish
ZOMO troops, a crack paramilitary unit, were known for their brutality during
marital law 1981-83, but the Polish People's Army was often known for their
hesitancy and even defections.
Our point is that, despite the superiority of police resources, police violence, once
initiated, often can turn into violent rage - strong words, but not inaccurate when
pitched battles erupt. We have all seen it at times - for example, in news footage and/
or suiTeptitious cell phone pictures of police repression in Myanmar, Iran, Thailand,
China (and Tibet); namely, savage beatings of protesters, well beyond what is
necessary for crowd control or dispersing the protest. Similar images occur too in
the developed democracies once protester-police violence breaks out, for example.
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Strategic Violence
Over 30 years ago, Piven and Cloward (1977) suggested the contours of a strategic
perspective on disruptive collective action that is further specified regarding
violent tactics in Frances Fox Piven's Chapter 2 in this volume. The theme of
strategic violence is also echoed in Kotranaki and Seferiades's Chapter 12 and
Simiti's Chapter 10. Piven and Cloward's original argument was based on the
analysis of four eases of poor peoples' mobilization in the US, and is well known
for its challenge to the - at that time - emerging emphasis on organizations and
resources to explain successful outcomes. Although their study was not specifically
focused on movement violence, Piven and Cloward found that disruptive tactics
could favourably influence the attainment of a social movement's change goals precisely what is nowadays missing in the form of the disruptive deficit we have
noticed. Their analysis identifies the importance of vanguard groups that push hard
and long for change-oriented goals, reminiscent of anarchist radicalizing influence
in numerous global justice protests.
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of moderates' (Haines 1988: 171). From the perspective of policy makers, these
are, after all, people that you can talk to, not 'wild-eyed radicals'. Just this kind
of consideration occurred in the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle, in which
anarchists' unsanctioned end-run around more numerous and tactically moderate
groups that formed the campaign coalition helped attract media attention and
public awareness of the campaign's overall themes (Smith 2002). Although
violence at this and other global justice protests did not by itself budge the WTO
ministers or IMF officials, by punctuating protesters' commitment and broadening
diffusion of globalization's impacts it may have forced policy makers to be more
sensitive and responsive to protesters' demands, especially loan forgiveness in
the poorest countries. Thus, the strategic use of violence by social movements
seems to revolve around two decision matrices: (1) its Sorelian 'actor constitution'
(as argued) and attention-getting benefits regarding policy makers, uncommitted
publics and the media, versus its alienating effects; and (2) internal relations and
negotiations within a movement regarding the first decision matrix, including the
ability of a movement to converse with its more radical wing - or its willingness
to do so, considering the positive benefits of militant tactics.
A Relational Perspective
In his influential treatment of collective violence we have already cited, Charles
Tilly (2003) rejects the possibility of an overarching causal model. He states overstates, really - that in explaining collective violence there are three kinds of
theorists: idea people, who lay stress on strategy, ideology and costs; behaviour
people, who stress emotions, passion and primordial impulses (to this Johnston's
Chapter 4 adds cognitive orientations characteristic of life-cycle development);
and relation people, with whom he claims membership. In his view, collective
violence in its various manifestations can be understood by examining the relations
among the social actors, as we have been doing in this chapter (in addition to some
ideational and behavioural detours), to identify a 'fairly small number of causal
mechanisms and processes that recur throughout the whole range of collective
violence - with different initial conditions, combinations, and sequences' (Tilly
2003: xi).
This represents a shift to a mid-level analytical focus of identifying the
'conditions, combinations, and sequences producing systematic variation from
time to time and setting to setting' (ibid.). This approach to collective violence
grows out of the dynamics of contention programme (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly
2001), which similarly seeks general and 'robust' causal processes that apply
beyond protest mobilization to other forms of contentious politics. In both works,
a broad range of rich and varied historical and contemporary examples is the basis
of inductively arriving at a surprisingly long list of generalizable 'mechanisms and
processes'.
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leaders had been in contact about the grievances endemic in the immigrant suburbs.
In these instances, the 'negotiation' presumes that non-violent demonstrations
cany the kernel of potential settlement, and during demonstrations there is give
and take between authorities and protesters. This can take the form of meetings
among movement leaders and political elites, which is another site for breakdown
of negotiations. When this occurs, paradoxically, violence erupts in a way that
involves even greater coordination (interaction) among the segmented actors. In this
connection, there may be a felicitous parallel with Tilly's theoretical schema and our
view that, to an important extent, contemporary collective violence is the product
of the combined accumulation of the reform and disruptive deficits - the former
reflecting impasses of the capitalist state, the latter the conspicuous political cooption of erstwhile militant contentious SMOs and political parties.
Conclusions
Tilly's relational approach to collective violence, a quest to identify processes and
mechanisms that are generalizable across different episodes of collective violence,
lays great stress on social perception and emergent processes of social definition.
As we close this chapter, this is not the place to undertake a broad critique of the
process-based approach characteristic of the dynamics of contention perspective,
but we do believe that future research in the relational perspective might be
more productive at higher levels of generalization such as the robust processes
of brokerage and polarization. Brokerage refers to the linking of two (or more)
social actors, often by a third who mediates the relations and perhaps does so with
others as well (Tilly 2005: 221). Brokerage is an important process - inherently
interactional - that often broadens conflict beyond isolated and/or local instances
by coordinating it. This can amplify the collective violence beyond an initial
outburst, a shift from scattered attacks to coordinated destruction.
Polarization is a 'widening of political and social space between claimants in
a contentious episode' (Tilly 2005: 222). This typically involves the movement of
uncommitted bystanders and/or moderates to one of the two extremes. Polarization
is a complex process of social definition of interests, of identity, and emerging
definitions of appropriate courses of action, but above all it is a process of social
construction. As such, its workings and effects can be seen after the fact, say,
examining the social history of the Rwandan genocide, or Bosnia, or the rise of
guerrilla movements in Mexico after the 1968 student massacre. Or, its workings
can be traced and refined as they unfold through closer attention to action, namely,
through engaged participant-observation research.
There are other processes that seem relevant to collective violence: 'actor
constitution' for one (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001), an iterative and
interactional category of identity construction forged in the fire of contention for
both protesters and opponents. Such general processes, we suggest, are important
sites for future research to focus and refine through observation how the processes
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work in the heat of conflict. Their importance is compounded because they also
are sites where emotions may enter into the causal equation. Tilly's descriptions
are surprisingly devoid of emotional inputs, but surely, in the polarization process,
anger, rage, shame and hatred may all play roles. It is fair to say that emotion
research in the social movements field is embedded in a process perspective insofar
as the preponderance of it usually describes how emotions figure into mobilization
for action and identity construction (for example, Bernstein 1997; Gould 2009).
A theme that we have developed in this chapter is that violent episodes are a
dramatic dance between multiple social actors: radicals and moderates within a
movement and the police, municipal authorities, and ruling elites. The usefulness
of the relational approach is that it captures this complex dance, and recognizes
that similar processes can guide the actions of both challengers and institutional
actors. The various processes and mechanisms that shape conflict can apply to
actors on all sides. So, too, do the emotions, which is why it is so crucial that
social scientists ponder what kind of methods and theories can adequately account
for both the relational and emotional elements of collective violence. As authors,
we have separately studied both the escalation of collective violence in the heat
of protests (in Greece) and the impassioned emotions of nationalist mobilization
(in Eastern Europe). Especially in police-protester confrontations, and especially
when we-they definitions activate the deep passions of identity, escalation of
protest into collective violence cannot be understood without emotions as a causal
factor. While we would resist returning to the bad old days of the frustrationaggression hypothesis, the J-curve, and relative deprivation theories, we hold that
a full understanding of collective violence must consider how to incorporate into
the equation not only frustration and aggression, but also shame, resentment, rage,
pride and passion, among others.