In 2007 a wall was built in east Germany. Made of steel and cement blocks, topped with razor barbed wire, and reinforced with video monitors and movement sensors, this wall was not put up to protect a prison or a military base, but rather to guard a three-day meeting of the finance ministers of the Group of Eight (G8). The wall manifested a level of security that is increasingly commonplace at meetings regarding the global economy.

The first book to conceptualize the social control of dissent in the era of alterglobalization, it is based on direct observation of more than 20 global summits. It demonstrates that social control has become preemptive and relegates dissent to the realm of criminality.

The charge is insurrection, but the accused have no weapons. The authors document in detail how social control forecloses the spaces through which social movements nurture the development of dissent and effect disruptive challenges.

“Solidly empirical, richly descriptive and clearly written analysis.”

American Journal of Sociology

“This book provides a timely and much-needed critical reflection on how major protest events are controlled and the consequences of such practices… dense yet accessible and important.”

Cultural Sociology

“Shutting Down the Streets offers a fresh perspective on the dynamic of protest policing and the control of dissent generally…[the book] broadens the scope of study beyond protest policing to include control mechanisms that are deployed against social movements over many years.”

International Social Science Review

“The authors of this excellent and beautifully written monograph…write not from the outside…but as activist scholars.”

Deborah Eade
Interface

“The authors provide an insightful explanation of current trends towards the policing of protests, including a vast array of empirical support. While the book uses a great deal of scholarly literature, it does not solely target an academic audience, but rather anyone interested in the role of social movements in today’s society.”

Anisha Mehta, International Law and Politics

“The work effectively combines scholarly analysis with the immediate sense of direct action taken from firsthand accounts.”

M.F. Farrell, CHOICE

“This is a work of the movement rather than a dispassionate attempt at objective analysis and evaluation…Shutting Down the Streets is an important resource in understanding the repression being experienced by the Occupy movement.”

Working USA

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: What is going on?

• Understanding social control
• Understanding dissent
• Dissent in the era of alterglobalization
• Methods
• Toward a new framework for studying the social control of dissent

Chapter 2: The Geography of global governance

• Space, legitimacy, and the contestation of global governance
• Selecting a location
• Dividing space
• Controlling individuals’ movement
• Militarization
• Channeling Dissent

Chapter 3: Political economy of the social control of dissent

• What does it cost?
  • Security
  • Operations of a Secure Summit
  • Collateral costs to the locality
• Tensions
• Political Economy of Social Control

Chapter 4: Policing of Alterglobalization Dissent

• Regulatory and Legislative Dimensions of Policing
• Intelligence
• Event Policing
• Prosecution
• Transnationalization of protest policing

Chapter 5: A taxonomy of political violence

• Marginalization
• Preemption
• Permeation and accumulation
• Political consciousness & terror.
• Collectivity
• Space and discourse
• Feeling Culture
• Political violence

Chapter 6: Anti-Repression: resisting the social control of dissent

• Resisting spatial control
  • Breaching the zones, blockading back
  • Marching tactics and organizing crowds
  • Affinity groups
  • Counter-observation
  • Pirate communication
• The political economy of solidarity
  • Legal Teams
  • Street legal
  • Political litigation
• Surviving political violence
  • Know your rights, know our past, know your enemy
  • Solidarity
  • Trauma groups
  • Security Culture
  • Protecting bodies
• Remaining out of order

Chapter 7: Democracy Out of Order

Appendix A: Summits directly observed by authors.

Appendix B: Of Stones and Flowers

Appendix C: Suggestions for future research

Chapter 7: Democracy Out of Order

This is a book we wish we did not have to write. You might prefer not to have read it. At stake in our subject is democracy itself. For those who see the liberal democratic state as a medium of peaceful and progressive social change, that promise is in deep trouble. To protect democracy we must confine it because too much democracy is dangerous. Thus, we witness the reduction of democratic liberties in the name of the preservation of democracy itself. Defending democracy from democracy is becoming an indelicate matter, as pointed out so lucidly by Rancière who concludes that democracy is (and has been) the enemy of the elite, an object of “hatred” among that class. To those unfazed by such a discovery, those who believe that the liberal state manufactures consent in the interests of capitalism, this book confirms the consolidation of that project.

We began our investigation with two observations. First, that the concept of “policing” was inadequate to describe the temporality, spatiality, complexity, and diversity of social control tactics we witnessed. Second, that “protest” was the wrong unit of analysis and in a significant sense. We surmised that the impressive apparatuses of control were impacting a much broader public – dissenters. Their unit of organization is the social movement.

Exploring the literature on social control and dissent, we found its roots in the idea that social control is neutral and positive for social cohesion. This perspective led for some period to a narrowing of the field to deviance and criminal deterrence. Marxist criminologists questioned the construction of criminality in the context of capitalism. Most helpfully, social theorists, along with media and education analysts have postulated that control is exercised through the production of norms, so that people discipline themselves and do not experience coercion. With a few notable exceptions, social movement scholars have focused on the policing of protest as the locus of social control, leaving aside analysis of the impacts of political criminalization on would-be dissenters. Dissent is generally envisioned based on the legal right of individuals to free speech. But dissent –particularly dissent ultimately linked to social change– is produced in a landscape of activities that are collective. This collectivity is part of social movements. While assemblies and associations have some legal protections, social movements do not.

Seeking to better describe the landscape of social control in the era of globalization, we began with geography, territory, and space. Our analysis in Chapter 2demonstrates that the social control of space is not about preventing dissent completely, but rather about channeling and controlling the form of protest. Many observers expect the state to engage in some degree of social control of protest – to make sure that it doesn’t “get out of hand”. But these observers may not have fully appreciated the historic role of dissent in democracy. Skeptics might ask “So what if the state moves the protest around? Aren’t people still expressing themselves?” There are three ways that channeling dissent in a way that reduces its social impact ultimately diminishes the quality of democracy.

Channeling pre-designs the spaces of possible confrontations, setting the stage for some forms of dissent, while reducing the possibility of others. Social movements scholars have concluded definitively that the effective expression of dissent is a function of its disruptive capacity. Without the opportunity to be disruptive, dissent is impotent, decorative, and unable to effect political contention which is its aim, and right, in a democratic society. Disruption in turn relies on access to the unexpected. This means to disrupt spatial routines, to dislodge the normal happenstance of everyday life so that the larger citizenry can pause to think, reflect, and act. When the state channels a protest through permits, established routes, or by incapacitating movement, dissent becomes predictable and governable. Denying protest the capacity to be unexpected in space and/or time deprives dissent of its disruptive capacity, thereby canceling its contentious participation in the political arena.

The territories defined by security fences are only one aspect of such preemptive re-arrangement of space. A second aspect is spatial operations such as intruding into activist headquarters and preparatory meetings or incapacitating the creation of convergence centers or protest camps. By depriving activists of materials, artworks, and the capacity to organize, their forms of expression are again channeled.

Preemption is not only precaution or prevention of effective contention, but also the criminalization of dissent. Security territory clearly demarcates a space inhabited by legitimate authority and a space occupied by illegitimate assault. In these spaces, the protester is no longer a participant in democracy, but a violent offender, a ferocious unknown, who must be fenced, channeled and guarded. The explicit and implicit implications are clear to those who might consider expressing themselves: Today, you are already the enemy.

Next we turned to the political economy of social control in the era of globalization. As we show in Chapter 3, Summit security budgets are huge. In addition to the official expenditures bankrolled at a federal level, extensive direct and indirect costs are (contentiously) imposed on localities and regions. Moreover, summit security has become an industry, with permanent security think tanks, departments of the European Union, and collaborative agencies. More striking yet is the scope of the multi-agency international networks, which attend to each successive event, including military, immigration and border control, civil agencies, and civil intelligence services of several countries. The low intensity operations performed by a mix of military and civil agencies is advised by international experts: while the local police agency might be a new one each time, the advising around them is increasingly provided by a formally networked agglomerate of security agencies, providing an accumulation of experience that otherwise could not take place. This is the global control of dissent.

The institutionalization of this extensive mobilization for social control makes the threat ever more real and ever more “Other”. We must read this mobilization as communicating in no uncertain terms that dissent is not part of us; dissent is an Other that we must defend against. Dissent is not a normal part of history, political process, and daily life but a new and extraordinary threat that governments have to be ready for.

The architecture of Othering (or “security”) is very expensive. It is becoming increasingly more costly to police global governance events. These are now routinely the most expensive police operations in host nations’ history. The expenditure and networked control of a summit protest has no precursor in normal policing operations; summits mobilize extra-parliamentary national budgets and international expert advisement. The environment of willingness to spend increasingly larger sums of money is comparable to the discourse and practices of war. But recent wars have been accompanied by extensive public debate about morality, strategy, and expense. In comparison, security operations for global governance summits are mostly taken for granted. The budgeting looks like war, but there is no political objective for the military operation, and never a victor. The search for a comparison is elusive, and informative.

The abrupt, jarring, intense militarization of space for brief periods, followed by an equally abrupt and surreal return to “normality” could be described as the creation of what Agamben calls a state of exception – a legal event in which the sovereign power dispenses with the rule of law purportedly in order to preserve the rule of law. For example, the state calls for martial law so that the rule of law can survive an external or internal threat. Agamben argues that the state of exception, overused, becomes the permanent rule. States of exception are constructed around civil flashpoints (or “emergencies”), such as riots, in which laws are suspended in order to impose “calm”. But domestic riot-control does not generally involve long-term investigations and prosecution of “organizers”, border controls, security geography, and appellations of “terrorism”. So state of exception is not an entirely adequate comparison.

Another possible comparison is counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency involves the long time-scale, a focus on individuals and groups, and expenditure of extensive and focused government resources. It involves domestic militarization, ongoing campaigns against insurgent groups which far outlast the flashpoint event (Low Intensity Warfare), and the suspension of rights as in a “state of emergency”. Most striking in this comparison are the European and US efforts regarding individuals associated with the alterglobalization movement (who have been treated as counterinsurgents) and the organized state programs to identify, isolate, criminalize, prosecute (with 20 year sentences), and assault them (with extrajudicial force).

While imperfect, these comparisons are revealing. Protest events are subject to a physical and budgetary environment comparable to war. Protests are now routinely defined as necessitating a “state of exception”. Activism relating to global governance is being dealt with not as protest, which is guaranteed in every modern democracy, but as counterinsurgency. It is important, however, that this is not the story. National elites are not at war with their own people, but with the domestic Other (and his confederates from nearby countries). Thus the discourse of terrorism is the public face of elites’ mobilization for domestic counterinsurgency.

In preparing the material for Chapter 4, the legal machinations and police operations which take place with the most immediacy around global governance events, we found our data organizing schemes perpetually tangled in their own web. When we tried to analyze what we knew best and most personally, we were unable to clearly distinguish policing itself from public relations, surveillance from event policing, and policing from prosecution. Most frustratingly, we had great difficulty sorting out those social control tactics with psychological objectives. Recognizing that this tangle pointed to knowledge we had yet to articulate, we turned to a more inductive and experiential analysis. The themes that emerged to structure chapter 5 were about marginalization, preemption, permeation, the impacts on political consciousness, building collectivities, discourse, and movement culture. We recognized that every policing tactic had psychological impacts and that these impacts were in fact its most important. We recognized, finally, that security perimeters, massive budget outlays, personnel mobilization in the tens of thousands, new weapons, and the rest of the police tactics discussed in chapter 4 have the unmistakable effect of discouraging participation in the social spaces that nurture dissent, and thus constitute, singly and as a whole, political violence against the population as a whole.

As we demonstrate in the chapters on geography and policing, social control of protest is taking the form of preemptive criminalization. Such criminalization is now familiar in a world where teenage activities like graffiti and skateboarding have been criminalized. Yet, these remain minor crimes. When we talk about the criminalization of protest, what kind of crime has the state defined? The expenditure and organization of resources led us to conclude that protest has not been criminalized as a lower-order crime. The crime is insurrection. But this “crime” is a right asserted at the foundations of democracy. So policing and prosecuting it is, indeed, political repression, rather than social order policing.

We conclude that the control of dissent has become a project in itself, which might resemble war but is not quite the same. While this may indeed not be new, it makes sense that there is a newly organized form of violence for these internal wars. Counterinsurgency will look different in an era of the “rule of law” and manufactured consent. This form of violence is organized to operate against dissent at the psychic level, not only through criminalization and the threat of force, but through Othering, marginalization and trivialization.

Chapter 6 describes “anti-repression” activism. This work has an isolated responsibility, which is to assemble sober and precise information about the points of impact between dissenters and the state. Anti-repression activism avoids ideology and hyperbole in the interest of presenting incontrovertible data to the press and in court. This stark focus, accompanied by severe frugality, affords a unique view on social control.

We showed that anti-repression work produces key analyses about how social control functions. This is possible because anti-repression collects a particular kind of data through time and space and can therefore analyze the police operation in total and compare it with other operations. For instance, the Miami Legal Defense team was able to assemble data to demonstrate that the police operation shifted from a security to a terror operation. The legal team in Genoa was able to determine that the assault on the Disobeddienti march to the red zone was a pre-planned police attack rather than a public order operation. Moreover, anti-repression work eventually gains precise information about victims, which, among other things provides the decisive finding that they are neither terrorists nor violent insurrectionaries, and moreover that (except for some passersby) they qualify as dissenters.

Social movements, to be effective, require two kinds of space which we think are particularly important sites for studying social control. First, they require diverse, secure, and informal social space for exploration to nurture collective intellectual and creative development. This is the space would-be dissenters enter to find solidarity, education, encouragement, and collaboration for expressing themselves. Our chapter on political violence shows the destruction of this space. Social movements also require access to public space where they can effect disruptive challenges to the existing system. Our chapter on geography shows the preemptive foreclosure of this public space.

Critical criminologists have long questioned the political motivations for criminalization. Our chapter on policing shows the creeping criminalization of dissent through laws, police behavior, surveillance, and prosecution. Our chapter on political economy shows that the expenditures on controlling alterglobalization can be compared to low intensity warfare and civil war counterinsurgency. Yet our chapter on activist forms of legal defense (anti-repression work) shows how this work has documented that the victims of social control are indeed dissenters, and not violent insurrectionists. We must conclude that dissent is being treated as insurrection, and political violence is now directed against the foundation of democracy.

Tragically, social control of dissent has only been litigated around harm to individuals and formal organizations. We believe that the most important socio-legal project is to gain legal standing for social movements as a class, so that the interests of innumerable affinity groups of dissenters may be litigated.

Until then, cameras, lemons, and fast sneakers.