Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State 9781138247307, 9781409418764

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
List of Figures......Page 8
List of Tables......Page 10
Notes on Contributors......Page 12
Preface......Page 18
Section I: Theoretical Perspectives......Page 20
1 The Dynamics of Violent Protest: Emotions, Repression and Disruptive Deficit
......Page 22
2 Protest Movements and Violence
......Page 38
3 The Outcomes of Political Violence: Ethical, Theoretical and Methodological Challenges
......Page 48
4 Age Cohorts, Cognition and Collective Violence
......Page 58
Section II: Regional Perspectives: France, Germany and the United Kingdom......Page 72
5 Political Violence in Germany: Trends and Exploration of Causes
......Page 74
6 The ‘Unusual Suspects’: Radical Repertoires in Consensual Settings
......Page 90
7 The Riots: A Dynamic View
......Page 106
Section III: Comparative Perspectives......Page 120
8 Protest and Repression in Democracies and Autocracies: Europe, Iran, Thailand and the Middle East 2010–11
......Page 122
9 Contemporary French and British Urban Riots: An Exploration of the Underlying Political Dimensions
......Page 138
10 The Volatility of Urban Riots
......Page 152
Section IV: The Greek December, 2008......Page 166
11 The Greek December, 2008
......Page 168
12 Along the Pathways of Rage: The Space-Time of an Uprising
......Page 176
13 The Accidental Eruption of an Anarchist Protest
......Page 190
14 Radical Minorities, a Decade of Contention and the Greek December 2008
......Page 202
Bibliography......Page 212
Index......Page 240

Citation preview

Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State

Edited by Seraphim Seferiades and Hank Johnston

Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State

The Mobilization Series on Social Movements, Protest, and Culture Series Editor

Professor Hank Johnston San Diego State University, USA Published in conjunction with Mobilization: An International Quarterly, the premier research journal in the field, this series disseminates high quality new research and scholarship in the fields of social movements, protest, and contentious politics. The series is interdisciplinary in focus and publishes monographs and collections of essays by new and established scholars. Other titles of interest from Ashgate Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur Culture, Social Movements, and Protest Edited by Hank Johnston The Policing of Transnational Protest Edited by Donatella della Porta, Abby Peterson and Herbert Reiter

Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State

Edited by Seraphim Seferiades Panteion University, Greece Hank Johnston San Diego State University, USA

© Seraphim Seferiades and Hank Johnston 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Seraphim Seferiades and Hank Johnston have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Violent protest, contentious politics, and the neoliberal state. -- (Mobilization series on social movements, protest, and culture) 1. Protest movements. 2. Protest movements--Cross-cultural studies. 3. Riots. 4. Riots--Cross-cultural studies. 5. Neoliberalism--Social aspects. I. Series II. Seferiades, Seraphim. III. Johnston, Hank, 1947303.6'2-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Violent protest, contentious politics, and the neoliberal state / [edited] by Seraphim Seferiades and Hank Johnston. p. cm. -- (The mobilization series on social movements, protest, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-1876-4 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-1877-1 (ebook) 1. Violence. 2. Political violence. 3. Social movements--Political aspects. 4. Collective behavior. 5. Social change. 6. Neoliberalism. I. Seferiades, Seraphim. II. Johnston, Hank, 1947HM886.V5695 2011 303.6--dc23 2011026966 ISBN 9781409418764 (hbk) ISBN 9781409418771 (ebk) IV

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group, UK.

Contents List of Figures   List of Tables   Notes on Contributors   Preface  

vii ix xi xvii

Section I Theoretical Perspectives 1

The Dynamics of Violent Protest: Emotions, Repression and Disruptive Deficit   Seraphim Seferiades and Hank Johnston

2

Protest Movements and Violence   Frances Fox Piven

3

The Outcomes of Political Violence: Ethical, Theoretical and Methodological Challenges   Lorenzo Bosi and Marco Giugni

4

Age Cohorts, Cognition and Collective Violence   Hank Johnston

3 19

29 39

Section II Regional Perspectives: France, Germany and the United Kingdom 5

Political Violence in Germany: Trends and Exploration of Causes   Dieter Rucht

55



The ‘Unusual Suspects’: Radical Repertoires in Consensual Settings   Mario Diani

71

7

The Riots: A Dynamic View   Donatella della Porta and Bernard Gbikpi

6

87

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Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State

Section III Comparative Perspectives 8

Protest and Repression in Democracies and Autocracies: Europe, Iran, Thailand and the Middle East 2010–11   Jack A. Goldstone

103



Contemporary French and British Urban Riots: An Exploration of the Underlying Political Dimensions   David Waddington and Mike King

119

10

The Volatility of Urban Riots   Marilena Simiti

9

133

Section IV The Greek December, 2008 11

The Greek December, 2008   Hank Johnston and Seraphim Seferiades

12

Along the Pathways of Rage: The Space-Time of an Uprising   Loukia Kotronaki and Seraphim Seferiades

13

The Accidental Eruption of an Anarchist Protest   Kostas Kanellopoulos

14

Radical Minorities, a Decade of Contention and the Greek December 2008   Nikos Lountos



Bibliography   Index  

149

157 171

183

193 221

List of Figures 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6

Number of all protest events (PEs) and participants per year, 1950–2009   Number of violent protest events and participants per year, 1950–2009   Distribution of type of action by periods, 1950–2009   Evolution of right-extremist political violence according to governmental statistics   Evolution of left-extremist political violence according to governmental statistics   Issue domains of violent protests, 1950–2002   Alliance network in Glasgow   Alliance network in Bristol   Alliances between organizations prepared to engage in confrontational protest in Glasgow   Alliances between organizations prepared to engage in confrontational protest in Bristol   Alliances between organizations prepared to engage in violence against objects (Glasgow)   Alliances between organizations prepared to engage in violence against objects (Bristol)  

11.1 Protest trajectory, December 5–31, 2008   11.2 Protest events with property damage, December 5–31, 2008  

60 61 61 63 63 65 79 79 80 80 81 82 153 154

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List of Tables 3.1

A typology of the outcomes of political violence  

31

5.1

Indicators of protest militancy  

64

6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

Forms of radical protest by city   Reports of protest repertoires   Links of ‘radical’ organizations to institutions by city   A profile of ‘radical’ organizations by city   Odds ratios predicting the use of ‘radical’ protest by city  

76 76 77 77 78

7.1 7.2 7.3

Percentage of topics in statements by selected speakers   Selected causes by selected speakers   Percentage of space dedicated to institutional and non-institutional speakers   How rioters are described by speakers  

94 95

7.4

97 98

Dedicated to the memory of H. Edwin Johnston

Notes on Contributors Lorenzo Bosi is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at the European University Institute, working on a research project on the development and demise of political violence. His main research interests have been in political sociology and historical sociology where his studies have focused on social movement development, outcomes and political violence. He has published in several refereed journals: Mobilization: An International Quarterly; Ricerche di Storia Politica; Research in Social Movement, Conflict and Change; Historical Sociology; and The Sixties. He is working on a book about the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement. Donatella della Porta is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. She has directed the Demos project, devoted to the analysis of conceptions and practices of democracy in social movements in six European countries. She is now starting a major ERC project, Mobilizing for Democracy, on civil society participation in democratization processes in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. Among her recent publications are: Mobilizing on the Right (with M. Caiani and C. Wageman, Oxford University Press, 2012); L’intervista qualitativa (Laterza, 2011); Social Movements and Europeanization (with M. Caiani, Oxford University Press, 2009); (ed.) Another Europe (Routledge, 2009); (ed.) Democracy in Social Movements (Palgrave, 2009); Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences (with Michael Keating, Cambridge University Press, 2008); Voices from the Valley; Voices from the Street (with Gianni Piazza, Berghan, 2008); The Global Justice Movement (Paradigm, 2007); Globalization from Below (with Massimiliano Andretta, Lorenzo Mosca and Herbert Reiter, University of Minnesota Press, 2006); The Policing Transnational Protest (with Abby Peterson and Herbert Reiter, Ashgate, 2006); Social Movements: An Introduction, 2nd edition (with Mario Diani, Blackwell, 2006); and Transnational Protest and Global Activism (with Sidney Tarrow, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Mario Diani is ICREA Research Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Before that, he was Professor of Sociology in the Universities of Strathclyde in Glasgow (1996–2001) and Trento (2001–2010). He has worked extensively on social movements and on social network approaches to collective action. His publications include Social Movements (with Donatella della Porta, Blackwell, 1999 and 2006); Social Movements and Networks (co-edited with Doug McAdam, Oxford UP, 2003); and articles in leading journals such as American Sociological Review; American

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Journal of Sociology; Social Networks; Theory and Society; and Mobilization. Current research interests include civil society networks in UK cities, on which he is just completing a book, as well as individual participation in associations and grassroots groups, and networks of migrant organizations. From 1997 to 2005 he was the European editor of Mobilization. Bernard Gbikpi is a lecturer in Political Science at Gonzaga University in Florence (Italy) and in Spokane (WA). He earned his PhD in Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence in 1996 and holds a D.E.A. from the University of Paris X-Nanterre. He has participated in various research projects at the EUI. Among his publications are “Contribution à une théorie de la légitimation politique des ordres politiques et sociaux modernes” (Cultures & Conflits 1999); “Dalla teoria della democrazia participative a quella deliberative; quali possibili continuità?” (Stato e Mercato 2005); he co-edited (with Juergen Grote), Participatory Governance. Political and Social Implications (Leske & Budrich 2002); and he has contributed to various edited books. His research interests are in modern political thought, political theory and comparative politics; his current research interest is in Machiavelli’s political thought. Marco Giugni is a professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations and Director of the Institute of Social and Political Research (RESOP) at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. His research interests include social movements and collective action, immigration and ethnic relations, unemployment and social exclusion. Professor Giugni is European Editor of Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Jack A. Goldstone is the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University. He is the author of Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, was awarded the 1993 Distinguished Scholarly Research Award of the American Sociological Association, and has published nine other books as well as over a hundred research articles on topics in politics, social movements, democratization, and long-term social change. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University, and has won Fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. His current research focuses on conditions for building democracy and stability in developing nations, the impact of population change on the global economy and international security, and the cultural origins of modern economic growth. His latest books are Why Europe? The Rise of the West 1500–1850 (McGraw-Hill, 2008), and Political Demography: Identities, Change, and Conflict (Paradigm, forthcoming). Hank Johnston is Professor of Sociology at San Diego State University. His research focuses on nationalist movements, resistance against state repression, framing theory, and cultural approaches to mobilization. He has lived and

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conducted research in Spain, the Baltic and Transcaucasian states of the former Soviet Union, Venezuela, and, currently, Mexico. He is the founding editor and publisher of Mobilization: An International Quarterly. His latest books are States and Social Movements (Polity, 2011); Culture, Social Movements, and Protest (Ashgate, 2010); Latin American Social Movements (ed. with Paul Almeida, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); Frames of Protest (ed. with John Noakes, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Repression and Mobilization (ed. with Chris Davenport and Carol Mueller, Minnesota, 2005); and Globalization and Resistance (ed. with Jackie Smith, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). He is also editor of the Mobilization series on Protest, Social Movements, and Culture with Ashgate Publishers. Kostas Kanellopoulos is an independent researcher based in Athens. He has studied Political Science and Sociology at the University of Athens. In 2009 he defended his doctoral dissertation at Panteion University. His main research interests are on the theory of social movements, globalization, and the anti-globalization movement. As a doctoral candidate he was a recipient of a scholarship from the Greek Institute of State Scholarships. In the 1990s he was an active member of the student movement. He is currently co-editing a volume, Contentious Politics and Social Movements in the 21st Century (in Greek), with Seraphim Seferiades. Mike King is Emeritus Professor at the Centre for Applied Criminology, Birmingham City University, UK. He has researched and published widely in the areas of public order policing and policing change, both in the UK and internationally. Mike’s recent work includes a co-edited book with David Waddington and Fabien Jobard, Rioting in the UK and France: A Comparative Analysis (Willan/Routledge, 2009). Loukia Kotronaki is a PhD candidate in Political Sociology at the Department of Politics and History, Panteion University of Social and Political Science, Athens. Her thesis is entitled “Beyond Consensus: Contentious Politics and the Dynamics of Internationalist Collective Action – The Greek Case, 2000–2007.” She holds a D.E.A. in Sociologie Politique et Anthropologie Politique from Paris I – La Sorbonne, where she has also been a researcher at the CPRS. Her works have appeared in edited volumes and journals such as Actuel Marx; Contretemps; and Situations. She is also a regular contributor to the Greek national press. Nikos Lountos is a PhD student at Panteion University of Social and Political Science. His thesis is on the interaction between secular and religious discourses in social movements in a Middle Eastern and a broader context. His MA thesis was on the “Material and Intellectual Origins of the Egyptian Nationalism until the Revolution of 1919.” His publications in the Greek language include a book on the war and the resistance in Lebanon (2006) and an edited volume on the movement against the Iraq War in Greece (2004). More recently, he edited a volume on the Greek economic crisis (2011). He is a member of the editorial

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board of the Greek socialist journal Socialism From Below and a member of the Contentious Politics Circle. Frances Fox Piven’s work reflects a preoccupation with the uses of political science to promote democratic reform. Regulating the Poor, co-authored with Richard Cloward, is a historical and theoretical analysis of the role of welfare policy in the economic and political control of the poor and working class. First published in 1972, it was updated in 1993; it is widely acknowledged as a social science classic. Poor Peoples’ Movements (1977) analyzes the political dynamics through which insurgent social movements sometimes compel significant policy reforms. Piven and Cloward’s The New Class War (1982, updated 1985); The Mean Season (1987); and The Breaking of the American Social Compact (1997) traced the historical and political underpinnings of the contemporary attack on social and regulatory policy. In Why Americans Don’t Vote (1988; updated as Why Americans Still Don’t Vote in 2000) they analyzed the role of US electoral laws and practices in disenfranchising large numbers of working class and poor citizens, and the impact of disenfranchisement on party development. In 1992, Piven edited Labor Parties in Postindustrial Societies. In The War at Home, Piven examines the domestic causes and consequences of the foreign wars launched by the Bush administration. Most recently, in Challenging Authority (2006) Piven develops a theoretical perspective on the interplay of social movements and electoral politics in American political development. In 2009, she published Keeping the Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters (with Lorraine C. Minnite and Margaret Groarke), an examination of voter suppression in American politics. Dieter Rucht is Professor of Sociology at the Social Science Research Center, Berlin. His research interests include political participation, social movements and political protest. Among his books are Social Movements in a Globalizing World (co-edited with Donatella della Porta and Hanspeter Kriesi, 2009); Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States (with Myra Marx Ferree, William Gamson and Jurgen Gerhards, 2002); and Protest Politics: Antiwar Mobilization in Advanced Industrial Democracies (with Stefaan Walgrave, 2010). He has published articles in the American Journal of Sociology; West European Politics; Mobilization: An International Quarterly; and other top-ranked sociology and political science journals. Seraphim Seferiades is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the Panteion University of Social and Political Science, Athens, a Life Member in Politics and History at the University of Cambridge (CLH) and co-ordinator of the Contentious Politics Circle. For several years the Secretary of the Greek Political Science Association, he has been Hannah Seeger Davis Fellow at Princeton University, Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute and tutor in Arts at the University of Cambridge (CHU). His work spans European and Greek labour and social history, contentious politics and social science methodology. He has edited or co-

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edited volumes on methodology, social movements and the Greek dictatorship and published extensively in journals such as Comparative Politics; the European Journal of Industrial Relations; the Journal of Contemporary History; the Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica; the Journal of Modern Greek Studies; Actuel Marx; and the Greek Political Science Review. He is currently completing two volumes on contentious politics and historiography. Marilena Simiti is Assistant Professor of Political Sociology at the Department of International and European Studies, University of Piraeus. She is the author of New Social Movements in Greece: Aspects of the Ecological and Feminist Projects (Department of Political Science, London School of Economics, 2002); and Civil Society in the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (Athens: Sakkoulas, 2008). Dr Simiti has also published articles and chapters in edited books concerning civil society and its actors (e.g., “Civil Society: New Forms of Collective Action,” Spoudai 52:4, 2002; “Central and Peripheral Non-Governmental Organizations in the International Community: The Construction of Social Networks,” in A. Chouliaras and P. Sklias (eds), Diplomacy of Civil Society (Athens: Papazisis, 2002); “The Contemporary Feminist Movement: Ideological Conflicts and Political Dilemmas,” Koinonia Politon 9, 2003; “Two Facets of Civil Society: The Struggle for Hegemony,” in Y. Voulgaris and L. Kotsonopoulos (eds), Following the Path of Antonio Gramsci (Athens: Themelio, 2010). She holds a Master of Arts from Columbia University and a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science. David Waddington is Professor of Communications and Head of the Communications and Computing Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, where he has been employed since 1983. His primary research interests are: industrial relations, the sociology of communities, research methodologies, and public order policing. He is author of Contemporary Issues in Public Disorder: A Comparative and Historical Approach (Routledge, 1992) and Policing Public Disorder: Theory and Practice (Willan, 2007). He is also co-author of Flashpoints: Studies in Public Disorder (with Chas Critcher and Karen Jones, Routledge, 1989) and has co-edited Policing Public Order: Theoretical and Practical Approaches (with Chas Critcher, Avebury, 1996) and Rioting in the UK and France: A Comparative Analysis (with Fabien Jobard and Mike King, Willan, 2009).

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Preface This volume is the fruit of an international conference, “Rioting and Violent Protest in Comparative Perspective: Theoretical Considerations, Empirical Puzzles,” held at Panteion University in Athens in December 2009. The conference marked the first anniversary of the social eruption that shook Greece following the murder of 15-year-old high-school student, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, by a riot policeman in the centre of Athens. The dramatic protests that followed resounded not only in national politics in Greece, but throughout Europe, demonstrated by several immediate solidarity protests in other countries, and by militant action by students in France, Great Britain, Spain and elsewhere, in years to follow. Considering that these events all occurred in democracies subjected to neoliberal restructuring, it seemed that something new and significant was unfolding, which raised important theoretical questions for protest scholars. A conference to explore these questions was organized by the Contentious Politics Circle [Κύκλος Συγκρουσιακής Πολιτικής], an interdisciplinary network of scholars based at the Panteion University of Social and Political Science, Athens (see http:// contentiouspoliticscircle1.blogspot.com/). This volume aspires to advance theoretical debate by comparing and synthesizing analyses of contemporary violent protest actions. The chapters that follow seek, first, to identify the precise social and political characteristics of the recent eruptions and compare them with other historical occurrences as a basis for theoretical advance. Their analyses highlight different domains of mobilization, organization, participation, repression, and the dynamics among different elements, which can be summarized by the following points. First, a key dimension includes the socio-structural underpinnings of violent protest, such as labour market precariousness (especially among European youths), the development of a new immigrant underclass, and mounting strains on traditional social and political solidarity networks. A related element concerns deficiencies in the way established political forces (especially parties and trade unions) have responded to these shifts, and to protesters’ claims and tactics. Second, our chapters trace how strategic-instrumental action interacts with emotional and cognitive factors. They ask how can we assess the role of violence in strategic efficacy, the interaction between the police and “disorderly crowds,” and if we are witnessing a regression to the aggressive police tactics of the 1970s and 1980s? Relatedly, is it possible to say that the recent eruptions bring about contentious repertoire renewal and, if so, could that be modular? Third, several chapters explore the different organizational phenomena at work in violent protest: parties, unions, youth groups and collectives, student

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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 chapters—above all—to whet appetites for further debate. Hank Johnston, San Diego Seraphim Seferiades, Athens

Section I Theoretical Perspectives

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Chapter 1

The Dynamics of Violent Protest: Emotions, Repression and Disruptive Deficit Seraphim Seferiades and Hank Johnston

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 insurrectionary 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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Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State

Collective Violence: An Unknown Familiar, Familiarly Unknown Despite strides made in recent years (e.g., Braud 1993; Tilly 2003), analysis of militant, on occasion violent, collective action remains a great unknown – both generally speaking, within political sociology and, more specifically, within the field of contentious politics. This strikes us as a conspicuous paradox. As McAdam (1999/1982), among others, has pointedly argued, non-institutional protest was for a long time considered to be pathological owing to what may be construed as the pluralist prejudice: the axiomatic assumption that political systems (at least in the West) possessed sufficient expressive channels, which protesters, to their detriment, evaded quite simply because they were ‘irrational’: ‘Why would any group engaged in rational, self-interested political action ignore the advantages of such an open, responsive, gentlemanly political system? [… Because m]ovement participants are simply not engaged in “rational, self-interested political action”’ (p. 6). Incorporating insights from social theory and novel research findings (both historical and contemporary), political process and contentious politics approaches have problematized and eventually shattered the pluralist assumption: actors engaging in contentious, non-institutional collective action are not irrational; instead their departure from the proper channels reflects systemic channel deficiency and is, if anything, eminently rational. What of collective violence? The operative (and perhaps even unwitting) assumption regarding collective violence is considerably more nuanced, hence more difficult to pinpoint and formulate; yet it is no less consequential. Official political institutions may be deficient as far as processing demands is concerned (hence collective action may indeed be conceived as ‘rational’), but as long as contentious organizations (trade unions, leftist parties, professionalized social movement organizations) are operative and functional, resorting to violence does indeed represent a pathological aberration. The theoretical starting point of this volume is considerably different. Irrespective of whether or not violent action is instrumentally counterproductive, that is, ‘strategically ineffective’, we claim that casually assuming it to be irrational prevents us from adequately comprehending, let alone interpreting and explicating it. It also prevents us from parsing it so that its rational and emotional elements can be identified for study. As a result, collective violence, an unknown familiar, an entity with which we increasingly have to deal, but whose distinct nature and varieties still escape us, is progressively becoming a familiarly unknown: a semi-legitimate cognitive gap, a new ‘black box’ to which we are increasingly become accustomed to acquiesce. What this volume sets out to accomplish is to make a contribution toward reversing this inauspicious state of affairs. As always, the starting point needs to be conceptual.

The Dynamics of Violent Protest

5

The Paradox of Conventional Protest In an incisive recent study of violence generally understood, Michel Wieviorka (2009) crisply counterpoised violence to conflict. ‘Conflict’, he argued, involves the – more or less – institutionalized relationship between contentious claimants and the state (or, more broadly, the authorities). It refers to an unequal relationship between […] groups or ensembles that compete, within the same space, with the aim or purpose […] of modifying the relationship, or at least strengthening their relative positions’ (pp. 9–10). Wieviorka does not deal with it explicitly, but it can safely be surmised that a prerequisite of ‘conflict’ is its medium/long-term effectiveness qua relationship: For ‘conflict’ to persist, claims need to be both adequately articulated (by the claimants) and sufficiently responded to (by the authorities) – at least to an extent and to a foreseeable future. Prolonged periods of conflictual irrelevance, a state of affairs where either claimant actors fail to adequately express grievances, or the state proves perpetually unable (and/or unwilling) to be responsive – what may be construed as a reform deficit – leads to ‘conflict’s’ eventual collapse (if it had ever emerged). This is where violence begins to set in. Epigrammatically put, ‘violence is an expression of the exhaustion of conflict’ (p. 16). This situation is not unknown to the early history of the European labour movement. Institutionalized ‘conflict’ between labour and capital emerged only in countries where sufficiently robust labour claimants were able to disruptively extract concessions by elites, in turn willing (and capable) to effect political and social reforms. Up until the outbreak of WWI, this was the case in Northwestern Europe, a state of affairs starkly different from what existed in the European periphery and semi-periphery (Eastern and Southern Europe), where labour movements remained sparse, the elites reform-deficient, and the protest scene intermittently convulsive (Seferiades 1998). As Tarrow (1998: 95) has pointedly illustrated, ‘[It] was in such states as czarist Russia that terrorism first developed – largely because protesters lacked access to legitimate means of participation and were forced to clandestinity, where their only means of expression [were] violent’ (see also della Porta 1995). Because it may easily slip our attention (as we believe it usually does), a key element that needs to be stretched in this connection is the extent to which ‘conflict’ (as non-violence) is premised on claimant disruptive propensity, that is, the tendency of contentious actors to act transgressively (though not necessarily resorting to violence) in order to further their goals. Even if states are reform-prone (and, nowadays, many seem viciously counter-reformist, both socioeconomically and politico-institutionally), ‘conflict’ is not possible unless protest is sufficiently pungent to disrupt the workings of the system: to exert pressure on opponents, bystanders and authorities. But in contemporary Western democracies, and on a variety of pretexts, official protest organizations, including several SMOs, trade unions and, above all, the parties of the Left, tend to approach contentious disruption as a relic of the past. Hoping to secure the consensual resolution of pent-

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up grievances, nominally contentious organizations are increasingly espousing (often in a dogmatic fashion) the modalities of an exclusively conventional protest repertoire. In their chapter, Kotronaki and Seferiades cite the letter addressed to the Prime Minister by the General Confederation of Labour at the time of the December 2008 uprising in Greece, where the unionists pronounced ‘the always incontestably […] peaceful conduct of the forces of labour’, whilst the Communist Party, abstaining from the insurrectionary mobilization, argued that ‘the uprising was the work of agents provocateurs manipulated by obscure powers’. They both went on to organize sadly irrelevant, ‘peaceful’ marches peppered with the usual litany of ‘demands’. In light of the preceding discussion, this disruptive deficit may lead to a great paradox: in seeking conciliation through exclusively conventional protest, institutionalized claimants end up inadvertently fomenting the kind of political violence they most dread and despise. Indeed, this is all the more so, considering that this disruptive deficit coincides with the reform deficit characterizing contemporary neoliberal policies. In fact, the two gaps combine to produce a conspicuous political vacuum liable to be filled by violence. Drawing this conclusion may serve as a basis for a more fine-grained analysis of the violent political phenomena that interest us in this volume. The disruptive deficit leads to a state of affairs where large (and apparently growing) layers of the population become estranged from both official politics as well as the politics promoted by erstwhile contentious agents. Especially in times of crisis, this may take the form of a profound ‘loss of political meaning’, whereby subjects begin to drift without a clear point of anchorage in the institutional political arena. Always remaining politicized (otherwise developments in the institutional arena would be irrelevant) these are actors – some of them unlikely, as Diani demonstrates in his chapter – become politically ‘floating’, feeling silenced, non-recognized, negated – a void that tends to precipitate violent action. But it would be erroneous to interpret such action as inherently ‘irrational’. Nor is political alienation in any way synonymous to the familiar ‘mass society’ imagery, portraying protesters as disconnected, unintegrated individuals. Protesters throwing rocks at police stations may appear ‘irrational’ in terms of the workings of the political system and the fastidious calculations of institutionalized SMOs and leftist parties, but this is because the official rationality canon is so hopelessly lacking. In that sense, violence may well reflect an arduous or even desperate (but rational) quest for political meaning in circumstances where none appears to exist: a situation where, to paraphrase Gramsci, old politics is dying but a new cannot be born. It seems to us that the vast majority of the chapters in this volume address precisely this conjuncture. This particular quest for meaning brings to mind Georges Sorel’s doctrine of the general strike (as expounded in his 1908 Réflexions sur la violence), where violence is assigned the important function of ‘constituting’ an actor. Loss of meaning is thereby compensated by the hyper-production of transcendental significations often bearing a mythical quality. As Wieviorka (2009: 151) keenly observed, this ‘allows

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the subject to move into a different space, and therefore 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 counterpoise 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–benefit 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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view, restraining violence depends less on destroying bad ideas, eliminating opportunities, or suppressing impulses than on transforming relations among persons and groups. (emphasis added)

These observations orient our analysis of collective violence. First, we see the variable play of different forms of violence – some of which may arguably be construed as belonging to the ‘quest for meaning’ variety, some others as cynical or even callous. On the one hand, protesters may plan and strategically employ violence as a means to gain attention and publicly assert their commitment. On the other, unintended escalation occurs as anger and frustration drive protesters’ behaviours in the streets. Most empirical occurrences of collective violence fall somewhere between these two extremes, and may even combine them sequentially. Second, we see the two key actors that are almost always present together in episodes of collective violence. On the one hand, there are the protesters. On the other, there are the agents of social control – including its elite planners and the troops in the streets. Sometimes, the police are absent at first, or it is possible that they never arrive at the scene of violence. More often, however, they become actors, as enforcers of a wave of state repression unleashed after a violent protest or even before it, especially when – as nowadays is increasingly the case – they act proactively. Because the police and military usually have overwhelming force at their disposal, how our observation of calculated versus spontaneous action plays out among them is crucial to the level of violence and its duration. Violence and the Police Protesting groups must consider the likelihood of repressive violence from the forces of social control and how this may escalate into a pitched battle – in which the odds are strongly against protesters and in favour of the police. Goldstone’s Chapter 10 in this volume nicely portrays the unequal array of resources that Revolutionary Guards and Basij Militia members employed in confrontations against pro-democracy protesters in Iran, 2009–10. In democratic societies, analysts of police actions agree that similarly draconian responses by the police were characteristic of the protest cycle of the 1960s and early 1970s, sometimes characterized as a period of escalated-force policing, meaning that protester– police interactions usually resulted in a spiral of increasingly forceful, sometimes brutal, repression. As social movements and protests have become more common, so developed democracies have adopted a more tolerant stance towards extrainstitutional protest, which has had moderating effects on violence. Since that time, however, a significant change has occurred in the way that police departments and municipal agencies deal with protesters (McCarthy and McPhail 1998; McPhail, Schweingruber and McCarthy 1998). Researchers have noted a shift to less aggressive methods that began in the mid-1970s, when some large police departments began to train their officers in non-violent crowd control.

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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 armed 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 surreptitious 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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G-10 protests in London in 2009 or the intense student–police clashes in Greece in December 2008 (see Chapter 12 by Kotronaki and Seferiades). Emotions and Collective Violence Elaborating our earlier mention of scholarly attention to the emotions of protests, from this literature we can identify several emotions that will be most relevant in the violent episodes analyzed in this volume. Hatred as a motivation to harm and inflict retribution comes immediately to mind, especially in regard to outbursts of savage ethnic conflicts that have been all too common in recent decades. Goodwin et al. (2004: 418) identify hatred as a social, affective emotion that, like love, respect and trust, tends to persist over time. Akin to resentment, another injusticebased affect, hatred simmers – by which we mean that it is not accompanied by intensely experienced physiological changes as is the case with more reflexive emotions, such as anger (or rage), fear and joy. Indeed, one might characterize hatred as anger spread out over the long term and, as such, sapped of some of its intense physical manifestations that persist beneath the surface of social relations even when they do not appear in collective action for long periods of time. Needless to mention, hatred is also the stuff of – eminently ‘rational’ – responses to the twin deficits we conceptualized at the outset of this chapter: the reformist (by the state) and the disruptive (by nominally contentious organizations). Be that as it may, the additional point we wish to stress is that hatred can be activated quickly, by precipitating events that reveal intolerable levels of injustice, by suddenly imposed grievances and/or by excessively coercive conduct on the part of the police. As some of our chapters analyzing riots in the Paris suburbs by disenfranchised immigrant youths show, hatred can be ignited into collective violence by small events that begin an interactive chain that suspends normative definitions of civic quiescence. Della Porta’s (1995) study of radical groups shows that hatred can be encouraged by ideological discourse, compounded by intense interaction under pressure of repression. Under these circumstances, and free of its ethnic dimension, hatred is a close cousin to resentment insofar as class inequality and/or social injustice can fester as long-term negative predispositions with a strong emotional content. Moreover, class-based negative affect is often compounded by state repression. Della Porta (1995) observes that police beatings, imprisonment and routine brutality against Italian and German radical groups fomented their hatred of the repressive ‘fascist’ state, which was used to justify acts of revolutionary anti-state violence. Under such conditions, long-term hatred quickly becomes volatile, passion-fuelled (though, in the circumstances, ‘rational’) rage, especially when taken into the streets and submitted to pressures of police confrontation and counter-movement groups. The three chapters analysing the Greek December 2008 (by Kotronaki and Seferiades, Kanellopoulos, and Lountos) nicely capture the simmering emotions that were easily turned to violence.

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Though long-term sentiments, however, hatred and resentment come and go in daily experience. They do not permeate all aspects of social life, but are situationally activated in the context of protest. Compounding their effect and, we suggest, fuelling the propensity to violence, are what Jasper (1998) calls reactive emotions, those few involuntary and rapid responses that arise given appropriate external stimuli. Paul Ekman (1973) identified six universal facial expressions that can serve as quick measures of six fundamental reflexive emotions – anger, fear, joy, surprise, sadness and disgust. It makes sense that all are relevant in various ways to different kinds of social movement (Goodwin et al. 2004: 416), but, regarding the intensification of collective violence, anger surely occupies first place. Especially when spurred by police coercion, anger can strongly shape the flow of protest and lead to violent outbursts. Among the other reflexive emotions, fear, of course, disperses crowds. As such, it is relevant in a negative sense to the police–protester interactions that often underlie collective violence. In other cases of violence (especially cynicism and callousness), joy may play a role. As already noted, however, emotions are not to be counterpoised to rationality. In the words of Goodwin et al. (ibid.), ‘We need to be wary of linking reflex emotions to irrationality. They can make us more alert and focused on the problem at hand, and therefore more rather than less rational.’ Other scholars, too, have challenged the link between irrationality and reflex emotions (Barbalet 1998), but the other side of the coin – which should not escape our attention – is that strong physiological reactions may focus attention and heighten awareness in ways that are not conducive to rational behaviour in a complex society. Rebutting the view that emotions are eo ipso irrational does not imply that they are necessarily strategically propitious. 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 cases 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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A contemporaneous and influential study of tactics was Gamson’s (1990 [1975]) analysis of numerous ‘challenging groups’ in the US. He found that, among other factors such as influential allies and resources, the use of disruptive and militant tactics seemed instrumental in achieving movement goals. Taking these two studies together, and recognizing that there are many kinds of militant tactic of which violence is only one, it is useful to consider the inference that, if disruption is effective, then the most disruptive tactics – property damage and attacks on persons – strategically used, may be even more so. Gamson’s logic was that disruption (hence, presumably, also violence) is effective because it gets the attention of policy makers. But his study spanned over a century’s data on challenging groups and their outcomes, and it is worth posing the additional question whether the effects of violent tactics would be much the same today as they were 50 or 100 years ago. One thing that has changed is how the mass media today are key players in transmitting the spectacle of challenge and response, and how the bar seems to be continually rising for what is considered a dramatic and poignant challenge. Social movements can ‘make news by making noise’ argued Thrall (2006: 417). Observing the trends some 30 years ago, however, Gitlin (1980: 182) noted that, although simple sit-ins or picket lines made the newspapers in 1965, ‘it took teargas and bloodied heads to make headlines in 1968’. This was during the student anti-war protest cycle in the US, and a curve plotting the threshold of media attention became quite steep during those years. McCarthy, McPhail and Smith (1996) examined a wide variety of media coverage and showed that large numbers, creativity and radical actions in combination – including property damage – are predictors of newspaper coverage. The other side of the coin regarding violent tactics is that they run the risk of alienating public opinion, especially when demonized by media coverage. Members of bystander public and uncommitted groups comprise a movement’s pool of potential allies, and a movement must be selective in its use of violence so as not to scare away future adherents. Moreover, because movements are complex networks of groups, organizations and individuals, there may be a few actors sharing the same movement umbrella who advocate radical actions while the majority may be tactically moderate. Protest and campaign organizers must balance the needs of various groups that make up a movement with the long-term goals, first, of maintaining membership, and second, of achieving policy change. Soule and Earl’s US study shows a steady decline in property damage and violence in protests after 1967, when 33 per cent of protests were violent and 21 per cent caused property damage (Soule and Earl 2005: 353). By 1986, fewer than 10 per cent of protests were violent and 2 per cent caused property damage. Nowadays, of course, this is changing – and several chapters in the volume indicate why and how. Especially strategic thinkers in large movements may take advantage of the ‘radical-flank effect’. By leaving more militant and/or violence-prone groups – the anarchist Black Bloc, for example – to pursue their radical tactics, the overall result for the movement may be ‘greater responsiveness to the claims

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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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Tilly casts a wide net in his consideration of collective violence, including forms as varied as cowboy brawls, gang violence, interethnic aggression and genocide, insurgencies, and revolutions. Moreover, as a way to accomplish this, he introduces several terms that transcend these familiar forms of violence. No longer do we speak of riots, property destruction, insurrections, terrorism, hostile outbursts; but rather opportunism, scattered attacks, broken negotiations, and coordinated destruction, among others. The rationale for a new typology is that the old terms carry conceptual biases that can inhibit the identification of generalizable processes that work across all types of violence. Tilly’s new categories vary on two dimensions: (1) the degree of coordination among violent social actors; and (2) the degree of ‘salience of violence to the act’, which roughly refers to the degree to which violence defines the action. Generally, more coordination among perpetrators means more destruction, injury and death, as in civil wars and revolutions. This volume’s focus places in abeyance certain forms of collective violence in Tilly’s typology such as brawls (street fights and sporting event free-for-alls) and – at the other end of the spectrum – coordinated destruction (civil wars, insurrections, organized terrorism and genocide). Most of our chapters are analyses of collective violence as an outgrowth of social movement and/or protest campaign mobilization, a more narrow focus than Tilly’s. We are interested in familiar intermediate forms that are direct products and/or manifestations of protest (such as what Kotronaki and Seferiades call ‘insurrectionary collective action’, or what Diani in his chapter attempts to conceptualize as a whole). Here, two of Tilly’s categories appear to be particularly relevant. First, scattered attacks describe a common form that occurs as a by-product of and/or in conjunction with small-scale non-violent action (regime opposition, or policy protests) such as when groups participating in a march strike out violently to make their claims or register discontent. The Black Bloc violence at anti-IMF and anti-WTO protests is a case in point. The key is that it was always part of their strategy to do so (high salience of violence for the action) and that the violence is carried out by one group, not a coordinated effort among many participating actors in the protests (low coordination). Property destruction, such as when Earth First militants torch a sales lot of SUVs is another example. Such scattered attacks are usually strategic actions, and therefore planned and instrumentally rational. Within the environmental movement network considered in its entirety, interaction between a group or groups strategically using violence and non-violent groups is restricted. Second, broken negotiations, in our reading, refer to the common situation in which non-violent protests become violent in their entirety, such as when the luxury hotels in Bangkok or Athens are attacked as a reflection of the situational nonresponsiveness on the part of authorities and the – more structural – accumulation of the reform and disruptive deficits. Here, violence is an organic product of claim making and the perception that authorities (and the political system as a whole – including institutionalized ‘contentious actors’) are not responsive, and not the tactic of a specific group. The banlieue riots analyzed by della Porta and Gbikpi in Chapter 7 fall into this category, with the implication that authorities and community

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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 carry 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 frustration– aggression 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.

Chapter 2

Protest Movements and Violence Frances Fox Piven

Violence often is a critical factor in the emergence, development and success or failure of social movements. But we have for some time not given it the attention it merits. American scholars in particular have been reluctant to acknowledge the role of violence. To be sure, it has not always been so. Indeed, until the mid-twentieth century, those scholars who paid attention to collective action took for granted that mass protests were associated with violence or the threat of violence, and generally explained the association by attributing an irrational and explosive rage or frustration to the participants. The turbulence of the 1960s, both in developed industrial countries and in the southern hemisphere, propelled more scholars to turn their attention to protest movements, and when they did they generally discarded the nineteenth-century paradigm and its attributions of irrationality to the movement. Curiously, however, the more recent American work neglected rioting, and tended generally to shrink from even acknowledging the violence that often accompanies protest movements (or else attributed such violence as occurred to the authorities). This tendency can be explained. It reflects the identification and sympathy of many of those who studied collective action with a number of the protest movements of the twentieth century, and especially with some of the movements in Europe and North America. In the United States, this particularly meant identification with the civil rights movement, known of course for its public profession of a commitment to non-violence.1 But, obviously, not all movements command our sympathies. The recent emergence of the Tea Party movement in the United States, a movement that is overwhelmingly white, older and better off than the population, as well as shockingly misinformed, reminds us of what Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in American politics, and his characterization of many American popular movements as backward-looking and illiberal (Hofstadter 1948; Hofstadter and Wallace 1971; see also Brown 2006). In any case, sympathies aside, the effort to justify protest movements by ignoring the violence with which protest is associated is a mistake, because the 1  In fact, although they are usually ignored excluded from the movement by definitional fiat, I think the civil rights movement broadly considered should include the riots that broke out in the cities, and the unaffiliated armed self-defense teams that formed among black farmers in the south. Mike Miller (2006) thinks of non-violence as a tactic rather than a philosophy of the civil rights movement.

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Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State

largely unexamined axiom that movements are non-violent distorts our analysis. Episodes of rioting or other forms of collective violence are simply excluded from study by definition. Think, for example, of Charles Tilly’s influential characterization of the mass demonstration as an assembly of people intending to display their worthiness, unity, numerous numbers and commitment, or “WUNC” (e.g., Tilly 2003). In other words, the crowd is intent on appealing to the authorities by displaying their own merits and the merits of their cause. In later work, Tilly paid more attention to violence, although he never modified his view of the demonstration (see Tilly 2003). There are demonstrations of this sort, of course, particularly during electoral campaigns. But from time immemorial the aggregation of people in the crowd or the mob has also implied the threat of violence. To deny this is simply to ignore historical experience. The long history of protest movements is in fact mainly the history of mobs and riots. Only think of the history of labor struggles, which typically included strikes and the accompanying vigilante actions by both employers and workers, by hired goons on the one side and direct attacks by workers on property on the other side. The anarchist Voltairine De Cleyre, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, explains: Now everybody knows that a strike of any size means violence. No matter what any one’s ethical preference for peace may be, he knows it will not be peaceful. If it’s a telegraph strike, it means cutting wires and poles, and getting fake scabs in to spoil the instruments. If it is a steel rolling mill strike, it means beating up the scabs, breaking the windows, setting the gauges wrong, and ruining the expensive rollers together with tons and tons of material. If it’s a miner’s strike, it means destroying tracks and bridges, and blowing up mills. If it is a garment workers’ strike, it means having an unaccountable fire, getting a volley of stones through an apparently inaccessible window, or possibly a brickbat on the manufacturer’s own head. If it’s a street-car strike, it means tracks torn up or barricaded with the contents of ash-carts and slop-carts, with overturned wagons or stolen fences, it means smashed or incinerated cars and turned switches. If it is a system federation strike, it means ‘dead’ engines, wild engines, derailed freights, and stalled trains. If it is a building trades strike, it means dynamited structures. And always, everywhere, all the time, fights between strike-breakers and scabs against strikers and strike-sympathizers, between People and Police. On the side of the bosses, it means searchlights, electric wires, stockades, bullpens, detectives and provocative agents, violent kidnapping and deportation, and every device they can conceive […] besides the ultimate invocation of police, militia, State constabulary, and federal troops. Everybody knows this; everybody smiles when union officials protest their organizations to be peaceful and law-abiding, because everybody knows they are lying. They know that violence is used, both secretly and openly; and they

Protest Movements and Violence

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know it is used because the strikers cannot do any other way, without giving up the fight at once. (DeCleyre 1912: 111)

The historical meaning of the picket line, of the massing of workers at the entrance of the struck factory or mine, was to physically intimidate any workers or “scabs” who were ready to take the place of the strikers, and thus break the strike. We forget this history because the picket line is now so closely regulated—only so many pickets are allowed, they must march at prescribed intervals from each other, and they must keep moving—that we treat the picket line as merely a form of speech. Or think of the sit-down strike, a tactic recurrently rediscovered by workers when they are mobilized in protest against their employers, for the simple reasons that it makes so much sense. The occupation of the workplace both threatens capitalist property and makes it difficult or impossible to resume production. The widespread use of this tactic by American workers in the 1930s led to bouts of fierce conflict that are best described as local civil wars. And the tactic is being used again today, as when French workers occupy a plant and threaten to detonate explosives if their demands are not met (e.g., see Gall 2010; Shantz 2010). In the United States, in 2009, workers threatened by lay-offs occupied the Republic Door and Window company, demanding the compensation they were owed. Not only did they move President Barack Obama to tell the country that the workers were right in their actions, but the bank that owned the company reversed the lay-offs. To acknowledge and analyze the political significance of the actual or threatened violence that can accompany protest movements, we need to begin with definitions. It is customary to define violence as the destruction of things or human bodies.2 (I should note, however, that some analysts restrict the use of the term to aggression against people. See Graber 2001.) However, such destructive behavior is so widespread, and occurs under such varying circumstances, that it should be considered simply a human capacity that can be activated by all sorts of conditions, an omnipresent possibility in human communities. In this sense, violence is like the human capacity for caring or helping or loving, a capacity that can be tapped by many diverse conditions.3 Young men hanging on the street mug passers-by virtually everywhere, and under some conditions they mobilize in crowds and go on looting expeditions, or they join in street fights that used to be called rumbles or gang wars. The lynching of blacks was routine in the American south, a ritualized form of violence where the public murder of the targeted black became a town holiday, complete with souvenirs of the event. Lynching can be understood as a crucial element in the system of terror by which 2  Kalyvas (2006) comments that “violence is a conceptual minefield” but goes on to define it at “a very basic level” as “the deliberate infliction of harm on people.” Keane (2004) similarly defines violence as “the more or less intended, direct but unwanted physical interference by groups and/or individuals with the bodies of others […]” Nieberg (1962). 3  “We May Be Born With an Urge to Help,” is the title of a New York Times article by Nicholas Wade (2009) describing a study of very young infants and chimpanzees.

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black people were subjugated and exploited. However, as I will explain below, that rationalistic “function” of lynching does not fully explain the culture of violence to which it was central. Lynching as a regular feature of the social system was perhaps distinctive to the American South, but the capacities for violence on which it drew were not. Soccer crowds rampage and attack. Soldiers rape, and so do men who are courting the women who become their victims. And gangster capitalists deploy formal and informal security forces whose specialty is brutality in Niger (JoabPeterside and Zalik 2008), Darfur, Zimbabwe and Mexico. Much of the time this capacity for violence is restrained, held in check or channeled into ritual forms, including religious forms. However, when the complex web of relationships, norms, and coercive controls that ordinarily restrains or channels the human capacity for violence is torn or broken by the dislocation that accompanies crop failures or wars or massive economic change, violence may be more likely. Perhaps that is why neoliberal globalization brought escalating violence in its wake.4 On the other hand, it is also the case that accusations of violence are often made in response to what are in fact nonviolent forms of collective action. Only remember how the weavers assembling at Peterloo in the early nineteenth century were mowed down because of the very fact that their assemblage could be defined as a violent threat. My point for now is that, if violence is an elemental human capacity and latent in all sorts of human undertakings, we have to be skeptical of efforts to study violence in general. The variety of precipitating conditions is reflected in the variety of theoretical approaches invoked to explain violence, including “micro-explanations that focus on individual frustration, social-structural explanations that focus on inequality in society and the role of institutions, social classes, cultural systems, critical theories, and the like; as well as a mixture of individual psychological factors and the nature of the political system” (Conteh-Morgan 2004). For these reasons I want to concentrate on explaining the violence that occurs as a recurrent element of movement strategy. But before I turn to violence as an element in movement strategy, a tactic intended to enhance or protect movement power, I have to say a word about the dark underside of the violence that social movements can generate. Violence can indeed become a force in its own right, generating ideas and motivations that leave further and further behind any rational calculus of achieving the goals of the movement. One obvious pattern is that violence spurs what Jared Diamond calls “the thirst for vengeance,” which he asserts is “among the strongest of human emotions” (Diamond 2008). And if the desire for retribution is acted upon, cycles of violent retribution are set in motion that may have little to do with any political goals. Rather it is participation in the violence and the “endless cycles of retaliation” that become the motive. 4  On collective protest and violence in response to neo-liberal structural adjustment programmes, see John Walton (1998). On the spread of global markets and ethnic conflict, see Chua (2004). On the role of geographical displacement in nurturing terrorism, see Sageman (2008)

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The Herrin Massacre that occurred in Illinois in 1922 illustrates this transformation. On April 1, 1922, soft coal miners across the nation went on strike. The local union in Herrin, Illinois allowed the owner of a strip mine to continue mining coal on condition that he did not ship it. By June, the owner was impatient, and he fired the union miners and brought in scabs and armed guards. The union men responded by looting the local hardware store to get guns, surrounding the mine and beginning to shoot. Early on June 22, the scabs surrendered to the promise that they would be escorted safely out of the county. So far, the use of violence to protect the strike power is familiar. But as the scabs marched away from the site “A slaughter began. Men were told to run and then were shot at. Some were tied together and shot when they fell, some had their throats slit, some were hanged. In all, nineteen men were murdered” (Hofstadter and Wallace 1971: 169–75). Stathys Kalyvas’s discussion (2006: ch. 3) of the process by which civil war leads to “barbarism” speaks to this process by which violence escapes rational political motive. Merely the exposure to violent conflicts, he says, brutalizes people, and the brutalization continues because violent conflicts can also remove social controls, lower the cost of violence, bring people to prominence with a propensity for violence, and create vested interests in violent skills. “All these mechanisms,” he says, “converge to generate a culture of lawlessness and violence that can be self-sustaining” (2006: 58). Michael Taussig (2002) calls the culture of lawlessness and violence the culture of terror. He is not writing about social movements or civil war, but about the pervasive brutality of the colonizers in the Putumayo valley of the Amazon basin. The ostensible goal was to harvest rubber, and ostensibly the culture of terror reflected the search for profits and the need to control labor. But behind those goals were “intricately constructed long-standing logics of meaning—structures of feeling—whose basis lies in a symbolic world and not in one of rationalism.” The catalog of horrors perpetrated by the rubber managers and their Indian guards is shocking. But my point here is not the horrors, but that the culture of terror itself generated the driving motives of men who “had lost all sight or sense of rubbergathering” (Taussig 2002: 219).5 Or consider again the American lynching: To kill the victim was not enough; the execution became public theater, a participatory ritual of torture and death, a voyeuristic spectacle prolonged as long as possible (once for seven hours) for the benefit of the crowd. Newspapers on a number of occasions announced in advance the time and place of a lynching, special ‘excursion’ trains transported spectators to the scene, employers sometimes released their workers to attend, parents sent notes to school asking teachers to excuse their children for the event, and entire families attended,

5  For a gripping fictional account of such a “culture of terror” in a similar setting, see Traven (1952).

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Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State the children hoisted on their parents’ shoulders to miss none of the action and accompanying festivities. (Litwak: 2004)

My focus on the strategic use of violence to defend or enhance movement power does not mean that I dismiss hatred, vengeance, anxiety and other emotionally propelling causes of violence. And although Gurr (2000) shows that violent protest episodes increased from 1945 to 1999, I am not arguing that protest movements always generate violence. They do not. Koopmans’s data on Germany (1995) shows that the overwhelming majority of protest events did not entail collective violence. And I also do not think that the strategic view of violence in collective action that I propose is exhaustive. People become aggressive and destructive for expressive reasons as well, and the violent actions undertaken for strategic reasons by some may be primarily expressive for others. I am simply arguing that a strategic perspective gives us insight and part of an explanation of episodes of collective violence. This requires, of course, that we also regard movements as strategic, at least in part. Collective protests, whatever else they may also be, are deliberate efforts at political change. Several strategic uses of violence by movements in the pursuit of movement goals seem to me evident. First, violence can be deployed to recruit adherents. Violent acts can in a sense be inspirational, because they reveal the vulnerability of the opposition, and the potential power of the movement insurgents. Gay Seidman writes, for example, about the importance of even the limited violence undertaken by the African National Congress because the display of military capacity by the insurgents, by showing that the apartheid regime was vulnerable, inspired courage and hope among potential recruits (Seidman 1994). To be sure, for decades after its founding in 1910, the ANC had remained committed to nonviolence. But escalating repression by the regime was matched by the emergence of armed struggle by the movement of Umkhonto we Sizwe that Nelson Mandela, still in prison, refused to denounce (Ash 2009). Vincent Boudreau makes a similar argument about the usefulness for recruitment of movement violence in Southeast Asia (Boudreau 2008). And the theatricality of the kidnapping exploits of the Tupamaros in South America seemed to be similarly intended as a way of communicating and recruiting support for the insurgents. In all such instances, violence generates drama, a symbolic show of power by the movement, and it may invoke or even create sacred myths. When the American abolitionist John Brown launched his bloody raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, the point was not in the direct effect of capturing the arsenal but rather the hope that the spectacular feat and the availability of arms that resulted would inspire a massive rising of slaves across the South. In this, the attack failed dismally. Still, John Brown and his violent exploits became an inspirational myth, captured in the refrain that became the hymn of the abolitionists: “John Brown’s body lies amoldering in the ground, but his truth goes marching on.” Second, violence can be deployed in direct physical assaults against a target group, or against the symbols that represent it. This is the violence that typifies

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the action of the rioting crowd or, in an earlier language, the mob, and it is often directed against property rather than persons. The crowd sometimes seeks immediate material gain, or sometimes it shows its hostility by doing damage that expresses the crowd’s grievances. The food riots that spread across Europe in the eighteenth century were assaults of this kind, as are episodes of mob looting generally. The pulling down of the houses of wealthy Tories in the period leading to the American Revolution combined the immediate rewards of goods and alcohol, with the satisfaction of destroying the property of the enemy. The goal is tangible and immediate, and the action is direct, but it is no less strategic for those reasons. Third, violent encounters may be staged to win the support of outsiders. The conflict between movement insurgents, the groups that oppose them, and governmental authorities is after all played out before an audience of the lessinvolved public, and the display of violence may sway the audience to sympathize with one side or the other. The movement may stand to gain from this drama if it can precipitate violence by others of which the public disapproves. Sometimes, indeed, the movement may inflict violence on itself, as when Irish Republican Army adherents, or the student protestors in Tiananmen Square, engaged in the drama of the public hunger strike, thus demonstrating the intensity of their own commitment, and the callousness of their opponents. The American civil rights movement relied on a scenario that depicted movement participants as Christ-like, always ready to turn the other cheek in response to violent assaults (including beatings, high-powered hoses, and menacing dogs) by enraged white Southerners. But the movement was not simply the victim of this violence. Rather it sought repeatedly to provoke the attacks. Between 1961 and 1965, instances of black protest coupled with white violence include repeated mob attacks on freedom riders (1961); white riots in reaction to the integration of Ole Miss (1962); the highly-publicized use of police dogs and fire hoses against demonstrators in Birmingham as well as the use of similar tactics in Danville, Savannah and Plaquemine, LA, later that year; the Klan instigated violence during SCLC protests in St Augustine and the deaths of Freedom Summer participants in Mississippi (1964); and violence surrounding the community-wide campaign in Selma (1965) (Santoro 2008: 1407). Finally, and this is my main argument, violence has often been crucial in the defense of the distinctive source of movement power, the ability to refuse obedience to the rules of dominant institutions.6 This assertion directly contradicts Hannah Arendt’s well-known argument that “[p]ower and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent” (Arendt 1969: ch. 1). In fact, the power sources of protest movements are not mainly in the display of WUNC—worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment, with its implication of electoral influence. Rather, movements exercise leverage when they can mobilize the withdrawal of cooperation in major institutions of the society. Movements pursue their goals in all sorts of other ways, of course. They march and proclaim 6  For the development of this argument see Piven (2006, 2008).

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and petition and denounce. But they are most effective when they succeed in persuading numbers of people to defy some of the rules that ensure cooperation in institutionalized social life. The ensuing blockages, slowdowns or breakdowns may give the movement a measure of power. In other words, movement power is the strike power writ large.7 This kind of disruptive power is real and threatening, and it also typically requires that movement participants break the rules that govern their usual institutional roles (Piven and Cloward 2005). The most obvious example is the labor strike, whether aimed at the bosses or at other workers perceived to be ratecutters or strike-breakers. But so is a student strike the refusal to participate in the regular routine of the school or the university. When American soldiers in Vietnam refused to participate in assigned missions, or indeed when any army suffers desertions or the tacit resistance of foot draggers they are exercising disruptive power. A highway blockade or a building occupation may be similarly disruptive, as is mass looting, or milk spillages by farmers who refuse to send their product to market. The result is institutional disruption with ramifying consequences, and the violence that often ensues should be understood as an effort on the one side to repress the disruptive behavior, and on the other to defend the withdrawal and refusal that causes the disruption. Because the institutional disruption discomfits many groups, and also because the behavior that causes the disruption breaks rules, it is likely to precipitate repressive violence by antagonists or by the authorities that can more readily be legitimated because the disruptors are breaking rules. To defend its disruptive power, the movement may try to counter repressive violence with its own violence. The history of the American labor movement provides endless instances of the use of violence, violence by employers and government in the effort to end a strike, and violence by strikers to protect their strike and the power it yields. The strikes and sit-down strikes of the 1930s are good examples. In 1933, early in the battle for unionization in the auto industry, the workers actually formed wrecking crews to carry out hit and run raids on Detroit plants (Bernstein 1970: 97). But, although violence played an important ancillary role, it was not violence alone but violence in defense of the leverage of the strike that, in the words of the union newspaper, “transformed wage slaves into men” Adamic 1936: 654). The potential power of the strike was that it halted production and profits. And if the workers also occupied the plant they not only halted production but prevented the use of the plant by replacement workers, and also held the company’s property as hostage to the resolution of the strike. And all sides used violence, in the effort to put an end to the strikes and sit-downs, or in the effort to defend them.

7  This understanding of popular power has been touched on by a number of authors besides me, although, as Womack has argued, it is an understanding of power that remains elusive. See for example Sharp (1973: ch. 1) and Womack (2005).

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Strikes and sit-downs could and were defeated by the deployment of company guards and law enforcement officers. In February of 1936 when Goodyear Tire and Rubber discharged 137 workers, a mass walk-out by other workers ensued. Goodyear called up 150 law enforcement officers to reopen the plant. In response 5,000 menacing workers faced down the officers, and Goodyear agreed not only to reinstate the fired workers, but to a number of other concessions. Before the end of 1936 there were 52 additional sit-downs, accompanied by physical assaults by the workers. Similar threats of violence, together with the less-than-lethal use of violence, accompanied the strikes the next year by automobile workers. Indeed, before the companies recognized the automobile workers union, and just in the period between March and June 1937, there were 170 sit-downs in the plants. Jim Pope (2006) tells the story of what became known as “The Battle of the Running Bulls”: On January 11, 1937, police battled strikers for several hours at Flint Fisher Body No. 2. […] The police used firearms and tear gas against the strikers, who retaliated by dousing the officers with a fire hose and bombarding them with a variety of projectiles including two-pound automobile door hinges. Fourteen strikers and supporters were wounded, mostly by gunshot, and eleven officers, including Sheriff Wolcott suffered injuries, mostly head wounds from hurled objects.8

Pope thinks that implicit in the widespread walkouts and sit-downs was an effort by workers to unilaterally establish and enforce a new system of rules regulating production. In this they did not succeed or, more accurately, they did not fully succeed. But they won significant concessions nevertheless, albeit in the form that Pope calls “bureaucratic contractualism.” A Goodyear report on the sit-downs concluded that “In most instances resumption of production has been accomplished only by substantial concessions on the part of management in the interest of peace and continuing production during the present peak period” (Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. 1936, cited in Pope 2006: 54). And the automobile strikes and sitdowns resulted in the first collective bargaining agreements in the industry. Conclusion All of which is to say that violence and the threat of violence are complexly intertwined with the efforts of social movements to exercise power, and to study movement power. We need also to study movement violence, both the violence used against them, and the violence with which movements respond. To be sure, the apostles of non-violence are indeed half right. 8  See also Fine (1969).

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People power in the twentieth century did not grow out of the barrel of a gun. It removed rulers who believed that violence was power, by acting to dissolve their real source of power: the consent or acquiescence of the people they had tried to subordinate. When unjust laws were no longer obeyed, when commerce stopped because people no longer worked, when public services could no longer function, and when armies were no longer feared, the violence that governments could use no longer mattered—their power to make people comply had disappeared (Ackerman and Duval 2005: 505). Mass defiance is indeed the great, untapped source of popular power on which movements draw. And when unjust laws are disobeyed, commerce halts, and services no longer function, the great utopian movement of the future may be unfolding. But all our experience tells us that the unfolding is not likely to be peaceful.

Chapter 3

The Outcomes of Political Violence: Ethical, Theoretical and Methodological Challenges Lorenzo Bosi and Marco Giugni

In 2009, a young Italian Muslim woman recalled her experiences at school, stating: There was never enough discussion in class about intercultural issues, but after 9/11 many controversies about what was happening started to emerge. So also in our class you could see that people were starting to talk about what foreigners do, about what they come to do here, and about what Islam really is. From that moment on, many schools have started to work on intercultural issues. (Bosi and della Porta 2010: 18)

The Italian educational system has been often criticized for the absence of intercultural approaches and its strong Catholic biases against other religions (Queirolo Palmas 2006). Paradoxically, this seems to have improved after the events of September 11. As the quote shows, a young generation of Muslims in Italy, while explicitly condemning political violence and terrorism, felt somehow “empowered” by 9/11 because it gave an explicit sign that they should be counted and listened to. This was one, unanticipated consequence of political violence. Whether unanticipated, threatened, or actual, political violence is a particular confrontational repertoire aimed at inflicting material damage to individuals and/ or property with the purpose of influencing audiences for political purposes.1 While violence is not an intrinsic feature of contentious politics (McAdam et al. 2001), neither is it rare—particularly in today’s world. Contentious politics can include different forms of violence such as rioting, attacks on property, sabotage, squatting, bombing buildings, bodily assaults, kidnapping, public selfimmolation, hunger strikes, murders, suicide attacks, to mention only a few. These radical forms of contentious politics may be called either terrorism or resistance, “depending on the circumstances and who is doing the naming” (Steinhoff and Zwerman 2008: 213). Also, violence is culture-dependent in that what is violent for one society can be perceived as an accepted, non-violent tactic in another, or in another historical period. Also, technological change can challenge the definition of violence. So-called “hactivism” strategically damages or attacks virtual property 1  We acknowledge the importance of state or state-sponsored violence as an object of research, but this chapter focuses mainly on non-state actors as perpetuators of violence.

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(e.g., hacking, defacing web pages, email floods, viruses and worms, and data theft or destruction). Although it does not inflict material destruction characteristic of older forms of protest violence, it is still perceived as violent action (Jordan 2002). Thus, when we deal with political violence, much depends on how it is perceived, received and, eventually, how much reaction it invites. It is obviously context dependent. In this chapter we focus specifically on the outcomes of political violence, especially violence committed by armed groups. The literature on political violence and terrorism has grown massively since 9/11, but has so far been mostly silent about outcomes (Abrahms 2006, 2008; Crenshaw 1983; Gurr 1988). This is even more striking if we consider that the very purpose of the vast majority of tactical political violence is precisely to elicit reactions from the state. Although states and state agents are the most common targets of armed groups, there are other targets, such as private enterprises and corporations, as in the case of the Red Brigades (della Porta 1995) or the Animal Liberation Front (Lutz and Lutz 2006). Sometimes political violence may even express its concerns indirectly, by targeting one institution but aiming to affect another—what social movement scholars call “a proxy target” (Walker et al. 2008). Tourism, which has suffered in different armed conflicts from attacks by armed groups that were indirectly targeting this sector in order to influence state policies, is a clear example of that (Drakos and Kutan 2003). Whether political violence has an impact or not is important for governments and the general public, but also for the analysts of political violence as its impact is critical to understanding its emergence, uses and spread both across time and across places. Ethical issues and disagreement on how we can measure political violence outcomes at the methodological level seem to have hindered systematic investigation and theoretical developments in this important research area. Our intention in this chapter is to stimulate further work on the outcomes of political violence.2 First, we focus on the range of potential outcomes associated with political violence. Second, we briefly review the difficulties of research on the outcomes of political violence. Third, we compare non-violent and violent action, from the less extreme to the more extreme, and ask which is more likely to be successful and under which conditions. We conclude by underlining some avenues for further research and how research on political violence contributes as well to the social movement literature, particularly by enriching the relatively scant attention it has paid to violent forms of political action. Throughout, we draw on empirical examples obtained from the literature on contentious politics.

2  Throughout, we use the terms “outcomes,” “effects,” “impacts” and “consequences” interchangeably.

The Outcomes of Political Violence

31

Political Violence and its Possible Domains of Impact Drawing on the social movement literature (Bosi and Uba 2009; Giugni 2008),3 we point to two main distinctions to establish a typology of the possible outcomes of political violence. On one hand, we can distinguish between the political, cultural and biographical impacts of political violence. On the other hand, we distinguish between internal and external impacts, depending on whether they occur inside the armed groups or affect the external environment. If we combine these two dimensions, we obtain a typology that includes six main domains the effects of which are possible. Table 3.1 A typology of the outcomes of political violence Outcome dimensions

Internal

External

Political Power relations within armed group Policy, procedural, institutional Cultural Value change within armed group Public opinion and attitudes Biographical Life-course patterns of militants Life-course patterns of violence targets

An example of an internal political outcome is a change in the power relations within the armed group. Armed groups are not static actors possessing a single, fixed program and strategy to advance their armed campaigns. The dynamic of internal power relations may induce competition among members of the same armed group. Competition for influence over the support base and the sectors of public opinion that the armed group wishes to influence is an ongoing process. Certain factions may disengage or deradicalize (Horgan 2008; White 2010; Bosi and della Porta, forthcoming), leaving the armed group in the hands of other cohorts and leading to changes in the group’s trajectory because of modifications in the group’s composition. Such changes can lead to either radicalization of action repertoires or to moderation, as when militant groups institutionalize into political parties. The case of the armed group Movimento 19 de Abril (M-19), in Columbia, is a good example of this. In 1990 it reorganized itself in the Alianza Democratica and contested its first parliamentary elections. Internal splits, however, usually lead to further radicalization, as was the case of the IRA in Northern Ireland during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Subsequently, the Provisional IRA (PIRA) and the Official IRA battled for the support of the broader republican constituency, their competition leading to further radicalization. Once the radicalization process

3  For more on what has been done regarding social movements outcomes as well as on who is working in the field today, see http://www2.statsvet.uu.se/moveout.

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begins, it usually becomes more difficult to disengage from armed activism, as the case of the Official IRA clearly shows (Rekawek 2008). External political effects are outcomes that alter the political environment in some way. They can include substantive political changes (i.e., alteration of decision-making processes), especially in the state’s provision of economic goods and changes in the legal rights of the armed groups’ constituencies (the Northern Ireland case is particularly interesting here, see Schmidt 2010), or changes in the political institutions (e.g., the decolonization of Cyprus or Algeria where colonial power’s departure led to the establishment of new institutions), or the violent campaigns by right-wing groups in Italy and Germany after World War I that established authoritarian fascist regimes there (see Chapter 7 in this volume). Fundamental for our thinking about outcomes are indications that governments would have ignored the political demands of the armed groups’ larger constituency without the use of political violence. Obviously, armed groups might also invoke negative external impacts. The response to radicalization can take the form of strengthening armed groups’ opponents (see Chapter 7 in this volume), stabilizing the order they are challenging, provoking more physical repression (Crenshaw 2010), for example, as occurred with left-wing armed groups during the 1970s in Latin America, (Fagen 1992; Lutz and Lutz 2005) and in Europe (della Porta 1995), or fomenting death squads, paramilitaries, or vigilante groups, as occurred in Latin America or in Northern Ireland. Regarding Table 3.1’s category of cultural effects, internal cultural outcomes occur when political violence changes the views of participants, affecting in the long run the identity, frames of reference, and discourse of the larger constituency of the armed group. Political violence can create, stabilize, and reinforce militant identities, all internal solidarity-building effects. Within these groups, violence has the power to make militants see themselves as participants in something greater than themselves, or it may foster a mentality of embattlement, or impart selfaffirmation and achievement. It may be a way of reclaiming dignity and rejecting subordination, real or perceived. The use of political violence can increase communal identification and improved morale of discriminated communities. The example with which we have opened the chapter is illuminating here because the effect can be indirect and unintended. Regarding external cultural outcomes, influences on public opinion or on the attitudes of sectors of society apart from the subordinated minority also occur as a result of political violence. These include the social-psychological dimensions of culture embodied by individual values, beliefs, and meanings; sociological dimensions relating to cultural production and practices, in which culture is formed by signifiers and their meanings; and a broad dimension usually embraced by anthropologists and social historians, where culture frames the worldview and mentalités of communities (Earl 2004). Internal biographical impacts of political violence are profound effects on the life-course of individuals who have participated in political violent activities— effects that have been brought about at least in part owing to their involvement

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in those activities. Individuals who have been involved in armed groups, even at a lower level of commitment, seem to carry the consequences of involvement throughout their life. The armed activists’ perceptions of their past struggles are fundamental in determining which kind of effect armed activism has. In Northern Ireland former volunteers of the Provisional IRA had continued to espouse republican attitudes and remained active in contemporary forms of social and political activities (Shirlow et al. 2010). Several external biographical effects of political violence derive from lifecourse patterns of armed groups’ targets. One might look, for example, at how violent right-wing activism impacts on the biographies of Jewish people or ethnic minorities. There exists a literature on victims of violence that looks at how victims of hate crimes suffer trauma as a result of their victimization (Bjorgo 2003; McDevitt and Williamson 2003).4 Trauma studies have started to explore the short-term and long-term impacts of political violence. Another helpful literature examines how political violence affects the psychological well-being of children and young people (Browne 2003). Ethical, Theoretical and Methodological Challenges The study of political-violence outcomes has a number of ethical, theoretical and methodological challenges connected with it. Regarding ethical problems, although it is widely recognized that non-violent protests can produce important results, the same cannot be said of political violence and terrorism. Precisely because of the issues we will take up in this section, the handful of existing studies of politicalviolent outcomes have not given clear and unambiguous answers (see Abrahm 2006, 2008; Gurr 1980; Issac and Kelly 1981; Piven and Cloward 1993, Gamson 1990; Giugni 1998). Moreover, studying the outcomes of political violence raises dilemmas about ethical obligations felt by many scholars to use research for the public good, “giving rise to moralistic positions rather than scholarly discussions” (Bonanate 1978: 197). For example, Frances Fox Piven (see Chapter 2 in this volume) recently became the object of condemnation from the political right in the US for her essay, “Mobilizing the Jobless” (2011). In that essay, she discusses the effectiveness of militant action, “angry crowds, demonstrations, sit-ins, and unruly mobs,” in forcing political responses, which some took as a call for violent revolution.5 These kinds of issue pose important ethical challenges that researchers need to be aware of in order to navigate the divide between their values and the scientific credibility of their work (Polletta 2006). It may appear obvious, but nonetheless worthy of mention that this chapter’s exploration of political-violence 4  Research on the life-course patterns of political-violent targets could have important extensions and implications for the social movement literature. This is clearly a silent zone, where research is much needed in the future: the life-course patterns of movements’ targets. 5  We thank Hank Johnston for pointing this out to us.

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outcomes is not an attempt to legitimize this repertoire of action, but rather an attempt to systematize our thinking about its payoffs and its social effects in terms of politics, culture and individual biographies as part of the broader enterprise of social science. The study of the outcomes of political violence also faces conceptual and theoretical hurdles. The first and most obvious concerns the delimitation of the phenomena at hand, and providing operational definitions for them. This implies defining both terms of the concept: “violence” and “political.” On the one hand, there is no consensus in the literature about what is violence, nor do popular and commonsensical usages of the term help much, as they often include both physical as well as verbal acts. In this regard, we can follow Tilly (2003: 3), who defines collective violence as “episodic social interaction that immediately inflicts physical damage on persons and/or objects.” He also includes two further aspects in the definition: it “involves at least two perpetrators of damage” and it “results at least in part from coordination among persons who perform the damaging acts” (Tilly 2003: 3). Such violence is political to the extent that it is exerted strategically in order to change the existing distribution of resources or power relations. Finally, we need to be clear about the actors making use of political violence. The most basic distinction in this regard is between “members” and “challengers” (Tilly 1978). In other words, violent actions for political purposes may be made by the state actors as well as by actors who are excluded from the institutionalized political arenas (such as social movement organizations). Here we restrict our attention to the latter. Thus, as we stated at the outset, we conceive of political violence as the strategic use of physical force to influence several audiences and to be perpetrated by non-state actors for political purposes. Once we have defined our explanandum (political violence), we need to do the same with our explanans (outcomes). We have already discussed our six kinds of outcome (internal and external dimensions of political, cultural and biographical effects), but, harkening back to our opening quote, we also need to acknowledge that political violence might produce unintended or even perverse effects, referring to consequences that are not among the outlined goals of an armed group. Violence intended to modify the status quo can end up, for example, “involuntarily transforming itself in the opposite of what it wants: that is the restabilising instrument of the existing system” (Bonante 1979: 208). Public statements of armed groups are often just propaganda designed to mobilize support or claiming more than they hope to achieve in order to provide room for negotiations or compromise. As Abrahms (2008) suggests, it seems that often the real aim of small armed groups is not their political objectives but such goals as survival, recruitment and procuring funds. So, the major effects of armed groups often have little or nothing to do with their stated goals (Beck 2008), as it is often the case for social movements (Tilly 1999). Consider, for example, the public backlash or the support for paramilitary or vigilante groups that arise in response to armed groups. Or look at the long-term biographical consequences of armed militants, at the spillover effects from one

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armed group to the other across time (e.g., the Republican movement in Ireland) or across countries (e.g., the transnational diffusion of violent repertoires in the 1970s, Klimke 2010), and at the incorporation of new values, beliefs, discourses and alternative opinions. In other cases, for example, in the case of transnational terrorism such as the Algerian FIS, armed groups may aim to provoke a backlash that will cause the masses in regions hosting the domestic dispute to mobilize against their perceived oppressive state. Armed groups seldom have a direct impact. They derive most of the time any significant impact from the reaction of states and electorates to their actions. The issue of unintended and perverse effects is related to the problem of the often very narrowly defined concepts of success and failure. Success implies that the armed groups’ stated program is realized. Studying the outcomes that expand beyond stated goals is one way of taking into account not only unintended and perverse effects, but also goal adaptation (armed groups might adapt their goals to changing conditions), time reference and effect stability (the impact of armed groups might be delayed or temporary), and interrelated effects (different kinds of effects of armed groups might influence each other). Methodological obstacles to studying political-violence outcomes mirror those of studying social movement outcomes. The dilemma of causal attribution, referring to the cause and effect relationship between an observed change and its supposed causes, is perhaps the most fundamental problem in this field of research. With regard to the study of political-violence consequences, the difficulty lies in proving that a particular change, such as the revision of legislation, is actually the result of a violent repertoire and not something else. Can we be sure that the change would not have occurred without violence? One way to inquire into the causal effects of political violence is to compare them with non-violent actions typical of social movement protest. A sort of counterfactual reasoning may be applied here: Would a movement (or a group) be more or less successful by acting violently? What are “value-added” dimensions of political violence with respect to non-violent actions? Are outcomes longer lasting, and for what kinds of claim and demand? The literature on social movements does not provide consistent answers to these questions. Much work on the effectiveness of disruptive protest, rioting, and political violence was done back in the 1970s in the aftermath of the urban riots of the 1960s in the United States. These studies often found different results, sometimes pointing to the ineffectiveness of violence, but other times showing its usefulness (see Gurr 1980; Isaac and Kelly 1981; Piven and Cloward 1993 for reviews). One of the main thrusts of early work was to assess the extent to which disruptive movements more successful than moderate ones (Giugni 1998). Gamson (1990), for example, found the use of radical and violent tactics to be associated with success (while being the target of violence made it more difficult). More recent studies have found little evidence that political violence is effective (Abrahms 2006, 2008). These studies rarely explore the effects of types of violence or varying levels of violence. Does categorical terrorism (Goodwin 2006) have the same effects as guerrilla-type

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violence? Do impacts differ in relation to religious, social revolutionary, right-wing, or ethnonational violence? Regarding the internal consequences of our typology, once an armed group has made use of violence, it is plausible that returning to peaceful tactics is difficult, especially if the violent action was perceived as successful and/or if the police intensify their targeting of the group. However, this is likely to depend much on who is the initiator of the violence. Although it is not always easy to establish who turned violent first, we can say that if the violence was started by the armed group as a strategic choice, then a path-dependency effect would be at work to make it more difficult to refrain from using it again. In the most extreme case, a given organization or group steps over the line of legality and eventually goes underground, a situation where escape is very difficult (della Porta 1995). In contrast, if the (legitimate) violence is started by the state through repression, then a political group prone to violent tactics is more a recipient than a perpetrator of violence and it is therefore easier to refrain from adopting such tactics in future actions. Following recent work on the consequences of social movements, we can stress two important contextual factors upon which the outcomes of political violence are contingent. The first and most obvious are the political opportunity structures characterizing a given country or place where political violence takes place. Just as it constrains the political consequences of social movements and protest activities in general (Amenta et al. 1992; Giugni 2004), political opportunity structures are likely to play a decisive role for the outcomes of political violence. In particular, the power alignments within the institutional arenas (government, parliament) may prove crucial to determine whether a violent action is successful or not. Reactions by political authorities are likely to differ according to the configuration of power among institutional actors. The second important contextual factor is public opinion. How public opinion evaluates violent action, and, more generally, the actor using it, is likely to be crucial in determining the degree of responsiveness of the political authorities to a group’s demands. A plausible hypothesis is that the more favorable public opinion, the more likely it is that state authorities will respond positively to violent tactics, at least in democratic political regimes. The mechanism at work is electoral politics, namely, that political authorities’ responsiveness would increase if demands are supported by potential voters. In other words, the more legitimate the claims of a group using violent tactics, the greater its impact, and the greater the chances that it may influence the population at large. To reiterate, the study of outcomes needs to look beyond the stated goals of a movement to examine unintended and perverse effects of political violence. While the responsiveness of political authorities refers to political outcomes, public opinion may also play a role in the broader cultural outcomes of political violence. Looking exclusively at an armed group’s agenda limits the analysis, excluding the broader consequences of armed groups, which are crucial for understanding the dynamic development of political struggles.

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Conclusion This chapter has provided a preliminary outline to direct scholars as they look to understand how political violence matters. We have offered systematic schema for considering the range of potential outcomes associated with political violence. We have also reviewed the problems of causal attribution, time reference and effect stability, goal adaptation, interrelated effects, and unintended and perverse effects associated with the assessment of the consequences of political violence. Our discussion has placed the study of political-violence outcomes in a broader perspective by comparing them with those of non-violent actions. The simple but important central message of the chapter is that an effort to assess movement effects in terms of the extent to which they achieve their explicit goals is limited if we consider the broader social impacts of political violence. Future work on the outcomes of political violence would benefit from bringing together two research strands that have too often followed separate tracks: the literature on political violence and terrorism, on one hand, and the literature on social movements and contentious politics, on the other. We agree with Beck (2008: 1565) that “social movement theory, due in part to its integrative and interdisciplinary nature, is uniquely positioned to contribute a necessary conceptual framework for the study of political violence and terrorism.” Obviously, Beck is not the first and the only scholar who has taken this path (see della Porta and Tarrow 1986; della Porta 1988, 1990, 1995; Tilly 2003; Oberschall 2004; Zwerman and Steinhoff 2005; Alimi 2006; Goodwin 2006; Gunning 2009; Bosi, forthcoming). We believe that a research agenda in this field can then take advantage from some recent developments in the study of social movement outcomes. Three developments in particular deserve mention (Giugni and Bosi, forthcoming). First, recent research on the policy outcomes of social movements has shifted the focus of attention from the organizational features of movements that are more likely to be conducive to success (including the use of violence) to a broader view that takes into account the crucial role of external facilitating factors in the social and political environment, such as powerful institutional allies or a favorable public opinion. Acknowledging the conditional and interactive nature of the effect of political violence surely is a fruitful avenue for further research. Second, research can benefit from bringing a comparative perspective into the study of the outcomes of political violence (Giugni 1999). Most existing research in the field is based on single case studies, and comparative research designs are quite rare. Comparisons across countries, across time, and across types of armed group (social-revolutionary, religious, ethnonational) allow the researcher to put the findings into a broader perspective, permit the testing of rival hypotheses and explanations, and permit generalization of the findings beyond the specific cases. Third, and perhaps most important, much like research on the consequences of social movements in general, the study of the outcomes of political violence could be improved by shifting the focus of the analysis from the conditions favoring the impact of violent actions to the search for the processes and mechanisms

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leading to such an impact, thus making a stronger case for causal linkages between political violence activities and policy change or other types of effect. Indeed, we still largely ignore both when and why violent actions might have an impact. Finally, when turning to empirical research, we believe that a researcher should make (a) a careful selection of the kind of effect to be analyzed, acknowledging first the kind of armed groups effects that could be studied; (b) a convincing operationalization of promising hypotheses; and (c) the availability of data in a field that tends to rely for the most on secondary and tertiary accounts.

Chapter 4

Age Cohorts, Cognition and Collective Violence Hank Johnston

Student movements and youth movements are especially prone to violent protests and extremist factions that pursue violent strategies. This chapter considers several influences in movements of the young, especially student movements, and the age composition of social movements more generally. Student movements are obvious examples of collective action that is strongly shaped by age-cohort influences, but, outside universities and—to a lesser extent—high schools, there are other generational elements that enter into the mobilization equation: the balance between youth and adult activists in a movement; their relations, especially over the long term when demands remain unanswered by the state; structural changes characteristic of the neoliberal state that close off opportunities for employment prospects of young adults, resource availability, which tends to cluster with older generations; tactical specialization according to age cohorts; and the tendency that violent groups in social movements have younger members willing to take greater risks. Despite these significant impact areas, it is fair to say that generational factors have not been accorded a central theoretical place in the study of social movements, although in many of the major movements of our time, generational factors are prominent: in the civil rights movement (McAdam 1882; Morris 1984; Blumberg 1987; Zinn 1966), the women’s movement (Whittier 1995; Rupp and Taylor 1989; Ferree and Hess 1987; Mueller 1994), and the 1960s student movement in the US (Klatch 1999; Wahlen and Flacks 1989); in revolutions and long-term oppositions against authoritarianism (Goldstone 1991; Johnston 1991, 2006). Whittier’s study of the women’s movement in Columbus, Ohio (1995) accords generational “microcohorts” a key role. Klatch’s comparison of left and right student activists, SDS and the conservative YAF, focused on generational-cohort influences (Klatch 1999). Goldstone and McAdam (2001) raised issues of life-course influences in movements since WWII as part of the Silence and Voice project of theoretical synthesis. Yet these analyses are at least a decade old, and it is fair to say that they have not generated many research spin-offs and/or responses.1 In the broad perspective of the protest studies field, the majority of generational research lies two decades (or more) in the past, and much of it rides on the work of a cohort 1  But see Jennings (2002) and Park (2005).

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of scholars who knew the movements of the 1960s and 1970s well, sometimes personally. More recent research interests have been guided by structural models of political process that do not accord generational and age-cohort development a causal role in movement trajectories (but see Goldstone and McAdam 2001). Overall, it is safe to say that the concept of generations—the common experiences of age cohorts, developmental predispositions, and structural location—has not been considered as an equal factor among the causes of mobilization, but rather mostly incidental. This chapter makes the case that generational factors are an “elephant in the room,” difficult to place among factors such as political opportunity, threats, framing, mobilizing structures, and repertoires of contention, and therefore accorded little attention although the youthful composition of many movements is quite apparent. Silence on the issue means that most researchers assume that the participation of an 18 to 25-year-old cohort is substantially the same as, say, 25 to 35 year olds, or older. Yet, as every university professor knows, there are important differences between 18 to 19-year-old undergraduates and young-adult graduate students, 25 and older, which go beyond levels of knowledge. A key theme that I will explore in this chapter is that the cognitive dimension plays an important role in these differences. Researchers have noted that the gray matter of a teenager’s brain changes in different functional areas at different times in development, based on MRI scans. Using the same techniques, researchers have also found that the brain’s white matter—wire-like fibers that establish neurons’ long-distance connections between brain regions—thickens progressively from birth in humans. Striking growth spurts can be seen until the teenage years in areas connecting brain regions specialized for language and understanding spatial relations, the temporal and parietal lobes (Giedd, Blumenthal, Jeffries et al. 1999; Thompson, Giedd, Wood et al. 2000; Sowell, Thompson, Holmes et al. 1999). Layered on top of these physical elements of late adolescent development are experiential patterns—as opposed to socialization and learning patterns—which also can be viewed through a cognitive lens. As life experience accumulates, teenagers and young adults have more information stored in problem-solving schemata by which they can navigate daily life, control emotions, and plot courses of action. Certainly, among young activists, these schemas intersect with collective action frames, which are also complex cognitive structures. Moreover, there is an interaction between the brain’s physical structure and how experiences are accumulated, stored, and accessed prior to action, which may help explain patterns of on-the-ground decision making among activists, say, dislodging street pavers to throw at the police versus tactical retreat. Of course, there are other factors at work, such as cohort socialization, structural availability, and police responses, but at least I would like to suggest that cognitive factors too, when predominant among certain groups, might enter into the analysis of social movement activism, especially youthful dedication, energy, emotions, violent tendencies, risk taking, idealism, and passion. While most social movements are never completely of one-generational fabric, it is important to recognize that many are, and others might be predominately so

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in determining ways. For example, many of the movements that formed the canon of new social movement analysis were mostly composed of 18 to 25-year-olds. In Alberto Melucci’s edited book, Altri Codici (1985), which was the empirical basis of a great deal of subsequent NSM theorizing, all the movement groups he studies fell mostly within this range, but the link between developmental characteristics and participations was mostly overlooked in favor of broad social-change analysis of postmodernism. Here, I especially have in mind questions of identity characteristic of young adulthood, and how cognitive-psychological considerations of a formative sense of who one is rather than large-scale structural shifts lay at the bottom of NSM phenomena. Also, in large cross-generational movements such as the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, or nationalist movements, different generations experience political opportunities and threats in different ways. It is well known that the younger generation of African American activists in SNCC saw opportunities for the civil rights movement through a different lens than their older-generation mentors of CORE, NAACP and SCLC members. SNCC students were less willing to adapt their elders’ strategies of civil disobedience and legal challenge. The same is true of the younger members of the Basque Nationalist party who in 1958 saw the strategic opportunities for Basque nationalism in significantly different terms from their elders of the conservative Basque National Party. These youths went on to form the ETA, which shaped Spanish politics for years to come. To bring age cohorts and intergenerational relations back into social movement analysis, a good place to start is to consider seismic shifts in politics where agecohort distribution played a key role. Such cases are numerous in the past 50 years: the Hungarian revolution of 1956, which began with student mobilizations; South Korean student protests that toppled the Rhee regime in 1960; the Red Guards in China’s Cultural Revolution; French student protests in May 1968, which almost brought down the regime of Charles de Gaulle, as well as huge student protests elsewhere, in Germany (Hanover 1967), the US (1968), and Italy (Turin 1969). Also, the students’ role in the 1978 Iranian Revolution was significant, and the Palestinian Intifada was fought by rock-throwing teenagers and youths. These were all actions that were part of broad oppositions to overthrow governments and challenge regimes. By selectively focusing on a few cases, we can begin to identify patterns of generational action and intergenerational influence. Student Protests and Generational Relations The democracy movement in China is one such movement, galvanizing the world’s attention 22 years ago, and culminating in the violent repression in Tiananmen Square, June 3–4, 1989. Yet, the movement’s roots can be traced to a series of student-powered mobilizations beginning on March 25, 1976, when demonstrations erupted for nearly a week in Nanjing to protest the regime’s lukewarm commemorations of Zhou Enlai’s death, who students venerated as

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a pragmatic reformer. These early-riser protests encouraged the April 5, 1976 protests in Beijing, which were not exclusively student protests, but which, importantly, seem to have set the expectation of toleration in subsequent events. Two years later, in the democracy wall movement, student participation again gained momentum, centering on discussion groups of the wall postings calling for liberalization. Goldman (1994: 41–7) observes that many of the same participants later joined the protest movement at the University of Science and Technology in Anhui. These set the stage for the massive mobilizations of spring 1989, which were precipitated by student marches at Peking University and Tsinghua University on April 15. These marches were organized to commemorate the death of Hu Yaobang, a former secretary general of the Communist Party, disgraced because of his calls for reform. In the next few weeks hundreds of thousands of students mobilized in marches, sit-ins, and hunger strikes, using Hu Yaobang’s death as a heralding cry for reform and democracy. There was broad popular support for the students, primarily among intellectuals and some workers. Indeed, workers called themselves “your elder brothers” when they joined the protests, but student energies, passions, and physical presence in the streets were the primary forces behind the events. Their hunger strikes and refusal to clear the square reflected their passion and risk taking, and led to the brutal repression in which hundreds of students died. It is plausible to speculate that, in China’s high-capacity authoritarian system, it was mostly students who were, at this historical moment, willing to risk status, freedom and safety for the principles of democratic reform. Also, only students were willing to speak the unspeakable, namely, make public criticism of the tight controls that the CPC had on Chinese society. Similar student vanguardism was evident in many other major protests against authoritarianism, in Hungary, South Korea, Iran and Palestine, as I mentioned earlier, as well as in Turkey (1960), Czechoslovakia (1968), Pakistan (1969) and Greece (1973). As a first step in generalizing, therefore, it is worthwhile to consider that, in non-democratic situations, the general populace often supports student protest for two overlapping and reinforcing reasons: (1) a recognition that, while certainly not for everyone, those are our children out there (or could be, especially when beaten by police); and (2) because of their naivety they risk speaking that which we dare not. This second point implies that, while Kuran’s (1995) observation of widespread “preference falsification” in authoritarian regimes may hold for adult generations, young adults (that is, students) are less constrained to falsify the truth. This is because of a combination of structural and cognitive-developmental factors. Structurally, the university is a space for the exchange of ideas and experimentation, and it is not surprising that some students do so energetically. Cognitively, risk thresholds for young adults are higher because of limited experiences with a repressive regime. This is a dimension of preference falsification that never entered into Kuran’s analysis.

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Student mobilization in Mexico City, 1968 Both high-school and university students were first animated by demands for educational reform but these protests later became highly politicized anti-regime mobilizations that had broad public support, despite significant street violence and revolutionary rhetoric as protests escalated. Mexico at that time was an authoritarian, one-party state that had experienced significant economic growth. As a measure of state development, Mexico was chosen to host the Olympic Games, to be held later that year in October. Despite the authoritarian character of the ruling party, the Partido Revolutionario Institucional, citizens enjoyed greater freedoms than most other Latin American states, and universities, like many in Latin America, were hotbeds of revolutionary discussions inspired by the Cuban revolution. In civic life, institutional channels of party and state offered a limited and piecemeal responsiveness to citizen claims within established clientalist structures. Initially, students occupied high-school buildings. The police responded brutally, attempting to crush protests as the Olympics approached, killing several students. Students, however, increased their mobilizations. Outraged by police violence and the closing of the huge national university (UNAM), students, surely with recent French student mobilizations in the backs of their minds, increased their anti-regime stridency and revolutionary rhetoric. They mobilized for several weeks with daily demonstrations in the city’s main plazas and streets, building barricades and setting fire to buses and cars (Harding n.d.). Despite the violence and despite strong anti-student messages from the statecontrolled media, police brutality was an important factor in citizen support for the students because it highlighted the state’s basic authoritarianism. On October 2, 1968, as the Olympics approached, thousands of peaceful students gathered at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. They were surrounded by 2,000 army troops with dozens of tanks closing off escape routes. Tensions increased, and, when shots were heard, the crowd and police panicked. Troops opened fire on trapped students in a slaughter reminiscent of Tiananmen Square. Hundreds were killed or wounded, and thousands were arrested, crushing the student movement before the Olympics began. Public opinion, while not unanimous in the face of disruptions, congealed in support of more moderate student demands and against the regime’s tactics. But, unlike China, student mobilizations continued in Mexico during the 1970s and 1980s and played an important role in the process of democratization. Popular memory held the student deaths in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas as an icon of state repressiveness as dissatisfaction grew during the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s. South Korea 1960: The April Revolution In relative terms, the scope of the 1960 student mobilizations in South Korea at least equaled, if not exceeded, student protests in France and elsewhere in Europe

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eight years later, as well as American student protests during that decade. A long tradition of university protest created a culture of student militancy in South Korea (Park 2005). This history served as a backdrop to the 1960 mobilizations, the largest that have ever occurred there, where universities have traditionally incubated movements and where students regard themselves as “the nation’s conscience” (Kim 1983). On March 15, Syngman Rhee, the authoritarian president of South Korea, claimed victory in national elections with 90 percent of the vote. Reminiscent of events this year in Iran, students immediately took to the street claiming that the election had been rigged. On election day, as students in the city of Masan had been killed by the police, and doubly outraged by police brutality and stuffed ballot boxes, students took to the streets in unprecedented numbers, not only in Seoul, but also in Pusan, Masan, Ch’ang-won and other cities. For the next several weeks, students mobilized massively to protest the government, burning government buildings and police stations, invading homes of politicians, and closing city streets with barricades and automobiles set afire. Students called for the resignation of Rhee and his government, a demand that was widely supported by the populace, who often applauded the students as they marched. Martial law was declared. On April 20, the army refused orders to crush the rebellion and instead turned their guns and tanks on government buildings, joining the rebellion. On April 26, a delegation of five students and the Army Chief of Staff General Song You Chan went to Rhee’s residence and demanded his resignation. A week later, the National Assembly, devoid of members of Rhee’s Liberal Party, voted for new elections and a constitution. Students, aware of their power, demanded prosecution of those responsible for the rigged elections. South Korea is a rare case where a student movement brought down a government. Of course, the support of the army was the final coup de grace to the illegitimate Rhee regime. The general population’s dissatisfaction, the government’s mismanagement of the economy, its authoritarianism, and its subterfuge of fair elections were important elements in the army’s defection. These three factors, students, popular resistance, and defection by the military, were an explosive mix. Unlike the 2009 protests in Iran, Korean students stood their ground against the police for weeks, often successfully driving them out of streets and plazas. Popular support for the students and their demands forced the hand of army commanders to abandon the Rhee regime and back the students’ call for a change in government, unlike the “Mai ‘68” insurrection in Paris, when the army stayed loyal to de Gaulle, as I will discuss shortly. It is clear that, in 1960, South Korean students were both the oppositional vanguard and the front-line fighters in the April Revolution. Afterwards, student movements continued to be key players in South Korean politics. Beginning in 1978, large student mobilizations against the re-election of authoritarian President Park Chung Hee took place, and in late 1979 against the coup d’état of General Chung Doo Hwan. Student actions continued into 1980 against an increasingly hard-line, repressive government, culminating in the Kwangju democracy movement and its bloody repression by the army in which an estimated 2,000 students and citizens were killed. Thereafter, the Korean

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student protest was marked by self-immolation during the 1980s, a reflection of the hopelessness during Chun’s authoritarian rule (Kim 2002). Like Mexico, the combination of student vanguard resistance and popular dissatisfaction eventually culminated in the South Korean democratic transition in 1987. Iranian Democratic Protests The final case in this section contrasts with the others in that it occurs as I write, leaving the long-term consequences undetermined. The “green movement” in Iran developed after the disputed Iranian elections of June 23, 2009. Opposition candidates charged fraud and vote rigging when a landslide victory of the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was announced so quickly that it raised suspicions. Subsequent analysis of voting patterns showed that Ahmadinejad’s huge victory margins in some districts could only be explained by ballot stuffing. Although many Iranians supported the incumbent and voted for him, there was also broad popular opposition to him, which congealed and animated in response to his manipulation of the vote and the intransigence of his clerical allies to reconsider election results. Opposition candidates, led by Mir Hossein Mousavi, called for new elections, and protests erupted in Tehran and throughout the country, which were met with violent repression. YouTube images of a young woman who was shot during the protests were widely seen on the Internet. It might be said that the intensity of the 2009 protests in part reflected not only broad dissatisfaction with Ahmadinejad’s conservative regime, but also how important these elections were in the minds of citizens when so many other civil and political liberties are constrained by the Islamic state. While the protests against the elections were not student-led as such, they demonstrate an important generational dynamic. First, based on impressions from the widely distributed YouTube videos of demonstrations immediately after the elections, it is quite clear that the composition of the protests was mostly young men, a gender pattern one would expect in an Islamic state. Youthful participation reflects, in part, student mobilization prior to the election, for example, when reformist students protested July 9, 2004 at Tehran University, and again in December 2006. This year, too, protests were brutally repressed by police and an Islamic paramilitary force called the Basij Militia, which raised the costs of participation and decreased the breadth and number of protesters, tending to concentrate participation among young risk takers. The protests that continued, on July 9, September 18, and October 14, were mostly young male students, although not entirely. Recently, on November 5, students were in abundance, partly because it was Students’ Day (the 13th of Aban in the Persian calendar), which commemorates the radical student takeover of the US embassy in 1977. This day, students demonstrated a creative repertoire by attending official demonstrations, ostensibly as regime supporters, and, once there, disrupted proceedings by parodying them, for example, amidst coordinated chants of “Death to the US,” changing the chorus to “Death to Russia,” one of the first countries

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to recognize Ahmadinejad’s victory. Student rallies all over Iran were turned into anti-government rallies, despite police repression (Daragahi 2009). Risk of participation was high, but so too was the creativity in protest tactics. Cognitive Development and Protest Behavior In all these cases, young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 were at the forefront of the movement. They constituted the vast majority of participants, although older ones obviously took part—often professors, teachers and workers. Overall, students were the risk takers, fighting in the streets, occupying squares, confronting police, and enduring police-violence arrests. They also were tactical innovators, as is evident with the Chinese students’ use of the Internet and the Iranian students’ use of YouTube and Facebook, not to mention their creative sue of “piggy-backing” protests upon officially sanctioned demonstrations. Also, the student sit-ins during the civil rights movement in Nashville and Greensboro were tactical innovations in the US drawing upon the Ghandian non-violent directaction repertoire, one that involved high risks and costs. While these observations are mostly non-controversial and intuitive, the cognitive basis of them may be less widely recognized. Might there be elements of behavior emanating from recent recognition of “emerging adulthood” as a distinct developmental stage (Arnett 2000). There is an emerging psychological literature on this cohort between late teens and early 20s that is naturally mostly removed from questions of collective violence and social movement militancy. Nevertheless, there are four areas where this cohort’s cognitive distinctiveness is highly relevant to social movement theory. First, regarding tactical innovation, research suggests that there are cognitive patterns in the way that young adults (18 to 25) deal with new and unexpected situations versus the way that older adults handle them. Young adults search for new strategies that optimize goals in a problem setting, while those who are older invoke past experiences stored in memory to arrive at a solution (BlanchardFields and Kalinauskas 2009: 3). It makes sense, therefore, that older participants will apply problem-solving models that have been successful in the past, while tactical innovation would be the province of youthful participants. In movements where generational groupings represent different segments, negotiation of tactical repertoires becomes an issue for the analyst. Regarding risk taking, while structural availability reduces the interpersonal fall-out of risky behavior—for example, one’s arrest would not negatively impact the livelihood of a household—there are cognitive patterns that suggest that 18 to 25-year-olds (not to mention adolescents aged 14 to 17) are less able to invoke and effectively apply more varied and elaborated problem-solving models and emotionregulation strategies to process hot-button emotional moments and situations of intense interpersonal involvements (Blanchard-Fields 2007; Blanchard-Fields, Mienaltowski and Seay 2007). Also, young adults are more prone to positive outlooks about problems and a false sense of overconfidence, reducing their willingness to

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invest additional cognitive resources in a problem-solving task, rendering them more likely to engage in risky behaviors. Regarding emotional participation, it is well documented that a person’s ability for emotion regulation is positively associated with age (Carstensen, Mikels and Mather 2006). Younger participants in protest actions will exhibit more emotional and spontaneous actions, sometimes leading to violence or ill-advised risks. Emotional responses originate in the brain’s limbic system, which for young adults grows at a slower rate than the prefrontal cortex that is the locus of control over emotions (Giedd et al. 1999; Gogtay et al. 2004). Cognitive science has traced how the growth of the limbic system expands rapidly during puberty; while it may take another nine to ten years for the prefrontal cortex to fully mature. This helps explain studies that show that emotional intensity decreases with increasing age (Carstensen, Friesen and Ekman 1991; Diener, Sandvik and Larsen 1985). It is a testimony to the training in non-violence of the student activists in the civil rights sit-ins that emotions did not carry them away. On the other hand, Soweto (whose participants were mostly high-school students) quickly escalated to violent confrontations, burning and property destruction. Also, the Mexico City protests discussed above, and the Greek December 2008, which both included many highschool students, had many highly emotional and violent street confrontations with the police. Finally regarding students’ role in general, I suggest that the concept of cognitive triggering—breaking with interpretative patterns of the past and seeing opportunities in a new way is a central and, perhaps, the most significant cognitive element. It partly accounts for the general phenomenon of student unrest and mobilization, for they see things in ways their elders do not. Interpretative schemas of 18 to 25-year-olds are less encumbered by past experiences; which allows for greater processing speed and the ability to make connections with other schemas more quickly. These of course are individual issues of cognitive processing, but I suggest that they aggregate, and in doing so a social effect is produced. Fresh cognitive orientations also account in part for Mannhiem’s observation that students can more clearly see injustices and inequalities owing to their “fresh contact” with history and society (1952: 300). I suggest that a combination of socialization processes, recognized by Mannhiem, and cognitive orientations— perhaps implicit in his understanding but not developed—often drives a wedge between generations. It can give rise to vastly differing visions of current politics, of the future, and of what must be done. This is the basis for the generation-gap thesis that was frequently invoked to explain the student uprisings in the 1960s. To put it differently, when linked with other age cohorts, cognitive triggering can enrich and energize the overall movement, imparting to it a militancy that increases its likelihood of success (or backlash). But when isolated, and wholly based on a combination of cognitive freshness plus intense interaction through youthful networks and subcultures powered in part by identity issues typical of

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young adults, the creative tensions of intergenerational contact can become a yawning generational gap.2 Intergenerational Contact and Broad Oppositions In previous research, I had the opportunity to see first-hand how intergenerational contact affects social movements. In these cases, I was analyzing resistance movements against authoritarian regimes that lasted over several decades, culminating in broad-based democratic oppositions that had elements of generational functionality that we have seen in some of our earlier examples— vanguardism, tactical innovation, and risk taking. In the collective resistance against General Francisco Franco’s regime in Spain, the time span was 40 years. In the opposition to the Russian occupation and the communist one-party state in the Baltic region of Soviet Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the time frame was 50 years. These studies indicated that when repression is long lived, the mere passage of so much time accords generational factors a central role in the development of the opposition. For oppositional attitudes and sentiments to persist, (1) they are in part congealed by one generation’s experiences, often in a civil war or coup d’état; (2) which are then passed to subsequent generations; (3) being reaffirmed among some and redefined among others, as new generations “freshly encounter” new political contexts in the Mannhiemian sense; and (4) these dual forces of continuity and change are in a dynamic relationship working through generational and intergenerational networks that shape the development of the movement. These factors are demonstrated in an excerpt from an interview in Spain with an older-generation activist, Xavier, who was a member of the then-illegal and underground Socialist Movement of Catalonia. He spoke of his discussions during the 1960s with Carlos, a younger-generation militant, who, like many other students at that time, was strongly influenced by revolutionary Marxist ideology. For example, let’s take Carlos. I would say that he made me into a Marxist and I made him into a nationalist. […] We went out at night in Barcelona for hours, me trying to convince him that they should contact our party and accept political pluralism […] and him, evidently resisting because of what then was very important for these young men, Castroism and the Cuban revolution. They were absolutely fascinated, bewitched, by Fidel Castro. Us, for us older ones, we took him with what we Catalans say, grànuls salís [grains of salt]. […] So 2  It is worth pointing out that another widely recognized factor helps shape the trajectory of many protests. It is well known that physical strength and dexterity begin to decrease after the age of 25. Regarding the demands of certain protest tactics, such as enduring beatings and jail, running through city streets to avoid police, or sleepless building occupations lasting several days with continual strategy sessions (as in Mexico), and even hunger strikes (as in China), these are the activities of youth.

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of course the Marxist history of Catalonia came to me through these kids. They showed an extraordinary intellectual inquisitiveness, and you don’t know what they did to get a hold of those books. (quoted in Johnston 2006: 197)

Here we can clearly see the ideological give-and-take that occurred between two generations, in which Xavier’s moderate approach to working with other political oppositional groups may have moderated Carlos’s Fidelismo, which represented a more radical, direct-action, approach to the Franco regime. On the one hand, Carlos’s revolutionary Marxism evolved from the student subculture of the university where books were passed and intense discussions held in coffee shops and student flats. On the other hand, Carlos may have raised Xavier’s points in discussions with his student compatriots, over time giving new perspectives, moderating action, and, perhaps, even extending intergenerational contacts. The point is that this interview segment represents a poignant example of numerous interactions between generations that occur in the course of broad oppositional movements. While in all cases we can’t claim mutual influence, it is surely plausible to assert that there were instances where the forces of moderation and radicalism worked dynamically through multiple network ties like this one. And while it is common that students go their own way, whether that be Tiananmen Square or Greensboro, NC, channels of intergenerational communication can soften both students’ actions and older generations’ opinions about them. Similarly, these mutual influences are at work on the tactical level. I frequently encountered older activists for whom student innovation and risk taking left them in wonder. In Spanish Catalonia during the Franco regime, small networks of students audaciously painted buildings, placed flags, distributed flyers, and organized campaigns that far surpassed the guidance of oppositional Catholic priests who were their mentors and stood out when the general populace was politically quiescent. The other side of the coin was that the older generation, if not evincing high-risk audaciousness in its actions, often showed considerable guile to advance the movement, by adapting legal organizations duplicitously to oppositional ends. In the Baltic state of Estonia, where all civic organizations were controlled by the party and state, members turned bee-keeping clubs, hiking clubs, English-language societies, and book clubs were routinely mentioned as groups where oppositional sentiments were percolated (Johnston and Mueller 2001). Potentially of even more benefit to the opposition were cases where some well-placed functionaries—publicly loyal CP members but privately democrats or nationalists—who were able to channel resources, influence favorable decisions, and/or preclude repression because of their placement in the power structure. It takes cognitive maturity to recognize the complexity of such actors’ positions— not dismissing them as traitors or sell-outs—something older-generation activists would be cognitively better able to do. The generational component was clearly apparent in these studies of long-term mobilization. Intergenerational relations were in part preordained by the longevity of the repressive regime against which the opposition fought. It was also caused

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by the authoritarian state’s penetration into daily life, which stifled the kinds of free spaces that give rise to subcultural autonomy characteristic of punk groups or radical student groups at the university. Universities may be freer compared with other institutions in authoritarian regimes, but they are still relatively more controlled when compared with universities in open societies. These long-term movements brought down regimes, and it is also plausible that, in the shorter term, student mobilizations that initiated broadly oppositional, regime-toppling mobilizations, such as in South Korea (1960), Greece (1973), Turkey (1960) and Iran (1978), had similar processes at work. Among students, we have their characteristic cognitive vanguardism (which gives a fresh look at possibilities and fresh approaches to tactical innovation), risk taking, and emotional participation. Among the older generations (which includes everyone else except the elderly), their tactical caution may constrain the movement, but they also bring greater numbers (through personal networks). They also deliver greater social capital, more channels of influence, more elaborated institutional contacts, which often take the form of behind-the-scenes support (as discussed above), and the provision of resources. Explaining just how these movements bring down regimes requires consideration of factors that go far beyond generational analysis to include elite interests and alignments, including the military, global pressures, and the repressive capacity of the regime, but the differences between the French May, Tiananmen Square, and student mobilizations in the Spanish, Mexican, or South Korean democratic transitions can be partly understood by intergenerational linkages, intergenerational support, and the ways that these broaden and strengthen the movement. Generational factors may not be fully explanatory of the outcomes, but it should be clear from our discussion that they are central processes. Conclusions I close the discussion by offering some general propositions about cognition and “conflict of generations” in explaining social movement mobilization. 1. First, there is a good empirical basis for affirming cognitive elements in generational dimensions of mobilization. Moreover, this work applies at all stages of the life cycle, but is especially relevant for the field of protest studies insofar as it gives insight into collective action among student and youth groups. 2. Specifically, I have identified the cognitive “gang of four.” • The most important is cognitive triggering. In this concept, I assert that students see new possibilities for politics and society, not because of their location in the educational process—a social determinant—but because their interpretative schemas are less encumbered and their processing speeds more rapid. They make connections more easily. At the aggregate level, this means that student groups are more likely to

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3.

4. 5.

6.

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break the surface tension of quiescence, and be examples for others about the possibilities for action. • The same cognitive factors also dispose student movements to tactical innovation. In large movements, when groups move outside the standard repertoire, they are typically youth groups and/or student groups. • Cognitive processes also dispose young militants to riskier behaviors. The well-known social-psychological construct of unrealistic optimism is especially strong among youth because schemas of interpretation are not as laden with experiences of disappointment and failure. Whether this basic cognitive mechanism is compounded or mitigated by collective discussion, consideration, and on-the-ground action is an open empirical question. • Cognitive emotionalism. Although studies of information processing have been biased towards rational decision making as a prelude to behavior, it is increasingly recognized that cognitive schemas link with processing nodes that activate emotional responses. It is well known that emotional control increases with age, which means that the emotional linkages are over laden with other problem-solving schemas that interrupt emotional responses. I suggest that this, in part, explains why student and youth movements often react violently to police intervention, creating a downward spiral in which the students are usually the losers. Personal and social identities are intertwined in identity schemas. As youth matures, social roles and experiences fill these schemas to give substance to identity, but this process is played out in terms of the continuing active construction of identity during the years 18 to 25. This observation has several effects • It gives rise to a preponderance of youth in new social movements. • It gives rise to the increased likelihood that ideological schemas become enmeshed with identity schemas. • In the contexts of cognitive triggering and tactical innovation, it disposes youth to subcultural networks where highly innovative lifestyle and ideological patterns construct and affirm new identities. Intergenerational contact mitigates the inward-turning construction of these kinds of generation-gap identities, characteristic of punk, hippie, beat, even gang subcultures. Yet these factors, when part of the overall mix of a social movement, shake out in the form of a division of labor in which students are the militant vanguard and the older members use the social and material resources available to them. Student radicalism is a two-edged sword. It has the capability of invigorating a movement with youthful energy and creativity or it can alienate older cohorts of militants and public opinion, and increase tendencies of tactical errors.

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Section II Regional Perspectives: France, Germany and the United Kingdom

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Chapter 5

Political Violence in Germany: Trends and Exploration of Causes1 Dieter Rucht

According to Norbert Elias, during the long process of civilization the level of violence in the Western world has gradually decreased because of the growing self-control of individuals over their desires and emotions as well as institutional arrangements that channel and mediate conflict (Elias 2000). Others have challenged this assumption, pointing especially to colonial genocides, atrocities in Nazi Germany, acts of terrorism, political rebellions, ghetto riots, amok runs, and the like (Tilly 1969; Baumann 1989; Goody 2006). It is difficult to say who is right or wrong in this debate when all forms of violence are lumped together, the time span covers centuries, and the geographical area is very large (Bauman 2001). Therefore, it makes sense to limit the scope of analysis when it comes to empirical research and potential explanations of patterns and trends of political violence. In this chapter, the broad stream of violence committed by state authorities, armies, criminals, militias, vandalizing youth, and so on, is not dealt with. Instead the focus is on political violence in the context of collective protest. The underlying definition of violence is narrow: it refers to deliberate damage of property and/or attacks on people, ranging from aggressive bodily contact to political murder (Neidhardt 1988; Kaase 1995). Moreover, the focus is on Germany in the twentieth century. Regarding the overall trend of political violence, no continuous and systematic empirical data are available for the first half of the century. Notwithstanding this gap, it is very unlikely that this period is characterized by a clear trend, given the two great wars as well as the significant regime changes in 1918–19, 1933, 1945 and 1949. As for the second half of the century, quantitative and more systematic data do exist. Two rival hypotheses on an overriding trend seem to be plausible. On the one hand, aside from short-lived ups and downs, one might expect a general decline in political violence because of two main reasons: first, the instalment of a solid democracy in West Germany and, after unification, also in East Germany along with the growing internalization of democratic values in the citizenry; and second, the creation of a relatively successful economic system and a corresponding 1  I am grateful to Sebastian Bödeker who has done the statistical analysis and created the figures for this chapter.

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welfare state with an increasing living standard until the late twentieth century. On the other hand, it would be reasonable to assume a discontinuous development of political violence based on the argument that it is not the situation and political attitudes of the large majority of the citizenry that matter. Rather, the frequency and intensity of political violence depend on other factors, for example, the condition and views of small and highly politicized minorities, and the reaction of authorities to their claims and activities. In the following, I will first provide a short overview on major developments and incidents of political protest in Germany in the past century. Second, a predominantly quantitative empirical overview will be presented mainly based on two large data sets on protest events (derived from newspapers) in West Germany and later the unified Germany. As a complement, I will also use statistics from federal government reports on ‘extremism’. Taken together, these data give answers about trends in political violence since the mid-century. Finally, I will discuss the reasons that might underlie the course of political violence from the 1950s to the present. Regarding this period, answers to two questions will be sought: Is there a general decline in political violence? Which factors could explain the course of political violence especially since the mid-century in Germany? Here I argue for the need to disaggregate data on political violence and identify issue-specific and partly contingent factors that influence particular waves of political violence that, in turn, heavily shape the aggregate waves of violent protest. Therefore, changes in the aggregate of violent protest can hardly be explained by general structures of the protest sector and general political opportunities. Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Germany: A Brief Overview Throughout the first half of the century, Germany had an extremely turbulent political and social trajectory marked by several periods of intense political conflict including waves of severe violence. The period until the beginning of WWI was characterized by major street protests organized by left-wing groups claiming, among other things, voting rights, the freedom of assembly, and better conditions in the workplace (Warneken 1986). The authorities’ attempts to repress these marches and assemblies occasionally led to violent clashes in which the great bulk of violence was enacted by the police and not the protesters (Gailus 1994). It appears that in the early phase of WWI political violence was at a relatively low level but increased towards the end of the war, culminating with the riots of navy sailors and army soldiers, and eventually the November revolution in 1918, which toppled the monarchy. Attempts to install or maintain socialist governments failed. ‘On May 1st, 1919, soldiers from the army assisted by the Free Corps took over Munich, killing at least 600 people – including children.’2 Tensions and 2  http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/weimar_republic_problems.htm.

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clashes between the political right and the left continued in the following period. Between 1919 and 1922, over 350 political murders took place, mostly committed by right-wingers who were targeting leftists (ibid.).3 After a temporary decline in these struggles, political violence increased again with the economic breakdown in 1929, a sharp increase of unemployment, and especially the clashes between the rising Nazi groups and left-wing forces. The number of assemblies in which police intervened increased almost ten times from 1929 to 1932 (Reichardt 2002: 62). In these years, 85 to 95 per cent of these clashes in Prussia involved communists or national-socialists (ibid., p. 65). Apart from these direct confrontations between the political antagonists, there were also occasional clashes between the protesters and the police. A remarkable event was Mayday 1929 when communist and other leftist protesters ignored the prohibition of their annual labour rallies. In reaction to this act of disobedience, the police indiscriminately started shooting, eventually killing some 30 protesters (Schirmann 1991). It is also worth noting that political violence, including the murder of activists, occurred among rival groups within the rising Nazi movement. Still, the vast majority of political violence occurred in direct clashes between the radical left – especially the communists – and the radical right – especially the national socialists. When the Nazi party NSDAP seized power in 1933, all forms of political critique were severely repressed. Oppositional forces were silenced, imprisoned, killed – or went underground. Political violence was enacted by underground groups who, during the war, engaged in anonymous acts of sabotage in production facilities as well as in a few assaults and (attempted) assassinations, including the plot on Hitler. In the first years after WWII, political violence was largely absent. The 1950s in the newly established Federal Republic of Germany were marked by numerous protests but few incidents of political violence. Minor acts of violence occurred, for example, in the context of Mayday gatherings when communist protesters were verbally and physically attacked by politically more moderate participants. However, violence directed against the police or political decision makers was extremely rare. In the communist-led East Germany, with the remarkable exception of the brutally repressed mass upheaval in June 1953,4 no incidents of political violence by demonstrators occurred.

3  http://www.luise-berlin.de/bms/bmstxt00/0003prof.htm: ‘Der Nationalökonom Julius Emil Gumbel (1891–1966) analysierte 1921 in seinem Buch “Zwei Jahre Mord” die politischen Morde in Deutschland von 1919 bis zum 30. März 1921. Während dieser Zeit gab es 13 – dreizehn – politische Morde von Links und 314 – dreihundertvierzehn! – von Rechts.’ 4  Beside the many peaceful activities in which 400,000 to 1.5 million people participated, there was also violence on the side of the protesters who, in East Berlin, injured 46 police and destroyed property. Police killed at least 55 demonstrators and

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In West Germany, protest activity declined in the first half of the 1960s but afterwards, in the context of the rising New Left and the student movement, rose significantly, including violent public protest and ultimately acts of left-wing terrorism starting in the early 1970s. While left-wing terrorism faded away in the 1990s, non-terrorist acts of violence occurred in several waves partly related to issues of the so-called new social movements from the 1970s to the present (Rucht 2003). Political violence was significant among the so-called autonomous groups who, on many occasions, sought confrontation with police and/or engaged in the destruction of property (Katsiaficas 1997). In part, this stream of violence became ritualized at the occasion of international summits, evictions of squatted buildings, and Mayday marches, especially in Berlin since 1987. Right-wing violence – with the exception of a few terrorist acts, the most severe of which was the 1980 bomb attack killing 13 people and wounding 211 at the Munich Oktoberfest – was relatively low until the early 1990s but then increased dramatically. From October 1990 through March 2010, right-wing and xenophobic perpetrators have killed 149 people according to non-governmental counts5 (less than 50 according to official statistics6). This, in turn, has spurred ‘anti-fascist’ groups to engage in physical confrontation with right-wingers and, mostly in these instances, also with the police. Most recently, left-wing political violence is again on the rise but, as far as physical attacks on persons are concerned, remains far below the level of corresponding forms of right-wing violence. Interestingly, unlike in a few other European countries, political violence among the work force and trade union activities is almost completely absent in Germany since the 1950s. The occasional wildcat strikes have also generally remained peaceful. Similarly, several other groups, for example, farmers, have largely abstained from any kind of political violence. With the exception of a few groups or movements, for example, the animal rights activists, political violence has been restricted to the radical segments of the left and the right. Historians have argued that political violence in the second half of the twentieth century is significantly lower than in the first half, and some consider that the pattern holds back to the eighteenth century (Kocka and Jessen 1990). Findings of Protest-Event Analysis and Governmental Sources For the recent decades, it is possible to investigate quantitatively the protest patterns in Germany based on two sets of protest event data. The first set, referred to as Prodat, covers the period from 1950 to – currently – 2002. It is derived from arrested some 6,000. In the end, 19 people were executed on the basis of martial law, 2 more were sentenced to death in trials, and around 1,500 were sent to jail. 5  http://www.opferfonds-cura.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4 9&Itemid=5. 6  http://www.hagalil.com/archiv/2009/02/04/todesopfer/.

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two nationwide so-called quality newspapers and based on a sampling procedure.7 It covers 15,930 protest events,8 including protests on East German soil since 1989, but excluding protests reported in the regional and local sections of these newspapers. The second data set, referred to as TAZ, covers the period from 1993 to – currently – 2009, and is based on full coverage of a left-alternative newspaper including the Berlin section (N = 10,280). My analysis, however, skips this section to allow for a better comparison of both data sets. Like all newspaper event data, it does not provide a representative picture of the actual universe of protests. Consider that the local authorities register between 2,500 to 2,900 protests only in Berlin of which some 15 to 25 per cent are reported in local newspapers and significantly fewer in nationally distributed papers. As research on selection biases has shown time and again, protests that are large, disruptive, creative, and include celebrities and/or have support from widely recognized organizations have much better chances of being covered than protests lacking these features or occurring frequently so that they are no longer considered to be newsworthy. In addition to the protest event data, governmental statistics on violent activities of left- and right-wingers will be used. These data, because of changes of definitional criteria that are not fully documented, will be used only for the period since 1990. Empirical findings In the following, selected findings from both data sets will be presented with a special emphasis on patterns of violent protests. Before taking a closer look at these kinds of protest, it is useful to get a rough idea of how the aggregate of all protest events and participants of protest evolved over time (see Figure 5.1). With regard to the number of protest events, apart from short-term fluctuations, there is a general increase from the 1950 to the 1990s followed by a decline. The curve of protest participants exhibits a more discontinuous course with especially remarkably high peaks since the 1980s. These peaks, rather than mirroring street protest, are mostly influenced by petition drives, which embrace many participants. Curves on events and participants do not run parallel, though. A striking example is the years 1968 and 1969 when the number of protests skyrocketed – mainly because of the activities of the New Left and the student movement – but the number of participants was low and even decreased. In other words, this was a period of many but mostly small protests. 7  The sample includes, first, all Monday issues (‘report days’) of the papers referring to events of the preceding Saturday and Sunday (‘event days’), and second, the Tuesday to Saturday issues of every fourth week. 8  Defined shortly, a protest event as a collective (minimum three people) and public activity of non-state actors expresses a critique or dissent along with a social or political aim or claim.

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Figure 5.1 Number of all protest events (PEs) and participants per year, 1950–2009 The detailed list of forms of protest can be reduced to four broad types of action: moderate, demonstrative, confrontational, and violent.9 Singling out the last category and looking at the distribution over time, a surprisingly erratic pattern emerges (see Figure 5.2). Regarding the yearly number of violent events, there is a general though discontinuous increase with a sharp peak in the early 1990s, followed by a remarkable decline in the next decade. In most but not all periods, the curve displaying the number of participants in violent protest roughly parallels the trends of the event count. Participation in violent protest shows a dramatic peak in 1970 that is accompanied by a – less dramatic – peak in event count in the same year. However, in a few other periods, for example from 1993 to 1997, a steep increase in participation is accompanied by a sharp decline of violent events. When the four types of action are broken down by decades, it becomes obvious that the absolute number of protest events rises stepwise from the 1950s to the 1990s (see Figure 5.3). Interestingly, the proportion of violent events also 9  Moderate action includes signatures/petitions/resolutions, public letters, press conferences, leaflets, teach-in/assembly, procedural complaint and litigation; demonstrative action includes non-verbal symbolic protest, demonstration march, public protest assembly/rally, defamation, hunger strike, and legal strikes; confrontational action includes disturbance/hindrance, occupation, and – only if illegal – non-verbal symbolic protest, demonstration march, public protest/assembly, and strike; violent action includes theft/ burglary, minor damage to property, severe damage to property/attacks/looting, scuffle, injuries, and manslaughter/murder.

Political Violence in Germany

Figure 5.2 Number of violent protest events and participants per year, 1950–2009

Figure 5.3 Distribution of type of action by periods, 1950–2009

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increases step by step, starting from 2.9 per cent in the 1950s to 18.2 per cent in the 1990s; but it declines significantly (8.9 per cent) in the period of the next three years for which Prodat data are available. The TAZ data confirm the decrease in the proportion of violence when the period from 1993 to 1999 (19 per cent) is compared with the period from 2000 to 2009 (12 per cent). While the relative and absolute number of violent protests may be shocking to many observers who believe in the necessity of peaceful claims making, one should also take into account that violent protests, contrary to the bulk of other protests, rarely remain unreported. Therefore, they are notoriously overrepresented in the media-based event data. Moreover, before raising an alarm, it is important to consider the numbers of participants in violent protests. These numbers are extremely low. In the average of the period from 1950 to 2002, only 0.16 per cent of all protest participants were engaged in violent protest. Proportions vary from 0.02 per cent in the 1950s to 0.40 per cent in the 1960s. In which political spectrum and which thematic domains do violent protests concentrate? When comparing left-wing and right-wing protests (a categorization that is not applicable to most protests10) one can see that their relative weight changes significantly over time. Left-wing protests were by far dominant in the 1970s and even more so in the 1980s, but then a reverse pattern emerged with right-wing protests dominating in the 1990s and even more so in the early 2000s (figures are not displayed here). Governmental data on the incidences of ‘politically motivated criminal acts’ by right-wing and left-wing activists can also be used for determining the absolute and relative weight of political violence over time. Looking at three relevant categories out of a larger range of felonies, one can see a stark increase of injuries caused by right-wingers in the early 1990s, followed by a moderate decline to a lower level, and another increase in the second half of the 2000s. Left-extremist violence was at a much lower level in the early 1990s when compared to right-extremist violence. It then rose, especially in terms of material damage, after the mid-1990s. In the second half of the 2000s, bodily harm increased somewhat and material damage rose dramatically. Interestingly, arson was almost absent in this period for both the right and the left extremists. However, when it comes to politically motivated murder, almost all incidents are committed by right-wingers. Retuning to newspaper-derived protest event data, we can also consider other indicators of disruptiveness and (potential) militancy of protest over time. When looking at the yearly average per decade of injuries, arrests by the police, and property damage, it appears that protest became more disruptive until the 1990s but then the trend was reversed, at least for the early 2000s (see Table 5.1). While 10  The left/right categorization was only applied when it was explicitly mentioned in the source or when the organizational carriers of the protest, to the extent that they were mentioned at all, could be clearly situated at the left/right axis that includes seven points plus the category ‘heterogenous’.

Political Violence in Germany

Figure 5.4 Evolution of right-extremist political violence according to governmental statistics

Figure 5.5 Evolution of left-extremist political violence according to governmental statistics

63

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it is debatable whether the number of arrests and of injured demonstrators or bystanders is primarily a measure of the disruptiveness of protest or of police repression, as presented above, it is safe to state that, as far as violent protests are concerned, their weight increased from the 1950s to the 1990s but then decreased, at least for the years from 2000 to 2003. Besides the crude and often inapplicable categorization of right-wing and leftwing protests, it is hard to interpret such general trends without knowing more about the issues of violent protests and who was involved. When lumping together violent protests, there is less concern with property damage. Along with the proportions of violent protests in the whole period from 1950 to 2002, the broadly defined theme of democracy and citizen rights, including specific issues such as human rights, anti-apartheid, religion freedoms, law and order, and censorship, is by far the largest category (Figure 5.6). Next come themes of ethnic minorities and infrastructure. The proportions of protesters for and against these broad themes vary greatly. In the domain of democracy and citizen rights, the ratio of for and against is about 1.3 to 1, whereas for ethnic minorities it is 11.8 to 1 and for nuclear power all protests are against. Table 5.1 Indicators of protest militancy (yearly average by decade) Decade 1950–59 1960–69 1970–79 1980–89 1990–99 2000–02 Yearly average 1950–2002 Total N

Injured total Injured police Arrests (per year) (per year) (per year)

Property damage > 10,000 DM (per year)

24 103 244 375 502 67

12 36 120 191 191 34

183 414 374 1422 2571 2083

0 1 2 8 9 0

239

106

1054

4

12671

5595

55888

204

It comes probably as no surprise that the relative weight of the thematic domains in which violent protests cluster changes considerably over time. Violent protests around infrastructure were especially frequent in the 1980s, which accounted for 69 per cent of all violent infrastructural protests of the whole period from 1950 to 2002. By contrast, the areas of democracy/civil rights and ethnic minorities attracted by far the most violent protests in the 1990s (53 per cent and 78 per cent out of all violent protests in the respective issue domain). To the extent that these issue-specific protests have a significant effect on the aggregate, we cannot limit ourselves to explanations based on changes in the overall movement sector and the general political opportunity structure. Rather, we have to refer to issue-specific

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Figure 5.6 Issue domains of violent protests,* 1950–2002

Note: * Numbers of violent protest in the first and/or second issue domain. Accordingly, totals can exceed the absolute numbers of violent protests.

factors and probably even to contingent incidents such as disruptive protest sparked, for example, by the killing of a demonstrator. Similar to the thematic domains, violent protest spreads unevenly across different age cohorts, social groups and types of organizational carrier. It is well known that young people are more inclined to use disruptive and violent means of action than older generations. In general, violent protest activities are mainly performed by males. Moreover, informal groups have a greater tendency to resort to violence than formally structured groups and organizations. When considering all kinds of protest, the proportion of informal carriers of protest increases over time. This also seems to hold for violent protests, though the number of cases, when broken down by types of carrier, is too small to make a safe empirical statement. In Germany, violent protest is mostly concentrated in the radical political left and right, whereas in some other European countries larger and/or more established groups occasionally resort to violence, for example, factory workers, farmers, wine growers and fishermen. In summarizing, several findings can be stressed. First, the level of political violence in the first half of the century was significantly higher than in the subsequent decades until the present. In the first half of the century, military and police forces were major agents of political violence, killing at specific incidents dozens or even hundreds of people. Second, both in terms of events and participants, political violence since the 1950s, the period for which we have more systematic data, occurred in relatively

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short waves that only sometimes parallel the trends in the aggregate of all protests and protesters. The number of violent protests peaked in 1992 with a sharp increase in right-wing and xenophobic aggression. Participation in violent protests culminated in 1969 in the context of the student revolt and other left-wing activities. More generally, the major carriers of political violence from the 1950s to the 1980s were predominantly left-wing. Starting in the early 1990s, rightwing groups prevailed. With some delay, also direct clashes between right and left radicals increased. Severe violence, including terrorist killings, was concentrated on the political left but then, since the 1990s, is almost exclusively on the right. Third, the proportion of violent protests relative to non-violent protests grew significantly over time from the 1950s to the 1990s but then started to decline, though remaining at a higher level in the 2000s than in the 1970s, let alone the two preceding decades. Unlike the proportion of violent protests, however, the proportion of participants in these protests has remained insignificant and did not increase over time. Fourth, though no cross-national data have been presented here, there are clear indications that the overall level of political violence in Germany since the 1950s is on an intermediate level when compared to other European countries. Northern Ireland, the Basque country, France, Italy and probably also Greece are likely to have higher levels of political violence than Germany, whereas the opposite holds for Scandinavian countries, Austria and Switzerland, to mention just a few examples. The intermediate position of Germany in terms of the role of violent protest is also confirmed by the study of Kriesi et al., which shows that violent protests accounted for 15.2 per cent of all protest in Germany compared to 11.1 per cent in the Netherlands, 12.4 per cent in Switzerland and 31.2 per cent in France for the period from 1975 to 1989 (Kriesi et al. 1995: 50). All these findings, as well as a range of more specific results, call for an explanation that, ideally, would imply the use of quantitative data on potential explanatory variables such as: levels of absolute and relative deprivation; general and issue-specific opportunity structures; responsiveness of decision makers to the claims of challengers; and repression by police force. Even if such data were at hand for considerable periods of time, explaining a whole series of different patterns and trends would be far beyond the scope of this chapter. Accordingly, a much more limited and selected interpretive attempt will be made in the final section. Discussion and Conclusion A first obvious question to ask is: Why did political violence, contrary to common assumptions, increase in the second half of the twentieth century but has started to decline more recently? In trying to explain such general trends on the aggregate of one type of action, it is obvious to focus on changes of the social and political structural context in

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which protest takes place. As I would argue, the low level of political violence in West Germany in the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, for example, can be attributed to a large extent to the overall situation in Germany, which still was marked by the effects of war. Getting food, shelter and work, as well as rebuilding the infrastructure, was much more important to the vast majority of the population than engaging in ideological disputes and challenging the present political decision makers who could not be blamed for the pressing material problems. ‘No experiments’ was a widely accepted political slogan of that period, launched by the ruling conservative party CDU in the federal electoral campaign in 1957. Yet to the extent that the basic physical needs of most people were satisfied and the political situation was perceived as stable, if not immobile, dissatisfaction grew, especially among left-oriented groups. Their discontent increased with the moderate and eventually pro-capitalist course of the Social Democratic Party, fixed in its 1959 programme, and eventually its participation in a grand coalition in 1966. At the same time, neo-Nazi groups were on the rise in quite a number of the states, thereby contributing to concerns among the leftist ranks. No wonder that the so-called extra-parliamentary opposition on the left gained momentum and, owing to a number of precipitating factors, among them the killing of a student by a police officer in June 1967, fundamentally questioned the given social and political order. After the relatively rapid decline of the student revolt, the left milieu split into a reformist and constructive strand on the one hand and, on the other hand, a radical but internally variegated strand ranging from unorthodox socialists to sectarian communists to left-wing terrorists. Activities of the radical left, partly including acts of violence, continued throughout the following decades, though the specific issues as well as the forms of violence changed over time. Terrorism gradually faded away, owing to both state repression and a growing estrangement from the majority of the radical left. At the same time, less severe acts of violence, especially by so-called autonomous groups, became more important in the 1980s and early 1990s. While left-wing political violence, in the aggregate, was relatively low in the first half of the 1990s, a massive wave of right-wing political violence started and, with some fluctuation, continued until the present. The rise of the right is mainly a reaction to three trends. First, the political left and especially the new social movements made some inroads into the political system but even more so influenced the political culture, allegedly leading to permissiveness if not moral decay, and an erosion of national values and identity owing to the embrace of multiculturalism. Accordingly, the radical right felt a need to react. Second, the economic situation worsened, partly owing to German unification and the financial and social burdens related to this. Precarious working conditions spread, unemployment rose, and welfare provisions were reduced. Unlike in the post-war period, the political decision makers were, for right or wrong, blamed for the economic problems. Moreover, right-wingers saw the influx of migrants as a major cause for rising unemployment and welfare cuts.

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Third, some of these problems, as well as a number of additional ones such as the shift of private investment to low-wage countries, were causally attributed to the rise of neoliberal economic policies in the context of accelerated processes of globalization. All this fostered feelings of anxiety and frustration, most prominently among the East Germans. Right-wing groups quickly and eagerly exploited these feelings by naming scapegoats – the Left, the Jews, and the foreigners – and proposing ‘simple solutions’. The rise of right-wingers, in turn, revitalized left-wingers, among them ‘anti-fascist groups’ who occasionally clashed with their antagonists directly, or the police who tried to keep both sides physically separated. With established politics turning rhetorically against the xenophobic right, but probably more so because of increased state repression, severe incidents of political violence became rarer. It is likely that, in this case, repression had a deterring effect rather than provoking even more violence. At the same time, practices of non-violent disobedience among more moderate groups became more widespread so that, in the aggregate, the level of political violence was relatively low in the first half of the 2000s but then rose again, partly in the context of direct clashes between the radical left and right. Broadly speaking, political violence in Germany in the last 60 years was nourished by two major currents. First, after a relatively peaceful period of reconstruction and economic recovery after WWII, an offensive left sought to bring about radical reform, if not outright revolution, in a period that was dominated by conservative forces. Then, starting in the early 1990s, a defensive right began to mobilize but soon faced counter-mobilization from the left as well as increasingly effective state repression. This crude picture, however, remains somewhat superficial as long as the more specific dynamics of political violence are ignored. This brings me to the second question: What factors drive the specific dynamics of waves of political violence? From the figures presented above, it can be seen that the dynamics of political violence, when looking at the aggregate, follow a discontinuous rhythm of mostly abrupt ups and downs. One might assume that this pattern by and large parallels that of the aggregate of all protests. So the hypothesis would be that violent protest is part and parcel of broader waves of protest. A second hypothesis states that violent protest clusters in the downswing phase of mass mobilization, as, for example, Sidney Tarrow has argued (1989: 306). However, preliminary and unpublished tests of this hypothesis have provided inconclusive results, at least for Germany. The first hypothesis about the close relation between developments of all protests and violent protests is largely disconfirmed by the data use in this chapter. When comparing the yearly proportional increase/decrease of the frequency of non-violent protests with the increase/decrease of the frequency of violent protests, no correlation can be found (Pearson’s coefficient .11). When applying the same procedure to participants in non-violent and violent protests, the correlation is very weak (Pearson’s coefficient .33). Thus, when comparing both types of protest, it can be concluded that either the same factors that influence their

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respective ups and downs have different effects (in fostering or curbing protest) or that different factors account for the rhythms of violent protest and non-violent protest. This finding supports the argument that a more detailed look at violent protest is needed in order to understand its potential causes. A first step of disaggregation is to look at the specific issue domains that produce changes in the volume of violent protests. For the most part, the subsequent and erratic waves of violent protest are not composed by the same issue or set of issues. Instead, mostly only one or two issues, and changing issues over time, are the main contributors to the aggregate wave. For example, the major wave of violent protests in the late 1960s was largely produced by the student movement and related groups, which, in this specific case, engaged in a number of issues ranging from the democratization of the universities to press concentration to the ending of the war in Vietnam. Another wave of violent protest in the first half of the 1980s was strongly influenced by struggles over squatted houses (and related clashes with the police) and physical attacks by clandestine leftist groups on the infrastructure of the energy industry, especially the nuclear power industry. A further wave of violent protests in the early 1990s was mainly based on right-wing and xenophobic activities, with the killing of people, for example, in arson attacks. A most recent wave of property damage mainly consisted of the burning of hundreds of cars. These incidents, attributed in part to leftist groups and in part to non-political perpetrators, culminated in 2009 and were concentrated almost exclusively in Berlin and Hamburg. Generally speaking, it would be completely misleading if one were to explain such relatively short waves by slow and gradual changes in the social movement sector or the general political opportunity structures. Rather, they are triggered by more specific and partly contingent factors such as: (1) the initial non-response of the political elites to the claims of the protesters in the second half of the 1960s; (2) the harsh eviction of squatters in Berlin and a few other cities in the early 1980s; (3) the failed attempts to occupy construction sites of planned nuclear reactors in the second half of the 1970s, which led the most radical anti-nuclear activists to engage in clandestine property destruction; (4) the specific discourse in the early 1990s about the ‘flood of asylum seekers’ and its alleged link to a number of social and economic problems in the recently unified Germany; and (5) the discourse in the most recent years about the financial crisis, gentrification, and precarious working and living conditions in big cities. While these few hints cannot replace a more detailed analysis of the factors that cause and/or trigger violent protest, they nonetheless point to the important role of policy-specific and even issue-specific factors such as: contingent political decisions; failed attempts to make an impact by other than violent means of protest; public discourses that encourage or discourage certain frames for interpreting a social problem and attributing blame; the social closure of political groups who, like sects, become isolated from their environment; and the interactions between police and demonstrators that may escalate and spur a whole series of protests. As we know from the riots in Los Angeles in 1992 or the Greek December in 2008, one single event can set in motion a wave of violence that, of course, is only

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possible because of structural reasons that have led to an increase of discontent and anger (Useem 1998). Still, we cannot assume that these structural reasons – for example, Neil Smelser’s (1962) ‘structural strains’ – are basically the same for all kinds of protest wave, including those of violent protests. All this is bad news for those students of social movements, political protest and collective violence who are looking for general and direct linkages between dependent and independent variables, tend towards crude ways of operationalization and measurement (preferably dummy variables), and try to interpret their results by drawing on general and parsimonious theories. Instead, my findings and arguments underline the need for rather close and specific investigations, though without necessarily concluding single case studies to be the one and only way to understand the ‘real world’. At the given state of knowledge and the available quantitative data in our field, we should refrain from making sweeping generalizations about broad large numbers of cases. Rather, it seems appropriate to focus on middle-range theories, to disaggregate quantitative data and to put these in their historical context, and to enrich and deepen the research with qualitative insights based on background and contextual knowledge that, beyond the statistics, helps to interpret findings in a world that is essentially based on social construction and meaning instead of universal mechanisms of stimulus and response.

Chapter 6

The ‘Unusual Suspects’: Radical Repertoires in Consensual Settings Mario Diani

What is the link between radical, and at times violent, protest, the much broader forms of public contention to be found within civil society, and the interorganizational networks that constitute its structure and one of its most important integrative mechanisms? (Baldassarri and Diani 2007). As the contentious politics approach has recently stressed (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001; Tilly and Tarrow 2007), consistently with several earlier lines of political analysis (Barnes, Kaase et al. 1978; Tilly 1978), it is always problematic to draw a neat line not only between radical and more moderate forms of protest, but also between protest and more conventional forms of political and civic participation. Even terrorism is best conceived as a strategy, accessible to – and actually accessed by – a broad range of political actors, including state actors, rather than the preserve of a distinct set of ‘terrorist’ actors (Tilly 2004). For these reasons, it is difficult to associate different instances of contentious collective action (and their protagonists) with distinct repertoires based on dichotomies such as radical vs conventional participation, violent vs peaceful protest, or the like. In contrast, it is advisable to aim at the definition of analytically distinct types of collective action, and then to check to what extent different types fit specific empirical episodes of contention, and to what extent they combine within them, thus enabling us to capture the multidimensional nature of politics. In the context of the present chapter, I will explore in particular to what extent radical repertoires of action are considered an option among civil society actors, and in particular among organizations that do not always fit the profile (or the stereotype) of the ‘protest group’. I will, in other words, look for the presence of radical tactics among the ‘unusual suspects’. I will exclude from my study forms of violence against human beings, whether used in the context of asymmetric terrorist activities1 or developing in the context of interactions between protestors and 1  For Tilly, ‘The word terror points to a widely recurrent but imprecisely bounded political strategy. We can reasonably define that strategy as asymmetrical deployment of threats and violence against enemies using means that fall outside the forms of political struggle routinely operating within some current regime’ (Tilly 2004: 5). This view is broader than that which restricts terrorist actions to ‘subnational groups or clandestine agents’, thus ruling out states from the pool of perpetrators of terrorist activities (Tilly

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police forces, or between protestors and counter-movement activists, or different factions of protestors. I will, instead, focus on violent actions against objects, and will adapt Tilly’s (2003: 3) definition of collective violence accordingly. I will define in particular violent protest as ‘episodic social interaction that immediately inflicts physical damage on objects (“damage” includes forcible seizure of objects over restraint or resistance); involves at least two perpetrators of the damage; and results at least in part from coordination among persons who perform the damaging acts’. It is important to note that violent protest repertoires do not coincide with the outbursts of violence against objects and possibly people that develop in a relatively spontaneous and uncoordinated way in short periods of time, and that are usually labelled as ‘riots’ (see Tilly [2003: 18] and Farrar [2003] on the problematic nature of this term). While these may be the focus of many contributions to this volume, in this chapter I take a different perspective. I am going to focus instead on the relation between civil society at large and radical protest, and on how looking at this interaction could contribute to our understanding of the context in which rioting takes place. In doing that, I am going to build on a series of assumptions. First, as analysts of collective action, we do not see ‘riots’, or more generally violent events. Rather, we see events and actions taking place in different locations and at different points in time. By calling such events and possibly series of events ‘riots’ we impose a certain meaning on them. This does not stem spontaneously from their ultimate nature as if there were one, but from processes of social construction that are inspired by our analytic categories. Second, the meaning of certain events and actions, and therefore also their labelling as ‘riots’ rather than ‘protest’ or ‘contention’, is likely to change over time, and is subject to different influences. It depends in particular on the system of relations in which certain actions and events are embedded. The same events in terms of properties such as the amount of confrontation with the police or counterprotestors, the radicalism of the repertoires adopted, the agendas pursued, and so on, can take on a totally different meaning if they are isolated events or if they are instead connected to each other and thus part of larger mobilization campaigns and initiatives. The connections between events may be of a variable nature. In the first place, they can be of the ideational type. For example, when we talk about our personal identity we establish connections between people and episodes that have been relevant to us. We assign them a meaning that enables us to see them as part of our own personal history. The same applies to the creation and re-creation of collective identities. These originate from processes of meaning attribution in which organizations and events are represented as parts of broader collective processes. These develop over time and space when they are woven together in

2004: 7). Whatever option we choose, neither version of terrorism applies to the forms of contention discussed not only in this chapter, but more generally in this book.

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broader narratives that stress commonalities and continuities, thus establishing connections between them (Melucci 1996; Pizzorno 2008). We can also explore connections between events by looking at the involvement in them of the same actors, whether organizations or individuals. By focusing, in other words, on what network analysts would call ‘two-mode networks’ (Breiger 1974; Borgatti and Everett 1997), it is not unreasonable to assume that events in which the same organizations and/or individual activists – or at least similar types of actor – were involved are more closely linked to each other than events promoted by totally different sets of actors. In other words, events may or may not be embedded in specific social networks. Depending on the nature of these networks and their nodes, the same events may take on quite different meanings. Think, for example, of the difference between the pre-modern revolt and the national social movement (Tilly 1984): properties of events matter, of course, but the decisive factor is the extended coordination between events and actions taking place in different localities and at different points in time. This seems to be distinctively missing in pre-modern forms of contention. The difference between disconnected events and social movements is relevant to our comparative understanding of violent protest. In particular, violent and disruptive events that are disconnected – that is, that are not located in stories, that are not located in broader networks, that are not perceived as part of much larger chains of events – are much more likely to be singled out as instances of deviance; they are also much more likely to be singled out as ‘riots’, with all the negative connotations associated with this particular concept (Tilly 2003: 18); and finally, they are much more likely to generate a series of phenomena that most would not regard as particularly healthy for the democratic process. These include the criminalization of dissenters and the spread of law-and-order orientations in the public opinion. One development that seems to characterize most Western countries, according to available evidence, is indeed the growing treatment as serious criminal offences of forms of protest that are indeed far more moderate than those that in the 1970s would have gone largely unnoticed (Earl 2006). The general implication of this reasoning is that not only is action driven by its context, but also that the context affects its interpretation and ultimately the meaning attributed to it. Among the important components of the context of collective action is surely ‘civil society’, by which I mean the range of associations that from different – often, very different – angles mobilizes on public issues and interests, with a focus either on political representation and advocacy, or on service delivery (Edwards 2004). I think it is important to look at the relation between protest activity and organizations, which in most cases are not radical at all, being often explicitly hostile to, or very reluctant to engage in, radical protest, and at times even suspicious of political action of any kind. For example, it may be worth looking at how the orientation towards protest affects the structure of civil society, in terms of inter-organizational exchanges; and whether and how it affects representations and interpretations of political violence. In particular, as I will suggest in the conclusions, the strengthening of connections between

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actors prepared to engage in some form of violent protest does not seem to increase the chances of occasional outbursts of collective violence. If anything, the – admittedly very limited – comparison of two local settings suggests that chances of rioting might be higher where organizations prepared to adopt violent repertoires are dispersed within civil society; where, in other words, there is not a distinctive radical sector within the broader civic networks. Violent Protest in Civic Networks: Evidence from the UK In order to address these issues, I am going to draw upon evidence from a study of civil society networks in two British cities, Glasgow and Bristol, in the early 2000s (Diani and Bison 2004; Baldassarri and Diani 2007; Diani, Lindsay and Purdue 2010). The project focused on networks of organizations mobilizing on environmental, ethnic and minority, community, and social exclusion issues. These organizations provide a particularly interesting unit for the analysis of coalition building and inter-organizational networking: they are distinct enough to work independently, yet have enough potential areas of convergence to render crosssectoral alliances a feasible option (e.g., on issues such as North–South relations, peace, refugees, urban decay, racism, etc.). Between 2001 and 2002, face-to-face interviews took place with representatives of 124 organizations in Glasgow and 134 in Bristol. These included both local branches of UK-wide organizations (in Glasgow, also Scotland-wide), and independent local groups, with a varying degree of formalization and bureaucratization. All the organizations that played a city-wide role were contacted;2 as for community organizations, rather than taking a small sample from across the city, efforts were concentrated on two areas, both relatively deprived.3 Respondents were asked to identify up to five most important partners in alliances. They were also invited to identify any additional important collaboration with groups belonging to any of the following categories: environmental organizations, ethnic organizations, community organizations, churches, political parties, unions and other economic interest groups, other voluntary organizations, other organizations. The resulting data on alliances should not be treated as a list 2  With the exception of one ethnic organization in Bristol, all the most central organizations in the two cities were contacted: while many other organizations, which were not among those interviewed, were mentioned by respondents, none received more than three nominations (the 10 per cent most central organizations in the two cities were named seven times or more by other network members). 3  These were the Southside in Glasgow, an area with a massive historical presence of working class, including neighbourhoods such as Govan, Govanhill, Gorbals and Pollokshields; and the area including the neighbourhoods of Easton, Knowles, Withywood and Hartcliffe in Bristol, featuring a strong presence of ethnic minorities. Baldassarri and Diani (2007) provide more information on the unit of analysis.

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of the groups with which our respondents exchanged most frequently or most intensely in objective terms, but of those they perceived as their most important allies at the time of the interview. Despite being located within a broadly similar political system, for all local differences, the two cities also differ on a number of important dimensions. Glasgow is still polarized along a quite deep class cleavage; apart from the historical cleavage between Catholics and Protestants, it is not particularly heterogeneous and is divided in terms of ethnic minorities, with the only major group, the Pakistanis, well integrated in the local Labour political machine; and Labour has traditionally dominated local city politics, despite the growth since the late 1990s of the Scottish National Party. Bristol is quite different on each criterion: it is very diverse in terms of ethnic composition, with Indian, Pakistani, West Indian and African communities all well represented; and it has a more pluralistic and competitive political system, with Labour and Conservatives always in contention for the control of city politics. For these reasons, and also taking into account its stronger new middle-class profile, Bristol is usually regarded as a particularly favourable ground for the development of new social movement types of collective action, such as environmentalism, and for the growth of countercultures pursuing social change through innovation in lifestyles (Bull and Jones 2006; Purdue, Dürrschmidt and Jowers 1997). In this chapter I look in particular at civic organizations’ adoption (or availability to adopt, the two options being treated as a single category) of four types of radical protest. These types include blockades and sit-ins, occupation of buildings, illegal graffiti, and violence against objects. While only the last falls squarely under the category of violent protest, and qualifies as an essential component of rioting, it is also important to look at the other three as they are representative of the grey area between the most radical forms of protest and the more conventional ones. The spread of this repertoire across civil society groups may provide important information on the context in which actors inclined to engage in rioting operate, but also on the possibility that the potential for rioting can be reduced by the presence of alternative channels for radical protest. There are some differences between the two cities, consistent with the more militant tradition of Glasgow, where local organizations are more inclined than their counterparts in Bristol to engage with blockades and sit-ins, and to occupy buildings. However, when it comes to heavily symbolic actions like the drawing of graffiti, or violence against objects, the two cities do not differ in a significant way (Table 6.1). Differences between the two cities are also minimal if we differentiate between organizations that have neither used nor would consider using any of those forms, those who have used some of them but not violence, and those who would also at least consider using violence on objects (Table 6.2). The proportion of organizations that entirely rules out the possibility of using any of such forms is lower in Glasgow, although still pretty high (two-thirds of the total). But the overall impression one gets from these data is that, for all the conventional representations of the two cities, differences between the two civic sectors are modest.

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Table 6.1 Forms of radical protest by city (per cent) Glasgow

Bristol

Total

27 23 10 18 124

18 14 14 13 134

23 19 12 15 258

Blockades/sit-ins*** Occupations of buildings Graffiti Attacks on property/land N Note: *** = p < .001.

Table 6.2 Reports of protest repertoires (per cent)

Would never use radical repertoire Might use non-violent protest Might use violence against objects N

Glasgow

Bristol

Total

66 14 20 124

76 16 8 134

71 15 14 258

Are there major differences between organizations promoting, or at the very least considering, the use of radical forms of protest (both violent and non-violent) and the rest of civil society? Table 6.3 reports differences between ‘radical’ organizations and others in the two cities, on several types of connections to institutional actors. The striking finding is that sympathy for certain action repertoires does not seem to affect at all ties to institutions and political representatives. On variables such as the range of collaborations to local council units, the levels of involvement in public-private partnerships, and the amount of collaborations with individual civil servants and local politicians, there are no differences of note between radical protestors and moderate civic organizations. The only exceptions are owing to the fact that radical groups seem at least in part less happy with the quality of such collaborations: in Glasgow, radical organizations are significantly more critical of public–private partnerships than other organizations,4 while their counterparts in Bristol report a lower percentage of useful collaborations over the totality of their ties to local council units than the rest of the local civic groups. Altogether, however, differences are lower than one might expect.

4  The activation of ‘Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs)’, including a mix of public bodies, representatives of the private sector, and voluntary and community sector organizations, was between the late 1990s and the early 2000s a central component of New Labour’s urban regeneration agenda (Daly and Howell 2006: 21).

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Table 6.3 Links of ‘radical’ organizations to institutions by city Institutional linkages Range of ties to council departments (0–100) Share of useful ties to council departments (0–100) Range of involvement in partnerships (0–5) Critical of partnerships (0–1) Ties to specific local politicians/ civil servants N

Glasgow radicals Total Bristol radicals Total 40

39

36

41

43

49

41***

57

.98

1.22

1.12

1.49

.40**

.19

.20

.15

3.1

3.2

2.6

2.6

42

124

90

113

Note: Differences between ‘radical’ and other organizations in either city significant at .001 (***) and .01 (**) level.

Table 6.4 A profile of ‘radical’ organizations by city Institutional linkages Support the professionalization of the voluntary and community sector (0–100) Level of organizational formalization (0–9) Interest in global and environmental issues (0–100) Network centrality (0–22) Identify with a social movement (0–1) Participation in local public events (0–96) N

Glasgow radicals Total Bristol radicals Total 32***

45

40*

48

4.5*

5

4.5**

5.4

36

35

55***

44

3.83*

2.84

1.56

1.96

.69***

.46

.78*

.62

28***

17

12

15

42

124

29

127

Note: Differences between ‘radical’ and other organizations in either city significant at .001 (***) and .01 (**), and .05 (*) level.

Differences are more pronounced when we look at the characteristics of ‘radical’ organizations, and are largely consistent across the two cities. In both Glasgow and Bristol, organizations willing to adopt radical tactics are more concerned than the rest about the risks deriving from the professionalization of the voluntary sector and its co-optation in the design and implementation of public policy in a position subordinated to business interests; they are less formalized in their organizational structure; and they are more likely to define themselves as part of

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larger social movements. There are differences across cities, as radical Glaswegian organizations are overall more involved in major public collective events and are also more central in local civic networks than their moderate counterparts, while no differences can be found in Bristol. Conversely, radical organizations in Bristol show a significantly higher interest in globalization and environmental issues than non-radical groups in their city, while in Glasgow no difference can be found on this ground between radicals and non-radicals. If we regress the variables discussed above on the nature of organizations as radicals, to control for spurious relations (Table 6.5), we get two sharper and more diversified pictures for the two cities. In Glasgow, the propensity to adopt radical protest is predicted by the combination of a strong involvement in public events, a movement identity, and a critical attitude towards professionalization and co-optation. Radical protest is, in other words, related to feeling part of a large collectivity that champions a model of collective action focused on the use of public spaces and public events and is strongly suspicious of direct involvement in policy making. In contrast, in Bristol radical protest seems particularly appealing to actors that occupy a peripheral position in civic networks, experience unsatisfactory collaborations with their local council units, and focus on relatively less established issues such as those closest to the new social movements, in particular, globalization. In other words, in Glasgow protest seems the preserve of actors strongly engaged in the local public sphere, and with a strong focus on collective action; in Bristol, it seems particularly popular among organizations that play in that scene a more limited and less rewarding role. Table 6.5 Odds ratios predicting the use of ‘radical’ protest by city Characteristics Share of useful ties to council departments Support the professionalization of the voluntary and community sector Level of organizational formalization Interest in global and environmental issues Network centrality Identify with a social movement Participation in local public events Pseudo R2

Glasgow

Sig.

Bristol

Sig.

.84

.822

.21

.021

.97

.004

.99

.231

.96 .99 1.02 3.03 1.05 .289

.799 .772 .718 .034 .001

.91 1.07 .82 2.20 .97 .273

.455 .000 .060 .180 .185

So far, we have focused on the traits of organizations taken individually. But how do they relate to each other? Let us look at the structure of the most important alliances in the two cities (figures 6.1 and 6.2). The black triangles represent the organizations with the most radical repertoires, the white circles those totally alien

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Figure 6.1 Alliance network in Glasgow

Note: triangles = have used/could use violence against objects; squares = have used/might use confrontational protest; circles = would never use any confrontational protest.

Figure 6.2 Alliance network in Bristol

Note: triangles = have used/could use violence against objects; squares = have used/might use confrontational protest; circles = would never use any confrontational protest.

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Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State

Figure 6.3 Alliances between organizations prepared to engage in confrontational protest in Glasgow

Note: triangles = have used/could use violence against objects; squares = have used/might use confrontational protest.

Figure 6.4 Alliances between organizations prepared to engage in confrontational protest in Bristol

Note: triangles = have used/could use violence against objects; squares = have used/might use confrontational protest.

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to radical protest, and the dark squares those in between. In both networks, radical organizations (including both levels of radicalism) tend to be concentrated in one section of the network. However, patterns become clearer, and more distinctive, if we take out of the picture the most moderate organizations (figures 6.3 and 6.4). Apart from a fairly similar number of isolated organizations, deprived of links to other radical groups, in Bristol we see longer chains of alliances than in Glasgow. In the latter, ties between radical groups are denser, as radical organizations are embedded in more tightly connected networks of similar organizations than in Bristol. Conversely, organizations in Bristol seem to be more frequently linked to actors that do not endorse the use of radical protest tactics. The difference between the two cities becomes even more striking if we focus only on the organizations that claim to be prepared to engage in the most radical form of protest among those listed, namely, violence against objects (figures 6.5 and 6.6). Most of the Glaswegian organizations are still linked to each other in a fairly dense pattern of ties and the network consists of a single component (barring three isolates, less than 20 per cent of the total). In Bristol, in contrast, the network is highly fragmented as no systematic connection seems to exist between groups advocating this particularly radical form of action: 6 ‘radical’ organizations out of 15 have no ties to the others, and the rest are linked in 4 different components, only 1 of which involves more than a dyad. We can derive some implications of these findings straight from what we know about the role of networks in individual recruitment and individual participation in radical collective action: namely, that individual traits and predispositions are

Figure 6.5 Alliances between organizations prepared to engage in violence against objects (Glasgow)

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Figure 6.6 Alliances between organizations prepared to engage in violence against objects (Bristol) hardly a sufficient cause to explain the involvement in radical protest, and that, in contrast, embeddedness in specific relational settings is of paramount importance (McAdam and Paulsen 1993; Passy and Giugni 2001; Diani 2004). By extending this fundamental principle to the organizational realm, we can expect that the propensity to adopt more radical forms of protest will be higher where actors prepared to do so are also linked to each other in relatively dense networks that can reinforce their approach and encourage them to face the higher costs that these options usually entail. As the graphs illustrate, in Bristol we have a situation in which radical actors are scattered across civil society and are only thinly connected, if they are at all. Most important, they lack by virtue of this the critical mass that can elaborate a distinctive radical agenda within local politics and make it more visible. They are not in the structural position that would enable them to easily promote collective action with a radical edge. In Glasgow, in contrast, an organizational infrastructure is already in place within civil society that is capable of promoting confrontational forms of protest on a fairly regular basis. From this, it follows that the most radical members of the citizenry may more easily identify a specific protest sector to which they may refer in order to express their political discontent.

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Conclusions: Does Availability Spur ‘Rioting’? The key question that the findings I have presented pose is: What are the implications of the different structural configurations in the two cities for the chances of development, not just of violent protest, but, in particular, of violent protest of a ‘riotous’ form? Apart from the fact that collective violence is not driven by deprivation per se (Spilerman 1976; Olzak and Shanahan 1996), one of the most established findings of research in collective action over the years has been that it is far from ‘unstructured’. To the contrary, there is a considerable amount of coordination and planning even within the episodes of disruptive violence that look closest to uncontrolled expressions of anger (see, e.g., Auyero 2007, in particular pp. 15–21), not to mention the importance of interaction dynamics between aggrieved groups, the police (e.g., Auyero 2007) and/or hostile groups, such as white racists in the British ethnic-based confrontations of the early 2000s (Hussain and Bagguley 2005; Amin 2003). By this token, one might be led to think that the presence of a cohesive subsector of civil society, linking together organizations prepared to consider violence against objects, should make violent outbursts more likely in Glasgow than in Bristol. Without any intention of resurrecting the argument about the spontaneity of riotous behaviour, I would suggest that greater connectedness of ‘radical’ actors in civil society acts rather as a constraint than as a facilitator of urban rioting. The empirical evidence to support my claim is undoubtedly thin. Of course, such a claim is consistent with much broader evidence suggesting that political violence is the outcome of the crisis of contentious politics, rather than its logical evolution, as Tarrow (1989) showed in his seminal analysis of protest in Italy between the 1960s and the 1970s. Still, the empirical support for the network version of this argument, which I am proposing here, is very limited. It largely draws on the fact that since the 1980s Glasgow has not experienced a riot of any relevance, while it has witnessed innumerable instances of contentious, at times radical, collective action. To the contrary, Bristol has seen at least two major instances of rioting, namely, the St Paul’s riots in 1980 and the Hartcliffe riot in 1992 (Rex, n.d.). These have been outbreaks in what has been otherwise a largely non-confrontational pattern of civic life. How do these differences fit the traits of the local polities? As we have seen, Bristol is closest to what one could term a ‘pluralist’ polity, in which radical protest is basically the preserve of actors • • • •

mobilizing on emerging issues; with an unsatisfactory relation to local institutions; somehow peripheral in civic networks; and most important, not densely connected to each other (or better, connected, but through relatively longer chains of ties rather than through denser, cliquish structures).

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In Glasgow, in contrast, we find a polarized polity, in which traditional cleavages still matter to some extent, and in which actors available to engage in radical protest • explicitly identify with broader social movements; • have a more similar relation than other organizations to local institutions, despite expressing a more critical opinion towards institutional co-optation; • are central in local public life; and • most important, are much more densely connected to each other – and to the rest of the civic sector – than their Bristolian counterparts. Of course, two cases hardly provide sufficient evidence for firm conclusions, especially given the fact that Bristol itself has only expressed two major riots since the 1980s. At the same time, they may be enough to provide sufficient insights to encourage a preliminary, purely hypothetical answer to the following question: What kind of civil society structure is the most capable of incorporating the potential for rioting, providing frustrated social groups with opportunities for sustained political representation, and offering a voice to their grievances while at the same time reducing occurrences of mass, uncontrolled violent outbursts? The absence of rioting in Glasgow suggests that this might be a structure in which organizations prepared to adopt confrontational, if largely non-violent, means of action are actually more strongly connected in a distinct position within civil society, and are therefore able to play a more specific and distinctive role. Paradoxically, the presence of a conspicuous sector of contentious politics within civil society might provide a bridge between the most radical and/or frustrated citizens, prepared to consider engaging in rioting, and the rest of civil society. On the other hand, the relational pattern found in Bristol suggests that organizations prepared to engage in confrontational protest do not have particularly tight patterns of relations among them. They are instead embedded in broader networks of largely non-confrontational organizations, which often results in them proving confrontational in intention rather than in practice. This certainly contributes to Bristol being associated with a peaceful and orderly style of interest representation, which certainly suits the most professional organizations in the civic sector, but which may be less responsive towards the emergence of new issues lacking adequate routine representation (Bull and Jones 2006). In a city like Bristol, organizations that are capable of working within the system on issues that are legitimately and routinely considered part of the local political agenda are likely to flourish. However, it is more problematic whether and how un-vested interests manage to get adequate representation. This may in turn create the conditions for prolonged periods of social ‘rest’, punctuated by short outbreaks of unrest on a scale unseen in cities like Glasgow. In other words, for all its ‘laid-back’ and peaceful nature, the Bristol polity, corresponding to a model of civil society without distinctive space for radical contentious protest, seems more conducive to occasional rioting than more contentious Glasgow.

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The interpretation put forward here, that mobilized, confrontational and cohesive sectors of civil society prevent, rather than encourage, ‘riotous’ behaviour, appears consistent with the arguments advanced by several observers of the urban riots of the early 2000s in the UK, that street violence also developed as a response to weak minority leadership (Amin 2003: 461); and that the perpetrators received very little support from their own ethnic communities even in the face of disproportionate legal sanctions (Farrar 2003). Apart from the peculiarities of the specific cases, however, the experience – and the patterns – I have described seem to support broader theoretical claims about the negative effects of recent processes of depolarization and deradicalization of conflicts on the quality of democratic life. One-sided conceptions of politics as oriented exclusively to the mediation of interests and the negation of deep ideological divides have made it increasingly difficult to give voice and structure to the divisions and the potential sources of conflict that nevertheless keep characterizing contemporary societies (Mouffe 2005). The more that conflict is denied as a major structuring force in society, the higher the chances that its expressions will take formats that are either explicitly hostile to the democratic process (e.g., the Western European populist parties like the Northern League in Italy or the Front National in France: Mouffe 2005) or largely detached from it in practice. According to this logic, the chances for rioting would be lower in a city like Glasgow because in that city organizations that are prepared to engage in ‘radical’ protest represent a distinct sector of civil society. This makes them visible to the most critical sectors of local civil society and dispels the notion that collective violence within riots is the only option left to express radical dissent. None of this can be found in Bristol, where there is no patterned, systematic organization of social conflict in the local civic sector. At the same time, one could of course wonder to what extent the hypotheses emerging from this analysis are the outcome of the peculiarities of the British context. It would be interesting, for example, to explore the networks between the organizations that are prepared to adopt radical confrontational repertoires in countries with a more confrontational political culture. Conventional wisdom has portrayed Greek society as permeated by a strongly contentious political culture and by deep ideological cleavages. However, the account that Kotronaki and Seferiades provide in this book of the wave of contention ignited by the December 2008 events and later by the drastic cuts in public spending bears several similarities to the case described here. They also stress the reluctance demonstrated by the traditional leftist parties and by the unions to engage in forms of protest, the radicalism of which could match the depth of the grievances felt by many Greek citizens in the face of violent police behaviour or economic measures perceived as deeply imbalanced. Nevertheless, the few analogies I can point at do not make a robust comparative argument. My contribution to the current debate should therefore be received in the first place as a stimulus to undertake systematic comparison of episodes of riotous collective action.

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Chapter 7

The Riots: A Dynamic View1 Donatella della Porta and Bernard Gbikpi I have omitted the widely used term ‘riot’ from the typology […] because it embodied a political judgment rather than an analytic distinction. Authorities and observers label as riots the damage-doing gatherings of which they disapprove, but they use terms like demonstrations, protest, resistance and retaliation for essentially similar events of which they approve. In cataloguing thousands of violent events—many of them called riots (or the local language equivalent) by authority and observers—from multiple countries and over several centuries, I have not once found an instance in which the participants called the event a riot or identified themselves as rioters. (Tilly 2003: 18)

Most social science concepts are contested—but some more so. This is the case for riot, which, as terrorism or Nimby, is a term derived from everyday language, and is used in a stigmatizing way to signify irrational and deviant behavior. While people freely admit that they protest, even in unconventional and sometime “disobedient” ways, they rarely state that they are rioting. Additionally, in the social sciences and in politics, a riot as a form of violence receives only sporadic attention, with little or no attempts at conceptualization. Compared with other forms of violence, the interpretations about riots and rioting vary dramatically, being influenced by both the specific characteristics of the analyzed events as well as the scientific or political background of the analysts. If it is true that no shared definition of riot exists in the social sciences, there is, however, a growing body of knowledge that challenges some of the stereotypes on the riots, of which Tilly spoke in the opening quote. Taking a lead from Tilly’s analysis of political violence, we suggest that it is best to focus on its dynamic and relational aspects, namely, “on interpersonal processes that promote, inhibit, or channel collective violence and connect it with nonviolent politics” (Tilly 2003: 20). Our approach to political violence can be summed up as:

1  This material is based upon work supported by the Science and Technology Directorate of the US, made to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START, www.start.umd.edu; Grant Award Numbers N00140510629 and 2008-ST-061-ST0004) at the University of Maryland. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors alone.

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• relational, as it locates political violence as developing from the radicalization of conflicts among various actors, institutional and noninstitutional; • constructivist, as it takes into account not only the external opportunities and constraints, but also the social construction of that reality by the various actors participating in the social and political conflict; and • dynamic, as it aims at reconstructing the causal mechanisms that link the macro-system in which political violence develops; the meso-system formed by the radical organizations; and the micro-system of the symbolic interactions within the activist networks. In this chapter, we examine to what extent this approach can be applied to the specific form of political violence often labeled as a riot. Problematizing the conceptualization of riots as anomic, spontaneous, and apolitical, we will bring into the analysis some concepts from the field of social movement research, such as resource mobilization and political opportunities, and bridge them with sensitivity to relations, symbolic constructivism, and causal mechanisms. We begin by briefly reviewing the most recent “riots” in France in November 2005 and in Greece in December 2008, to suggest ways that social movement concepts illuminate aspects of political violence. The Riot Within: The Dynamics of a Riot The events of December 2008 in Greece have been often described—and stigmatized—as riots. The term is often applied by those who want to stress the blind, unrestrained, and intense character of violence; the lack of explicit, understandable aims; the anger (rather than reason) of participants; the spontaneous and fragmented nature of their actions; and the absence of organizational structure. This image is, however, challenged by recent research, among which Chapters 11–14 in this volume are important empirical contributions. Social science indicates that, in contrast to these stereotypical points, so-called riots often include: • the targeted use of violence (especially attacks against banks, hotels, shops and the police), within a broader repertoire of contention (marches to police stations, sit-ins, general strikes, building, university, and school occupations); • the articulation of some claims (recognition of “invisible” groups); and • the importance of both traditional (left-wing) organizational structures and of new forms of coordination (e.g., through mobile phones, blogs). • Beyond the preconditions for rioting, research focused on the dynamics of the riots, singling out some common characteristics but also differences in different types of riot.

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Constrained violence Research on past and present episodes of riots has stressed the constrained dimension of violence. Although with significant exceptions (in particular, in ethnic riots), the rioters tend to limit their use of violence. The choice of targets during riots is selective—for example, food riots tend to address some stores, not others (e.g., Auyero 2007)—and the amount of damage is usually limited. Also, rioters follow rituals that vary according to contextual (time and space) characteristics as well as social characteristics of the participants. As for the French banlieues riots, dramatic “telegenic” images (Lagrange 2006b) of violent confrontations, gasoline bombs, and car arson have been stressed. Other images include attacks on institutional symbols of everyday life, such as the schools and stores. Yet, in fact, there were few cases of theft, almost no intra-gang violence (ibid.), and very few injuries—as opposed to 54 deaths and 3,000 wounded in the Los Angeles riots of 1992 (Cicchelli et al. 2007). In Greece, violence was also highly symbolic and often very constrained within a broader repertoire of contention, including marches to police stations, sit-ins, general strikes, 800 school occupations. No one died other than the young student, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, whose killing on December 6 precipitated the protests. It is also common that violence is shaped and constrained by the interactions among different actors in the street, especially between the police and specific populations, such as migrants, youths, anarchists, football hooligans, and so on. In the French case, Cicchelli et al. (2007) refer to “heavy contention with the police” (contentieux lourd avec la police), linked to short-term interactions with youth who are aroused by disrespect, humiliation, and persecution (see Johnston’s Chapter 4). Analysts also mention long-term factors such as police conflicts and racism as part of the shared memory of a neighborhood (Kokoreff 2005–06). In the Greek case, the escalated-force police strategies that played a pivotal role in starting the protest in 2008 invoked recent memories of police violence in the final march of the fourth edition of the European Social Forum, the encounter of global justice movement activists developed on the model of the World Social Forum, that took place in Athens in 2006 (della Porta 2009). Also relevant was the history of territorial resistance in free space, such as the Exarcheia neighborhood of Athens, and the principle of universities as police-free spaces of asylum (Kouki 2009), or the symbolic attacks on the “highest European” Christmas tree in Sintagma square. The rioting net Another widespread empirical observation in studies of riots is the role of networks in rioting (e.g., Bohstedt 1983; Thompson 1971; Markoff 1986). Riots are carried out by small groups of people connected by friendship, family, or community that tend to stay together (Auyero 2007). This was confirmed in the research on French riots that points at the participation of groups of young friends, especially between

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Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State

14 and 20 years old (Kokoreff et al. 2007). In the Greek riots, research indicates the important role played by various left-wing political organizations and local networks of students active in protest in high schools and universities, as well as the use of mobile phones and blogs in order to build a loose infrastructure of the protest. Thus, in line with the assumption about the relevance of mobilizing structures that is fundamental in social movement research, riots have greater organization than usually recognized. Beyond this, and again in line with research on social movements, many riots are also linked to routine politics, confirming the existence of fuzzy and permeable borders between institutional and non-institutional politics (Auyero 2007). Research on religious riots and food riots has pointed at the participation or complicity of politicians, priests, and sometimes even the police. Parallel to a basic finding regarding social movement mobilization, this research emphasizes the organizational rootedness of collective violence in normal social relations. Strategic rioting? The riot is, at least in part, a political tool of negotiation. It has been, in fact, stressed that riots do have effects that sometimes go in the direction desired by the rioters. Riots have been, in particular, often followed by reform in the police (e.g., after Brixton in 1981 and Los Angeles in 1992), with larger presence of ethnic minorities, or by investigating committees, which often suggest policies against social exclusion, but also by policies that restrict asylum rights or expel unwanted migrants. In the French case, the strategic dimension of the riot as a demand for recognition is often stressed by the rioters that explain their participation as a reaction to a (collective) injustice, in the face of a lack (or failure) of alternative channels of voice. In the words of a rioter, “I think it is a means like another for express oneself. If we had done marches, that would have changed nothing. The only solution, might be, that we found is to burn car in order to make oneself heard” (in Kokoreff et al. 2007: 94). On this basis, researchers also presented the main motifs of the rioters as a demand for respect (not only rage, but also dignity), and “repoliticization from below” (Kokoreff 2005–06: 530). Similarly in the Greek case, events such as the interruption in the public TV station of 80-second live broadcasting of mute protestors showing a banner inviting people to join the street protests testify to the strong request for visibility by voiceless groups (youths, precarious workers). The Causes for Rioting: Riots Narratives Taking seriously the statement that riots are to be understood—as other forms of protest—in their interaction with “normal politics,” we should ask, what does

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this tell us in terms of the causes and effects of riots? The political dimension of a riot is, in fact, linked with the symbolic dimensions of its assumed causes and potential solutions. If confrontations in the street influence the dynamics of riots, their effects are filtered through a debate that addresses their social causes and the potential policy solutions. The social and political bases in the riot narratives Researchers have identified a wide variety of causal factors that influence both contemporary and historical riots, too numerous to review here in detail. Suffice it to say that if we concentrate exclusively on social factors, ecological-spatial and identity-based analyses are especially relevant to our focus on narratives of the French riots. Regarding spatial factors, studies have consistently found significant correlations among the intensity of the riots, spatial segregation, and internal neighborhood differentiation (Kokoreff et al. 2007). Researchers have correlated the number of burned cars with characteristics of neighborhoods, such as unemployment rates, income levels, and family size (Lagrange 2006b). The crises of the welfare state, job insecurity and job discrimination have been mentioned as clustering by neighborhood (Duprez 2005–06). These social characteristics tend to be present in the ZUS (Zones Urbaines Sensibles), or the cités pauvres, those urban areas in need of urban restructuring, with overlapping exclusion and relative deprivation (Lagrange 2006b). In the Greek case, it was noted that the media coverage of the violence was accompanied by debates that, at least in part, recognized justifications for the participants’ anger (e.g., Kouki 2008). However, in both Greek and French cases, most analyses—both in social science and popular media—were done by citing socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the actors and areas, rather than by listening to the voices of the participants themselves. Ethnic identity is another dimension of the social causes of riots, especially regarding the disproportionate participation of some ethnic groups. Many foreign commentators have pointed to the unwillingness of both scholars and politicians to admit to the racial dimension of riots (e.g., see Kokoreff 2005–06 regarding the US; Rea 2005–06 regarding Belgium; also Cicchelli et al. 2007 regarding France). In the French debate, the racial-ethnic element has been linked to social discrimination of immigrants and how these two factors interact. Lagrange and Oberti (2006) have pointed out how the memory of discrimination against and exploitation of the first generation of migrants interacts with the growing job insecurity of migrants of the second and third generations. Additionally, cultural patterns of different migrant groups have been mentioned with reference to the different participation rates of immigrant youth, with especially much lower participation from individuals with Maghreb origins in comparison with those coming from Sub-Saharan families. In the first case, there is a strong orientation to integration, success, independence from the family and secularism (Kakpo 2006). In the Greek case, there also was an immigrant presence, especially on Monday

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Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State

night when violence peaked (see Chapter 13 by Kanellopoulos), although, overall, participants there were mostly ethnic Greeks. While the political effects of riots are disputed, as causes political factors come to the fore quite often among observers, especially the absence of effective policies for the integration of marginal groups. In the interpretations of the 2005 French riots, political causes have emerged at various levels. They have been interpreted as proof of the failure of the Republican model, as rising expectations are created but left unmet, and therefore cause indignation and revolt (Duprez 2005–06). Additionally, the role of political actors, in particular, the Minister of Interior, using the riots to serve political ends has been stressed. Cicchelli et al. (2007) discuss the reasons for revolt in terms of Left’s timidity and its failure to develop a different discourse about the invisible and poor urban periphery (les banlieues invisibles) after the co-optation of the anti-racist movements in the 1990s (SOS Rascisme and le mouvement des beurs, see Kokoreff 2005–06). Other analysts stress the specific effects of the right-wing government’s abandonment of policies to support neighborhood associations in les cités pauvres and police de proximité programs (Duprez 2005–06: 513). The rioters are often described as politically isolated (Lagrange 2006a). These observations synchronize with analyses of other contemporary riots that focus on social and political conditions, including the consequences of unemployment, transformations in the structure of social classes, unsuccessful urban policies, and of the degradation of relations with the police (Zancarini-Fournel 2004; Bachman and Le Guennec 1996; Rey 1996; Wieviorka 1999). In Greece, widespread corruption has been linked with the effects of the crisis of the political parties in a highly politicized society. Widespread discontent with policies of neoliberal privatization (especially in the university system, a precipitant of large student protests in previous years) compounded the political crisis. A social movements approach would in fact point to the role of closed opportunities in the radicalization of political conflicts. In Greece, like in Italy in 1977, political violence developed when young people, who mobilized on new claims, not only found channels of access to political power closed, but saw their claims for recognition of emerging collective identities rejected also by potential allies in the left-wing opposition. The construction of the French riots: an illustration Not only are “riots” made of interactions among participants, but they are also constructed in narratives of various commentators. We have carried out an examination of the treatment of the French riots by the press to illustrate the different narratives that—in the real world, as in the social sciences—emerge when accounting for rioting. For three weeks in 2005, from October 27 to November 19, French banlieues witnessed violent events variously referred to as “urban violence,” “riots,” “revolts,” “insurrections,” and “troubles.” According to the French Ministry of Interior at that time, Nicolas Sarkozy, during these weeks

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10,000 vehicles were burned, 200 public buildings destroyed (libraries, schools, post offices, tax offices, sports halls, public transport installations), and thousands of square meters of shopping activities attacked and gutted (Sarkozy 2005). Damages amounted to about 200 million euros (Le Monde 2005a). Nobody died, but one old woman was seriously wounded when she was trapped in a bus set in flames by rioters. According to the French Ministry of Justice, 2,734 persons were put under arrest between October 29 and November 14. At the same date 639 legal adults had been or were to be soon tried; 122 adults had been brought before a judge; 108 judicial investigations had been initiated; 489 sentences to prison pronounced, of which 375 were immediate and others conditional; 41 adults had been released; and 494 juveniles had been brought before juvenile courts, of which 108 were arrested (Cabinet Garde des Sceaux 2005; Cazelles, Morel and Roché, 2007; Lagrange 2006a, 2006b; Lagrange and Oberti 2006). Statements about rioters offered various interpretations. Very soon after the riots, the Ministry of the Interior announced that 70 to 80 percent of the persons arrested were delinquents who had violent antecedents (Sarkozy 2005a). In contrast, according to the general prosecutors of two important tribunals of the Parisian suburbs (Bobigny and Créteil), the majority of the youths arrested had no previous criminal records (de Charette 2005). According to Jean-Pierre Rosenczveig, president of the Tribunal for Children in Bobigny, of the 87 minors processed in his jurisdiction, only 17 had antecedent judicial files, some of which were not of a criminal nature but regarded educational assistance for children in danger (Rosenczveig 2005). The difference between the two accounts might lie in the fact that some youths may have been known to the police services but not to the judiciary. In the meantime, precise statistics have been produced about the judiciary profile of the rioters, challenging the idea that most rioters had previous police records (Mazars 2007; Kherfi 2006; Jobard 2006). There were also controversial views about the ethnic profile of the rioters (Kakpo 2006). Though the media broadcasts and pictures gave the idea that they were mainly people with Maghreb and Sub-Saharan origins, a closer look seems to reveal a greater ethnic diversity. Among the people arrested in the suburbs around Paris, there was certainly an over representation of people with names from Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa, but not so in the suburbs of the cities in the north of the country (in cities such as Lille and Arras) (Saberan 2005). On the other hand, almost no violence occurred in Marseille, a large southern city with a very sizeable population from Maghreb countries (Le Monde 2005b). Linked to the ethnic issue, and because some religious organizations made calls for appeasement that seemed to resonate among some youths, there has been talk of the Islamization of the banlieues. Some politicians have expressed regrets, recalling that it signifies the failure of the secular Republican order (Sarkozy 2005b). However, analysts have generally discarded the idea that the violence could have been manipulated by religious authorities or even that the actors might have acted moved on religious feelings (Cesari 2005). Other observers see more

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general trends, such as the influence of Afro-American street culture, consumerist culture, or nihilist tendencies, rather than Islamic ones (Bui 2005; Debray 2005). Analysts and officials generally concur that these events were spontaneous, and neither planned nor organized by organized groups or political forces. Events exploded and spread spontaneously after two boys (Bouna, 15, and Zied, 17 years old) died from electrocution while hiding from the police who were after them (Mignard and Tordjman 2006). The hypothesis of a generalized coordination among the suburbs where riots occurred has eventually been discarded. Rather, there is the belief that the actors moved with a kind of emulation from each other’s actions (Libération 2005). In this sense, the riots certainly had “no ideology and no purpose other than to make a statement of distress and anger” (Pfaff 2005; Copernic 2005). These various frames emerged in our empirical research, during which we have read and coded all articles published in Le Monde from October 28, 2005, the day of the first news on the death of two boys in Clichy-sous-Bois to January 2, 2006, the day after the lifting of the state of emergency. In the 366 statements we found on the riots, different types of actors were quoted; we classified those types as Government, Opposition, Experts, Local Government, Media and Journalists, President of the Republic, the Police, the Youths from the Neighborhoods (i.e., the poor periphery), the Neighborhoods’ inhabitants, Voluntary Association, Religious Organizations and Groups, Corporations, Public Services, Rioters, Trade Unions, and European Union and Foreign Government. Most statements addressed the causes of the riots but many also addressed the potential remedies, while fewer focused on the riots themselves and a few on the youth. Focusing attention on the most frequent types of speaker (see Table 7.1), we can see that the interpretation of the riots (of their causes and remedies) changed. Table 7.1 Percentage of topics in statements by selected speakers Topics (%) Selected speakers Government (N = 62) Opposition (N = 44) President (N = 25) Experts (N = 41) Associations (N = 30) Inhabitants (N = 14) Youth (N = 14) % of total statements No. of statements (N = 230)

Youths Rioters

Causes

% of total

Remedies Others Statements

5 2 8 17 43 21 8 13

11 2 0 10 0 0 15 6

34 45 36 68 37 21 38 43

42 30 52 0 13 57 23 29

8 21 4 5 7 0 15 9

27 19 11 18 13 6 6 100

30

14

98

67

21

–

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Selected speakers

Discrimination

Exclusion

Government

Sarkozy

Immigration

Delinquency

Police

Others

% of total statements

Table 7.2 Selected causes by selected speakers

Government (N = 62) Opposition (N = 44) President (N = 25) Experts (N = 41) Associations (N = 30) Inhabitants (N = 14) Youth (N = 14) % of total statements Total statements (N = 230)

24 20 33 25 27 33 0 23 54

0 5 56 38 27 0 0 17 40

10 20 0 13 18 0 0 11 25

5 30 11 8 9 33 0 13 29

19 20 0 4 0 0 0 10 23

29 0 0 4 0 0 0 9 20

0 0 0 8 18 0 40 6 14

13 5 0 0 1 34 60 11 25

27 19 11 18 13 6 6 100 –

Different actors also appeared to privilege different narratives—social problems taking a dominant position in the debate (see Table 7.2). Even the government, which favored the narrative of immigration and delinquency, admitted discrimination as a potential precondition. For other actors, discrimination and exclusion were the main causes, often linked to police attitudes. All seven types of speaker presented different narratives. Those offered by the government were highly varied, but with a clear predominance of delinquency and criminality, followed by uncontrolled or insufficiently controlled immigration. Islam was expressively said to have nothing to do with the riots. Discrimination was invoked in a mixed manner since it is also explicitly said not to be the first cause of the violence. As for the proposed solutions, the government focused on repression or on the fight against criminality, followed by fighting discrimination or reaffirming the republican principles, avoiding stigmatization, showing respect, assuming France’s diversity, and giving a sense of living together. Associations are acknowledged for the importance of their role. For the opposition, Sarkozy’s misunderstanding of the banlieues’ problems and his verbal-escalation policy are offered as the main causes of the riots. Immigration is also mentioned by the opposition, but mainly in order to deny that it is the reason of the riots. Segregation or non-representation of youths from immigration is also important for the opposition, and the feeling of a lack of future the youths have. Delinquency never shows up in the opposition statements. As for the remedies, the opposition proposes quite a wide range, including a return to a more selective repression as well as the cutting of the subsidies to some families. The opposition also proposes social intervention, public services coordination, policies of justice, respect and equality, employment and training, and a better political representation of French diversity.

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The President of the Republic’s statements are clearly focused on remedies (52 percent) that consist essentially in fighting discrimination. In order to achieve that, corporations are deemed to have a determining role, while media and political representation are called to reflect French diversity. Other remedies are about everybody’s duty to respect the law and to make his/her acts consistent with his/ her words. Among the remedies the president recalls that violence is not a solution. Then, the president’s speech bears importantly (36 percent) on the causes of the riots. They are notably inequalities and discrimination. The banlieues impose too many handicaps (violence, trafficking, massive unemployment, inhuman urbanism, school failure) and do not offer equal opportunities to youths who have the feeling of being left aside and discriminated against. Experts’ statements are clearly focused on the causes of the riots (68 percent) and motivations of the youths from the banlieues (17 percent). While according to the experts, exclusion, discrimination and ill government policies are the main causes of the riots, no suggested remedy is reported in the press. The bulk of the voluntary associations’ speech is about the youths of the neighborhoods (43.36 percent) and the causes of the riots (36.67 percent). They depict the banlieues’ inhabitants as stigmatized by the media and discriminated against by the government, which tends to consider them all as drug dealers. They thus suffer from an identity deficit while simultaneously yearning for recognition. To be recognized as French in what they consider to be their home country, and to have political representation, are what they desire most. Among the causes, the associations mention the exclusion and the difficult relationships with police, led by a stupid and tactless Sarkozy. The ghettoized France marks the failure of the French model of integration, that is, the Republican model. Banlieues’ inhabitants mainly speak about remedies (57.14 percent). They especially believe in repressive remedies, on the one hand (75 percent), such as getting rid of trouble makers, expelling them, cutting family subsidies, and expecting the immigrants to behave, keep quite, and participate in the social mix, and on the other hand (25 percent)—that is, the residential mix of people from various economic and social conditions and especially ethnic origins. Among the mentioned causes are Sarkozy, families’ difficulties in educating the youth, and racism. Neighborhood inhabitants also provide important descriptions of the neighborhood youths as a generation with no future and who think only of money and consumption, some of whom traffic. As for the youths from the banlieues, most of what they say is about causes, potential causes, or descriptions of living conditions in the suburbs (38.46 percent). They all mention policemen’s and government’s contempt for them, reacting to the most immediate event, such as Sarkozy’s words and management of the crisis. There is one proposed remedy and it is about transforming violence into something else. The rioters’ descriptions clearly cast doubt on their desire to integrate and willingness to play the “normal” game of sending CVs and attending school. Therefore, if there is symbolic bargaining over the meaning of the riots, the use of violent tactics seems to have produced the perverse dynamic of excluding

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some actors from the public debate. Defined as rioters, the young protestors were denied “the right to speak”—their claims being at the best interpreted and voiced by other actors. Looking again at our empirical research on the French riots, we can see that even liberal Le Monde did not let the young “rioters” speak up. An examination of the full range of speakers that our research has identified reveals an obvious imbalance among the numbers of statements held by the different speakers. In Table 7.3, we provide their percentage of the total statements reported in our empirical material, distinguishing between institutional actors and noninstitutional actors. As we can see, not only institutional actors cover the big share of the statements (54 percent), but some non-institutional actors remain silent. In particular, rioters are not given voice. Even though their deeds are talked about, rioters are almost never asked to explain their meanings. Table 7.3 Percentage of space dedicated to institutional and non-institutional speakers (N= 366) Institutional speakers

%

Non-institutional speakers

%

Government and parliamentary majority Parliamentary opposition Local governments The President of the Republic Police Judges and teachers EU and foreign governments

17 11 9.3 6.8 6.3 2.2 1.1

Experts Journalists Associations Neighborhoods inhabitants Youths from neighborhoods Demonstrators Religious organizations Corporations Rioters Trade unions

11.1 9.3 8.2 3.8 3.8 2.7 2.5 2.2 1.4 1.1

Total % of statements by institutional speakers Total N of statements by institutional speakers

Total % of statements by non-institutional speakers Total N of statements by 197 non-institutional speakers 54

46 169

The high selectivity of access to the public forum has also a relevant effect on the image that is constructed of the rioters themselves. We have identified four types of characterization of the rioters among the statements: their behavior is attributed either to delinquency, to deviance, to protest or, more rarely, to Islamist activism. In 43 percent of the statements by our seven selected types of speaker, rioters are seen as delinquent; in 28.5 percent as deviant and in the same percent as protesters. Those who use a frame of delinquency mainly refer to smuggling, notably of drugs, or, in general, to organized gangs. The frame of deviance depicts participation in riots like a game practiced by dislocated youths. The government’s

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statements present rather clearly the rioters as delinquent. Also the interviewed youths in the neighborhood tend to depict the rioters as deviant people, next to delinquency though. By part of the opposition, rioters are instead clearly seen as protesters. Somewhat surprisingly, experts make no mention of rioters but rather of youths from the banlieues. The meaning of the riots is in fact interpreted and mediated by others (Lapeyronie 2005–06: 445). The process of communication of the demands of the rioters is, however, complex, since rioters are rarely given voice in the public debate. In this sense, rioters have been defined as primitive rebels (Hobsbawn 1959) who appeal to the dominant values in the society and demand recognition (Lapeyronie 2005–06: 435). Table 7.4 How rioters are described by speakers (percentages of each speaker’s statements) Selected speakers Government and parliamentary majority (N = 7) Opposition (N = 1) President (N = 0) Expert (N = 4) Association (N = 0) Neighborhood inhabitants (N = 0) Youths from neighborhoods (N = 2) Percent Number (N = 14)

Deviance Delinquency Protesters % total 14.2

85.7

50 100

25

100 28.5 4

75

43 6

28.5 4

7 0 29 0 0 14 100 –

Concluding Remarks In this chapter we have suggested that riots are usually constructed as events characterized by a high level of irrational and unorganized violence. As Gérard Mauger (2006: 132) observed, in France the events of November 2005 have triggered another riot, a “paper riot” about the interpretations of the events whose stake is to politically qualify or disqualify the “riots” and whose fate relies on the reception that the youths of the cités (and all French citizens) will give them. In fact, The sense attributed to the riot and the intentions attributed to the rioters depend on the result of symbolic fights that oppose attempts at disqualification and of political habilitation, and depend on the echo that they are likely to have. If one considers each of these stances and the representations that are associated

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to them like political offers addressed not only to the youths from the cités but to the entire ‘people,’ the result—always more or less reversible—of these symbolic (and political) struggles depend at the end on the reception made to these offers by the ‘people’ in general and by the youths of the cités in particular. (Mauger 2006: 132)

Research on events that have been constructed as riots stresses, however, the presence of mostly restrained, often strategic and quite organized violence. Both riots themselves and their image develop from a relational process that sees the interaction of different actors in a social and dynamic process. Violent events prompt symbolic struggles about their meaning, causes and events. Different narratives present different visions of the riots. Governments, opposition, experts, and voluntary associations participate in high public debates, from which, however, the actors of the riots are excluded. Pleading for recognition, the rioters are, however, not recognized as legitimate actors. A further reflection on the notion of recognition could help us take a further step in our constructivist approach to the riots. In an interview to the journal Sciences Humaines in June 2006, Axel Honneth (2006: 148) was asked about the possibility for the theory of recognition to shed some light on the November 2005 riots in the French banlieues. Honneth answered that “it seems self-evident that these riots rest on deep disappointments about the type of social recognition granted to these populations by the society.” Thus, the feeling of being considered as having no positive value by the other members of society is one of the principal motivations of this social conflict. Honneth essentially links labor to such positive value, stating that work has been in Europe a way of recognizing that one is a full member of society (Honneth 2007: 148–9). According to Honneth, because unemployment is also now structural, a growing number of people do not have the opportunity to gain the kind of recognition for their acquired abilities that I refer to as social esteem. Because of this they can hardly consider themselves as contributing members of a democratic polity, since that presupposes the experience of cooperation, that is, the socially recognized contribution to social reproduction. Without a radical extension of the meaning of labor and what can sensibly and justifiably be included within that, this approaching struggle for recognition cannot really be resolved. (Honneth 2001: 54–5)

With this theoretical input, the question is whether the social scientist’s acknowledgement of the legitimate aspects of the riots could refer not only to the fact that the rioters express the limits of the current system, but also to their expressing its new dimensions. In particular, the action addresses exclusion through discrimination in the labor market, with the development of a parallel economy as a consequence of the stalling of the system regarding full employment. This would

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be a radical extension of the meaning of labor—here launched by radical means that are fights for recognition.

Section III Comparative Perspectives

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Chapter 8

Protest and Repression in Democracies and Autocracies: Europe, Iran, Thailand and the Middle East 2010–11 Jack A. Goldstone

The year 2010–11 will go down in history as a year of violent protests: in Tehran in January, in Athens in January and again in May, in Thailand and Jamaica in May, and then throughout North Africa and the Middle East in January through March 2011, the streets have been filled with protests, and people have died in confrontations with the state. Yet there is a vast difference between the settings of these events, and understanding that difference illuminates much about the variation in forms and effects of protests. I shall address the following questions: Why is there violent protest in democracies? How does that differ from protests in highly repressive non-democratic regimes? What do protestors hope to accomplish in both cases? Protests and Violence in Democracies Scholars of social movements—Tilly (1995), Goldstone (2003)—have shown that the action repertoire of modern protests, such as street marches, signage, media events, vast urban assemblies, boycotts and sit-ins, developed only with the onset of modern democracy in Europe, and moreover remains a vital and essential part of how modern democracy operates. As I have argued (Goldstone 2002), disruptive protest actions are not merely an alternative to the institutional repertoire of democratic actions, namely, voting, political party activities, court decisions, legislative and regulatory decisions. Rather, they are complementary to such actions, and will recur and even expand in line with the expansion of democracy. In fact, social protest has become so integral to democratic politics that the line between social movements (fueled by protest events) and political parties is not clear, and often breaks down. Many political parties draw much of their strength from social movements and are assisted in election campaigns by social movement organizations. In the United States, environmental and labor movements are strongly associated with the Democratic Party, while conservative religious and social movements (e.g., anti-abortion and anti-immigrant groups) are associated

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with the Republican Party. Social democratic parties in European countries grew out of labor movements; and more recently the Green parties in Europe arose from environmental movements. Political rallies are often indistinguishable from social movement assemblies or marches. Social protest occurs alongside of, and in addition to, normal party politics because it provides vital functions that cannot usually be fulfilled within the normal institutional channels of democratic action. First, political parties often fail to represent small groups, or those widely scattered in society. Students, for example, though often from privileged backgrounds and well-above average for their societies by most indices of human development, are frequently involved in social protests. This is because, on the one hand, they are too few, too young, and too transient to establish strong roles in major political parties, and thus cannot call attention to the issues that concern them (university fees, job prospects) except by protest. On the other hand, students also will take it upon themselves to protest to show their concerns on behalf of others—the poor (including those in developing societies), victims of apartheid, victims of state violence—who students believe are not represented or not listened to by the authorities. Second, even groups that are represented within political parties may protest to influence the agenda of those parties, or to draw society’s attention to specific issues (Burstein 1999). Thus, abortion protestors engage in protest to dramatize their issues and raise them on the legislative agenda. The “million man march” in Washington, DC, was organized to focus national attention on family issues, especially the plight of fatherless families. The Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, the Paris banlieue riots, and the Athens riots all grew out of efforts to call attention to police brutality and violence against specific groups. Indeed, the more a society proclaims itself “democratic” and representative of all in theory, but in practice neglects certain groups or certain issues, the more it invites protest to call attention to those groups or those issues. But what of the form of those protests? Most democracies do recognize there is a role for protest; so much so that they have introduced a process for institutionalizing protest, through permits for marches or assemblies in public areas that are recognized as logical sites for protest. The police may cordon off areas to traffic, designate these areas at certain times for use by protestors, and even protect protestors from attack or disruption by counter-movement actors. In some cases, these permits allow protestors to peacefully engage in activities with more convenience and media access than might otherwise be the case (as with marches on the central mall in Washington, which have become a routine activity for social movements seeking to call attention to various issues). In other cases, this process is used by states as a way of containing and restricting protest activity (as with the permits for “remote” protests promised at the Chinese Olympics, or those given for the summit meetings of the G-8 nations). Yet, while the permit process aims to turn unruly protests into routine and non-violent behavior, violent protest nonetheless recurs even in democratic societies, as current events in Athens, the 2005 riots in France, and the Rodney

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King riots in the US showed. I was in Los Angeles for the Rodney King riots, and the next morning, from the heights of the Santa Monica mountains (which bisect Los Angeles), if one looked towards the downtown area of Los Angeles, all one could see were towers of black smoke, rising from dozens of still smoldering fires set by rioters. The riots had spread from black communities to downtown, where Korean-owned businesses became a prime target for attack. Later in the week, as military transports unloaded armed national guardsmen to patrol the city, one had the definite feeling of being in a war zone, rather than in one of the main commercial centers of the world’s leading democracy. Why does such violence arise in democratic societies? The answer generally lies in the interactions between protest groups and the state, and in the history of specific groups and their perceptions of their opportunities to have an impact through peaceful actions. There are two basic patterns: groups that initiate violence in their protests because they feel they will otherwise have no impact—what the editors of this volume have labeled a response to a disruptive deficit—and groups that respond with violence to what they see as state violence against them or similar provocations—a reactive and often emotional, retributional response. There are some cases where groups decide on violent tactics because they feel they have no other way to have an impact on social attitudes toward their issues of concern. Charles Tilly (2004), in discussing the emergence of protest tactics in democracy, highlighted the rise of the mass event—marches and protests that are disruptive and draw attention by their sheer size. Tilly described these events as demonstrating “WUNC,” that is, the character of the protesters as worthy, united, numerous, and committed to their cause. While WUNC may be viable for groups that are sufficiently large and wellorganized to mobilize for mass protests, it is not an option for much smaller or extreme groups who feel passionately about specific issues that they see as neglected or wrongly dealt with. These individuals do not need to show themselves as “worthy,” for they are not seeking personal or group acceptance. They cannot seem numerous, for often they are not. What they do need to show is that they are committed, and dangerous to ignore. Thus radical environmentalists (e.g., Earth First), animal rights activists, and anti-abortion activists have recently undertaken violent and destructive actions even in the most advanced democracies. Their destruction of property —and even lives—is designed to demonstrate their belief that action on these issues is of immediate, vital importance worth taking on the risks associated with illegal and violent activities. Violence is also often a response among those in democracies who feel that the normal institutional channels—parties, courts, peaceful protests—are closed to them, or that they are being subjected to violence and so violence in turn is the only way to send the appropriate message to authorities regarding their anger and loss (Eisenger 1973). Street violence with its own repertoire—breaking shop

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windows and overturning cars, setting fires, taunting or throwing rocks at police— has been a consistent response to police violence in modern democracies. Democracies are not only premised on voting; elections occur only every few years. The daily promise of democracy is the rule of law, exercised equally and for the protection of citizens. When groups feel they are denied this aspect of democracy, that they are instead victims of abuse by the police and courts, their natural response is to protest. Moreover, to the extent that they feel they have been victimized by violence, the more likely they are to respond with violence to call attention to what they believe has been wrongly undertaken against them by police or other state authorities. The Rodney King riots in Los Angeles (1992) started as protests following the announcement of a court decision that exonerated several white policemen charged with excessive violence against a black suspect, Mr Rodney King. The protests sprang up in black-majority areas where entire communities felt they had been repeatedly victimized by the police. The Los Angeles Police were apparently unprepared for the sudden eruption of these protests, and when initial confrontations between small groups of police and vast numbers of protestors turned into rock-throwing and threats of violence against the police, the police retreated to their stations to await further orders. The police retreat was received by protestors as an “all-clear” signal to release their anger against years of perceived exclusion and repression, including displacement from economic opportunities by Koreans who had come to control many commercial establishments in the downtown area. Widespread destruction of stores and vehicles, burning and looting occurred, and was only brought under control when the police regrouped and were assisted by the national guard. In Paris recently and in Athens in December 2008, it was the death of youths as a result of police actions that was the last straw for communities with a history of confrontations and violence by police in their neighborhoods, setting off both violent and non-violent protests against police behavior but also against years of perceived neglect and deprivation by authorities. Violence by authorities is thus the most common reason for violence in protests in democratic societies. While retributive violence is most often a response to a history of abuse by the authorities, several other relational patterns can also produce violent protests in states that style themselves as democracies. First, violence in street protests often arises from the actions of counter-movements, who attack movement protestors and set off a round of violence between groups that also spills over into violence against authorities or local surroundings. In the civil rights movement in the US, it was often violence by non-government actors (the Ku Klux Klan or other vigilantes) that created the worst incidents and sparked off fears of greater violence (Luders 2010). Second, groups who see themselves as permanently relegated to secondary status through discrimination imposed by a hostile majority, such that they cannot obtain effective response to their concerns by democratic actions, or who see themselves as effectively under a military occupation, may turn to violence

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against the majority/occupiers in an effort to make the continued discrimination or occupation too costly too continue. The actions of the Irish Republican Army in Britain, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Basque ETA in Spain, and Sunni sectarians and Shi’ia militias in Iraq, are all examples of this kind of violent protest that—when met with a military response—veers toward rebellion and terrorism. Third, groups who feel betrayed by their own government because of unexpected revelations or unwanted actions or policies—from novel taxes to extreme corruption—may feel they have no recourse other than protest to demand changes. This kind of protest is an effort to remind governments—at a time when elections are distant but action on policy is needed now—that they dare not neglect their own people when formulating policy. But because such protests are already rooted in a sense of betrayal, producing both anger at the government and feeling that the government’s authority has been rendered illegitimate by its actions, if such protests are met with violence by police and security forces they are likely to be seen as further betrayal, and provoke an even more violent popular response. This last mode is what has happened in Athens and other European capitals this year, in response to the euro crisis and consequent austerity measures. It seems likely that we will see even more of such riots as the crisis continues to unfold and governments seek policies to cope. Protests in Non-Democracies In democracies, where the very legitimacy of the government is supposed to rest on the consent of the governed, disruption and even violence by protestors shows that this consent is lacking (Cloward and Piven 1999). It thus might be reasonably expected that such protests would lead to recognition that certain groups or issues had been unduly neglected, and in order to regain legitimacy with those groups the government needs to respond in some way—whether by disciplining police and curbing their abuses, or by attending to other community concerns regarding discrimination or neglect. Indeed, one can say that there is a distinctive mode of response to riots— by which I mean sudden outbreaks of violence involving looting, smashing windows, attacking cars, arson, and attacks on security personnel or particular targeted groups—in democratic societies. This response involves first suppressing the violence by coordinated and large-scale use of non-lethal force (tear gas, batons, massed police, mass arrests). Second, the government responds by trying to identify grievances behind the rioting, and act in some constructive or palliative way to respond to those grievances. Thus Los Angeles responded with reconstruction funds and social programs and efforts to address police brutality in the wake of the Rodney King riots. Even in France, where Nicolas Sarkozy had denounced the rioters in Paris’s banlieues, the French government undertook job programs to respond to the grievances of the community.

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Thus many violent protests have a plausible instrumental purpose in democratic societies. But what of non-democratic societies, where authorities rule by coercion, and popular consent is a minimal concern? If any kind of response to protest, other than repression, is unlikely, and hence there is no plausible instrumental reason for protest, why do authoritarian regimes nonetheless see periodic protests? What is the goal and motivation of protestors under such conditions? There is no single answer to this question. Rather, protest in authoritarian settings results from a combination of different factors, which may operate to different degrees at different times. At one extreme, Bert Useem and I have studied riots in prisons—a severely authoritarian setting in which (unlike escape attempts) prisoners can have hardly any hope that attacks on guards or setting fires to prisons will improve the conditions under which they live (Goldstone and Useem 200; Useem and Goldstone 2002). Indeed, punishments are almost certain to follow from such actions. Nonetheless, prison riots occur regularly, in both democratic and authoritarian societies. To paraphrase Marc Bloch, one of the leading historians of medieval Europe, who claimed that peasant riots were not aberrations but part of the normal relations of feudal society, we found that prison riots seem as much a part of prisons as peasant rebellions were a part of feudal societies. We found that prison riots tended to be triggered by efforts at reform, to change the “status quo” rules that had prevailed. This could operate in either of two directions. First, if reforms attempted to worsen prisoners’ conditions, by reducing space or eliminating recreation, work, or religious opportunities, this often provoked riots aimed at protesting these further deprivations, which were seen as unjustified (we were already imprisoned under a given set of conditions, what had we done to make those conditions worse?). These riots could be seen as instrumental: an attempt, sometimes successful, to get authorities to reduce or withdraw the new harsher conditions. Such riots were usually aimed at an outside audience, namely, state authorities or the public outside of the prisons, who prisoners hoped would affect decisions by prison wardens. Prisoners also made efforts to obtain media attention and to present demands to external authorities and not merely to the wardens. Yet even where such changes were unlikely (as where the changes were imposed by budget constraints and could not be undone, or had been imposed by state legislatures or courts), the protests still occurred, and took on an existential quality: as if the protests were intended simply to say “We matter, we are human beings, we do suffer if you do these things to us, and we want you to see how we feel about that. Moreover, if we can, we want to make you suffer a bit too.” This existential aspect of protest seems also to apply to some cases of violent protests in autocracies, and sometimes in democracies as well. Burning stores and cars, throwing rocks at police, are acts of rage and desperation. But they are not merely irrational or anomic actions. Rather, they are assertions that the protesters matter, have feelings, and are feeling devalued and abused. Beyond merely saying

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“We won’t take it anymore,” these actions are messages that “You have hurt us, and we are going to show you that this should hurt you too, insofar as we can do so.’ However, surprisingly, we also found that protests and riots sometimes followed reforms that were meant to improve prisoners’ conditions, by imposing new restraints on guards or adding freedoms, or reforms that were meant to streamline prison operations or save funds (e.g., staff cuts, automation). Where such conditions followed prior regimes that had been relatively harsh or abusive of prisoners, either guards refused to follow the new rules and thus became targets of prisoners for violating the newly announced norms, or prisoners took advantage of the new freedoms or reduced staffing to get back at guards for past or current offenses. The worst violence came when prisoners managed to take over whole facilities and mete out revenge through punishment of their enemies (informers and guards), or when authorities used force to regain control of the prisons. I have presented our findings on prisons because they illustrate, on a smaller scale that can more easily be studied in repeated circumstances, several general principles regarding protest in authoritarian societies. These are: (1) protests usually are triggered by a change in the status quo, whether positive or negative; (2) negative changes in the status quo trigger protests that have both an instrumental aim (restore the status quo) and an existential aim (demonstrate that protesters matter as human beings with feelings and lives that are hurt by the changes); (3) positive changes in the status quo trigger protests when authorities do not in practice live up to promised positive changes, or when the changes allow and encourage more protest than intended or expected; and (4) the worst violence is often committed by authorities seeking to restore order and end the protests. The history of the protests in Iran since the election of June 2009 and the redshirt protests in Thailand illustrates all of these principles. Let us first consider Iran. The people of Iran had been living in a semi-democratic, semi-authoritarian regime for decades. It was clear that this was not a full democracy: decisions on who would be allowed to run for office, and which laws could be passed by the parliament, were made by an unelected group of religious leaders, the Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council. Nonetheless, within those limits, the population was accustomed to fairly free elections among the permitted candidates, which had previously produced somewhat unexpected, anti-establishment victors: the reformist Ayatollah Khatami for President in 1997 and the populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. Ahmadinejad had, however, failed to deliver on many of his economic promises, corruption was still rife, and many Iranians felt that his extreme antiWestern pronouncements had damaged Iran in terms of global standing and economic opportunities. Moreover, the Supreme Leader seemed to be breaking with Ahmadinejad and distancing himself from him, appointing a major rival of Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Rafsanjani, to an important senior post as chairman of the Assembly of Experts, and readily accepting the election of a major Ahmadinejad opponent—Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf—as mayor of Tehran. When most of the opposition united behind Mir Hossein Mousavi, who had served as prime

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minister during the early years of the revolutionary Islamic regime, on a platform of economic reform, anti-corruption, and less hostility to the West, a large portion of the population of Iran, especially the urban and educated, felt that the stage was set for a positive change (with 70 percent of its population living in cities, and most of its young people—who form almost half the population—having some higher education, Iran is one of the most urbanized and educated societies in the Middle East). In the weeks before the elections, the political rallies for Mousavi (which were permitted by the authorities) drew increasingly massive crowds of supporters. It seemed certain that at the least Ahmadinejad was sure to be severely challenged, and that, even if he won a close victory, the substantial opposition vote would likely lead the Supreme Leader to further reduce support for Ahmadinejad and his extremist policies. At best, Ahmadinejad would be defeated and replaced in the June elections. Yet the authorities failed to deliver on their promise of a reasonably free election among officially-permitted candidates. Instead, the government suddenly announced, seemingly before sufficient time had passed to even count the ballots, that Ahmadinejad had won victory by a huge majority. This was followed by the issuance of preposterous vote counts that showed Mousavi losing badly even in his own home province, and Ahmadinejad carrying majorities in most of Iran’s urban centers as well as throughout the countryside. It seemed obvious that, instead of allowing a free election, the government had intervened to falsify the balloting and award Ahmadinejad a massive but fraudulent victory. The promise of a positive change in the status quo (removal or restriction of Ahmadinejad’s authority) was thus followed in practice by the denial of opportunity for any such change. Moreover, the fashion in which this denial took place—a fraudulent manipulation of election results—itself marked a negative change in the status quo: where previously the population was at least allowed to express its preferences among officially-permitted candidates, now even this opportunity was withdrawn in favor of the government choosing to award victory by its own arbitrarily chosen margin to a favored candidate. The response of the Iranian regime to the street protest exposed the regime as a simple dictatorship. It was now clear that the Ahmadinejad victory was created to allow the Revolutionary Guards to stage an effective takeover of the Iranian government. The Revolutionary Guards and anti-Western clergy had their views shaped in the Iraq–Iran war when the US not only supported Iraq against them but tolerated the use of poison gas by Iraq, and in the aftermath of the first Gulf War against Iraq, when the US seemingly encouraged Shi’ites in Iraq to rise up against Saddam Hussein, but then stood by while they were brutally slaughtered in reprisals by Saddam’s military. In their view, the West was simply dangerous and could not be trusted, and any reduction in anti-Western fervor would endanger Iran. Seeing the rising support for Mousavi, these groups apparently felt that they could not afford to risk a free election, and instead manipulated (and persuaded the Supreme Leader to support) a large victory count for Ahmadinejad. Soon after his

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victory, Revolutionary Guard leaders extended their roles in the main government ministries, the armed forces, and the economy. The government then responded to the street protests—which initially were only seeking a recount of the election—in a manner characteristic of dictatorships. The protestors were publicly denounced as enemies of the state, and security forces were urged to use brutality and even lethal force to terrorize the protestors. From snipers to midnight visits to homes of suspected protest leaders to executions of those convicted of participation in riots against the government, no quarter was given. Treatment of peaceful protestors as enemies of the state, not merely perpetrators of disorder, is the hallmark of dictators’ responses to protest and is exemplified by the conduct of Iran’s government in 2009. Why No Green Revolution in Iran? The protests in Iran in June 2009 were in many ways similar to those that arose in Czechoslovakia in 1989 following the beating of protestors in Prague, or in the Philippines and the Ukraine following the election frauds in those countries in 1996 and 2002. In all these cases, discontent with the prior regime crystallized around support for an opposition leader, and led to street protests in the capital. While there were attempts by the government to crush those protests, the attempts failed and protests grew larger, eventually leading the government to give up power. One might have expected events in Tehran, after the fraudulent elections and shooting of an innocent bystander, to follow the same pattern. Yet they did not. The key ingredients of revolutions, as I have argued (Goldstone 2009), are government weakness, elite divisions, and popular mobilization. It certainly seemed that all three ingredients were present in Iran in June 2009: the government had been financially weakened by collapsing oil prices; the elites were divided with many prominent Ayatollahs and business leaders backing the opposition candidate, Mousavi; and popular mobilization had clearly developed in the campaign running up to the election, and following the announcement of the election results. However, the Iranian government has succeeded, although at a high cost to its popular support, in holding on to power and forcing back the protests. I believe it has been able to do so mainly because of the precise nature of the elite divisions in Iran, which have created more weakness in the opposition than in the ruling regime, and enabled the government to block the mass mobilization that began in June. In the Philippines, as in Russia following the Yeltsin-led anti-communist movement, a large portion of the national military forces defected from the regime, and provided cover and support for the popular mass mobilization. Without such defection to create space for mass mobilization, the Philippine protest would not have succeeded. In Czechoslovakia and the Ukraine, authorities provided similar space because respected authorities issued orders making use of force against the protestors infeasible. In Czechoslovakia, Gorbachev had already announced that

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the Russian military would not intervene to support unpopular governments, as it had in that country in 1968. Knowing that their own military would be reluctant to act against their population without Soviet support, Czech leaders took only limited actions against popular protests, allowing the protests to grow and eventually capitulating. In the Ukraine, the Supreme Court ruled that the election results were dubious, thus supporting the protestors. Under this ruling, the army would not likely act to preserve the ruling party’s authority by using force to suppress the protestors. Thus, again, space was made for mass mobilization by a higher authority, enabling protests to continue and force capitulation by the regime. In Iran, no such space opened, owing to either elite divisions or the actions of higher authorities. If this had happened—say the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei had acted like the Supreme Court in Ukraine, and declared that the announced election results appeared false and ruled them invalid—there might have been sufficient divisions in the military (perhaps with the professional military restraining the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij Militia) to keep open the space for protests, which might in turn have spread and grown to the point of forcing Ahmadinejad’s departure from office. Yet, not only did the Supreme Leader support the election results, but the anti-Western clergy and the Revolutionary Guards and Basij were also mobilized throughout the country to support Ahmadinejad and act against protestors. Media and communications were shut down (even Twitter, after the initial outpourings), prominent supporters of the opposition were increasingly denied public voice, and massive arrests and harsh detention were designed to break the spirit of the mobilization. The Revolutionary Guards tightened their control over the government and military, oil revenues turned sharply upwards again, and many leading figures who had previously been at odds with Ahmadinejad, such as Ali Larijani, the head of the parliament, sided with the government in condemning the protestors. The most visible leaders of the opposition, meanwhile, such as Ayatollah Rafsanjani, Ayatollah Khatami, and Mousavi himself, seemed undecided on what do to. They did not call for Ahmadinejad to be cast out of office, their direct criticism of the Supreme Leader was muted, and their support for continued protest often seemed tepid. Only Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, a long-standing opponent of the regime based in Qom, was direct and uncompromising in his attacks on the regime. With his passing, and mourning ceremonies constrained by overwhelming force by the regime, the major voice for action was stilled. In short, the Iranian regime succeeded in maintaining control of the military to close off space for mass mobilization, and in largely neutralizing those elements of the elite who opposed the regime. As long as this situation continues, protests in Iran will continue to have a mainly existential character: showing the regime that opposition still exists and considers it illegitimate, but being unable at present to mount the mobilization that would force it to cede power. At the same time, the regime is storing up a reserve of resentment and rejection, such that, should the time come when its military capacity falters, will likely unleash

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an even more revolutionary movement than the one it suppressed in the days following the June elections. Thailand’s Red-Shirt Protests It is too soon to write the history of the 2009 protests in Thailand, but it is already clear that they conform to the pattern of protest in authoritarian societies noted above. The initial red-shirt protests were triggered by a change in the status quo, the 2006 coup against then Prime Minister Thaksin. This was considered a negative change by the populist red shirts, designed to frustrate popular democracy and keep a narrow elite dominant in Thailand’s polity and economy. The red-shirt protests were designed both instrumentally (to restore the status quo by either bringing back Thaksin or having new and open elections) and existentially (to show that the red shirts, who claim to represent the “real majority” of Thailand’s rural and poorer inhabitants, are aggrieved and will not simply accept the loss of democracy and Thaksin’s leadership). The Thai leadership initially responded to the initial red-shirt protests in a somewhat democratic fashion, trying to find a new prime minister who would offer some cooperation to the red-shirt interests. This was current Prime Minister Abhisit. Yet Abhisit’s policies and promises did not convince the red shirts; the protestors believed the authorities would not in practice live up to promised positive changes. This led to the latest confrontation, in which the red shirts demanded Abhisit’s resignation. Yet in this case, the Thai government responded in authoritarian fashion; the protesters were attacked, apparently by snipers, who killed a prominent Thai general who had joined the red-shirt movement. When red-shirt protestors expressed their anger by hurling rocks and petrol bombs at security forces, they fired on protestors and even medics and declared certain areas “free-fire zones.” This violence by the state triggered further violence by the protestors, including massive arson and attacks on properties; these were in turn met with greater military force by the Thai regime. In the end, massive military violence ended the protests. Yet that mode of response makes it unlikely that Thailand will emerge from authoritarian rule anytime soon. The government has been discredited and relied on force rather than legitimacy to stay in power; once that step is taken, governments are generally committed to that path (Economist 2010). A New Wave: The Arab Revolutions of 2011 At this writing, revolutions have just overturned governments in Tunisia and Egypt, led to a partition of Libya, and obtained a promise by Yemen’s leader to step down from power. In addition, popular revolts in Morocco and Oman have demanded reforms, while similar revolts in Bahrain were put down by force with

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Saudi intervention, and revolts in Syria are growing each week. Only the Libyan revolt, however, has seen notable violence on the part of protestors/rebels. In other countries, violence has come mainly from the regime in power. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria, the revolts were a response to both positive and negative changes during the last decade. Positive changes, undertaken as part of modernization programs, included investments in education, encouragement of foreign investment, and the growth of Internet and satellite communications. Yet these positive changes did not yield the expected results for most of the population, and especially for the recipients of higher education. Jobs remained scarce and badly paid, and poverty remained widespread. What the positive changes did produce was greater ability of youth and labor to communicate and organize. The negative changes included sharply rising food prices, and increasingly obvious corruption and privilege among the families and cronies of the state leaders. Youth played a particularly prominent role, as both the positive and negative changes most strongly affected those under 30. The surge in population in this group—young adults aged 15 to 29 increased by a third or more in the last 20 years, comprising roughly 40 percent of all adults in North African and the Middle East—combined with a doubling of college enrollments, to heighten the demand for white-collar jobs. Yet at the same time, from the late 1990s, the governments of the region ceased providing guaranteed government jobs to college graduates, reduced food and energy subsidies, and relied more on foreign investment (whose gains went to a small number of well-connected individuals) to boost the economy. The result was youth unemployment in this region reaching double the global average level, large numbers of young men under 30 remaining unmarried, and a concentration of grievances among the best educated, most Internet savvy, and youngest adults in these societies. As Hank Johnston notes in his contribution to this volume, and I have noted elsewhere (McAdam and Goldstone 2001), youths frequently play a vanguard role in political protests. Conditions in the Middle East and North Africa positioned them to take precisely that role in 2011. The entire chain of events began with an act of existential violence, as a fruit vendor in a rural town in Tunisia—Mohamed Bouazizi—set himself on fire, and died soon thereafter. Bouazizi had been unable to find formal employment, and had been repeatedly harassed by police over his fruit stall. After an incident in which he had been publicly humiliated by a female official, seeing no other way to express his anger and frustration with authorities, he immolated himself in public in front of the governor’s office. His act, captured and spread on YouTube, catalyzed protests against government policies and abuses that spread from his home town across Tunisia. When the protests reached the capital of Tunis, the army created the critical space for mass protest by turning against the regime. Although there was some property damage from protestors overturning cars, setting fires and attacking government offices, most of the protests in Tunisia took the form of peaceful marches, demonstrations and strikes. There was violence, with over 100 protestors killed in clashes with police and security forces, but lethal

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violence was only used by the authorities. Deliberate efforts by the protestors to follow the model of previous “color revolutions” in Serbia and Ukraine, employing a strategy of non-violent resistance, meant that relations with the authorities did not lead to a cycle of rising violence. Instead, peaceful protests and strikes spread and, when the army made clear that it would support the revolution, President Ben Ali was forced to give up power. Virtually the same pattern was followed in Egypt, with youth and labor protests against low wages, high prices, unemployment, and state corruption giving rise to ever-larger protest actions and strikes, with the army again defecting to the side of the revolutionaries and forcing President Mubarak to leave office. Again, hundreds were killed by the authorities; but protest organizers allowed such violence to delegitimize the authorities, while keeping to their strategy of non-violent resistance. The example of successful protest in Tunisia no doubt emboldened the Egyptian opposition. Yet Egyptian youth and labor organizers had been staging smaller protests since 2006, had been training in tactics for nonviolent protest, and had been planning protests for January 25, 2011, on their own. The Egyptian revolt was thus not merely an imitation of Tunisia, but was grounded in Egypt’s own conditions and protest organization. The effectiveness of the protests in Tunisia and Egypt, despite the authorities’ use of lethal violence against protestors, illustrates another dynamic of violent collective action. When protestors lead with violent actions, and the state retains considerable legitimacy even if challenged, it is easy for authorities to depict protestors as a threat to social order, and to justify using repressive tactics against them. The state may even strengthen its position with the general populace if the latter see state actions as effectively putting down a threat to stability. However, if protestors lead with non-violent resistance, especially if espousing a popular cause, then if the government reacts with harsh and violent repression, the state is likely to lose legitimacy with the general populace. Indeed, protest may expand as more people feel threatened or betrayed by the state and join protests against state actions. This was the cycle that occurred in both Tunisia and Egypt. In Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria, however, different patterns of protest and state response developed. Although the mix of positive and negative changes in the status quo was similar to those in Tunisia and Egypt, in these cases the defection of state military forces was partial or absent (so far). In Libya, although portions of the professional army did defect, creating a space for protest to grow, other portions of the security forces—mainly mercenaries and special guard units that were personally attached to members of the ruling Gaddafi family—remained loyal. As a result, the regions of Libya where the Gaddafi family resided, in the western region centered on Tripoli—remained in the hands of Gaddafi’s forces, while the eastern part of the country was taken over by rebels. Using heavy military forces to reassert their power, the loyalists advanced on the eastern regions, announcing their intent to sweep out and kill the rebels “like rats.” This left the rebels no further space for non-violent resistance; instead they armed and sought international assistance to slow Gaddafi’s advancing forces. The result

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was a civil war leading to thousands of deaths, and an ongoing armed conflict for control of the country. In Bahrain, economic grievances were abetted by ethnic cleavages, as the majority Shi’a population protested against control of the state and the economy by the minority Sunni monarchy and its Sunni supporters. Yet, in Bahrain, these ethnic cleavages dominated and did not leave the most educated youths and the military on the side of the rebels. Instead, the security forces remained loyal, as did the economic and bureaucratic elites. The Sunni monarchy was also reinforced by thousands of troops from neighboring Saudi Arabia, where a Sunni monarchy also had faced social protests by its Shi’a population (although the latter was a minority in the Saudi kingdom). The combination of loyal military and security forces and elites, plus strong external support, allowed the Bahrain monarchy to put down the protest movement in that country. In Yemen, popular protests have grown in size and diversity, uniting many formerly divided opposition movements. Much of the military has defected, leaving only a minority of forces in place to protect the long-standing ruler, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Although some protestors have been killed, violence has so far been minimal, as Saleh, recognizing the weakness of his position, has mainly been stalling for time and seeking to negotiate favorable terms for his departure from power. At this writing, those negotiations continue, but it seems only a matter of time until Saleh departs. In Syria, the situation is currently fluid, and it is unclear which pattern it will follow. So far, events are unfolding as they did in Egypt and Tunisia. A large youth cohort is leading non-violent resistance against a corrupt and cronysupported authoritarian regime, which has used lethal violence against protestors, killing hundreds. However, these actions seem to have only further delegitimized the regime of President Assad, causing protests to grow to include workers and professionals, and spread to more and more cities throughout Syria. Yet unlike Egypt and Tunisia, but like Bahrain, the Syrian leader belongs to a religious minority (the Alawites), and so far the security forces have remained loyal. However, the Alawites are a relatively tiny sect, many of the rank-and-file of the security forces are of the Sunni majority, and not all of the business community is aligned with the leadership. So we may yet see more defections among the security forces and economic elites, which could lead to the fall of the regime, as in Tunisia and Egypt. Or we could see those forces remain loyal and seek to increase repression to a level that would crush the protests, as in Bahrain. Or, the security forces could split to a degree that creates civil war, as in Libya, or split in a way that leaves Assad negotiating terms for his departure, as in Yemen. Many of the relational elements that will determine the extent of violence, and the outcome of these protests, are thus yet to definitively emerge.

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Conclusion: Future Protests The sources and patterns of violent social protest are thus highly varied. Far from being a simple emotional response, or an effort to attack the social order, violent protest is—as Seferiades and Johnston make clear in the opening chapter of this volume—the product of complex relations among protestors, state authorities, and the general populace. Relations among protestors (the role of youths, how protestors react to state actions, and their ability to maintain unity in the face of state repression), among elites and authorities (whether the state can retain its legitimacy and support among military, economic and bureaucratic leaders), and the general populace (will they support the protestors or the state if either uses violence in pursuit of its goals?) all play a role in shaping the risks and results of violent protest and violent state response. In democracies, we should always expect protests as a normal adjunct to political party competition, and as a part of the agenda-setting process to call attention to specific groups and issues. In cases of police brutality and economic discrimination, we should even expect violence as a recurrent result of such practices, for victimized groups often will have no other, and certainly no more effective, means to display the extent of their hurt, and to call attention to their grievances. As long as authorities respond by curbing police abuses, and taking some measures to address the grievances of the victimized communities, one can expect protests to diminish. Where protests are likely to grow increasingly violent is where they are met by harsh state violence. And protests are only likely to grow sufficiently large to trigger regime change where positive or negative changes in the status quo (or a combination of both) have occurred to trigger such protest, and in addition internal elite defections or external restrictions on military responses allow an opening space for mass mobilization to be sustained. Such space was opened in Tunisia and Egypt, was closed in Bahrain, and was opened but remains contested in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. However, in Iran and now Thailand, as in Myanmar, China, and even in Venezuela, such openings have not yet arisen, or have been quickly closed off. However, we should expect that in Iran and Thailand, and in these other countries as well, protest will return, as people test the limits of the regime’s unity, and hope to provoke that crack in the elites, or that defection in the military, that would open the way to overturn those regimes. Protest, even violent protest, is thus inextricably linked to the progress of democracy, whether in challenging dictatorships, or in keeping democratic regimes from neglecting the needs of their own people.

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Chapter 9

Contemporary French and British Urban Riots: An Exploration of the Underlying Political Dimensions David Waddington and Mike King

There were two major features of the French urban riots of October–November 2005 that made them unique in the nation’s post-war history. In the first place, rather than lasting for two or three days, which had been the norm for previous confrontations, the riots of 2005 continued to reoccur and proliferate for three weeks. Secondly, in contrast to earlier French riots that had taken place and had been contained in particular localities, the 2005 disorders encompassed a much wider geographical area. Having initially broken out in the northern Parisian neighbourhood of Clichy-sous-Bois, rioting then developed in adjoining parts of the capital before spreading right across the country. In all, nearly 300 towns in 200 major cities experienced disorder during this period; over 10,000 cars were ‘torched’, and damage to property and buildings, including a number of mosques, synagogues and churches, exceeded 200 million euros (Jobard, 2008; BodyGendrot, 2007; Koff and Duprez, 2009; Mucchielli, 2009). Indeed, observers have suggested that these riots constituted the most important social upheaval since the student protests of May 1968 (Koff and Duprez, 2009, p. 714). It is generally acknowledged that the ‘trigger’ for the French riots was an incident in which police chased a group of three adolescent boys (two of African and one of Turkish heritage) who were thought to be trespassing on a construction site in the course of making their way home from a rugby football match. In the event, the youths tried to hide in an electricity substation – an action that resulted in two of them being fatally electrocuted (ibid.; Body-Gendrot, 2007, p. 416; Mucchielli, 2009, p. 735). This incident, allied to subsequent police and governmental denials that the youths had died whilst being pursued by the police, was a significant, immediate factor in the three consecutive nights of rioting that followed in Clichy and in two neighbouring localities. Thereafter, rioting began to extend well beyond northern Paris into the suburban areas of other major French cities. This escalation followed a secondary incident, on 30 October, in which a tear gas canister of the type used by the French police was discharged in the entrance of a mosque in Clichy, where Muslim worshippers were engaged in prayers for Ramadan (Roche and de Maillard, 2009). On 9 November a state of emergency was declared, enabling localities to establish curfews, searches

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of homes at any time of day or night, closure of cafes and meeting places and the banning of crowds (Body-Gendrot, 2007, p. 416; Roche and de Maillard, 2009, p. 34). During the period of the riots 5,200 people were detained by the police, 4,300 of whom were held in police custody. Of these, nearly 800, including over 100 juveniles, were sentenced to terms in prison (Body-Gendrot, 2007, p. 418; Mucchielli, 2009, p. 734). Explanations for the riots put forward by the French Establishment variously attributed them to such factors as the ‘wanton criminality’ of local youths (or ‘riffraff’), the involvement of Islamic agents provocateurs, the role that hip-hop lyrics played in inciting the youths, and the copy-cat affect of televised news pictures. All of these have been dismissed by British and French scholars (Mucchielli, 2009; Waddington, 2008) and academic debate is still focused on an attempt to understand the deeper political meanings and significance of the French urban disorders (e.g., Body-Gendrot, 2010; Jobard, 2008, 2009; Lagrange and Oberti, 2006; Mucchielli, 2009; Waddington et al., 2009; Waddington and King, 2009). This chapter makes a further contribution to this debate by demonstrating the extent to which the riots share similar underlying political rationales to earlier British urban disturbances of the 1980s, 1990s and 2001. The essential features of these three major eras of British rioting may be summarized as follows. The 1980s UK riots involved confrontations between the police and predominantly African-Caribbean youths in major inner-city areas such as Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, London and Manchester. A precedent had been set by the St Paul’s (Bristol) riot of 1980, which was sparked by the arrest of the proprietor and a customer during a police drugs raid on a cafe frequented by African-Caribbeans. This riot was followed by a plethora of similar disturbances one year on, and by a handful of equally serious disorders in the autumn of 1985 (Benyon, 1984; Benyon and Solomos, 1987; Kettle and Hodges, 1982). The corresponding riots of 1991 and 1992 contrasted with those of the preceding decade inasmuch as they involved clashes between white youths and the police on ‘peripheral’ (politically marginal) lower-working-class housing estates located within the hinterlands of major towns and cities – for example, Cardiff, Oxford and Newcastle (Campbell, 1993; Power and Tunstall, 1997; Waddington, 1992). Such disturbances occurred as a consequence of police clampdowns on the wholesale theft of motor vehicles for the purpose of ‘joyriding’ (driving at high speeds for the ‘thrill’ of it), ‘hotting’ (performing ‘acrobatic stunts’, such as skids and ‘hand-break turns’ in the road), and ‘ram-raiding’ (crashing into shopfronts with the intention of looting the goods). As would be the case in the 2005 French riots, the iconography of burned out automobiles set alight by young, masked men formed the centrepiece of worldwide media coverage of these disturbances. The final notable ‘wave’ of rioting occurred in 2001 when there were significant confrontations between the police and (mainly) Muslim youths of Asian heritage residing in the former textile manufacturing towns or cities of Lancashire (Burnley and Oldham) and Yorkshire (Bradford and Leeds) (Bagguley and Hussain, 2008; Lea, 2004; Waddington et al., 2009). A main distinguishing characteristic of these

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disorders was the existence of preceding tensions between the Asian communities and white neo-fascists (King and Waddington, 2004; Rhodes, 2009). The following section of this chapter will show that, whilst undoubtedly distinctive in some respects (not least in terms of the ethnic characteristics of the main protagonists), the three phases of rioting none the less have several key elements in common. A further section will then underline important causal similarities between these disturbances and the French riots of 2005. The chapter concludes by reiterating the key underlying political dimensions of the British and French disorders, thereby emphasizing that it is necessary to look beyond naive and socially irresponsible conceptions of the rioters as ‘wantonly criminal’ in order to more adequately appreciate the meanings and significance of their behaviour. The British Riots (1980 to 2001) The origins of the British riots of the 1980s, 1990s and 2001 may be traced back to particular patterns of deindustrialization and political marginalization and the ways in which they impacted on relevant sections of society, notably male working-class and/or ethnic minority youths. The roots of the 1980s British riots are thus to be found in post-WWII migration trends, which saw tens of thousands of African-Caribbean immigrants arriving in the UK in response to government-sponsored advertising campaigns that had appealed to them to fill the chronic employment shortages existing in the public service and industrial sectors. Having been enticed by the false promise of a more comfortable and affluent lifestyle, the new migrant labourers instantly found themselves forced, by a combination of low wages and discriminatory local government housing policies, into highly segregated, overcrowded and dilapidated neighbourhoods containing poor schools and facilities (Rex, 1987). It was precisely these communities that found themselves hardest hit by the economic downturn of the 1970s – particularly in terms of unemployment, which was disproportionately high among black youths (Benyon, 1987). The British media was swift to propagate an accusatory racist discourse that stigmatized the minority population as ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘welfare spongers’, intent on stealing all ‘our’ jobs. This paved the way for tighter immigration laws that gave the police enhanced powers of surveillance and intervention, the consequence of which was to alienate, frighten and offend Asian and African-Caribbean communities in particular. The next major round of rioting occurred at the outset of the following decade. A key distinguishing feature of these disorders was that they involved young white males inhabiting run-down and geographically isolated council estates that were experiencing high unemployment and/or the actual or impending loss of their staple local industry (Campbell, 1993; Power and Tunstall, 1997). These locations typically comprised predominantly white working-class populations in which large numbers of children, often with lone parents, were commonplace. Such

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areas were heavily stigmatized and unpopular, with local residents feeling ‘largely abandoned by the main parliamentary political parties’ and therefore bereft of political representation (Campbell, 1993, p. xi). According to Power and Tunstall, it was the local boys in particular who were most harshly disadvantaged by their relatively poor educational showing and dearth of employment opportunities. Indeed, Lack of work, lack of direction, lack of role and lack of independence led to a pointless existence. The overriding preoccupation of community members on their behalf was the shrinking employment for unskilled males […] Even if there was work more generally – and there certainly people around with jobs – these young men had often already failed. They felt they had nothing and were going nowhere. They were very far from any formal job market. They were alienated from training, maybe through fear of further failure. They were often hostile to adults, maybe through fear of or an expectation of rejection. These attitudes led them to reject authority. (Power and Tunstall, 1997, p. 43)

The social conditions giving rise to the 2001 riots in the former textile areas of Bradford, Burnley and Oldham were similar in origin and character to those underlying the 1980s riots (Amin, 2002, 2003; Kundnani, 2001). Here, it was the high incidence of migration into the UK during the 1960s and 1970s of South Asian workers and their families arriving from the ‘New Commonwealth’ countries of Bangladesh and Pakistan. Such additions to the workforce were brought in especially to cover the undesirable night shifts required by the textile industry. Like their African-Caribbean predecessors, these migrant workers found themselves equally consigned (as a result of low wages and racist estate agency and local authority housing practices) into highly segregated and impoverished areas. The collapse of the textile industry in the 1990s compounded existing levels of chronic deprivation: All the wards affected in the disturbances that stretched from Oldham to Bradford are among the 20 per cent most deprived in the country and parts of Oldham and Burnley rank among the most deprived 1 per cent; all have average incomes that are among the lowest in the country and many of the wards in these areas have low educational attainment standards in schools. (MGhee, 2005, p. 57)

Industrial demise also produced high levels of unemployment among Asians and whites alike, but most seriously affected the employment prospects of young males of Bangladeshi and Pakistani heritage who were educationally underachieving relative to their white and female counterparts. Numerous authors (e.g., Amin, 2002; Frost, 2007; McGhee, 2005) have made the point that another direct consequence of industrial downturn was to harden the competition over scarce resources between local whites and Asians. Claims by the former alleged that Asian areas were being systematically favoured in terms

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of local welfare and regeneration investment, whilst spokespersons for the latter insisted that white candidates were receiving preferential treatment in the jobs market. One significant upshot of this mutual hostility and scapegoating was a rise in the pervasiveness and activity of the Far Right. Though crucially important, none of these background conditions is sufficient in itself to adequately explain the occurrence of rioting in each of the affected areas. In order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the underlying causes of the disorder it is necessary to outline: (a) the processes of cultural adaptation adopted by those youths most affected by relevant economic demise; and (b) the ideological and practical policing processes directed at them. Such explanations are dealt with in the next two sections of this chapter. Patterns of cultural resistance Lea and Young (1982) posit that such harsh conditions gave rise in the 1970s to a black ‘street counter-culture’, fusing elements of the Rastafarian and Rude Boy styles already being popularized on the deviant fringes of Caribbean society. These authors maintain that this was invariably accompanied by a proliferation of local crime and that, ‘whereas most of it [was] of no significance (e.g. cannabis smoking) other elements such as street robbery and interpersonal violence [were] seriously anti-social’, and severely frowned upon by the older generation of African-Caribbean immigrants (ibid., pp. 8–9). Lea and Young further argue that this black youth counter-culture is unlikely to have flourished to such a great extent had those involved not found themselves quite so politically marginalized. In the absence of political organizations and ‘any viable tradition of ethnic politics’ through which to defend or further their interests, black youth was simply left with ‘no alternative to the streets’. In their analyses of the 1990s riots, both Campbell, and Power and Tunstall highlight the significance of the discrepant ways in which the local young men and women of these areas responded and adapted to the conditions of economic crisis and the ‘pointless existence’ characterizing their daily lives. In the main, the young women did better at school and therefore enjoyed relatively superior employment prospects. The high rate of teenage pregnancies provided them with an additional source of self-esteem that was unavailable to their masculine counterparts (Power and Tunstall, 1997, p. 51). It was therefore up to the young men to seek out alternative ways of expressing positive social identity in the absence of paid employment. According to Campbell in particular, the youths’ main cultural response involved stealing and flaunting high-performance cars as a mechanism for reasserting masculine power and status within the local community. Such ‘reputation’ was further enhanced via a range of other illicit activities, including burglary, shoplifting and drug-dealing, and the direct intimidation of anyone threatening to report them to the police. Not that the prospect of being ‘sent down’ acted as a deterrent to the youths. Appearing in court and/or being given a custodial sentence was a source of considerable kudos and peer-group respect:

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Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State For young men whose self-esteem was already in crisis, whose joyriding was perhaps fearless to the point of being suicidal, the criminal justice system offered little or no challenge or threat. At worst it was felt to be disrespectful or humiliating, which confirmed the commitment of many workers in the juvenile justice system to work tirelessly to keep young men out of prison. At best, court became part of the young men’s social life, part of the circuit of visibility from the street to the courthouse, another public appearance where what mattered to them was not that their behaviour was perceived as wrong but that it was seen as important. (Campbell, 1993, p. 268)

The cultural posture adopted by Asian youths in the build-up to the 2001 riots was arguably more defensive in orientation. Finding themselves confronted by a dire economic predicament, the threat of racist incursions and what they regarded as police indifference to their safety, these young men formulated a cultural adaptation based on hip-hop ‘gangsta’-style sensibilities involving experimentation with drugs, combined with a collective determination to meet racist violence in kind (Burlet and Reid, 1998; Din and Cullingford, 2006; Webster, 1997). This standpoint reflected determination not to tolerate or yield to the type of racial discrimination and harassment inflicted on previous generations (Saldago-Pottier, 2008, p. 1) and was partly predicated on perceptions that the Asian political elite was ‘out of touch’ with and insensitive to the youths’ psychological and material requirements (Jan-Khan, 2001). Establishment responses and their consequences The above theoretical linkage between economic crisis and ‘survival crime’ in the genesis of the 1980s riots has also been posited by Jefferson and his colleagues (Brogden et al., 1988; Jefferson and Grimshaw, 1984). However, equally fundamental to the explanation of these authors is their emphasis on what they regard as the intensifying effect of a media-led ‘moral panic’, generated by politicians, senior police officers and other ‘primary definers’, which served to transform African-Caribbean youths into ‘folk devils’ and thereby justified the repressive policing of their communities. Jefferson and his co-workers illustrate how a ‘deviance amplification spiral’ was activated whereby the incidence of ‘muggings’ (street robberies) was not only exaggerated out of all proportion but also unreasonably associated with a stereotypically predatory black perpetrator. This ideological vilification and ‘criminalization’ of the youths quickly activated a repertoire of harshly repressive ‘saturation’ policing measures, involving close community surveillance and random stop-and-search procedures. Such tactics progressively alienated entire minority communities, causing them to withhold cooperation and unify in their opposition to the police. It was under circumstances of this nature that police arrests of ostensibly isolated individuals became widely perceived ‘as a symbolic attack on the community per se’ (Lea and Young, op. cit., p. 12), and triggered off major conflagrations.

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Lea (2004) justifiably remarks that it was not the kind of obtrusive and repressive police presence marking the 1980s riots that contributed to the disorders of ten years later. Rather, it was the fact that riot police were responding to appeals by older residents to salvage a situation that the authorities had allowed, through their neglect, to get hopelessly out of hand: It was a symptom of wider policing difficulties and weak enforcement that incidents of violence, law-breaking and criminal damage rumbled on over years in areas of weak control, until they finally boiled over […] In areas where cars were stolen and driven dangerously around estates, buildings were set on fire, drugs were peddled and small groups of men were out of control, tension between older residents and groups of law-breaking youths built up to a point where eventually residents demanded police action to suppress behaviour they themselves could not control. In the 13 areas, incidents mounted to a point of extreme conflict within the community over behaviour standards and expectations, which then triggered police intervention. It was scarcely surprising that the police, attempting to intervene in an already long-running situation of disorder, failed to impose their authority without a struggle. Police attempts to re-establish control over an area were often seen by young people as a challenge to fight back. (Power and Tunstall, 1997, p. 15)

Numerous commentators have pointed out that the growing inclination of Asian youths to defend their communities in the face of external aggression (e.g., Kalra, 2002; Ray and Smith, 2004; Salgado-Pottier, 2008) was persistently and mistakenly portrayed by senior police and journalists in the build-up to the 2001 riots as ‘evidence’ of growing Asian attacks on whites by local ‘drug barons’ keen to protect their markets. Thus, as Webster explains, White territorialism inadvertently generated an Asian challenge aimed at “turning the tables on whites”, which created those very conditions that whites complained about [...] that attacks on Asians had declined and attacks on whites had increased, enabling white young people to portray racism as something that black people inflict on whites in the form of violent racism and abuse aimed at whites, and that Asians were a threat to public order (their order). A further consequence was a growing perception among the police and local agencies of Asian gangs’ involvement in drug abuse and criminality. (1997, p. 76)

The resulting deterioration of relations between the police and Asian youths served to enhance the electoral influence and popularity of Far Right groups, such as the British Nationalist Party (BNP), the National Front (NF) and Combat 18 (C-18). Thus emboldened, such groups became increasingly more active and conspicuous in those areas in which the riots eventually occurred. Each of the major riots had been preceded by recent instances of collective provocation, such as well-publicized fascist marches. The disorders all occurred in the wake of

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triggering incidents involving Far Right mischief makers, and amidst complaints that insufficient was being done by the police to deter impending attacks on Asian communities (see King and Waddington, 2004, and Waddington, 2007, 2010, for case studies of the three separate riots). The French Riots, 2005 There are notable similarities between the 2005 French riots and those that occurred in England and Wales during the 1980s, 1990s and 2001. Corresponding patterns of migration and de-industrialization were equally pivotal to the French urban disorders. In the immediate post-war period the French, like the British, looked to their former colonies for a cheap and subservient workforce that, they correctly supposed, would help them to achieve the unprecedented period of economic expansion spanning the next three decades (Ireland, 2005; Murray, 2006). These predominantly Arab and black African immigrant workers and their families settled initially in shanty towns (bidonville) and were later relocated to the relatively contained and isolated banlieues of major cities such as Lille, Lyon, Nice, Paris and Toulouse (Waddington and King, 2009; Oberti, 2008; Zauberman and Levy, 2003). Ireland (2005) argues that ‘Often there was only just enough public transport provided to take these uneducated working class Arabs and blacks directly to their jobs in the burgeoning factories of the “peripherique” […] but little or none linking the ghettos to the urban centers’. The word banlieues has long been used in French society to denote an especially stigmatized and violent social location. Indeed, The term […] itself dates back to the thirteenth century when it referred to a perimeter of one league around the city. In medieval usage the term signified a liminal space associated with social marginality, uncontrolled movement and spatialized poverty. To be au ban meant to be excluded from a group by edict; worse to be banished from the city was to be relegated to the margins of what constituted social life and order. (Ossman and Terrio, 2006, p. 7)

Body-Gendrot (2007, p. 420) makes the point that a minority of present-day banlieues are in fact wealthy. By far the majority, though, come within France’s 751 designated deprived urban areas, known as ‘ZUSs’ (zones urbaines sensibles). Economic decline from the mid-1970s onwards has had a marked impact on these areas and has reinforced already existing conditions of social disadvantage and deprivation. This, in turn, has negatively impacted on job opportunities available to young people, to the extent that, by the 1990s, youth unemployment had reached 20 per cent (twice the national average) and over 30 per cent in the banlieues (Silverstein and Tetreault, 2006). As in the UK, the introduction of more restrictive immigration legislation in the 1970s worked to the detriment of police–community relations. From 1975

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onwards, new laws provided greater powers of expulsion concerning those immigrants lacking proof of a stable job and fixed accommodation (Zauberman and Levy, 2003). The political emergence of le Pen’s National Front during the municipal elections of 1983, in the following year’s European elections, and again in the parliamentary elections of 1986 and 1988 (for the latter of which they achieved a 14 per cent share of the vote) was predicated on the argument that immigration ‘was a major source of crime and terrorism’ (Guyomarch, 1991, p. 331). Increasing impoverishment in the majority of banlieues has since resulted in the closure of local shopping complexes, whilst the gradual dilapidation or demolition of the prefabricated dwellings, which had stood for years in states of disrepair, has not only compounded local feelings of distress but also stigmatized residents as they have tried in vain to find work (Silverstein and Tetreault, 2006). In a recent analysis of the sociological preconditions of the riots, Mucchielli (2009) points to the significance of such additional factors as: inadequate local schooling and correspondingly poor academic attainment; high youth unemployment and poor prospects for the future; poor health care and facilities; a sense of being different and isolated from mainstream French society; and daily experience of racial discrimination, involving perceptions of scorn from authority figures such as the police and members of the social services. He posits that the upshot of such factors has been a crisis of integration in which France’s ethnic minority youths have been systematically denied access to both citizenship and social status (ibid., p. 747). As in the UK, it was the ways in which they responded culturally to this socio-cultural predicament that brought them into conflict with the authorities and resulted in eventual rioting. Patterns of cultural resistance In 1983 growing French–Arab opposition and political organization resulted in the first ‘March for Equality against Racism’ (commonly referred to as Marche des Beurs – ‘Beur’ being the slang term for Arab). This consisted of approximately 100,000 participants demanding to be recognized comme les autres – ‘like everyone else’ (Ireland, 2005; Body-Gendrot, 2010). Further, youth-led associations, like SOS Racism and France Plus, also emerged to protest against racism and fight for equal citizenship. But the leaders of these organizations soon lost ground to entrenched political parties and state institutions that tried to tap the frustrations of these segments of society for political ends in the hopes of creating a single ethnic or religious voting bloc […] This increased the frustration felt by youth, who did not benefit from this political activity and who had the feeling they were being manipulated for others’ political gains. (Wihtol de Wenden, 2006, p. 49)

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It was this combination of social and economic adversity and lack of effective political representation (ibid.; Meier and Hawes, 2008) that gave rise to a youth ‘gangsta’ street culture of the form adopted by young African-Americans (Mohammed, 2009; Mohammed and Mucchielli, 2006). On this basis, it is evident that in the ZUS especially: What coalesced the rioters is first of all a “neighbourhood identity”. They are known by the name of the estates: “Cité des 4000” at la Courneuve; “La Madeleine” at Evreux; “Val Fourré” at Mantes la Jolie; “Les Minguettes” at Vénissieux, near Lyon. Usually groups of youth stroll together in the neighbourhood streets, squares and buildings’ entrances. They “hold the wall” (an expression borrowed from the Franco-Algerian slang, “hittist”, referring to idle young males in the streets). These “bandes” or “groups” are not really gangs like Los Angeles types. They are based on neighbourhood identity and a loose affiliation with a hard core nucleus of local “caïds” or leaders; they don’t recruit beyond the neighbourhood. The hard core is often involved in drug dealing and petty delinquency. The others are often school drop-outs and unemployed youth. The whole group will join to protect the territory from intruders, whoever they are: a rival gang, police but also journalists […] Many youngsters are not affiliated with these gangs, go to school, may have occasional jobs, but keep in contact and could be mobilized in case of an external threat. (Roy, 2005)

Participants in the riots revealed to British journalists how their anger had been especially directed against the police on the one hand, and the man to whom the police were ultimately answerable on the other. As one 18-year-old rioter asserted, the immediate responsibility for the rioting lay with the police: Les keufs, man, the cops. They’re Sarkozy’s and Sarkozy must go, he has to shut his mouth, say sorry or just fuck off. He shows no respect. He calls us animals, he says he’ll clean the cités with a power hose. He’s made it worse, man. Every car that goes up, that’s one more message for him. (quoted by Henley, 2005)

This primary focus of anger was also referred to, among a number of others, by interviewees in Mucchielli’s study: Frankly, there were all kinds of things in the riots. There were guys who were angry against the cops, others who were enraged against schools, because they didn’t have any school any more, others because they didn’t have a job, others to look big in the neighbourhood […] But most of the guys, their hate was against the cops because they try to look big, lots of them are racist, and they treat us like shit […] Sarkozy, didn’t he try to hide it when the cop threw that tear-gas grenade in the mosque? (riot participant, quoted by Mucchielli, 2009, p. 741)

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Similarly, Duvall Smith (2005) recounts that interviewees provided an apparent logic to the torching of cars in that they ‘make good barricades and they burn nicely, and the cameras like them’. Another youth asserted: ‘How else are we going to get our message across to Sarkozy? It is not as if people like us can just turn up at his office.’ Establishment responses and their consequences Youth culture in the banlieues has variously been depicted by both politicians and the media as going hand-in-hand with delinquency and violence, ranging from gang rapes and drug ‘turf wars’ to honour killings and vengeance murders (Ossman and Terrio, 2006). Especially since the 1990s, the banlieues have been associated in the public imagination with terrorist activity. Such negative perceptions have been compounded by media-led allegations that the banlieues are recruiting grounds for Islamic fundamentalism, have become the locations of Islamist summer camps, and are now part of a global terrorist network. Indeed, the Lyon and Paris train station bombings in 1995, attributed to the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (Groupement Islamique Armé), only served to reinforce widespread suspicions of this nature (Echchaibi, 2007; Laachir, 2007). More recent events, such as the arrest of a French-born Moroccan for his part in the 9/11 attacks and the discovery of French citizens among Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, have concretized such assertions even more (Silverstein and Tetreault, 2006). A successive hardening of policing in the banlieues in response to media and political pressure is similarly apparent since the 1990s. Bonelli (2007) has argued that the increased routine flooding of such areas with plain-clothes officers, riot police and gendarmerie amounts to their ‘effective militarization’. Following his appointment as Minister of the Interior in 2002, Nicolas Sarkozy put through a package of measures amounting, in effect, to zero tolerance policing, thereby making such ‘quality of life’ crimes as aggressive begging, loitering in hallways, fraudulently riding on public transport and forming youth gatherings on the streets, ‘arrestable offences’. These events resulted in an even greater frequency and intensity of everyday confrontations between police and banlieue youths, and gave rise to forceful allegations of police harassment and physical violence (Ossman and Terrio, 2006, p. 10). In such ritualized encounters, issues of group honour and solidarity are at stake. Groups of youths would rapidly gather at the scene of any police security or identity check, with the objective of, in their own words, ‘“putting pressure” (mettra la pression) on the police, i.e. as a display of numerical strength’ (Bonelli, 2007, p. 112). Youth–police confrontations of this nature are apt to be exacerbated by the centralized nature of policing in France. In this respect, too, Sarkozy is seen as having played a significant part in inflaming the situation. During the late 1980s a policy of community policing was enacted, but it was generally unpopular with the police and politicians. The general police attitude was reflected in the assertion by one member of the Police Union that ‘We are not here to meet social goals (faire

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du social)’ (Body-Gendrot, 2010, p. 665). Politicians were also concerned that the accent on community policing appeared to have coincided with an increase in reported crime. Thus, shortly after becoming Interior Minister in 2002, Sarkozy disbanded the community policing initiative. Mouhanna (2009) maintains that police are now simply deployed from the outside into problem areas, making the banlieues geographically and culturally removed from their knowledge and experience. After two years of ‘front-line service’, they are then dispatched to ‘less demanding’ areas. Such practices almost inevitably result in ‘policing by strangers’ – that is, policing by officers lacking any connection with or sensitivity to local cultural mores and having no incentive to forge a lasting relationship with the local population. Numerous academic commentators have remarked on the way that controversial statements made by Mr Sarkozy undoubtedly contributed to the 2005 riots (BodyGendrot, 2007; Jobard, 2008; Mucchielli, 2006). Four months prior to the riots, Sarkozy had visited ‘banlieue nord’ (the 93rd district on the outskirts of north Paris) where a child had been shot dead in cross-fire between rival gangs. There, in the company of a group of journalists, he was reported to have said that such estates should be ‘Kärcherized’ (i.e., cleansed away with a pressurized water hose) (Fassin, 2006, p. 1). Then, on 25 October, a mere two days before the outbreak of the rioting, he characterized the youth of this area as la racaille – which translates into English language as ‘scum’ (Jobard, 2009, p. 239). It has also been argued that Sarkozy’s insistence that the two youths who were electrocuted at Clichy-sous-Bois had entered the substation with criminal intent had an intensely arousing effect on the proceedings. Coming less than two days after their deaths, these comments are generally acknowledged as having served as the emotively symbolic trigger for the riots (Body-Gendrot, 2007; Jobard, 2009; Murray, 2006). The subsequent disclosure of recorded radio exchanges between attending police officers and their command centre indicated that the police had given chase to the youths and seen them entering the electrical substation (Roché and de Maillard, 2009, p. 36). Indeed, had Sarkozy deliberately ‘set out to increase alienation and defiance, he could not have chosen a more effective tactic’ (Roché and de Maillard, op. cit., p. 37). Similarly, the firing of the tear gas canister into the entrance of the mosque in Clichy during Ramadan ‘acted as a powerful mechanism of boundary activation’, fostering a pronounced ‘us versus them’ mentality throughout the length and breadth of French society (Jobard, 2008, p. 1290). Finally, it would seem that the tendency for the policing of the riots to be managed centrally – at the regional département, as opposed to the more local police station level – combined with the ‘segmentation’ of police services (into public police, the compagnies républicaines de sécurité (CRS), escadrons de gendarmerie mobile, etc.) produced problems of poor coordination and strategic confusion (Roché and de Maillard, 2009, pp. 37–9). Separate police units often intervened without having their ‘reciprocal roles’ clearly defined and lacking adequate knowledge of the local territory – all of which led them to concede space and initiative to the rioters (ibid., pp. 37–8). By contrast, it was only when police officers were subsequently deployed

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in significantly greater numbers, with a ‘containment’ objective uppermost in mind, and when tactical command was transferred to local level from the départements, that rioting eventually subsided. Conclusions We have indicated above that the French and British riots have much in common in terms of their underlying contextual factors. We should also note, however, that there are important distinguishing features between them. These include the distinction existing between the formally inclusive notion of citizenship that prevails in France, compared with the more explicit recognition of minority ethnic groupings existing in the UK. Another marked difference is that French policing has a more routinized paramilitary nature than its UK counterpart. In the same vein it would be misleading to attribute broadly similar motives to the core groups of participants involved in the French and British riots – or, for that matter, to those engaged in the three principal riot eras occurring in the UK. It is possible, as Lord Scarman stipulated in his official report of inquiry into the Brixton disorder of that year, that the 1981 riots represented a collective demand for greater inclusion in society, an end to social discrimination and disadvantage, and that many of those involved ‘believe[d] with justification that violence, though wrong, is a very effective means of protest: for, by attracting the attention of the mass media of communication, they get their message across to the people as a whole’ (Scarman, 1981, para. 2.38). What is infinitely more certain, though, is the fact that it was opposition to repression and harassment that unified the black communities against the police. It was an equally defensive orientation – though this time in the face of Far Right intimidation and aggression – that characterized the UK riots of 20 years later. As one commentator put it, ‘Locked into their degradation and defeat by a racist police force, vilified by a racist press and violated, finally by the true fascists. What were the youth to do but break out in violence, self-destructive, reactive violence, the violence of choicelessness, the violence of the violated?’ (Sivanandan, 2001, p. 5). McGhee (2005, p. 62) makes the related point that members of the Asian communities involved in the disorders had no faith in police willingness to protect them from Far Right hatred and intolerance: From this perspective, the motivations of the British Asian “rioters” can be seen not as the activities of “maniacs”, but as a group of people who had had enough, who could not depend on the police or the government to do anything about their situation, who had to take matters into their own hands. (ibid.)

Lea (2004, p. 189) has emphasized that what made the 1991 riots in Britain so different from their predecessors of ten years earlier was that they ‘seemed less oriented to a confrontation between a community and state agencies perceived

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as oppressive and denying equal treatment, and more symptomatic of socially excluded communities turning in on themselves’. However, even in this instance, it is possible to detect a relatively inchoate and undirected, though nonetheless discernable, political objection: Denial of basic status or recognition, breakdown in controls and lack of voice led young men who were marginalized and beyond control to claim power through attacks on society. Their aggressive energy, their youth and their male egos usually prevented them from withdrawing into depression. In the eyes of society their behaviour might be ugly, irrational or short-term, but from a perspective which sees no exit and no future it may have offered some immediate relief of inexpressible feelings. (Power and Tunstall, 1997, p. 53)

A political connection is rather more overt in the case of the 2005 riots in France. Two dimensions of this are especially prominent: first, the riots being a reaction to the stigmatized, criminalized, heavily policed and marginalized nature of the banlieues and their residents. In this respect Body-Gendrot (2007, p. 422) paints a stark picture of reality in the banlieues as consisting of: weak social networks and the fragmentation of residents in marginalized urban spaces [whereby] a feeling of disempowerment on the part of some youths […] is fuelled by the awareness of their social uselessness [and] by poor relations with the police who constantly stop and search them […].

The second dimension, as we have argued earlier, is the apparently incisive role of Sarkozy’s dismissive statements. To put it simply, in the words of Koff and Duprez (2009, p. 728), the riots escalated ‘because a politician, hoping to contribute to the political capital necessary for a presidential campaign in 2007, made indelicate statements concerning the residents of poor urban neighbourhoods’. It does not get more political than that. Acknowledgement Many of the ideas on which the chapter is based are drawn from a jointly-funded ESRC/ANR workshop series involving French and British academics which took place between 2007 and 2008.

Chapter 10

The Volatility of Urban Riots Marilena Simiti Riots draw a variety of people for a variety of reasons […] Different groups of people participate in different ways on different days […] arrest records merely capture a slice of time, an incomplete picture. (Miller 1999)

The aim of this chapter is to underline the crucial differences between riots and social movements by analyzing three different aspects of riots: (1) their dynamic of discontinuity, volatility, and alternation; (2) their temporal and spatial limitations as challenges to social order; and (3) the contested political identities of rioters. I will emphasize that riots differ from and should not be equated with social movements. Rather than analyzing riots as unified events, riots should be disaggregated into multiple, variable, smaller events, in which the protagonists, the repertoires, and the reasons for participating may not only differ but may also be contradictory. Moreover, riots express and are bound by the socioeconomic and spatial immobility of their participants in contrast to social movements, which have the ability to shift their mobilization to a broader spatial and political scale. Finally, claims making and political identities in riots challenge perceptions about politics that are based on strict dualities, such as political/non-political. However, taking into account these differences, the two concepts should not be juxtaposed or perceived as mutually exclusive, since riots may take place within a social movement’s cycle of protest (e.g., the Watts riots of 1965 occurred within the broader context of the civil rights movement1) and social movements may emerge from riot events (e.g., the 1984 riots in Lawrence, Massachusetts and the formation of the Alliance for Peace2). 1  The Watts Riots took place in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, in 1965. The riots began on August 11, when a highway motorcycle patrol officer arrested an African-American driver and two members of his family. Events escalated and the largescale riot that subsequently took place lasted for 6 days leading to the death of 34 people, the injury of 2,032 and to 3,952 arrests. 2  The population of Lawrence, Massachusetts, comprised numerous ethnic and racial groups. During the late 1960s many Hispanic immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and other Latin American countries as well as Asians settled in Lawrence increasing the number of migrant communities (e.g., Irish, French-Canadian, Italian, German, Jewish, English). Tensions between whites and Hispanic youths escalated into a riot in 1984. The rioters came mainly from the Hispanic community, but there were also some white-working class participants. During the riots, some of the rioters founded a grassroots citizens organization (Alliance for Peace) in order to curb collective violence

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In order to illustrate the differences between riots and social movements, I will review and analyze scholarship on the 1992 Los Angeles riots and on the 2005 riots in the outer suburbs of French cities. I will theorize the findings and compare them with what we know about social movements. The 1992 Los Angeles Riots Multiple riots took place in American cities in the 1960s. After the Watts riots erupted in 1965 in Los Angeles, no fewer than 164 other riots occurred in other US cities, most within the broader context of the African-American civil rights movement. They were a manifestation of a political culture of resistance in the African-American community as well as a statement of growing black power in American cities. In these riots, black anger at the racial divide that marked American society, violent confrontations with the police, as well as looting and destruction of white-owned shops dominated.3 In the 1992 Los Angeles Riots there were some common elements with the urban riots of the 1960s, such as black anger at institutional racism, but also new aspects came to the foreground concerning urban conflict in the post-civil rights era. On March 3, 1991, four white Los Angeles Police Department officers arrested black motorist Rodney King after a high-speed chase. A nearby resident videotaped the police officers brutally beating King while he was lying on the ground. The incident was broadcast worldwide. On April 29, 1992, a predominantly white jury acquitted all four police officers involved in the incident.4 Shortly afterwards, crowds started assembling and the protest quickly escalated into widespread riots. Rioting lasted more than a week and Marine and Army units were called in to restore order. During the riots, 53 people were killed and thousands were injured in Los Angeles, while smaller riots took place in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Las Vegas and Pittsburgh. The Los Angeles riots illustrate significant changes in the contemporary urban ghettos of American cities. In his analysis of black ghettos, Wacquant (1993, 1998) claims that, since the early 1970s, ghettos have witnessed a violent transformation. The end of the post-Fordist era, deindustrialization and the contraction of the wage-labor economy as well as increased flexibility in the new service sectors have led to the erosion of stable wage-labor relations, a sharp increase of and channel the demands of the Hispanic community to the governmental and community level (Duran 1985). 3  In the urban riots of the 1960s deadly violence against persons was mainly used by the police. In the 1980 Miami Riots and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, on the other hand, the majority of deadly violence against persons was used by civilians (McPhail 1994). 4  The trial did not take place in Los Angeles County. It was transferred to Simi Valley, a predominantly white and conservative city in Ventura County. The jury was composed of Ventura County residents (ten whites, one Asian and one Hispanic) (Linder 2001).

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unemployment and the continuing marginalization of the unskilled and unqualified urban poor.5 This economic restructuring was coupled with a significant rollback of the public sector. Federal funds for urban and community development were severely cut, while welfare programs and unemployment coverage shrank. The public sector withdrew from the provision of goods and services (housing, health care, physical safety, education, etc.) that affect social conditions in ghettos as well as opportunities for their residents. Moreover, the improved socioeconomic status of a significant number of black residents led to their departure from the inner-city ghettos and their resettlement in the suburbia. This process signified their move into the middle and professional classes. It had, however, a negative effect on those left behind. Living conditions in the ghettos deteriorated, while the institutional density of the communities was undermined. The disparities between the inner-city ghettos and the suburban rings increased. According to Wacquant (1993), these transformations led to the gradual erosion of the ghettos’ civic and organizational base. Thus, a distinctive feature of contemporary American ghettos is the lack of organizations that can support community functions, as well as the struggle of their residents for social goods. For Wacquant, American ghettos today differ from the “communal ghettos” of the post-war years that were inhabited by black people from all classes (Wacquant 1993). In these “communal ghettos,” strong collective identities, viable organizations, and social networks made them places of potential political mobilization. Contemporary ghettos, on the contrary, have assumed the form of a “hyperghetto,” a socially and ethnically homogenous enclave that brings together the most dispossessed, marginalized and racially segregated segments of American society.6 Wacquant’s analysis highlights that recent changes in the black urban ghettos of the United States have decreased the chances for sustained long-term mobilizations. The Los Angeles Riots started in an African-American neighborhood with violence against whites (e.g., Reginald Oliver Denny, a white track driver). However, they did not evolve into a typical race riot. On the second day, attacks centered on the Korean-American community, with widespread and systematic looting and destruction of Korean stores in the African-American community. The Los Angeles Riots illustrated vividly that in order to understand contemporary urban conflict in American cities one must look not only at the racial divide (black/ white), but also at the inter-minority conflicts that have been generated by recent immigration patterns.

5  From June 1990 to February 1992 more than 300,000 jobs were lost in Los Angeles. In the South Central district, four workers in ten were unemployed (Pearson and Kirby 1993). 6  Wacquant’s description of contemporary ghettos has been criticized for overlooking “that the African American experience is not monolithic,” and leaving no room “for an analysis of class diversity and related conflict within the enclave.” See White, 2007: 372, 373.

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During the 1970s and the 1980s Korean small businesses started opening across the United States. This was especially the case in South Central Los Angeles, where Korean grocers lived outside black neighborhoods, while running their stores in these neighborhoods. Tensions between the African-American and the Korean communities had escalated just before the riots, owing to the shooting to death of a 15-year-old African-American girl (Latashe Harlins) by a Korean shop owner in March 1991.7 There were, however, more long-standing tensions between the two communities. In Los Angeles, massive immigration of Asians and Hispanics had led to the further marginalization of the black community.8 African-American violence against the Korean community was a product of their frustration and anger at being pushed down the economic ladder once more by a new group of migrants. The ethnic conflict between the two communities was, to a certain extent, also a class conflict between ghetto residents and ghetto merchants. African-Americans accused Koreans of not hiring any blacks and of making a profit out of their marginalized communities. In this case, ethnicity became an indicator of class position (Davis 1993; Rosenfeld 1997). The Los Angeles Riots revealed a socioeconomic divide between the “haves” (whites and Asians) and the “have-nots” (Hispanics and AfricanAmericans). Even though not all whites or Asians are rich and not all Hispanics or African-Americans are poor, this divide illustrates the fierce competition between the communities to defend and/or enhance their socioeconomic position within the broader context of severe economic recession and rapid demographic change. In post-Watts Los Angeles another significant element was the rise of black gangs.9 Gangs had an immense influence on life in the urban ghettos. They intensified the vulnerability of ghetto residents, because of the excessive use of physical violence, whilst also contributing to the spread of the drug trade. Gangs, however, are a very heterogeneous phenomenon. They differ according to issues like culture, political activism, and how central criminality is to their core mission (Varano 2004). During the Los Angeles Riots the two major gangs of Los Angeles 7  On March 16, 1991, Latasha Harlins was shot in the back of the head by Korean immigrant Soon Ja Du in the Empire Liquor Market, which was owned by Du’s family. Du shot Harlin, believing she was a shoplifter. She was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, but the sentence given to her (five years’ probation) enraged the African-American Community of Los Angeles (Gray 2007). 8  From 1970 to 1990 the proportion of the African-American population in Los Angeles County remained stable; however, the share of Hispanics rose from 15 percent to 37 percent and the share of Asians from 2.5 percent to 10.5 percent (Di Pasquale and Glaeser 1998). 9  In the early 1970s, black gangs were influenced by the black liberation movement’s rhetoric about community control of neighborhoods. The early 1970s were marked by the extraordinary rise and expansion of the Crips gang. The Bloods gang was formed subsequently, as a reaction to the rise of the Crips. By the early 1980s gangs had spread to the largest cities in the USA. In the 1990s, Los Angeles’ major gangs (Crips and Bloods) had already evolved into mega-gangs, which had multiple branches outside Los Angeles. See Davis 1990; Taylor 2008; Umemoto 2006.

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(Crips and Bloods) participated in the riots and became politicized. The two gangs called a truce, in order to reduce violence in the black community, contribute to the creation of work opportunities, and promote black activism. Although gang violence re-emerged occasionally in Los Angeles, sustained efforts to maintain the truce led to the formation of community-based organizations (e.g., the UNITY One organization, which was active in intervention and prevention at the community level) (Katz 2008). The dynamic of urban conflict is also shaped by a city’s political structures and local history. The local context is significant for understanding the intensity, duration and scale of riots. In her comparative analysis of New York and Los Angeles, Abu-Lughold found that in New York, where political structures were more conciliatory, riots led to specific gains for the African-American community (e.g., housing, schools). In Los Angeles, by contrast, the militarized structure of the police, the lack of organized and sustained black political power and the domination of political structures that are not receptive to minority representation in local government (e.g., city councils) led to more violent riots, which were not followed by any tangible gains for the African-American community (AbuLughold 1997, 2007). In the case of Los Angeles, there were many structural factors present that can also be observed in different cities that experienced similar events of largescale rioting.10 Chronic poverty, unemployment, income inequalities, unequal consumer services (e.g., poor schools, inadequate housing, lack of access to health care, poor transportation), lack of political representation, marginalization, urban relegation, police bias and brutality, racial discrimination, stigmatization, spatial segregation, significant shifts in institutional policies and the emergence of new forms of governmentality are elements that can be found also in the French cities, which saw riots in 2005. However, structural factors can give us information about the context in which rioting occurs; they cannot provide an adequate insight into the fragmented, complex and volatile evolution of riots. The Los Angeles riots started with violent attacks on civilians, the destruction of private and public property and looting by African-Americans. However, the protagonists in these riots were not only African-Americans but also Hispanics. 10  The large number and severity of the riots that occurred in the 1960s led to a wide-ranging academic debate and multiple empirical studies on the underlying structural causes of riots. The research focused on the correlation between structural factors and the frequency or severity of riots. Few studies pinned down a limited number of specific variables affecting riots (e.g., Lieberson and Silverman 1965; Spilerman 1970). Many studies were also conducted into the individual attributes of rioters. Empirical research showed that the urban riots of the 1960s cut across class, income, educational level and occupational status. The only difference between rioters and non-rioters was that rioters were usually younger. Thus, the studies did not demonstrate that rioters share any typical and distinctive attributes. One must take into account, however, that the urban riots of the 1960s took place in the broader context of the civil rights movement, thereby affecting the boundaries between rioters and non-rioters.

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The participation of Hispanics followed that of African-Americans and was characterized by far more extensive looting. Thus, looting took place on different days by different groups for different reasons. The Kerner Report (1968) on the urban riots of the 1960s in American cities concluded that, initially, looting and property destruction was targeted against symbols of the white establishment. However, as the riots evolved, property destruction took the form of creating looting opportunities. Research indicates that collective violence usually takes place in the first days of a riot. As rioting proceeds, new actors may join in to take advantage of the circumstances (Martin, McCarthy and McPhail 2009; Bergesen 1982; Miller 1999). Thus, the same collective or individual behavior (looting) may imply different things in different episodes of rioting. The anger of the African-American community was about racial injustice in the United States and declining living conditions in their communities. On the other hand, it was the newest immigrants from Mexico or Central America who suffered most severely from the nationwide economic recession. It is not surprising therefore that the most extensive looting outside the African-American neighborhoods took place in districts with Mexican or Central American residents (the eastern half of South Central Los Angeles and neighborhoods like Hollywood and McArthur Park). After an extensive review of films and videotapes of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and the 1965 Watts Riots, Clark McPhail concluded that: • Every individual in the riot area did not engage in violence. • Those who did engage in violence—vandalism, looting, arson, or assault—did not do so continuously or exclusively.

• Despite repeated references to ‘mob violence,’ the majority of violent acts were carried out by individuals or small groups, not collectively by all nor even most of the larger gathering. • Thus, riots are not a uniform blanket of continuous and mutually inclusive violence. Riots are patchworks or kaleidoscopes of individual and collective, nonviolent and violent, alternating and varied action. (McPhail 1994: 12)

Based on this discussion, it is best to conceptualize riots as continuous but fragmented processes of forming and dissolving, during which multiple shifts occur from planned to spontaneous, non-violent to violent, collective to individual actions and vice versa. This volatile flow distinguishes riots from social movements, which also entail a diversity of actors, repertoires, and claims, but are always characterized by a certain degree of coordination, formalization, or organization. Moreover, in social movements, political strategies and articulated claims are quite visible, but in riots, the aims and claims of participants remain obscure and/or contradictory. The absence of a clear and comprehensive agenda is of course related to the volatile nature of riots (e.g., conflicts emerging in riots may vary across space and time; riots evolve in multiple, localized and fragmented

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centers;11 a diversity of actors is involved). The lack of a clear framework in riots opens up space for individuals or groups to join in also for their own private or collective reasons. As one community member stated concerning the Lawrence riots (1984): “The riots […] meant something different to everyone involved […] everybody joined in for some of the same reasons […] but your own private reasons too” (Duran 1985: 47). Compared to social movements, riots are also more dependent on real-time, micro-level dynamics of interpersonal encounters owing to the absence of a structured framework. However, riots are not devoid of meaning. When rioters are interviewed about their participation, they usually invoke identity frames to justify their decision.12 Riots also do not preclude the participation of organized collectivities with clear objectives. In the urban riots in American cities during the 1960s, some civil rights organizations got involved in order to redirect the anger and put an end to the violence in black communities. In the 1981 urban riots in Britain, leftist groups participated in the riots, but with their own agenda (Rex 1982). Still, in riots, organized collectivities are usually unable to control the dynamic of events or to assume a leadership role. Riots differ from social movements also in relation to public perceptions about rioters’ identity. Riots usually spark fierce public debate about whether they are meaningful protests or meaningless disruptions. The conflictual interpretation of riots is, of course, related to the issue of collective violence that riots entail, as well as to the lack of clearly articulated mobilizing frames. However, it is also related to public perceptions about who is justified to be a political subject and who is not. Rioting entails a process of “subjectification,”13 meaning that people or collectivities that participate in riots emerge as new claim-making subjects. The everyday functioning of the political system is based on a series of regularities and patterns that entail classifications (e.g., what is political, what is non-political). As Oliver and Myers state (1999: 40), “public life is ritualized and organized, so that public actions generally […] are meaningful to participants and observers.” In these classifications both the formal representatives of the political system as well as the contenders of the existing political order are perceived as political subjects. Thus, the patterns of everyday political processes (political interactions or conflicts) shape, influence and consolidate our perceptions about the agents of the political sphere. For instance, in the past, many social movements, such as feminism or gay rights, challenged formal politics, emerged as new claimmaking subjects, and succeeded in broadening the political arena by redefining what could be politicized. However, social movements are to a certain extent ritualized and organized. Social movements are persistent in time, articulate clear 11  For instance, in the Watts Riots of 1965, no single point of origin could be traced. Rioting took place in a number of different and spatially separate incidents. 12  Hacker and Harmetz demonstrated in their study that the frames rioters used to justify their participation in the riots referred usually to identity affirmation as an individual or a group (Hacker and Harmetz 1969). 13  For the process of “subjectification” see Nyers 2010.

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objectives, follow certain norms and patterns, and make public the conflicts they are involved in through campaigns, tactical repertoires, public performances of their worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment (Tilly 2004). Riots, on the other hand, are not organized as a unified protest event; they do not articulate any comprehensive and clear agenda and collective expression in riots remains episodic and fragmented. Thus, even though riots enter with extreme force into the public sphere, they do not follow the rules of organized and ritualized public life, making them difficult to decipher. They also defy the typical classifications and conventions of public life, such as the political/non-political divide. In riots, new people and collectivities, who may have been previously absent in formal or contentious politics, emerge as claim-making subjects, thereby intensifying the confusion about the political or non-political identity of rioters. In the Los Angeles riots many participants were young African-Americans, who did not participate in the formal structures of their communities and had distanced themselves from the established African-American leadership (Jacobs 1993). They questioned the legitimacy of their political representatives, while the latter, together with older generations, questioned the entitlement of young rioters to act as claim-making subjects, owing to their prior involvement in criminal and illicit activities. This conflict was even more clearly illustrated in the case of the Los Angeles gangs. The Crips and Bloods participated in the riots, but afterwards called a truce for the first time in order to articulate specific claims in their communities, especially unemployment. The politicization of the two gangs was either rejected by broader society as a manoeuvre to advance their illicit activities, or was received by their own community with great skepticism. In a similar vein, the 2001 riots in Britain and the 2005 riots in France also revealed conflict-ridden communities.14 The Los Angeles Riots were extremely visible and succeeded in disrupting the political system. However, rioters are not usually able to operate at a variety of temporal and spatial scales. Thus, in the Los Angeles riots it was harder to sustain mobilization on a broader political scale. The French Riots of 2005 illustrate clearly the case. The 2005 Urban Riots in France On October 27, 2005, three teenagers from Clichy-sous-Bois (in the Parisian district of Seine-Saint-Denis) were returning home, after a football game with 14  During the summer of 2001 in Britain there was extensive rioting in the northern towns of Bradford, Burnley and Oldham (former important industrial sites) by young Asians (second- or third-generation migrants, primarily of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin). During the riots the diversity and conflicts within the Asian communities became apparent. Second- and third-generation immigrants clashed with their community leaders, while the first-generation immigrants distanced themselves and did not participate in the riots. See Waddington and King 2009; Hussain and Bagguley 2005; Amin 2003; Webster 2003.

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friends, when they saw a police patrol. Believing that the police were chasing them, they tried to hide in an electrical power station, where two of them were electrocuted. On the same night violent confrontations between the police and local youths took place. A few days later, rioting spread to the urban outskirts of Paris, and then spread to 274 cities all over France.15 The riots lasted almost three weeks. During this period there were violent confrontations with the police (e.g., use of petrol bombs), attacks on public property (e.g., 233 public buildings were burnt) and private property (e.g., 10,000 private vehicles were burnt), but looting was limited. There were no fatal attacks on civilians during the riots. Riots have occurred regularly in the outer suburbs of major cities since the 1980s. Between 1990 and 2004 there were approximately 10 to 15 local unrests every year.16 The novelty of the 2005 riots was the prolonged duration and widespread diffusion of the riots across the national territory, including some smaller and less urbanized cities (Jobard 2008). The riots took place in suburbs (or banlieues) that were poor, marginalized, and with a high percentage of ethnic and racial minorities (Cesari 2005; Coole 2005; Body-Gendrot 2007). In the post-WWII period (1953–73) the banlieues were constructed to provide a solution to the housing problem of working-class families. They were inhabited by migrants of rural areas, middle-class families and migrants of former French colonies. When the economic crisis of the 1970s broke out , many native-born French abandoned the banlieues, which became increasingly inhabited by immigrants. Today they are inhabited mainly by immigrants from other European countries, the region of Maghreb, other African countries and poor white French.17 Even though the banlieues are not ethnically or racially homogenous enclaves, they share some common traits with the AfricanAmerican ghettos, such as chronic poverty, exclusion from the labor market, poor schools, inadequate housing, lack of access to health care, police bias and abuse, discrimination and stigmatization, urban relegation, spatial isolation and political exclusion.18 The inhabitants of the banlieues comprise a significant section of 15  The riots provoked by the accident of the two teenagers were confined to the locality of the event. However, when a few days later a tear gas grenade was thrown by police forces into an entrance to a mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois and Nicolas Sarkozy, then Interior Minister, refused to apologize for the conduct of the police, rioting spread quickly to a large number of other localities (Jobard 2009, 2005). 16  Unrests documented in the French Press Agency bulletins (Jobard 2005). 17  In the banlieues the proportion of migrants is three times higher and unemployment is 50 percent higher than the national average. The proportion of people under 25 years old is one-third higher and of single-parent families twice higher than the national average (Jobard 2008). 18  Loïc Wacquant in his comparison of the French banlieues to the black American ghettos has found significant differences. Wacquant’s findings sparked an academic debate on the patterns of urban development across advanced capitalist countries (e.g., the Americanization of European cities). See Wacquant 2003; Marcuse 2007; Musterd 2008; Tissot 2007.

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the unskilled working class in France. They have been negatively affected by deindustrialization and the severe cutbacks in funds for social and urban programs. This has led to the expansion of the informal economy in the housing projects. In recent years the banlieues have seen a significant shift in institutional policies towards tighter security measures and immigration laws. These trends, together with the rise of Islamophobia, have intensified the stigmatization of the population living in the Urban Sensitive Zones (“ZUS”) as well as the frequency of lengthy encounters with the police and ID checks. Moreover, many banlieues recently had to face urban renovation projects or demographic changes owing to the settlement of poorer migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa.19 The inflammatory statements of Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of Interior, of his intention to clean the suburbs with a “karcher” (allusion to “a high pressure washer,” Wihtol de Wenden 2005), escalated further the tension in the banlieues. Adding insult to injury, two days before the accident in Clichy-sous-Bois, where two teenagers died, Sarkozy referred to the banlieue youngsters, who were involved in rioting, as “racaille” (“scum”). In the past the banlieues were places of sustained and prolonged political mobilizations. Today, however, there is a significant deficit of political representation and mediation. The reasons for the gradual erosion of viable political organizations have been diverse (e.g., severe cuts in the state’s financial support to local civic associations since the 1980s; public authorities’ support of sociocultural associations rather than political associations; the disillusionment of immigration activists with the political parties of the Left and trade unions; the resettlement of political activists into nearby locations) (Poupeau 2006; Hajjat 2005; Wihtol de Wenden ibid.). The banlieues’ diminishing organizational density signifies additionally an important intergenerational rupture, which was manifested in the 2005 riots. The youths who were the protagonists in the riots had lost respect for the history and political activism of their elders. For the youths, their elders’ political projects and mobilizations had failed to integrate them fully as equal citizens. Youths, experiencing everyday socio-spatial segregation, institutional discrimination, penalization, racism, urban relegation, and so on, were dismissive of the moral authority that their elders had acquired in their local communities. Thus, during the riots when the elders (“big brothers”) attempted to calm the spirits, they had hardly any control over the rioting youth (Hajjat ibid.). The main participants in the French riots of 2005 were a new generation of very young “estate kids” (12 to 25 years old, predominantly male). Most of the rioters were second-, third-, or even fourth-generation immigrants, meaning that they were full French citizens.20 Many of them were still going to school, 19  In the 2005 French riots these two factors were strong indicators of rioting. The cities engaged in rioting were mainly in the west of France, where migrants from SubSaharan Africa had recently settled. Extensive rioting also occurred in districts affected by housing renovation projects (Jobard 2008). 20  Only around 7 percent of the arrested rioters were foreigners (Roy 2005).

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but many others were drop-outs and unemployed. Many also shared a common “neighborhood identity.” It was common in these banlieues that youths belonged to gangs that protected local territory from “intruders” (rival gangs, the police, etc.). Youths belonging to the hard core of these neighborhood gangs are often involved in drug dealing or other illicit activities (Body-Gendrot 2009; Petrova 2008). Even youngsters who were not willing to join these local gangs were in contact with them and are sporadically mobilized by them. Still, the majority (60 percent) of minors and adults arrested during the riots did not have any previous criminal record. Young rioters are not a new phenomenon in France; however, during the 2005 riots their presence became more visible because of the absence of organized collectivities and the youths’ disrespect for their elders. In the 2005 riots, also, the significant role of locality in defining the collective identities of these youngsters came to the foreground. Rioters’ identities were a complex amalgam of diverse and intersecting elements. The rioters who were questioned by the press used the word “us” to define themselves. However, this collective identity was extremely complex and ambivalent since it combined migratory, territorial, social and racial identities that interacted with each other (Jobard 2009). Nevertheless, there were two consistent themes that marked rioters’ identity: citizenship and locality. Rioters expressed first of all their anger at not enjoying the rights that accompany full citizenship. They protested against the institutionalized discrimination they face in employment, housing, education and political representation as well as the everyday experience of spatial stigmatization. The young rioters did not ask for any special cultural or religious rights; on the contrary they expressed their anger at the unfulfilled promises of the French Republican model. Hence, in the French riots of 2005, the rioters’ solidarity was founded on a negative element: the denial of equality. The first factor shaping rioters’ identity was the general claim to full citizenship. The second factor, on the other hand, was related to the limited scope of their life chances and life experiences. The social profiles of first-generation immigrants are usually diverse, in contrast to the second-, third- or fourth-generation immigrants, who are confined to segregated and excluded ethnic spaces and therefore share common experiences. Hence the second most important element in rioters’ identity was locality. The rioters were known by the name of the housing projects they inhabited (e.g., cité des 4000 at la Courneuve; see Roy 2005) since locality was a key determinant of their life trajectories. Locality has also shaped the youths’ affiliations. In the banlieues these affiliations are fragmented and conflictual because neighborhood identities are usually linked to violent conflicts for control over local territories. For some youngsters participation in the riots was an act of affirming affiliation with their peers or their locality. Rioting also occasionally took the form of competition between different local groups (Silverstein and Tetreault 2006). However, in the French riots of 2005 these fragmented affiliations came usually together and new spatial solidarities emerged amongst the youths, who mobilized to protect their physical space from state intrusion and regulation. The micro-level of local territory is the only space where the youths can exert

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autonomous influence in their daily lives. In the French riots, youths clashed violently with the police in order to regain control over their local territories and secure their autonomy from central state policies. However, their anger at the existing social relations of power and authority was demonstrated within the boundaries of their local districts, since they were unable to extend their mobilization to other parts of French cities. The city is an important factor in regard to collective mobilization. In the case of social movements it functions as a relational incubator that facilitates complex exchanges, which generate the necessary resources for campaigns at a variety of spatial scales (Walter 2008). Thus location plays a significant role as a nodal point in broader social and political networks. Like social movements, riots do not occur in a social vacuum, but in communities with associational and informal networks. Riots, therefore, activate social ties. However, in riots these ties are predominantly informal and local, isolated from broader networks that can provide resources for long-term and sustained mobilization at diverse spatial scales. Therefore, riots are usually geographically and socially circumscribed. Riots differ from social movements also in regard to the assembling and communication processes they encompass. In social movements, assembling processes are more centralized than in riots, since organizations play an important role in channeling information and instructions to the broader public. In riots, on the contrary, the assembling processes are more volatile and spatially decentralized, since the communication channels are usually private and informal (e.g., family, friends, acquaintances, civilians, etc.). The significant role of informal and private diffusion of information in riots is illustrated by the fact that riots can occur just on the basis of rumors, transmitted from one person to another.21 In the 2005 French riots most youngsters participated in small groups of 10 to 15 people.22 Rioters adopted hit-and-run tactics, in order to avoid direct confrontation with the highly trained and heavily armed riot police (Jobard 2005). Communication and information was transmitted mainly by the use of mobile phones (and to a lesser extent the Internet). Some targets were selected collectively (e.g., collective discussions by youngsters) on the basis of local conflicts (Jobard 2009). Collective action remained localized. Efforts to develop collective action in other parts of the French cities failed. Thus, even though riots took place in most major urban centers across France, they remained confined within the districts of the housing projects. Rioting outside the youngsters’ localities took place only sporadically at the margins of the massive students’ mobilizations against youth labor laws in March to April 2006. Even though the majority of students in the banlieues joined the mobilizations, many youngsters attacked violently the protesters. In the 2005 French riots, the temporary and fragile coalitions that were 21  Rumors cannot initiate or sustain prolonged, coherent and organized episodes of collective action of social movements. 22  There were only two exceptions of organized mobilization by approximately 200 rioters.

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made and unmade among actors who were driven together by common problems did not overcome the barriers posed by the spatial and institutional isolation of the banlieues. The lack of supportive social networks and sustained interaction with other organized collectivities restricted the dynamic evolution of the riots. Thus, the French riots vividly illustrated the spatial and social immobility of their participants. Conclusions Riots entail agency (even though the participants may be united by the use of disruptive repertoires, without necessarily sharing long-term solidarities or collective projects) and are contentious in the sense that they challenge existing social norms and regulations. Thus, riots are not irrational, random and unorganized events as the “collective behavior” model assumes. Riots, however, differ from social movements. They cannot be analyzed by the same causal processes and mechanisms that explain mobilization in social movements. Riots are not coherent or unified events. Riots are volatile, discontinuous and comprise often very contradictory elements. Rioting usually takes place in a number of different and spatially dispersed incidents. In rioting there is a continuous but fragmented process of forming and dissolving, during which multiple shifts occur from planned to spontaneous, non-violent to violent, collective to individual actions and vice versa. In riots, not only are the claims of rioters not clearly articulated, but also their right to act as claim-making subjects is severely contested. Thus, riots challenge public definitions and perceptions of “politics.” Furthermore, riots activate social ties that are predominantly informal and local, isolated from broader networks that can support long-term and sustained mobilization at diverse spatial scales. Therefore, riots are usually geographically and socially circumscribed. “Riots” and “social movements” are two concepts that highlight different manifestations of collective action. However, the two concepts should not be perceived as mutually exclusive. Riots may take place within a social movement’s cycle of protest and social movements may emerge from riot events. In the latter case the volatile, fragmented and contradictory elements of rioting are gradually transformed into more coherent, coordinated and sustained episodes of collective action.

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Section IV The Greek December, 2008

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Chapter 11

The Greek December, 2008 Hank Johnston and Seraphim Seferiades

The protests of the Greek December 2008 were distinguished by their breadth, scope of claims and depth of anger. They have a central place in this volume’s treatment of violent protest because they represent a singular event in the new millennium: on the one hand, a violent rejection of political alignments and economic policies residing at the heart of the European Union, and, on the other, an echo of the dimmed hopes of the young generation as a result of those policies. With the benefit of hindsight, however, it is not an exaggeration to argue that the Greek December was, at the time that it occurred, a harbinger of things to come in the global protest scene. Since December 2008, violent protest has broken out in such dissimilar – and ‘unlikely’ – countries as Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Iceland, France and Britain in Europe; Thailand, India and Bangladesh in Asia; Mozambique, Tunisia and Libya in North Africa; and Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain in the Middle East – and the list is obviously not complete. Shedding light on the Greek case is thus important because it helps us gain crucial insights into the mechanisms and processes at work in all violent protest. In our view, the task involves two theoretically important challenges. The first consists in avoiding the trap of environmental reductionism: the tendency to mechanistically infer violent protest from economic and political crisis. We claim that violent protest, though under certain circumstances likely, is far from inevitable or preordained as a mere reflection of the environment. This means that in order to comprehend, let alone explain it, one has to take into account a broad array of factors as well as their dynamic interrelationships. In this spirit, the next three chapters, closely examining the Greek December, probe at violent protest’s socioeconomic, politico-institutional, and cultural-emotional prerequisites. Our second challenge flows from the first. Even if implicitly so, the notion that violent protest is but a knee-jerk reaction to external impulses tends to be associated with the view that violent protesters are inherently impetuous and, coextensively, ‘irrational’. As we have already argued in Chapter 1, however, this is an assumption with which we strongly disagree. Violent protest does not erupt despite institutional political relations but – precisely – because of them: because of protracted inability of established political channels to process social demands (or, in the case of the institutional Left, to adequately air grievances) and the glaring democratic deficit accumulating in tandem with neoliberal socioeconomic impasses.

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Because the chapters that follow undertake analysis from different theoretical lenses, we present here a brief overview and assessment to set the context and draw connections. Although all three chapters reveal details of the temporal sequence of the December events, we begin with a concise chronology of the Greek December’s drama. In doing so, we recognize that its scope and significance must stem from deeper social forces – that the scope and intensity of the December events were driven by social currents coursing beneath them and which carried them far beyond their singular precipitant, the killing of a 15-year-old student by the police. In our view, these forces include: (1) the neoliberal policies of the recent Greek governments, which brought hardship on sizeable sectors of the population, whilst weakening meaningful representation of the traditional labour movement; (2) the hollowing out of employment prospects for the younger generation, as represented by the phrase, ‘the generation of 700 euros’, referring to the modest monthly salary university graduates expect; (3) the widespread illegitimacy of contemporary parliamentary democracy in Greece, marked by numerous political scandals and worsened by the protracted inability of the party system (or the thoroughly bureaucratized trade unions) to produce credible alternatives; and (4) a protest culture in which this erosion of state legitimacy combined with increasing – often inordinate – coercion and historical patterns of militancy to articulate a strongly transgressive collective action frame (Seferiades 2000). The past several years in Greece were characterized by regular street protests, described by Lountos’s Chapter 14 as part of economic and political claim making, most of which was met by harsh police repression. Taking these factors together – and echoing King’s/Waddington’s and Simiti’s arguments (Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 respectively), the Greek December superficially appears to follow the pattern of other well-known cases of violent collective action: the Black urban riots of the 1960s in the US, the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, and the 2008 French banlieues riots; namely, driven by fundamental structural factors that excluded large sectors of the population from meaningful political participation. On the other hand, let us repeat that, in and of themselves, such factors are not adequate explanations, nor should we allow structural similarities to conceal profound differences. Indeed, Kotronaki and Seferiades’s chapter argues that, because riotous actions diffused all over Greece and beyond (missing from the rest of the cases just mentioned), the Greek December was not a typical riot but a special contentious form they label Insurrectionary Collective Action. A Greek Tragedy Mise-en-Scène: Saturday night, 6 December 2008, in the Athens neighbourhood of Exarcheia, a section of the city known for its concentration of students, leftists, counter-cultural activities, as well as the bookstores, bars, restaurants and coffee shops in the same vein, which on the weekends draw many young visitors from

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other parts of the city. Exarcheia was a scene (see Leach and Haunss 2009: 258) in the sense that many inhabitants shared anti-establishment values and norms, and attracted many others who sought to move in that milieu. In such a neighbourhood it is not surprising that neoliberal reform deficit also obtained its corollary coercive surplus: proactive and incessant police surveillance often resembling conditions in occupied areas. That night, a group of about a dozen young men walking the streets were confronted by police – common fixtures there, especially on a Saturday night. It was not uncommon that the view of patrolling police vehicles would be met by booing and other signs of contempt. But these policemen had left their vehicle, and one of them, Epameinondas Korkoneas, fired a shot at the youths, instantly killing 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Like the assassination of Martin Luther King, or the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King, the death of Grigoropolous was the spark that ignited a cycle of violent protest in Greece that was unprecedented in scope and intensity in contemporary times. Act I: News of the killing spread rapidly by text messages, email, word of mouth and various websites, some set up for the purpose. On the one hand, it triggered numerous spontaneous street barricades and local attacks on the police, whilst buildings symbolizing the political and economic establishment were set ablaze. Several stores, bank buildings and police vehicles were completely destroyed, and many others damaged by fire and attacks. On the other, meetings were immediately organized, mainly by leftist and anarchist groups, to plan strategic responses to the killing. For days to come, this dynamic mix of protest unfolding in the streets and parallel mobilization efforts being strategized by militant political currents characterizes the overall trajectory of the December events in Athens and throughout Greece. On the night of 6 December, as news of the killing spread, it seems that the spontaneous dimension prevailed, fuelled by outrage and anger, as property damage spread from Exarcheia to other parts of Athens, and as protests erupted in other Greek cities, in Thessaloniki, Patras, Herakleion and Ioannina, among others. As Sunday morning dawned in Athens, occupations of buildings at the Polytechnic University, the Law School of Athens University (and, since 8 December, the Athens University of Economics) gained momentum, following a common repertoire of Greek student mobilizations. In these seizures, political groups of various stripes vied for leadership of the assemblies. Act II: The next day, too, anger and outrage seemed to drive many of the events. Although Sunday is typically a day of relaxation, protests developed rapidly. Thousands of protesters, including second-generation immigrants, surged into the centre of Athens. The presence of police in their usual riot regalia – helmets, shields, boots, truncheons, tear-gas masks, and guns – no doubt radicalized the protesters in the context of the previous night’s killing. Dozens of businesses, boutiques and shops were destroyed by fire in the central commercial district of

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Athens, not far from Exarcheia (Carassova 2008a: 6). A central, luxury department store was torched and looted. Symbols of the consumer society promised by neoliberal ideology came under widespread attack by predominately youthful crowds. Chants and songs made it clear that the day’s confrontations were not just about police violence but were also animated by a more general anti-government and anti-establishment frame. This, plus the intensity of the violence, pointed to deep and persistent political and economic claims among the protesting youth, and augured more to come. Act III: Monday morning. Enter the students, specifically thousands of high school students. They were brought into participation, on the one hand, by the simple fact that Monday morning starts a new week of classes, commenced by collective gatherings in the schoolyards where a critical mass for collective action was ready-made. In Athens, schools were closed, but students still gathered to chart their course of protest action. Many in the suburbs marched to key plazas or to the local police stations where they hurled rocks and insults. Others migrated to the city centre, where scattered violence occurred throughout the day. Occupations at the Law School, the Polytechnic University, and also at the Athens University of Economics thus welcomed new participants from high schools. As the movement was gaining momentum, the parliamentary left was split over ideology and tactics. Although condemning police violence and government policies, the Greek Communist Party (KKE) –a party with strong organizational resources – as well as the major trade unions remained strongly suspicious of direct action and condemned spontaneous violence as the act of agents provocateurs. The other bloc, centred mostly at the Law School and the University of Economics, occupied the radical flank and refused to express disapproval of the violence of the previous day. It was larger, more diverse and more contentious, in both its internal organization and its external strategy. It included the parliamentary SYRIZA coalition, composed of a splinter communist party and several other leftist parties, plus several other small militant-left parties, anarchists, and the Coordinating Body of School Students Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Monday’s protests culminated that evening in a big demonstration that neither party officials nor the police were able to contain. Both blocs mobilized in different locales, but the numbers soon swelled to over 10,000, according to some estimates. Participants attacked symbols of the political and economic establishment, hurled Molotov cocktails and threw rocks at store windows. Stores were looted and set on fire. Numerous vehicles were destroyed and burned. Luxury tourist hotels were attacked, looted and set aflame. A fire was set in the lobby of the Foreign Ministry, whilst clashes with the police on a radius far larger than the usual contentious repertoire continued well into the night. A spokesman for the Law School bloc observed that the violence was not only connected to the killing, ‘but is a struggle to overthrow the government’s policy. We are experiencing moments of a great social revolution’ (Carrasova 2008b: 6).

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Figure 11.1 Protest trajectory, December 5–31, 2008 Source: Papanikolopoulos 2009.

Final Scene – Dénouement: Figure 11.1 charts one estimate of the course of mobilizations during the December events throughout Greece. As can be seen, protests decreased on Tuesday 9 December, the day of Grigoropoulos’s funeral, when the police began intensifying their repressive tactics. On the next day, trade unions had planned a general strike to protest the federal budget, but it was cancelled by the General Confederation of Labor (GSEE) in the ‘interest of order’, and to ‘act responsibly’. Nevertheless, thousands of workers peacefully marched that day to protest the policies and coercive conduct of the government. Several actions of a more confrontational character carried out by far left and anarchist groups occurred on the margins of the organized demonstrations. Demonstrations also continued in other cities, most notably in Thessaloniki, Piraeus and Patras. As can be seen in Figure 11.2, protests involving property damage declined sharply during the union demonstrations, but continued to erupt in the days that followed. Thereafter, protest actions continued, with some violence, but at a diminishing rate, as student participation decreased, until just before the Christmas holidays. While property damage was extensive in the first three days of mobilization, one analysis suggests that the proportion of violent events was only 18 per cent, and if estimates of high school and university building occupations are added to the total count, the overall percentage of violent events drops even more (Papanikolopoulos 2008). Viewed from a broadly comparative perspective, injuries during the Greek December (plus Grigoropoulos’s death) pale alongside tallies from anti-regime

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Figure 11.2 Protest events with property damage, December 5–31, 2008 Source: Papanikolopoulos 2009.

protests in Syria in April 2011 (over 400 killed by security forces over a roughly similar 20-day period, Shadid 2011), or the Egyptian revolution in early 2011 (over 300 killed and hundreds tortured). Viewed in these terms, the Greek December might be more accurately described as a repertoire of targeted property damage rather than unrestrained violence. On the one hand, Greece is not an authoritarian state, and one does not expect the ruthless repression by security forces that stand above the law, as in Syria or Bahrain. On the other hand, on the side of the protestors, they did not perpetrate deadly violence of a personal nature, say, against the upper classes or corrupt politicians, or property destruction in wealthy neighbourhoods, in the same way that protesters attacked shop owners and bystanders in Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots. Seen from this perspective, the Greek December is perhaps more accurately characterized as several days of rage followed by reversion to a more familiar repertoire of limited violence (see Kannelopoulos’s Chapter 13). This leads to two questions whose apparent contradiction of each other – at least on the surface – raises interesting theoretical questions: (1) why the violent outburst at the outset; and (2) why the constraint in the long term? A Preliminary Assessment We claim that the incidence of violent protest such as that seen in the Greek December is the joint product of two sorts of deficit: a reform or democratic deficit

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propagated by contemporary neoliberal politics; and a disruptive or protest deficit on the part of major oppositional organizations (institutional trade unions and parties of the parliamentary left). Let us briefly summarize our argument. The advent of global crisis in the last decade of the twentieth century (and, much more dramatically, at the dawn of the twenty-first) has brought along falling living standards, the progressive dismantling of the welfare state (in countries where one existed) and increasing authoritarianism on the part of the state. Consensual bargaining arrangements between labour and capital were brought to an abrupt end, pulling the carpet under the feet of unions and left parties accustomed to ‘social dialogue’ and piecemeal reform. On most occasions, the latter attempted to address the problem by de-politicizing struggles and by abandoning all prospects of undertaking (or condoning) militant action in favour of a cooperative model. Even when it had become obvious that the paradise of post-war stability and normal bargaining had been lost, its apparition continued to haunt the actions of the left. In Greece, unions and left parties tried to check the movement’s traditional penchant for transgressive action, proclaiming this to be the dawn of a new era. Struggles continued to be waged, of course. But it was in the name of the old relationship, which in the case of Greece turned out to be conspicuously stillborn. For example, the Greek labour movement was granted the status of an official ‘social partner’ only in the early 1990s, especially after the introduction of Law 1876/1990 establishing free collective bargaining at the peak level. Alas, immediately afterwards, concession bargaining began (Seferiades 2000). As Kim Moody (1997: 54) put it over a decade ago, although action sometimes would push forward, the eyes of the leadership were ‘focused clearly on the past’. In the context of economic crisis and rising unemployment, however, bargaining, instead of improving, further worsened the problem of declining union credibility. The reform deficit epitomized in welfare state retrenchment was thus compounded by the protest deficit epitomized in the lukewarm response of traditional oppositions. Although the concatenation and particular dynamics of the violent outburst in Greece (and more generally) cannot be inferred solely from this amalgam of factors, we nonetheless venture to suggest that it lies at the core of the process –\whereby increasing layers of the population feel politically silenced, nonrecognized and alienated not only by the official political system but also by organizations that, built to perform ‘voicing’ demands, opt instead for inauspicious ‘loyalty’ in Hirschman’s (1970) sense. Turning to direct, often violent action to air accumulating grievances cannot be understood unless this fundamental trait of the political conjuncture is taken into serious account. What of the second query we posed: Once militant action breaks out, why should it, sooner or later, subside? Whence the restraint in the longer term? The best way to approach this question is by qualifying it. Restraint usually sets in after a while but, as the recent Arab conflagration indicates, this is not always the case. Though violent protest cycles usually subside, some may well escalate into revolutionary situations or even full-fledged revolutions (revolutionary outcomes). This, of course, is not the place to dwell on the differences between

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violent protest and revolution, but, as one of our authors has long noted, social movements, protest cycles and revolutions ‘are not different genera of social phenomena […] but neither are they simply the same phenomenon, differing only by degrees from mild to extreme’ (Goldstone 1997: 24). Having said that, however, the point remains that unless violent protest escalates it is bound to subside. The modern state’s coercive capacity is such that this is hardly a paradox. But this allows us to rephrase the original question – Why does militant and/or violent action subside? – into: What does it take for it to escalate? We pose the question in those terms obviously not in order to meaningfully discuss it, let alone fully answer it. Our goal is, rather, to orientate our thinking in one particular direction: of examining the prerequisites of significant social and political change. In this context, it is appropriate to recall some of the factors identified by Sidney Tarrow (1998: 157–8) who, summarizing a long and diverse literature, noted that a successful challenge by one previously disadvantaged actor simultaneously (1) advertises the vulnerability of authorities; (2) provides a model for effective claim making; (3) identifies possible allies for other challenges; (4) alters the existing relations of challengers and power holders to each other; and (5) thereby threatens the interests of yet other political actors who have stakes in the status quo.

Such factors are clearly not easy to come by. Moreover, for militant protest to escalate, they all need to be present. The three chapters that follow, although they are guided by and focus on developing different theoretical perspectives, hopefully set the grounds for drawing conclusions regarding which of the factors were present/absent during the Greek December and why. We will consider it a success if the analyses undertaken in the volume as a whole whet scholarly appetite for even more fine-tuned approaches towards this important phenomenon, in Greece and internationally, both theoretically and empirically.

Chapter 12

Along the Pathways of Rage: The Space-Time of an Uprising Loukia Kotronaki and Seraphim Seferiades

Considering the Greek events as an instance of contentious politics par excellence, this chapter aspires to make a contribution toward their analytical appraisal and theorization. It seems to us that existing conceptual tools, though useful for a preliminary assessment of the December eruption, are nonetheless lacking in ways that reflection on the Greek case may help highlight and remedy. The first, cardinal problem is conceptual. Outbursts such as the Greek December are typically portrayed (and subsequently discarded) as mere ‘riots’: instances of an undifferentiated violent repertoire, with all the related, crushingly negative connotations. ‘Riots’, however, are seldom defined – which precludes serious analysis and explication. Our first task, then, is semantic: to clarify the meaning of this key contentious form. Starting off from this conceptual core (What is rioting and how is it triggered?), however, we claim that the Greek events were something profoundly more intense and politically consequential: a special, hitherto theoretically underspecified form we dub Insurrectionary Collective Action (ICA). Involving far more than mere violence, we suggest that ICA is characterized by broad socio-geographic diffusion processes, whereby riots originally breaking out in one locale amongst populations that are usually segregated snowball to engulf entire regions and diverse social strata. In the case of Greece, convulsive activity erupting in the centre of Athens subsequently spread to the whole of the country and beyond, with syncretic action arising in over 50 cities in some 40 countries. In it participated a large number of underprivileged strata (school students, secondgeneration immigrants, precariously employed, etc.), whilst the political message emitted was framed in utterly uncompromising ways, making a shambles of official left rhetoric. In order to analyze the causal mechanisms through which this critical diffusion process materialized, we focus on three neglected dimensions of contentious politics: the spatial, the emotional and the temporal. Highlighting the importance of these dimensions, it is of course crucial also to consider their limits: the fact that in order to gain a full grasp of the diffusion process we also need to take into account a broad array of additional explanatory factors – most of them ‘structural’ – including the morbid crisis of neoliberal capitalism and the political system, generalized corruption, precarious work, etc. But this is as it should be. Our goal in what follows is not to discard structural variables, but to supplement them.

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Defining ‘Riots’, Debunking Insurrections According to Piven and Cloward (1992: 303), ‘a riot is clearly not an electoral rally, and both the participants and the authorities know the difference’; whilst, according to William Gamson (1990: 139), ‘rebellions are merely politics by other means’. But what are ‘riots’ and what ‘rebellions’? Are there any similarities, and what are the differences? Preliminarily defining ‘riots’ as temporally condensed, collective, public and transgressive expressions of a historic relationship of embedded violence between distinct social strata and the official agents of subordination (the coercive apparatus), we are now setting out to unpack the content of this specific contentious repertoire. One common, emblematic property of all riots – apparently at odds with the long history incubating them – is the unexpected, convulsive nature of their outburst. They appear paroxysmally as the culmination of a largely invisible trajectory, whilst their life, besides being intensely confrontational, is also typically transitory and brief. To assess this unexpected emergence, work by Benford and Hunt (1993) as well as the special synthetic interpretation of the theory of expectations advanced by Bourdieu (1972) and Snow et al. (1998) are particularly helpful. The combination of unexpectedly imposed deprivation (in the context of a correspondingly strenuous quotidien) and lack of expectations for the future seems to constitute a genuinely combustive contingency, conducive to the expression of rage and/or riotous practice. From this flows the second defining property we identify. In the background of all riots, and irrespective of their spatiotemporal particulars, one can always discern the incidence of an extraordinary, non-normalized event of coercive violence – an event un-inscribed to the social imaginary, and incompatible with the existing ‘coercive repertoire’,1 which upsets both standard conceptions of injustice as well as entrenched notions of how to cope with a ‘bleak future’. Non-normalized coercive events detonate rage, serving as par excellence catalysts of ‘cognitive liberation’ (McAdam 1999), a key process that amplifies contentiousness. But while in most forms of collective action rage typically converses with hope, in the case of riots the latter appears to be largely missing. In riots, rage itself appears to be ‘the only hope’, the only real motivation to act. Even a cursory look at the slogans of the December uprising suffices to convince us: • 15-year-old dead – and our hatred is growing: cops, swines, assassins; 1  In the case of Greece, though several instances of scantly justified, albeit extreme, coercive violence routinely take place against immigrants (at the border, in Athenian police stations, in workplaces, etc.) and demonstrators (both within and outside the protest environment), they go largely unnoticed because of their exceedingly unexceptional (routinized) character, as events fully compatible with the coercive repertoire as the latter resides in the social imaginary.

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• One thing is right – that Kougias2 ought to die ostracized; • Greece, domain of the cop – pimps, assassins, torturers. Such a combination of ‘rage without hope’, argue McAdam and Aminzade (2001: 31–2), ‘is not likely to produce coordinated collective action, but rather other (usually individual) forms of resistance and/or expressions of discontent […]’ In this light it comes as no surprise that, in the majority of cases, riots do not unfold under the tutelage of official, fully or semi-institutionalized organizations, but via the coming together of groups agreeing on the content and contentious intensity of the action in question. A third defining property of riots is, then, that the forms of coordination characterizing them are eminently spontaneous. In any case, the events comprising the active temporality (Sewell 1996) of riots are expressed through symbolically violent forms of action. Tracing the experience of the Greek December, for example, one observes extensive looting of department stores; arson and material damage against bank branches; clashes with the police and symbolic assaults on police stations. Such actions are not merely directed against institutions – especially coercive institutions – or, more generally, against agencies performing social control functions; they also signify a symbolic rupture with predominant cultural norms (consumerism, profiteering, etc.) as well as the social category epitomizing them, in the Greek case the noikokyraioi.3 Burning and Looting; Sweat, Consume, Choke – are some of the slogans one reads on the walls of bank buildings and the streets of Athens. But as we have already pointed out, although the Greek December clearly contained all the violent rituals typical of the ‘riotous repertoire’, it was not simply a riot but a distinctive form of contentious collective action we dub Insurrectionary Collective Action (ICA). Insurrectionary Collective Action (ICA) To start with, whilst riots break out locally and without any real diffusion dynamics or prospects, ICA is, first and foremost, characterized by extensive diffusion

2  Kougias, a high-profile lawyer, became the defence attorney for Korkoneas. On several occasions he made provocative remarks, including the preposterous statement that ‘whether or not the teenager had to die is a matter for the Law to decide’ (MEGA Channel, 10 December 2010). 3  Literally ‘masters of households’, a term denoting lawful and morally conservative petty bourgeois strata, noikokyraioi have been politically relevant in Greece at least since the interwar years (see, especially, Mavrogordatos 1983: 136–41 and passim) with varying connotations depending on the actor utilizing it: it has been positive for conservatives, anathema for radicals. During the Greek December, the noikokyraioi persistently demanded the immediate re-imposition of ‘law and order’ and also got involved in counter-insurgency action.

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processes. In the case of the Greek December, riotous action spread to engulf the whole of the country and beyond. It must be stressed that this diffusion was both • geographic – syncretic action breaking out in over 50 cities in some 40 countries; and • social – with riotous practice spreading amongst previously inactive and/ or latent social strata (school students, second generation immigrants and precarious workers). Moreover, ICA is characterized by • the combination of riotous contentiousness with non-violent –albeit transgressively disruptive4 – protest forms largely absent from riots: in the case of the Greek December, this involved occupations of municipal buildings, radio stations and university faculties – all occurring daily at the initiative not only of the aforementioned, previously uncharted and resource-poor actors, but also of established organizations. The fact that collective action was set in motion as a result of the encounter between ad-hoc collectives and established organizations temporarily relaxing (if not liquidating) their identity boundaries in order to serve as fomenters of the spontaneous (Kotronaki 2009) caused a profound • polarization within the political system – whereas in riots most established political actors (including the parties of the Left) are uniformly dismissive or simply inattentive, in ICA important established actors intervene to provide certification.5 Protracted failure to discern what is particular about ICA (i.e. socio-geographic diffusion, the combination of violent and non-violent repertoires; and polarization as a result of the intervention of established organizations) has caused scholars to unduly subsume it under riots –an inauspicious theoretical lacuna preventing meaningful analysis and explication. Having so far conceptualized ICA as a contentious phenomenon, we now turn to explication. We claim that ICA’s constitutive characteristics cannot be fully comprehended unless we take into serious account the three aforementioned – largely neglected – dimensions of contentious politics: the spatial, the emotional and the temporal.

4  On the notion of ‘transgressive contention’, see McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly (2001). 5  It merits attention, however, that even those parties of the Left that abstained from morally stigmatizing the action, eventually sough to instrumentalize the insurrectionary cry it contained and domesticate it to their existing political programmes.

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The Spatial Prerequisites of the Explosion Despite the work of scholars such as Lefebre (1973), Castells (1983), Harvey (1985) and, more recently, William Sewell (2001), Martin/Miller (2003) and Ó Dochartaigh/Bosi (2010), rarely do we appreciate the key role space plays in contentious politics – especially in such dense conjunctures as ICA. Because space is such a ubiquitous cognitive and behavioural dimension, it constitutes a critical resource both for transgressive mobilization and for the ‘maintenance of order’ (Sack 1986). It comes as no surprise that it typically becomes a central – though often implicit – bone of contention. For insurgents, the stakes include the active construction of milieus, permitting the strategic concentration and coordination of forces, facilitating WUNC displays (Tilly 2004) and fomenting insurgent confidence as well as the kind of collective effervescence required for the undertaking of militant (hence risky) collective action. Often engraved with the history of past transformative experiences, and providing safe spaces for recruitment and political energy-replenishment free of police surveillance, such milieus facilitate communication between individuals and groups by compressing time-distance (mouth-to-mouth and door-to-door communication by de facto ‘political couriers’ supplementing mere electronic paging is technically feasible). This thickens insurgent group interaction and concretizes the moral imperatives of collective action in the background of burgeoning solidarity (again running counter to latent fear in the face of repression). The intensity of these experiences contributes to the – more long-term – emergence of protest cultures of resistance. If sufficiently robust, and assisted by spatial proximity to the centres of power (the House of Parliament, Ministries, etc.), such cultural locales may function as a lever for spatial scale shifts, a process whereby protest initially undertaken within one specific locale may snowball to engulf the city as a whole, the entire country, or even spread internationally. It is important to stress, however, that space is not an ‘independent variable’ – a ‘mere structure’ independent of human agency. Space is eminently ‘constructed’ (and subsequently ‘imagined’) by deliberate political work undertaken both before and during the time of the insurrectionary eruption. Before space can serve as a resource, insurgents have to actively invest it with cognate meaning, wresting it from rival representations and framings (e.g., insurgent locales as ‘bastions of resistance’ vs ‘areas of anomie’). As Dochartaigh/Bosi (2010: 409) put it (citing the work of Paasi 2003), space or – in their use – territories ‘are not frozen frameworks […] Rather, they are made, given meanings, and destroyed in social and individual action. Hence, they are typically contested and actively negotiated’. But this is not all. Spatial agency also involves the establishment of spatial routines, however informal: hanging out in special pubs after political branch meetings, frequenting specific areas for casual political debate, attending film screenings and related artistic events, and so on. It is such spatially determined routines that house and nurture the intense political interaction upon which a

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protest culture is premised. All things considered, space may well turn out to be the catalyst allowing the insurrectionary dynamic to take off; the resource which, though itself shaped by previous political and cultural activity, critically implements and amplifies its impact. Nearly all of those features are applicable in the case of Exarcheia, the area in the centre of Athens spearheading the uprising. Historically politicized as an ‘oppositional territoriality’ (Ó Dochartaigh/Bosi 2010: 410) and adjacent to four historic university buildings (the Polytechnic School, the Law School, the School of Economics and the Chemistry Faculty), it is home to a large number of radical groups as well as unconventional artistic creation and lifestyles (Iakovidou, Kanellopoulos and Kotronaki 2011). In this context, it is not surprising that wars of signification regarding the nature of the ‘Exarcheia identity’ have been going on for quite some time. Though safe as few other areas in Athens, Exarcheia is casually referred to by the official media as an ‘independent state’ and an ‘anarchobandits’ grotto’, and has been the target of proactive police surveillance of an intensity often resembling conditions in occupied areas (especially after the 2004 Olympic Games and the 2006 student outburst). The assassination of the teenager became the straw breaking the camel’s back in the background of this accumulated experience of coercion. But the Exarcheia contentious culture does not emerge only reactively, as mere opposition to police brutality. The (co-)existence of such a large number of leftist political groups and activist networks creates a spatial sociopolitical élan that keeps alive the vision of instigating radical political projects as well as alternative ways of organizing day-to-day life. The spatial identity that develops is akin to the dimension of class formation that Katznelson (1986: 17–9) dubbed ‘shared dispositions’: ‘cognitive constructs [that map] the terrain of lived experience and define the boundaries between the probable and improbable’ (p. 17). In the case of Exarcheia this has taken the form of joint action against police presence, the functioning of informal citizens’ assemblies and, of course, daily politicoideological and social fermentation. This positive spatial identity erupted with the news of the shooting, forming a robust political and moral front of rage, radiating and spreading. According to the theory of diffusion (McAdam and Rucht 1993; Strang and Meyer 1993; Hedström 1994; Hedström et al. 2000; Myers 2000; Rogers 2003; Oliver and Meyers 2003; Vasi and Strang 2009; Vasi 2011) the transmission of a political message is a function of the likelihood that the transmitter and the receiver establish a contact. Though obviously critical, this dimension tends to underestimate the robustness of the message transmitted. On all pertinent counts (degree of information, overall predispositions and behavioural patterns) the strength of the message emitted from Exarcheia on the night of 6 December served as a catalyst for everything that ensued. The strength of the signal, however, becomes analytically relevant only to the extent that the receiving end is receptive – which leads us to the examination of the urban make-up of metropolitan Athens. Highlighting the key role of urban

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geography is not, of course, novel. Building upon the pioneering work of scholars such as Lefebre (1973) and Castells (1983), Roger Gould (1995) showed how urban restructuring in nineteenth-century Paris created the conditions for the emergence of an altogether new, eminently spatial contentious identity in 1871 that was missing in the 1848 upheaval. How about Athens? Without resembling the inner-city model (of heavy low-income concentrations), the centre of Athens is, nevertheless, devoid of upper-middle-class residential areas, includes (as seen) several university buildings and maintains intact all the spatial memories of a long and intense contentious tradition (Seferiades 2007). It is thus an explosive mix of high politicization and declining living standards. Parts of it are inhabited by new immigrant populations, in conditions of utter destitution – in sharp contrast to the adjacent commercial centre. The political message broadcast from Exarcheia, then, found ideal conditions to diffuse throughout the immediate central area – which in a different urban environment would have been absent. Of course, the December eruption was not purely an event of the Athenian centre, whilst other riotous convulsions provoked by police brutality in the past (e.g., the riots that broke out in Exarcheia after the assassination of another 15-year-old, Michalis Kaltezas, in 1985) did not lead to ICA. A full understanding of this critical process thus requires the simultaneous examination of other causal factors such as the emotional effects engendered by the occurrence of a nonnormalized coercive event as well as the contentious performances it provoked. The Emotional Dimension The literature has established that, under specific conditions, contentious collective action emerging in a specific locale may set off parallel contentious dynamics.6 We claim that to fully understand the ways in which contentiousness was transmitted in the Greek case, it is necessary to highlight both the emotional energy unleashed by the news of the shooting of an ‘innocent’ youth (a teenage school student of Greek nationality without any sort of contentious involvement at the time of his assassination) in the centre of Athens, as well as the communicative dynamic the contentious performances represent. The news of the shooting spread fast, both indirectly, through the media (mainstream and alternative), as well directly, through mouth-to-mouth communication, within Exarcheia. The fact that, in that particular neighbourhood, there exists an emotional code for interpreting and devising ways of resisting coercion (developed over years of having to cope with police brutality) constitutes a first explanatory factor for the immediate outburst of contentious action. The 6  For an extensive discussion of the robust process of the quantitative and qualitative transformation of coordinated collective action, see Tarrow and McAdam (2005) and McAdam (2003).

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critical process of legitimizing and calling into action – what in the literature is termed ‘the attribution of meaning’ (in our case, threat – Goldstone and Tilly 2001) – took place not as a result of the activation of resource-rich organizations, but, rather, because of the emotional and identity toolkit of a specific political geography in Exarcheia, where a collective ‘we vs them’ boundary existed, involving, among other things, the polarity of freedom vs coercion. The identity of these fomenters of the spontaneous is indicative: libertarian networks of the far left, anarchist groups, student coordinating committees, second-generation immigrants, organizations of the non-parliamentary Left. It merits attention that the adversarial construction of the contentious ‘we’ (vis-à-vis the police) was evident not only in the discourse of anarchist and far left materials but also in immigrant statements. We cite from an announcement made by the Centre of Albanian Immigrants: Now is the time for the streets to speak out. The cry heard is for the 18 years of violence, repression, exploitation, humiliation […] for the hundreds of immigrants, refugees murdered at the border, in police precincts, in workplaces. These days are also our days […]. (http://steki-am.blogspot.com/2008/12/blogpost.html – posted on 15 December 2008, 5.31 pm)

In contrast, the Communist Party – a political apparatus with an abundance of organizational resources – not only abstained from the original insurrectionary mobilizations, but, even after they had become socio-spatially diffuse, argued that ‘the uprising [was] the work of agents provocateurs manipulated by obscure powers’ (Rizospastis, 8 January 2009). Beyond the available interpretative schemata, however, it is important to stress the existence of solidarity bonds connecting the contentious actors. In their absence, the news of the shooting might have easily led, instead of the outburst of insurrectionary action, to paralysis. Pre-existing solidarity links and informal personal networks amongst anarchist groups and constellations of the far and libertarian left constitute, then, a critical factor for explaining mass participation, at least in the initial phases of the insurrectionary eruption. Equally important, however, have been links between such Exarcheia-based actors and forces of the parliamentary Left (in particular, the SYRIZA coalition of the radical Left) which acted as a dynamic, albeit conjunctural transmission belt of information and of calls for militant action. This initial certification (Tarrow and Tilly 2006) of the public expression of rage by a force of the parliamentary Left served as a catalyst, if not for the diffusion, then certainly for the supra-local legitimization of insurrectionary action. Solidarity bonds built in the course of previous mobilization cycles (especially the student protests of 2006) also help explain the crucial process of coordination. The coordinating committees of the occupied Law School, the Polytechnic and the School of Economics as well as impromptu deliberative bodies became themselves

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parallel contentious sites, setting in motion a dynamic process of devising new contentious events. But solidarity bonds and parallel contentious trajectories do not suffice to explain the socio-geographic breadth of the insurrectionary propensity unless we take into account two further factors – both emotional par excellence: (a) the moral shock caused by the shooting;7 and (b) the emotional and communicative role that contentious performances played in the process of identity amplification (Snow and McAdam 2000). The unexpected, non-normalized character of the shooting was immediately perceived as a supreme offence. The dramatis personae of the incident are here critical. To start with, a Greek school student, shot dead without rhyme or reason by a riot policeman, was someone with whom both members of the same sociodemographic category (students and parents) as well as sections of the population systematically suffering the consequences of generalized injustice in the form of state coercion (especially immigrants and the ‘usual contentious subjects’) could readily identify. Equally important was that the emergent injustice frame did not concern some abstract category (e.g., neoliberalism), but a specific moral and physical perpetrator (i.e., riot policeman Korkoneas), which served as a lever for the mobilization of rage, at least at the early stages of the eruption. The matrix of potential identifications with contentious activity spread pari passu with the conditions underlying the injustice frame. That the shooting took place in an environment of grim prospects for the future, in a historical and institutional conjuncture of crisis and de-legitimation of core political personnel (involved in an endless stream of scandals), and political authoritarianism, favoured the articulation of scattered dissatisfaction into an alternative model of conducting politics: Insurrectionary Collective Action. The breadth and social heterogeneity of the social actors favouring contentious activity was, to a large extent, owing to the diffusion of the view that insurrectionary action was both just and legitimate. Of course, the diffusion of this belief did not happen automatically. The trajectory and dynamic of the protest would have been different had the emotional action sustaining it taken on different forms. Approaching contentious performances (Tilly 2008), as means for the dramatization of an extant injustice we claim that, in the circumstances, they: • brought to the fore and intensified the clash with official agents dictating the terms of the ‘social contract’ as well as predominant organizing principles of mainstream, everyday life (the banking system, the police, political elites, bureaucratized trade unionism); 7  According to Jasper/Poulsen (1995) and Jasper (1998) a moral shock occurs when an unexpected event or piece of information produces a collective feeling of outrage so intense that it subsequently serves as a catalyst for the undertaking of collective action, under certain conditions also amongst inactive or politically inexperienced layers of the population.

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• attracted the attention of the mass media accustomed to conventional protest routines; • introduced new ways for conducting contentious collective action – especially crucial at a time when whole layers of the population are being excluded from institutional protest routines, or when the institutional protest routines exclude contentious action; and • enhanced the identity rift ‘we vs them’. Unless we take into account all of these crucial dimensions of contentious performances, it will be impossible to understand how, two short days after the shooting, school students all over Greece, without any previous contentious experience, began throwing rocks at police stations, the media alerting that the whole of Greece had been turned into a huge domain of riotous Exarcheia ‘balaclava bearers’.8 It will be equally impossible to understand how and why all insurrectionary repertoires of collective action historically have been, and will continue to be, proto-political repertoires (Kotronaki 2009); that is, archetypical means for the imperative negotiation, in the ‘here and now’ time, of non-negotiable proto-demands, such as the hope for life. But the character, the rhythm and the dynamic of contentious phenomena are also a function of their timing. The Temporal Dimension Things would have developed differently had their temporal concatenation differed. As Myers and Oliver (1998: 1) have pointed out, ‘one action changes the likelihood of subsequent actions’. In this context the concept of a critical event (or critical juncture) becomes particularly relevant (Collier and Collier 1991; Sewell 1996). One fine description deserving to be quoted at length belongs to McAdam and Sewell (2001: 102, 106): The [critical or transformative] event […] is punctual and discontinuous rather than cyclical, linear or continuous. The precise sequencing of actions over the course of a few hours or days and the particular contingencies faced by actors at particular times may have structuring effects over a very long run [… T]hese 8  Balaclavas, gear covering the whole of the head except for only part of the face, have been in use by movement militants since the early 1960s. In its current form, balaclava use has become widespread in the context of the anti-globalization movement and the transnational diffusion of its disruptive practices. Militant demonstrators (especially anarchist) use them when clashing with the police or assault symbolic targets (e.g., banks, government buildings, multinational firms) to protect themselves from tear gas and avoid recognition from CCTV surveillance cameras. ‘Exarcheia balaclava bearers’ [koukouloforoi ton Exarcheion] has become a derogatory media catchphrase.

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[are] moments of concentrated transformation, when dramatic confrontations and feverish activity definitely change the course of [a] movement’s history […] Of course, most [critical] events do not establish hitherto unimagined categories of political action. But it is true that the course of contention never runs smooth and that the bumps and turns in the road tend to occur in concentrated temporal bursts.

Spawning powerful legacies and enduring effects, including new templates for interpreting reality, transformative events ‘come to be interpreted as significantly disrupting, altering, or violating the taken-for-granted assumptions governing routine political and social relations (ibid.: 110 – emphasis in the original). In that sense they help insurgents (or potential insurgents) attribute opportunities to otherwise opaque environmental situations by distilling and expressing ‘the potential for insurgent action inherent in a particular environment’. Once again, however, this presupposes political work, what may be construed as temporal agency: interpretative ascriptions endowing an occurrence with meanings motivating and/or precipitating collective action. As McAdam and Sewell (2001: 112) explain, ‘It is not the event itself, but the importance that comes to be assigned to it in the immediate aftermath of the event that determines its transformative potential.’ We approach the Greek uprising from two complementary angles. The first is an effort to reconstruct insurrectionary diffusion’s path dependency during the first critical hours and days after the shooting and – secondarily – point out the factors that led to its eventual implosion. The second angle is more macroscopic – wondering whether or not December can function as a transformative event in the flow of Greek contentious politics. The critical events The first, evidently catalytic contingency was, of course, the cold-blooded assassination of Alexandros Grigoropoulos on the night of 6 December. But equally crucial for explaining contentious diffusion has been the rapidity of the response to the news of the shooting. Just hours after the news of the event, direct, transgressive action broke out forcefully and unconditionally: rallies, marches, occupations of public buildings, clashes with the police. It is worth stressing that things would not have developed the way they did had the response to the shooting not been so militant and immediate. The political networks-transmission belts of the insurrectionary drive (what we previously called the ‘fomenters of the spontaneous’) also remained active on Sunday 7 December. During the militant march organized on the afternoon of that day via personal contacts and electronic communication three critical events took place, which, at the moment of their occurrence, contributed – each one in its own way – to insurrectionary diffusion.

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The first was the initially contradictory conduct of the police – at first a discreet presence, but tons of tear gas later on – which, by betraying strategic bewilderment on the part of the coercive apparatus tended to be interpreted as a peculiar political opportunity whilst also accentuating the protesters’ rage. The second was the gradual mobilization of second-generation immigrants – an event of momentous symbolic significance, demonstrating the contentious potential of this enraged human reservoir. The third factor contributing to diffusion was the quasi-modular eruption of similarly contentious collective action in a large number of Greek cities. The feedback of the sense that the insurrection was being generalized constituted, at the time, a key diffusing factor. On all counts, Monday 8 December represents the apex of the diffusion process. Extremely important in that context was the spontaneous entry in the protest, from early on in the morning, of the school students. The massive character and moral projection of their participation concretized the general feeling of rage, giving to their actions the hue of a categorical imperative. But the climax of this momentous day was undoubtedly the afternoon march, marked by the astounding outburst of accumulated anger on the part of the protesters: burning and looting of department stores; raids on public buildings (until early in the morning of the following day and on a radius far larger than the usual contentious itinerary); prolonged clashes with police. Other than demonstrating the protesters’ rage, however, Monday’s contentiousness also revealed the inability of the radical and far Left to play a decisive role in the flow of events. The political message its agents emitted, though on occasion far-reaching and uncompromising, ultimately failed to express the insurrectionary mood, or to transform rage into viable political hope – at least in the short term. This state of affairs led to a generalized feeling of ‘surpassing the vanguards’, which, in the circumstances, affected the diffusion process in a contradictory manner. Whilst in the first instance, and for the most militant protesters, it propagated a triumphant mood of ‘prevailing over the bureaucrats’ of the institutionalized opposition (thereby accelerating diffusion), in a second instance it started raising questions about the overall nature and strategic orientation of the political project the uprising was de facto articulating. On Tuesday 9 December (the day of the Grigoropoulos funeral) and Wednesday 10 December (the day of a scheduled general strike), this political questioning intensified without it, however, being enough to arrest diffusion. In the circumstances, the process was punctuated by two further critical events. The first was the progressive hardening of police conduct (shortly after the funeral more than ten ‘deterrent’ shots were fired) and the appearance of the first ‘vigilante citizens’ (mainly recruited from the noikokyrairoi pool, mainly in provincial towns and mainly against immigrants). The second consisted in the non-expansion of the insurrectionary activity in the workplaces. Pivotal here was the role played by the General Confederation of Labour (GSEE), which, in a letter addressed to the Prime Minister, rushed to pronounce its loyalty to ‘order’ (‘the always incontestably […] peaceful conduct of the forces of labour’) and cancelled its traditional march to the

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parliament. Thoroughly bureaucratized GSEE’s conduct may have not affected the insurrectionary subjects, but it obviously cast a heavy shadow on all by-standing labouring strata. In the period between Thursday 11 and Saturday 13 December, diffusion started to run out of steam. Although contentious events continued to break out, it was clear that, if it had not already started to implode, the insurrectionary mood of the previous days was being simply kept at a standstill. We suggest that the key critical event here was the progressive exhaustion of unmediated rage as a sufficient political motive for the escalation of militant collective action. This contingency was also to be the root cause of insurrectionary diffusion’s gradual reversal. Indicative of the overall militancy of the conjuncture, however, is that collective action remained militant and imaginative even during the following few days, until 17–18 December, when the students began withdrawing and the uprising started ebbing: occupations of radio and television stations, disruptions of theatrical and musical events, dynamic action in underground train stations, protest in archaeological sites, and so on. This leads us to our second angle, examining the uprising’s legacy. December as a critical juncture Is it possible that December may function as a transformative catalyst of contentious politics in Greece? Posing this question, our goal is obviously not futurology. But we are still justified to wonder about the prerequisites of an answer. In this context we stress the emergence of a new contentious élan on a variety of occasions, such as the occupation of the headquarters of the underground train after a mafia-style attack against the secretary of the cleaners’ union Konstantina Kouneva (an immigrant worker) and the emergence of a new militant unionism (especially amongst the casually employed). Whether or not actions such as these will turn out to be a harbinger of things to come is a function of the way in which December’s memory is going to be ‘constructed’ in the collective imaginary – and here the role of deliberate political interpretation will obviously play a pivotal role. Once again, this will be a battle of significations where protagonists will be the state, traditional/think-tank intelligentsia, the media and institutional political agents on the one hand and contentious networks and radical political groups on the other. The balance of forces is obviously in favour of the former, but this was also the case back in December 2008, without this sufficing to avert the uprising and the diffusion characterizing ICA. Two critical conclusions flow from this observation. The first testifies to the disproportionately influential role that the political message of the militant, transgressive networks may come to play; and the second to the continually huge relevance of contingency: events of extraordinary emotive projections – very likely in conditions of prolonged and deepening crisis – may definitely come to spearhead unexpected eruptions indeed. In conclusion, however, it is also important to stress the pristinely obvious: that

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the official – yet deficient and disdained – political system tends to demonize the Greek December may turn out to be Insurrectionary Collective Action’s biggest source of legitimation. The way contentious collective actors construct their ontological narratives is often unforeseeable.

Chapter 13

The Accidental Eruption of an Anarchist Protest Kostas Kanellopoulos

There are three different but complementary contextual dimensions of the Greek protests of December 2008. The first is international, and involves the international press coverage of those events, as well as the actions of solidarity that erupted in various cities across the globe. The second dimension, the national one, concerns the various narratives produced in Greece by institutional observers and the mainstream media. The third and apparently least-known dimension is local and interpretative. By this, I refer to the perspectives of the protagonists, those involved in violent acts, and especially the anarchist groups of the Exarcheia neighbourhood of Athens. While these three levels differ in terms of importance and form, each had a catalytic effect on the others, both as events developed on the ground and, afterwards, as they were analyzed by the media, political actors and academic observers. Although the intersection of these three dimensions led many observers to characterize the events of December 2008 as a ‘social rebellion’ against the state, this chapter argues that they are best conceptualized as ‘urban riots’. Such a perspective helps explain much about hidden aspects of the violence, which I will discuss in the body of this chapter, as well as the confused reactions to it by institutional actors of state, party, media and intelligentsia. The fall of 2008 ushered in the worst economic crisis since 1929. Although the mortgage credit meltdown of August 2007 should have made the economic collapse predictable, the world’s economic leaders seemed to do nothing to prevent it from happening (see Blackburn 2008; Balakrishnan 2009; Gowan 2009; Foster and Magdoff 2009; Krugman 2009; Panitch and Konings 2009; Wade 2009; and Harvey 2010). The media bombarded audiences with predictions of imminent bankruptcies, mass redundancies, and deep and lasting global recession. Comparisons with the 1930s crisis and its aftermath were common, with European public opinion showing signs of concern, insecurity and fear. Under these circumstances, media seized upon the unrest in Greece – a developed, eurozone economy – to portray visions of the future awaiting other developed countries. In France, for instance, a survey showed that 72 per cent of the public feared a Greek-type rebellion in their own country (Feloukantzi 2008). It was clear that the riots in the centre of Athens and other Greek cities targeted the state, democratic institutions and the capitalist system itself. They made front-page international news for a whole week, and suggested further unrest throughout Europe. At the

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international level, the ‘social rebellion’ interpretation of the Greek December seemed entirely plausible. At the national level, the Greek electorate in late 2008 seemed widely distrustful of its government. The conservative party of New Democracy (ND) was, for the first time in eight years, behind in the polls.1 At the same time, news about the international economic crisis increased anxiety and fear about the future of the vulnerable Greek economy.2 Although the government announced that it would handle the crisis responsibly, offering a generous rescue package for the banks and guaranteeing bank deposits, a political scandal erupted to severely undermine public confidence. The Vatopedi Monastery scandal – as it was called – revealed that some of the prime minister’s closest associates and cabinet members were involved in questionable land deals in which the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Vatopedi exchanged land for extremely valuable state-owned maritime property, which was then sold for huge profits. When the scandal broke, the government denied involvement, but everyone knew that ND’s rise to power was helped by the active support of the traditionally conservative Greek Orthodox Church. Media pressure and a judicial investigation later forced government to admit involvement of some officials. In a calculated political move, the Greek Prime Minister assumed ‘full responsibility’ for the scandal and gave immunity to those involved. He did not resign; nor did his governmental majority permit a parliamentary investigation of the case. This move occurred just a few days before the tragic events of December. While most Greeks felt disdain and anger towards the government, the Vatopedi scandal did not singularly transform the political climate against the ND, but was just the latest instalment in a record of venality, consecutive scandals and enormous growth of clientalistic practices. This was despite the fact that ND’s rise to power was based on promises to fight the widespread corruption of the previous PASOK administration. The combination of the economic crisis, broken promises and ineffective administration turned the public against the government and further set the stage for the ‘social rebellion’ interpretation of the December events. Finally, at the level of local contention, mobilization varied by social movement sector. Following the huge demonstrations of 2006 and 2007 against educational reform, student protests had quieted. In the labour sector, the official confederation announced its routine annual strike against the state budget for 10 December. Among anarchist groups, however, mobilization was increasing. Almost daily, they engaged in small scuffles with the police. The vast majority

1  ND was leading the polls since 2000 and had won the national elections of 2004 and 2007. ND retained the advantage in the polls against its main rival, the centre-left party of PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement), until the beginning of autumn 2008. 2  It is worth noting that in spring 2010 the Greek economy finally came under the surveillance of the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission.

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of these episodes were happening in or around the neighbourhood of Exarcheia in the centre of Athens. Exarcheia is a neighbourhood inhabited by students, intellectuals and radicals. Historically it has been the epicentre of numerous left-wing movements. The area is full of small bookstores, printing offices, restaurants, coffee shops, bars and art galleries, along with offices of political parties, members of parliament, small leftist groups and NGOs. There are also several autonomous spaces of movement and anarchist groups. In short, Exarcheia is both an area for entertainment and nightlife – frequented by many Athenians – but also carries vivid political symbolism. If visitors and inhabitants are not directly involved in the area’s politics, most are at least aware of this contentious symbolism (Iakovidou, Kanellopoulos and Kotronaki 2010: 145). Especially after the colonels’ dictatorship of 1967–1974, the area has also been linked to anarchist groups, frequently clashing with the police. Tension increased with the general hysteria over terrorism since 9/11, when heavily armed police forces were moved into the area. The anarchists reacted to this police presence with rage, often attacking patrolling police vans on Saturday nights with Molotov cocktails, oranges, empty beer cans and stones (Iakovidou et al. 2010: 146). Authorities and the mainstream media characterized Exarcheia as a notorious ghetto of extremists. This tension was largely shaped by the spatial dimensions of the neighbourhood and the struggle for its control (Tilly 2000; Sewell 2001; Martin and Miller 2003). It is striking that the inhabitants of Exarcheia and those who went there for fun were mostly unaffected by the overall situation. The Dynamics of the Conflict On Saturday night, 6 December 2008, a police car passed through Exarcheia. Some youths threatened to attack the vehicle, and the policemen ignored orders to return to their base. Instead, they parked and went on foot to patrol the area, where they encountered another group of young people. One policeman shot at them, instantly killing a 15-year-old student. The possibility of injury in these night-time attacks was, of course, always there, but nobody really believed it would ever happen (Marnellos 2008). In a matter of minutes, this assassination of an unarmed youngster by a police officer triggered a full-force attack on the police by the inhabitants of Exarcheia, building barricades, setting fires, and setting buildings alight. Countless emails and text messages transmitted the news of the unfolding events. Some Exarcheia activist groups, mainly of anarchists and leftists, held unscheduled assemblies to evaluate the situation and strategize further action. That same night clashes with the police occurred in Thessaloniki, Patras, Herakleion, Chania, Ioannina, Alexandroupolis, Mitilene, Agrinio and Xanthi. In Athens alone, eight shops, seven banks and 20 vehicles (six police cars) were totally burned; another 23 shops, two banks and five vehicles suffered smaller damage. Six people

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were arrested for looting, one for carrying a gun, and 24 policemen were injured. In other Greek cities, damage was somewhat less pronounced (Morou 2008). Although in Greece Sunday is traditionally a day without demonstrations, a march to the Athens police headquarters was called. A large crowd of anarchists and leftists, young and old, first-time and veteran activists appeared. Given the violent clashes of the previous night and the informal character of the march, it is plausible that most participants anticipated that violence would occur. And indeed, from the outset, the march turned into a riot. By the end of the day, the shops and cars parked along a major avenue in the city centre were destroyed. Violent clashes between activists and the police continued all night long, especially around university buildings (the Polytechnic School, the School of Economics, and the Law School), which had been occupied by students. Demonstrations and violent clashes with the police also took place in Thessaloniki, Herakleion, Chania, Ioannina, Mytilene and Patras, all cities with campuses and large student populations. Monday morning was the turn of high-school students to make their appearance. The students identified with the victim – ‘their schoolmate’ – and wanted to express their anger. High-school student protests unfolded simultaneously all over the country, even in towns that had never experienced demonstrations before. The students occupied their schools, or abstained from their classes, marched and blocked the traffic in city centres, and rallied outside the local police stations. In many cases, they attacked with oranges, stones and empty bottles (Elefterotypia 2008a). On Monday evening the political parties of the left called for a central demonstration in Athens. The participation in that demonstration was even bigger than that of the previous day, the violent clashes between protestors and the police were more intense, and the burning and looting even more widespread. Hundreds of shops, public buildings and banks in the city centre were destroyed and looted. The majority of the protestors were peaceful – especially those belonging to political organizations – but several thousands of others were not. The violent protestors were not only experienced anarchists who were accustomed to this kind of action, many were young students and immigrants. A shop owner who witnessed the events aptly describes: We lived four waves. The first with the protestors, peaceful, then came the wild ones to break specific targets for example banks and offices of multinational corporations. The third wave was breaking everything without discrimination. And the fourth looted from the smashed shops. And there were not only immigrants participating in the looting, I have to mention. There were people you can’t imagine. (Charalampous 2008: 46)

That evening the police made 70 arrests but it was apparent that they could not fully control the situation since nobody in the police headquarters expected that the violent episodes would continue for three days. The interior minister, afraid

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that a second death would further destroy the government’s image, ordered police restraint (Elefterotypia 2008b). The following day, the prime minister – in an attempt to resolve the situation – met with the political leaders of the other parliamentary parties. The political leaders condemned the violence – with different tones and intensity – and asked for a resolution to call elections (Korai 2008). The demonstrations and violence continued almost daily for two more weeks, but never reached the severity of the first three days. Participation decreased, and policing intensified, gradually containing protests in Athens and Thessaloniki. Actions by the most militant students stopped by the start of the Christmas vacation. During this time, some armed extreme-left groups, of which a few still survive in Greece, made an appearance (Kavoulakos 2009). One group fired on a police squad, severely wounding one policeman, to avenge the killing of the young student. As the New Year began, the occupations of the university buildings gradually stopped, and the policing of protest intensified even more. The short protest wave of December 2008 ended as suddenly as it had started. Activist Networks and Organizations During the first three days, nobody expected that so many people would react so violently and turn the protests into riots. Many veteran activists from the left and the anarchist community were mobilized, but the key difference was the spontaneous participation of high-school students, immigrants and the small-time outlaws of the city centres. The first attempts to coordinate the actions were made by the anarchists. Various groups and independent activists occupied the buildings of the Polytechnic and the School of Economics. At these occupations and especially at the Polytechnic, many people participated who did not belong to the anarchist community or to any other political group. The assembly of the Polytechnic occupation functioned with great difficulty because of the heterogeneity of the participants and, as a result, some anarchist groups left and occupied the School of Economics. At the same time several leftist groups occupied the Law School building, also very close to Exarcheia, to create their own centre of coordination. There were two assemblies there, one of university students and one of workers. In reality both assemblies had the same origins and goals, since the ‘workers’ assembly was formed mainly of former students who were now working or who had kept their leftist political commitments. The geography of these extra-parliamentary leftist political groups in Greece is rather chaotic and the details are secondary to this analysis. Most of them are splinters from other groups with ideological differences that would be arcane and obscure to the external observer. What they have in common is miniscule membership, a shared recruitment pool of university students, and militancy: despite their small size these groups had leading roles in almost all the social movements that emerged after the transition to democracy in 1974.

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Also important was the role of the parliamentary parties of the left. The traditional Communist Party (KKE) and SYRIZA, a coalition of the old eurocommunist party (that emerged from a break up of KKE in 1968) with some small leftist groups, are both parliamentary parties that sometimes operate as SMOs. In the December 2008 events both parties condemned police brutality, but mobilized very differently. KKE is by far the largest leftist party and has strong ties to the Greek working class. It restricted its supporters to its own demonstrations that were organized separately at a safe distance from the places where violence would break out. In addition, the party strongly condemned all violent episodes as the work of agents provocateurs ‘objectively opposed to the popular movement’ (KNE 2008). Highschool students who were KKE members participated in a party-controlled student coordinating initiative that was formed during a previous protest cycle. KKE university students, finally, tried to channel the participation of other students to party-organized actions and away from those called by the Law School assemblies. SYRIZA supporters, on the other hand, participated in the events with the main body of protestors without discriminating or condemning anyone (Simos 2009). Referring to SYRIZA’s participation, a leader of the main coalition stated, ‘[It] does not adopt violent practices, but it is a part of this spontaneous rebellion which demands dignity and the right to life’ (Synaspismos 2008). High-school students close to SYRIZA formed their own coordinating initiative named ‘Alexandros Grigoropoulos’, after the name of the murdered student, and followed the Law School assemblies. The same happened with the university students belonging to the SYRIZA coalition. Framing the Events Due to the great impact of the December events on Greek public opinion, almost all the involved actors tried to frame the events according to their interests. The position of the ruling ND party was ambivalent. At the beginning, it condemned the action of the police officer, offered its condolences to the family of the victim, and supported the decision to passively police the riots in order to avoid more deaths. But after a while the government’s stance towards the events changed. Responding to calls for law and order from LAOS (a recent extreme-right splinter from ND) and from the opposition party PASOK, the government hardened police repression, supported the theory that the killing was an accident, and accused SYRIZA of initiating the riots to destabilize the government. The opposition party of PASOK used the events to attack the government, focusing mainly on its inability to secure public order and manage the police. The party leader called for a ‘peaceful protest against violence, a protest without violence’ in every municipality of the country, in which he and other party officials participated (PASOK 2008). PASOK blamed the government for the unrest and demanded its resignation. While the official PASOK party organization by no

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means participated in the mobilizations, a significant pa of its electoral base was friendly to those who did. According to surveys conducted at that time, PASOK voters were closer to the voters of the left parties that supported the mobilizations than to those of ND, which clearly opposed them.3 Regarding the collective action frames of the protagonists, the anarchists attacked private property, consumerism, the forces of repression, and the state. Based on a review of their brochures and bulletins, their immediate demand was the liberation of all the ‘state hostages’ of the December episodes. They also indicated that the broader aim of the movement should be the overthrowing of bourgeois democracy, not just the resignation of a minister or a government. The main slogans the anarchists used in their banners were: ‘Their democracy kills’, ‘Legality is the civilization of the consciousness’, ‘No hostage in the hands of the state’, ‘You ruined our lives, we will ruin everything’. The leftists groups, for their part, tried to connect the student’s death with social discontent caused by the neoliberal policies of the last two decades. According to this line of thought, government policies had widened social inequalities leading to the social exclusion of a large part of the population, especially the young generation. In this frame, the December events were really a rebellion of the excluded classes against these policies. The brochures and bulletins of various leftist groups demanded a reduction of working hours, salary increases, free public education, disarming of the police, legalization of all immigrants, and withdrawal from NATO. The immediate demands were the resignation of the government and the release of all of those arrested in the protests. At the tactical level, according to one brochure, ‘the left should adjust itself to the rage of the young and not the young adjust to the routine of the left’; with the strategic goal to ‘pass from the days of the rebellion to the days of the revolution’. Two poignant slogans of the leftist groups were, ‘You give money to the banks and bullets to the young’, and ‘Down with the government of killers and its policies’. The frames of KKE attributed responsibility for the violence to the government, especially regarding the arbitrariness and bad organization of the police force. Like the other left parties, the KKE also connected events with economic and social policies pursued over the previous decades. Unlike the leftists, however, KKE distinguished between peaceful and violent protestors and characterized the actions of the latter as provocative and against the interest of the popular movement. On this point, KKE accused the SYRIZA leadership of encouraging the actions of the ‘so-called anti-authoritarians’. It is interesting, however, that the attitudes of KKE’s electoral base were more or less similar to those of SYRIZA’s base: 71 per cent of KKE voters thought that the episodes were justified, versus 84 per cent of SYRIZA voters. Also, 66 per cent of KKE supporters characterized the events as a social rebellion and not as actions of deviant groups, versus 77 per cent for SYRIZA voters; 41 per cent approved attacks at police stations, versus 30 per 3  I am referring to the research done by VPRC on behalf of the newspaper Avgi and the web channel TVXS.

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cent for SYRIZA voters and 28 per cent for PASOK voters. Finally, 30 per cent had a positive opinion regarding the destruction of banks, versus 32 per cent for SYRIZA voters (Kouloglou 2008). In contrast, the SYRIZA leadership and electoral base had unconditionally positive views towards the episodes of December. The coalition’s brochures and the bulletins linked the events to police repression and arbitrariness, the low funding of public education, and the growing unemployment of the youth. The main demands were the abolition of riot police, salary increases, and the resignation of the government. The negative position of KKE was also criticized. Finally, the intellectuals of the country suggested their own interpretations (see Kostopoulos 2009). The public discourse they developed was, of course, fragmented and controversial. Some were positive towards the events while others – perhaps the majority – expressed their disdain for violence and the ‘apolitical’ character of the protests. Some considered the social explosion a sign of health and others a sign of decay. The majority, however, expressed the view that the December protestors were spontaneous and disorganized actors, mobilized by irrational motives, driven and manipulated by crowd psychology, and incapable of rational political discourse (for a critique see Gavriilidis 2010). Repertoires of Action We can distinguish between the action repertoire of the first three days and that of the subsequent three weeks. During the initial period: participation was larger; levels of violence were higher; and the police response was unable to contain the contentious dynamic. Large and heterogeneous crowds took to the streets from Saturday night until Monday in many Greek cities. The prevailing forms of action were clashes with the police, destruction, burning, and the looting of public buildings and stores. Although past demonstrations in Greece had often erupted into violence, the difference this time was that violent tactics did not occur as part of an ongoing mobilization of a movement or protest campaign, and they diffused quickly across the country. After the first three days, however, and until the New Year, the protest wave followed a much more familiar pattern. It followed a repertoire that was commonly used in Greek protest mobilizations for (at least) the last two decades: student assemblies with leftist students taking the lead, occupying university buildings and calling upon workers to join them, continuous demonstrations where most participants are from the educational community, property damage and clashes between the anarchists and the police at the margins of the demonstrations, and the police responding with tear gas and scattered arrests. Then, new assemblies form, in which various leftist groups accuse each other, demand the release of those arrested, renew occupations and call for new demonstrations. At times, the

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student movement is accompanied by a parallel high-school student’s movement and some short-lived strikes of school teachers and university professors. This traditional Greek repertoire was replicated, but also enriched by several highly symbolic actions, such as the interruption of television broadcasts on 16 December, the hanging of a protest banner at the Parthenon on 17 December, and the dumping of rotten meat at the Christmas tree in Athens’s central square on 21 December. On the one hand, such actions reflected the emotions of some activists and the participation of new actors, such as artists. On the other hand, they were tactics aimed to animate participants and sustain the attention of the larger public. A symbolic action that was both impressive and substantive was the occupation of the historical building of the General Confederation of Labour (hereafter GSEE) by some independent unions. The workers of these unions accused the GSEE bureaucracy of not supporting the demonstrations and for cooperating with the PASOK and ND governments in the implementation of a series of anti-labour laws. This occupation, unlike the sanctity of Greek universities, was not protected by any asylum law prohibiting the police from entering, and the police could have entered at any time. An assembly was again created where many workers of the unofficial sector, anarchist and leftist activists participated. This assembly discussed the problems of precarious and disorganized labour, which put the GSEE leadership into a difficult position. The president of the GSEE asked the police not to intervene and the occupiers protected the building against vandalism. During the occupation, the anarchist logic of organization and action prevailed, and the assembly established a close connection with the occupations of the Polytechnic and the School of Economics, but not with the leaders of the various leftist groups that occupied the Law School. All these occupations along with the occupations of the high schools ended peacefully during the Christmas vacation and the students returned to normality preparing for their exams. The Greek Riots of December 2008 Reconsidered Since the beginning of the December events, there was an intense debate about how to characterize them. From the midst of the assemblies, occupations and street violence, the actual participants, and especially the main protagonists – the anarchists and the various leftist groups – had every reason to believe that what was going on was a full-blown rebellion against the state. There were numerous actions all over the country in which any symbol of state authority would become a target. The police and the government seemed incapable of controlling the situation; universities and schools were not functioning; the commercial life of the city centres ground to a standstill; and the media, both nationally and internationally, transmitted for several days images of burning and rioting that fit the popular understanding of a social rebellion. Nevertheless, on closer examination, what happened in Greece during this time cannot easily be characterized as a social rebellion. Significantly, the protest

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never spread to organized labour or to any other broad sector of the population. After the initial explosion, the protestors were mainly leftist students and the active members of the anarchist community or of leftist political organizations. In the scale-shift process (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001; Tilly and Tarrow 2007), which would be instrumental in moving from a localized episode of violence in Exarcheia to a national rebellion, there was a telling absence of the brokerage mechanism by which various groups could coordinate and focus their actions. Linkages between the various groups were mostly achieved through the media and impersonal means, such as each other’s brochures and flyers. The different groups were incapable – or, better, unwilling – to communicate in person with each other. Each group interpreted the events as a verification of its own ideology, and tried to impose upon the emerging narrative of the protest its own political line. While some frame amplification and frame extension was observed (Snow et al. 1986) – every group spoke intensely against state repression and police arbitrariness – the discourse developed by the December protestors was fragmented and sometimes contradictory, not because they were inarticulate or apolitical, as many Greek intellectuals believed, but because most participating groups had unresolved ideological differences and were competing with each other for leverage. As a result they could not develop a coherent master frame that might have resonated more broadly to engage the wider society. Partly for these reasons, the December events resemble what has been termed ‘urban riots’ (Auyero 2004; Schneider 2007, 2010; della Porta 2009; King 2009; Simitis 2009). These writers do not use the term ‘riot’ with its old negative connotations as was the case with collective behaviour theorists, but as a reflection of a normal collective action phenomenon. Based on a comparison of the 1960s black urban riots in the US with the 2005 immigrant riots in France, Schneider (2010: 3) argues, ‘[r]iots occur when a particularly egregious act of police violence deeply offends a community and all other forms of collective action are unavailable or seem fruitless’. Her research shows that when categorical boundaries that divide society are very clear, and where the police and the state authorities have a long history of violent enforcement of these boundaries, riots commonly occur. The Greek riots of 2008 were quite different. The initial events took place in a busy and rather expensive area in the centre of Athens, and the majority of actors had middle-class origins. In accordance to Schneider’s typology (2010: 3), in the Greek case we observe: 1. dominant groups (represented by the media speaking about the Exarcheia ghetto) feeling threatened and demanding a police ‘crack down’ of subordinate (political in our case) groups to restore law and order; 2. the police interpreting such calls to mean that they are immune from prosecution in their interactions with subjugated (political) minorities; 3. police violence increasing, leading to a particularly egregious act of violence; and

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4. lacking other options (such as established institutions to channel grievances, strong social or community organizations, or a repertoire of successful non-violent protest, communities explode. In the place of blacks in the American ghettos and of immigrants in the French suburbs, Greece had the inhabitants of Exarcheia, particularly the anarchist community. When police violence sparked widespread anti-establishment sentiment, the community exploded, synchronizing its anger with that of the highschool students and with the disdain for the government felt by a large section of the youth. The role of the anarchists was central in the protests because: • The action repertoire of the Greek anarchists, which mainly included clashes with the police and property damage, was indisputably prevalent during the first crucial days and continued to a lesser degree until the end of December. • The widespread property damage and attacks on the police captured the international media’s attention for a whole week. • Do-it-yourself mobilization (Moore and Roberts 2009) and the antiauthoritarian modes of organization – both characteristic of the anarchists – were soon adopted by almost all the participating actors. • The political organizations of the left were obviously unprepared and were soon divided on the issue of violence. • The high-school students more or less followed the repertoire of the anarchists. • The international solidarity that unfolded – when it was not by Greek students studying abroad – was exclusively by foreign anarchist groups. Furthermore, a year later, in December 2009, when the riots were commemorated in Athens, the vast majority of participants coming from abroad were anarchists. In analysing the December 2008 events, the prevailing action repertoires are the decisive factors. Not the protestors’ demands, their number, or their impact on the political system proved to be of significant importance in the long run. Police surveillance over Exarcheia remains harsh to this day. The various left parties did not gain any ground in the October 2009 national elections (Iakovidou et al. 2010: 156). To consider the violent repertoire and the rioting of the first days as instances of a wider social explosion is misleading and distorts the processes by which the events unfolded (for a contrary view see Lountos’s chapter in this section). When, after the first three days, the traditional repertoire of the Greek left replaced rioting, the much-vaunted ‘social explosion’ rapidly declined.

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Chapter 14

Radical Minorities, a Decade of Contention and the Greek December 2008 Nikos Lountos

The enormous scale and explosive nature of the Greek December gave credence to interpretations of the events as totally exceptional and unrelated to previous mobilizations. Common explanations in the local media (regardless of political colouring) often resorted to blunt reductionism: the ‘riots’ were reactions to youthful frustration about the future, rising unemployment, the effects of neoliberalism, or the unfolding economic crisis. But such interpretations are both easy and unsatisfactory. They are easy because immediate economic and political context can be applied to any social explosion; and they are unsatisfactory because facile ex post theories are not helpful as scientific explanations. Most glaringly, such answers do not stand the test of cross-country comparison: Greece was not the only country, nor the hardest hit by neoliberal economic policies. Why Greece and not Bulgaria, Latvia, Portugal, or Ireland? I will state my argument in a very straightforward way from the outset of this chapter. The Greek December was not the immediate product of the deprivations caused by the neoliberal offensive in Greece. Rather, they were, above all, the product of a sustained resistance by a militant minority of activists who have been fighting against government policies for at least a decade. Their role is obscured because the media, worldwide, transmitted images of clashes with the police, petrol bombs, smashing of shop windows, and looting by masked and kafiascarfed youths. These images were also accompanied by headlines proclaiming the mobilizations as ‘riots’. But these media images obscure the essence of the Greek December. My argument is that, if scholars look beyond the sensationalist images of ‘violence and rioting’, they will see the December events as but one specific expression of a broader contentious repertoire that spans more than a decade. Much as Trotsky’s (1972, 1980) descriptions of looting, fires and crowd violence in both 1905 and 1917 Russia did not turn the two Russian Revolutions into cases of ‘rioting’, so too, I argue, that it is crucial to place the December events within a broader context. In what follows, almost all the descriptions about the December events and the other social movements of the last decade are based mainly on my personal participation as an activist since 1995. Having worked as a full-time journalist for the weekly Workers’ Solidarity from 2001 to 2006 and as a part-time journalist since then, I had the opportunity not only to participate actively in many struggles,

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but also to write about them on a weekly basis. Most of the information about the events found in this chapter are based on my own and other journalists’ articles in the Workers’ Solidarity. Teachers, Students and the Working Class On 8 December, less than 48 hours after Alexandros Grigoropoulos’s was shot dead, high-school teachers went out on strike. Marching in Athens, the main banner of their trade-union federation (OLME) stated, ‘The government is guilty for the murder’. On the same day, the civil servants’ confederation (ADEDY), the second biggest trade union in Greece, called a four-hour walk-out in order to join the demonstrations, whilst the university lecturers’ union (POSDEP) staged a 48-hour strike. All the major trade unions issued statements not only condemning the assassination of Grigoropoulos, but also condemning police violence as a whole and making political connections blaming the government and its policies as responsible. From the very first days, it was obvious that the murder was taking political dimensions, and inside the workplaces it was mixing with the anger against the government. The university rectors, encouraged by the government, tried to use the POSDEP’s strike in order to keep the colleges closed early in the week. They hoped that this would let off the steam, avoiding a situation in which mass student assemblies would provide a focus for more generalized action. Two days did not prove enough for that; mass assemblies were organized later in the week and many colleges went under occupation. High-school students High-school students have been one of the most impressive and lively sections of the movement. All over the country, starting from the morning of Monday 8 December, they gathered at schoolyards just before the bell rang and organized their response. I base these observations on my own participation in a march at Peristeri, near Athens, and in the main demonstration in the Athens centre (see Lountos 2008 for a fuller description). In most of the cases they decided to stage demonstrations and marches in their neighbourhoods: in some cases they stayed in their local areas, while others decided either to march or to take buses and go to the city centre. For those who stayed in their localities, the town halls or the main squares were the obvious places to go to. Unfortunately for the police, many of their stations happen to be near these main squares. Virtually everywhere, some students proposed to their colleagues to march towards the police stations, where in most cases they used stones to pelt the windows or any visible target. For the students marching to the city centre, it was again the police and other symbols of the state that became the target.

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The working class The trade-union confederations had, long before the assassination, picked 10 December as the day for a 24-hour strike against the 2009 budget. The government panicked and made an unprecedented move. The prime minister himself called the trade union leaders and asked them to call off the strike, or at least cancel the traditional demonstration, claiming that a demonstration would cause more riots in Athens. The trade union leaders bowed partially to this call for ‘national responsibility’ by cancelling the march. The Communist Party-controlled unions also bowed to the government’s calls. While usually these unions stage in Athens a separate march to the Parliament, on 10 December they only briefly marched around Omonoia Square. But things did not go as expected. Federations, trade unions, student unions along with Left parties and organizations decided not to follow the call for cancelling the demonstration. The elementary and secondary school teachers’ union, the university lecturers’ union, the unions of the major telecom companies (INTRACOM, WIND, VODAFON), the union of private cram school teachers, the union of temporary workers at the Ministry of Culture, were among the unions that participated in this march. It was a big blow to the government, because it proved that, despite the compliance of the trade union bureaucracy and the Left parties’ leadership (Communist Party and SYRIZA), they were not able to hold the movement back. Militant unions and students provided a focus for thousands of workers and youths who wanted to march. The mood was obvious even in the official trade-union rally that took place. The leaders made surprisingly brief, 20-minute speeches (condemning the government for the assassination), trying to have the rally dispersed before the ‘unofficial’ march would reach them. They were booed by many workers, and while there were no more speeches delivered, the majority of the participants stayed on waiting for the marchers to arrive. In most of the other cities around Greece, the trade union leaders did not cancel the marches. Slogans, such as ‘Down with the government of the assassins’, were not only shouted by hundreds of thousands, they were also on the banners of many unions. In terms of social composition, duration and repertoire the December events were, then, very different from mere riots or spontaneous eruptions against police brutality. There were sections of those taking part that participated for the first time in demonstrations, but the whole process was based on the most experienced sections of the movement. It was based on networks and organizations that had established connections and links between them, had confronted the government and the police several times in previous years, and had experienced both struggle and victory. All the sections of the movement, from the school students to the trade unionists showed a high level of organization and of strategic thinking. The duration of the movement cannot be interpreted in any other way. More than one month of action does not fit with riots that ‘go up like a rocket, but fall

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down like a brick’. The student unions and the Left organizations in the universities provided the engine for mass meetings, debates, occupations and a sequence of marches. Looking at many of the photos from the December events, it is difficult even for an experienced eye to distinguish if these come from December 2008 or from the student occupation movement of 2006–2007. The order of the banners, the way the protesters marched, the slogans and the placards they used, the route they walked in the cities and towns followed almost the same repertoire. The last observation also makes us discard any notion of ‘a new subject’, which was proposed by several commentators on the participation of young immigrants or of radical trade unions (see Tsakiris 2009). That such fresh layers did play a role is of course undeniable. Yet, the organizational core of the Greek December was not them, but the tried and true coalition of student unions, trade unions and Left organizations. Their participation also challenges the view that pauperized sections of society were the main actors of December. The union of the Athens’ Polytechnic Students had the most massive and crucial participation in the events. They are not in any sense pauperized or marginalized: The Polytechnic School is considered one of the best Greek universities. Moreover, in recent years Polytechnic students have gained profound levels of experience and organization as they have mobilized against the privatization of the university system (see Sortis 2010). Social movement theory has used the concept of protest cycle to contextualize different movements as part of a broader wave. I suggest that, although this is a useful perspective, the Greek December must be seen as much more than just an eruption within a protest cycle. Such a view does not take into account that the upturn of mobilizations in Greece since 1998 cannot be cut off from previous movements in the 1970s or even the 1960s. As Seferiades argues (2007), the specific route followed by almost every protest march in Athens is the same since the eruption of the movements in 1965. Also, the parties of the Left, the origins of PASOK, and the unions were consistent factors during all this time, providing a deep sense of continuity and historicity. Following Barker (2010) the notion of class struggle suggests a conceptualization of a broad movement in the singular instead of movements in plural. I suggest that this broader approach is especially helpful for understanding the dynamics of the different labour, student and political movements in Greece and the ways in which they intertwine. The Unity of Contemporary Greek Protest The specific course of the class struggle and its interaction with politics is necessary in order to understand why December 2008 has been so thick in terms of political importance. The Third Greek Republic was established on the collapse of the Greek dictatorship in 1974. Important struggles that culminated in the insurrection of the Polytechnic School students in 1973 had undermined the Colonels’ junta and forced them to pass power over to a more hard-line group of

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army officers. They, in turn, had to leave office after just a few months because of the fiasco of their ultra-nationalist coup d’état in Cyprus. Despite the fact that, until late 1973, the official left-wing and centre parties had been in secret talks with parts of the regime about the prospects of a peaceful move to a republic, democracy in Greece came in an abrupt discontinuity with the dictatorship, giving credence to militant ideas. A period of very intense working-class and student struggles opened (Lountos 2004) in early 1974. The level of struggle decreased only in the prospect of PASOK, a newly founded socialist party coming to power. PASOK was able to contain many of the more militant parts of the movement, by promising to change society from above. But, when in 1985 PASOK decided to move against the working class, commencing an austerity package, its grip on the union bureaucracy proved to be limited. The leadership of the union federation split in two and after two years the government was forced to back down, change its ministers of economics and finance, and proclaim the end of the austerity. The next wave of neoliberalism came from a clearly Thatcherite government elected in 1990. This government resigned three years after its election, badly hit by massive struggles mainly in the telecommunications and transport industries, but also in education. PASOK was re-elected and re-nationalized the recently privatized Athens buses, making the unions feel vindicated and confident about their struggles. It took some years for PASOK to get on the offensive again. The difference that became evident from 1997–1998 onwards is that all these years of experience had created a layer of union activists in the workplaces and in education who could take initiatives despite the union leadership’s inaction. Following the events in 1998, there is a record high of strike actions in local governments, in schools, in banks and in transport, at the same time as the leadership was controlled by PASOK members and was making open calls for forbearance. In 2001, the stakes went to the highest. The government tried to reform the pension system by lowering pensions and raising the pension age. Two successful general strikes forced them to abandon their plans. The right-wing New Democracy party was re-elected in 2004, on a centrist profile. The first skirmishes with the unions in 2005 did not give a winner. The government chose the privatization of the universities as a favourable field in order to make a breakthrough, but this led to the biggest wave of university occupations ever, along with a six-week all-out strike in the primary schools. The most contradictory element in the course of the struggles in Greece is that, on one hand, it is obvious that successive waves of neoliberal offensives failed owing to the struggles; on the other hand, though, there was no emergence of a political expression of these struggles. The Left did gain after waves of struggles: with clearest examples those of the European elections of 1999 and the parliamentary elections of 2007, but not in a way that could provide a solution to the political paradox. Thus, it was not mainly the organized Left that played a unifying role in these events. Rather, this role can be more specifically traced to a layer of militant and radical minorities who sustained activity in successive struggles. Adopting the concept of leadership as a purposive dialogical relationship (Barker, Johnson and

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Lavalette 2001), I suggest that radical minorities have been significant influences in several of these struggles. Radical Minorities and Sustained Contention To begin, let us take the example of the huge June 1998 clashes between teachers and riot police that took place outside several schools where examinations for prospective teachers were given. The unions reacted to the new registration procedures for these exams and organized mass blockages of the examination centres, leading to a highly confrontational weekend – clashes that still provide a benchmark for militant trade-union action. Yet earlier, in prior union meetings, the teachers’ union had proposed just one 24-hour strike. If we take a more finegrained view at the level of the local unions, things get more interesting. For example, in the prefecture of Athens, the results at the Fifth Local Union were 52 for the official 24-hour strike, 57 for two 48-hour strikes, and 32 for an all-out continuous strike. At the Second Local Union in Athens, the 24-hour strike got just two, 60 teachers voted for two 48-hour strikes and 37 voted for a continuous strike. The official record says that the assembly of the local unions’ presidents decided for a compromise of one 48-hour strike. Although those union members who called for continuous strikes were a minority early in 1998, they were not marginal, and a large base wanted to escalate action. On the other hand, because the militant section did not win a majority, they invested more hope in the main confrontation, which is why direct violence erupted during the mobilization. The point is that if the researcher tries to trace the origins of the militant mood expressed in the clashes of June 1998, the official trade-union declarations and reports will not be of much help. If they are taken as a mood indicator, they can lead to the trap mentioned at the outset of this chapter: to interpret the explosion as a surprise, and miss connections with earlier phases of the movement. The researcher might conclude that, before June, the prevailing mood among teachers was against an escalation of action. But we see that the passive majority was a slim one; that there was a minority that pushed for action; that they were concentrated in Athens and other big cities; and that their weight as registered in the local unions presidents’ assembly proved more important than that of the passive majority. Another more recent example – occurring just weeks before the December events – is the struggle for the non-implementation of the new law on higher education after it was voted by the parliament. The first phase of this battle was the government’s attempt to organize rector elections using the new law. While the parliamentary Left considered the battle as already lost, the militant minorities organized to stop the elections through direct obstruction. They not only found the government against them but also the parliamentary Left, which accused them of diluting a majority struggle into a guerrilla war. Looking back, this parliamentary Left spoke out against ‘too much violence’ just a few weeks before the December events (Lountos 2008).

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Although these are only two isolated examples, they help illustrate an uninterrupted process of movement development that dates back more than a decade to 1997. Its development was neither continuous nor linear – often coming in waves – but there is no point in the decade where one can identify a serious defeat or a retreat. On the contrary, there are nodal points throughout the decade where these militant minorities were able to act as vanguards, and by their example involve the majority, or at least gain consent for their militancy. Actually, all the high points of the movement in Greece began as battles of groups that bore the weight of being accused as radical fringe, but who eventually assumed vanguard roles as their repertoire became common ground. Indeed, there have been certain instances in which the action of militant minorities tended to form a Gramscian counter-hegemony (see Harman 1983). There are four waves through which this process developed. 1. The 1997–1999 strike wave There was extensive labour unrest against Costas Simitis’s government during these years. First, school teachers went on an all-out strike for eight consecutive weeks in 1997. Then, in 1998, the Ioniki Bank workers fought against the privatization of their bank through an all-out strike. They occupied the bank’s computer headquarters and clashed with the riot police who tried to re-occupy the bank. These struggles represented a shift not only because of their militancy and strength, but also because they were conducted by trade unions in which the governing PASOK party had a strong organized presence. Costas Simitis had recently been elected party head and prime minister on a Tony Blair-inspired ‘third way’ platform that had the support of the trade-union bureaucracy. The school teachers and the Ioniki workers’ mobilization diverted the rightward turn of Simitis’s policies. It was the very first time after the hot 1970s that a wildcat strike erupted with very limited preparation and support by the trade-union leadership. The trade unionists of Ioniki who were members of PASOK split the party’s tradeunion faction or even resigned from PASOK. The origins of the upturn of class struggle in the following years can be traced all the way back to those struggles. 2. 2001 mobilizations against pension reform It is arguable that the strikes of 1997–1998 found their continuation in 2001, when two huge general strikes occurred, and when several labour sectors staged even longer strikes to force Simitis’s government to retreat from its plans to reform the pension system. It was the biggest blow against one of the most ambitious government plans in the last decades to restrict social welfare programmes. Unsurprisingly, it was considered a great victory for the labour movement.

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3. 2006–2007 mobilizations against privatization in the educational sector Karamanlis’s right-wing ND government, which came to power in March 2004, sought to pursue its own plan of privatizations, but was confronted by a strike wave and the student movement of 2006–2007. The government’s plan to amend the Constitution in order to permit private companies’ own universities and colleges collapsed (Lountos 2007). Tens of thousands of students, professors and instructors protested in 2006, closing most Greek universities prior to the summer exam period. Hundreds of solidarity committees sprang up across Greece in almost every neighbourhood, with people outside the education sector actively participating. Hundreds of thousands of signatures were collected in petitions and many solidarity resolutions were passed through trade unions of the private and public sector. These mobilizations represented yet another defeat of conservativeplans through the action of a militant vanguard minority. 4. Autumn 2007 and winter 2008 The final wave of mobilizations came after Karamanlis was re-elected after a snapelection in 2007. Although his new government had an even weaker parliamentary majority, it managed to push through a reform of the pension system, only after changing twice their Labour Affairs minister and confronting no fewer than three general strikes. A new layer of radicalized doctors, nurses and hospital workers staged unofficial strikes in some of the biggest hospitals in 2008. On two occasions workers in factories being shut down owing to the eruption of the global crisis staged occupations. The bus drivers overturned their elected trade-union leadership in a mass assembly, accusing them of not fighting effectively. At Intracom, one of the biggest private telecom factories in Athens, the Left (of which a big section is an extra-parliamentarian anti-capitalist minority) gained the majority of the union after decades of it being controlled by friends of the management. These are only some aspects of what Karamanlis himself later called ‘a bad social climate’, which prevented his government from proceeding with reforms. Indeed, the events of the Greek December 2008 were the culmination of this ‘bad social climate’ and finally led his government to resign in 2009. Thus, we see that, over the past decade, neoliberal government policies have been met with four waves of mass struggle, all of which began as minority initiatives. In every case, the government used rhetoric about ‘minorities’ and ‘extremists’ to try to delegitimize them, and applied brutal police repression to try to crush them. The parliamentary Left, despite being strong and influential, in most of the cases echoed the government’s rhetoric and did not make available its resources to help the militant minorities organize more effectively, claiming that calls to militancy were premature and represented a small minority. Taking into account these mobilizations over the past decade, none of the events of December can be considered as absolutely unprecedented. Even the most creative events of December, like the burying of the riot police under piles of garbage around

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the Athens Christmas tree, had a precedent. The dustmen’s union had done the same outside the interior ministry building during their strike marches. The joint initiatives in the education sector also had a history of at least ten years. In every major battle of primary or secondary teachers, of college students, of university lecturers, or of school students, there were minorities taking over the duty to organize solidarity actions across the different sectors, strikes in solidarity with student occupations, or occupations in solidarity with strikes. The school students had an unbroken tradition of occupations every year, in which local marches and big demonstrations in the city centres were almost always accompanied by clashes with the riot police. A watershed protest with profound implications for student and educationworker participation in December 2008 was the 2003 anti-war movement. On 20 and 21 March, high-school students gathered in their schoolyards and after improvised meetings decided to stage marches and head to the city centres along with many of their teachers – a pattern very similar to what happened in 2008. It is important to stress that the movement against the Iraq war had many months of prior organizing and did not start with the invasion. On 15 February, organized anti-war minorities in several schools around the country mobilized their classmates so that the global day of action against the war had a big high-school student component in Greece. These minorities led the way for the eruption of anti-war sentiment on 20 and 21 March. Also, looking at the trade-union participation in these protests, one major component were the teachers unions and the student unions. A second major component were the unions that led the battle against the privatizations and pension reform of the Simitis government, namely the rail workers union, the bank workers union, the electricity workers union. In this way, the actions of militant minorities of previous protest campaigns became catalysts for the new, broadly based anti-war movement. There is a need for a re-reading of the struggles of the last decade in Greece through the lenses of the December events. My re-examination shows that militant minorities have played a crucial role in the unfolding of most of the recent protest campaigns, which in turn have profoundly shaped the political arena. These minorities went through a process of political radicalization and, by offering an example to other movement sectors, have broadened their appeal and gained greater weight in the movements and in society in general. Successive governments have tried to confront these movements as well as the minorities that spur them on by discounting their claims and demands, and by repression. This dark dance by both sides was the prelude to December. On 6 December 2008 there existed a crucial amount of common experience, of solidarity, of dense networks and a collective feeling of non-vindication. This situation made the militant minorities able to form the substructure of a generalized uprising.

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Index

abolitionism 24 activist networks 8, 162, 175 activists 160, 164, 167 adolescent development 40, 46 African-Americans 41, 128, 133n1, 134, 140, 141 community 75, 94, 134–8 African-Caribbean immigrants (see immigrants, African-Caribbean) African National Congress (ANC) 24 age cohorts 39–51, 65 agency 167 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud 45–6, 109–10, 112 anarchists 13, 14–15, 20, 89, 151–3, 164, 166n8, 171–5, 177–81 political parties 103–04 anger 9, 10, 12, 13, 18, 70, 83, 88, 91, 94, 106–07, 113–14, 128, 134, 136, 138–9, 143–4, 149, 168, 172, 174, 181, 184 Animal Liberation Front 20 animal rights movement 58, 106 anti-establishment frames 151–2 anti-establishment sentiment 181 anti-fascist movements 58 arab spring 113, 155 armed groups 19, 24, 30–38, 175 arson 7, 62, 69, 89, 107, 113, 138, 158 Asian (South) 120, 124, 125 Asian communities 121–2, 125–6, 131, 133, 136, 140n14 Athens (Greece) 16, 89, 151–2, 157, 162, 163, 171, 173, 179, 180, 184 Law School occupation 151–2, 162, 164, 174–6, 179 Polytechnic School 151–2, 162, 164, 174–5, 179 attribution of meaning 6–9, 23, 32, 70, 72–3, 96–7, 100, 164

authoritarian regimes 11, 32, 39, 42–5, 48–50, 108 autonomous groups 58, 67 background conditions 70, 87, 123 banlieues 92, 93, 95–6, 98, 126–9, 130, 132, 141, 141n17, 141n18, 142–5 banlieues riots (see riots, banlieues) Basij Militia 9, 11, 45, 112 Black Bloc 14, 16 Bristol (UK) 74–85, 120 broken negotiations 10, 16–17, 90 brokerage mechanisms 17, 180 Brown, John 24 building occupations (see occupations, buildings) bureaucratization 27, 74 bystanders 5, 17, 64, 154 Castro, Fidel 48 Catholic Church 29, 49 Catholics 75 causal mechanisms 15, 35, 37–8, 40, 88, 91, 145, 157 certification 160, 164 citizenship 64, 127, 131, 143 civil rights 64, 134 civil rights movement 20, 25, 39, 41, 46–7, 106, 133, 134, 137n10 civil rights organizations 139 civil society 71–6, 82–5 claim-making 4–5, 6, 8, 16, 26, 30, 31, 36–7, 43, 50, 76–7, 83–4, 90, 97 clandestine groups 69, 71 class (see social class) class struggle 3, 11, 12, 20, 74–5, 92, 186, 189 Clichy-sous-Bois 94, 119, 130, 140, 141n15, 142

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coercive apparatus 153, 156, 158, 168 (see also police repression) coercive event 158, 163 coercive institutions 159 coercive repertoire (see policing of protest) coercive surplus 151 cognitive factors (see protest, cognitive factors) cognitive liberation 158 cognitive triggering 47, 50, 51 cohorts, age 31, 39–41, 46–7, 51, 65, 116 (see also micrcohorts) collective action frames 7, 40, 69, 94, 97, 139, 165, 177 transgressive 150, 155, 158, 161, 167 collective action, coordinated 16, 159, 163n6 collective action, insurrectionary 3, 6, 16, 150, 157, 159, 160–61, 163, 165, 169 collective effervescence 161 collective identities 7, 11, 17, 18, 32, 41, 47, 51, 67, 72, 78, 91–2, 96, 135, 143 collective violence 3–9, 15–8, 20, 24, 62, 72, 74, 83, 85, 90, 99, 133n2, 138–9 communication 24, 49, 98 communism 67 Communist Party 6, 42, 48, 57, 152, 164, 176, 185 community organizations 74, 76, 181 (see also civil society organizations) constructivist approaches 17–18, 51, 70, 72, 88, 92, 97–9 consumer society 94, 152 consumerism 159, 177 contention, local 172 pre-modern 73 transgressive 160n4 contentious events 17, 72, 165, 169 contentious forms 150, 157 contentious politics 3–5, 29, 37, 83, 84, 140, 157, 160, 161, 167, 169 contentious repertoires 15, 40, 72, 84, 88–9 co-optation 17, 77–8, 84, 92 CORE 41

corruption 92, 107, 109, 114–15, 157, 172 countercultures 75 countermovements 5, 10, 12, 68, 72 criminalization 62, 73, 93, 95, 124, 132 criminality 120, 125 crisis 107, 123–4, 127, 141, 149, 155, 157–8, 165, 169, 171–2, 183, 190 (see also economic crisis) financial 69 global 155, 190 neoliberal capitalism 157 political 83, 92 times of 3, 6, 96 critical event 166–9 critical mass 82 crowds 13, 20–23, 25, 33, 43, 110, 120, 134, 152, 174, 183 control of 9, 11 cultural norms 159 cultural resistance 123 Cultural Revolution (China) 41 culture (see also protest culture) immigrant 91 impacts of violence 31–2, 36 political 67, 85 of resistance 161 street 94 student 44, 49–50, 51 of terror 23 Czechoslovakia 42 deaths, of protesters 11, 16, 25, 43, 65, 94, 106, 116, 130, 133n1, 136, 151, 153, 176–7 December 2008, Greece (see Greek December) deindustrialization 121, 134, 142 delinquency 93, 95, 97 democracies, western 3, 5, 9, 11, 36, 103–08, 117 democracy 55, 64, 85, 103, 105, 106, 109, 113, 117, 150, 175, 177, 187 democracy movements China 41–2 Iran 9 South Korea 43 democratic processes 43, 73, 85, 99

Index demonstration 3, 10, 17, 20, 33, 41–3, 45, 57, 60, 69, 87, 97, 114, 152–3, 172, 174–6, 178–9, 184–5, 191 deradicalization 31, 85 deviance 73, 87, 97–8, 123–4, 177 diffusion 15, 35, 141, 144, 157, 159, 160, 162, 164–5, 166n8, 167–9 discrimination 32, 91, 95–6, 99 (see also stigmatization) disruptive deficit 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 16, 105 drugs 120, 124 dealers 96, 97 dynamic analysis 31, 36, 45, 48, 49, 68, 83, 87–91, 96, 99 dynamics of contention 15, 17 Earth First! 16, 105 East Germany 55, 57 economic crisis 43, 57, 67, 69, 123–4, 141, 155, 171–2 economic decline 126 economic influences 22, 32, 43, 57, 67–9, 96 Egypt 113–17, 149, 154 emotional energy 40, 51 emotions 7–8, 10, 12–13, 15, 18, 22, 24, 40, 46–7, 51, 163, 164, 165, 179 in protest 179, 105 environmental movement 16, 74–5, 77–8, 104 establishment 120, 124, 129, 138, 151, 152 Estonia 48, 49 ETA (Euzkadi ta Ataskuna) 41, 107 ethics 20, 29 ethnic characteristics 121 ethnic cleavages 116 ethnic conflict 12, 16, 22, 83, 136 ethnic discrimination 91, 95–6, 99 ethnic diversity 93, 96 ethnic identity 91 ethnic minorities 33, 64, 74–5, 90, 121, 127, 131, 133n2, 141 ethnic organizations 74–5 ethnic politics 123, 127 ethnic violence 89, 93 European Social Forum 89 event analysis 58, 59, 62 (see also protest event data)

223

Exarcheia 89, 150–52, 162–6, 166n8, 171, 173, 175, 180–81 extremist groups 30, 39, 56, 62–3, 105, 175, 176 left-wing 63, 65, 67 far-right groups 62, 123, 125–6, 131 farmers 19, 26, 58, 65 fear 10, 12–13, 106, 122, 161, 171–2 food riots 25, 89, 90 football hooligans 22, 89 formalization, organizational (see bureaucratization) frames (see collective action frames) France 3, 10, 43, 66, 85, 88, 91, 95–6, 98, 104, 107, 126–9, 131–2, 140–42, 142n19, 143, 144, 149, 171, 180 free spaces 50, 89 freedom riders 25 French riots 2005 (see banlieue riots) Gaddafi Muammar 115 gangs 16, 21, 51, 89, 97, 125, 128, 129, 130, 136, 136n9, 137, 140, 143 General Confederation of Labour (Greece) 6, 153, 168–9, 179 generations 30, 39–51, 65, 96 Germany 24, 32, 41, 55–70 Ghandian non-violence 46 ghetto 55, 96, 135 Glasgow 74–85 global justice 13, 15, 22, 77, 89 globalization 15, 22, 68, 78 Gorbachev, Mikail 111 Graffiti 75, 76 Gramsci, Antonio 6, 189 Greece 150, 151, 153, 155–7, 158n1, 159, 159n3, 166, 169, 171, 174–5, 178–9, 181, 183–7, 189, 190–91 anti-capitalist left 190 anti-war movement 191 Communist Party 6, 152 economy 172 left 90, 92 military dictatorship 173, 186–7 New Democracy Party 172, 187

224

Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State

PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) 172, 176, 177–9, 186–9 political system 157, 170, 181 Polytechnic uprising (1973) 186 Greek December (2008), 6, 12, 47, 69, 85, 88–90, 106, 149–50, 153–4, 156–9, 160, 162, 163, 164, 167–73, 175–81, 183–6, 188, 190–91 Green movement (Iran) 45–6, 111 grievances 5, 6, 12, 17, 25, 84, 85, 107, 114, 116–17, 149, 155, 181 Grigoropoulos Alexandros 89, 151–3, 167–8, 176, 184 guerrillas 17, 35 hactivism 30 hate crimes 33 hatred 11, 12–13, 18, 24, 131, 158 Herrin Massacre 23 High-school students (see students, highschool) Hispanics 136–8 hyperghetto 135 Idealism 40 identity 123, 128–9, 139, 140, 143, 160, 162–6 amplification 165 collective 7, 18, 32, 51, 72, 78, 92 construction 18, 51 ethnic 91 immigrant 91, 96 national 67 personal 11, 17, 41, 47, 51, 72 schemas 51 immigrants 121, 123, 126–7, 133n2, 138, 140n14, 141–3, 151, 157–8n1, 160, 163–5, 168–9, 174–5, 177, 180–81, 186 African 93 African-Caribbean 12–13, 75, 120, 121, 123, 124, 126 communities 17, 85 discrimination 91 first generation 91 Hispanic 133n2 organizations 74

second generation 140n14, 142, 143, 151, 157, 160 violence 7, 64, 83, 89, 91, 93 youth 12, 91, 95 immigration 67, 89, 90, 95, 121, 126–7, 135–6, 142 in democracies 103 in non-democratic regimes 103 informal economy 142 Informal groups 65 insurrectionary collective action (see collective action, insurrectionary) internet 45, 46, 114, 144 Intifada 41 Iran 9, 11, 41, 42, 44–6, 50, 103, 109–12, 117 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 31–2, 33 irrationality (of violence) 4, 6, 13, 19, 87, 98 Islam 29, 45, 94–5, 110, 120, 129 Islamic activism 93, 97 Islamophobia 142 Italy 3, 29, 32, 41, 66, 83, 85, 92 Karamanlis, Kostas 190 King, Rodney 104–07, 134, 150, 151, 154 KKE 152, 176–8 Korea (see South Korea) Korean community 105, 106, 135–6 Korean students (see students, Korean) Ku Klux Klan 25, 106 labour movement 5, 25, 103–04, 150, 155, 189 LAOS 176 Lawrence riots 139 left parties 4, 5, 6, 85, 152, 155, 177, 181, 185 left-wing extremists 164 left-wing students (see students, left-wing) left-wing violence 32, 57, 58, 67, 69 leftist groups 56, 57, 67–9, 90, 139, 151–2, 162, 173, 175–80 leftist milieus 67 Libya 113, 114–17, 149 life course 31–3, 39 locality 141n15, 143

Index looting 7, 21, 23, 25, 26, 60, 106, 107, 120, 134, 135, 137, 138, 141, 159, 168, 174, 178, 183 Los Angeles riots (see riots, Los Angeles) lynching 21–3 Maghreb region 91, 93, 141 Mandela, Nelson 24 marginalization 92 Marxism 48–9 mass society 6 mayday 57, 58 media bias 58, 59, 62, 91, 93, 94, 96 media coverage 14, 120 media, mass 43, 131, 166 methodology 18, 29–38 Mexico 17, 22, 43, 45, 138 Mexico City 11, 47 microcohorts 39 milieus 151, 161 leftist 67 militants 16, 31–2, 151–2, 169 armed 34 minorities 183, 187–9, 190–91 militancy 4, 7, 11, 14, 17, 33, 75, 155–6, 161, 164, 167, 169, 188 militarization 9–11, 24, 65, 129 military defection 44 militias (see also Basij Militia) 10, 20, 55, 107 Mobilization 6, 15–16, 18, 43–50, 68, 72, 90 mobilization 111–12, 117, 133, 135, 140, 142, 144–5, 151, 153, 161, 164, 165, 168, 172, 177, 178, 181, 183, 186, 188, 189, 190 mobilization and the city 144, 162–3 mobilization, resources (see resource mobilization) mobs 20, 33 violence 138 Molotov cocktails 10, 89, 152, 173 moral decline 67 moral shock 165 Mousavi, Hossein 45, 109–12 mouvement des beurs 92 multiculturalism 67, 93, 95–6

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NAACP 41 narratives 73, 91–3, 95, 99, 180 Nazis 32, 56, 57 negotiated-management policing (see Policing, negotiated management) negotiation 3, 15, 34, 46, 90 broken 16 neighbourhood 74, 89, 91, 94, 96, 119, 121, 128, 132, 150, 151, 154, 163, 171, 173, 184, 190 neoliberalism 6–7, 22, 39, 68, 152, 165, 183, 187 politics 155, 183, 190 restructuring 92 neo-Nazi groups 67 network centrality 74, 77–8 networks 14, 47, 48–9, 51, 73, 81–5, 89–90, 129, 132, 135, 144, 145, 162, 164, 164, 167, 169, 185, 191 activist 88 networks, civic 74, 78, 83 organizational 71, 85 rioting 89 student 90 two-mode 73 New Democracy 172, 187 New Left 58–9 new social movements (NSMs) 41, 51, 58, 67, 75, 78 non-normalized coercive event (see coercive event, non-normalized) non-violence 5, 17, 24, 27, 47, 104, 145 non-violent protests (see protests, nonviolent) non-violent resistance 115–16 norms, cultural 22 Northern Ireland 31–3, 66 Northern League (Italy) 85 nuclear power 64, 69 occupation, military 106–07 occupations of buildings 26, 48, 60, 75–6, 88–9, 151–3, 160, 167, 169, 175, 178–9, 184, 186–7, 190–91 workplace 21 organizations 135, 137, 138, 144, 155, 159, 160, 164, 185, 186

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networks (see networks, organizational) civic 20, 49, 59, 72, 74–85, 133n2, 137, 181 civil rights 139 established 160 lack of 135 leftist 164 moderate 12 oppositional 155 political 89–90, 123, 127, 142, 174, 180, 181 protest 115 radical 88 religious 93–4, 97 social movement 4, 5, 13, 34, 36, 62, 65, 72–4, 103, 176 outcomes, of violence 3, 29–37 outcomes, revolutionary 155 outcomes, social movements (see social movements, outcomes) paramilitary groups 11, 34, 45 (see also militias) Paris 106, 119, 126, 129 suburbs 104, 107, 130, 141, 163 (see also banlieues) parliamentary left 67, 97, 152, 155, 164, 188, 190 participation, protest 5, 16, 40, 42, 57, 88, 90, 111, 138–9, 143, 152–3, 164, 168, 174–6, 178–9, 186, 191 civic 71, 77, 78, 96 coalitional 67 costs 10, 46 emotional 47, 50 violent 22, 32, 60, 66, 81, 89, 91, 97 youth 42, 45 PASOK (Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement) 172, 176–9, 186–7, 189 path dependency 30, 36, 74, 167 Patras 151, 153, 173–4 people power revolutions (see Revolutions) Philippines 111 physical damage (see property damage) picket lines 14, 21 Piraeus 153 pluralism 48

Poland 11 polarization 17, 18, 160 police 9–10, 20, 40, 42, 47, 48, 51, 57, 68, 69, 83, 89, 90, 93–4, 95–7, 104, 106–08, 114, 119, 120–21, 123–32, 134, 137, 141–4, 150–53, 159, 161–2, 164, 166–8, 172–5, 177–81, 183–5, 188 arrests 43, 48, 62, 64, 93, 107, 124 brutality 104, 107, 117, 137, 163, 176, 185, 190 French 95–8, 119 repression 10–11, 25, 42, 45, 64, 66, 125, 150, 176, 178 surveillance 36, 151, 161–2, 181 violence 10–11, 12, 27, 43, 44, 56, 65, 67, 85, 89, 106–07, 152, 158n1, 180–81 violence against 57, 58, 64, 88 policing of protests 9–10, 125, 130, 175 negotiated management 10–11 saturation 124 strategies 9–10, 89, 90, 92, 123–5, 129–31, 168 political asylum 69, 89, 90 political culture 67, 85, 134 political institutions 4, 32, 76–7 political interpretation 169 political opportunities 7, 41, 56, 88 political parties 4, 5, 6, 17, 31, 74, 85, 92, 103–04, 122, 127, 142, 173–4 political system 4, 6, 22, 67, 75, 139, 140, 155, 157, 160, 170, 181 political violence (see violence, political) politics 6, 7, 36, 47, 50, 71, 75, 85, 87, 90 American 19 German 68 local 75, 82 protest 8 South Korean 44 Spanish 41 Prison riots (see riots, prison) Professionalization 77–8 property damage 14, 16, 20, 25, 29, 47, 55, 57, 58, 60, 62, 64, 69, 76, 114, 151, 153–4, 178, 181 targeted 138, 154 protest 108–9, 112–14

Index anti-nuclear 69 cognitive factors 4, 7–8, 15, 40–42, 46–7, 49–51 cultural dimensions 22–3, 29, 44, 134, 150, 161–2 disruptive 13–14, 26, 35, 59, 62, 64–5, 73, 83, 103 event data (see event analysis) global justice 13, 15, 22, 89 institutional 166 left-wing 57, 62 non-violent 9, 10, 16–17, 20, 29, 33, 35, 37, 46, 66, 68–9, 76–7, 84, 106, 160, 181 radical 31, 71, 72, 78, 85 repertoires 3, 6, 10, 40, 45, 46, 51, 76, 88–9 (see also repertoires of action) tactics 10, 16, 46, 105, 152, 179 trends 60–1 violent 29, 34, 35, 72, 74 Protestants 75 Prussia 57 public opinion 14, 31, 32, 36, 37, 43, 51, 73, 171, 172, 176 public spaces 5, 7, 17, 42, 50, 78, 84, 89 public sphere 78, 140 racism 74, 89, 96, 125, 127, 134, 142 radical left (see left-wing extremists) radical protest 72, 73, 75–8, 81–5 radical-flank effect 14 radicalization 31, 32, 88, 92, 191 rage 11, 12, 18, 19, 25, 43, 44, 90, 108, 154, 158–9, 162, 164, 166, 168–9, 173, 177 rank-and-file action 11 recruitment 24, 34, 81, 161, 175 Red Brigades 30 red-shirt movement 3, 113 red-shirt protest 113 reform 5–6, 12, 14–15, 16–17, 36, 42–3, 45, 66–8 piecemeal 43, 155 police 90 relational analysis 7, 8, 15–18, 82, 84, 87–8, 99 relative deprivation 18, 66, 83, 91, 155

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repertoires (see protest repertoires) of action 133, 138, 140, 145, 160, 166, 178, 181 disruptive 143 proto-political 166 resistance, individual 26, 138, 145, 159, 161 resistance, political 26, 29, 48 resistance, popular 44, 87, 89 resistance, student 45, 89 resource mobilization 88 resources 161–2 police 11 protest 9, 13, 14, 34, 39, 49, 50, 88 retribution 12, 22, 105 revolution 16, 33, 39, 111, 152, 155–6 American 25 April (South Korea) 43–5 Arab 113, 115 color (Serbia and Ukraine) 113 Cuban 43, 48 cultural 41 Hungarian 41 Iranian 41 people power 28 Russian 184 revolutionary guards 9, 11, 110, 112 revolutionary ideologies 48, 49 revolutionary rhetoric 43 revolutionary situations 37, 155 right-wing violence (see violence, rightwing) riots (rioting) 16, 19, 20, 25, 29, 35, 72–5, 83–4, 87–8, 92–98, 104–05, 107, 111, 119–20, 124–5, 133, 137–9, 140, 144, 145, 157, 158–60, 171, 175, 180–81, 183, 185 banlieues (France), 3, 11, 16, 87–9, 92, 99, 107, 119–21, 126, 128, 130–32, 139, 141–5, 150, 180 communication 98 defined 158–9 food 25, 90 gangs 89, 97 Greece (see Greek December 2008) identity frames 32, 139 insurrectionary collective action 159–60

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intensity 91 Los Angeles (1992) 89, 90, 134–8, 139, 140, 150, 154 micro-level analysis 22, 88 military 56 narratives 91–2 organization 90 peasant 108 police brutality 104–05 political representation 84, 96, 131, 140 prison 108–09 race 91 segregationist 25 social movements 133–4, 138–9, 144–5 space (locality) 138–9, 143–4 strategic 90 three phases 121 UK 74, 83, 84, 85, 120–26, 131, 139, 140n14 urban 119, 134, 137n10, 138–40, 150, 171, 180 US 35, 55 youths 12, 56, 81, 91, 93, 94–8, 130, 142–3, 182 rising expectations 92 risk taking 46 Rwanda 17 sabotage 29, 57 Sarkozy, Nicolas 92–3, 95–6, 107, 128–30, 132, 141n15, 142 scabs 20, 21, 23 scattered attacks 16, 17, 152 Scottish National Party 75 segregation 91, 95, 137, 142 September 11 (2001) 29 Simitis, Costas 189, 191 SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) 41 social class 3, 12, 22, 92 conflict 11, 75 lower 11 middle 11, 75 working 74 social construction (see constructivist approaches) Social Democratic Party 67, 104 social dialogue 155

social esteem 99 social movements 9, 14, 15, 19–28, 34–7, 39–41, 46, 58, 85, 103, 104, 133, 138–9, 144–5, 175, 183, 186 anti-racist 92 networks 14, 47, 48–9, 51, 73, 81–5, 89–90 new (see new social movements) organizations (SMOs) 4, 5, 6, 17, 34, 103, 176 outcomes 13, 14, 31 political parties 103 riots 133–4 138–9, 144–5 repertoires (see repertoires of action, also protest repertoires) students (see student movements) tactics 13–15, 25, 35–6, 43, 46, 48, 71, 77, 81, 96 (see tactics) social networking 73 SOS Rascisme 92, 127 South Korea 42–4 space 42, 72, 78, 89, 91, 108, 111–12, 114–15, 117, 126, 130, 132, 138–9, 143, 160–63, 173 free (see free spaces) media 97 political 17 routines 161 scale shift 161 segregation 91 social 7, 17, 84 Spain 48, 107, 140 spontaneity 9, 47, 72, 83, 88, 94 squatters 69 state 3, 5, 6, 9, 12, 17, 20, 29, 30–31, 34–6, 43, 45, 48–50, 68, 71, 91, 103–06, 108, 111, 113–17, 127, 131, 143–4, 150, 169, 171, 177, 179, 184 of emergency 94, 119 non-democratic (see authoritarian regimes) repression 9–12, 24, 26, 32, 41–6, 48–50, 56–7, 64, 66–8, 95–6, 117, 165, 180 welfare 56, 91, 155 stigmatization (discrimination) 87–8, 95–6, 137, 141–3 strategic violence (see violence, strategic)

Index street barricades 43–4, 151 strike 20–1, 26 coal 23 general 6, 88–9 hunger 25, 29, 42, 48n2, 60n9 sit-down 21, 27 student 26 violent 26 wildcat 58 structural strain 70 student movement 3, 39, 48–51, 58, 59, 66, 67, 69, 179, 190 China 25, 41–2 Greece 47 (see also Greek December) Iran 45–6 Mexico 43 South Korea 43–5 student protests 11, 14, 26, 92, 119, 144, 164, 172, 174 students 104, 144, 150, 152, 157, 160, 165–9, 173–6, 178–81, 184–6, 190–91 high-school 39, 43, 47, 90, 174–6, 179, 181, 184, 191 Korean 41, 44 left-wing 39, 59, 62, 66 university 26, 40, 42–5, 49–50, 88, 92, 175–6 Sub-Saharan Africa 91, 93 suburbs 12, 17, 93, 94, 96, 134, 141–2, 152, 181 (see also balieues) suicide attacks 30, 124 symbolic battles (fights, conflicts) 24, 60n9, 75, 89, 98–9, 159, 166n8, 179 symbolic violence 89 Syria 114, 115, 116, 117, 149, 154 SYRIZA 152, 164, 176–8, 185 tactics 14 (see also protest tactics) hit-and-run 144 innovation 46, 48, 50–51 non-violent 19n1, 29, 36, 115 radical 14, 15, 71, 77, 81 repressive 115, 153 violent 13, 22, 30, 35–6, 96, 105, 178, 179 (see violence) tea party movement 19 temporality 157

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terrorism 5, 16, 21, 22n4, 29–30, 33, 35, 37, 55, 58, 66, 67, 71, 72n1, 87, 107, 127, 173 Thailand 3, 11, 103, 109, 113, 117, 149 Thessaloniki 151, 153, 173–5 Tiananmen Square 25, 41–3, 49–50 trade unions 4, 5, 58, 94, 97, 142, 150, 152, 153, 155, 184–6, 189–90 bank workers 189 building trades 20 declining credibility 155 electricity workers 191 railway workers 20 school teachers 185 university lecturers 184 transformative event 166–7, 169 transformative potential 167 transgressive networks 169 trigger events 69, 98, 118, 130 Tunisia 113–17, 149 Tupamaros 24 UK riots (see riots, UK) Ukraine 111–12, 115 unemployment 57, 67, 91, 92, 96, 99, 114, 115, 121, 122, 126, 127, 135, 137, 140, 141n17, 155, 178, 183 unions 142, 150, 152–3, 155, 179, 184–9, 190–91 (see also trade unions) United Kingdom (UK) 74, 83, 84, 85, 120–22, 126–7, 131 university occupations 88, 187 (see also occupations, buildings) urban decay 74 urban renovation 142 Vatopedi Monastery scandal 172 vengeance 22, 24, 127 Vietnam War 26, 69 vigilante 20, 32, 34, 168 violence 19, 21, 21n2, 26, 27–8, 71, 75, 76, 79, 80–81, 88, 91, 95–6, 106, 109, 113–17, 125, 129, 131, 134–7, 139, 152–4, 158, 164, 170, 174–81, 183, 188 constrained 22, 89 expressive 114 democracies 103, 105, 106

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interpersonal 123 irrational 12–13, 98 labor 26–7 mob 138 non-democracies 107–08 outcomes 33–6 physical 129, 136 police 9–11, 43, 46–7, 104, 106, 107, 152, 158, 180–81, 184 political 29–33, 55–6, 58, 65–6, 68–70, 73, 83, 87–8, 92 racist 124–5 right-wing 58, 62–3 state 104, 106, 114–15, 117 strategic 13–15, 20, 22–5, 88 threatened 19–20 trends 55, 56–8, 66–7 violent protest 3, 7–10, 16, 24, 33, 39, 56, 59–62, 64–6, 68–9, 71–5, 83, 103–08, 114, 117, 137, 145, 149–51, 154–6, 159, 160, 170 clashes 12, 56–7, 66, 68–9, 142–3, 174 repertoire 29, 31, 35, 65, 71–2, 74, 76–8, 85, 157, 181

voluntary associations 74, 76–8, 94, 96, 99 Watts riots 133–4, 136, 138 women’s movement 40, 41 working class 23, 27, 42, 74, 120–21, 126, 133n2, 141–2, 176, 185, 187 youth 56, 91, 155 World Social Forum 89 WUNC (worthiness, unity, numbers, commitment) 20, 25, 105, 161 xenophobia 58, 66, 68, 69 youth 11, 41, 47–8, 48n1, 50–51, 55, 93, 106, 114–17, 119, 120–21, 123–32, 133n2, 141–4, 151–2, 163, 173, 178, 181, 183, 185 immigrant 12, 91, 94 YouTube 45, 46, 114 zero-tolerance policing 129 Zones urbaines sensibles 91, 126, 128, 142