Power in Movement (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics) by Sidney G. Tarrow

Author:Sidney G. Tarrow [Tarrow, Sidney G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

Source: Adapted from Jennifer Earl, “Tanks, Tear Gas and Taxes: Toward a Theory of Movement Repression,” 2003.

Although a rhetorical rollback of some of these repressive techniques occurred under the Obama Administration, underneath the liberal rhetoric, the American state has normalized most of them (Margulies forthcoming).

The threat to protesters and potential protesters is not limited to the use of overt instruments of repression. Using the term “protest control” rather than “suppression,” Jennifer Earl (2003) outlines a typology that distinguishes among twelve different kinds of control, which combine three fundamental dimensions: (1) the identity of the actor engaging in protest control (e.g., state agents closely connected to national elites, (2) state agents loosely connected to them and to non-state actors); and (3) the form of the action (outright coercion versus channeling to encourage or discourage certain types of actions), and whether the actions are covert or overt. Table 8.1 reports Earl's typology but for simplicity excludes the visibility of protest control. Earl's work shows that we cannot reduce the potential or actual threats to protesters to the overt use of police violence against them, as we will see below.

Coercive Control

Coercion of protesters (the left hand column of Table 8.1) was the major recourse of most regimes until the 20th century, even in liberal polities such as the United States, where no national police force existed, but where state militias and private detective agencies were often employed to repress strikers. However, direct repression began to lose its sting after World War I, when major expansion of the concept of civil liberties was achieved by the courts (Stone 2004). Thus, although antiwar protesters, radicals, and anarchists were severely repressed during that war, by the 1930s many of the court decisions that condemned them had been reversed (pp. 226-ff.). Posner and Vermeule even see a “libertarian ratchet” in American civil liberties from the 1930s on (pp. 146–149).

The invention of nonviolent resistance helped to neutralize the effectiveness of coercive methods, because nonviolent protesters appeared to welcome incarceration (Sharp 1973). In response to the strategic weapon of nonviolent protest, the police and the courts began to accept as legitimate forms of action that they had previously repressed. Thus, the sit-in, punished almost universally by incarceration when it was first employed, was increasingly accepted in the 1960s as a form of speech. Diffused among progressive and liberal groups in the 1960s, the sit-in even spread to their ideological enemies in the 1980s, as the antiabortion movement gained ground (Staggenborg 1991).

Channeling Contention

Perhaps because of the growing ineffectiveness of coercive controls, states have turned to some degree toward what Earl calls “channeling.” Though outright repression is more brutal and frightening, evidence indicates that increasing the costs of organization and mobilization is a more effective strategy for reducing contention in the long run (Tilly 1978: 100–102). For example, when Steven Barkan compared Southern cities that used the courts to block civil rights activities versus those that used the police to repress them, he found that the former were able to resist desegregation longer than the latter (1984).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.