Spatial Strategies in the Policing of Protest: The Liberal Democratic State and the Contestation of Public Space

In the contemporary era of increased economic globalization, the role of the state as the entity embodying supreme political authority has come under scrutiny. One reading of it views state sovereignty as being deterritorialized and transcending to a global level, while another post 9/11 view suggests that the state’s ability to exercise violence through regulation and concentration within its demarcated boundaries is evocative of “territorial fundamentalism.”¹ Both hold very important spatial connotations and require (de)territorial(ized) strategies of power.

The following discussion will not focus on the role of state sovereignty vis-à-vis globalization or international relations, but will instead seek to examine the notion of internal sovereign power in relation to the state and public space. The state, as supreme political authority, is responsible for the maintenance of order within the places and spaces that are constitutive of its territorial boundaries. In “Western” liberal democracies, the notion of “public” or “democratic” space is invoked as a forum for dialogue and discussion amongst “citizens” wishing to voice opposition and exercise democratic dissent.

* Photo by Indymedia

Within this notion, the phenomenon of street politics has been revitalized, reminiscent of the massive demonstrations of the 1960s. Large social protests around international ministerial summits, as was witnessed at the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle in 1999, has raised global public awareness around a mass movement that is organizing and protesting against inter-governmental organizations (IGOs) such as the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, “elite” informal networks such as the G8 and World Economic Forum (WEF), and macro-regional organizations such as the EU and NAFTA.² This invokes questions surrounding the existence of “public” or “democratic” space in the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization and whether or not the politics around these spaces have changed: How do we understand political protest in spatial terms? Is there such a thing as democratic space in Western liberal democracies? This essay will examine the role of the modern democratic state and the exercise of sovereignty in the contestation of “public space” in an era of “alter-globalization” protests³ and raise questions about the state’s legitimacy.

The first section will be devoted to constructing a theoretical infrastructure through defining and articulating an understanding of the notions of violence and state sovereignty, the “dialectic of public space”, and the phenomenon of police territoriality in the maintenance of public order. By gaining insight into the notion of the legitimization and monopolization of violence inherent in the geopolitical realities of the modern state, a discussion can be opened up concerning the “dialectic of public space” in which the liberal state must allow for democratic dissent yet the function of police territoriality is responsible for the maintenance of order within public spatialities. This will set the stage for the “clash” in the frontiers of public space outside of international ministerial summits in which the spatial strategies, manifested in “negotiated management” versus “escalated force”, adopted by police in the contestation of space can be scrutinized. It is hoped that this theoretical analysis, using empirical examples from the “clash” between the “alter-globalization” movement and the state in the last ten years, will contribute a rich, geographical dimension to the existing literature.

Sovereign Territoriality and the Monopoly of Violence

Violence is inextricably linked to order and territory. The foundation of social order in modern political thought is predicated on the capacity for violence which is manifested in the sovereign state. The need for such a capacity is a fundamental point of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, in which the sovereign is authorized through contract to take whatever action is necessary to maintain order internally.⁴ This form of regulating human conduct does not preclude the use of violence if necessary in what Barry Hindness calls the “domestification of terror”, and can be synonymously referred to as the tyranny of territoriality.⁵ The legitimization and monopolization of violence in the hands of the sovereign also has profound implications for how territory is conceptualized.

The concept of territory cannot be disassociated with the notion of the constant threat of violence imposed by the sovereign. Just as Max Weber had acknowledged that the state retains the monopolization of the legitimate use of violence over a given territory, political geographers have also recently made the link between violence and the state more generally.⁶ Weber’s approach to the state recognized internal territorial control through the claim to the legitimate use of force exercised by the state’s establishment of an organized administration in ensuring and sustaining order.⁷ Similarly, Nicholas Blomley notes that violence is sanctioned within the state, which has the legitimate monopoly to use violence legally, whether it is by police officers, the military, or capital punishment.⁸

However, Blomley also notes that there has been a hesitation within the discourse of political geography of associating law and violence, as both appear antithetical to one another.⁹ By raising questions regarding the ontological assumptions inherent in the liberal discourse, such as the contention that violence is located outside the law, new ways of conceptualizing violence’s manifestation, its agents, and its legitimization can be investigated. This can be done by looking at the “juridico-political notion” of territorial spaces (and places) in relation to liberal democratic states. Dalby rightfully claims that places, which are inherently political, are “secured by the drawing of lines and the operation of territorial strategies that ensure control over demarcated areas.”¹⁰ The direction of this paper, however, will flow with the notion of space, which may not have the same distinct demarcations, but nonetheless is similarly influenced and affected by the territorial strategies of the sovereign.

Non-demarcated spatialities exist within the territorial confines of the state in which the sovereign reserves, and at times exercises, the right to assert its control and maintain public order - including when such forums are used for voicing political dissent. Within traditional notions of political geography, the relationship between the state, its citizens, and these spatial specificities is seen as facilitating political possibilities and actions while excluding and silencing others. Indeed, the modern geographical imagination revolving around the state and the control over invisible boundaries serves to silence other political possibilities by securing mobility and space. The state’s securitization of space through force is testament to the efficacy of territorial strategies of power.¹¹ Here, the logic of security is synonymous with spatial exclusion as the state works to (re)assert its control over spaces that are supposedly public or democratic.

“Dialectic of Public Space”

The contestation of space in which the state reserves the right to spatial exclusion through force if necessary raises questions surrounding the notion of the “dialectic of public space” in Western liberal democracies. When attempting to visualize spatialities around notions of public dissent in the modern state, one may invoke scenes of demonstrations in front of public buildings, in public parks, or street marches that have a specific destination, be it private or public. There is an assumption that although the state has lain concrete over spaces in the construction of urban geographies, the street remains a public place, and a necessary venue for democracy, outside the walls of government institutions. A territorial element exists among the concretized walkways and roadways because, while the state maintains sovereign jurisdiction over these spaces and is in charge of protecting its citizens through the maintenance of public order, it must simultaneously allow for freedom of speech and democratic dissent.

Referring to public space in legal terms, Don Mitchell refers to the regulation of this type of public forum as necessarily having the least restrictive laws governing the exercise of speech. Laws regulating speech in streets, parks, and other places open to the public since time immemorial must be “rigorously content neutral” and must be open to individuals who are interested in coming together to debate or voice dissent. However, the “public forum doctrine” is entrenched alongside the same juridical notions that are reminiscent of the liberal adherence to democratic ideology which exclaims that, “the free exchange of ideas can occur only when public space is orderly, controlled…and safe.”¹²

As a result, the “dialectic of public space” has been deemed an “inescapable conundrum.”¹³ Mitchell posits that, “the central contradiction at the heart of public space is that it demands a certain disorder and unpredictability to function as a democratic public space, and yet democratic theory posits that a certain order and rationality are vital to the success of democratic discourse.”¹⁴ The “dialectic of public space” lies at the heart of liberal democracy, where we have seen that the state as an institution monopolizes the capacity to exercise legitimate coercive force, yet also functions as the neutral administrator of public space.¹⁵ While the principles of liberalism emphasize the necessity of political decision-making transpiring in a neutral manner, the rights of all citizens must also be protected in this process.

However, it has been posited that the legal framework constitutive of the “dialectic of public space is not necessarily neutral. For instance, while it has been acknowledged that the judiciary has contributed to the progress of including those traditionally excluded from public spaces, there has always been a desire to control dissenters through maintaining order in the protection of the dominant interests of society.¹⁶ Where in the past this has been used largely against radical workers, we will see that it also plays a role in dealing with the new social movements organizing around international ministerial meetings.

The “dialectic of public space” materializes around counter summits where it is arguable that public space is not something that is altruistically granted by the state to those who wish to voice dissent, but rather it is a phenomenon that must always be “produced”. Public space is produced through a dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, order and disorder, rationality and irrationality, and violence and peaceful dissent.¹⁷ The status of “space” can only be created and maintained as “public” through those who seek to control and order dissent and those who seek out places to organize politically in an unmediated fashion.¹⁸

Public space is not only produced by social forces, but it must also be taken through constant struggle. In territorial terms, public space becomes a representational place where oppositional political organization (and reclamation) occurs outside of the framework of the state. Social groups must claim space in public in order to voice their concerns to a wider audience. As a result, public space occupies an important but contested ideological position in liberal democracies. The occupation of space has always been a necessary component of political protest and whether social forces from the left or right of the political spectrum attempt to create and take certain public places, the established power of the state may feel threatened by the exercise of public rights within public space.¹⁹

* Photo by T. Cochrane

Police Territoriality

The potential for conflict between social forces and the state that is produced through the phenomenon of the “dialectic of public space” has materialized throughout the history of liberal democracy. The role of the police as the arm of the state responsible for maintaining internal order is important for the discussion of protest and policing public space.²⁰ In the contemporary era of transnational “alter-globalization” protest, oppositional organization in public spaces around international ministerial summits has created challenges for the police who have been forced to devise and adopt new spatial strategies in the policing of protest. Police forces constitute a main operative component of the “dialectic of public space” as a balance is sought between respecting demonstration rights and the maintenance of public order coupled with the protection of domestic and foreign dignitaries.²¹ Spatial control remains a crucial necessity for the state and where the ordering and controlling of space is seen as absent and lacking, as was in the case of the “battle of Seattle” in 1999, such ineffective territoriality is equivocal to an “incomplete state power”.²²

Since Seattle, the policing of protests in Western liberal democracies have focused on securing mobilization around and within public space. Within this phenomenon, it becomes necessary to invoke the Weberian notion of the state maintaining the legitimate capacity to use force combined with Gidden’s notion of “internal pacification”, the means by which the modern state seeks to survey and control its population.²³ Supplementing these notions by factoring in the role of the police into the equation, Bittner proclaims that as agents of state law, the police are the social agency charged with the capacity to use force legitimately.²⁴

The central role of the police in society revolves around the authoritative capacity to use force. When summoned by the state, the police are expected to exercise their coercive power to secure control over space.²⁵ Herein lies the importance of the application and implementation of “police territoriality” in which police forces follow a spatial strategy to “affect, influence, or control resources and people, by controlling area.”²⁶ Through the capacity of the police to control space, the function of protest policing involves the creation, maintenance, and/or restoration of order. In this way, the police become “agents of territoriality” charged with the maintenance of order within the state.²⁷

As a result, an effective police force has become a requisite component of the modern state. As the institution of law enforcement evolved and had its powers expand in the service of the state, the police became the primary agents of legitimate coercion within internal geopolitics as well as a “personification of the values of the center.”²⁸ As a result, the police “stand as the state’s principal repository of coercive force” while personifying its power as the symbolic (muscle of the) Leviathan among the populace and occasionally resorts to donning riot gear to secure mobility within the public spaces of democracy. Therefore, as agents of the state’s territorial authority, the police must ensure state hegemony through repelling challenges to its authority. Political protesters that gather in and attempt to “produce” public space constitute such a challenge.²⁹ In turn, these challenges that materialize outside of ministerial summits require spatial tactics on the part of the “agents of territoriality.”

Clash in the Frontiers of Public Space

The phenomenon of police territoriality is invoked when there is a perceived threat to public order, transpiring as a result of a new spatial “clash” between competing social forces. Struggles over space are not limited to militarized forms and may also encompass ideas, forms, images, and imaginings.³⁰ This is where conflicting imaginative geographies engage each other, in the frontiers of public spaces. Although the frontier appears to be a neutral boundary, it is recognized that it serves a condition of the possibility of a violent geography.³¹ The notion of the frontier - which may be figurative, temporal, and spatial - is useful for analyzing the contestation of public space between the state and a decentralized, non-hierarchical “anti-globalization” movement that is often portrayed and viewed as negative, violent, and antithetical to the orderliness inherent in the modern state. Thus, to conceptualize the frontier in this context necessarily pits the regulated rationality of state violence in maintaining order against what is deemed as irrational disorderliness.³² The notion of the frontier relates to producing public space and creating new territory and new spatialities. Therefore, the frontier is not constant as it is shifting with the movement of the movement. A brief historical analysis reveals that both staticité and fluidity have characterized the methodological approach of the police in controlling order in the frontiers as police have adopted different strategies at different times to deal with democratic dissent.

Policing Protest: Competing Paradigms

Historically, the police have used different modes for controlling protest in Western liberal democracies which are embodied by dichotomous variables. Police actions vary in terms of the degree of force used (brutal versus soft), the number of prohibited behaviours (repressive versus tolerant), the number of repressed groups (diffused versus selective), police respect of the law (illegal versus legal), the timing of police intervention (reactive versus preventive), the degree of communication with the demonstrators (confrontational versus consensual), the degree of “adaptability” (rigid versus flexible), the degree of formalization of the rules of the game (formal versus informal), the degree of preparation and training (professional versus improvised).³³

The combination of these various dimensions constitutes two divergent styles of protest policing. The first gives low priority to the right to demonstrate and is known as the “escalated force” model. This mode is characterized by minimal communication between police and demonstrators, intolerance of innovative forms of protest, and frequent use of coercive force or illegal methods such as agents provocateurs. By contrast, the other mode, the “negotiated management model”, prioritizes the right to demonstrate peacefully and is characterized by communication, the allowance of disruptive forms of protest, and the avoidance (as much as possible) of coercive means.³⁴

According to many studies, after the great wave of protests that enveloped the 1960s, the police have sought to develop more tolerant modes of policing protest.³⁵ (1998). Thus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and into the 1990s, the traditional strategy of “escalated force”, which was based on harsh police repression of even minor forms of transgression, gave way to a new policing strategy of “negotiated management” with a focus on “de-escalation”.³⁶ During this phase, the police, as the coercive arm of the nation-state, to a large degree upheld the guarantee of the right to peaceful demonstration as exemplified in the “dialectic of public space”.³⁷

Shaping rather than quashing dissent has been a main historical task of the modern liberal state. A primary objective has been to shape and control dissent through its regulation and incorporation into the legal framework of the democratic state. The challenges posed by protesters invoke the “dialectic of public space” and the logical response of the police in respecting the democratic rights of political demonstration is through strategies of institutionalization. Meyer and Tarrow delineate three distinct but complementary aspects of institutionalization:

• 1. routinization of collective action, such that challengers and authorities can both adhere to a common script, recognizing familiar patterns as well as potentially dangerous deviations;
• 2. inclusion and marginalization, whereby challengers willing to adhere to established routines will be granted access to political exchanges in mainstream institutions, while those who refuse can be shut out of conversations through either repression or neglect;
• 3. cooptation, which means that challengers alter their claims and tactics to ones that can be pursued without disrupting the normal practice of politics.³⁸

In short, both parties reach agreements as to the manuscript for action, as part of the negotiated management strategy employed by the state.

However, it can be argued that the attempt at incorporating dissent with the framework of the state has become unravelled when contextualizing it with the “alter-globalization” movement and the “escalation of force” strategy now readopted by police. The WTO meeting and ensuing “battle of Seattle” in 1999 in which activists blocked key intersections and prevented delegates from entering meetings resulted in the police devising new techniques and strategies to control space and prevent such an occurrence from happening again.³⁹ In this pivotal moment, the “battle of Seattle” may have triggered a re-escalation of the use of coercive force as the police began to develop new techniques and practices for controlling spaces outside of ministerial summits across Europe and North America.

As a result, the question has been posed as to whether the adoption of new policing strategies is a re-emergence of the “escalated force” model, or is it representative of a new “repressive protest policing style” that has apparently replaced the previous “negotiated management” model.⁴⁰ Regardless of how it is characterized, coercive force seems to have become normative in the spatial strategies of control concerning the maintenance of order in public spaces encompassing contentious politics. As we will see in the following section, what we are indeed witnessing is an era of renewed “escalated force” in the “clash” in the frontiers of public space.

Spatial Strategies of Protest Policing

The contestation of public space transpires through the “clash” at the frontiers and is characterized by a struggle in and over specific territorial spaces. This battle is one that seeks to define and redefine the political spaces representative of national (and transnational) power.⁴¹ As a result, the “clash” is indicative of the ways in which public spaces for democratic deliberation are being revitalized and alternatively threatened by the protesting of the “alter-globalization” movement and the state’s response.²⁹ Abby Peterson speaks of contentious politics in the “frontier-lands” outside of ministerial summits in which the notion of space has been extraterritorialized due to spaces now being under-defined, under-determined, and under-regulated. Therefore, we can posit that Peterson’s analysis represents a break from the “negotiated management” strategy in a different form (not through policing tactics per se, but in conceptualizing spatialities), whereas spatial control was once rooted in territorial strategies of defining, determining, and regulating space. In this mode, the “police’s adversaries were easily identifiable and could be contained in their presubscribed roles and places.”⁴² Agreements were forged between protesters and police predetermining which spaces were accessible and which spaces were off limits. The police fixed boundaries and led marches along predetermined routes and for the most part, protesters were respective and compliant, bringing order to contentious politics.²⁹

There are elements of this strategy still at work as police attempt to control territories outside of international ministerial summits. Although extraterritorial tactics may be utilized by activists, the police employ counter-techniques to ensure spatial control and the maintenance of public order.⁴³ The control of space is central in the social control of dissent and the state goes to great lengths to manipulate and secure space, thus shaping and controlling democratic dissent. The adoption of strategic geographical tactics by the state along with the attempt to spatially contain democratic dissent within these geographies is invoked by visuals of fences, perimeters, and protest pens. In the securitization of space around ministerial meetings, police have come to realize, since Seattle, that the modification of strategies revolving around geographical space is necessary in controlling the mass movement of demonstrators converging in the streets around summits.

The state has developed a knowledgeable appreciation for the role that geographical location plays in the social control of dissent and pacification of social movements. As Fernandez details, the control of space begins with the selection of geographical location:

“Currently, there is an increasing trend towards selecting sites that make mobilization more difficult, locating the meetings in places that are hard to access, easy to isolate, and that have little local help for the movement. Taken together, these tactics set the stage for facilitating the control of space and for decreasing the mobilization and potential force of the movement.”⁴⁴

Seattle set a precedent whereby meeting planners now attempt, for the most part, to select locations for ministerial summits in locations that are hard for protesters to access, are easily defensible, and have little movement history. In neoliberal globalization summits held for international financial institutions (IFIs), economic regionalization, and the G8, in places such as Qatar, Cancun, Kananaskis, Georgia, and Montebello, physical control of the environment by the state has had the effect of minimizing dissent.

Fernandez invokes Foucault’s analogy of social control as disease control in gaining an understanding of the dynamics of protest policing.⁴⁵ Foucault analyzed the power mechanisms involved in controlling the Black Plague (or any plague) which required the strict management and portioning of space through containment, isolation, and separation so that the disease would not spread. Fernandez equates these same tactics (contain, isolate, separate) with police techniques towards controlling protesters within public spaces where activists are contained in an area so that the disturbance does not spread (like a disease), separate and isolate those who are infected (the “radical” elements), and divide and control the space and time around the meetings.²⁹ The method of “corralling” demonstrators into “protest pens” is done by confining people into relatively small, fenced off areas established by police for control purposes.⁴⁶ In the case of the march against the World Economic Forum in New York City in 2002, when marchers arrived at a pre-determined destination the police corralled them into groups of approximately 2,000 in order to contain them in neat, manageable boxes. In effect, the politics of location revolving around a strategy of minimizing the effect of protest has been supplemented by police tactics that lead protesters to locations where they could more easily be arrested.⁴⁷

These various spatial strategies utilized in the policing of protest are important because they show the attempt at the spatial regulation of dissent. However, they also have the effect of legitimizing a violent police response when such regulations are not adhered to. If the demonstrators fail to adhere to the intrinsic legal geographies of confinement within their designated routes or “pens”, then a violent response is warranted against the disobedience of persons moving through or occupying alternative public spatialities.

As most of the case studies reveal in Donatella della Porta’s and Herbert Reiter’s volume on the Policing of Transnational Protest, there has been a tendency for policing strategies to be “overly coercive” with an inclination towards the use of excessive force in particular circumstances.⁴⁸ The editors acknowledge the use of coercive strategies, although differential across national boundaries, with adaptations to new protest repertoires, police frames, and technologies which include a heavy police presence, a range of ‘less-lethal’ weapons, combined with non-selective mass arrests. Furthermore, as part of the regression away from repression towards “selective” groups as was fundamental to the “negotiated management” strategy, charges by the police have occasionally triggered violent reactions by previously peaceful groups of demonstrators, as was witnessed in Genoa in 2001.⁴⁹

International ministerial summits pose particular problems for the police around the question of the “dialectic of public space”, as the protection of foreign dignitaries usually take precedence over peaceful demonstrators. The host nation-state has a symbolic need to “assert itself before international public opinion as able to display a monopoly of force on its own territory, an indispensable corollary of its sovereignty in international interactions.”⁵⁰ Here, spatialities of control are enacted by colour-codified systems of zoning by police to signify the degree to which dissent is tolerable in spaces outside of summits. Thus, the spatial fortification of ministerial meetings has the effect of creating dangerous situations as police in Genoa were given the authorization to use lethal force if they perceived an attempted breach of the “red zone”.⁵¹ In the aftermath, young Carlo Giuliani lay dead after being shot point blank by the Italian carabinieri.

Spaces in and around the “red zone” outside of international ministerial summits are geographical localities of contention between demonstrators and police. The erecting of fences is a key spatial strategy in the zoning of space in which the overall police strategy appears to be wedded to the occupation of territorial space.⁵² By erecting barriers and creating “security” or “frozen” zones, the police seek to control space and contain the movement of large amounts of people around the meeting location.⁵³ In effect, these zones become “paramilitarized”, as the “fortification” of space becomes a crucial tactic in the “last line of defense” between protesters and police.⁵⁴

Although the coercive use of force by police, as exemplified in the indiscriminate police charge, is evident in the violent clashes often erupting within fluid spaces in the frontiers of public space, the spectacle of violence often materializes in confrontations that are staged at the fence.⁵⁵ Invoking old forms of civil disobedience in the form of “pushing and shoving”, demonstrators and police engage in physical confrontation in the contestation over space as was evident in Prague, Gothenburg, and Genoa.⁵⁶ However, confrontations at the fence embody other diverse forms, from the use of “less-lethal” weapons by police to the creative symbolic provocation of the protesters, for example, retaliating against water cannons with toy water pistols.⁵⁷

The use of non-violent direct action is the overall preferred method by the majority of groups comprising the “alter-globalization” movement. However, it can be argued that the state and the media undergo a campaign of psychological warfare against the population with the purpose of instilling fear by blaming violent clashes on radical fringes and urban guerrillas, while also seeking to blame the movement as a whole for its ambiguous position towards the use of “violence”.⁵⁸ On the other hand, the heavy-handed use of force by police has been criticized by the movement and other elements of the public discourse which argue that the use of disproportionate actions infringe on the civil and political liberties of the majority of peaceful demonstrators.⁵⁹

Police have used brutal tactics in preventative forms of policing (as was witnessed in Genoa),⁶⁰ indiscriminate use of non-lethal weapons such as tear gas and rubber bullets on peaceful demonstrators and innocent bystanders, the use of firearms in Gothenburg and Genoa, unjustified arrests, mistreatment while in custody, and “judicial repression” in Prague and Barcelona amongst numerous other localities.⁶¹ Subsequently, there has been a reactionary censuring of police repression. The EU Network of Independent Experts in Fundamental Rights (CFR-CDF), set up by the European Commission in September 2002, emphasized: “Police conduct at demonstrations organized on the occasion of big international summit meetings constitutes a source of particular concern”, as it outlined the extreme violence of police in Gothenburg and Genoa.⁶² Furthermore, five years after the G8 summit in Genoa, Amnesty International released a public statement condemning Italian police brutality and impunity.⁶³ Therefore, we have seen that in the spaces of dissent and contention outside of ministerial meetings, the moment of practical confrontation by the imperatives of government is testimony to the violent reassertion of state control over public spaces.⁶⁴ The securitization of mobility and the containment of dissent illustrate the crucial role that geographic space performs, but these tactics also call into question the very existence of democratic space, as well as the legitimacy of the state.

The State and Democracy

The processes by which the police attempt to control space are basic components of the exercise of state power. The control of space is crucial to maintaining public order as the ability to dictate the nature of space is to exercise tremendous power within the democratic state.⁶⁵ As we have seen, the breakdown of the incorporation of dissent and the redevelopment of a strategy based on “escalated force”, characterized by a spectacle of violence engulfing democratic spaces, leads to a new geography within liberal democracies and raises questions concerning whether or not the toleration of dissent is withering away.⁶⁶ This calls into question the liberal state’s performative role in the “dialectic of public space” which is to allow for democratic dissent while also maintaining public order. Logically, this has led some to question the quality of democracy and the very legitimacy of the modern state.

Criticisms have ranged from mild to harsh. After the debacle of the state and the police in Seattle in 1999, Steve Herbert has modified Mitchell’s “dialectic” as he sees the role of the liberal democratic state as being more than an entity responsible for allowing democratic dissent and the maintenance of public order. His most critical views of the state are that it embodies the characteristics of being, “a complex, fractured, and often inept social organization” and “a handmaiden to global capitalism.”⁶⁷ In the instance of the Seattle street protests, the actions of the police worked towards delegitimizing the state through the protection of an undemocratic inter-governmental organization⁶⁸ which calls into question the whole notion of the state’s alleged loyalty to democracy, and through unprovoked acts of violence which shatters the ideal of a neutral state.⁶⁹ In this way, it is argued that a political space is opened, allowing for the emergence of alternative social forces.⁷⁰

Thus, despite evolving police tactics in an apparent hastened tendency towards violent force on the part of the state, new geographies of resistance emerge around the notions of decentralization, non-hierarchical formation, and non-violence to combat the violence of the state, giving hope for the materialization of alternative spatialities. Indeed, spaces within the frontiers of democratic societies are not given nor guaranteed by a neutral administrator, thus necessitating the “clash” and the struggle.

“The construction, protection and maintenance of spaces for challenges to the social and political order are vital for ongoing democratic processes, not only for the dissemination of the messages of protesters and the construction of public opinion, but also for the health of the democratic nation-state.”⁷¹

The health of the modern liberal state is dependent upon the voices of its challengers and is representative of the alternative spaces that activists are opening for democratic discussion.⁷²

Finally, police territoriality plays a fundamental role within the notion of the “dialectic of public space” as the police are the coercive arm responsible for the maintenance of internal order within the territorial boundaries of the nation-state. The delicate balancing act of respecting freedoms and individual rights with the protection of public security and public order in democratic spaces and the degree to which this balance is upheld is a way to measure the effectiveness and legitimacy of democratic societies. Therefore, the spatial strategies employed by police within the frontiers of public space outside international ministerial summits, reflect the amount of respect that the state shows for the civil and political rights of its citizens and the overall quality of democracy in the political system.⁷³

Bibliography

Amnesty International. Public Statement: Five Years After the G8 Policing Operations:

Italian Authorities Must Take Concrete Action to Prevent and Prosecute Police Brutality in all Circumstances. (21 July 2006). Available: <http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGEUR300052006?open&of=ENG-ITA> (18 November 2007).

Bessel, Richard and Clive Emsley. Patterns of Provocation: Police and Public Disorder. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000.

Blomley, Nicholas. Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93(1), (2003), 121-141.

Blunt, Alison and Jane Wills. Dissident Geographies: An Introduction to Radical Ideas and Practice. Harlow, England: Prentice Hall, 2000.

Clark, John P. and Camille Martin. Anarchy, Geography, Modernity. The Radical Social Thought of Elisee Reclus. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2004.

Conway, Janet M. Identity, Place, Knowledge: Social Movements Contesting Globalization. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2004.

Dalby, Simon. Political Space: Autonomy, Liberalism, and Empire. Alternatives 30 (2005), 415-441.

della Porta, Donatella et al., eds. Globalization From Below: Transnational Activists and Protest Networks. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

della Porta, Donatella and Herbert Reiter, eds., Policing Protest: The Control of Mass Demonstrations in Western Democracies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

della Porta, Donatella, Abby Peterson, and Herbert Reiter, eds. The Policing of Transnational Protest. Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006.

Elden, Stuart. Governmentality, Calculation, Territory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 25 (2007), 562-580.

Epstein, Barbara (2001). ‘Anarchism and the Anti-Globalization Movement’, Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, Vol. 53, Issue 4: 1-14.

Ericson, Richard and Aaron Doyle. Globalization and the Policing of Protest: The Case of APEC 1997. British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 50, No. 4 (December 1999), 589-608.

The EU Network of Independent Experts in Fundamental Rights (CFR-CDF), Report on the Situation of Fundamental Rights in the European Union and its Member States in 2002. Available: <http://www.statewatch.org/news/2003/apr/CFR-CDF.2002.report.en.pdf> (1 December 2007), 58.

Fernandez, Luis. Policing Space: Social Control and the Anti-Corporate Globalization Movement. The Canadian Journal of Police & Security Studies, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter 2005), 241-249.

Fyfe, Nicholas R. The Police, Space and Society: The Geography of Policing. Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1991), 249-267.

Habermas, Jurgen. Legitimation Crisis, translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2000.

Herbert, Steve. The “Battle of Seattle” Revisited: Or, Seven Views of a Protest-Zoning State. Political Geography 26 (2007), 601-619.

Herbert, Steve. Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.Hindness, Barry. Terrortory. Alternatives 31 (2006), 243-257.

Klein, Naomi. Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front of the Globalization Debate. London: Flamingo, 2002.

Leitner, Helga, Jamie Peck and Eric S. Sheppard, eds. Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers. New York: The Guilford Press, 2007.

MacLaughlin, Jim. State-Centred Social Science and the Anarchist Critique: Ideology in Political Geography. Antipode 18:1 (1986), 11-38.

McPhail, Clark and John D. McCarty. Places of Protest: The Public Forum in Principle and Practice. Mobilization: An International Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 2 (June 2006), 229-247.

Meyer, David S. and Sidney Tarrow. The Social Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.

Mitchell, Don. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: The Guilford Press, 2003.

Mitchell, Don and Lynn A. Staeheli. Permitting Protest: Parsing the Fine Geography of Dissent in America. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 29, No. 4 (December 2005), 796-813.

Nicholls, Walter J. The Geographies of Social Movements. Geography Compass, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2007), 607-622.

O’Neill, Kate. Transnational Protest: States, Circuses, and Conflict on the Frontlines of Global Politics. International Studies Review, Vol. 6 (2004), 233-251.

Opp, Karl-Dieter and Wolfgang Roehl. Repression, Micromobilization, and Political Protest. Social Forces, Vol. 69, No. 2 (December 1990), 521-547.

Rupert, Mark. Anticapitalist Convergence? Anarchism, Socialism, and the Global Justice Movement, in Manfred Steger, ed. Rethinking Globalism. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.

Rupert, Mark (2000). Ideologies of Globalization: Contending Visions of a New World Order (London: Routledge).

Sack, Robert David. Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1993.

Shukaitis, Stevphen, and David Graeber with Erika Biddle, eds. Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations//Collective Theorization. Oakland: AK Press, 2007.

Starr, Amory (2000). Naming the Enemy: Anti-Corporate Movements Confront Globalization (London: Zed Books).

Zick, Thomas. Speech and Spatial Tactics. Texas Law Review, Vol. 84, No. 3 (2006), 581-651.

Notes:

1. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000), and Barry Hindness, Terrortory, Alternatives 31 (2006), 256. [↩]
2. Donatella Della Porta, Abby Peterson, and Herbert Reiter, eds, The Policing of Transnational Protest (Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006), 1. [↩]
3. ”Alter-globalization”, or the alternative globalization movement, is an ideological trend within the current global resistance to redefine globalization in an alternative way. “Alter-globalization”, therefore, attempts to rebuild global governance and transnational relations not just through institutional reforms but also, and mainly, through the plural participation of grassroots from below in transnational solidarity networks. It aims to put the totality of globalization on a genuinely democratic track. See S.A. Hamed Hosseini, Beyond Practical Dilemmas and Conceptual Reductions: the Emergence of an ‘Accommodative Consciousness’ in the Alternative Globalization Movement, Portal, Vol. 3 (2006), 5. The movement is also about creating alternative spaces. From a perspective of spatial imaginaries within the movement, see Michael Osterweil and Graeme Chesters, “Global Uprisings: Towards a Politics of the Artisan,” in Shukaitis, Stevphen, and David Graeber with Erika Biddle, eds. Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations//Collective Theorization (Oakland: AK Press, 2007). [↩]
4. Hindness, Terrortory, 247. [↩]
5. Ibid., 251. [↩]
6. Nicholas Blomley, Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93(1), (2003), 121. [↩]
7. Steve Herbert, Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 14. [↩]
8. Blomley, Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence, 121. [↩]
9. Ibid. [↩]
10. Simon Dalby, Political Space: Autonomy, Liberalism, and Empire, Alternatives 30 (2005), 429. [↩]
11. Ideas derived from personal conversations with Simon Dalby. [↩]
12. Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: The Guilford Press, 2003), 48. [↩]
13. Steve Herbert, The “Battle of Seattle” Revisited: Or, Seven Views of a Protest-Zoning State, Political Geography 26 (2007), 603. [↩]
14. Mitchell, The Right to the City, 130. [↩]
15. Herbert, The “Battle of Seattle” Revisited, 603. [↩]
16. Mitchell, The Right to the City, 50-51. [↩]
17. Ibid., 51. [↩]
18. Ibid., 129. [↩]
19. Ibid., 149-150. [↩]
20. The police became the principal agency responsible for safeguarding internal security and public order, thus marginalizing the role of the military which has increasingly been directed outwards. See della Porta, Policing Protest, 1. [↩]
21. della Porta, The Policing of Transnational Protest, 188. [↩]
22. Herbert, Policing Space, 15. [↩]
23. Herbert, The “Battle of Seattle” Revisited, 604-05. [↩]
24. Herbert, Policing Space, 12. [↩]
25. Ibid., 10. [↩]
26. Robert David Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5. [↩]
27. Herbert, Policing Space, 10. [↩]
28. Herbert, The “Battle of Seattle” Revisited, 605. [↩]
29. Ibid. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
30. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1993), 7. [↩]
31. Blomley, Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence, 135. [↩]
32. Ibid., 124. [↩]
33. Donatella Della Porta, and Herbert Reiter, eds., Policing Protest: The Control of Mass Demonstrations in Western Democracies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 4. [↩]
34. della Porta, Policing Transnational Protest, 13 and 175. [↩]
35. della Porta, Policing Protest. [↩]
36. della Porta, Policing Transnational Protest, 3. [↩]
37. Ibid., 4. [↩]
38. David S. Meyer and Sidney Tarrow, The Social Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 21. [↩]
39. Luis Fernandez, Policing Space: Social Control and the Anti-Corporate Globalization Movement, The Canadian Journal of Police & Security Studies, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter 2005). [↩]
40. della Porta, Policing Transnational Protest. The editors acknowledge that the advent of negotiated management did not signify the disappearance of coercive intervention, but represented the dominant protest policing style of the decades following the 1968 protest cycle; as well, it may be rash to conclude that the “negotiated management” model has been completely replaced by a new protest policing style (177 and 182). [↩]
41. Abby Peterson, Policing Contentious Politics at Transnational Summits: Darth Vader or the Keystone Cops?in della Porta et al., Policing Transnational Protest, 44. [↩]
42. Ibid., 47. [↩]
43. Fernandez, Policing Space. [↩]
44. Ibid., 243. [↩]
45. Ibid, 247. [↩]
46. Ibid., 248. [↩]
47. Don Mitchell, and Lynn A. Staeheli, Permitting Protest: Parsing the Fine Geography of Dissent in America, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 29, No. 4 (December 2005), 810. [↩]
48. della Porta, Policing Transnational Protest, 176-77. [↩]
49. Donatella della Porta, The Policing of Global Protest: The G8 at Genoa and its Aftermath, in della Porta, The Policing of Transnational Protest, 20-21. [↩]
50. Ibid., 24. [↩]
51. Ibid., 27. [↩]
52. della Porta, Policing Transnational Protest, 9. [↩]
53. Fernandez, Policing Space, 246. [↩]
54. Ibid., 243-245. For an analysis on the “paramilitarism” of policing, see Peterson, Policing Contentious Politics at Transnational Summits, 50-51. [↩]
55. della Porta, Policing Transnational Protest, 2. [↩]
56. Ibid., 2. [↩]
57. Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front of the Globalization Debate, (London: Flamingo, 2002), XXV. [↩]
58. Donatella della Porta, Transnational Protest and Public Order, in Donatella della Porta et al., eds., Globalization From Below: Transnational Activists and Protest Networks (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 151. [↩]
59. Ibid., 151. [↩]
60. Italian police stormed Pertini-Diaz school, which was being used as a dormitory to house protesters. 62 of the 93 demonstrators arrested inside the school were hospitalized, with prognoses ranging from 5 days to indeterminate. From della Porta and Reiter, The Policing of Global Protest: Genoa, 21. [↩]
61. della Porta, Transnational Protest and Public Order, 151. [↩]
62. The EU Network of Independent Experts in Fundamental Rights (CFR-CDF), Report on the Situation of Fundamental Rights in the European Union and its Member States in 2002. Available: <http://www.statewatch.org/news/2003/apr/CFR-CDF.2002.report.en.pdf> (1 December 2007), 58. [↩]
63. Amnesty International, Public Statement: Five Years After the G8 Policing Operations: Italian Authorities Must Take Concrete Action to Prevent and Prosecute Police Brutality in all Circumstances, (21 July 2006). Available: <http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGEUR300052006?open&of=ENG-ITA> (18 November 2007). [↩]
64. Dalby, A Critical Geopolitics of Global Governance. [↩]
65. Herbert, Policing Space, 22. [↩]
66. Mitchell, Permitting Protest, 811. [↩]
67. Herbert, The “Battle of Seattle” Revisited, 612-16. [↩]
68. Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck and Eric S. Sheppard, eds., Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers (New York: The Guilford Press, 2007). [↩]
69. Herbert, The “Battle of Seattle” Revisited, 608-617. [↩]
70. Ibid., 617. [↩]
71. Peterson, Policing Contentious Politics, 80. [↩]
72. Ibid., 70. [↩]
73. della Porta, Transnational Protest and Public Order, 151. [↩]

Email this Post
Citation Styles
Print this Post
Save as PDF
Share & Bookmark