Editors' Introduction: Policing the Protest Cycle of the 2010s.

• Date: 22 June 2020
• Author: Maroto, Manuel,Gonzalez-Sanchez, Ignacio,Brandariz, Jose A.,Maroto, Manuel^Gonzalez-Sanchez, Ignacio^Brandariz, Jose A.
• Published date: 22 June 2020
• Author: Maroto, Manuel

BY THE TIME THIS SPECIAL ISSUE IS RELEASED, IT WILL HAVE BEEN OVER 10 years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the beginning of the Great Recession: one of the most decisive periods for global economic transformation in recent decades. However, it is 2011, rather than 2008, that is associated with the moment of political transformation: it was then that a sort of protective countermovement reappeared on the global stage, a diffuse community of workers and collectives affected by capitalism, to which Polanyi (1944/2001) attributes the historic function of protecting society from the worst effects of the free market. Contentious politics were put off for three years while the actors involved in austerity politics began implementing a project to take neoliberal discourses and practices to unprecedented levels (Dardot & Laval 2009/2013). In most cases, the hopes for change and resistance generated by these protests remain far off and unsatisfied as of today.

The Global Protest Cycle and Its Waves: Globalization's Winners and Losers

The rise of protest movements in the last decade has generated a renewed interest in the long-range historical analysis of the role of riots and other forms of resistance in the context of capitalist development (see Clement 2016). Some of these recent contributions have emphasized the centrality of the relation between riots and crisis, highlighting the changing importance of riots and strikes from a broad historical materialist perspective (Clover 2016). In this issue and introduction, however, we are going to focus on some of the political characteristics and consequences of protest and its policing in the recent past. In particular, the protest cycle (Tarrow 1983) to be analyzed in this issue starts to take shape in 2008 and to flare up in 2011. In 2013, it surges forth in a second wave before beginning to dwindle over the following three years, but not without a few eruptions of lesser significance such as Nuit debout in France in 2016. The antiglobalization movement can be seen to be this cycle's immediate predecessor; however, the cycle under question is distinguished by more diverse social bases and a more diffuse political identity, which places it halfway between movements of affluence and movements of crisis. It is difficult, in this sense, to speak of a homogeneous movement: the cycle incorporates geographically and politically diverse contexts. However, continuities and shared elements can also be found: frames and repertoires of action extend across diverse areas adapting to different situations with different degrees of mobilization capacity (della Porta 2017, 14).

Indeed, it is important to distinguish between the different waves within the cycle itself. 2011 could be classified as a year of global contention, comparable, for example, to 1848 and 1968. The wave of protests of 2011 begins with the Arab Spring before spreading to Southern Europe, particularly to Greece and Spain, some of the countries most affected by the financial crisis. From there the contagion spreads to the United States, with Occupy Wall Street inspired by the protests of Southern Europe, which, in turn, had been inspired by protests in Tunisia and Egypt. In 2013, there was a second wave of mobilization, which extended to countries such as Brazil, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, South Africa, Bosnia, and Bulgaria. The protests of the 2011 wave can easily be shown to share a common denominator: they involved opposition to austerity policies in semiperipheral countries with highly contentious environments where the effects of the last financial crisis were acutely suffered. However, some of the 2013-2014 protests emerged in countries that are often considered the winners of globalization in economic terms (Brazil, Venezuela, Turkey, South Africa, and Hong Kong), and others in countries without particularly contentious environments (Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Bosnia).

Despite these differences (and others), however, participants in both protests and academic analyses have coincided in identifying the existence of continuities and common features, to which we now turn our attention.

Common Features of the Protest Cycle

First among these common characteristics is the centrality of democracy in the practices and claims channeled through protests. In authoritarian political contexts, as well as in liberal democracies, speaking out against the corruption of the elites in government was a common denominator, but there was more to it than making objections against the established order. One of the great novelties of the protest cycle was its ability to produce a political culture that was lived as radically new, a culture that had been considered impossible prior to the cycle by many protest participants. In the occupied squares and at demonstrations, a decidedly egalitarian conception of democracy was championed and embodied, and this conception was made manifest, not just in juxtaposition to the increasingly weak electoral mechanisms of legitimation promoted by neoliberalism. This conception of democracy was also strongly linked to defending urban commons (Dardot & Laval 2014, Hardt Sc Negri 2009) and public spaces and services--a defense which was carried out not solely through occupations and encampments, tactics that were previously associated (for the most part) with Western anarchist circles, but also through making claims to and a practice out of public space, which was understood as collective life experience in the face of the impoverishment of forms of sociability and coexistence (akin to a phenomenon referred to as "spatial citizenship," see Sbicca &c Perdue 2014, Sorando Ortin & Gonzalez-Sanchez 2013). The novelty, according to scholars like Tugal (2013, 152), was not the political efficacy of this type of action, so much as the experience of a life in common in a liberated square in the city, albeit temporary and limited.

The second common feature is directly linked to the first: the radical equality put into practice in the squares was not formalized in demands relating to electoral programs--at least not to the same extent as it emerged in the form of prefigurative politics. The "collective thereness" (Butler 2014) of bodies refusing to be expelled from the streets and occupied spaces was a practice of resistance and challenge, but also a manifestation of the will to exist as part of a larger whole, the prefiguration of a new collective identity lived, intensely, in the present (Butler 2014; della Porta 2017, 228). Politically, this approach resulted in a clear distancing from the electoral political system: square occupiers in Greece, Spain, and Turkey showed their open disinterest in the potential electoral transfer of their actions. This abstentionism became particularly rigid in some cases, including in the United States. Occupy Wall Street participants refused to formulate articulated demands, as directing demands to the political establishment would be a way of recognizing its legitimacy (Jacobs 2011;Tugal 2013, 161). This distancing from representative politics is what led authors such as Harcourt (2012) to point out that the traditional concept of "civil disobedience" is obsolete when it comes to designating the political intervention type of movements like Occupy; to fill the breach, this U.S. political scientist coined the notion of "political disobedience." In other countries, as was the case of the Indignados movement in Spain, proposals were made in different areas including the labor market, the right to housing, and the regulation of the banking system. In any case, experimentation with forms of direct democracy and modes of organization in which formal leadership was avoided clearly prevailed over any potential strategy to create new political parties or promote reforms to the existing system of representative democracy. It must be said, though, that the end of the cycle of mobilization in countries like Spain and Greece did coincide with a renewed interest in electoral politics and with the emergence of newparties such as Syriza and Podemos; however, the relationship between these parties and protest movements was never particularly natural. In fact, their electoral surge seemed to mark the beginning of the demobilization phase in the streets. The link between movements such as UK Uncut or Occupy Wall Street with the renewing candidacies of Corbyn in the United Kingdom and of Sanders in the United States within traditional parties appears to have been equally complex, although perhaps less tortuous. The subsequent evolution in the electoral plane--with Syriza's inability to resist European impositions in Greece; the failure of Podemos in Spain (beyond specific local experiences) to take power in a progressive sense; or the arrival of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States--does not shed an encouraging light on the political impact of protests in these countries. Nevertheless, the legacy of the 2011 cycle persists in a different way in the field of political culture (Tugal 2013, 152).

A third shared element intersects the two previously discussed factors: the Great Recession as a common political and economic context. Although it is not appropriate to describe all the mobilizations involved as forms of protest against austerity policies, their analysis, as della Porta (2015) has emphasized, must not be limited to examining their social composition or their forms of communication and organization. It must be framed from a perspective that incorporates political economy and the evolution of neoliberal capitalism in recent decades (bringing capitalism back in). Thus, the search for continuities must take us beyond the 2008 crisis: protests against the advance of neoliberalism (ibid., 66) could have spread from the periphery (the struggle in Latin America against reforms imposed by international financial institutions in the 1980s and 1990s) to the...