Illan rua Wall

Focusing on the moment when social unrest takes hold of a populace, Law and Disorder offers a new account of sovereignty with an affective theory of public order and protest.

In a state of unrest, the affective architecture of the sovereign order begins to crumble. The everyday peace and calm of public space is shattered as sovereign peace is challenged. In response, the state unleashes the full force of its exceptionality, and the violence of public order policing is deployed to restore the affects and atmospheres of habitual social relations. This book is a work of contemporary critical legal theory. It develops an affective theory of sovereign orders by focusing on the government of affective life and popular encounters with sovereignty. The chapters explore public order as a key articulation between sovereignty and government. In particular, policing of public order is exposed as a contemporary mode of exceptionality cast in the fires of colonial subjection. The state of unrest helps us see the ordinary affects of the sovereign order, but it also points to crowds as the essential component in the production of unrest. The atmospheres produced by crowds seep out from the squares and parks of occupation, settling on cities and states. In these new atmospheres, new possibilities of political and social organisation begin to appear. In short, crowds create the affective condition in which the settlement at the heart of the sovereign order can be revisited. This text thus develops a theory of sovereignty which places protest at its heart, and a theory of protest which starts from the affective valence of crowds.

This book’s examination of the relationship between sovereignty and protest is of considerable interest to readers in law, politics and cultural studies, as well as to more general readers interested in contemporary forms of political resistance.

With the emergence of modern human rights in the Universal Declaration, what remained of a radical political potential of the discourse withdrew: statism and individualism became its authorised foundations and the possibilities of other human rights traditions were denied. The strife that once lay at the heart of human rights was forgotten in an increasing juridification. This book seeks to recover the radical political pole of human rights.

When the left-wing indigenous candidate Evo Morales was elected as President of Bolivia in 2006, the movement he led was faced with a significant problem. The political and legal structures established over the previous 40 years were inimical to the radical platform that swept him to power. The constitutional structures inscribed the state as the site of market stability, and a business-as-usual exclusion of the indigenous majority of Bolivia. The Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) government represented the antithesis of the political elites that had fashioned the Bolivian state for well over a century. If their coming to power was to have any lasting significance, the old state had to be overcome. This chapter argues that of the many novelties developed in the 2009 Bolivian constitution, one of the most intriguing was the generation of a radically new form of separation of powers. Where the conventional separation of powers internally divides power within the state apparatus, ensuring that no one arm of the state can overpower the others, the Bolivian model actively encouraged extra-systemic social movements. The constitution envisioned an active and continuing constituent power that counter-balanced the ten- dency of state structures to become ‘recursive’ in their power. In this way, the 2009 Bolivian experiment is a ‘constitution of turbulence’, something that would have important effects on the trajectory of the Bolivian state over the decade that followed its adoption. This would culminate in the 2019 coup and its subsequent defeat.

The article examines the affective dynamics of law in the everyday. It insists upon the importance of ‘the background’ for thinking about law. In the everyday cut and thrust of daily life, law tends to fade into the background. It becomes unobtrusive, functioning from the background by structuring the capacity to act. In other words, it functions affectively. Key to law’s functioning is its ability to also move out from the background in certain crucial moments. In this it becomes obtrusive, taking centre stage in such a way that its former position in the background becomes imperceptible. The movement from background to foreground and back again are essential to begin to grasp the manner in which law functions with and through affect. Using the work of Kathleen Stewart, Hans Lindahl and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos the article insists upon the importance of the affective dynamics of law. The article develops the idea of nestled affects which help us to understand the movements from background to foreground.

In 1983 the British police adopted their first public order policing manual, laying the foundations of a secretive archive. The manuals and training materials produced in the intervening years provide an untapped repository of affective thought. This article reads the 1983 and 2016 training materials for their atmospheric insights. It develops the term police ‘atmotechnics’ to describe interventions that are specifically designed to affect the crowded atmosphere of protest or other disorder. The manuals reveal a gradual shift from interventions designed to evince fear and awe, to ones that seek to calm crowds. But more importantly, they underline a shift from a linear understanding of atmotechnics (as a prelude to ‘the use of force’), to an affective feedback loop where specialised officers are deployed to ‘sense’ mood changes among crowds, allowing senior strategic and tactical decisions to take account of atmospheric conditions.

This article documents the ‘Orders in Decay’ project, in which students taking the Law and Disorder module at the University of Warwick were required to produce a podcast as a part of their assessment. The article situates the pedagogic benefits of student podcasting through the fields of legal storytelling, law and literature, and digital storytelling. It uses these to theorise three key moments in the podcasting process: the interview with an expert as an affective encounter with the ideas, the production of a complex and layered podcast that excites an affective response, and publication of the best of the podcasts to shift the student’s horizons of communication. Ultimately, the article suggests that the undergraduate is uniquely positioned between worlds – neither an expert nor a member of the public. As such, they are perfectly placed to mediate ideas and discussion in an affecting manner.

From the Arab Spring and Occupy to the London riots and student tuition fee protests, the disordered crowd has reemerged as a focal point of anxiety for law-makers. The article examines two recent cases where the UK courts have thought about crowds: In Austin the House of Lords connected the crowd to an idea of human nature. This essentialist rendering placed the crowd within an old analytic register where it is understood to release a primordial violence. In Bauer the Administrative Court utilised a very different sense of the ‘crowdness’ of the crowd to uphold the conviction of UK Uncut activists for aggravated trespass. These two mutually exclusive senses of the crowd are interesting not because they require synthesis, but because they reveal a deeper question of the relation between the judicial-administrative rationality of rights and the police rationality of management, or between principle and strategy. This is the fundamental tension of the ‘Law of Crowds’.

Commentators often remark upon the “festive” or “tense” atmosphere of major protests. This seems to signify the general outlook of the protestors or the relations between them and the police. It signals the potential of the protests to unfold in a peaceful, joyous manner or with violence. While “festive” and “tense” are useful ways of thinking about protest atmospheres, they are often used in a highly reductive manner. The literature on atmosphere from social movement studies also tends to reproduce this reductive idea of atmosphere, whereby it can be understood through unidimensional metrics. This chapter discusses the social movement literature and opens the debate about atmospheres of protest more widely. Ultimately there is a much greater variety of atmospheric conditions in moments of protest. These nestle together, changing and interacting as the conditions shift. Atmospheres are the affective tone of space. They are produced by those gathered in that space, by the spatial dyn...