European Spring

The protests on Tahrir Square in Cairo have come to symbolize the Arab uprisings of 2011. They have proven that Arab political life is more complex than the false choice between authoritarian rule or Islamist oppositions. The popular uprisings witnessed the emergence of “the Arab peoples” as political actors, able to topple entrenched authoritarian leaders, challenging repressive regimes and their brutal security apparatuses. In our contribution we want to analyze the political dynamics of these uprisings beyond the salient immediacy of the revolutionary events, by taking, as our guide, Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet The Mass Strike (2005 [1906], London: Bookmarks). An interesting theoretical contribution to the study of revolution, Luxemburg’s book provides us with tools to introduce a historical and political reading of the Arab Spring. Based on fieldwork and thorough knowledge of the region, we draw from evidence from the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and the more gradual forms of political change in Morocco. Re-reading the revolutionary events in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco through the lens of The Mass Strike offers activists on the ground insights into the dialectic between local and national struggles, economic and political demands, strike actions and revolution. The workers protests in Tunisia and Egypt during the last decade can be grasped as anticipations of the mass strike during the revolution; the specific mode in which workers participate as a class in the revolutionary process. This perspective enables an understanding of the current economic conflicts as logical forms of continuity of the revolution. The economic and the political, the local and the national (and one may add the global), are indissoluble yet separate elements of the same process, and the challenge for revolutionary actors in Tunisia and Egypt lies in the connection, organization and fusion of these dispersed moments and spaces of struggle into a politicized whole. Conversely, an understanding of the reciprocity between revolutionary change and the mass strike allows activists inMorocco to recognize the workers’movement as a potentially powerful actor of change, and trade unionists to incorporate the political in their economic mobilizations.

The US national response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks accelerated the adoption and refinement of a new repertoire of protest policing we call ‘strategic incapacitation’ now employed by law enforcement agencies nationwide to police protest demonstrations. The occupation movement which formally began 17 September 2011 was the most significant social movement to utilise transgressive protest tactics in the United States in the last 40 years and posed a substantial challenge to law enforcement agencies. This research seeks to better understand the implementation of strategic incapacitation tactics through a detailed analysis of the policing of the first 2 months of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests in New York City. Original data for this study are derived from 2-week-long field observations made in New York City during the first and second month anniversaries of the OWS occupation in Zuccotti Park. These are supplemented by activist interviews, activist accounts posted on OWS websites, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds as well as news reports, official police documents, press releases and interviews with legal observers.

Contemporary protesters confront a dual-struggle. Most obviously, the struggle of protest is directed at targets in an effort to make social, cultural or political change. Yet, in order to engage the struggle of protest, activists must prevail to some degree in a struggle to protest. The struggle to protest pits citizens against a multidimensional policing strategy designed to incapacitate the protest itself. The research here examines the Occupy Wall Street struggle to protest by identifying and analyzing a dozen “moves of resistance” performed by protesters to counter the New York Police Department’s efforts to incapacitate protest through spatial constraints, surveillance and information control. The analysis here focuses on the first two months of OWS protests in New York City based on data derived from two week-long field observations in New York City during the first and second month anniversaries of the occupy protests as well as interviews with activists, news media and activist accounts, legal reports, and legal observers.

Following the emergence of mass protest against the austerity measures taken by the Greek government in 2010, the question arises to what extent the protests are just mobilizing the ‘usual suspects’ of left-wing trade union activists or a new protest generation. Using a general population survey carried out in December 2010, we find that almost one third of the adult Greek population had taken part in anti-austerity protests, but less than one in five had been first time protesters. Comparing new with veteran protesters but also non-protesters, we find that new protest recruits do not fit the expected pattern in many respects. The Greek protest movement has re-mobilized many of the ‘usual suspects’ but it also includes first timers as ‘apprentice’ protesters, particularly in demonstrations, who differ markedly from veteran participants.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9248.12076/abstract