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Article
Publication date: 10 July 2023

Hye-Sung Kim and Christopher J. Marier

Government repression against civilians while enforcing COVID-19 related lockdowns was widely reported in Africa. At the same time, many have claimed that high-speed (4G) mobile…

Abstract

Purpose

Government repression against civilians while enforcing COVID-19 related lockdowns was widely reported in Africa. At the same time, many have claimed that high-speed (4G) mobile network proliferation provide an accountability mechanism that may constrain police abuses. This study focused on Nigeria to examine (1) the effect of COVID-19 lockdowns on police repression and (2) whether widespread high-speed mobile data networks constrain police repression.

Design/methodology/approach

Using data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Database (ACLED) and the Mobile Coverage Database, this study used difference-in-differences (DID) and triple difference (DDD) estimation on a sample of 423,925 observations (local government area-days) between January 1, 2019 and June 30, 2020 to estimate the causal effects of COVID-19 lockdowns and high-speed (4G) mobile data on police repression.

Findings

Lockdowns increased certain forms of police repression in areas with substantial high-speed (4G) mobile networks. Separate from the lockdowns, widespread 4G network increased police repression even without lockdowns.

Research limitations/implications

Proliferation of high-speed mobile networks in Nigeria appears to facilitate, rather than constrain, police repression. It is possible that high-speed mobile data networks allow police to detect and repress citizen behaviors, rather than permitting citizens to correct repressive police behaviors.

Originality/value

Although many studies have explored the COVID-19 pandemic and police behavior in Western countries, only a few have examined its effects in states with even more troubled policing institutions, including those in sub-Saharan Africa, using DID and DDD estimation.

Details

Policing: An International Journal, vol. 46 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1363-951X

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 6 July 2021

Gabriela González Vaillant and Fernanda Page Poma

This paper analyzes the relationship between the Chilean student movement and state force action during the period 2000–2012, placing specific attention on three waves of student…

Abstract

This paper analyzes the relationship between the Chilean student movement and state force action during the period 2000–2012, placing specific attention on three waves of student contention that took place at the turn of the century. During the decade under study, the Chilean students became more contentious, they broadened their demands beyond specific grievances to encompass a critique to the education system as a whole, their alliance system grew (gaining from these denser networks of collaboration more resources to mobilize), and they managed to win public opinion on their side. However, the relationship with state forces has not been static across time, and both students and state forces have experienced changes in how they interact with each other. The results of this paper are based on a mixed method approach that drew on a quantitative database of student contention in Chile (n = 491 student events) and 15 in-depth interviews with leader activists from the most salient recent Chilean student movements of three periods under study, in addition to some key informants. The findings confirm that when student protests target the government, when they use disruptive strategies that affect the status-quo, and when they mobilize alongside other challenging actors, they are more likely to be met with direct repression by authorities. The research shows that there is a “dialect of repression” at play by which state forces' direct repression of protest can be two-fold: on the one hand, it gives students visibility in the public opinion, but on the other, it can be negative for ushering support if the media and authorities are successful in portraying them as violent or a threat to public order. In this sense, the figure of the “encapuchado,” students who disguise their identity and purposefully seek confrontation with authorities during mobilizations is problematized by the movement itself. How to win public opinion and use that visibility in their favor is related to decision-making mechanisms that the movement puts at play but also to the calculations done on the part of the government and security forces about the leverage of the movement.

Details

Four Dead in Ohio
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-807-4

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 10 March 2010

Jennifer Earl and Sarah A. Soule

Scholarship on the effects of various kinds of state repression (e.g., counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, protest policing) on subsequent dissent has produced a body of…

Abstract

Scholarship on the effects of various kinds of state repression (e.g., counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, protest policing) on subsequent dissent has produced a body of contradictory findings. In an attempt to better understand the effects of one form of state repression – protest policing – on one form of dissent – public protest – this paper examines the effects of various policing strategies used at protest events on subsequent protest levels in the United States between 1960 and 1990. Theoretically, we argue the effects of repression cannot be broadly theorized but instead need to be hypothesized at the level of particular police strategies and actions. We theorize and empirically examine the impacts of five police strategies, while also improving on prior analyses by producing a comprehensive model that examines lagged and nonlinear effects and examines the effects across the entire social movement sector, as well as across two specific movement industries. Results (1) confirm that not all police strategies have the same effects; (2) show that policing strategies tend to have predominately linear effects; (3) show that police actions have their strongest effects in the very short term, with few effects detectable after a few weeks; and (4) point to interesting differences in the effects of policing strategies on subsequent protest across different social movements.

Details

Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-036-1

Book part
Publication date: 20 December 2005

Jennifer Earl

Using socio-legal research on arrests and the criminal justice system, this paper contests the implicit argument in recent research on repression that arrests are “softer” than…

Abstract

Using socio-legal research on arrests and the criminal justice system, this paper contests the implicit argument in recent research on repression that arrests are “softer” than police violence. Specifically, the paper explores the physical conditions of arrest and detention, and the extent to which arrests initiate costly interactions with the legal system that punish defendants before they are even tried (or even if charges are later dropped). Using data on arrests and police practices from mine strikes in Arizona from the early 1980s and data on arrests and police practices during urban riots in the 1960s, the paper: (1) discusses the physical realities of arrest and detention; (2) outlines the array of costs that arrests impose on protesters; (3) discusses the implications of biased policing on that set of costs; and (4) examines the costs associated with mass arrests. The paper concludes this empirical analysis by questioning the commensurability of arrests with other forms of police action, including violence, against protesters.

Details

Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-263-4

Book part
Publication date: 23 August 2012

Silvia Pasquetti

How are social groups unmade? Current theories identify the symbolic power of the state as a primary factor in the creation of social groups. Drawing on Gramsci's The Southern…

Abstract

How are social groups unmade? Current theories identify the symbolic power of the state as a primary factor in the creation of social groups. Drawing on Gramsci's The Southern Question, this chapter extends state-centered theories by exploring policies that are critical but under-theorized factors in group formation. These include the concession of material benefits as well as the use of coercive means. Further, while current theories focus on how social groups are made, a Gramscian perspective draws attention to how the state intervenes to prevent or neutralize group-making projects from below. This chapter explores a case of a decrease in national group solidarity. Specifically, this study explains how in the 1990s the Israeli state weakened national group formation among Palestinians by adopting two spatially distinct but coordinated strategies. First, the rearrangement of the military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank through the establishment of an authority of self-rule (the Palestinian Authority) demobilized and divided Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories, especially along class-cum-moral lines. Second, state practices and discourses centered on citizenship rights shifted the center of political activism among Palestinian citizens of Israel toward citizenship issues. I argue that these two routes, which I call the indirect rule route and the civil society route, were complementary components of a broader attempt to neutralize Palestinian collective mobilization around nationhood. Despite recent changes and contestations, these two strategies of rule continue to affect group formation and to create distinct experiences of politics among Palestinians under Israeli rule. Analysis of the Palestinian–Israeli case shows that the state can unmake groups through the distribution of interrelated policies that are specific to certain categories of people and places. Understanding the conditions under which certain policies of inclusion or exclusion affect group formation requires going beyond the analytic primacy currently given to the symbolic power of the state.

Details

Political Power and Social Theory
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78052-867-0

Book part
Publication date: 12 July 2023

Tony Huiquan Zhang and Tianji Cai

Measuring the diffusion of protests, or more generally, the diffusion of events, is an ongoing task in social sciences. This paper proposes an inter-event approach to study what…

Abstract

Measuring the diffusion of protests, or more generally, the diffusion of events, is an ongoing task in social sciences. This paper proposes an inter-event approach to study what types of protests tend to diffuse or decline. We develop a standardized, five-step procedure to measure what we define as “event diffusion momentum” (EDM): (1) employ event-based data containing information on the time, location, and features of each protest; (2) define the temporal and spatial ranges of interest; (3) for each observation, count the number of events before and after it within the defined ranges; (4) predict the numbers of post-event and pre-event protests with appropriate count models; (5) calculate the ratios of predicted values for each predictor and confidence intervals using the delta method. The ratio is the EDM. Applying this method to Dynamics of Collective Action (DoCA) data, we identify several micro- and macro-level factors associated with protest diffusion in the United States, 1960–1995. We conclude with the implications and generalizability of the proposed method.

Details

Methodological Advances in Research on Social Movements, Conflict, and Change
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-887-7

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 7 August 2017

Javier Ruiz-Tagle

In this chapter, I focus on stigmatization exercised and experienced by local residents, comparing two socially-diverse areas in very different contexts: the Cabrini Green-Near…

Abstract

Purpose

In this chapter, I focus on stigmatization exercised and experienced by local residents, comparing two socially-diverse areas in very different contexts: the Cabrini Green-Near North area in Chicago and the La Loma-La Florida area in Santiago de Chile.

Methodology/approach

Data for this study were drawn from 1 year of qualitative research, using interviews with residents and institutional actors, field notes from observation sessions of several inter-group spaces, and “spatial inventories” in which I located the traces of the symbolic presence of each group.

Findings

Despite contextual differences of type of social differentiation, type of social mix, type of housing tenure for the poor, and public visibility, I argue that there are important common problems: first, symbolic differences are stressed by identity changes; second, distrust against “the other” is spatially crystallized in any type and scale of social housing; third, stigmatization changes in form and scale; and fourth, there are persisting prejudiced depictions and patterns of avoidance.

Social implications

Socially-mixed neighborhoods, as areas where at least two different social groups live in proximity, offer an interesting context for observing territorial stigmatization. They are strange creatures of urban development, due to the powerful symbolism of desegregation in contexts of growing inequalities.

Originality/value

The chapter contributes to a cross-national perspective with a comparison of global-north and global-south cities. And it also springs from a study of socially-mixed areas, in which the debate on concentrated/deconcentrated poverty is central, and in which the problem of “clearing places” appears in both material (e.g., displacement) and symbolic (e.g., stigmatization) terms.

Book part
Publication date: 1 March 2013

Tina Askanius

Much scholarship has looked at how radical politics and its symbolism are framed and distorted by the mass media, while less attention has been devoted to how the symbolic imagery…

Abstract

Much scholarship has looked at how radical politics and its symbolism are framed and distorted by the mass media, while less attention has been devoted to how the symbolic imagery of violence and death is used in activists’ self-representations. This chapter provides one such alternative angle by probing how “visual protest materials” are creatively used in activists’ own videos to pass on stories of communion and contestation.It interrogates how activist video practices mirror the continuum between physical places and mediated spaces in political activism by analyzing a thread of videos circulating on YouTube that commemorate people who have died in connection with three protest events across Europe, putting on display the “spectacles of death” punctuating each of these events. The analysis draws on social semiotics, in particular the work of Barthes (1981) and Zelizer (2010), to examine how death is used as a visual trope to signify the ultimate prize of taking to the streets. This chapter suggests how agency and meaning travel back and forth between offline and online spaces of activism. Engaging with some implications of this interplay, the chapter argues that, in the quest to document truth and induce realism and immediacy, tensions between fact and fiction emerge in the creative appropriation and remixing of images. Finally, it demonstrates how the cityscape is recruited to document and dramatize the spectacle of death as part of a larger struggle for semiotic resources within the protest space and over media representations of social movements more generally.

Details

Advances in the Visual Analysis of Social Movements
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78190-636-1

Keywords

Content available
Book part
Publication date: 25 May 2017

Abstract

Details

Race, Ethnicity and Law
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-604-4

Article
Publication date: 4 January 2021

Pablo Toro-Blanco

This paper aims to explore the construction of social imaginaries of fear by the Chilean press regarding student violence during the 1968 university reforming process. Using an…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to explore the construction of social imaginaries of fear by the Chilean press regarding student violence during the 1968 university reforming process. Using an approach inspired by the history of emotions, the primary purpose is to analyze the discourse of two relevant conservative newspapers with national circulation about students' mobilization.

Design/methodology/approach

The research rests on the analysis of content in the discourse of the two more representative right-wing Chilean newspapers (El Mercurio and El Diario Ilustrado). Founded in the early years of the 20th century, both had national circulations and were a part of a tradition in the history of the Chilean 20th-century national press. Through the analysis of a selection of editorials and news regarding students' mobilization during 1968, with a focus on the experience of the most prominent institution (Universidad de Chile), this research highlights similarities and differences in the ways that both media endeavoured to elaborate social imaginaries of menace and fear regarding student movements.

Findings

Through the study of the discourse of traditional newspapers, it is possible to identify critical issues concerning the university student movements' purposes to implement breaking (and occasionally violent) methods to carry out the reforms that they promoted, according to the right-wing press. Against this backdrop, the different importance of an anti-communist component is discernible, typical of the Cold War period, in the (political and emotional) arguments of the newspapers under analysis.

Originality/value

This article proposes an interpretation that intertwines a local phenomenon (the reformist movement of the University of Chile) with a global one (the May student revolution of 1968). It also establishes a novel approach by linking, through its approach, yet traditional concepts of social and cultural analysis (the idea of social imaginaries) with a new emphasis on social science and humanities (emotional dimensions).

Details

History of Education Review, vol. 51 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0819-8691

Keywords

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