Policing Protest in Russia

As Russia’s post-communist regime descends deeper into authoritarianism, protest politics has become a regular feature of the political landscape. As such, President Putin increasingly faces the “dictator’s dilemma”: How much coercion to deploy against protesters without incurring a social backlash against the regime? That question more generally is now part of analytical consideration in comparative scholarship on social movements and contentious politics. This article contributes to the comparative discussion, first, through an elaboration of an original conceptual typology of protest-policing strategies, applicable to democratic and authoritarian regime types. Second, the article applies this conceptual scheme to Russia to illustrate the variant protest-policing strategies employed during the post-communist period. The research explains how Putin’s authoritarian regime responded to the challenge of the dictator’s dilemma by enacting protest-policing reforms. Inspired by policing trends in the Western democracies, these reforms entail a shift from confrontation-based to containment-based tactics. The article shows variation and adaptation in the way protesters were policed across Russia’s transition from unconsolidated democracy to consolidated authoritarianism. Finally, the article suggests the consequences of protest-policing reform for the ruling regime.

Crowdsourcing Documentary Making

The creative commons documentary Preempting Dissent (2014) builds upon the book of the same name written by Greg Elmer and Andy Opel. The film is a culmination of a collaborative process of soliciting, collecting and editing video, still images, and creative commons music files from people around the world. Preempting Dissent interrogates the expansion of the so-called “Miami-Model” of protest policing, a set of strategies developed in the wake of 9/11 to preempt forms of mass protest at major events in the US and worldwide. The film tracks the development of the Miami model after the WTO protests in Seattle 1999, through the post-9/11 years, FTAA & G8/20 summits, and most recently the Occupy Wall St movements. The film exposes the political, social, and economic roots of preemptive forms of protest policing and their manifestations in spatial tactics, the deployment of so-called ‘less-lethal’ weapons, and surveillance regimes. The film notes however that new social movements have themselves begun to adopt preemptive tactics so as not to fall into the trap set for them by police agencies worldwide.

Protest, policing and law during COVID-19: On the legality of mass gatherings in a health crisis

This article considers the legal status of protest rights in Australia during the COVID-19 public health crisis. It discusses jurisprudence of the New South Wales Supreme Court regarding the legality of mass gatherings for the purpose of protest during the COVID pandemic. Balancing protest rights with risks to community safety posed by possible coronavirus transmission at public assemblies, the Court has sometimes allowed and sometimes prohibited protests. The article critically examines the policing of protest during the pandemic and explores some of the implications of comparing emergency measures introduced during the COVID crisis with similar measures introduced in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.

The Puzzle of Protest Policing Over Time: Historicizing Repression Research Using Temporal Moving Regressions

Research attempting to predict repression, including the policing of protest, has tended to rely on pooled time series data, which statistically produces coefficients that estimate the average relationship between each variable and the outcome across the entire pooled time period. When relationships are very stable, this statistical assumption, referred to as temporal homogeneity, is unproblematic. But, when enforced without testing, it threatens to artificially “stabilize” temporally heterogenous relationships. In terms of protest policing, this has resulted in relatively ahistorical empirical explanations of protest policing. This article imports modeling techniques from work on identifying historical periods to show how temporal moving regressions can be built to recognize and model temporal heterogeneity in the factors influencing protest policing. We present three important uses for these models: testing exhaustively for temporal heterogeneity in apparently stable findings; testing for temporal heterogeneity that may reconcile otherwise contradictory findings; and inductively combining orthogonal research lines. We demonstrate the utility of each in examinations of protest policing. More generally, we show the potential of temporal moving regressions for uncovering new insights and bringing greater historical sensitivity to research on protest and beyond.

Public fear of protesters and support for protest policing: An experimental study

As protests erupted across the United States in recent years over politically polarized issues (e.g., Black Lives Matter, COVID-19 restrictions), so too did questions about when and how police should respond. The context of these protests and how police reacted to them varied substantially, with limited understanding of relevant public attitudes. Public opinion is double-edged; it is critical for police legitimacy and influences criminal justice policy, but it also often reflects racial animus. We hypothesized that disruptive, dangerous, or unlawful protest tactics would increase support for police control, by elevating public fear, but also that support for repression would be higher when protest goals conflict with preexisting racial beliefs. To test our hypotheses, we embedded an experiment in a nationwide survey fielded in 2020, after George Floyd’s killing sparked the broadest protests in U.S. history. We randomized protest tactics (e.g., weapon carrying, violence) and goals, as well as other contextual characteristics (e.g., protest size). We found that the public generally opposed repressive protest policing. However, certain protest tactics increased support for repression by increasing public fear. Protest goals (e.g., pro-Black Lives Matter, anti-COVID-19 restrictions, or pro-confederate monuments) also impacted support for repression, but the effect depended on respondents’ racial beliefs.

“Return of the repressed”: Exposure to police violence increases protest and self-sacrifice intentions for the Yellow Vests

Worldwide, it is not uncommon to observe violent police reactions against social movements. These are often rationalized by decision makers as efficient ways to contain violence from protesters. In France for instance, the ongoing Yellow Vests protests have generated an unprecedented number of casualties, injuries, and convictions among protesters. But was this response efficient in diminishing violence stemming from the Yellow Vests? To this day, little is known about the psychological consequences of police violence in the context of protests. Combining insights from Significance Quest Theory and the Social Identity perspective on collective action, we predicted that exposure to police violence could “backfire” and lead to increased radicalization of protesters. A cross-sectional investigation of 523 Yellow Vests yielded evidence for this hypothesis. We found positive direct effects of exposure to police violence on intentions to attend future demonstrations and to self-sacrifice for the Yellow Vests. Moreover, these effects were serially mediated by perceived Loss of Significance and Identification with the Yellow Vests. Paradoxically, these results highlight for the first time the mechanism through which political repression may contribute to the formation of radical politicized identities. Thus, we recommend that decision makers privilege the use of de-escalation techniques in protest policing whenever possible.