Interface A journal for and about social movements VOL 3 ISSUE 1: REPRESSION & MOVEMENTS Interface: a journal for and about social movements Contents Volume 3 (1): i - iv (May 2011) Interface volume 3 issue 1 Repression and social movements Interface: a journal for and about social movements Volume 3 issue 1 (May 2011) ISSN 2009 – 2431 Table of contents (pp. i – iv) Editorial Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Lesley Wood, Repression and social movements (pp. 1 – 11) Articles: repression and social movements Peter Ullrich and Gina Rosa Wollinger, A surveillance studies perspective on protest policing: the case of video surveillance of demonstrations in Germany (P) (pp. 12- 38) Liz Thompson and Ben Rosenzweig, Public policy is class war pursued by other means: struggle and restructuring as international education economy (P) (pp. 39 - 80) Kristian Williams, The other side of the COIN: counter-insurgency and community policing (P) (pp. 81 - 117) Fernanda Maria Vieira and J. Flávio Ferreira, “Não somos chilenos, somos mapuches!”: as vozes do passado no presente da luta mapuche por seu território (P) (pp. 118 - 144) Roy Krøvel, From indios to indígenas: Guerrilla perspectives on indigenous peoples and repression in Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua (P) (pp. 145 – 171) i Interface: a journal for and about social movements Contents Volume 3 (1): i - iv (May 2011) Action / practice notes and event analysis Musab Younis, British tuition fee protest, November 9, 2010, London (event analysis, pp. 172 - 181) Dino Jimbi, Campanha “Não partam a minha casa” (action note, pp. 182 - 184) Mac Scott, G20 mobilizing in Toronto and community organizing: opportunities created and lessons learned (action note, pp. 185 - 189) Aileen O’Carroll, Alessio Lunghi, Laurence Cox “I’m in the news today, oh boy”: responding to smear tactics and media bullying (practice note, pp. 190 - 194) Articles: general Eurig Scandrett and Suroopa Mukherjee, Globalisation and abstraction in the Bhopal survivors’ movement (P) (pp. 195 - 209) George Sranko, Collaborative governance and a strategic approach to facilitating change: Lessons learned from forest agreements in South East Queensland and the Great Bear Rainforest (P) (pp. 210 - 239) John Agbonifo, Territorialising Niger Delta conflicts: place and contentious mobilisation (P) (pp. 240 - 265) ii Interface: a journal for and about social movements Contents Volume 3 (1): i - iv (May 2011) Reviews [single PDF] (pp. 266 - 291) Laurence Davis and Ruth Kinna, Anarchism and utopianism. Reviewed by Martha Ackelsberg Fiona Dukelow and Orla O’Donovan, Mobilising classics: reading radical writing in Ireland. Reviewed by Fergal Finnegan David Graeber, Direct action: an ethnography. Reviewed by Mandisi Majavu Nathalie Hyde-Clarke, The citizen in communication: re-visiting traditional, new and community media practices in South Africa. Reviewed by Marian Burchardt Gabriel Kuhn, Sober living for the revolution: hardcore punk, straight edge, and radical politics. Reviewed by John L. Murphy Alf Gunvald Nilsen, Dispossession and resistance in India: the river and the rage. Reviewed by Lesley Wood General material Call for papers (volume 4 issue 1): The season of revolution: the Arab Spring (pp. 292 - 296) List of editorial contacts [no PDF] List of journal participants [no PDF] Call for new participants [no PDF] Call for IT allies [no PDF] Interface: a journal for and about social movements is a peer-reviewed journal of practitioner research produced by movement participants and engaged academics. Interface is globally organised in a series of different regional collectives, and is produced as a multilingual journal. The Interface website is based at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Articles marked (P) have been subject to double-blind peer review by one academic researcher and one movement practitioner. iii Interface: a journal for and about social movements Contents Volume 3 (1): i - iv (May 2011) Cover art The cover photograph to this issue was taken at a showing of the 2002 film The Battle of Orgreave, directed by Mike Figgis. The film is a documentary of an event-based collaborative project by artist Jeremy Deller, which re-enacted a demonstration of the British Miners’ strike on June 18 1984. Deller worked collaboratively with those involved in the original strike and members of battle re-enactment societies in the UK in order to reconstruct the original demonstration and confrontations with police. Further details of the re-enactment are on the EventPlan Limited website, an organisation who worked with Jeremy Deller: http://www.historicalfilmservices.mysite1952.co.uk/orgreave.htm. Their overview notes that the recreation had a significant “positive effect on the local community” and that “a belated healing process had began for many Orgreave ‘veterans’, who until the recreation had found the memory of June 1984 just too painful to discuss”. The original demonstration saw a violent clash between striking miners and police at a British Steel coking plant, in the English mining town of Orgreave in South Yorkshire. It occurred at the height of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s attempts to close numerous steel works and rout the labour power of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The original protest involved between 5000 and 6000 picketers organised by the NUM, and saw the police deploy between 4000 and 8000 officers from 10 counties in order to stop the demonstration. In the resulting confrontation ninety-five picketers were charged with riot, unlawful assembly and other offences and many people were injured. The later trial regarding the incident collapsed and all charges were dropped. A number of lawsuits were brought against the police for unlawful arrest, and £425,000 compensation and £100,000 in legal costs was later paid in an out of court settlement. This image is used by kind permission of Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis. iv Interface: a journal for and about social movements Editorial Volume 3 (1): 1 - 11 (May 2011) Flesher Fominaya and Wood, Repression Editorial: repression and social movements Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Lesley Wood With the events of the “Arab Spring” revolutions fresh in our minds, an Interface issue dedicated to repression and social movements may seem very timely. But the fact is that any time is a good time to reflect on repression and social movements. The two realities go hand in hand and have always done so. Any reader can cast their minds back and call up their own memories of social movement repression, whether experienced first-hand, handed down as oral history, witnessed on TV from the relative comfort of a living room sofa, or drawn from a passage in a history book. Suffragettes being force-fed in prison in the UK in the early 1900s, vicious dogs attacking civil rights protesters in the Southern United States, the execution of environmental and indigenous rights activist Ken Saro Wiwa in Nigeria, the systematic kidnapping, torture and assassination of political activists in Argentina’s Dirty War, the massacre of students in Tlatelolco and Tiananmen Square: the list, unfortunately, goes on and on. While these examples are striking representations of repression, the repression of social movements does not always take such visible forms. Much repression of social movements is deliberately invisible – from surveillance and infiltration to the mysterious deaths of labour unionist and environmental whistleblower Karen Silkwood or peace activist and Green Party founder Petra Kelly. Sometimes the media make repression invisible by not reporting it. Of course some forms of repression are difficult to detect, because the mechanisms used are subtle and institutionalized. Examples of this are the ways that intellectuals working in the academy are denied tenure or suspended for their critical intellectual work, or for their movement engagement. A few decades ago, scholars standing up for civil rights for women and ethnic “minorities” often faced hostile administrations. Even in theoretically liberal countries, critical scholars questioning the uses and abuses of anti-terrorism legislation, like Dr. Rod Thornton at the University of Nottingham, can be suspended or arrested1. General blacklisting processes, surveillance, “unspoken” understandings that joining a trade union might cost you your job or promotion, and public proceedings such as the House Un-American Activities Committee (1938-1975), are other examples of institutional mechanisms that silence and discourage dissent and activism. 1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/may/04/nottingham-university-row-after- lecturer-suspended 1 Interface: a journal for and about social movements Editorial Volume 3 (1): 1 - 11 (May 2011) Flesher Fominaya and Wood, Repression The contradictory effects of repression But repression doesn’t always demobilize movements. Sometimes it inspires greater resistance, and wider participation in protest. The Egyptian uprising this year was after all, partly triggered by the police beating and murder of Khaled Said. Even in cases of more subtle repression - the banning of protest, or the rumoured or threatened arrest of a leader - mobilization often increases. It seems that sometimes repression inspires more mobilization; and sometimes it effectively quashes movements or pushes them underground. Sometimes repressive forces are successful in characterizing protestors as legitimate targets of repression, and other times they delegitimize the State and increase the legitimacy of the social movements.