ABOUT THIS BOOK
In November 1999, fifty-thousand anti-globalization activists converged on Seattle to shut down the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Meeting. Using innovative and network-based strategies, the protesters left police flummoxed, desperately searching for ways to control the emerging anti-corporate globalization movement. Faced with these network-based tactics, law enforcement agencies transformed their policing and social control mechanisms to manage this new threat.
Policing Dissent provides a firsthand account of the changing nature of control efforts employed by law enforcement agencies when confronted with mass activism. The book also offers readers the richness of experiential detail and engaging stories often lacking in studies of police practices and social movements. This book does not merely seek to explain the causal relationship between repression and mobilization. Rather, it shows how social control strategies act on the mind and body of protesters.
REVIEWS
"Policing Dissent is one of the best books I've come across in any field that examines the intersections of globalization, dissent, and late-modern social control."
— Peter Kraska, Senior Research Fellow, and author of Militarizing the American Criminal Justice
"Luis Fernandez's Policing Dissent is a fascinating and courageous book—a book where the crackling energy of contemporary street protest animates a careful analysis of late modern social control."
— Jeff Ferrell, author of Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy
"A fascinating look at a vitally important movement for social change—and the obstacles it faces. Important reading for self-reflective artists."
— Starhawk, Activist and author of Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising
"This book is frightening, urgent—crucial reading."
— Christian Parenti, author of Lockdown America and The Soft Cage
"Fernandez's survey of new protest policing helps us all feel the chill—not just of mass mobilizations but of dissent itself."
— Amory Starr, author of Naming the Enemy and Global Revolt
"An important contribution to our understanding of the state's response to unrest that puts the scholarship on protest policing into contact with the repressice reality."
— Kristian Williams, author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America
"Luis Fernandez's Policing Dissent is a first-hand account of the nature and effect of social control practices utilized by police against the emergent American anti-globalization movement. ... a worthwhile piece of research."
— Mobilization
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Protest, Control, and Policing
Chapter 2: Perspectives on the Control of Dissent
Chapter 3: The Anti-Globalization Movement
Chapter 4: Managing and Regulating Protest: Social Control and the Law
Chapter 5: This Is What Democracy Looks Like?: The Physical Control of Space
Chapter 6: “Here Come the Anarchists”: The Psychological Control of Space
Chapter 7: Law Enforcement and Control
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author