Riots and Militant Occupations

Smashing a System, Building a World - A Critical Introduction

Alissa Starodub, Andrew Robinson

• Editore: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786603722
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoria: Lavoro e relazioni industriali

Riots and Militant Occupations provides students with theoretical reflections and qualitative case studies on militant contentious political action across a range from across Europe to Nigeria, China and Turkey. This multi-authored, interdisciplinary collection adopts an interpretive and participatory approach to examining meanings, affects, embodiment, identity, relationality and space in the context of riots and protests. The rapidly shifting terrain of riots and occupations has left existing social-scientific theories lagging behind, challenging dominant constructions of agency and rationality. This book will fill this gap, by offering new understandings and critical perspectives on the question of what happens in space, in time and between people, during and after riots. Weaving together observations, experiences and analyses of riots from participants, theorists and social scientists, the authors craft theoretical perspectives in close connection with researched practices. These perspectives take the form of new theoretical contributions on the spatiality, affectivity and immanent meaning of riots, and grassroots qualitative case-studies of particular events and contexts. Countering the preconceptions of riots as a trail of broken windows, burned dumpsters and angry conservatives, this book aims to demonstrate that riots are fundamentally creative, generating forms of meaning, power, knowledge, affect, social connection and participatory space which are rare, and sociologically important, in the modern world.

Part I

Theoretical Reflections

Chapter 1

A Theory of Rupture

Riot and Participatory Research

Alissa Starodub

Riot and Political Desire

Traditionally, the large majority of the existing literature on riots and social movements involves an external power/knowledge relation between researcher and participants, and studies of riots have often fallen into the same fallacies as popular mediatised perspectives. Researchers who seek to establish characteristics common to rioters in terms such as class, age, gender and residence use these quantitative criteria to ‘explain’ riots in terms of social marginalisation, disenfranchisement, or the revolutionary subjectivity of particular groups. Early theories such as those of Gustave Le Bon repeated the media stereotype of riots as instances of social dysfunction or spontaneous explosions of negative energy. Panics, mass movements, marches, riots and demonstrations were all analysed with the same analytical tools within the theoretical paradigm of collective behaviour theories that had its peak of popularity amongst researchers from the late 1940s up to the 1960s (Buechler, 2000, 32). Riot researchers asserted that riots were primarily ­psychological, not political, and therefore ought to be regarded as dangerous and irrational (McAdam, 1982). Later variants of collective behaviour ­theories – for example, those based on a structural functionalism (Smelser, 1962) – ­continued to define deviations from social and political norms as irrational (e.g., Buechler, 2000, 28).

Theoretical paradigms linking relative deprivation to collective behaviour approaches (Davies, 1962) tend to explain the occurrence and the timing of riots with the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance, to theorise the causes of contentious collective behaviour (Geschwender, 1968; Gurr, 1969) through ascribing psychological conditions such as an interconnection of frustration and aggression to rioters. More recently, riots have been subsumed in the wider field of social movement studies, which is dominated by rationalistic approaches. These approaches focus on self-interest and observed statistical patterns, to the neglect of affect, relations, embodiment and meaning. The riots of 2005–2007 in the French suburbs, for example, have been analysed by researchers as caused by disadvantaged groups who want to make themselves visible and heard (Moran, 2012). Contemporary studies of riots relate them to social movement theories that led to a diversification of conceptions and theoretical approaches (e.g., Mayer, Thörn and Thörn, 2016) – but one thing remains the same: in most studies of riots the riot is performed by ‘others’ (Young, 2005; Olkowski, 1999), while the researcher observes and analyses what these others do.

As sensational, risky, emotive events, riots involve a high level of emotional intensity and concentrated social meaning for participants. These meanings and affects have not been sufficiently explored by the social sciences due to the existing quantitative bias in the literature, and this contributes to the demonisation and marginalisation of social movements and strata accused of rioting. There are clear differences between historical riots and contemporary riots, including the latter’s mainly urban character and anti-identitarian orientation (Flesher Fominaya, 2010, 399; Holloway, 2010). Contemporary riots are harder to integrate into a class-struggle framework than historical peasant revolts. Also, while earlier studies focussed mostly on explanations based on underlying causes of riots that are accessible to an academic as external observer, a substantial minority of recent investigations seek to extract a grounded theory of revolt from ethnographic observation and dialogue with participants. Anthropological approaches such as those of James Juris and Abby Peterson help to reconstruct meanings and motives, but this literature is small and limited today. Increasingly, participants in events such as the 2008 Greek revolt and the 1999–2001 summit protests have published their own reflections and theoretical analyses, providing a strong sense of participants’ conceptions that is, however, neglected in academic theory.

Academic analytical perspectives on riots observing them from a subject position situated outside of the contentious actions has tended to depoliticise riots, although it might place them in a political context: there was no space to speak about the political desires of participants.

Hence, in order to create a discursive space for the diverse political desires of riot participants, research on riots needs to take the anti-identitarian orientation of contemporary militant protesters into account (Peterson, 2001) and open up to participatory perspectives from within the riot.

Taking the example of the No-Expo riot in Milano 2015, I will show in this chapter why only a perspective from within the riot that relies on participatory methodologies helps to shed a light on particular creative aspects of riots as experiences, such as the creation or reinforcement of social relations, the transformation of spaces and spatial narratives of dissent, and the creation of affect.

In the case of riots performed by anti-identitarian horizontal social movements, this perspective helps to engage in a horizontal theorisation of political desires and the creation of another, less hierarchical world.

‘They Cannot Stop Us AnyMore!’ Transforming the Street

The demonstration had been walking for an hour through the posh streets of the city centre of Milano. Although several thousand people were taking part, we could still see the flags of the Syndicalists in front of us. Slowly the people who were dressed in black and not carrying any flag or group name were getting together in one bloc of the demonstration. The atmosphere was getting more and more tense, and I had the feeling that people around me were feeling tense, too. Some were already wearing masks. At every crossing we could see the cops standing in the side streets – in riot gear with water cannons, ready to jump on us any moment to separate us from the rest of the demonstration and lock us in a kettle between the blocks that we were walking through. The large street with its tall buildings and fancy shop windows felt like a deep, dark canyon. I could hear the slight rattling of spray cans in people’s bags around me and remembered how the locals whom we met yesterday at another demonstration against the Expo 2015 had told us that ‘it is not only against the Expo as an event. It is about the precarisation of work and against the gentrification of the city. It is about making radical dissent heard! And it will be possible tomorrow’. Suddenly several loud bangs just behind us: at the back of our bloc in black some people started to use pyrotechnics right in the middle of a crossing facing the cops. ‘The cops will shoot!’ said my buddy, who was scared of rubber bullets. With many others, we moved forwards into the street. As soon as we realised that the cops would not come running after us but had erected protection walls in front of themselves, the demonstration sped up. It felt like our bloc was moving through the street like an organism with two antennas in front and a spike in the back. The antennas consisted of groups of masked sprayers walking along the walls and covering them with political slogans as high as they could reach. Every metre was used. The walls turned into a whole explanation of the radical dissent performed here that was written in many colours and handwritings: ‘Expo = workers exploitation’; ‘this is a zone to defend’; ‘our right to the city’; ‘Expo? Expect resistance!’

Some people in the middle of the bloc were breaking the windows of jewelry shops, banks and companies with exploitative labour policies. In the back people were continuously throwing pyrotechnics and bottles at the cops, who were shooting missiles of tear gas. Hard to see and breathe. The round, metallic tear gas bullets were coming from all directions, and we had to take a lot of care not to get hit in the head by one of them. Still, the demonstration, buzzing and moving, was transforming into a riot. ‘This moment is intense . . .’ my buddy said, coughing from fumes of tear gas. He looked happy.

Riot as Political Practice: Knowing from within a Horizontal Plane of Experience

Recent contentious political practices of contemporary social movements engage with a variety of socio-political issues in expressing a radical dissent towards what can be broadly summarised as mechanisms of structural oppression. For those who issued an international invitation to participate in the contentious demonstration against the Universal Exposition in Milano 2015, the protest against the event was an act of resistance and rejection of gentrification processes in the city of Milano as well as against the precarisation of labour at the Expo itself (Italian Anarchist Federation, 2015; Students against Expo, 2015). In 2011 massive demonstrations against the Spanish government’s austerity policies took place in more than fifty Spanish cities, and the ‘15M’, as the movement called itself, occupied several squares and transformed them into encampments that were a practical example of a different, more horizontal social organisation: in the occupied squares people were participating in direct decision-making processes in assemblies with horizontality as a tool of autonomous self-organisation and as a goal (Azzellini and Sitrin, 2014, 123). Several riots and clashes with police occurred when 15M, an inclusive post-representative movement (Azzellini and Sitrin, 2014, 132 ff), was occupying the squares.

In December 2013 a three-week-long riot erupted in Hamburg right after the police attacked a demonstration against the eviction of a squatted social centre and two residential buildings as well as for solidarity with refugees and their freedom of movement. Participants came from a diversity of backgrounds: neighbourhood initiatives, cultural associations, refugee councils, trade unions, student groups, collectives running self-managed spaces and others (A. K. Kate et al., 2013).

In February 2014 a demonstration in Nantes against the mega-project of a new airport to be constructed in the commune of Notre-Dame-des-Landes turned into a riot. Since 1972 the project has met with strong opposition from local farmers, environmentalists, some political parties, associations and autonomous groups (L’Insomniaque, 2013, 10 ff). Squatters and local inhabitants refused to move away from the territory of the planned construction site. When buildings of the company, which, together with the local authorities, was the driving force behind the planned construction of the airport and the eviction of the squatted autonomous zone in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, were marked with paint and the demonstrators clashed with the police in 2014, it was impossible to tell whether the rioters were local farmers, students, squatters, international supporters, single mothers or environmentalists from Nantes (e.g., Comité Invisible, 2014, 228).

Post-Representative Dissenting Subjects . . .

‘Anti-identitarian’ movements (Flesher Fominaya, 2010; Holloway, 2010) see the refusal of a fixed collective identity as a political statement in favour of an inclusion of difference into their identity. This can be seen as a contrast to institutionalised or more formally organised social movements, such as trade unions, because ‘an institutionalized orientation is characterized by a clear division of labor and authority, a centralized organisation, and a loose coupling of ends and means’ (Pruijt, 2014, 144). Within autonomous social movements the individual participates in organisations that are dispensable – they can be restructured any time and exist to serve the individual’s desires and goals (e.g., Flesher Fominaya, 2007, 339).

In his historical analysis of European autonomous social movements, Georgy Katsiaficas explains the rejection of fixed group identities by autonomous social movements with their opposition to the existing social order that reproduces exploitative divisions of labour and authority and couples it with group identities (Katsiaficas, 2006). This opposition emerges from an articulation of individual and collective needs fleshed out in an anti-oppressive critique of everyday life. Instead of resisting oppression as women, refugees, workers, poor or indigenous people, autonomous social movement’s resistance is conditioned by decentralised, informalised and affinity-based organising (Day, 2001; 2004). Instead of subsumption under an identitarian politics that represents demands advanced by a shared subject position, cohesion is defined by a post-representational collective practice of direct action prefiguring the fulfilment of individual and collective political desires, it is defined by the coming together of small groups connected through personal relationships of affinity.

The refusal to be represented through political articulation within the current status quo is in some cases of contentious political practices ‘an ideological choice or position – a rejection of the state or forms of hierarchical powers; but for millions of others it is the result of a lack of alternatives’ (Azzellini and Sitrin, 2014, 9).

In direct articulations of dissent, such as riots and militant occupations, there is thus no singular identifiable protest identity but a ...