Food Riots, Food Rights and the Politics of Provisions

Thousands of people in dozens of countries took to the streets when world food prices spiked in 2008 and 2011. What does the persistence of popular mobilization around food tell us about the politics of subsistence in an era of integrated food markets and universal human rights? This book interrogates this period of historical rupture in the global system of subsistence, getting behind the headlines and inside the politics of food for people on low incomes. The half decade of 2007–2012 was a period of intensely volatile food prices as well as unusual levels of popular mobilization, including protests and riots. Detailed case studies are included here from Bangladesh, Cameroon, India, Kenya and Mozambique. The case studies illustrate that political cultures and ways of organizing around food share much across geography and history, indicating common characteristics of the popular politics of provisions under capitalism. However, all politics are ultimately local, and it is demonstrated how the historic fallout of a subsistence crisis depends ultimately on how the actors and institutions articulate, negotiate and reassert their specific claims within the peculiarities of each policy. A key conclusion of the book is that the politics of provisions remain essential to the right to food and that they involve unruliness. In other words, food riots work. The book explains how and why they continue to do so even in the globalized food system of the 21st century. Food riots signal a state unable to meet a principal condition of its social contract, and create powerful pressure to address that most fundamental of failings.

'Leave Them No Space': Checkmating Political Dissent in the Policing of Two UK International Summits

This study examines how the state, through its main agencies, responds to and controls horizontally planned transgressive 'alter-globalisation' protest movements organised against two international summit meetings in the UK (being the 2009 G20 summit protest in London and the 2014 NATO in Wales, although I draw briefly on the 2013 G8 summit). These dissenting groups set out to challenge the state and the established political order and increasingly employ direct action and civil disobedience to make their protests seen and heard by global elites. Analytically, I take a critical human rights based approach as well using the strategic and tactical perspectives of Jaspers (2015) and Scholl (2012) viewing counter-summit movements and the authorities as 'players'in a strategic relational interaction with each other to gain advantage over the opponent. Methodologically, I use an ethnographic approach embedding myself within anti-globalisation protest groups as well as drawing opportunistically on a range of other primary and secondary data sources. My findings reveal that the state and its coercive arm, the police, do much to modify, delimit, and repress protest action. There has now been a transformation in summit policing (and public order policing more generally). The broad components of recent policing innovation includes the following key strategies: (1) careful selection and fortification of summit sites and establishing 'no protest zones' (2) the intensive (overt and covert) use of police surveillance practices to intimidate protestors, reduce anonymity at protest spaces and increase transparency and real time intelligence gathering; (3) the disruption and/or smashing of protestor critical infrastructure, including (but not limited to) convergence centres; (4) using non-lethal weapons against unarmed protestors to incapacitate them, enacted clandestinely as a method of dispensing 'street justice' and increasing the costs of participation, officially allowing police to control and retake any protest spaces; and (5) pre-emptive legal repression (including legal tools such as, banning orders, permits, and mass pre-emptive arrests, etc.) all of which distracts activist leaders and aids demobilisation. These tactics are strategically adapted to the prevailing conditions imposed by each particular summit, and interact dynamically, although not always incrementally, to protestor's own tactical repertoires

Performance and Dialogue – An Ethnographic Study into Police Liaison Teams

Scholarly discussions on public-order policing often centre on the role of paramilitary policing tactics, only recently has the role of dialogue become more prominent within the field. This thesis primarily focuses upon a dialogue-focused public-order policing tactic – the Police Liaison Teams (PLTs) – operating within the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) in London, England. The thesis draws on data collected over a 13-month ethnographic immersion in the MPS’ public-order unit. This data was gathered during a doctoral studentship within the MPS over the period of 2015-2017. This thesis is fundamentally concerned with understanding how dialogue impacts social order within a public-order policing setting. From a micro-sociological perspective, the research seeks to understand the structures behind dialogic behaviours that Police Liaison Officers (PLOs) engage in when attempting to establish a form of ‘order’. The aim of the research is to consider the role dialogue plays during police-citizen interaction at public order policing events – specifically protests and a street-based carnival. This will be understood primarily through the perspective of uniformed officers and, more specifically, officers occupying the tactical role of PLO. Though reference will also be made to officers within other public order policing roles. Applying a dramaturgical conceptual framework, this thesis provides new insights into a lesser studied area of public-order policing. Within PLT-citizen interaction the significance of performance when interpreting actions is central. Framing the interpretation of police work using Goffman’s theories facilitates a more nuanced investigation into the ‘everyday’ behaviours within policing. My research develops our conceptual understanding of the policing of crowds still further, exploring on a micro level police-citizen interaction and the communicative structures that govern this

Policing of ethnic minorities in Britain

This research explores the complexities of the relationship between the police and young black people. This includes considerations on how young people specifically, young black minority ethnic groups are shaped by government policies and its agents, the police. Published research supports the notion that Black young people continue to be affected by a lack of services such as education, employment as well as other social inequalities. In addition, the stop and search practices have caused much damage to BME groups and has impacted negatively on the relationship between the police and Black communities. This thesis explores the issue of Black young people within a historical and social policy context, as well as exploring the views of young Black people and the police. There is a significant body of published research about policing in general. There are however not many in depth research studies on a particular police setting about the experiences of white and black youths and how they are affected by policing. This research explores young people’s thoughts on exactly this theme. The empirical research was derived from qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 18 police officers, and 17 young people taken from diverse and economically active areas of London. The findings supports published research of police discriminatory practices to explain the disproportionate treatment of black young people within the criminal justice system. It also highlighted the feelings and the effect of police stop on the individuals being stopped. This study therefore suggests a move away from the notion that black young people are criminals to involving them as contributors to social policy by giving them a true voice in policing and social policy making process

Hong Kong

CK Lee situates the post-1997 China–Hong Kong contestation in the broader context of 'global China.' While Beijing deploys numerous power mechanisms globally, this Chinese power project has triggered countermovements from Asia to Africa. Hong Kong, stunning and singular in its many peculiarities, offers lessons about China as a global force

Why People Protest: Explaining Participation in Collective Action

Revolution is too difficult to be empirically studied. Revolutionary collective action can be defined as “simultaneous large-scale and spatially diffused protest”. This definition captures the complexity of the phenomenon in terms of three features- think about them as sufficient conditions- that should accompany protest for a collective action situation to be described as “revolutionary” collective action, as follows: a. Number of Actors. Although Olson (1968) argues that there is a negative relationship between group size and the propensity to participate in collective action as the increase in the number of participants makes the individual unnoticeable and decreases the marginal profit of participation, others like Schelling (1978:41) argues that “[sometimes] there is “immunity in numbers”. Between both arguments, it remains as the first obvious feature of revolutionary collective action is the large number of participants. This is even more important when individuals protest in authoritarian contexts where freedom of expression is expected and so is violence from security apparatus. b. Spatial Diffusion. A second distinctive feature of revolutionary collective action is its simultaneous spread over space. While some studies refer to the spatial dimension when analysing the spread of revolutionary vibes across countries, spatial dispersion here is confined to the sub-state units, be it states in federal systems, cantons in confederal system, cities, counties, or governorates…etc. Of course, this spatial diffusion in itself signals successful coordination efforts of the organizing agents. Yet, as a feature of revolutionary collective action, the importance of the momentum’s spatial diffusion is double fold. On one side, some are concerned with the peripheries-centre relationship, the level of urbanization and how the state controls the revolution. On the other side, another group of scholars put more emphasis on the city as an interactional field where distinctive features, be it static (population density, size, area, distance from the capital) (Kuran. 1989) or dynamic (social relations, information cascading and resources) contribute to individuals’ mobilizability (Lohmann.1994). My concern about the sub-state unit, aka the city, falls under the rubric of the dynamic/relational aspect of the latter. c. Time Synchronization. The third feature of revolutionary collective action is its simultaneity across different sub-state units. People act together in different places at the same time to express their dissatisfaction and desire for change. However, it is noteworthy that features of spatial diffusion and time synchronization might interact. Charlesworth (1983) compared rural protests in British and French cities in the 1800s and the line of analysis showed that sometimes spatial diffusion takes place over time. In other words, riots start in one city, and because of media coverage showing what happened in neighbouring cities, it became contagion that other cities start to riot as well. For this, if we cannot study revolutions as they happen or detect the simultaneous nature of people’s collective actions, it can be relegated for now to protest as the core/essential component. Next is to question the spatial diffusion of this collective action situation. Accordingly, this thesis main research question can be simplified to be: when/under what conditions do individuals protest? Related to this is the following three questions: 1. How can the interaction between social and political trust affect individuals’ decision to participate in collective action? 2. How can the interaction between social and political trust affect individuals’ (non)compliance with social and political authorities? 3. How can the interaction between social and political trust explain the spatial diffusion of collective action? The reason why trust is chosen as the main explanatory variable will be explained in detail in the literature review and the theoretical framework

Understanding the Legal Constitution of a Riot: An Evental Genealogy

This thesis considers the constitution of a riot as an event that ruptures. The aim of the thesis is to use an evental theoretical framework to develop a novel understanding of the constitution of a riot, in response to the absence of sustained theoretical reflection on riots, specifically following events in 2011, and England’s so called ‘summer of disorder’. The absence of theoretical reflection on the constitution of riots in much existing riot research follows from the centrality of questions of causality within it, such as: what caused the breakdown of law and order? Existing work rushes to respond to specific events, to explain causality, in a way that quells concern over the destabilisation that the breakdown of law and order generates. The thesis begins by posing the alternative, more contemplative and critical question: what is a riot? Drawing on evental theory, the thesis develops a conceptualisation of the riot as a particular kind of transgression; a transgression of the aesthetic faultline in the world (Badiou, 2008; Shaw, 2012). This is the line that regulates what can and cannot appear in the world. To develop an understanding of the constitution of the riot as a transgression of the aesthetic faultline in the world, the thesis traces the drawing and policing of this line through history, specifically in the legal domain, through legal archival work. It takes a historical approach in order to develop understanding of the historical constitution of this line, and how it has been policed during different instances of disorder, such as in Orgreave 1984-5, for example