The Policing of Transnational Protest

"This is a collection of essays, which came out of a workshop that took place in Sweden in the mid 2000s. A number of academics, including myself, had gathered to discuss the policing of international protest and its repercussions in the post-Seattle period. The Seattle protests took place at the 1999 World Trade Organisation talks, and were a real watershed event. It was a situation where a major city was host to leaders from around the world, who were left virtually stranded in their hotels because the city was ostensibly taken over by protesters. The Policing of Transnational Protest is important because it charts the events and decisions that explain police tactics today, such as we saw at the protests at the G20 in London. Many international police forces regarded Seattle as their ‘Pearl Harbour’ and became determined not to let the same thing happen again. International protest events are relatively new, and the police are wary of the protesters at this kind of event because they are not as cooperative as they’d like. They don’t have hierarchical organisations and they don’t have recognised leaders with whom the police can organise negotiations. A pair of American academics, Pat Gillham and John Noakes, came up with a very handy description of police tactics now used in Europe and America, which they call ‘selective incapacitation’ and which they discuss in The Policing of Transnational Protest. Selective incapacitation involves an emphasis on surveillance, segregation (known as ‘kettling’), selective arrests, and keeping protestors hemmed in in order to control them. The book is talking about how these tactics have evolved, why they are not perhaps as sensible as they seem to be, and why it would be wise to change them."