The Privatization of Protest: Demobilization and the Emergence of Political Violence in the Aftermath of Local Protest Campaigns

From Firenze University Press Journal: SocietàMutamentoPolitica

Mans Lundstedt

Processual approaches to political violence have greatly improved researchers’ understanding of how individuals and collective actors over-come the strategic, normative, and emotional limitations on using violence as a means to block or promote political change (Bosi 2021). In their current usage, however, these approaches have been most closely linked to a single temporal model: the gradual escalation of large-scale social movement cam-paigns. As valuable as insights into this basic model of escalation have been, its predominance has meant that theoretical development has been limited to a relatively narrow set of empirical circumstances. These approaches have thereby side-lined alternative temporal patterns that are clearly present in empirical cases of political violence. The continued dominance of the gradual escalation model thereby limits the full potential of a demonstrably valuable analytical approach. Following a discussion of the relationship between processual approaches and temporality, this article devel-ops its argument through the detailed presentation of one pathway through which violence emerges in the absence of an unbroken escalation process: the privatization of protest. In the privatization pathway, violence does not emerge immediately from within the dynamic of highly mobilized movement environments, but from the rhythm of interactions within the private, personal networks of friends, family members, neighbours and acquaint-ances. However, when violence happens, its facilitative frames, emotions, networks and considerations of politi-cal opportunity remain traceable to the initial phase of protest. In the empirical section, the article demonstrates how the notion of a privatization pathway helps explain why attacks against migrant accommodation centres in Sweden, despite occurring seemingly arbitrarily, often happened in communities and against targets that had already been singled out in prior protest campaigns. As the article concludes in the final section the pathway can also be applied analogously to a range of other contexts. The article thereby makes an empirically grounded contribution to the critical discussion on temporality in processual approaches to political violence.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/smp-15496

Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/smp/article/view/15496