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Policing Protest in Argentina and Chile. By Michelle Bonner. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2013. 249p. $65.00.

This book provides a creative and engaging take on an issue of considerable topical relevance in both of the countries studied. Present-day Argentina and Chile are both experiencing significant levels of urban protest and mobilization, something that has been almost routine in Argentine political culture but is a more recent departure for Chile, where student-led street protests in and since 2006 have irrupted onto a largely static and demobilized posttransitional political arena. Given the high levels of security-force repression endured by both countries during the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, the issue of police behavior, and particularly of the management of citizen mobilization in public space, is a sensitive one and is often taken as a litmus test for the success or failure of the democratization of state–citizen relations and the exercise of coercive power. Michelle Bonner adapts the horizontal and vertical accountability framing developed by Guillermo O’Donnell, and the social accountability variant of it proposed by Catalina Smulovitz and Enrique Peruzzotti, to investigate how and by whom the limits of “acceptable” protest policing are set, developed, and challenged in response to incidents and accusations of heavy-handed or outright repressive police behavior. She finds that Argentina has managed to a greater degree to develop a civil rights framing for expectations of police behavior, one that acts to inhibit police violence somewhat and reduce manipulation or stage-managing of protest incidents and the reporting of them. By contrast, she asserts that in Chile, a public-order framing persists, basically suspicious of collective action and of the motives and intentions of protesters, and accordingly more tolerant of repressive or transgressive police treatment of participants. Thus far, the characterization is convincing, albeit static. However, Bonner usefully also offers an account of the ways in which such framings have changed or may continue to evolve. She adopts the notion of “discursive accountability” as a framing activity through which various actors strive to “create . . . a cognitive environment where it is understood that repressive protest policing is no longer acceptable” (p. 26). Chapter 1 discusses how the very notion of repressive and nonrepressive policing, and the dividing line between them, is necessarily contextually and culturally determined. Chapter 2 examines the particular meanings of protest policing behavior in the context of low-intensity Latin American democracies, given not only authoritarian legacies but also the effect of neoliberalism in stripping down state functions to the point where security provision, in its narrow, policing, interpretation, is foregrounded. Chapters 3 to 5 provide, respectively, a history of Argentine protest policing, and analyses of prevailing discourses about it, including media treatments. Chapter 6 takes the case study of Pueyrredon Bridge, where two men were killed during a 2002 protest incident, which has been widely considered a tipping point toward a more skeptical and less indulgent attitude on the part of political authorities toward police wrongdoing, real or alleged. Turning next to Chile, Chapters 7 to 10 treat similar themes showing a basic contrast in much stronger public sympathy for police, even during and after the Pinochet dictatorship. Unsurprisingly, therefore, media and other discourses tend to cast doubt on the motives and veracity of protesters, rather than police, to the point where protest organizers are persuaded of the need for and legitimacy of requests to “self-police” activity in public space. The case study chapter, however, illustrates Bonner’s discussion of the dynamism of discursive frames, showing how undeniable police wrongdoing in 2010 student protests was eventually acknowledged by the conservative mainstream press, leading to the eventual, albeit grudging, recognition by police authorities of individual— though never institutional—“excesses.” Although a dominant civil rights framing still seems distant or improbable, there is a detectable shift toward the expectation of transparency and accountability to back up police claims of exigent circumstance. Bonner’s concept of discursive frames, developed, deployed, and internalized by a mix of institutional and noninstitutional actors (inter alia police chiefs, political authorities, social movements, and human rights organizations), is useful in bridging the gap otherwise left between official policy pronouncements and the monitoring of media coverage, since mass media sources are rarely a particularly reliable guide to the “general public opinion” for which they are so often, and somewhat lazily, taken as a proxy. We are, in other words, presented with a more realistic and nuanced scenario where public opinion varies widely, certain groups have a much closer and more personal stake in rights-compliant policing than do others, and that which individual officers believe and are told is and is not acceptable does inform their everyday behavior on and off the job. Getting inside the heads of public officials or members of the security services, in order to somehow decipher what they really make of the written and unwritten codes that surround their profession and others’ perceptions of it, is of course a challenge better suited to social psychological or even anthropological techniques than to the political science framing adopted here. The author wisely steers clear of claiming special insight into what officers “really” think or do, and her subject is primarily what is thought of and said about, rather than by, police responsible for facilitating and