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Book Review: Donatella Della Porta, Abby Peterson and Herbert Reiter (eds) The Policing of Transnational Protest Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, 213 pp

A national protest cycles washed across Western Europe and North America during the late 1960s and early 1970s, police agencies, almost universally, responded with a bundle of crowd control strategies that Clark McPhail, David Schweingruber and I have characterized as ‘escalated force’. Key features of escalated force summarized by Della Porta and Reiter in their conclusion to this volume include: ‘Massive use of force to deter even minor violations; Intimidating use of relations with organizers; Generalized and indiscriminate information gathering’ (p. 183). By the end of the 1980s, however, those same police agencies had, for the most part, adopted a ‘negotiated management’ bundle of crowd control strategies. Key features of negotiated management summarized in the conclusion include: ‘Coercive intervention as a last resort; tolerance of minor breaches; Partnership aimed at ensuring the right to demonstrate; Information gathering focused on punishing offenses’ (p. 183). A cumulative body of research on both sides of the Atlantic has documented similar national evolutions of protest crowd control strategies from escalated force to negotiated management. The Policing of Transnational Protest departs from most previous analyses by examining transnational protest within an explicitly comparative framework. Starting with the confrontation between the diverse groups of global justice demonstrators and police in Seattle, Washington in December of 1999, however, and in the subsequent cycle of large ‘transnational protest demonstrations’ in Europe and North America, the breakdown of the détente that had prevailed between police agencies and protest groups under ‘negotiated management’ became obvious to newspaper readers, casual observers and, especially, to global justice activists and protest policing researchers. These global justice movement protests, according to the editors, appeal to cosmopolitan identities, are organized transnationally and target intergovernmental organizations, often at their summit meetings, and international organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Making sense of the recent evolution of crowd control strategies at these events, describing them and accounting for why they have changed, motivates each of the analyses included in The Policing of Transnational Protest. Earlier versions of most of the articles collected in The Policing of Transnational Protest were presented at a workshop held at Fiskebäckskil on the northwest coast of Sweden in May 2004 convened by Abby Peterson and Donatella Della Porta. In addition, the editors penned a theoretical introduction, Herbert Reiter and Olivier Fillieule added a chapter on recent European Union (EU) cooperative efforts in policing transnational protest (a topic of great interest and of extensive discussion and speculation at the workshop) and Della Porta and Herbert Reiter added a well-crafted summary and conclusion. How am I aware of the substance of discussion at the workshop? Full disclosure requires that I confess I attended, as did representatives of the Swedish Ministry of Justice. The motivation of the Swedish sponsors of the workshop was an assessment of what came to be viewed by both Swedish authorities and citizens as an unfortunate response by police to the June, 2001 protest demonstration organized around an EU summit (with United States President Bush in attendance) held in Gothenburg where police liberally employed preventive detention, excessive and relatively undisciplined force and shot three demonstrators one of whom was critically wounded – a rare occurrence at protest demonstrations anywhere in Western Europe or North American during the last decades of the twentieth century. Abby Peterson’s chapter compares the crowd control strategies and outcomes surrounding the protests at the EU summit in Gothenburg with those at the subsequent EU summit in Book Reviews