Virtual icon ‘Get in the protest pen’: The limits of the right to protest and the production of the docile protester

Abstract

Speakers: Koshka Duff, University of Nottingham Matthew Hall, University of Nottingham Abstract: The right to protest is in crisis. As economic, environmental, and myriad interrelated crises deepen and intensify, liberal democracies turn to increasingly authoritarian measures to contain popular unrest. In the UK, controversial Public Order and Policing Acts have extended police powers and criminal sanctions to target ‘disruptive’ and ‘noisy’ protesters. Even ‘slow walking’ has been pinpointed by legislators as a ‘selfish, guerrilla protest tactic’ demanding ‘tougher penalties’. Fundamental democratic freedoms of expression and assembly are crumbling. Now, more than ever, it seems we must defend the right to protest. Our paper complicates this narrative. We argue that the ‘right to protest’, as standardly articulated by liberal political philosophers and enshrined in the law of ‘liberal democratic’ states, does not provide a straightforward counterweight to reactionary developments, nor does it uniformly protect anti-oppressive movements from the state’s coercive control. Rather, the right to protest is often - indeed, is paradigmatically - purchased at the cost of the ability to protest creatively and effectively. This is because the liberal conception of a ‘right to protest’ is co-imbricated with real-world policing practices such as protest ‘zoning’, or more colloquially, the ‘protest pen’: a monitored and contained area of acceptable protest activity into which authorities corral dissenters to neutralise their impact. By legitimising the surveillance and suppression of dissent that acts outside a delimited range of legally sanctioned activities, the liberal rights framework pens protest literally and metaphorically. Discourses, practices, and technologies institutionalised under the banner of a ‘right to protest’ function as disciplinary instruments, a process we theorise as the production of the docile protester. In section one, we explain what we mean by the docile protester and examine how this figure is constructed and mobilised, in policing practice, to incapacitate and divide social movements. In section two, we dig into the philosophical underpinnings of the protest rights framework to diagnose its ineffectiveness against repressive state violence and surveillance. We argue that rights to protest neutralise the effectiveness of protest by delimiting the protected category of dissent to that which looks like ‘speech’ and can exist in ‘balance’ with the extensive rights and interests of accumulated property baked into the existing order. So long as severe structural injustices mark this order, the right to protest perpetually produces its own crisis. This is because it constructs as legitimate only a docile form of protest, defined by its undisruptive nature, which must be constantly exceeded in the process of genuine liberatory struggle, and therefore constantly cracked down on by the liberal state. In summary, it is no surprise that so much debate focuses on the limits of permissible protest, because limiting protest is what protest rights fundamentally serve to do. Recognising the limits of the right to protest allows us to embrace more radical horizons for the democratic recreation of social existence.