In the 1960s and 1970s, militant protest cultures and civic surveillance of police violence led the governments of France, Italy, and West Germany and their police to reinvent state violence. Luca Provenzano deftly narrates how a transnational cohort of revolutionaries rejected and challenged the state's monopoly on legitimate force during protests in the context of 1968 and the revolutionary movements of the 1970s. Meanwhile, opposition parties, journalists, photographers, and citizens questioned police behaviours that contradicted principles of minimum force, discernment, impartiality, and humanity. Over the course of these turbulent decades, this double challenge to state authority provoked politicians and police to embrace new theories, tactics, and weapons to control public space. Offering a transnational and comparative account of this process of struggle and adaptation, Power is in the Streets examines how European governments learned to suppress protest movements at reduced political cost.

‘No other study of the global 1968 treats the question of force-whether exercised by protestors or police-at the center of its analysis. A sophisticated reimagining of the conflct between the forces of order and movement at a pivotal juncture, Luca Provenzano's book is of both historical and contemporary relevance.'

Timothy Scott Brown - Northeastern University

‘While many historians invoke the need for transnational studies, Luca Provenzano actually does it. Moreover, whereas most studies of '1968' investigate the radical social movements of that time, Provenzano focuses on government responses and police repression. A must-read and a modern classic.'

Gerd-Rainer Horn - Sciences Po

‘A fascinating history of militant protest and its opponents in the long 1960s. Luca Provenzano's deeply researched, transnational analysis challenges narratives of liberalisation to show instead how the forces of order reinvented repression. An original and striking contribution to histories of violence, protest, policing, and the legacies of 1968.

Ben Mercer - Australian National University

‘In this original and impressive study, Provenzano dramatizes the remaking of state violence in the 1960s and 1970s: how in response to mass protests by radicals, European police authorities remade themselves and reestablished order. As protest and repression again engulf our world, Provenzano's work could not be more relevant.'

Udi Greenberg - Dartmouth University