1. Introduction
In numerous urbanized societies, safety has become an invaluable premium. Amplified media and social media coverage of the tiniest incidents, an overabundance of information concerning safety risks and experts’ advice from the growing safety industry in turn create an increased sense of urban insecurity, fuel the demand for more protection and a political preference for the precautionary principle.
Large cities around the world are where multiple global processes assume concrete and localized forms. These localized forms represent what globalization is about. Despite all their assets and resources, global cities (to be understood as a concentration of strategic functions commanding far-flung economic and financial networks) have conflict wired into the urban space itself. The reasons are numerous. Extreme inequalities generate the resentment of those confined to less hospitable urban areas at a time when information reaches the most distant points of the world and makes residents aware of their fate. Such cities provoke fascination and rejection among radical activists. There is the diversity of populations in urban spaces, most of them being ready to compete for survival. There is uncertainty, and the loss of bearings, etc.
Due to the multiplicity of presences in the urban landscape, cities are a contested terrain. Global capital players and the new immigrant workforce are instances of transnationalized actors, all claiming entitlements and a right to the city, but in an asymmetric way.
Those metropolises that are the recipients of flows of capital, of people, innovations and ideas, experience continuous mutations. Issues of order/disorder, safety/insecurity, norms/deviance raise deep and complex questions, including a general inability to anticipate what may happen. Terrorism, catastrophes, massive social injustice, collective outrage at abusive social control, are among the threats that cities confront. Urban protest/unrest is the object of the current study.
In what follows, the topic of public disorder is used as a lens to grasp change and mutations in our time. The question is whether instead of craving for certainty, institutions and populations should not embrace uncertainty.Reference Nowotny 1
Historically, fear has accompanied the history of cities.
A famous letter of October 1604 to Henry IV, King of France, from the provost of merchants, François Myron, comes to mind:
It is a poor idea to build neighbourhoods, exclusively dedicated to craftsmen and workers. In a capital where the Sovereign dwells, it is not appropriate that the little ones are on one side and the big plump ones on the other, it would be best and more secure to mix them together: your poor neighbourhoods would become citadels blocking your rich neighbourhoods.
…
And as the Louvre is in the nice part, it could happen that bullets would bounce off your crown… I do not want, your Majesty, to be an accomplice of such measure.
Henry IV replied
My fellow, you are as quick as a beetle but finally a good and loyal subject. Your will shall be heard and the King of France will attend your school of wisdom and conciliation for a long time… (Anonymous source)
All through the centuries, thinkers have noticed that civilizations had their foundation in fear and that the latter could paralyse men or spur their development. Tocqueville, the most modern of political thinkers, described the democratic malaise as ‘a worry regarding the future and an uncertainty regarding the past’.Reference de Tocqueville 2 He analysed the loss of markers of ‘the lonely crowd’ and of individuals with no bearings.
In this research, I deconstruct how forms of disorder emerge into the thickness of cities, how they engage the global directly, often bypassing the national. I examine their diversity, their scope and their scale. Then, in each context, I compare cross-national and local responses, the reservoirs of action and knowledge from governments, police and justice.
Are not cities – the first on the frontline and the sites of contradictions between the need for economic development and social redistribution – sometimes forced to be ahead of states and supra-national entities, in terms of innovation, prevention and repair of the social fabric?
Defining the terms used in this research is our first task. Take order. What ‘order’? For whom? The same ‘order’ for all residents, various visitors and users, as well as for the hypermobile actors on whom cities increasingly depend? How is such ‘order’ produced? Who is in charge and accountable? What are the processes at work? With what outcomes?
2. Definitions
Following a collective mobilization of dissent, public disorder can be defined as ‘turbulent, erratic collective actions, disturbing public tranquillity and disrespecting established order’. Adding public to disorder means that:
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(1) The dynamics of disorder are empowered by public space (or some private space looking like public space): streets, parks, squares, etc.
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(2) Public forces with a legitimate monopoly of force intervene to restore public order.
Disorder can only be understood by reference to order. Some forms of disorder are harmful, merely destructive and cannot be tolerated by society and its institutions. Disorder is perceived then as threatening the functioning of society. Order is a fundamental value in any society.Reference Body-Gendrot 3
The culture of control has very little tolerance for uncertainty and disorder. Unchecked violence harms persons, properties, values and the cohesion of a society.
This topic of disorder is important because it takes place in a context of insecurity felt at times of macro-mutations currently induced by globalization. What the governments (and voters) make of insecurity is of great concern in democracies, threatened by populism. Globalization creates fractures between winners and losers eager to take their revenge with populist votes for providential demagogues.
Insecurity, a slippery term, is different from risk, saturating our lives. Risks can be calculated one by one, people tend to employ puzzling rationalities in selecting the risks that they want to be concerned with. Insecurity is a more general feeling that one tries to escape by building or requiring protection. It has numerous meanings and referent objects. J. Jackson compares insecurity to ‘a sponge, absorbing all kinds of anxieties about related issues of deteriorating moral fabric, from family to community to society’.Reference Jackson 4 For R. Castel, the paradox in our secure Western societies comes from an inflation of insecurity conflated by all kinds of fears.Reference Castel 5 He distinguishes social insecurity (a work accident, an illness, losing one’s job, one’s status, and so on), which used to be protected by the Welfare State, from civil insecurity (threats to physical integrity and property) fought by the rule of law, police, justice and communities.
3. Globalization and Public Disorder
What is new in this research concerns the association of public, disorder and of a third term, globalization. Globalization amplifies local disorder, it condenses time and space, it gives local events a world echo (Occupy Movements, ‘riots’, disasters).
Globalization also provides the context for contest, for change and innovation. Local space is reinterpreted via global networks, a global drama is organized in contentious territories.
Some disorder (i.e. civil disobedience) is a necessary step in the adjustment of change: the future order is inside the transitory disorder, which acts as its envelope. The notion of intricacy linking the two terms is appropriate.Reference Chevallier 6 Such disorder can be interpreted as a healthy signal for democracies. This research explores such differences.
Communication networks via smartphones, websites or social media link dispersed people, create visibility for local mobilizations and impact on the evolution of hyperspatialized events. In other words, social networks interpret local disturbances, they ‘globalize’ them. Yet they do not create a global public space.
It is my assumption that clicking ‘I like’ is a different commitment from that of standing up in a specific space. In my research, I observe the two forms of activism and their interaction.
Why does the global context make insecure people change into outraged participants? There are numerous reasons. One explanation that comes to mind is the awareness that systemic logics of expulsions are at work, breaking up individual and collective certitude and feeding uncertainty regarding present and future times.Reference Sassen 7
4. Urban Disorder in a Global Context
Protests and urban disorder refer to a hardly conceptualized ‘newness’, to an inability to think urban change in the long term. When people take to the streets, it reveals that other channels of expression are blocked or refused (such as voting for many young people). Some people then need to ‘act out’ and even to resort to violence to become visible.
In this ‘acting out’, how much is the impulse carried by cities’ spaces themselves? And how much by external forces and events (terrorism, financial dislocations, natural disasters)? There are no easy answers to such questions.
Urban space is a political resource for all kinds of grievances, given coverage by the media and the internet. Due to governments’ unconvincing performance and to global cities’ failures, fear may change to indignation and outrage. For a majority of people (in Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, Brazil, Spain, etc.), such ‘happenings’ make sense.
Protest is about rites and symbols; belonging and sharing an individual and a collective experience; becoming visible, being heard, growing up more mature.
The way public disorder is perceived is diverse. Take May 1968. Middle-class students blocking the streets, making barricades out of overturned cars, writing graffiti on the walls, were all the more visible as their revolt was backed up by intellectual spokespersons, and by ten million people on strike. Political decision-makers at the top were taken by surprise and paralysed. This type of giant public disorder is quite different from that of the 2005 so-called ‘riots’ in France, which spread in 300 deprived neighbourhoods over three weeks. In no locality did the disorder last more than three evenings and there were no casualties. However, after the tragic deaths of two youths chased by the police in a poor locality on the periphery of Paris, the youth revolt resorted to rites and symbols: vandalizing buildings, setting cars on fire (a mode of action also used in Sweden but less so in Britain) and confronting the police with missiles and tear gas. Unlike in London in 2011, the French disorder was contained within inner-cities, making it less costly. This approach is characteristic of the way French police control disorder.
5. Police: Order Maintenance
The police are indeed an essential piece in the dramaturgy of our societies. Their use or non-use of force is part and parcel of public disorder. Since disorder is a contextually defined matter, it cannot be easily studied outside of careful observations of police practices.Reference Manning 8
There are ten thousand demonstrations taking place every year in Paris. Police responses are determined by the strength of the groups they confront, their profiles and goals, their resources and the nature of the disorder.
The French police experience in order maintenance is notorious. According to a poll published by Le Figaro on 16 July 2016, 84% of the French hold positive views of the police, a figure that rose even higher (87%) after the terrorist attacks of January and November 2015 in Paris. The police are frequently the best rated among public services, which is not the case everywhere and certainly not for justice (seen as slow and opaque).
New techniques that are used to disperse mob gatherings operate through sophisticated weaponry, with officers equipped in riot gear and trained in riot-control tactics and are hardly questioned. The strategy of incapacitation based on risk management makes use of high metal fences and other devices whose goal is to restrict access to zones of contention. Depending on circumstances, the police may use water cannons and horses to disperse crowds. Undercover policemen and helicopters take photos of participants for subsequent identification and surveillance. Their goal is not to make arrests on the spot, but subsequently, after three months or so. The ritualized nature of public confrontations should be underlined, both on the part of the agents of disorder and on that of law enforcers.
The tools of the French state to restore order are large and diverse: emergency laws, laws and ordinances, injunctions, preventative arrests, arrests and sanctions. Well-trained anti-riot police forces act in concert with judges acting in real time – their decisions, including incarceration, having a deterrent impact on participants. In other words, public authorities rely on historical know-how to halt disorder. This goes from revolutionary times, when army forces intervened to stop crowds, to current times, when a negotiated management of order frequently prevails.
The media know that ‘when it bleeds, it leads’ and they may cover events with gross and sometimes shocking distortions. The truth is that, even in 2005, during three turbulent weeks, Paris was never under siege, the Stock Exchange kept rising and there was no need to cancel hotel reservations in tourist zones. A similar observation applied to the times of emergency during the first half of 2016. For city residents, life – even with international events such as the climate conference and the Euro soccer championship – went on as usual.
In times of disorder, police inaction reveals that order maintenance is anything but neutral. It may happen in France that political authorities, monitoring events from their headquarters, order police commanders not to charge protestors, even those who are being destructive. Consider the following case: on 23 March 2006, several thousand students converged on Les Invalides, a large symbolic square at the centre of Paris, protesting against a bill then being examined by the Constitutional Council. Several thousand violent troublemakers (casseurs), unrelated to the demonstration, waited for the students to appear. The thugs violently attacked them, using hit-and-run guerrilla tactics. The police remained passive, as the Minister of the Interior had not ordered them to charge.Reference Jobard 9 In addition, it was impossible to distinguish between the two types of hoodie-wearing youngsters, with similar appearances yet with radically different social characteristics and attitudes.
In European countries, the public outcry after overt acts of violence by police has made police abuse unacceptable. Casualties resulting from police action during global summits or student demonstrations are traumatic for police forces, always in search of legitimacy. This observation is supported by the Malik Oussekine case in France. In 1986, when the Minister of the Interior, a hard-line Gaullist, had to confront large-scale demonstrations from students against a proposal to make entry to universities selective, a student in fragile health, Malik Oussekine, was pursued by mobile police on light motorcycles (voltigeurs). Suffocating from asthma, he died in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The government suffered political damage to the extent that it dropped the reform proposal.
While the police are the public institution that ‘have better do something now’ when disorder erupts, or even before, the authorities frequently hesitate to let the police respond to the aggression of youths for fear of seriously hurting one of the young people and so experiencing the anger of public opinion.Reference Bittner 10
The police are there to instil order. Orderliness is encouraged by both formal and informal means.Reference Manning 8 The police have leverage to categorize their opponents and to assign positive or negative social status in their dealing with ‘order’.
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) offers a good illustration of such leverage.
On average, five demonstrations a day take place in New York City. The police characterize them as peaceful, rowdy or destructive. According to my interviews with high-ranking police officials at the NYPD in January 2016, the Police Department has considerable operational, intelligence and technological resources. Take the Security Coordination Center, for example, which was created at a cost of $150 million, or the 2000 cameras with live-stream videos operating night and day, as was the case during the occupation of Zuccotti Park. The Police Department is high on technology. It exerts an influence on city decision-makers.
The reconstruction of Ground Zero illustrates this development.Reference Body-Gendrot 11 After architect Daniel Libeskind designed the glass structure called the Freedom Tower, close to West Street, a six-lane highway used continuously by trucks coming from Brooklyn and New Jersey to Lower Manhattan, the tower appeared too vulnerable to the head of the Counter-terrorism Bureau at the NYPD. At his request, experts, engineers and CIA agents convinced the developer, Larry Silverstein, that the tower could not withstand a bomb carried by a truck. Hugely expensive design structures were then incorporated at the foot of the tower – rings of steel – to ensure the safety of the building, in a way – it is claimed – like no other building in the world. An assemblage of, until then, dispersed processes involving prevention came to form a compact system of protection, along with electronic surveillance and the virtual space of databases.
The attack on 9/11 contributed to justifying and reinforcing the principle of precaution – ‘What if?’ – imposing a certain type of order dictated by the police to authorities, planners, etc. and reconfiguring urban order in specific spaces.
Suppression is an easier method for governments to deal with complex urban problems than the long-term process of social prevention. It meets majorities’ demands for order and safety and for quick responses. The police role lies at the root of political order and in the claims a state makes upon its people for deference to rules, laws and norms.Reference Bittner 10
While American police agencies place a lot of trust in technology, numerous observers in Europe point out that human resources to evaluate risks – especially on issues of terrorism – are just as important. However, even though scholars bring proof of the well-founded character of their recommendations, resistance to change in practices is strong within Police Departments. The police manage the appearance of effectivenessReference Manning 8 while too few reforms actually address issues such as racism, discrimination, police abuse and their possible correlation with unrest in inner cities. Changing the composition of the police with the hiring and promotion of more minorities, and better training and supervision, have proved efficient at certain times in American cities. Conversely, police unions in France defend the idea of a colour-blind Republic, claiming that efficiency in police work is not linked to the composition of the police. National traditions of policing differ in this respect. It is urgent to reconcile police practices and knowledge.
6. Protest Movements as a Healthy Signal
Some politicized protest movements are modes of dissent, giving visibility to inequalities, injustice and emotions that are not on the political agenda. Protesters, the voices of the unheard, have the courage to start something without knowing the end, Hanna Arendt remarked.
The causes of such types of public disorder are diverse: protestors may express outrage at the current influence of finance on various forms of capitalism, promoting and accommodating inequalities (Occupy Wall Street, 2011); at authorities’ environmental decisions and authoritarian trends (Gezi Park, Istanbul, 2013); at the social exclusion of visible minorities and immigrants (Greater Paris, 2005); at institutional abuse (Greater London, 2011); or at jeopardized democratic processes (Umbrella revolution, Hong Kong, 2014). Collective disorganization may then spread spatially from one part of a city to another or from one region to another, but not automatically. Why unrest escalates here, then abruptly fades or lingers there is puzzling. The interaction of global inequalities and of local unrest appears as straightforward in some cases but less so in others. The time/space factors play an important role.
Such mobilizations, too ephemeral to be called social movements, are contagious. From the (so-called) Arab Spring to the Indignados’ occupation of the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, there was indeed noticeable imitation among participants, led by invisible organizers on the ground and online. Nine-hundred cities were ‘occupied’ in November 2011.
What is the part played by the city in such uprisings? ‘The sense of place empowers protests.’Reference Kimmelman 12 The political power of physical space is too frequently ignored. It haunts imaginations. People assemble in specific spaces with their differences, they experience collective effervescence, akin of electricity. The media and the social media give visibility to such horizontal modes of action. Civil societies’ capacity of resistance should not be downplayed. But are such embryos of movements channels to long-term change?
7. The New Story
Such questioning has been abruptly interrupted by the irruption of religious terrorism hitting Western cities, particularly in 2015 and 2016. The new question is whether terrorism is a form of public disorder or a war? There is no consensus on this highly subjective question.
The deadly attacks in Paris (2015), Brussels (2016), Nice (2016) and other cities open a new chapter.
More challenging perceptions of globalization have taken place over the last ten years after the crisis of 2008, revealing its failures. But what is new is the perception that borderless, enigmatic actors, the product of global, national and local dynamics, collectively organized and mastering digital activism, have launched ‘an asymmetric war’ on the West, with no end in sight. A major transformation is taking place, a rupture in a historical continuum and the surge of an unusual form of global disorder.
Confronted with such challenges, targeted states, cities and institutions reveal their limits. They do not know how to deal with unpredictability. They did not properly anticipate such attacks (could they?) and their tools and resources are perceived as dysfunctional.
In such a situation, public opinion can easily be manipulated. How do global fears worm their way into everyday life? What do people do with them? Do they gate themselves? Buy weapons, as they do in America? Become insurgents?
Democracies are in danger when opinions’ loss of bearings feeds populism.
8. Conclusion
Are recent protests and horizontal modes of expression powerless to bring progressive changes?
Would vertical commitments to the renovation of modes of political decision-making, articulated to the pressure of horizontal actions of disorder eventually generate a new order, respectful of democratic values? The shortcoming of horizontal movements needs to be emphasized. These movements ignore the fact that democratic states have institutions created to think, deliberate and orient common affairs: parliament monitors the political debate, justice puts a halt to mob lynching, unions buttress labour and work conditions. All those institutions are instruments that have transformed people into citizens. ‘We, the people’, it is claimed, emanates from a Constitution, it may not spring up naturally.Reference Rousseau 13
We know what works. History demonstrates that institutions have the capacity to confront crises, frequently for the better. But it may take 20 or 30 years of successive crises to fix current financial dysfunctions, force institutions to work better and closer to citizens, and bring change for better (or for worse).
There are still lots of unknowns and we need to understand emerging situations while they are still in flux and therefore subject to influence (Ref. Reference Nowotny1, p. 7). New patterns (threats and responses) arise, along with pictures of acute uncertainty, but we currently lack conceptual tools to make sense of them.
At this point, Chateaubriand’s last words come to mind:
I found myself between two centuries, as at the confluence of two rivers… I plunged into their troubled waters, regretfully leaving the ancient strand where I was born, and swimming hopefully towards the unknown shore where new generations will land. (Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1848)
We seem to have reached this point.
Sophie Body-Gendrot is Emeritus Professor at the University Sorbonne-Paris IV. Visiting scholar at, among others, New York University, the University of Tasmania, and the University of Washington State, and is Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Sao Paulo. Her research focuses on urban unrest. She is a member of numerous academic committees and editorial boards. Her recent books in English include: Public Disorder and Globalization (Routledge, 2017); (with C. Wihtol de Wenden) Policing the Inner City in France, Britain and the U.S. (Palgrave Pivot, 2014); (co-ed. with M. Hough, R. Levy, S. Snacken, K. Kereczi) Routledge Handbook of European Criminology (Routledge, 2013); Globalization, Fear and Insecurity: The Challenges for Cities North and South (Palgrave Macmillan 2012, 213 pp.).
