Territorial Pacification: Police as Allies and Dual Responses to Police Repression

• In Event: 20861 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 14: The Protest-repression Nexus

Abstract

This paper examines how nonviolent protesters respond to subtle police repression, an understudied aspect in the literature on the repression–resistance nexus. Taking the South Korean Candlelight Protests as a case study, I argue that perceptions of police can mediate the effect of subtle protest control by leading protesters to legitimize a particular mode of interaction with involved actors. Analyzing individual protesters’ perceptions of, and interactions with, police, I show that cultural elements led nonviolent protesters to perceive police as: (1) active allies who fulfill their responsibility to protect protesters by providing necessary help for protesters and protests through deploying subtler policing measures; (2) silenced allies whose willingness to actively cooperate with protesters is suppressed; and (3) conditional allies whose responses are contingent on protesters’ tactics, numbers and identities. These perceptions shaped regulatory practices (self-policing and collective discipline) that constituted a social process—“territorial pacification”—whereby practices of protesters deemed transgressive are coerced by fellow protesters to deradicalize the protest environment and forge cooperative and defensive interactions with police. Territorial pacification mediated the consequences of subtle police repression by regulating power relations between participants, resulting in both voluntary and forced deradicalization that produced differential impacts upon nonviolent and transgressive protesters.

Author

• Junghyun Nam, George Mason University