Beyond Repression. Social Control of Protest and Participation in Illiberal Times

Abstract

The Covid 19 pandemic has generated protests and mobilizations in many countries, framed around the potential “sanitary dictatorship” it would entail, targeting in particular the lack of consultation concerning the public health measures to mitigate the pandemic. The authoritarian or illiberal tendencies stimulated by the pandemic crisis are, however, deeper. Many scholars have pointed the rise of illiberal democracies and authoritarian practices, including in well-established representative governments (Brown, 2015; Hou and Knierbein, 2017). This authoritarian turn embodied by attacks on the independence of the press or the academia, jeopardy of the rule of law, has also important consequences for social movements, NGOs and whistle-blowers: critical actors are increasingly seen as potential adversaries by governments and ruling political parties (Buyse, 2018; Della Porta and Steinhilper, 2021). Such transformations have resulted in a radicalization of repressive practices and of the policing of protest – for instance illustrated by the treatment of Independantists mobilizations in Catalunia, the pro-democratic movements in Honk-Hong or Taiwan, Feminist and Student movements in Chile or the Yellow Vest movement in France. As a matter of fact, the escalation of violence and repression has received renewed scholarly attention (see Della Porta, Fillieule, 2004; Fillieule and Jobard, 2020; Bloom, 2020). We hypothesize, however, that the policing of protest and the use of force to constrain mobilizations is only the most visible manifestation of the transformations of the state/civil society relationships. The latter would also be marked by soft or discreet forms of repression or control of protest (Ferree-Marx, 2004; Garcia, 2014; Talpin, 2016; Maestri and Montforte, 2021) that still remain an under-documented phenomenon. It also takes the form of increased surveillance and administrative constraints to collective action, symbolic attacks on activists, institutional use of the judiciary to target critical actors, restriction of the financial autonomy of NGOs, etc. (Cunningham, 2008; Davenport and Oliver, 2020), that will be at the center of this panel. The roots of these phenomenon are diverse and frequently attributed to the rise of neoliberalism and its lack of popular support (generating social tensions and a crisis of consent); terrorist attacks targeting liberal democracies that have resulted in a greater autonomy for police and judicial actors and a more restrictive legal framework for social movements; the Covid-19 pandemics that have often induced centralization of power in the hands of the executive branch, etc. The goal of this panel is less, however, to question the origins and root causes of these authoritarian trends, that to see them at work in practice in the interactions between social movements, NGOs and the state. Between co-optation, institutionalization, channeling, disqualification and repression, what forms do the relations between protest actors or interest groups, on the one hand, and institutions, on the other, take? Are we observing a socialization of the former to partnership or an "ensauvagement of institutions" (Neveu, 2011)? The aim is to study the ordinary relationships between collective mobilizations and the State, and their reciprocal feedback effects.

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