The “Indignados movement” in Spain (better known as the 15-M movement) has been the largest mobilization process in this country since the Spanish political transition, both in quantitative and qualitative terms. The dynamics of the movement has been based on two sources of legitimacy at the discursive and the practice levels: on the one hand, at a discursive level, in criticizing the limits of the current model of democracy and in reporting the causes and consequences of the economic crisis affecting the country; on the other hand, at the level of practice, the 15M movement has meant an unprecedented process of self-organization in the recent history and, also, in the development of non violent disobedience as the exclusive repertoire of collective action. This massive practice of disobedience (unauthorized demonstrations, the squatting of public and private buildings) has been unanimously supported excluding other options such a some kind of urban violence as a repertoire of action. This violence, in contrast, has taken place in other similar contexts (Italy, Greece) and also in other mobilization processes in Spain (for instance, the last General Strike in September of 2010). In a parallel way, this collective choice for a non-violent strategy has also been a challenge for the model of “policing of protest” driven by the authorities. In fact, authorities have been forced to implement new tactics to face this challenge. In this paper we analyze some hypothetical explanatory reasons for the choice of a non-violence strategy and also analyses the impact that this choice has had on the way that Police, “mass media” and political authorities have tried to “control” the protests.
