Anatomy of a Violent Protest Wave: Understanding the Mechanisms of Escalation and De-Escalation in Far-Right and Anti-Fascist Street Clashes

Abstract

With the rise of right-wing populist ideologies and ensuing social polarization, political violence has become more widespread. Between 2017 and 2019, far-right extremists and anti-fascists engaged in more than twenty violent protest clashes in Portland, Oregon, USA. Through a protest event analysis of those clashes supplemented with a case study of the protest wave, this paper explores how the mechanisms of radicalization and de-radicalization operate when two violent protest movements collide and interact with state security forces. The three-way interaction among a movement, counter-movement, and the police can produce unanticipated outcomes. For example, rather than de-escalating the situation, police underbidding resulted in an increase in violence between the two movements. Understanding how the mechanisms of radicalization and de-radicalization function in a movement/counter-movement protest cycle can provide insight into the ways in which a movement’s strategy and their adversaries’ responses to it can increase or decrease levels of violence.

Being fractal: Embodying antiracism values in course‐based participatory action research

“…Despite reasonably successful efforts to drive White supremacists underground, the election of Donald Trump to national office brought a new wave of emboldened White nationalists back into the light, as illustrated by the 2017 fatal light‐rail incident fueled by anti‐Muslim sentiment (Haag & Fortin, 2017; Thompson, 2019). In recent years, far‐right, White nationalist groups in the greater Portland area (e.g., Proud Boys) have been operating without cover and violently clashing with antifascist activists (Serbulo, 2020). Together, underneath the veneer of progressivism, there exists a throughline of White supremacy that predates Oregon's constitution until today that has served as the backdrop for the 2020 protests for racial justice and the 2021 capstone course.…”