Permitting Protest: Parsing the Fine Geography of Dissent in America

Abstract

The ability to dissent and to protest is a cornerstone of western liberal democracies. But dissent always threatens to exceed its bounds and to become a threat. The issue facing liberal states, then, has not only been how to incorporate dissent, but also how to shape dissent. In this project, the politics of public space has assumed a central role, as material public spaces have become a primary venue for the shaping of dissent. This article examines the ways in which dissent is incorporated into the liberal democratic state through a case study of protest in Washington, DC. In that city, as in others throughout North America and Western Europe, protest permit systems have evolved as a bureaucratic means to actively shape, if not directly control, public dissent. And yet, even as permit systems are becoming fully regularized, debates over their legitimacy suggest that geographically based permit systems might be inadequate to the task of incorporating dissent. As we indicate, recent protest activity shows just how important geography is to regulating, incorporating and policing dissent, even as those protests expose just how blunt and how fragile a tool that geography is. Pouvoir être en désaccord et le manifester est l’une des pierres angulaires des démocraties libérales occidentales. Pourtant, le désaccord risque toujours de dépasser ses limites pour devenir une menace. La difficulté rencontrée par les États libéraux n’était pas tant d’intégrer la divergence d’opinion que de la façonner. Dans ce projet, la politique d’espace public a joué un rôle central, les espaces publics physiques étant devenus un site primordial pour ce façonnage. Les méthodes d’intégration du désaccord dans l’État démocratique libéral apparaissent à travers l’étude de cas de la protestation à Washington DC. Là, comme dans d’autres villes d’Amérique du Nord et d’Europe de l’Ouest, les systèmes d’autorisation de manifestation ont évolué en un moyen bureaucratique de façonner effectivement, si ce n’est maîtriser directement, le dissentiment public. Pourtant, tandis que ces systèmes se régularisent totalement, la mise en cause de leur légitimité suggère que les régimes d’autorisation de type géographique seraient inappropriés pour intégrer le désaccord. Récemment, l’activité de protestation a démontré l’importance de la géographie pour réguler, intégrer et contrôler le dissentiment, même si ces manifestations révèlent aussi combien la géographie est un outil limité et fragile.

Watching the watchmen: resisting drones and the "protester panopticon"

“…In exploring the potential responses to this new tool, this article has sought to supplement valuable work on the impact of previous technologies on power relations between protesters and police, such as mobile phones (Mitchell and Staeheli, 2005) and social media (O'Rourke, 2011), and work on the terrestrial territorial element of protests (Mitchell and Staeheli, 2005;Herbert, 2007).…”

“…This restriction of access has led to the US Department of the Interior and the US Forest Service pushing the simple message, "If you fly, we can't" (Federal Aviation Administration, 2015). As part of allowing the execution of the democratic right to protest, British and American police are at protests to help ensure the safety of protesters and the public (Mitchell and Staeheli, 2005). The denial of police access to the aerial dimension of the protest may, therefore, stimulate action by the police in order to re-establish their own aerial surveillance of protests in order to ensure safety at the protest and control.…”

Women hawkers in Tehran’s metro: everyday politics and the production of public space

“…Urban space in the global North has witnessed the proliferation of privately owned spaces of consumption and leisure, where a sanitised and predictable 'community' -rather than 'public' -is prohibited from engaging in political dissent (Staeheli and Mitchell, 2006;Mitchell and Staeheli, 2005). In contrast to the slow but inexorable erosion of public space in the North, urban transformation in the South is often more dramatic and contested because of the extreme socio-spatial inequality that characterises many cityscapes.…”

Immigration Policing Through the Backdoor: City Ordinances, the "right to the City," and the Exclusion of Undocumented Day Laborers

“…Much of this research, including Mitchell's, has focused on how deployments of law-particularly city ordinances-have played a central role in these struggles. Scholars have explored, for instance, the ways in which local ordinances and/or the policing of public space have been used to constrain the behavior (and therefore presence) of homeless individuals (Smith, 1992(Smith, , 1996Mitchell, 1995Mitchell, , 1998aMitchell, , 1998bMitchell, , 2003Amster, 2002), panhandlers (Ellickson, 1996), youth (Valentine, 1996(Valentine, , 2004Collins and Kearns, 2001;Stratford, 2002), protesters (Staeheli and Thompson, 1997;D'Arcus, 2003D'Arcus, , 2004Mitchell, 2004;Mitchell and Staeheli, 2005), labor organizers (Mitchell, 2002), and immigrant day laborers (Esbenshade, 2000).…”