Vom 3. bis 5. September findet in Breslau die Critical Legal Conference 2015 statt. Die Veranstaltung steht unter der Überschrift ‘Law, Space and the Political’. Die Veranstalter haben den Call for Papers veröffentlicht und bitten, Abstracts zu den einzelnen Themensträngen der Tagung einzureichen. Von besonderem Interesse für KriminologInnen dürfte der nachstehende ‚Stream‘ sein:
The Dynamics of Policing Protest
Stream conveners: Andrea Kretschmann (Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology, Universität Bielefeld) and Markus Michael Müller (Lateinamerika-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin)
The beginning of the 21st century has witnessed a new wave of political protests around the world. From the Arab Spring to anti-EU activism in post- recession Europe, to indigenous struggles against neoliberalism in Latin America to political protest against land grabs and neo-colonial extractivism in Africa, these protests challenge the distribution of wealth in society as well as established patterns of rule and domination. Therefore, they are not only met with legal frameworks and police actions which secure their freedom of assembly, but also with legal and law- enforcement-centered forms of state repression.
In light of the above, it is surprising the topic of policing protest has received little scholarly attention. This conference stream seeks to address this void. Particularly, we seek to grasp the productive power, the surplus emanating from the inherently relational, dynamic and fluid liminal space that emerges out of the interactions between political protests and state efforts to repress, control and contain them. In these situations, far from being a zero-sum game, violence (physical and symbolic) produces a veritable surplus that is not controlled or controllable by any of the involved actors. This situational and relational dimension of policing protest poses a challenge to conventional approaches to policing.
In order to uncover the dynamics of protest policing, we invite submissions for panels that speak to one or more of the following questions from an interdisciplinary perspective:
- What forms of and figurations does contemporary protest policing take? How are they shaped by the actions of protestors?
- Which methodological tools and research strategies are most suitable for researching the relational spaces and interactions of protest policing?
- What challenges and obstacles does this type of research imply and how can they best be addressed?
- What theoretical approaches are most suitable for explaining the phenomenon of protest policing?
Please send abstracts (max. 250 words) to: andrea.kretschmann@universität-bielefeld.de and muellerm@zedat.fu-berlin.de
