Commanding and Controlling Protest Crowds: APEC, G20 and Beyond

Presented by Kylie Bourne

Wednesday, 13 May 2009

Abstract:

In this paper I argue that in the management of protest crowds in places like Australia and the United Kingdom there has been a shift away from ‘negotiated management’ strategies and towards ‘command and control’ strategies. These latter strategies are predicated on a view that not only sees the protest crowd itself as inherently troublesome, but that also mistakenly and universally attributes to all protest crowds a capacity to form a morally considerable intention. While some protest crowds may be troublesome for authorities, the extrapolation of the view that all crowds are troublesome or deviant underestimates the complexity of crowds as they appear in the world and incorrectly attributes violent or disruptive intentions to the crowds or to sections of its membership. As a consequence this view fails firstly to see membership of a protest crowd as either a right or a form of community participation and secondly leads to an over-reliance on often aggressive command and control strategies that in and of themselves may give rise to the violence that they are intended to prevent or repress.

Short Biography:

Kylie Bourne is in the third year of her PhD candidature in the Philosophy department in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wollongong. Her thesis ‘Crowds and Moral Responsibility’ build a taxonomic account of crowds according to which some crowds can sometimes bear moral responsibility for the harms that it makes to sense to say they have caused.  Kylie has given papers at national postgraduate conferences and at philosophy and faculty seminars on collective intention in crowds, police methods of crowd control in Australia, the application of crowd control technology and on the moral culpability of spectators in crowds.  

For further information contact:

Dr Nadirsyah Hosen
Lecturer
Faculty of Law
University of Wollongong
NSW Australia
Email: hosen@uow.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 4221 4192
Fax: +61 2 4221 3188