Riot control agents: The case for regulation.

Tear gas, first used in World War One, is increasingly becoming the weapon of choice for security forces across the globe. Anna Feigenbaum offers a bleak picture of how companies - with a particular focus on Condor in Brazil - are capitalising on this trend and reaping financial benefits by marketing it as a "non-lethal" weapon. She demonstrates how in reality categorising tear gas as "non-lethal" is at best misguided and at worst disingenuous. Feigenbaum sets out the historical reasons for this "non-lethal" categorisation of tear gas - ones which governments and big business are happy to rely on today despite the ever increasing body of evidence that shows the extreme human rights abuses that its use inflicts on civilian populations worldwide

Book Review: Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women’s Movement

Review of Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women’s Movement, edited by Jo Rege

From cyborg feminism to drone feminism: Remembering women’s anti-nuclear activisms

By the 1990s the dynamic array of creative direct action tactics used against militarised technologies that emerged from women’s anti-nuclear protest camps in the 1980s became largely eclipsed by cyberfeminism’s focus on digital and online technologies. Yet recently, as robots and algorithms are put forward as the vanguards of new drone execution regimes, some are wondering if now is the time for another Greenham Common. In this article I return to cyborg feminism and anti-nuclear activisms of the 1980s to explore what drone feminism might look like today. I examine how antinuclear protesters infused affect and techne´, creating innovative images of, and tactics for, material resistance. I argue that Greenham women’s cyborg feminisms arose from their material entanglements with the military base. In their efforts to reveal and undermine the national and imperial myths upon which warfare is based, protesters re-imagined technological possibilities based upon a global accountability for ‘earthly survival

Activist Reflexivity and Mediated Violence: Putting the Policing of Nuit Debout in Context

To better understand the historical trajectory of the policing of Nuit Debout, in this article we argue that the reflexive relationship between police and protest tactics is heavily mediated by the presence of the press and by the emergence of digital technologies. Our analysis focuses on three sets of reflexive activist practice: (a) challenging media representations—the adaptations and innovations that respond to dominant media framing of police–protester relations; (b) “sousveillance” and police monitoring—the recording and monitoring of police violence and the public education around the police’s use of force; (c) civic forensics and data aggregation—the gathering, analyzing, and collectivizing of citizen-generated data. Although not intended as a taxonomy, these groups of practices are offered as conceptual lenses for critically examining how activists’ tactical repertoires for protesting police adapt and evolve, building on each other to challenge the representational, legal, and material dimensions of state power as it manifests in police–protester relations

Humanizing data through 'data comics': An introduction to graphic medicine and graphic social science

In recent years data visualization scholars and practitioners have drawn attention to the need for data to be humanized. In addition to making complex information more coherent, visualizations can work to incorporate empathy and help audiences connect to information. Addressing this call for humanizing data visualization, this chapter considers the emergent area of ‘data comics’, looking at how the new fields of graphic medicine and graphic social science deal with numeric data. We examine recent data comics from graphic medicine and graphic social science that exemplify the complexities and potential of presenting data in humanizing ways. Our discussion is framed around what we call the EMA framework, considering the Epistemic (knowledge and perspective), Methodological (ways of working), and Aesthetic (practices of representation)

Vulnerable warriors: the atmospheric marketing of military and policing equipment before and after 9/11

In this article, we analyse changes in the circulation of advertisements of policing products at security expos between 1995 and 2013. While the initial aim of the research was to evidence shifts in terrorist frames in the marketing of policing equipment before and after 9/11, our findings instead suggested that what we are seeing is the rise of marketing to police as “vulnerable warriors”, law enforcement officers in need of military weapons both for their offensive capabilities and for the protection they can offer to a police force that is always under threat

What Counts as Police Violence? A Case Study of Data in the CATO Institute’s Police Misconduct Reporting Project.

Background: This article presents a case study about the role of data in the CATO Institute’s Police Misconduct Reporting Project and reflects on what constitutes police violence. Analysis: Augmenting this data aggregation work, the article turns to additional data projects focused on recording police crime and misconduct to gather a broader understanding of incidents of police violence beyond acts that cause death. Conclusion and implications: It is only when we look at data on acts of violence that occur when an officer is on duty and off-duty, with or without a firearm, that a clearer sense of the traumatic cycle of policing can be understood. This way of looking at police data requires both broader practices of “copwatching,” as well as a broader definition of what counts as violenc

Protest camps

Protest camps are global phenomena, occurring across a wide range of social movements and encompassing a diversity of demands for social change. They are spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state. By taking a closer look at protest camps this book contributes two original insights. Firstly it provides a detailed investigation into the empirical history of protest camps from a global perspective, a story that has never been told before. Protest Camps will discuss a variety of examples of camps, taking the reader across different cultural, political and geographical landscapes of protest. Secondly the book will contribute to the understanding of the role of protest camps in contentious politics. This book argues that protest camps are unique spaces in which activists form collective political identities and enact experimental and experiential forms of democratic politics