Ben Horton
Hello, everybody, and welcome to this Chatham House members event on How Protest Movements Make Change, the latest instalment of our Centenary Historian series. My name is Ben Horton and I’m a Communications Manager at Chatham House, where I also lead their Common Futures Conversations Project, which brings young people from Africa and Europe together to discuss the major political issues facing our world. As you can imagine, much of the conversation in recent months within that project has focused on Black Lives Matter and the global wave of protest movements campaigning for an end to systemic racism and Police brutality. It, therefore, feels like a really important time to be considering the impact of mass protests within democratic systems and we’ve lined up a fantastic panel today to discuss this.
Drawing on contemporary and historical examples from across the globe, this panel will consider the tradition of protests and assess how we move beyond protests to enact meaningful change. And so, to discuss this today, we’ve got some fascinating speakers with us. Joining us from the UK we have Dr Nadine El-Enany, who is Senior Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck School of Law and the Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law at Birkbeck University of London. She is the Author of Bordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire and Co-edited After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response. Nadine researches in the fields of Migration and Refugee Law, European Union Law, Protest and Criminal Law and Justice. She has published widely in the field of EU Asylum and Immigration Law. Her current research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, focuses on questions of race and criminal and social justice in death and custody cases.
Also, with us today, we have, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh. Sizwe is a South African Author, Musician and Activist and a Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. He holds a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford and is the Author of Democracy and Delusion: 10 myths in South African Politics. And in 2016 Sizwe was part of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in Oxford.
And also joining us today, from Baltimore in the US, we have, Dr Stuart Schrader, who is the Associate Director of the Program in Racism, Immigration and Citizenship and a Lecturer, that’s act – Assistant Research Scientist at John Hopkins University. At John Hopkins Stuart teaches courses on Police and prisons, Black social movements and critical race theory and he is the Author of Badges without Borders: How Global Counter Insurgency Transformed American Policing, which examines the relationship between US projections of power overseas and the rise of the carceral state at home. Without further ado, I’m going to hand it over now to our fantastic panel and we’re are going to start now with Nadine El-Enany for some opening remarks on this question. Nadine over to you, Thank you.
Nadine El-Enany
Thank you, Ben, and thank you to Amra and everybody else involved in inviting and organising us to speak today and thanks to everyone who is tuned in. It’s a very hot day in Britain today, so, hope you can all bear with us. So, yeah, I am going to start by outlining, briefly, how the right to protest is protected in law, very briefly, before then, turning to the history of one aspect of how the criminal law has been used to suppress protest activity in Britain. And I’m just going to close with a few comments on how I see this narrative connecting and also, kind of, resurfacing, how we’ve seen it resurface with the recent Black Lives Matter uprising.
So, just to give the, sort of, legal basis for the right to protest, as probably most of you know, it’s protected in the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, which is incorporated into UK Law by the 1998 Human Rights Act and Article 10, which protects the freedom – protects Freedom of Speech and Article 11, Freedom of Assembly and Association. And the two taken together provide the foundation for the right to protest, in legal terms. And of course, there are – there is a potential for restrictions that are permitted in relation to these rights, which have to be prescribed by law, necessary in a democratic society, including those aimed at protecting national security, public safety or for the prevention of disorder or crime. And its particularly disorder or crime that I’m going to focus on in my critique today of how Britain, historically, and until today, invokes disorder, the notion of disorder, as a means of depoliticising protest activity and, indeed, targeting protestors.
So, the scope of the freedom to protest depends, in part, on the way in which it is legislated, and Britain has a long history of criminalising protest and resistance movements in its colonies and on the mainland. I’m going to focus here on a piece of legislation that has been used increasingly over the past decade on the British mainland to target protestors and this is the 1986 Public Order Act. When this state or the Empire’s power has been challenged or threatened, the authorities will often resort to the powerful ideology of criminal justice and a discourse of law and order as a means of depoliticising that resistance, in order to present it as a question of individual wrongdoing and disorder, rather than one of legitimate political contestation, or indeed, radical protest activity designed to achieve a systemic structural change.
So, until the late 18th and early 19th Century, the British State’s method of limiting speech, in particular that against the state of a church, entailed prosecutions under the Law of Seditious Libel. By the late 18th Century it was becoming increasingly unacceptable in Britain to limit what could be said in the form of political speech or descent. And so, the state was working hard to find another way to retain its hold on power, in the face of growing political opposition. Local authorities at the time were particularly concerned about the gathering of large crowds at rallies and marches and it was with the Peterloo Massacre of the 16th of August 1819 that the way was paved for the use of public order offences against protestors.
The 60,000 people gathered in St Peter’s Fields had come to listen to the orator and reformer, Henry Hunt, on the subject of parliamentary reform and the extension of suffrage to all men. Despite the peaceful demeanour of the meeting, the 1714 Riot Act was read, and the participants were forcibly dispersed by military offices on horseback wielding sabres. According to the Riot Act, after it was read, “Justices and their servants engaged in efforts to disperse, seize or apprehend rioters, were free, discharged and indemnified for the killing, maiming or hurting of such person, or persons, who resisted.” In total, 11 people were killed at Peterloo and more than 500 were injured.
The common law offence of unlawful assembly that was then elaborated in the course of the Peterloo Trials, so the trials that were then brought against speakers and people who were engaged in organising – involved in organising and participating in the rally, in the course of these trials, this common law offence of unlawful assembly was elaborated. And it is a largely unacknowledged connection between current public order offences and – that are used today against protestors and the laws of that time, which obviously, today, are widely regarded as being particularly repressive. Of course, we can argue that we see the same level of oppression today, but it – this connection between what is assumed to be an age where there wasn’t any idea of free speech and people were being prosecuted under seditious libel for the things that they said, those very same laws that were developed in that period have their own iteration in place today, and I’ll come to that.
So, the offence of unlawful assembly was useful to lawyers at the time, because it had a depoliticising effect, it allowed the Government Prosecutors to focus on the behaviour of protestors, rather than solely the content of what they said. And so, by focusing on the disorderly manner in which political opinion was expressed, or a disorderly manner that might be read onto an activity that had taken place, the authorities could divert attention away from the political nature of the charge. So, large crowds were assumed to be violent and treacherous, simply by virtue of the number of people present. So, after Peterloo, the Lord Chancellor told the Lords, that, “Numbers constituted force and forced terror and terror illegality.” The assumption that crowds are an inherent danger underlies public order offences that are currently enforced today, that, of course, found their origins in the offence of unlawful assembly elaborated after Peterloo. So, for the offence of riot, violent disorder and affray, in the Public Order Act a certain number of individuals have to be present together, so 12 for riot, three for violent disorder and two for affray, and then the offence can be triggered.
So, in the case brought against Henry Hunt in the wake of Peterloo, the Prosecutor quickly did away with the argument that those who were gathered at Peterloo had a right to free assembly, invoking what he argued to be, “an inherent danger and unpredictability in the gathering of such a large number of people, particularly,” he said, “of the working class.” Justice Bailey held the peaceful assembly at St Peter’s Fields was “unlawful, because it was seditious and, therefore, created fear amongst the public.” However, it had not actually begun before it was attacked, and this is crucial. So, how could it be said that it was, itself, seditious? It couldn’t have actually be shown itself to have caused fear. “It was unlawful,” the Judge said, “because the seditious words intended to have been spoken, would have occasioned fear.” So, the rationale for the ruling was a reliance not on actual fear, but a hypothetical fear.
The hypothetical fear on which Hunt’s conviction was based plays a key role in the modern offence of violent disorder, of which unlawful assembly was the precursor. So, Section Two of the Public Order Act of 1986 provides that, “A person is guilty of violent disorder, where that person uses or threatens violence that would cause a person of reasonable firmness, present at the scene, to fear for his personal safety.” But importantly, “No person of reasonable firmness need actually be, or be likely to be, present at the scene.” And of course, if we think about protest activity, usually, people present at the scene, alongside the demonstrators themselves, who are of, course, unlikely to be afraid of each other, are, of course, exclusively Police Officers, often dressed in riot gear and carrying weapons. So, the thought that fear might be occasioned is quite unlikely. So, it’s rather – it’s important that the events include this notion of it being no person a reasonable firmness need likely to be present at the scene.
So, unlawful assembly, as I mentioned, was a forerunner to violent disorder and this offence of violent disorder is the offence of choice for the Crown Prosecution Service when prosecuting protestors today. It carries a maximum term of five years imprisonment and despite being very similar to offence of unlawful assembly, it’s quite telling that the name of the offence was changed to violent disorder, so, from the common law offence to its statutory iteration. Because the violent disorder reflects the moral reprehensibility of the offender, rather than the illiberalness of the state, which is suggested by the notion of unlawful assembly, which seems to be fly in the face of a notion of free assembly or human right to associate with others.
So, by prohibiting violent disorder, the state is purporting to maintain order for the good of the wider public, rather than restricting the right to assembly. So, entailed in the naming of the offence is also the idea that so-called disorder, is necessarily violent. Despite evidence of indiscriminate baton use and heavy policing at public order events, order is still habitually equated with the state and legitimacy, whilst the imaginary violence of the crowd tends to be understood as disordered and illegitimate. And I sat through a lot of the student protests and the students who were prosecuted after the anti-fees protests of 2010 and it was really clear and the language that the prosecution would use around the behaviour of the students. Because they would say to them, when they were questioning them, you know, “We understand that you have very strong feelings around not charging fees and education being free, but it’s the way that you protested, it’s the way that you protest is an issue.” And you could really see this depoliticising discourse present in the way in which the offence of violent disorder is – was operationalised.
And so, the practice of using violent disorder charges against protestors took on a greater frequency following the protest against George Bush’s visit to the UK in June 2008, after which 12 protestors were charged with violent disorder. In 2009 we saw 71 young people with no previous convictions who participated in protest against Israel’s assault on Gaza, being charged with violent disorder. 64 pleaded guilty and received prison sentences. However, importantly, of the seven who pleaded not guilty, six were acquitted, and I’ll come back to why that is important shortly.
Before George Bush’s visit and the use of violent disorder to target those protestors, individuals arrested at protests would usually be given cautions or tickets and fixed penalty notices. And in 2010, there was a stream of cases of protestors charged with violent disorder following the anti-fees protests, as I mentioned. Of those 27 charges of violent disorder, 14 of the 15 who pled not guilty were acquitted, three other cases were dropped and three were reduced to lesser charges and so, what we have to consider here, is the question of overcharging. Because of the pressure that’s put-on individuals to plead guilty, overcharging, so charging more serious offences or charging behaviour that doesn’t need to be charged, leads to the very likely possibility that individuals are wrongly criminalised, imprisoned and, of course, for disproportionate lengths of time. Because, as I mentioned, violent disorder carries a maximum time of five years, it is very likely if one is convicted with violent disorder, there will be a prison sentence that follows.
So, the use of the Public Order Act against protestors has significant political implications in serving to divert public attention away from the political message of protestors and instead, presents them as having engaged in disorderly and criminal behaviour. In the face of political opposition to unpopular government policy, a government mindful of public opinion might perceive an interest in presenting those protesting as disorderly, violent and engaging in criminal activity, rather than exercising a right to free expression and assembly.
So, just to conclude, we saw the same depoliticising law and order discourse deployed following the 2011 riots, with some very serious consequences for people who had participated in the riots, in terms of the overnight courts that were run and the lengthy disproportionate prison sentences people are still serving in connection with those riots, as we just pass another anniversary of those riots. And, of course, those riots followed the Police killing of an unarmed Black man, Mark Duggan. So, again in the wake of Black Lives Matter uprising that we have seen, following the killing of George Floyd, it’s particularly important to consider how we still see peop – we still have people incarcerated as a result of participating in those protests back in 2011 today, as we see, indeed, another, uprising Black Lives Matter uprising.
So, in response to the recent protest, officials have pushed the narrative that the problem is not the political opinions of the protestors or their wish for anti-racist outcomes, but rather, the manner in which they protest. So, we saw in the toppling of the statue of slaver, Edward Colston, in Bristol, the anti-racist demand that the statue be removed can, ostensibly, be entertained, officials say, but through official processes. Of course, you know, no official processes had yielded any results until this point, or indeed, been instigated until the actions of these protestors, but that seems, of course, unimportant in the discourse. Rather, officials have sought to focus on the disorderly behaviour in taking the statue down and, as we know, Boris Johnson said that those protestors “should face the full force of the law.”
So, it’s important to resist this depoliticising narrative that constructs protestors as criminal or violent. The sort of direct action we have seen in the course of the Black Lives Matter protests in Britain, in the UK and elsewhere, whether in the form of taking statues down, burning symbols of corporate greed and looting, are the very forms of resistance that tackle the core structural racism. While the law constructs protests as criminal and having desecrated public monuments and having damaged property, in reality, these protestors are engaging in powerful acts of resistance, which are, themselves, part of a long history of anticolonial resistance and, of course, that is the other important side of history that has to be brought into this question, again, centuries of violence and destruction of racialised people, their persons, their culture, their freedom and their humanity. Thank you.
Ben Horton
Nadine, thank you so much for that opening. I think I’m going to move straight over now to Stuart Schrader to give us a similar kind of overview, but more from the US perspective. Stuart, thank you so much.
Stuart Schrader
Thank you so much and it’s great to be here and I’m happy to participate in this panel, and I think what I’ll say right now will build a little bit on what we just heard. So, today happens to be the 50th anniversary of the assassination of a US Police Advisor in Uruguay, August 10th. His name was Dan Mitrione and he was killed by the urban guerrilla group, the Tupamaros Movement for National Liberation. He’d been abducted about ten days prior, held in a secret location, interrogated and this was a major event at the time. It garnered a great deal of attention in the press and obviously in the foreign policy establishment of the United States, going all the way up to The Oval Office. So, I want to use my few minutes today to use this incident and this anniversary to reflect on what this history, leading up to and then following the assassination, might tell us about contemporary protests, dynamics and policing, particularly in the US.
So, Mitrione, Dan Mitrione was a veteran Police Officer. He had worked in Latin America, advising Police on behalf of the United States for around a decade, at the height of the Cold War. His employer was an organisation called the Office of Public Safety, which was housed in the Agency of International Development. The Office of Public Safety was the overseas Police assistance arm of the United States Government and it existed in various forms for around two decades. And at its height, it was advising Police in dozens of countries around the globe and it also operated a training academy in Washington D.C. and 77 countries from across the world sent high ranking Police Officers to the Police Academy for training. Some of the training consisted of relatively mundane Police tasks and administrative recommendations and some of it was more secretive and specialised policing techniques. The Office of Public Safety, basically, in addition to training, supplied a lot of materials to Police around the globe. Some of that material, again, ranged from the very mundane, things like handcuffs, to more sophisticated communications technologies and, of course, weapons, ranging from standard pistols to more sophisticated and advanced weapons.
Now, the Office of Public Safety, particularly after Mitrione’s killing, was painted as the nefarious covert arm of the CIA, used to, you know, reach into the politics of the countries that were being assisted and used to institute political repression. In some ways, those accusations were actually true, but the Office of Public Safety was guided by a principle that tried to reckon with the advance of modern communications technologies in the middle of the 20th Century. And this principle was that when Police were trying to control public protests and demonstrations, the best approach was to avoid brutal and wanton violence toward peaceful protestors and bystanders. The risk, according to the Office of Public Safety, was that if Police were too harsh and too brutal toward protestors and protestors were killed, that would create a so-called martyr.
The idea was, according to their understanding of politics at that moment, the idea was that the Communist movement around the globe was always itching to, or eager to, have a martyr that it could use in its campaigns, that would then be able to discredit and delegitimise the government. So, the consistent principle was, you know, avoid creating a martyr when dealing with public protests. And what’s interesting is that when Mitrione himself was killed, the US Government and the Uruguayan Government actually used his memory and used his, kind of, martyrdom in the Cold War, to try to discredit the left and to paint left as blood thirsty and cruel.
But how did Advisors, like Mitrione and his colleagues, introduce this principle of avoid creating a martyr? Well, in Uruguay, where he ultimately ended up getting killed, Police traditionally approached public protest in a pretty aggressive fashion. Often times, Police on horseback would confront demonstrators with sabres or swords. Now, obviously, this was violent, and it could lead to grave injuries. So, Mitrione’s colleagues in the Office of Public Safety, beginning in the middle of the 1960s in Uruguay, started to recommend new approaches to crowd control, modernising crowd control techniques. And one of the main tools that they recommended was teargas and particularly the chemical CS, which is ubiquitous today in crowd control, but was uncommon at the time in Uruguay, as well as many of the other countries, under the advisement of the Office of Public Safety. So, soon, teargas started to be used with great frequency, but the problem was that, in Uruguay, which was a democratic country, with relatively high levels of political pluralism, the problem was that Uruguayan Police started to stifle legitimate forms of protest, particularly using teargas. Student demonstrations, labour strikes, would often be met with, you know, copious amounts of chemicals that would disperse the crowds.
Now, according to the principle, no-one necessarily was getting killed, but the, you know, the – and the chemical didn’t leave a mark, necessarily, but the protests were essentially prevented from occurring. The government was not autocratic, was not authoritarian, but the Police were preventing protests from being able to occur. So, as a result, a number of young left-wing radicals, feeling the traditional modes of protest, including the labour movement, were not effective, were no longer effective, because of this Police response, they started to go underground and they started to form organisations that were not operating on a traditional political terrain, including the Tupamaros. And this organisation began to focus its anger and its political tactics on the Police, and this meant sometimes non-violent, but nonetheless, shocking tactics.
They would show up at Police officers’ homes, you know, late at night and try to harangue Police Officers into quitting their jobs and they would also do things like breaking into Police installations, stealing weapons, stealing uniforms, and so forth. So, in time, the Police repression increased and with the help of US Advisors, hundreds of militants across Uruguay were identified and, ultimately, arrested. And this only increased the militancy, where now this underground organisation felt that so many of the members were being arrested that they needed to try to undertake audacious acts, that they could then use as negotiating tools to try to win the release of some of their comrades, who were in prison. So, this chain of events unfolds that, ultimately, leads to the abduction of Mitrione at the end of July, and then, after he was held for a number of days, eventually – and in the process of searching for him, many of the members of the organisation – the Police searching for him, many of the members of the organisation were arrested, which left the organisation, basically, desperate, confused and, ultimately, they made the foolish decision, to kill Mitrione, which, of course, only sparked even more intense oppression.
But the leader of the organisation, some years later, after he was eventually released from prison, he reflected back on this period of the 1960s, before the kidnapping of Mitrione, and he remarked, you know, “It was the repression that we experienced that spurred our resistance.” And I think that this is an interesting lesson, because not only was the resistance spurred by repression, but then, the repression itself became part of a cycle that was quite difficult to end and ultimately, as many people will know, Uruguay, turned into a military dictatorship, beginning around 1973 that lasted into the 1980s, and it was an extremely harsh and repressive society. And it wasn’t the only, of course, military dictatorship in the Southern Cone, but one aspect that, kind of, distinguished the Uruguayan regime, was its use of imprisonment. Political prisoners which, you know, were arrested beginning in the 1960s, before Mitrione’s assassination, that technique just lasted for years and years, and years, and more and more people, were arrested, of course, further stifling any possibility of legitimate democratic protest and demonstration.
So, of course, we are not in the United States, where I am right now, we are not in the same type of situation as Uruguay in the 1960s and 70s. But I do think that there are some lessons that we can take from this experience, as we observe what has been happening in the United States over the past couple of months, with the Black Lives Matter protests in the aftermath, of the killing of George Floyd. What I would argue is that we are not actually seeing the introduction of the types of underground militant activities that characterise Tupamaros.
The United States is, and I think just generally, a lot of developed countries like the United States, are not in a situation where this is necessarily the risk, but on the other hand, it is certainly the case that the stifling of protest, through really harsh and repressive means, is inciting greater protest. That has been the cycle over the past couple of months, where Police have engaged in such harsh techniques that it has bolstered the size of the crowds and actually given the protest greater authority and legitimacy. And what we have seen in the United States, over the past couple of months, is that protests not only are happening in many places where they have not happened before, certainly anti-racist protests like we’ve seen have not been happening in many small towns or rural areas until 2020. And we’re also seeing that the protests, not only are they large in size, but the number of people, or the members of the crowds, are quite diverse, in terms of race and class and gender and other indicators. And so, the geographic and demographic diversity is also combined with a focus on centre city or downtown locations. They’re not necessarily happening in the Black neighbourhoods that have been the focus of protest, even five or six years ago in previous rounds of Black Lives Matter protests. Instead, they’re focused on municipal buildings, federal buildings, as well as high-end shops and shopping districts.
Throughout the protests, we’ve also seen, of course, the introduction of chemical weapons, tear gas and other types of munitions and various weapons that have been causing grievous injuries to a lot of people. But in a way, the introduction of these types of weapons, has also backfired, in some sense, because, as many protestors have said, particularly in Portland, “After the first – you know, the time you have a flash bang grenade go off near you, it’s terrifying, but the fifth or sixth time, you know, five or six days in a row that it happens, that effect of scaring protestors no longer really works.” So, protestors are becoming more unified, more audacious, as Police are, you know, increasing their aggression toward the protests and trying to prevent them from occurring in the first place.
And finally, the last thing that I would say is that the – just as we saw in this history that I’ve looked at, you know, in my work 50 years ago in Latin America, and particularly in Uruguay, what we have seen in the recent protest is that the protestors themselves are focused, obviously, on Police, on Police tactics and are making the content of their protest about very specific demands related to Police. Obviously, the slogan that has been most widely used is “defund the Police”, which, of course has some ambiguity in terms of what it actually means. But I think that the pattern that has emerged is that Police are responding to the content of the protest, rather than the form.
Typically, when protest occurs, if it’s blocking traffic, if it’s, you know, shutting down parts of a city, Police are interested in, you know, restoring order. As we just heard in the previous presentation, they’re interested in, you know, getting commerce to function normally, traffic to flow normally and so forth. I think in the protests over the past two months that has been not been the primary goal of Police. Instead, Police are focusing, as I said, on the content, they’re responding in, a kind, of deeply politicised way, to what protestors themselves are saying, rather than merely on the tactics themselves. And this has created a further cycle of escalation, rather than de-escalation.
So, the history I think, suggests that, you know, a cycle of escalation and aggressive and offensive response, rather than defensive response, to protests, you know, leads to innovative tactics by protestors, it can also lead to underground and illegal tactics that I think, you know, many people are obviously worried about. But I think it’s really important to recognise that, you know, that is not what we’re seeing yet in the United States, but we are seeing this really harsh and aggressive Police response. And the pattern that we see in history is that this is very hard to deescalate once this cycle begins. So, I’ll leave it there, thanks.
Ben Horton
Stuart, thank you very much. Sorry to anybody listening if they can hear sirens outside, that’s not sound effects or mood music, it’s just a busy road. Okay, let’s move on now then, to Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, thank you very much for your contribution, in advance.
Sizwe Mpofu Walsh
Thanks very much, Ben. Hopefully, the sirens aren’t the sign of repressive tactics, either. Glad to be with you all. Thanks very much for the invitation and also, very glad to be part of this panel and some very interesting interventions that we’ve heard already.
So, South Africa is held by many observers to be the protest capital of the world and this is often thrown about in the South African public discourse. I think what it eludes to, whether it’s true or not, is that South Africa, as a country with both widely protected constitutional freedoms and also, severe material challenges, is a unique melting pot for a very fractious democracy, with anywhere between a million and 2 million people on the streets in any given year, and that’s the country which I come from. But I also recently spent, as Ben alluded to, seven years at the University of Oxford, first doing an MPhil and then a DPhil. And if South Africa is the world’s capital of protest, Oxford is the world’s capital of polite discussion over tea and scones. And so, in some ways, you couldn’t get two more contrasting places in which protests happen. And so, it’s within the context of that set of contrasting experiences, that I’d like to reflect on the story of “Rhodes Must Fall at Oxford” and its links to the history of protest in South Africa, in a very important and present global moment of protest that we have been alluding to in the early parts of this discussion. And I had a front row seat, of course, in this “Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford” movement, because I was one of many activists, but also because I have been at Oxford for quite a long time. I got to see both the first wave, of “Rhodes Must Fall”, which appeared to be unsuccessful and then I have been able to watch, in some delight, as a new wave, very recently, has borne more obvious and immediate fruit.
So, what I’ll do is just briefly recapitulate the story of “Rhodes Must Fall” to give you a bit of grounding and context. And then, after that, what I’ll do is try and reflect on some lessons, from “Rhodes Must Fall” in the international context. And then, finally, enter some caveats and some qualifications about the story, that might also be useful for our discussion going forward.
So, let me begin with “Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford”. All I can say is it was the definition of and has been a definition of a wild ride. In March 2015, a South African student by the name of, Chumani Maxwele, hurled a bucket of human faeces at a statue of Imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, which was at the Centre of the University of Cape Town, which was a university that I also attended. And this sparked an uprising in the student body, which tend to be known as “Rhodes Must Fall” and morphed into a movement called “Fees Must Fall” and resulted, amongst other things, in the removal of this very prominent statue at the centre of the University of Cape Town. And a number of Southern Africans, Black British students, African-American students, at Oxford at the time, were watching on as this was unfolding in South Africa and pondering on the strange fact that a similar statue of Cecil Rhodes was placed right at the epicentre of the Oxford City Centre, overlooking the high street, placed as Rhodes had requested, both above the clergy and the Royal Family, on the third storey of the Rhodes Building. And we began to think along the following lines, if it was unacceptable for Rhodes to stand in the place where he committed his crimes, then, why should he be left in the place where he bequeathed the loot, why should he be left to stand? And so we began to think that we might be able to, in some ways, mimic, and in certain respects, draw inspiration, from the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa and actually launch a Rhodes Must Fall movement, in the epicentre of empire, as we saw it, right in Oxford University.
And just to share an image of what that looked like in the early part, you’ll see, unfortunately, it’s quite a blurry image. It wasn’t taken with any media cameras at the time, but that was the first Rhodes Must Fall protest. I’ll show you the second one just now, and all we thought was hopefully we would spark a debate. We certainly knew we were contending against, you know, great forces within Oxford that would resist this. And it seemed, over the process of a number of months and hard battles, that eventually Oxford would dig its heels in and decide that nothing would happen with the Rhodes statue. And it eventually did take such a decision in January, well, between December 2016 and January 2017, that the statue would not be touched. And throughout the process students were largely caricatured as a group of juvenile, politically correct, attention seekers and many students left Oxford with their heads in their hands and their reputation severely diminished and the statue of Rhodes still standing.
Fast forward to this year, I’m sure many of you will have seen, that in the wake of the George Floyd moment, this catapulted the question of Rhodes in Oxford right to the forefront of the British media agenda and within weeks Oriel College, one of the most obstinate institutions in the history of the world, and I say that because it only admitted women into the college as late as 1984; this is a 700-year-old institution, so you can imagine the difficulty of trying to move an institution like this. Within weeks, Oriel College bowed to the demand for the statue of Rhodes to be removed. And where you saw the earlier picture, this was the picture of the protests of a few months ago, which doesn’t quite tell the full picture, because, you know, we had a huge spectacle of a protest which caused this.
What does this tell us? Very briefly, I think the lesson can be drawn, one lesson that can be drawn, is that there is more and more a global economy of protest methods, particularly around anti-racism protests, that is being shared and that we can see being shared and, so the lines between those protests, the very obvious inspirations that are being drawn between protestors in South Africa, protestors in the United Kingdom, protesters in the United States, in the University setting, for example, are brought into sharp focus. And, in fact, the directions of those inspirations, often run counter to traditional colonial narratives of centre inspiring periphery and, in fact the inversion, is true in this case.
But secondly, I think it’s also a story of the non-linearity of protest and of, what Stuart referred to, I think, as the cyclicality of protests. What strikes me as fascinating about “Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford”, is just how one wave seemed to dissipate as quickly as it began, disappeared from view and then, a full five years later, sprung into being and achieved it’s ends, you know, at light speed, in comparison to the earlier iteration. And I think there’s something interesting to be gained by analysing the success of protest, not in its immediate outcomes, but in the seeds, it may plant for a non-linear and a non-cyclical fruition. And, of course, that applies to the dangers of protest, as equally as it does to its opportunities. So, I think in some, the Rhodes Must Fall movement shows us not only the importance of the methods of protest used in centring the statue, the inspirations gained from different parts of the world and the non-linearity of those protests, but also shows us how, in many important respects, a place like South Africa, with the fractious history of protest, can come to influence a place as apparently idyllic and quiet as Oxford and, in many ways, turn it upside down. Thanks.
Ben Horton
Sizwe, thank you very much for that and, yeah, thank you all three of you for your contributions so far. We have some questions coming in, in the Q&A box. Please keep those questions coming in. I have a few that I’m going to put to our panel first, just to massage my own curiosity. But thank you very much for this so far. I would like to, sort of, go back to front, actually, in terms of speaker order and I was just wondering, Sizwe, just to pick up on the methods question that you were reflecting on with the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, I wondered whether that’s – this – the question, the – well, the fact, rather, that you focused your efforts in this campaign on the removal of a specific statue and that you were able to – you had, like, a specific tangible, sort of, realisable demand, I wonder whether that is – whether you see that as a potential, sort of, differentiation between, that protest and may be the wider Black Lives Matter movement? Something that I’ve been wondering about is whether the call to break down the institutions of systemic racism, absolutely a, sort of, key concern in societies across the world, but does that almost let people off the hook, because it is not directly, sort of, a specific tangible action? Like, it’s something that everybody can agree with, you know, of course, systemic racism is bad, and we can get onboard with that. But then, the kind of what next question, maybe, is something that isn’t answered as loudly, or maybe the media don’t focus on those specific actions. So, I was just wondering whether you think that actually, when we’re constructing protest movements in the future, we should be thinking very much about, kind of, tangible specific things, or is that too limiting? I just wondered if you wanted to come in on that.
Sizwe Mpofu Walsh
Thanks, Ben, yeah, I think there are number of really interesting responses to that question in the light of Rhodes Must Fall. So, if we look at the methods used, I think two things stand out, the first is, as you say, this use of a symbol as a totem for a wider set of debates. And the second is this question that you speak about, which is people’s purported agreement with the aims. So, let me deal with each of those, because I think they’re interesting insights on both.
What I think the central insight of Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford was, as it was in the University of Cape Town, was that there had been a set of ongoing debates. We were by no means the first set of students who had contested the heroic glorification of figures of empire and their link to racism in the present. But the problem was, firstly, in attracting enough attention to that question, so that appropriate pressure could be brought to bear on the institution. And, secondly, in some ways, simplifying that question in a way in which multiple conversations could be had around one symbol, as opposed to several conversations without the same force. Now, there are some costs to that, because what you gain in attention, you may lose in nuance. But our bargain, and I think the success of this movement in comparison to previous attempts, in Oxford, shows that you can use a central image and a central theme as a way to have multiple conversations and that is a useful strategy, often, especially when that image attracts such antipathy.
But I think there’s another and a very important question that you raised which is, the problem at the moment, and this alludes to what both Nadine and Stuart were saying about adaptation and how, you know, these, both resistance and protest metastasises, is that it’s all too easy now for people to purport to stand in solidarity with racial justice and people have developed black belts in using all the right language, you know, around gender or around queer people or around race. The question, though, is, when push comes to shove, what happens in an institution? And so, I think the real insight of Rhodes Must Fall was to say how do we cut through all this flowery language and make push come to shove, how do we centre a specific icon in such a way that people can’t revert to flowery language, but have to decide the issue that’s visceral before them? And only, I think, once you cut through this buffer layer, can you really see where an institution lies on a question. So, I think, strategically, going forward, it’s important for all of us to think about how you pierce the veil of the language of solidarity.
Ben Horton
Thank you very much, yeah. We’ve got a couple of more questions coming in, but I just wanted to pick up something with you Stuart, before we go to that, which – and forgive for – if this seems like a, sort of, brief question. But obviously a lot of the content that you focused on in your talk was around policing methods and the extent to which there’s been a, kind of, militarisation of policing in the US and elsewhere, in recent times, has been much discussed in the media. I just wondered whether the events of this summer are revealing the kind of legislation around the use of force by Police, or regulation, at least around it, is, kind of, lagging behind the practice in this, in this sort of area. I mean, there are all sorts of regulations and conventions and international law on the use of force by the military in battle spaces, but is there work that needs to be done, in, sort of, regulating the domestic battle space, if we want to – like, I – it’s not the nice idea, but it seems to be the way that it’s going? So, yeah, I just wondered if you had a view on that.
Stuart Schrader
Yeah, thanks. Obviously, “domestic battle space” is a term that came up in July, with the Trump Administration. And I think that that does, kind of, give a sense of how law enforcement is – has become militarised in ways that might not only have to do with their, kind of, outward appearance or their tools or technologies, but also with a certain kind of mind set or ideological approach toward protest and even toward democracy. I think the question you raised about, you know, limitations on use of force, absolutely, there are a number of efforts, both longstanding and new efforts, to restrict Police use of force, to outlaw certain techniques, you know, chokeholds and so forth. But at the same time, I think that there is a great deal of scepticism, certainly among protestors, as well as people who’ve been following these issues, that these types of limitations, actually, will be successful. And one of the fundamental reasons is that the core characteristic of policing is discretion. Police Officers on patrol, Police Officers on the street and in their kind of, everyday activities retain a great amount of discretion to decide, kind of, in the moment, how to deal with the given situation. And it’s very hard to imagine a set of legal restrictions that could operate within the bounds of what Police deem to be their necessary, you know, prerogative or discretion, and also, prevent some of the types of injuries and deaths that we have seen.
I think this is a, basically, an irresolvable paradox that is specific to policing because of the kind of design and structure and, you know, centuries old history of the institution that allocates so much discretion at the lowest levels. You know, in contrast, in the military Soldiers don’t operate with a huge amount of discretion, because they generally have to, you know, follow orders, and as you say, have certain types of rules of engagement. That’s a contrast, where I think that the metaphor of militarisation of policing doesn’t quite help us understand or explain, what’s occurring on the streets, because this is a real distinction to be drawn. So, I don’t think there is any clear answer. I’m sure it’s going to be the case that people will continue to ask for restrictions on use of force. Whether that will actually reduce or eliminate the types of abuses that we have seen and that have pushed protestors in the streets, I think is quite unlikely.
Ben Horton
Thank you very much, absolutely, and now, Nadine, I just wondered, again, sorry to take up this time that I had a couple of thoughts for you. One was on this question of the depoliticisation efforts of the UK state, as regards protest movements, I found your argument about that very compelling. But I wondered whether you think that to – rather than just pointing out that it is a practice that has a lot of problems, whether protest movements need to, sort of, take account a bit more and take account particularly of the PR costs of engaging with methods that they know are going to be presented in a certain way by the state, whether these methods are going to be vilified as looting and portrayed as, kind of, troublemakers? Is there ever an extent to which the movements themselves should be going, we’re going to get, like, condemned for doing this and it’s not going to help our cause in the long run, as regards trying to change public opinion? And, apologies, I have got another question as well on that, which is just I wanted to ask if we could, kind of, speculate a little bit and imagine something different. I wondered whether you had a vision, or an understanding, of how state institutions could take account of protest movements, rather than depoliticising them and portraying them as troublemakers? What would it look like to have a system where protest movements are, kind of, legitimate stakeholders in political discussion? So, two questions there.
Nadine El-Enany
Thanks. Well, I mean, on the first one, no, I don’t think that protest movements should be concerned about how that will be presented, when they choose, particularly, I suppose, you’re talking about, kind of, direct action methods of protest. I mean, what we’ve seen is that it tend – it is direct action methods of protest that actually bring about transformative outcomes. We can look at several instances throughout history where insurgencies, rebellions, uprisings, have started with the commission of what would be understood as a crime as being something against the law. But is it – itself, it is an act of protest that starts a movement that sees change, if not in the long – linear or immediate term, as Sizwe was saying, but in time. And so, I think it would be counterproductive for the protest movements that we are talking about and concerned about, to be changing tactics according to how the state is going to respond to them.
And I think the other thing to bear in mind is that protest movements often adopt tactics that might be seen as being defensive or constructed as violent, precisely because of Police action and tactics and protest. There’s a lot of research on crowd behaviour, for example, which I think Stuart also was referring to a bit in his talk, about how, you know, peop – crowds are not these wild and mob-like entities, but actually form as collectives in response to the way in which they’re treated by Police present at protests. And so, if they’re charged with horses or if they’re hit with batons, they will form collectives and come together and defend themselves, essentially. And this is a real problem in the way in which the law constructs protestors as being either peaceful or violent and attending protests, with an intention to either be peaceful or violent. And this, kind of, touches on one of the questions that I can see from somebody in the chat around Keir Starmer, because you know it is unsurprising to see his critical, or sort of, cowardly kind of response in relation to the Black Lives Matter protests, because it is unsurprisingly, if we think about his history as the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time. When we saw the riots and we saw the student protests I was talking about he wrote the guidelines, the rule book on when to prosecute protestors. And key in that rulebook is the idea that protestors will be prosecuted – will – are more likely to be prosecuted where they intended – where they come to a protest intending to be violent. But that, of course, is not how violence starts at protest.
What happens it that the Police, and in particular, these guidelines are written in the wake of the student fees protest, and really there is a lot of research, for example, by somebody called Chris Cocking, a Crowd Behaviour Specialist, who interviewed protestors who attended. And they would say things like, “Well, we were just standing, we were a static crowd and all of a sudden horses charged, we felt we needed to have a go back.” And, unfortunately, the courts haven’t been helpful either.
The case of Austin in the UK, which was the case that, kind of, rubberstamped the use of kettling in 2012, you know, just as the Olympics were coming to Britain and it was, sort of, you know, it was, kind of, felt like commentators that maybe the courts were concerned to take away a key tactic from the Police at a time when disorder was expected around the Olympics. And, of course, the gentrification and the – that was entailed and the heightening of surveillance and Police operations around that time. And what we saw is a – it was the court saying, we was looking at the case of the Mayday demonstrations of 2001 and saying “Yes, people were kettled for nine hours, no access to water, their liberty seemingly constrained,” but they, nevertheless, found it to be justified.
And I’m not going to go into the details, in terms of the critique, but one thing that they didn’t consider was that the violent minority, which the state were saying, “Well, the Police had to keep the cordon in place because of the existence of violent minority within the crowd,” there was no violence prior to the cordon and having been put in place. And actually, the violence started after the cordon was put in place and people saw, rightly, that their freedom was being constrained and wanted to react against that and did, indeed, some people did react against that. But that is not considered by the courts and I think that’s really the fundamental problem with the way in which protestors are – protestors seen, the violence is only considered in the, sort of, shot that the media get of the violence taking place, without really thinking about, well, how did that riot start and what are the roots of that violence?
But I don’t think the answer should be that protestors should refrain from looting, or refrain from any kind of, direct action protest, because I think that we have to think about the work that the law does in keeping the various systems of injustice in place. And the violence in everyday society, the material violence, in terms of peoples’ access to basic means of life, housing, food, clean air, all of these things are as result of laws in place and the efforts they enfor – state authorities make to ensure that they’re enforced. And so, if we think something about something about looting, I mean, as Sizwe mentioned, Britain, I mean, here, Britain is loot to centuries, colonial loot, I mean, that’s essentially what it is, if we think about Britain in the context of its imperial history. And so, when we say, our protestors are looting, what is important is actually change the narrative, to change the discourse and to ensure that we say, well actually, what does it mean to loot and what does it mean to loot in a context where we are not just looking at what the law says about theft today, but thinking around questions of colonial effect and why certain groups are particularly dispossessed in the ways that they are today?
Ben Horton
Thank you very much, yeah, absolutely. We’ve got a question from Cinzia De Santis. I just wonder if we unmute you, whether you would like to ask that question directly?
Cinzia De Santis
Hi, Ben, thank you so much and thank you guys for giving me the chance to ask the question. So, basically, I have been a – I am a Venezuelan and I’ve been living in the UK for 17 years, but since 20 years ago we started protesting against the government in the streets of Valenzuela and lots of students, university students, were involved in these protests. They have been, a lot of them, also, have been tortured, have been arrested and killed, many are in exile here in the UK, as well. So, we, basically, now the Venezuelan people are giving up hope over change or improvement or free elections. So, there is – do you think there is any chance, thinking about the non-linearity of protest, do you think there is any chance that things might change, there is any chance that at some point Venezuelan people might gain their freedom?
Ben Horton
Cinzia, thank you very much for that. I don’t know whether we should go to Stuart or Sizwe, or maybe both of you, but maybe Stuart, would you like to have an answer of that first?
Stuart Schrader
Well, I don’t know that I can speak specifically about the situation in Venezuela, you know, except to say that I, you know – it – I’m not sure exactly what 20 years means, because if we’re talking about how Hugo Chávez became President, you know, it strikes me that that was on the backs of a longstanding social movement. And then, you know, there still is a movement, obviously, that is maybe not happy with the current regime, but the people who are in that moment still exist. I do think that it does suggest, on the other hand, that, you know, there is a clear difference between protesting and, you know, being in the streets, mobilising, demonstrating in governing, but, you know, I also don’t think that there’s a clear-cut answer for what a protestor should do, and what protest tactics should look like, that, you know, will translate into the, you know, kind of, achievement of state power down the road.
I think that, you know, there – it’s obviously a very complicated relationship and instead of questions, you know, looking – I was raised in Uruguay and my remarks earlier, you know, looking at the history of Uruguay, you know, some of the people who were the protestors, who experienced really deep repression during the 1960s and 70s, after the military dictatorship ended, they then went on to govern. And I think many people, many observers from around the globe, you know, felt that the transformation from military dictatorship to a more liberal and free society, was stark and remarkable, but for some of those people, it may have felt like the realisation of some of the demands that they were asking for, you know, decades earlier. So, you know, these are very long and complicated processes and it’s challenging to, kind of, come up with a blueprint or a cookie cutter answer to how particular protest movements might, ultimately, set themselves up for taking state power and that’s, like, a quite a large question to answer.
Ben Horton
Thanks very much, Stuart, and Sizwe, would you like to have the last word on this?
Sizwe Mpofu Walsh
Oh, I think I would also probably like to sidestep the deeper politics of Venezuelan protest, because I’m not a specialist on the subject and I think it’s an intricate and an ambiguous situation. But what I think the question gets at is this notion of non-linearity, to which I referred earlier, and I think, on that score, what I would say, and what I actually also wanted to say to flesh that notion out a little bit, is, first, that, sort of, outright swift resolution is extremely rare, historically. And so, we are almost always talking about partial victories and grey areas and ambiguities when we’re talking about protests. And so, the notion of a romantic linear protest which begins, ends and achieves its goals, is more of an ideal type than an actual reality. And that’s complicated further by the fact that we have been referring a lot to protests with which we broadly agree here, but, of course, there are also protests for deeply regressive causes that can use exactly the same methods. And so, often you get a clashing of different ideals, using similar methods, and that adds to the non-linearity and the complexity of the situation.
But I do think what the relationship between protests in different parts of the world shows is that, not only is there a non-linear, albeit non-linear, relationship temporally with protests about the same things, but also spatially. So, that one protest which fails in one place, may actually spark a successful protest at a later date in another place, and I think that also needs to be borne in mind.
Ben Horton
Sizwe, thank you very much for that, yeah, and we’re going to leave it there. Thank you very much, everybody, for attending today and for your questions, and thanks, in particular, to our panellists: Nadine, Stuart, Sizwe. It’s been really, really fascinating to hear your thoughts on this and to range so widely over all of those different historical examples, as well. I hope it’s given everybody some food for thought and I guess all is left for me to say is, thank you very much, enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks again for joining us and see you soon at the next Chatham House event.
Sizwe Mpofu Walsh
Thanks very much.
