Contesting police-protest relations in the June 1999 London demonstrations

Michael, Christalla

Abstract

The juxtaposition of policing and protest promote narrative, descriptive and analytic structures through which it becomes possible to explain demonstration events. The police-protest relational pair facilitates assessments and explanations of events of this kind. However, the June 18 1999 London demonstrations, or the Carnival Against Global Capitalism, became a focus for the indeterminacy or contestability of the ideas of protest and policing. The event threw into sharp relief cumulative and, in some ways analogous innovations in both public assembly staging and public order policing. The event can be seen as an occasion during which cumulative and fundamental transformations in both these forms disrupted expectations about what protest and policing practices now involved, and about what the terms of ‘police-protest relations’ now were. A question that runs through this thesis concerns the semi-theoretical structuring of explanations of political demonstration through the police/protest pairing, and the degree to which such structuring is affected by empirically observable transformations in protest and policing as forms and practices. The thesis is especially concerned with the relation between the theoretical and the ontological dimensions of protest and polidng in the particular case of J18 (London).

Citation

Michael, C. (2008). Contesting police-protest relations in the June 1999 London demonstrations. (Thesis). Keele University. https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/1236962

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Online Publication Date: May 13, 2025
• Deposit Date: May 13, 2025
• Keywords: J18 (London); police-protest dichotomy; demonstration; explanatory strategies; School of Politics, Philosophy, International Relations and Philosophy. Research Institute for Law, Politics and Justice.
• Public URL: https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/1236962
• Additional Information: Digital copy available upon request from the Archives https://forms.office.com/e/sRWE7eQWgU - third party copyright content preventing thesis being published online.
• Award Date: 2008