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«(Не)внезапное насилие»: почему демократии могут жестко подавлять протесты
The article examines the phenomenon of extraordinary police violence in democratic states, which manifested during several protest waves in recent years. Drawing on protests against inequality in Chile and anti-lockdown protests in the Netherlands and Australia, the author shows that even consolidated democracies may witness police resort to disproportionate force. Each case is analyzed through an escalation timeline, including the legal framework, official rhetoric, the repertoires of police and protesters, and the scale of arrests and injuries.
The review of the most common theoretical approaches to repressive escalation — rational-choice theory, the law of coercive responsiveness, the police-culture perspective, and cognitivist explanations — demonstrates their limits for comprehending these cases.
The author concludes that it is necessary to shift the analytical focus to a mechanistic approach, tracing concrete mechanisms and event sequences. Three key mechanisms are identified: emergency (the expansion of police powers under the states of emergency), marginalization (the stigmatization of protesters by authorities), and security (the prioritization of public order and police task performance over political dialogue). In combination, these mechanisms create conditions for “sudden” violence that fails to resolve underlying problems and instead amplifies protest mobilization, political crisis, and social cleavage.
The article concludes with the case of Brisbane (Australia), where these mechanisms were not activated, allowing authorities to avoid escalation during protests against COVID-19 restrictions. This case supports the proposed explanatory model, which can be applied to analyses of repressive dynamics in any contemporary democracy.