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Article Excerpt
This article analyzes the policing of the protest against the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement in Miami in November 2003. Specifically, it uses the case to develop a theoretical understanding of the contingencies, weaknesses, and unpredictable consequences of ostensibly repressive applications of power in transnational summit spaces. It then evaluates participants' modes of resistance to critique ongoing assertion among academic and activist circles concerning the unity of activists in alter globalist space, in favor of a view of power relations as constitutive of complex forms of social identity, and which require greater reflection on the part of activist circles in order to translate the experience of repression into a source of activist commonality. KEYWORDS: alterglobalism; power, resistance, analytics, violence
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Within critical security studies, there is a growing concern with the intersection of security strategies and everyday public environments: the heavy policing of alterglobalist protests during transnational ministerial events; the use of increasingly strict passenger searches and biometric data evaluations within airports; the increasing powers of arbitrary detention of both migrants and suspected religious terrorists.
Many theorists, particularly from the historical-materialist angle, view such practices as consistent with the repressive means by which an unaccountable, transnational, capitalist elite devoid of public support or trust rules through the cultivation of a climate of intimidation and fear at an everyday level. (1) Such theorists have investigated what they view as the embedding of US-dominated capital imperial interests in everyday life through the disciplining and surveillance techniques famously identified by Foucault in the context of the Panopticon, and in his theory of governmentality as the dominant mode by which bureaucratic power is exercised. (2) However, rather than a "productive" form of power, this mode of neoliberal-imperial rule is instead viewed as being applied with blunt duress in both North and South, disciplining miscreants in violent and systematic fashion for the benefit of a bloc of political and economic interests that has little concern for its social legitimacy, (3) Such work, combining the Foucauldian with the Gramscian, claims to deepen the perspective of earlier approaches concerned with the changing basis of international power, and the growth of national and supranational agencies dedicated exclusively to the protection of transnational capitalist actors, at the expense of the wider human security of the general global population. (4)
However, rather than acting as a supplement for Marxian understandings of the exercise of power, I contend that Foucault's work points toward contingencies, limitations, and ambiguities in the exercise of power that are lacking in this literature on neoliberal-imperial "supremacism." I argue that the viability of a bloc of neoliberal-imperial interests that enslaves its subjects through the cultivation of fear is thrown into question by critical questions concerning the unpredictable unfolding of both power and resistance in concrete micropolitical contexts. By opening a dialogue between these different approaches, and by applying them to a specific case in point (the protest in Miami against the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement in 2003), I argue that the complex and asymmetrical relationship of intense security to variegated modes of resistance must be understood as necessarily incomplete and open-ended processes that both open space for more critical, reflective praxis on the part of activists and poses major challenges that dominant activist imaginaries have failed to adequately address.
Neoliberal-Imperial Power: Systemic and Repressive?
The neo-Gramscian work associated with Robert Cox, Stephen Gill, and Mark Rupert theorizes violent policing as the work of an increasingly coercive and socially illegitimate neoliberal-imperial form of globalization, of which "New Constitutionalist" trade agreements and institutions are emblematic. (5) Police forces are invested with the same globally hegemonic imperative to protect the sites of these nomadic institutions through the use of repressive strategies. (6) Water cannons, rubber bullets, and tear gas incapacitate dissenting subjects without inflicting the fatalities that might undermine their wider social legitimacy, rendering clear the consequences of daring to declare opposition to this world order. (7) In Genoa in July 2001, sleeping activists were brutally attacked in the middle of the night by police agents. (8) During the WTO protests in Hong Kong in December 2005, riot police fought running battles with South Korean farmers with water cannons and tear gas. (9) In the months preceding the protests against the G8 in Heiligendamm in 2007, activists complained of raids against community centers proposed as sites for preparatory meetings for activists to map out protest strategy. (10) There is also a growing concern with the increasing use of "less than lethal" chemical and biological weapons as means of social control. (11) This ethically questionable repertoire, justified in the name of security in a context of proliferating global terrorist networks, is to be read systemically, as a symptom of the undemocratic nature of neoliberal-imperial rule that sows grotesque inequalities of wealth and ontological insecurity for the majority as a fundamental component of its rule. (12) This security imperative has cut across many alterglobalist protest sites.
This rule is echoed through control over the global media. The core ideological bases of corporate neoliberalism (the necessity of privatization; the meritocracy of free markets; the declared conviction that footloose capital was inevitable) are represented as indispensable by commercial news outlets that stand to benefit from their implementation, despite the threat they pose to the security and liberty of so many people. (13) Political threats to the supremacy of this narrow bloc of interests are inflated and caricatured, facilitating discourses of normalcy/deviancy in the interests of ensuring the proliferation of a largely docile, depoliticized civil society. A particular and increasingly authoritarian security culture is becoming globalized in order to protect a small politicoeconomic elite from throngs of people whose only recourse to register discontent is through mass protest. Rather than seek compromise with critics, these elites resort to the cynical negation of hard-won civil rights to entrench their systemic power, a sharp contrast to the consensual pre-1973 Pax Americana. (14)
From this theoretical angle, the ruthless policing of the Miami protest at the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) summit in 2003 was ruthless: the erection of an enormous perimeter fence surrounding the summit site, surveillance of protest organizations, and deployment of nonlethal weapons featured heavily. (15) There is clear evidence of the systematic nature of this repression: An ensemble of tactics emerged from a convergence of national, local, and commercial imperatives. The Miami-Dade police were granted $8,500,000 from the 2003 federal Iraq spending bill to purchase large quantities of new and untested weapons. In June 2003, a training weekend was organized by the Department for Homeland Security, focusing on strategies to protect the FTAA, rather than the civil liberties of activists. (16) The city also had an interest in securing the role as permanent secretariat for the FTAA: Its most renowned newspaper, the Miami Herald, stood to benefit from liberalization policies that would enable the acquisition of media throughout Latin America and supported the FTAA with $217,000 of free advertising and $67,000 of donations to subsidize the summit (17) The strategy was activated rigorously. Preemptive, temporary ordinances throughout South Florida curtailed established protest tactics, most notably banning unlicensed social gatherings of more than seven people. (18)
These meticulous measures contrasted with the carte blanche given to the police to criminalize "any instrumentality intended for use as a dangerous weapon"; whereas protesters' behavior was prescribed in minute detail, the acceptable limits of policing were vague. (19) The city appointed John Timoney to oversee the event; he had organized a similarly harsh crackdown at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 2000. (20) Thousands of leaflets were distributed to businesses and addresses in downtown Miami warning of the threat of thousands of anarchists to property. (21) Cynically, undercover police officers and federal agents even encouraged local African Americans to intimidate, threaten, and rob activists. (22)
Consequently, the Miami police avoided the failings of their Seattle contemporaries at the now legendary 1999 WTO meeting, when activists were allowed to seize control over the WTO area early in the morning, and police established superiority only after several hours. (23) In Miami, activists were trapped between two streets through an efficient pincer movement. Dozens of activists were arrested arbitrarily or subjected to tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray. (24) A repertoire of psychologically debilitating solitary confinement and low-level taunts and threats shattered any prospects for solidarity within jails, (25) measures reminiscent of those at Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib, (26) drawing Miami into a repertoire of techniques associated with the so-called war on terror. Whereas protesters in Seattle disrupted the WTO, in Miami the FTAA proceeded without the slightest interruption.
News coverage reflected these practices. As in Iraq, reporters were embedded within police units, dispatches filmed in quasimilitary fashion, identifying protesters as a dark, ubiquitous threat, relegating any discussion of the wider implications of the FTAA agreement to the margins. (27) Public relations staff were employed to deliver an "official" version of events to the local press; Naomi Archer, media relations officer for South Floridians for Fair Trade and Global Justice, recalls that one Miami Herald reporter was appalled by the brutality, but that her account castigating the police failed to appear in the newspaper. (28) Such measures replicate James der Derian's MIME-NET ("military industrial media entertainment network"), the post-9/11 enlistment of the entertainment industry in the construction of narratives of good/evil, with recognition that civil liberties ought to be suspended in the interests of security. (29) Although der Derian focuses on terrorism, the Miami case is indicative of its proliferation as a means of constructing images of the "enemy within" as a threat to capitalism; significantly, Mayor Diaz, referring to activist plans to blockade...
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