Riots disobedience and the philosophy of protests

we

are living through an era of political

protest

and discontent from mass demonstrations

in hong kong

to school strikes over climate change

people are fighting serious injustices

people like this woman here you can see

she’s using bolt cutters

she’s actually carrying out an act of

sabotage

against a giant pipeline carrying crude

oil from canada

to the us and later in the talk i’ll

talk a bit about why

she and others are going to such extreme

lengths in their protests

because what i want to talk to you about

today

is something that often gets neglected

it’s the

moral questions raised by different

tactics

that protesters use as a lecturer in

political philosophy

i’m interested in these fundamental

moral questions

what tactics and methods can protesters

use to challenge the status quo

how do we balance the rights of

protesters on one hand

with the rights of members of society on

the other to go about their business

a very common view that we hear in media

and in public debate is that protesters

should act in a very restrained peaceful

and indeed civil way they don’t call it

civil disobedience for nothing now this

is said to be the right thing to do

because it respects the democratic

process

and also the rights of our fellow

citizens it’s also we are told the

lessons of the great moral and spiritual

sages who made civil disobedience so

famous and respectable and i’m talking

here of course

about these two gentlemen mahatma gandhi

in his struggle for independence for

india against

british rule and martin luther king

in his struggle for civil rights in the

us

now these protesters set a very high bar

when it comes to protest they emphasize

the moral

power of non-violent action even in the

face of extreme intimidation

and violence from the state now i think

the

lesson that they’ve handed down to us

the philosophy

of non-violent action is extremely

powerful

and inspiring and we still have a lot to

learn

from studying their political successes

today

but in the hands of establishment

politicians

in the hands of the media this idea of

civility

this idea of peacefulness often gets

used

as a rhetorical tool to bash protesters

those who fail to be civil in the way

deemed acceptable

by the powerful often get labeled as

vandals

criminals and even terrorists

take the group extinction rebellion for

example who

many of you will have heard of they are

trying to wake society

up and sounds the alarm about the

effects of climate change one of the

most extreme

urgent threats we face as a species and

they do this by

peacefully blocking traffic in places

like oxford circus

in central london as you can see here

now

i went down to one of their protests in

waterloo bridge

near where i used to work they blocked

off the bridge

it was very peaceful there were people

sharing food there was music

there was discussion groups there was no

molotov cocktails being thrown

if there was any cocktails to drink they

would have been non-alcoholic

that’s for sure but this didn’t stop the

uk

police recently putting them on an

anti-terrorism

watch list so apparently the real

security threat we face is not

rising sea levels floods extreme weather

from climate change

but the people trying to protest these

things so in the rest of the talk i want

to

give three examples of forms of recent

political protest

that are more confrontational and indeed

more uncivil

and think about the ethics of these the

first case

is sabotage which involves deliberate

damage

to property in october

2016 these five activists in the u.s

managed to stop the flow of oil from

canada

to america through five giant pipelines

and what they did is they cut the

padlocks

on the flow stations they broke in and

they turned these giant valves

that controls the flow of oil into the

us and they actually managed to

temporarily stop

three million barrels almost of oil

flowing into the us

and you can see obviously from the photo

they look like a very

scary and intimidating bunch of people

now the argument they made for doing

this was based on the idea of necessity

and the idea of necessity says that in

extreme

emergencies where there’s a threat to

life

and where there’s no reasonable

alternative it can be justified

to violate property rights in order to

prevent disaster

and save life and this defense of

necessity

is sometimes used as a legal defense in

court

in philosophy the idea of necessity has

a long pedigree going back to ancient

roman

and medieval philosophers and one of the

favorite examples philosophers used to

talk about it

is the idea of a hiker in a storm

on a mountain top she’s hiking a

dangerous snowstorm comes

the only way she can save her life is

breaking into a hut

that doesn’t belong to her to shelter

from the storm

now obviously she’s not carrying out

sabotage but she’s violating the

property rights of the owner

without their consent but the idea this

is is that this is justified out of

necessity

given no reasonable alternatives are

there so when it comes to the oil

pipeline protests

these activists have said given the

imminent threat of climate change

and the threat it poses to the natural

world there’s a case of necessity

to take these measures there’s no

reasonable alternative they argue

because of the domination of big

corporations and in particular

fossil fuel companies have over the

political process

in america and elsewhere as one of the

activists put it

annette clapstein we had to put our

bodies on the line

because all other avenues were exhausted

my next case

is slightly more difficult it’s the case

of urban riots in the case of urban

riots what we see

is an explosion of political outrage and

disorder

and it’s often in response to an

incident a flare-up

of violent policing against a racial

minority

there were if you remember riots in

england in 2011

following the police killing of an

unarmed man

mark duggan in tottenham and it’s

tottenham high street

that you can see here there were riots

in the us

in baltimore and elsewhere in 2015

following the murder of a other

black man in police custody so

what we have seen is many different

riots in response to

cases that look like police abuse

against a racial minority

now these riots often lead to extremely

harsh

jail sentences for those involved

in response to the english riots in 2011

david cameron who was prime minister at

the time said it’s criminality

pure and simple and there’s absolutely

no excuse for it

so how do we think about the ethics of

something

like riots now of course they only

happen

in these cases in response to a long

history

of injustice those who take part in them

are often from uh young

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poverty backgrounds they feel cut off

from the political process

in the case of the english riots in the

build-up

to those in 2011 uh young black men were

five times more likely to be stopped and

searched

than anyone else in the country in the

us in 2015 at the time

of those riots young black men were nine

times more likely

to be killed than other americans at the

hands of the police

so some philosophers have said that in

such cases

we can understand riots as a form of

self-defense against

certain acts of police violence now the

argument here

says that just as countries have a right

to self-defense

when they’re attacked by an external

threat in the case of an invading army

so communities have a right to

self-defense that’s the argument

but the problem of here of course is

that riots are often

chaotic disorderly affairs they often

spill

out of control and those who get harmed

are not

always the ones who are responsible for

an injustice they’re often quite

indiscriminate

in the destruction that they leave

another way of thinking about riots is

the overall political consequences

that they have they often get media

attention

but how helpful is this at all for the

rioters

interestingly and perhaps surprisingly

there is some

academic research that suggests that

over the long term

sometimes governments do direct

resources

and investment in jobs programs and

apprenticeships

to the communities that are affected by

these kind of disturbances

there was an article in 2010 in the

european political science review that

said

that after riots in paris lyon bradford

and london

governments did actually look at

investing in programmes in those

communities

but the same article also found that

there was often quite a significant

negative backlash to rioting

that the police often were given more

powers

by the government more repressive

police policies happened a lot of

research also shows

that writing encourages social division

and

polarization so it’s important to

understand what the long-term effects

are now of course

it’s rarely ever going to be justified

to inflict this kind of destruction

there’s

often better ways people can protest but

we should be careful

about chastising them for their failure

to be civil

or labeling them as thugs and criminals

now my third case

is an unusual form of protest

which is the hunger strike

and other forms of resistance where

people inflict harm

onto their own bodies now in the case of

the hunger strike people refuse food

they become progressively weaker and

they often risk

organ damage and even death so it’s a

very unusual form of protest

and it’s been used recently by refugees

around the world

in immigration detention centers in

order to fight for human rights

so conditions in these immigration

detention centers

are often very squalid they’re

overcrowded they’re abusive

people have very few means of making

their voices heard

and they’re treated like criminals or

indeed far worse than criminals in many

cases

so the woman you can see here that’s a

syrian refugee

on hunger strike in athens in a public

square

in greece in the uk alone there’s been

over three thousand hunger strikes in

immigration detention centers

since 2015. now as well as hunger

strikes

refugees have also engaged in other

forms of self-harming protest

and the man you can see here is an

iranian refugee at the calais refugee

camp

and he’s actually sewn his lips truck so

it’s quite a shocking

disturbing protest he’s carrying out a

hunger strike and he’s also saying his

own

lips through self-mutilation so what is

going on here why would people

inflict this harm on themself i think

we’re seeing with these kind of protests

a form of self-directed violence

it’s a way of symbolizing the violence

and the cruelty they’re subject to

by inflicting it on their own bodies

through the suffering they endure

through these kind of protests

they also demonstrate their

vulnerability and of course their shared

humanity

to us it’s also a demonstration of their

determination to resist their

mistreatment

and if you look at this particular

example the case of lip sewing i think

what’s also being communicated

is the lack of political voice the fact

that refugees

are denied any say in how they’re

treated

so in the case of lip sowing in the case

of hunger strikes

we see this unusual form of

self-directed violence

it’s shocking it’s disturbing it’s a way

of putting pressure

emotional and psychological pressure on

the authorities

it doesn’t fit the model of strict civil

disobedience i think for those reasons

because of this emotionally shocking and

coercive aspect it has

but it’s justified i would say as a

last-ditch defense

of dignity and human rights

in the case of these three examples of

protests that i’ve shown you

i hope that i’ve shown the way in which

philosophy can help us think through

some of the ethical issues involved in

different forms of protest

i think that protesters should strive

for civility

they should strive for dialogue where

they can with people that disagree them

with them but in the case where the

political system

offers no opportunity to vote make their

voices heard

there may be a case for alternative

means

so when there’s a threat like climate

change and where

the political system is dominated by

bigel for example

there may be a case again for more

confrontational

and more and civil forms of protest

to fight serious injustices thank you