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