Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

States fight back 81
Such public ambivalence is key in understanding the importance of the
‘incitement to silence’ typifying media non-coverage of topics ‘uncomfortable
to dominant forces in society’ (Wahl-Jorgensen 2003: 133). In order to
maintain the silencing process there needs to be no accompanying debate
about the activists beyond their deviancy and naïveté. Unlike the traditional
folk devil the AGM has a voice within civil society, albeit a liminal one, but
this is denied in the mainstream press by their portrayal as folk devils.
This is important because it re-affirms Melucci’s (1996a) argument that
most political discourse seeks to deny the existence of fundamental conflicts
about the production and appropriation of social resources by reducing
everything to a question of grievances or political claims. Finally, the
demonisation of activists militates against large sections of society identifying
with their actions. By removing the identity of the individuals and
focussing on the group as ‘anarchists’ and ‘thugs’ they become associated
with the violence that the media chooses to focus upon, not the message
their activism seeks to advance.
One possible outcome is that politicians seek the social–democratic
assimilation of these movements through some new political settlement.
However, it seems more likely that the criminal justice systems will be left
to ‘police the new crisis of interest representation’ in democracies confronted
by the pressures of neo-liberal globalisation. In the United
Kingdom, New Labour is reported to have created more than 600 new
criminal offences since 1997 (Kettle 2004) whilst media reportage on terrorism
since 9/11 has proliferated despite there being fewer actual terrorist
events per year since 2001 (Lewis 2004). It would appear that the extension
of terrorist tropes to less marginal social locations is set to construct more
rebels with a cause who will appear within the criminal justice system leaving
judges and juries confronted with the task of reconciling underlying
motivations, ‘deviant’ behaviour and what constitutes legitimate forms of
protest. Precedents from relevant jury trials in cases brought against Trident
Ploughshares activists in the United Kingdom suggest that citizens are more
than able to balance international and national legal concerns to arrive at
verdicts embodying the ‘lesser evil’. All such cases have been dismissed to
date intensifying Home Office attempts to limit trial by jury.
The incremental extension of legitimate offences under public order
legislation and the creation of arrestable offences requiring the exercise of
judgement by police personnel appears set to multiply cases in which citizens
experience an intensity of feeling opening out onto a need to exercise
judgement and conduct ‘free acts’. The tension between state legislature and
the judgement of citizens reflecting upon the actions of apparently marginal
actors will increasingly perturbate the distribution of institutional trust
within the United Kingdom. One of the fundamental and inescapable consequences
of the AGM and associated movement networks particularly
those opposed to the illegal military assault upon Iraq has been increased
public and institutional questioning of seats of legitimate decisional authority.
The scale of the social force attached to issues is critical here.