Palgrave Dictionary of Public Order Policing, Protest and Political Violence

P. Joyce, Neil Wain

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137270085
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Protest and political violence are concerns of global importance in the twenty-first century. This dictionary brings together in one comprehensive volume a number of key issues relating to the conduct of protest and political violence and the response of the state and police to such activities.

A

ANIMAL RIGHTS PROTEST GROUPS

The philosophy of animal rights views all creatures that inhabit the planet as animals and insists that non-human animals should be treated in the same way as human animals. In particular, animal rights insists that non-human animals should not be regarded as property (and/or ‘things’), since this accords them an inferior status within society and justifies them being exploited and used as food, for clothing, entertainment and research, or being forced to perform heavy work, which is epitomised by the image of donkeys being forced to carry heavy loads on their backs.

The treatment of non-human animals in a manner that is inferior to the treatment accorded to human animals is referred to as speciesism (Ryder, 1971), which rejects as a form of discrimination the allocation of different values, rights or considerations to individuals based on their species membership. It has been argued that ‘there can be no reasons – except the selfish desire to preserve the privileges of the exploiting group – for refusing to extend the basic principle of equality to members of other species … attitudes to other species are a form of prejudice no less objectionable than prejudice about a person’s race or sex’ (Singer, 1995: xiii).

Groups that seek to place issues affecting animals on the policy-making agenda are inspired by a wide range of philosophic positions regarding how non-human animals should be viewed and what measures should be adopted to enhance their treatment within society. However, a broad distinction exists between animal welfare groups (that seek to promote the better treatment of animals to avoid unnecessary suffering, but without challenging their status as being inferior to that of humans) and organisations that embrace the doctrine of animal rights that contends that animals have interests (especially an interest to avoid suffering) that should be accorded equality with measures that defend fundamental human interests. For the former, concern for animals is based upon moral considerations, whereas for the latter, it is underpinned by a political perspective regarding the status that animals should occupy within society.

In the UK, an example of an animal welfare group is the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). This organisation investigates allegations of animal cruelty and may (as a prosecuting authority) initiate legal action against those whose actions have caused unnecessary suffering to animals. The League Against Cruel Sports is also a UK-based animal welfare organisation that seeks to prevent cruelty to animals associated with ‘sports’ that include fox hunting, cock fighting, game-bird shooting and other forms of wildlife crime. It is at the forefront of current attempts to ensure that the legislation outlawing fox hunting with dogs is not repealed. Many of these concerns are also shared by Hunt Watch, which was set up in 2005 to coordinate the work of all hunt monitoring groups in the UK.

An international organisation that seeks to combat the cruelty, abuse neglect and suffering experienced by animals around the world at the hands of humans is the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA). This has the status of a charity that raises money from individual donors (termed ‘animal protectors’), which is used to promote campaigns against animal cruelty. These have included opposition to factory farming, the trade in wildlife and sea turtle farming. Since 2011, the WSPA has campaigned against the mass culling of dogs to prevent the spread of rabies and instead advocates programmes of mass vaccinations in countries where rabies exists.

One group whose agenda goes beyond that of animal welfare is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). This is ‘an animal rights organization founded on the premise that animals are not ours to use for food, clothing, experimentation, or entertainment. Since 1980, PETA has grown from a handful of volunteers to an international organization with more than 3 million members and supporters’ (PETA, 2013). Its activities include mobilising public opinion against organisations that are responsible for animal cruelty, one recent example of this being the campaign seeking to persuade the American Southwest Airlines to end its commercial relationship with Seaworld on the grounds of animal cruelty, especially that experienced by orcas. PETA frequently uses celebrities in connection with its campaigns: the support given to local activists to end bullfighting in the Catalonia region in Spain in 2012, for example, secured support from Ricky Gervais. However, more militant animal rights activists dismiss its activities as constituting ‘new welfarism’ (Francione, 1996).

An international organisation that promotes animal rights is the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). It originated in the UK as the Band of Mercy in 1971, whose diverse agenda was directed at targets that included hunting, research and animal testing laboratories and a seal cull of the Norfolk Coast. A wide range of direct action tactics were used that included arson (committed against a research laboratory in Milton Keynes in 1973 and boats involved in a seal cull in 1974), causing damage to premises and property associated with animal testing and other forms of animal abuse, and freeing (‘liberating’) animals from a farm in Wiltshire in 1974. The perceived violent nature of these tactics brought the Band of Mercy criticism from other bodies (including the Hunt Saboteurs Association) whose concerns were of a similar nature.

The Band of Mercy adopted the name of the Animal Liberation Front in 1976 and spread beyond the UK, now being active in over 40 countries. It is leaderless, has no formal hierarchy and constitutes an underground movement. It utilises a cell structure, which makes it difficult for law enforcement agencies to penetrate, and also provides activists with a considerable degree of autonomy in connection with the operations that they mount. Some activists also operate in isolation and are known as ‘Lone Wolves’. The highly decentralised structure of the ALF also means that leading activists who operate above ground and act as spokespersons for it cannot be held responsible for actions carried out in its name. The underground activities performed by the ALF are also supported by more formal, above-ground organisations, including the Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group (ALFSG), which supports ALF activists in prison across the world and to promote an understanding ‘of the reasons why decent, caring people feel forced to break the law’ (ALFSG, 2012).

The tactics of the ALF embrace various forms of direct action, for example, mounting raids to remove animals from laboratories and farms, and destroying facilities and equipment that are related to animal abuse. It has been claimed that in the first year of its operations, ALF actions ‘accounted for £250,000 worth of damage, targeting butchers shops, furriers, circuses, slaughterhouses’ (Monaghan, 2000: 160). The ALF claims to be non-violent (at least in connection with violence against people), but some of its actions (sometimes performed by ALF activists using the name of a different body, including that of the Animal Rights Militia [ARM]) have been identified with violence and have led to its members being labelled as ‘terrorists’ in both the UK and the USA. The term ‘extensional self-defence’ has been coined with reference to the justification of violence as a necessary measure to defend animals who have no means of defending themselves (Best, 2004).

A number of campaigns have been conducted by animal rights organisations. In 1982, an attempt to force the company manufacturing Mars Bars to cease using monkeys for tooth decay tests took the form of a claim by the ALF (sent to the Sunday Mirror newspaper) that Mars Bars in stores located in a number of cities across England had been injected with rat poison. Although the contamination claim was a hoax, it resulted in the company temporarily ceasing production of the product and caused the removal of Mars Bars from the shelves of retail outlets. This tactic was later used in other campaigns. In 2007, for example, the ARM claimed to have contaminated tubes of the ointment Savlon, which was manufactured by Novartis, a company that made use of the services provided by Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS). This led to a number of retail outlets withdrawing this product from their shelves.

In 1999, a major protest was mounted against HLS, which used animals to test the safety of new drugs. It was Europe’s largest animal testing laboratory. The protest (termed Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty or SHAC) involved mounting a permanent presence outside the firm based in Cambridge to lobby staff who were employed there, which was coupled with more violent tactics that included physical attacks on staff, their homes and property, such as cars, and planting fake and real home-made bombs at the homes of employees of the company. The campaign of violence extended to directors of companies which had links with HLS, who were also subject to libellous accusations that included letters being sent to their neighbours claiming that they were paedophiles. Many of these tactics were associated with the campaign mounted in connection with the breeding of guinea pigs for medical research at Darley Oaks Farm, Newchurch, Staffordshire between 1999 and 2005 that was attributed to the ARM.

Economic pressure was also exerted against HLS. One innovation was pressurising corporate shareholders to sell their shares in HLS, using tactics that included activists turning up at the homes of those they consider to be collaborators of the company in a bid to persuade them to sever their links with it (a practice known as ‘doorstepping’) and sending letters and flooding the switchboards of city backers with telephone calls. These actions led to HLS being dropped from the London and New York Stock Exchanges in December 2000 and March 2001. In 2003, HLS obtained a permanent injunction against SHAC which led to the reduction of violent actions against the company and those it employed.

These forms of economic pressure are conducted worldwide and have made considerable use of the Internet to mobilise supports to undertake actions and to enable activists to discover personal information about those they target (such as addresses and telephone numbers) (Cohen, 2007).

In the UK, the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 outlawed practices associated with animal rights organisations that included ‘doorstepping’ and sending intimidatory mail and email to staff engaged in research involving animals and to shareholders in companies that were involved in such activities. In 2004, the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit was set up to monitor illegal animal rights activities performed by the ALF and similar bodies.

In America, the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act (amended in 2006 by the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act) was enacted in response to animal rights activities. This legislation created the federal crime of ‘animal enterprise terrorism’ to penalise those who intentionally damaged or caused the loss of any property (including animals or records) used by the animal enterprise or who conspired to do so. The first prosecution conducted under the 1992 legislation took place in 2006 when the US government successfully prosecuted six members of SHAC.

See also: direct action, terrorism

Sources and further reading

ALFSG (2012) ‘The Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group’, www.alfsg.org.uk/index.html (date accessed 19 April 2014).

Best, S. (2004) ‘Gaps in Logic, Lapses in Politics: Rights and Abolitionism’ in J. Dunayer, Speciesism. Derwood, MD: Ryce Publishing.

Cohen, N. (2007) ‘Doorstep Protest: Very Real, Very Virtual’, New York Times, 26 November.

Francione, G. (1996) Rain without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Mann, K. (2007) From Dusk ’til Dawn: An Insider’s View of the Growth of the Animal Liberation Movement. London: Puppy Pincher Press.

Monaghan, R. (2000) ‘Terrorism in the Name of Animal Rights’ in M. Taylor and J. Horgan (eds), The Future of Terrorism. London: Routledge.

PETA (2013) ‘PETA’s Guide to Becoming An Activist’, www.peta.org/action/activism-guide (date accessed 19 April 2014).

Ryder, R. (1971) ‘Experiments on Animals’ in S. Godlovitch, R. Godlovitch and J. Harris (eds),Animals, Men and Morals. New York: Grove Press.

Singer, P. (1995) Animal Liberation, 2nd edn. London: Pimlico.

ANTI-GLOBALISATION

Anti-globalisation has been associated with protests conducted across the world since the 1980s.

Opposition to capitalism is associated with two social movements – the anti-capitalist movement and the anti-globalisation movement. Anti-capitalism seeks to replace capitalism with an alternative economic system and embraces a wide array of political ideologies that includes socialism, anarchism and communism. The anti-globalisation movement is opposed to the globalisation of capitalism, especially the undemocratic nature of this development. This movement may, however, embrace those opposed to all aspects of capitalism. Anarchists, for example, commonly participate in anti-globalisation protests.

Globalisation is not a new phenomenon and arose towards the end of the nineteenth century. However, its pace slowed down for much of the twentieth century, but picked up in the later decades of the century in response to neoliberalism: ‘Neoliberal policies include privatizating public industries, opening markets to foreign investment and competition, creating fiscal austerity programs to curtail government spending, removing controls on capital flows, reducing tariffs and other trade barriers, and ending government protections for local industry’ (Engler, 2007: 151).

These policies were promoted by international institutions such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), and gave rise to opposition since the 1990s in the form of the anti-globalisation movement, which has particularly criticised the operations of the world’s trading system. Movement participants argue that neoliberal policies ‘have created sweatshop working conditions in the developing world, threatened unionized jobs and environmental protections in the global North, benefited the wealthy at the expense of the poor, and endangered indigenous cultures’ (Engler, 2007: 151).

The anti-globalisation movement (which is sometimes referred to as the counter-globalisation movement or the global justice movement) is especially critical of the power wielded by multinational corporations whereby politicians ‘jump to the commands of corporations rather than of their own citizens’ (Hertz, 2001d: 5). This power has been enhanced by privatisation (a policy that is viewed as being driven by large corporations) (Hertz, 2001b), the deregulation of financial markets and through trade agreements promoted by international institutions, especially the WTO. Anti-globalisation protesters view the WTO and the IMF as key agents of the global economy which seek to manage it in a manner that is beneficial to the USA and to American-owned multinational corporations, but which act to the detriment of developing nations where wealth has not trickled down as had been predicted (Hertz, 2001d: 202) and where what has been described as a ‘race to the bottom’ exists – ‘multinationals pitting developing countries against each other to provide the most advantageous conditions for investment, with no regulation, no red tape, no unions, a blind eye turned to environmental degradation. It’s good for profits, but bad for workers and local communities’ (Hertz, 2001b).

However, protesters are not opposed to all forms of globalisation (thus suggesting that the term anti-globalisation is a misnomer) since ‘the left and the workers movements … were founded on the principle of international solidarity – that is, globalization in a form that attends to the rights of people’, but is opposed to those aspects of it that promote ‘private power systems’ (Chomsky, 2002).

The chief criticisms of this movement are directed against the exploitation of labour and natural resources (and the consequent environmental damage caused by the latter)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Entries
• Preface
• About the Authors
• Dictionary
• Index