Images of Los Angeles This week of protesters who throw stones and police officers who spray tear gas mirror scenes from other recent confrontations between demonstrators and the authorities from all over the world.
Los Angeles has been studied by public indignation since the Trump administration launched a series of immigration raids on Friday. In response to the protests, President Trump called in the National Guard and the army. By Tuesday it was expected that 700 Marines would be in the city, together with 4,000 monitoring forces.
For social scientists who study the intersection of protests, politics and law enforcement, the scenes are broadly in California a script that has often taken place in many other countries. A strong response from the government to demonstrations that initially start peacefully, they say, often produce more and more violent confrontations. In some cases, they add, leaders have used the prospect of bourgeois unrest to use harsh tactics or create pretenses to expand their hold on power.
Here are three lessons from international protests, which experts say they can help understand what unfolds in Los Angeles.
1. Crackdowns form optics and optics form uprising.
When states fight protesters, the images circulated online and in the news media of the resulting collisions are the understanding of the public about what is happening.
Such optics, experts said, play a crucial role in strengthening or undermining the actions of a government in the midst of unrest.
Her performance can generate sympathy for protesters, said Omar Wasow, a political scientist at the University of California in Berkeley who studies protest movements. The ‘spectacle of violence and repression’, he said, can frame states as ‘bullying heads’ that are wrongly express explicit expression.
But those images can also behave like a “double -edged sword,” said Mr. Wassow. When residents come into violence with the authorities, viral images – for example, from burning cars or burned property – can generate sympathy for the state instead.
Because most people are not on the protests, the idea of the audience of the demonstrators can be colored by the images of violence that the most traction gets, even if the events are largely peaceful.
“It’s all about story,” said Laura Gamboa, a assistant professor of democracy and global matters at the University of Notre Dame. To control their image in the light of the state’s performance, movements need a strong internal organization, she added. But spontaneous revolts often miss such an organization.
Mrs. Gamboa pointed to Honduras, where protests broke out after a disputed election in 2017. When peaceful protests became violent, the movement was struggling to “overcome the story and get the international support they needed”.
2. Haduwe can lead reactions to more violent protests.
Repression of the state inspires violence and increases the size of protests in general, said Mrs. Gamboa, which changed problem -based demonstrations into mass movements.
“You are being suppressed; gas is thrown at you,” she said. “It is your natural instinct to protect yourself by fighting back.”
In addition to an immediate need to respond to violence, aloud succinations make protests by the cause to fight. What started, for example, as an opposition against the tax overseeing of the Colombian government in 2021 in a much larger campaign against police violence and the role of state power after a bloody action against demonstrators.
Aggressive state reactions to protests led to No fewer than 300 dead in Mozambique last yearand hundreds of arrests in India Protests in 2019 About a Citizenship Act.
3. Crackdowns can be stimulating until wider power grabs.
The decision of a government to exercise violence, the experts said, can be an opening for authoritarians to generate democratic checks.
Governments can violate standards to a thorough forces, said Andrew O’Donohue, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace who studies Democratic Back -backfall. They can then use the “pushback to justify further action against institutions and protests,” he added.
After demonstrators and the police constantly shifted the boundaries of what was accepted tactics during a year of protests in Hong Kong, the government of the mainland ended the cycle of increasing violence in 2020 by stripping the semi -autonomous territory of many of its rights.
The government in Beijing justified the passage that year of The National Security ActThat the government of the mainland handed over broad powers to combat political activities, to effectively ban pro-democracy parties and to limit freedom of expression.
Amanda Taub contributed reporting.
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