<p>This dissertation aims to contribute to our understanding of contemporary state strategies targeting social movements by examining the case of Occupy Oakland. Emphasizing how state strategies, both tactical and discursive, dynamically evolve through their iterative relation to movement strategies, it presents a detailed empirical account that is disaggregated into three ?moments?, each of which are characterized by the predominance of a distinct state strategic repertoire. The objective is to highlight an underlying transformation through which the state?s strategies evolve from being highly reactive, indiscriminate and vulnerable to spectacularization to becoming increasingly pre-emptive, targeted and discursively buttressed.
The first ?moment? commences with the movement?s occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza. Faced with Occupy Oakland?s highly disruptive tactics and its firm rejection of any forms of negotiation or cooperation with City officials, the state resorts to a strategy of Naked Coercion (reactive, indiscriminate violence that is highly vulnerable to spectacularization) which backfires and results in an internationally televised disaster on the evening of October 25th. This creates an extraordinary window of opportunity for the movement, dramatically increasing public support and enabling it to undertake the first general strike in the U.S. since 1946. This fuels a process of adaptation as the struggle proceeds into the second ?moment?, and the state shifts to a strategy of Targeted Repression that is increasingly pro-active, targeted and discursively buttressed so as to diminish the danger of its spectacularization. The new strategy succeeds in permanently dislodging the occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza, as well as criminalizing the tactic of occupation and excising it from movement?s repertoire. Still unsatisfied with the repression it had achieved, in the third and final ?moment? the state introduces a strategy of Pre-emptive Neutralization that is pre-emptively oriented, targeted at high ?risk? populations and discursively buttressed by powerful spectacles of ?risk?. This enables a thorough incapacitation of the movement ? fully neutralizing its potential for collective action by rendering Occupiers a target population that could no longer even publicly assemble without inciting highly militarized police responses that were now pre-emptively justified by the risk of ?violence? they collectively posed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:10190289 |
| Date | 02 February 2017 |
| Creators | Behbehanian, Laleh |
| Publisher | University of California, Berkeley |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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