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2012 45: 119 originally published online 15 Comparative Political Studies
Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow
Behavior With an Application to Transnational Contention
Interactive Diffusion : The Coevolution of Police and Protest
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425665CPS45110.1177/0010414011425665della
Porta and TarrowComparative Political Studies
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1
European University Institute, Florence, Italy
2
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Corresponding Author:
Donatella della Porta, Sociology and Political Science, European University Institute, Florence
50016, Italy
Email: DonatellaDellaPorta@EUI.eu
Interactive Diffusion: The
Coevolution of Police
and Protest Behavior
With an Application to
Transnational Contention
Donatella della Porta
1
and Sidney Tarrow
2
Abstract
In this article, the authors focus attention on a poorly understood aspect of
contentious politics: the interaction between the transnational diffusion of
new forms of protest behavior and police practices in response to them. Stud-
ies of diffusion are usually limited to the diffusion of one kind of innovation by
one set of actors to another, as in the diffusion of technical innovations from
innovators to adopters. But collective action diffusion also produces a parallel
and interactive sequence of public order reactions. Using the transnational
countersummits that emerged around the turn of the century as their source
of evidence, the authors focus on the coevolution of protester and police in-
novations across national boundaries. The authors major finding is that the
mechanisms that cause protester and police innovations to diffuse are re-
markably similar, even though they can combine in different ways at different
moments: promotion, the proactive intervention by a sender actor aimed at
deliberate diffusion of an innovation; assessment, the analysis of information on
past events and their definition as successes or failures, which leads to adap-
tion of the innovation to new sites and situations; and theorization, the location
of technical innovations within broader normative and cognitive frameworks.
120 Comparative Political Studies 45(1)
The authors close with a speculative application of their findings to the recent
diffusion of protester tactics and regime responses in the Middle East and
North Africa.
Keywords
countersummits, diffusion, protest, police, transnational contention
Interactive Diffusion: Three Cases
Seattle, November 1999. At the third ministerial conference of the
World Trade Organization (WTO), called to launch negotiations aimed
at increasing market liberalization, a countersummit is organized by a
heterogeneous group of protesters ranging from trade unionists to envi-
ronmentalists to anarchists.
From the morning of the very first day, on November 30, a series of
sit-ins, coordinated by the Direct Action Network, stops most of the
3,000 delegates from 135 countries from reaching the inaugural cere-
mony. Organized into affinity groups, only loosely linked with each
other, some 10,000 demonstrators sit on the ground tied together in
chains using the so-called lock down and tripod techniques that
make removing the blockages more difficult. When the police arrive to
clear the streets leading to the summit, the demonstrators make no
move to resist but apply the tactics they have learned during courses in
nonviolence.
On the fringes of a massive march called by the AFL-CIO (American
Federation of LaborCongress of Industrial Organizations), small
groups turn violent, smashing the windows of shops dealing in multi-
national products. The police have already stepped in en masse, deploying
tear gas and pepper spray. After a curfew is declared, blockages and
police charges continue for 3 days until the intergovernmental summit
breaks up with no agreement reached. As many as 600 people are
arrested. Seattles chief of police resigns the week after.
This Battle of Seattle will come under the scrutiny of four commis-
sions of inquiry organized by the American Civil Liberties Union, the
Seattle National Lawyers GuildWTO Legal Group, the Committee for
Local Government Accountability and the WTO Accountability Review
Committee.
della Porta and Tarrow 121
Genoa, July 2001. Another international summit, this time of the G8
industrialized countries, is met by another countersummit. The Genoa
Social Forum, a coalition of about 800 organizations, has worked for
more than one year to prepare the protest. Negotiations between them
and the local and national authorities have been sporadic and inconclu-
sive. To control the protests, in addition to installing high barriers to
protect the so-called red zone around the summit meetings from the
protesters, the airport, railway stations, and motorway exits are closed,
and suspected activists are sent back to the city limits.
During the entire first day of the summit, on July 20, protests are
staged in different areas, with protesters trying to enter the red zone
in nonviolent ways. At various points, however, the police respond to
the Black Blocs attacks by setting on those in or near peaceful protests,
including doctors, nurses, paramedics, photographers, and journalists.
After the police charge against the (nonviolent and authorized) march
of the Disobedients, some groups of demonstrators react by throwing
stones, provoking the police to use armored cars.
During one incursion, a carabinieri jeep becomes stuck and its occu-
pants are attacked by demonstrators. One of the carabinieri inside
opens fire, killing a 23-year-old Genoese activist, Carlo Giuliani. Within
the red zone, the police use water cannon laced with chemicals against
demonstrators from the transnational social movement organization
ATTAC, left-wing and trade union groups, who have been banging on
the fences and throwing cloves of garlic.
On the evening of July 21, after various police charges during a
peaceful march of about 200,000, the police burst into the Diaz-Pertini
School, where the GSF, its legal advice team, the Indymedia press
group, and a dormitory for protestors are based, searching for weapons
and Black Bloc activists. Here as elsewhere, the behavior of the police
is particularly brutal.
In the days that follow, various testimonies are published recounting
civilians mistreatment in the Bolzaneto barracks, where a center for
identifying detainees had been set up. Many of these statements, a
large number of them from foreigners, describe physical and psycho-
logical assaults.
The final balance includes about 1,000 demonstrators wounded
(328 sent to hospital; della Porta, Andretta, Mosca & Reiter, 2006,
pp. 3-6). A parliamentary investigative committee is established, and
three major trials are held, one of them bringing about the indictment
of high-ranking policemen.
Evian, MayJune 2003. The annual G8 summit takes place in a
small French-speaking town on the Geneva lakeside, Evian. As protests
are announced, from May 28 until June 3, 2003, Evian is surrounded
by a broad no-go zone, while protests develop in nearby Geneva as well
as on the other side of the border, in France. During the summits, thou-
sands of activists gather in a conferences, meet, and march. Alternative
villages are self-organized and self-managed as experiments in anti-
capitalist life. A Third-World Debt Court involves celebrities and sit-
ins. Street performances and road blockades are staged on both the
Swiss and the French sides.
On June 3, 100,000 people are involved in two marches (from
France to Switzerland and vice versa) that meet at a checkpoint left
unattended by the authorities. Violent confrontations also develop
between the police and the demonstrators. Two activists suspend them-
selves from the Aubonne bridge, with a rope stretching across the
bridge, halting traffic. The police cut the rope: one of the protestors,
Briton Martin Shaw, plunges into a rocky river, suffering multiple
fractures. The police will be put on trial but acquitted as, according to
the judges, their actions were based on a series of unfortunate misun-
derstandings.
In these accounts of three protest episodes and their policing we find two
main departures from past practices:
First, the contestation of international summits using a variety of
forms of direct action
Second, the development of specific strategies for policing, based
on the isolation of the official summit and aggressive forms of coer-
cion of demonstration rights (della Porta, Peterson, & Reiter, 2006)
1
Although there were some differences in the development of these events
that reflect deep-rooted national traditions, underlying them was a family
resemblance between protester and police behavior in these three episodes,
and something else as well: Protestors and police repertoires spread trans-
nationally in interaction with one another. There was, as the title of our arti-
cle suggests, a process of interactive diffusion.
In recent years there has been a remarkable convergence in the social
sciences on a process that many had acknowledged but few had studied
systematically: the transnational diffusion of collective phenomena. Beth
A. Simmons and her collaborators survey this development in a number
of fields:
Anthropologists . . . laid primary emphasis on diffusion, that is, the
process of adopting or borrowing by one culture from another various
devices, implements, institutions and beliefs. More recently, sociolo-
gists have argued that nations mimic their successful peers almost
ritualistically. Economists debate whether there is a rational/material
base to international financial crises. Or whether they result from
contagious herd behavior. Political scientists have incorporated the
diffusion of ideas into their accounts of the choice of economic poli-
cies. Students of organizational behavior model international net-
works among people and firms that are said to drive the diffusion of
technology and management practices. (Simmons, Dobbin, & Garrett,
2006, p. 789)
Social scientists interest in diffusion dates to three decades ago, when
Everett Rogers (1983) first called attention to the diffusion of technological
innovations. Diffusion, Rogers showed, generally follows an S-shaped
curve, first beginning with an innovation that is hesitantly accepted by a few
adopters, followed by a rapid expansion to a large number of adopters, and
leveling off at or near the capacity of a given population to absorb it.
Although Rogerss findings were replicated for a number of politically rel-
evant phenomenafor example, the diffusion of welfare policies between the
American states (Soule & Zylan, 1997)for some time, political scientists
had little to say about the diffusion of collective action. That was in part
because a single-minded structuralism focused attention on the economic and
social preconditions of change, rather than on its processes (Elkins & Simmons,
2005, p. 34), in part because diffusion and its constituent mechanisms seemed
to fit badly with dominant correlational strategies of analysis, and in part
because processes such as democratization, social movement mobilization,
and economic modernization were studied in largely domestic terms. These
studies tended to reduce external influences to simple exogenous factors
(Simmons et al., 2006, p. 3).
But sometime around the turn of the century, students of various collective
phenomena, from economic liberalization, to democratization, to various
forms of contentious politics, began to attend seriously to the diffusion pro-
cesses they observed around them. First in third wave democratization,
then in the diffusion of Keynesianism and neoliberal doctrines, then through
the collapse of state socialist regimes at the beginning of the 1990s, and
finally in the so-called color revolutions of the turn of the century, social
scientists began to study the patterns they saw in the diffusion of collective
phenomena.
2
The latest episode, to which we will briefly turn in our
conclusions, is the rapid diffusion of revolutionary insurgency across the
Middle East and North Africa in the first half of 2011.
Three ambiguities limited the capacity of these studies to grasp both the
complexities and the overall patterns of diffusion of these collective
phenomena:
First, although diffusion is normally defined as a process, a principal
source of confusion . . . concerns its use as both outcome and process
(Elkins & Simmons, 2005, p. 36).
3
Second, studies of the spread of technical innovations did not take
scholars very far toward an understanding of the differential imple-
mentation of the innovations studied. Farmers might be faster or
slower in adopting hybrid corn seeds, but there were few signs of
collective processes within farm communities that either helped
or hindered the innovations adoption. Not so for the diffusion of
collective phenomena.
4
Third, diffusion studies tracked shifts between an innovator and an
adopter in the absence of significant third parties whose reactions
might also diffuse. In the case of revolution or democratization, they
could be states that opposed these shifts (Soule & Tarrow, 1991); in
the case of social movement diffusion, the police or countermove-
ments. Few studies of contentious politics linked the diffusion of new
social movements to the coevolution of opposing forces.
Some Preliminaries
The study of such reciprocal patterns of diffusion began in 1983, when
Doug McAdam (1983) published his now-classical article, Tactical
Innovation and the Pace of Insurgency, in American Sociological Review.
McAdam (1982/1999) collected a vast events data set from New York Times
index on the black movement in America between 1955 and 1970 for his
book, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930
1970. He also recorded information on the introduction of new protest
techniques as well as information on segregationist actions and government
events (McAdam, 1983). This made it possible for McAdam to measure not
only the number of protest events but also the rise and fall of five different
innovative forms of contention: bus boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, com-
munity campaigns, and urban rioting (see Figures 2 and 3 on pp. 739-740
of the 1983 article) and the responses of both southern elites and police
forces to these changes.
McAdams (1983) model to explain the pace of insurgency can be simply
stated. He writes,
Barring the attainment of significant institutionalized power, then,
the pace of insurgency comes to be crucially influenced by (a) the
creativity of insurgents in devising new tactical forms, and (b) the
ability of opponents to neutralize these moves through effective tac-
tical counters. (p. 736)
These two broad processes McAdam described, respectively, as tactical
innovation and tactical adaptation. Together they concatenated in the larger
process of tactical interaction, in which insurgents and opponents seek, in
chess-like fashion, to offset the moves of the other. How well each succeeds
at this task crucially affects the pace and outcome of insurgency (McAdam,
1983, p. 736).
5
Given the innovative character of McAdams data set, it is not surprising
that there were few attempts to replicate it or even to theorize the dynamic
interaction of protester and police innovation. Important theoretical work
was done by Pam Oliver and Dan Myers a number of years ago, when they
concluded that
the mixes of actions emitted by different kinds of actors evolve
(change) over time, and . . . the action sets of actors coevolve with each
other. For example, protest strategies have coevolved with policing
strategies. . . . Diffusion and coevolution are closely related. (Oliver &
Myers, 2003, p. 2)
However, Oliver and Myerss work remained at the level of general theory;
they did not try to specify the mechanisms that explain the coevolution of
protester and police practices. In this article, we attempt such a double
specification by studying transnational diffusion of countersummits, which
developed in Western Europe and the United States in the late 1990s, and of
police practices in response to them.
We began with a brief analysis of the evolving protest performances
observed at countersummits, using the Seattle, Genoa, and Evian events as
our main data points. In the third part, we turn to the mechanisms of diffusion
that we observed among protestors in these events. In the fourth and fifth
parts, we examine police practices that developed in response to these inno-
vations and how these practices diffused. Finally, in the sixth part, we suggest
how reciprocal adaptation through competition occurred between police
forces and transnational protesters during this period. We are interested in
identifying the causal mechanisms within the diffusion of transnational coun-
terprotests and the diffusion of the police practices in response to them.
First some definitions:
Transnational protests we define as protests that mainly address inter-
national targets and involve a substantive number of protesters from
different countries (della Porta & Tarrow, 2005).
6
Diffusion we define, with David Strang, as when prior adoption of a
trait or practice in a population alters the probability of adoption for
remaining non-adopters (Strang, 1991, p. 325).
Causal mechanisms we define, with John Gerring, as the pathway
or process by which an effect is produced or a purpose is accom-
plished (Gerring, 2007, p. 178).
We are not the first to attempt to specify the mechanisms of transnational
diffusion. In their research on the global diffusion of international
norms, Simmons and her collaborators (2006) singled out four main
mechanisms:
a.Coercion, through manipulation of opportunities and constraints by
powerful countries
b. Competition, as a more decentralized adaptation
c. Learning, which refers to a change in beliefs or change in ones con-
fidence in existing beliefs, which can result from exposure to new
evidence, theories or behavioral repertoires (p. 795); simple learning
leads to changes on means, complex learning includes changes in aims
as well
d. Emulation, which is based on adhesion to shared global norms (i.e.,
appropriateness) propagated by experts and/or identified peers
In our cases, coercion has a low impact as, even in the spread of police
repertoires, public order remains mainly a domestic policy area. Competition
is also of little relevance, as, within each camp states and movements of dif-
ferent countries cooperated in their respective aims. Our analysis, however,
stresses the importance of learning through the spread of information (Givan,
Roberts, & Soule, 2010, p. 9), but also of its link with emulation, the devel-
opment of shared norms. But learning is a composite mechanism: We find
that it works through three mechanisms, which we define as promotion,
assessment, and theorization.
7
By promotion, we mean the proactive intervention by a sender actor
aimed at deliberate diffusion of an innovation
By assessment, we mean the analysis of information on past events
and their definition as successes or failures, which leads to adaption
of the innovation to new sites and situations
By theorization, we mean the location of technical innovation within
broader normative and cognitive framework (Strang & Meyer,
1993), a mechanisms also facilitated by experts (Simmons, Dobbin,
& Garrett, 2008, pp. 35-40)
Empirically, we use illustrative data from the three transnational protest
campaigns sketched above and police responses to them to show how these
sets of mechanisms coevolved between protester and police actions. The
similarities and dynamics we find in these events suggest the need to consider
each episode as part of a (shorter or longer) interactive chain: None can be
considered as an independent unit (for a similar methodological observation,
see Schmitter, 2009).
The New Protest Strategy: What Diffused?
We first examine the general countersummit strategy as it developed in the
late 1990s and the early part of the new century and then turn to the variety
of distinct performances found within it.
The Countersummit Strategy
Countersummits are broad combinations of different protest performances
held during official summitsmainly at the site of these summitsand on
the same issues but from a critical standpoint, heightening awareness
through protest and information with or without contact with the official
actors (Pianta & Marchetti, 2007). The form first emerged in the 1980s in
rather contained form but was given a more contentious face in the 1990s
as the doctrine of global neoliberalism took hold. Between the mid-1990s
and the years following the turn of the century, the number of these events
continued to increase (see Figure 1, reproduced from the work of Pianta &
Marchetti, 2007).
The early countersummits mainly took the form of conferences on the bor-
ders of official summits; only later did they evolve into complex, multiform
protest episodes.
8
The introduction of nonviolent direct action was a strategic
innovation, adopted in response to the scant success of more moderate tactics.
Although at subsequent countersummits both networking and the spread of
alternative knowledge through public spaces for discussion were important,
and the logic of numbers continued to play a role, nonviolent direct action
was added as an instrument that increased the disruptive capacity (and media
value) of the protest.
The underlying objective of the protesters in the countersummit strategy
was to enter the red zones where the delegates worked during the summit.
This was usually done through nonviolent direct action. Crucial was the
symbolic value of disrupting the summit, and so denying the legitimacy of
Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and highlighting their isolation by
forcing them into fortress-like enclaves. In the words of the prominent activ-
ist Naomi Klein (2002),
Confrontations are staged at the fencebut not only the ones involving
sticks and bricks: tear-gas canisters have been flicked back with
hockey sticks, water cannon have been irreverently challenged with
toy water pistols and buzzing helicopters, mocked with swarms of
paper airplanes. (p. xxv)
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
Figure 1. Growth of transnational civil society events, 19902005
Source: Adapted from Pianta and Marchetti (2007, p. 41). Copyright 2007 by Paradigm Publishers.
Broadly understood, the countersummit strategy includes variations on
two traditional protest forms: the march and the assembly. Even though these
are well-known modular forms of protest, their arrangements (to extend the
musical metaphor) developed in new directions. In general, the marches typi-
cally consist of different actions: Protestors marched, but they also ran,
danced, jumped, played, sang, shouted, preyed, carried banners, and distrib-
uted leaflets. The innumerable and improvised ways in which the different
actions, like musical notes, are arranged makes for constant innovation.
9

More generally, despite the underlying unity of intent, in the countersummit
strategy there is a deliberate attempt to demonstrate diversity. To continue
the musical metaphor further, as Peterson (2006) observed, some of the
recent performances follow the notion of stolen time, as activists intro-
duce innovations that take the time of the police (e.g., by using instruments
to chain themselves to each other or to buildings), thus prolonging the period
of protest. This can be seen in Table 1, where we summarize the information
we collected on the basis of expert interviews and existing studies (della
Porta, Peterson, et al., 2006; King & Waddington, 2006; Noakes & Gillham,
2006; Peterson, 2006) on the presence of specific performances at the main
countersummits from Seattle to Evian.
10
The next part of this article is based
on the information included in the table.
Protest Performances
Although each countersummit experimented with a variety of specific
actions, in the history of these events we see a fluctuating set of repeated
performances, some new and others familiar from the past history of new left
protests. We list some of them, drawing on the work of Lesley Wood (2004,
2007) on Seattle and on work on Genoa, as well as from work on other coun-
tersummits (della Porta, Peterson & Reiter, 2006; King & Waddington, 2006;
Noakes & Gillham, 2006; Peterson, 2006; Reiter & Fillieule, 2006). Although
none of the performances used in Seattle were new, some of them were
recorded as successful and exciting through being associated with those pro-
tests (Wood, 2007, p. 377).
The main performances observed by Wood in Seattle included the
following:
Nonviolent direct action by affinity groups: Small activist groups that
make decisions and act as a unit within street protests, sometimes
linking their actions to other affinity groups through spokesperson
meetings
130
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Masked street formations by the Black Blocs: These involve masked
protesters wearing black clothing and moving in tight formation
Blockading: Stopping movement along a particular road. Wood identi-
fies two variants: soft blocs, which involve protesters holding on
to one another, and hard blocs, in which they are locked to one
another
Jail solidarity: Noncooperating techniques which protesters use after
arrest, such as refusing to identify oneself to the police.
Protest puppetry: The use of giant puppets to visually portray the issue
to by-standers, the media and others (Wood, 2007, pp. 377-378).
With some variations, many of these Seattle performances were adopted
and adapted in the Genoa events, including the following:
Breaking into the area of the summits: This involved using various
(more or less) symbolic techniques, involving pushing and shoving
the police, who patrolled the borders of the no-go areas.
Marches: Oriented to show the force of the numbers, these were inte-
grated into the program of the countersummit. On the last day of the
Genoa countersummit, a large common march was meant to show
unity in diversity.
Spaces for debate: These were used to develop alternatives and facili-
tate networking. Here as well, the different movement sectors had
separate spaces in which to build on their affinities, as well as com-
mon spaces, designed to increase reciprocal understanding.
Social disobedience: Theorized by the Laboratorio della disobbedienza
sociale,
11
it included the use of theatrical performances and the
wearing of shields and other defensive means resembling the armor
of medieval warriors.
Sit-ins: The nonviolent wing (led by Rete Lilliput, a large coalition
of NGOs and social movement organizations active on issues of
peace, human rights, and environmental protection) staged sit-ins
as well as peaceful interposition, sitting with their hands in the
air, painted in white, between the police and more violence-oriented
demonstrators.
These performances traveled to Evian. There as well we see blockages on
the highway and other ways of access, marches, debates, even some violence.
An important innovation was the introduction of encampments: Responding
to police success in keeping the Seattle and Genoa demonstrators away from
the summit scene, some of the protesters at Evian constructed countervil-
lages, which were designed as free spaces (or temporary liberated zones)
where capitalism and liberalismtogether with racism and sexismwere
contested in the everyday life of the camp.
The information summarized in Table 1 shows how diffuse this combi-
nation of different performances was in the various countersummits.
Having established some characteristics of the repertoire of the counter-
summit, we now turn to how the new protest strategy diffused across bor-
ders and over time.
How the New Strategy Diffused
Previous research on diffusion has stressed the importance of both indirect
and direct channels in the adoption of specific tactics, such as the sit-in
(McAdam & Rucht, 1993). The symbolic construction of similarities
between the conditions of the senders and those of the receivers has been
considered as a precondition for diffusion (Strang & Meyer, 1993). And dif-
fusion has been seen mainly as adaptation of tactics by an active adopter
rather than accommodation to ideas produced by an active transmitter. Some
of these assumptions are confirmed if we look at the spread of the counter-
summit strategy. We describe below three mechanisms that we see operating
in this process of diffusion through learning and emulation: promotion,
assessment, and theorization.
Promotion
The deliberate use of direct channels of communication and the strategic
promotion of specific performances (such as particular theatrical perfor-
mances, or the nonviolent interpositions) seem to be more relevant for
the countersummits of the early 2000s than they were for the sit-ins of the
1960s. Although the Internet helped to spread some of these innovations
through indirect channels, they were also promoted through transnational
training sessions in nonviolent protest. Some performances spread from
one countersummit to the next by pamphlets and alternative newspapers,
increasingly available on the web, as well as active teaching. Socialization
into the practices of direct action, which derived from the peace movement
of the early 1980s, was organized proactively through workshops and trainings.
Through them, activists were taught the techniques of passive resistance
and trained in the use of some physical instruments as well as being psy-
chologically prepared (often through role-playing but also through simula-
tion of blockades) to assess the external risks as well as their capacity to
react to them.
The teaching of direct action involved the creation of dedicated organiza-
tions for planning and carrying out these activities at countersummits. For
instance, at the Evian summit, training was offered on the technical aspects
of direct actionincluding how to move big stones, building pyramids,
and how to build puppets with ecological instruments (Beauzamy, 2008,
pp. 435-438). Promotional activity, however, was not limited to technical
teaching; it also extended to the socialization of the activists to direct par-
ticipation during training sessions. Similarly, the practice of social disobe-
dience promoted by the Italian White Overalls, as well as their style of
dressing up in white, spread through contacts developed at the Marcha de la
Dignitad Indigena in Mexico and during countersummits (such as the coun-
tersummit in Prague in September 2000) and later through technical training
during on visits to the main squatted centers by activists from other coun-
tries (such as those of the Spanish Movimiento de Resistencia Global;
see Iglesias Turrion, 2008, pp. 283-288). And although the organizational
composition of specific campaigns evolved over time, some of the same
groups tended to be involved in most of them, actively promoting particular
forms of action.
Assessment
A second mechanism we observed in the diffusion of the countersummit
process was the process of critical and self-critical assessment. Debates on
the efficacy and legitimacy of different performances involved not only the
organizing committees of particular countersummits but also the rank and
file. The Internet was widely used for critique and self-critique, as well as for
elaborating new theorizations. Debates on the forms of action to be used took
place in open assemblies. For instance, before the protest in Genoa, a two-
day-long assembly discussed what to do in the streets and piazza of Genoa
during the summit.
Several of the adaptations in protest forms followed the critical analysis
of information from previous protest events, including reference to police
actions. For instance, responding to criticism by protestors who did not want
to participate in direct action, a sophisticated (even though far from perfect)
system of division of space during demonstrations developed. In Prague in
2000, columns of activists wearing different colors were organized, each of
them adopting a different form of action, with different degrees of tolerance
for law infringements and violence. Following similar principles, in Genoa,
different squares were allocated to the different movement areas, each of
them experimenting with different ways of overcoming police barriers.
There was also a perception of failure after the antiEconomic Social Forum
countersummit in Davos in 2003, when the police successfully kept the
demonstrators away from the site. Activists blamed this failure on our lack
of inventive capacity (cited in Beauzamy, 2008, p. 424). After the Evian
summit, the Commission Oprationnelle des Noctambules Topographes
pour des Rassemblements Extraordinaires criticized the blockades attempted
at that counter-summit too: If we want to continue to disrupt these interna-
tional events, one activist argued, we have to change tactics (Beauzamy,
2008, p. 435).
Theorization
In their landmark article on diffusion, Strang and Meyer (1993) pointed out
that diffusion models often abstract from specific practices to theorize a kind
of folk wisdom that can travel more readily than more specific practices.
Thus, for example, the diffusion of the Gandhian nonviolent repertoire from
India to the U.S. civil rights movement took place through a theorization of
its major properties, leaving many of the specific practices Gandhi had used
behind (Chabot, 2002). One striking aspect of the transnational network that
developed after Seattle was the rapidity with which advocates, scholars, and
publicists theorized the forms of action and organization employed at different
countersummits.
Theorization was visible in the adaptation of the tactic of social disobe-
dience by the White Overalls (Tute Bianche, later to be known as the
Disobedients) in Genoa. Although long trained in pushing and shoving the
police, including low-level violence, this network in Genoa developed a
tactic of what they called social disobedience, based on nonviolent, but
protected, collective and self-organized direct action. The activists wear
masks and other instrumentsto protect themselves from police weapons
but do not carry any offensive arms. The renunciation of violence is justified
by them as following the observation of the risks that violence represents for
the reputation of the movement.
Later on, following the perceived failure of the countersummit against the
World Economic Forum in Davos in 2003, some groups at the G8 counter-
summits in Evian criticized the attempt to break into the well-protected premises
of official summits, developing countercultural alternatives in their place. On
the model of a no border militant camp that had been set up near Strasbourg,
the camp was self-managed through an assembly. In the camp, direct action
was prepared, but it was especially the everyday life in the camp that
was perceived as a subversive practice, based on nonmarket exchange and
nonauthoritarian relations (Beauzamy, 2008, pp. 441-445). In short, anti-
authoritarian villages are suggested as ways of countering the summits, by
disrupting contested social rules and structures (p. 444).
Protest Policing: What Diffused?
Countersummits have been met with growing police concern and by a new
strategy of protest policing, including internationalization, militarization,
and the escalation of force. Table 2 summarizes information we collected on
the policing of countersummits on the basis of expert interviews and existing
studies (King & Waddington, 2006; Noakes & Gillham, 2006; Peterson,
2006) from which we draw our comments in the next section.
First, given the priority accorded to the protection of heads of state,
international summits involve the cooperation of various police units.
Second, more and more, police from different countries are providing each
other with information on traveling activists. Third, countersummits have
become occasions for experimentation with joint intervention of police
from different countries. For instance, at the EU summit in Laeken in
December 2002, liaison officers were sent from 11 countries (see Reiter &
Fillieule, 2006, p. 160).
The transnational coordination of police units combined with the militari-
zation of public order, even in countries, such as Great Britain, that were once
considered a prime example of citizen policing (Waddington, 1993). This
militarization, including equipment, training, organization, and strategies, first
developed in the fight against organized crime, but also against street crime
and football hooliganism, and then migrated from there to the control of pro-
test (McCarthy, McPhail, & Schweingruber, 1998).
Finally, there has been a shift from the practice of negotiated protest
management developed in the 1980s and 1990s to escalated protest control.
The coercive strategies that developed from Seattle to Genoa and beyond
recall the escalated force style of the past, but with adaptations to respond
to the new protest strategies, police frames, and technologies (della Porta &
Reiter, 2006; Vitale, 2005, 2007). In a cross-event comparison, the police
style in the control of transnational was summarized as follows:
There was indeed a return to the massive use of force, especially ori-
ented at temporary incapacitation, with protestors forced to the mar-
gins. Negotiations took place, but trust between the negotiators
136
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remained low, also because of the uncompromising messages sent by
the police with other interventions aimed at protection and prevention
during the period leading up to the demonstrations. Finally, there were
clear attempts at intelligence-led, policing with much emphasis
given to massive collection and frequent exchange of information.
(della Porta & Reiter, 2006, 182)
A massive police presence with high visibility was found at numerous
transnational protest events in both North America and Europe. In most of the
cases examined in the comparative research of della Porta, Peterson, et al.
(2006), police officers donned heavy antiriot gear and, above all, special units
were deployed for coercive intervention against troublemakers. The army,
as well as paramilitary bodies, such as SWAT teams in the United States,
often intervened (Fernandez, 2008).
Various types of less-lethal arms were also used against demonstrators,
from those traditionally deployed by police public order units, ranging from
tear gas to water cannons, to newer developments like hand-held irritating
sprays and rubber and plastic bullets. The results were predictable: In
Gothenberg, three demonstrators were wounded, in Genoa one demonstrator
was killed, and in Seattle, Windsor, and Gothenburg, groups of demonstrators
were encircled by police and kept penned in for long periods. Mass arrests,
sometimes made far from the demonstration venue, and often reversed by the
courts, were made in Seattle, Washington, Prague, Quebec City, Gothenburg,
and Genoa.
Deterrence of demonstratorsboth in general and in specific areasis a
main strategic goal of authorities in the policing of transnational protest
events (Fernandez, 2008, p. 86). After a geographical location is selected for
the summit, police departments carefully select and map out the material
environment before and during a protest (p. 93). Special trains transporting
activists are blocked at the borders. As far as the European Union is con-
cerned, border controls are routinely reintroduced during international dem-
onstrations, and numerous potential participants (including EU citizens) are
refused entrance, often on a questionable legal basis. In Quebec City as well
as in Genoa, checkpoints were set up at the city borders, and railway stations
were closed and/or heavily patrolled. The aim is [t]o contain, isolate and
separate activists so that the disturbance does not spread like a disease by
confining people into relatively small, fenced off areas that police have
established for control purposes (Fernandez, 2008, pp. 130, 132).
Police forces in various countries also employed coercive measures during
the prelude to the summit meetings. In Genoa, in Copenhagen, and elsewhere,
the police harassed young people who looked like movement activists,
employing continuous identity checks and body searches during the days and
nights prior to the protest events. In Genoa, Cancun, Miami, and Washington,
D.C., patrolling was used as an instrument of intimidation (Fernandez, 2008).
Preventive arrests were sometimes made against specific protest actions and
accompanied by the confiscation of propaganda materials such as puppets and
banners. Police have entered and searched demonstrators headquarters, inde-
pendent media centers, and legal assistance offices. A technique sometimes
used in these cases was the meticulous regimentation of time, space, and the
human body: Fernandez (2008) writes, [P]olice departments carefully select
and map out the material environment before and during a protest (p. 93). In
short, police were attempting to strategically incapacitate the protestors
(Noakes & Gillham, 2006).
Legal provisions (from city regulations to national codes) against vandal-
ism, trespassing, failure to disperse, and disobeying a lawful order, but also
traffic laws and laws on the use of fire in public, are frequently arrayed to
repress protesters. In fact, Temporary ordinances, creative use of old laws, and
legal permits are now common ways to control the protest (Fernandez, 2008,
p. 166). In the United States, before the summit of the World Economic Forum,
the NYC police department called for zero tolerance against violent protesters,
implementing arrests against anyone interfering with traffic (using an edict of
1845 prohibiting three or more people from assembling in a public space wear-
ing masks). In the same vein, fire regulations and public health ordinances have
been applied to prevent the preparation of protest. Protest permits have also
been used to reduce the movements of protesters and restrict them to inconve-
nient areas. The housing of demonstrators has also been actively obstructed
(e.g., in Calgary, where the authorities refused to host protesters, and outbid an
offer by the protesters to lease land from the Stoney First Nation; Fernandez,
2008, p. 87).
How the New Police Repertoire Diffused
The transnational spread of police techniques was also diffused by a set of
causal mechanisms that parallel remarkably the ones we singled out for the
diffusion of protestor tactics.
Promotion
A major vehicle for the diffusion of techniques of protest control is through
promotion, which included the production of handbooks as well as training.
The promotion of specific police performances became more and more
focused, as well as more transnational, after Seattle. As for the United States,
before the Miami Summit, instructors from the New York City Police
Department, the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, the
Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Santa Monica Attorneys Office,
the Morris County Prosecutors office, and the county of Los Angeles Police
Department were used in a 6-month training of local officers. Topics taught
included history of riotous behavior and lessons learned, planning, training,
community and media relations, riot control agents and less-lethal muni-
tions, fire ground tactics, and mass decontamination scenes (Fernandez,
2008, pp. 98-99). The categorization of demonstrators as a dangerous group
was taught at police courses in the psychology of mass behavior (Fernandez,
2008, p. 120).
This type of training also diffused transnationally, as police leaders invite
colleagues from other countries where transnational protests had taken place
to discuss their successes and failures. At the EU level, a Security Handbook
for the Use of Police Authorities and Services at International Events such as
meetings of the European Council was issues by a Police Cooperation
Working Party in November 2002, after a request of the EU Council for
Security and Justice. It includes recommendations for international coopera-
tion, with exchange of information as well as risk assessment on known
potential demonstrators and other groupings expected to travel to the event
and deemed to pose a potential threat to the maintenance of public law and
order and devices to prevent them from traveling to the location of the events,
while mentioning negotiations with protestors as just one of the potential tac-
tics available (Reiter & Fillieule, 2006, p. 164). We can therefore say that EU
institutions worked as certifying agencies, legitimizing the new forms of
policing through their endorsement.
More in general, national and international agencies have been put in
charge of the coordination of various police bodies, with enforcement agencies
(such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Domestic
Preparedness) instructing and training police forces in updated techniques of
civil disobedience management (Fernandez, 2008, p. 98). In the EU, the
European Police College has been charged with offering targeted training on
public disturbances.
Assessment
After the perceived failure in Seattle, police forces engaged in extensive
planning to control future countersummits. This included the collection of
information on the protesters (who they are, how numerous they are, who are
the organized groups) as well as a critical elaboration of the lessons learned
from the policing of previous transnational events. In the United States,
information collected from open sources as well as from infiltration (with
police power increased by the U.S. PATRIOT Act) was used to train officers
(Fernandez, 2008, p. 109).
Previous experiences, both successes and failures, became benchmarks for
critical assessment. If the protesters were responding to critiques from the inside,
so were the police. The Seattle case was considered a failure in law-and-order
control and linked to the lack of preparation of the police that allowed the protes-
tors to surprise the police and block the summit. Learning from that, police
forces began to invest more effort in the preparation of their intervention. Heavy
criticism emerged also in Gothenburg, where the usually civilized Swedish
police were accused by the media and other observers of having lost control,
engaging in a sort of police riot (Peterson, 2006).
The EU Council for Justice and Home Affairs in July 2001 established a
Police Chiefs Task Force made of police intelligence officers and national
contact points with the tasks of collection, analysis, and exchange of informa-
tion on persons and groups that are likely to pose a threat to public order and
security on the occasion of transnational protest events. This Task Force had to
help the member states that were hosting international summits by advice and
monitoring. In addition, it had to develop analysis of violent disturbances
(Reiter & Fillieule, 2006, p. 159).
Theorization
Police strategies also spread through theorization. The literature on transna-
tional policing has underlined the significance of technical innovation and the
influence of advanced surveillance, information processing, and communica-
tion technologies on the organization of policing. New terms such as strategic,
proactive, and intelligence-led policing imply approaches for targeting suspect
populations and individuals in a highly systematic way. This is applied at the
national and transnational levels. In the European case, the European Police
Collegeestablished by a Council Decision of December 2000states on its
webpage that it aims (among others) at reflecting on the challenges coming
from countersummits such as in Gothenburg and Genoa.
Innovative performances were often legitimized by the extension of a
police theory from one sector of policing to another. For example, the prac-
tices that the European police developed in dealing with gangs and soccer
hooligans have sometimes been extended to protesters, through the theorization
of underlying similarity between gangs and soccer hooligans and protesters.
Police tactics for the control of protest follow some general conceptions of the
role of the police. For example, Noakes and Gillham (2006) underline the
importance of shifts in the dominant visions of the causes of crime and in the
corresponding conceptual principles underlying police intervention for pro-
test policing, in particular the implications of the new penology with its
emphasis on protection and risk management. Zero-tolerance doctrines, as
well as militaristic training and equipment, are imported into the field of pro-
test policing from other forms of public order control addressing micro crimi-
nality or football hooliganism.
The elaboration of a penal law of the enemy is another case in point. The
strategy of space fortification reflects a conception of prevention as isolation
from the danger (and the dangerous ones), through a reduction of rights (of
demonstrations, movement, privacy) of those citizens that are considered as
potential enemies. The assumption here is that the implementation of the
rights as well as the security of the included pass necessarily through the
exemption from those rights of the excluded, that is those who do not deserve
them, who are marginals (Pepino, 2006, p. 262). This emergency right devi-
ates from the principles or universal rights, instituting a dichotomy between
citizens and enemy: In the control of protests, the political rights of the citizens
are subordinated to the security of certain groups.
Both in Western Europe and North America, the trend toward intelligence-
led policing, first established in the United States in the war on drugs, has
been generalized to transnational protest policing. Comparative research dem-
onstrates an attempt to extend control over a population of transnational activ-
ists through a broad collection of information, shared among the different
national and local police bodies (e.g., the Joint Intelligence Group operating in
Canada), with enforcement agencies (e.g., the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security Office of Domestic Preparedness) instructing and training in updated
techniques of civil disobedience management (della Porta & Reiter, 2006b;
Fernandez, 2008; King & Waddington, 2006).
Intelligence-led policing is facilitated by the expansion of police preven-
tive powers (e.g., in the control of football stadiums) or in the widespread use
of phone tapping and video cameras (originally used against organized crime
and terrorism). In several countries, antiterrorism or anticrime policies have
introduced new associational crimes (membership in or moral support of sub-
versive or terrorist associations) or crimes against the personality of the state
and heads of state with the effect of orienting repression against categories of
people rather than against specific crimes. Militarization is therefore justified
by states of exception that foresee the use of the army. In addition, the penal
code shifted from punishing specific conduits into the definition of entire cat-
egories of people as dangerous for law and order (Pepino, 2006, p. 550).
Interactive Diffusion
Given the parallels in the mechanisms of diffusion we observed within each
major actor, it is not surprising that we found evidence of reciprocal adapta-
tion between police and protesterswhat Oliver and Myers called coevolu-
tion and what we call interactive diffusion. In the competition for control
of public opinion, both police and protesters adapted their moves to the
perceived or expected behavior of the other party, based on the experience of
previous summits.
In the first place, as we have seen, the police adapted their strategies to each
move by the demonstrators. As the cycle of global justice protests evolved, not
only were summits protected by larger and larger no-go areas, but also they
were often located in distant places as well as in nondemocratic countries
where protesters would find it difficult to travel and organize (on the WTO
summits and countersummits, see Silva, 2008). Second, as activists were
observed and taken into custody, police files on them were built, exchanged
with other police across borders, and updated to reduce the possibility for
cosmopolitan activists to travel to new venues to stage protests. Third, police
forces also reacted with greater violence to the delegitimation that they per-
ceived aggressive repression had brought about.
There were connections between police responses to the protests and future
police practice. For example, after the killing of a protester and the brutalization
of many more at the anti-G8 protests in Genoa, public outrage compelled
changes in Italian practice, leading, among other things, to authorities disband-
ing a special police squad (della Porta & Reiter, 2006a, 2006b). Even though the
judges denounced the lack of collaboration of the police with the investigations,
as well as the lack of the crime of torture in the Italian civil code, which contrib-
uted to time delays and the proscription of several police crime, the trials con-
firmed the responsibility of low and, especially, high-ranking police officers for
much of the violence in Genoa (Agnoletto & Guadagnucci, 2011). Similarly in
Canada, public criticism of the Canadian Royal Mounted Police (CRMP) for its
lack of respect for demonstration rights at the G20/IMF and World Bank summit
in Ottawa in November 2001 led to the adoption of a soft hat strategy to con-
trol the G8 summit in Calgary in 2002 and the G20 summit in Ottawa in 2002
(King & Waddington, 2006).
Changes in police strategy were also mediated by other public institutions
responding to the failures of earlier police practice. For example, after Seattle,
Genoa, and other highly debated cases of protest policing, parliamentary
committees were formed and policemen (including highly placed police officers,
as in the Italian case) were tried and sentenced. Following the Republican
Convention in New York, the city was sued by numerous protesters, protest-
ing their treatment by the NYPD, leading to a new set of guidelines for the
future management of demonstrations.
Just as police forces responded to protester behavior with both repression
and reform, demonstrators adapted their performances in response to them.
In Seattle an important innovation was the successful blockade of the del-
egates to the conference. In Genoa this aim was adapted to breaking into the
no-go areas that the police had set up and fortified to avoid another Seattle
(della Porta & Reiter, 2006a).
Violence tends to produce escalation, focusing media attention on street
fights between protestors and the police. Criticism of this danger led organiz-
ers in Genoa to avoid repeating the mistake made in Gothenburg of allowing
physical clashes with the police to justify a negative media image of the pro-
testors. One technique used to reduce the potential for escalation was the
integration of radical groups into the main protester coalition. For the same
reason, the organizers of the European Social Forum in Florence adopted
innovations, such as a special type of parade marshals armed with video
cameras to avoid the violence that had shocked many demonstrators as well
as members of the public in Genoa.
Conclusion
In this article, we have extended the insights and the research tradition on the
interactive diffusion of protesters and police repertoires begun by McAdam on
civil rights and theorized by Oliver and Myers and Simmons and her collabora-
tors. Drawing on empirical evidence collected for other purposes, we singled
out some key causal mechanisms that we observed in the process of diffusion
of the countersummit and of police responses to it. The changes in both pro-
tester and police practice that we found during the cycle of transnational global
justice countersummits suggest that interactive social learning was occurring
both within protester and police communities as well as across the two com-
munities. Without denying that forms of action are normatively rooted, we
observe that they were strategically adapted to respond to both internal and
external criticism as well as to the new conditions imposed by each summit and
each move of reciprocal adaptation. Just as McAdam found southern elites and
the civil rights movement adapting incrementally to each others behavior at
previous encounters, the countersummits we studied were learning occasions
for both police and protesters.
What is new and different about the cases we studied is that, although
McAdams actors were learning within a single national political community,
ours were learning and diffusing techniques of protest and policing across
national boundaries. In a general sense, such transnational diffusion can be
seen as the result of the globalization of the communications media; but,
more concretely, it is evidence of the growth of transnational ties, both among
governing elites (Slaughter, 2004) and among transnational activists (della
Porta & Tarrow, 2005).
We do not think we have exhausted either the mechanisms for the diffusion
of transnational protest or their interactions with the diffusion of police practices.
We hope, however, that we have demonstrated some important points about
this transnational cycle of contention:
First, with reference to research on transnational activism, we saw the emer-
gence (and transformation) of the innovative repertoire of the countersummit
against international financial institutions. We found continuity with previous
forms of protest but also changes that adapted both to new challenges and to
new codes of behavior among protestors.
Second, in line with recent work on the responses of police forces to the
degree of threat represented by protesters (della Porta, Peterson, et al., 2006;
McCarthy, McPhail, & Crist, 2009; Vitale, 2005), we found the development
of new forms of policing strategies based on an escalation of force to keep
activists away from the places where the summits took place.
Third, we think our analysis has demonstrated that neither protester nor police
practice can be understood as mainly reflecting the search for more efficient or
more effective methods: Each has to be seen as part of an interactive process of
social learning between protesters and their antagonists.
Fourth, we singled out specific mechanisms of diffusion among both protestor
and police performances. On both sides, learning developed through promotion,
assessment, and theorization. On the side of the police, these mechanisms brought
about institution building at the transnational level. The process of interactive dif-
fusion also involved mechanisms of competitive adaptation of police perfor-
mances to protest innovation and vice versa.
Various actors intervened in this process. Police institutions for cross-national
cooperation worked as epistemic communities to spread new tactics, which EU
institutions then certified. On the side of the movement, specific epistemic com-
munities developed around specific tactics, which were often endorsed by influ-
ential networks of activists.
Recent events in the Middle East and North Africa have shown how fast
emerging movement tactics can diffuse across boundaries. The occupation of
Tahir Square not only was an important step in the wave of protests demanding
freedom in the Middle East and North Africa but also introduced a new form
of actionthe long-term occupation of an important square, linked to the
creation of a free space where citizens could express themselves and form
networks. This practice quickly not only spread throughout the Arabic Spring
but also reached Europe, where it was adopted (with explicit reference to
Tahir Square) by the Indignados movement in Spain and then in Greece. As
in the cases we studied mainly in Europe and the United States, we saw here
an interdependent decision-making process that relied not on coercion or
competition but on learning and emulation. Activists came into contact with
each other, connecting the squares where they protested through the use of
new technologies and similar symbols.
As in the transnational countersummits we studied, the first mobilizers
taught others what to do, the effects of the new tactics were assessed, the
importance of the building of free space for the encounters of different sub-
jectivities was theorized. However, as Valerie Bunce and Sharon Wolchik
(2010) remind us, addressing the electoral revolutions in Eastern Europe, not
only protestors but also police forces learn cross-nationally from each others
failures and successes. The demise of dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, for
instance, contributed to push their counterparts in Libya and Syria to use more
repressive tactics and led the Saudi monarchy to send troops to the aid of their
homologues in Bahrain. The innovative use of new technology that helped
(even though it did not determine) the rapid spread of protests in the first two
cases was jeopardized by the strategies used by these regimes to restrict com-
munication. Also in these cases, the police adapted to the protestors tactics:
what had worked in Tunisia and Egypt did not have as much success in other
countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
From evidence from the electoral revolutions in Southeastern Europe and
Central Asia, Valerie Bunce formulated the expectation that
the geography of the intra-regional diffusion of protest against
authoritarian leaders will be contained as a consequence of the radi-
cal nature of the project, the mistaken assumption among many oppo-
sitional groups as the wave continues that emulation does not require
dress rehearsal, hard work or planning and the formidable resources
authoritarian leaders command, in part because of the lessons they
have culled by watching dictators fall in other countries. (Bunce,
2011, pp. 39-40)
Here as well, the study of interactive diffusion can help us to understand
the dynamics of the new wave of protests for freedom and their fate.
Acknowledgments
This is a revision of an article delivered to the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin by the
first author and to the University of Minnesota seminar in comparative politics by the
second. We are grateful to Phillip Ayoub, Martin Binder, Jennifer Earl, Matthias
Ecker-Ehrhardt, Nina Egger, Pat Gillham, Marco Giugni, Monika Heupel, Gisela
Hirshmann, Doug McAdam, Pamela Oliver, Herbert Reiter, Abby Peterson, Dieter
Rucht, Kathryn Sikkink, Sarah Soule, Simon Teune, Alex Vitale, David Waddington,
Lesley Ann Wood, and Michael Zuern for their insightful comments on a previous
version of this article and/or information on specific protest events.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this
article.
Notes
1. Note that there was evidence before Seattle that elements in the police forces of
the United States were already using paramilitary methods against political dis-
sidents. See McCarthy, McPhail, and Schweingruber (1998, pp. 346-349).
2. See the brief surveys in Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett (2006) and Strang and
Soule (1998) and the collection of research on social movement diffusion in
Givan, Roberts, and Soule (2010).
3. For example, using the spread of welfare reform across the American states,
Soule and Zylan (1997) measure it as an outcome through time-sensitive event-
history models; Susan Olzak (1992) does the same with the spread of ethnic
conflict. In work on democratization by Brinks and Coppedge (2006) in political
science and Wejnert (2005) in sociology, democratizations incidence becomes
the proxy for its diffusion. The results of these studies are not insignificantfor
example, Brinks and Coppedge and Wejnert identify important neighborhood
effects in democratization, whereas Soule and Zylan show that the same states
that innovated in early welfare systems were also early risers in their reform.
But these scholars infer the process of diffusion from its outcomes rather than
specifying the process itself.
4. For example, although the 1989 collapse of communism diffused all across
the state socialist world, it produced results ranging from full democratiza-
tion in Central Europe and the Baltic states, to partial democratization in
Eastern Europe and the Balkans, to renewed authoritarianism in Belarus and
Central Asia, to the fragmentation of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and
Yugoslavia (Bunce, 1999). Only by specifying the process of diffusion itself
could scholars predict the paths that diffusion might take (Weyland, 2009).
5. McAdams model was already complicated, but he embedded it into a still more com-
plex political process, which he constituted from two main structural factorsthe level of
indigenous organization and the alignment of groups within the political environment
what has come to be called the structure of political opportunities. Indigenous
organizations, he argued, mobilize community resources in support of new tactical
forms and diffuse them to other insurgent groups, whereas the larger political system
determines whether tactical innovations are apt to be repressed or ignored rather than
triggering expanded insurgency. Tactical innovations, he concludes, only become
potent in the context of a political system vulnerable to insurgency (McAdam, 1983,
pp. 736-737).
6. We do not include in this category either the intervention of one countrys activ-
ists in another countrys conflicts (Keck & Sikkink, 1998) or the framing of
domestic protests with global themes (Tarrow, 2005).
7. The metaphor of a dance has been used also in other fields. Among others, schol-
ars of industrial relations have referred to it to describe the interaction between
unions and firms (Huzzard, 2005).
8. Note, however, that there were significant neighborhood effects in the coun-
tries from which participants came. Thus, the Seattle summit recruited mainly
from the American and Canadian northwest, with very numbers coming from
other regions of the United States and Canada and minute proportions coming
from elsewhere in the world. See Lichbach (2003) for figures on U.S. and non-
U.S. participants in Seattle.
9. In the most recent evolution, following the street party performances of
the reclaim the street movement, a concert or a sort of choral speech (with
dozens of short testimonies) has taken the place of the traditional closing
speech by movement leaders, and leafletting has been partially displaced by
street theater.
10. Scholars who had studied specific countersummits were sent the two tables and
asked to fill in information in the specific cells.
11. A network of squatter social centers from the north and northeastern Italian
regions, which had deradicalized their forms of action that had developed par-
ticular forms of direct action that, while not excluding violent confrontation with
the police, tended however to deemphasize physical confrontation in favor of
more theatrical forms (Iglesias Turrion, 2008).
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Bios
Donatella della Porta is professor of sociology in the Department of Political and
Social Sciences at the European University Institute. Her main research interests
concern social movements, political violence, terrorism, corruption, police, and poli-
cies of public order. In 2011, she received a ERC Advanced Grant on Mobilizing for
democracy. Among her most recent publications are Mobilizing on the Extreme Right,
Oxford University Press, 2012; Meeting Democracy, Cambridge University Press,
2012; The Hidden Order of Corruption Ashgate 2012; Social Movements and
Europeanization, Oxford University Press, 2009; Another Europe, Routledge, 2009;
Democracy in Social Movements, Palgrave, 2009; Approaches and Methodologies in
the Social Sciences, Cambridge University Press. In 2011 she was the recipient of the
Mattei Dogan Prize for distinguished achievements in the field of political
sociology.
Sidney Tarrow is professor emeritus of government at Cornell and visiting professor
at the Cornell Law School, where he coteaches The Constitution and Society. He
has just published a third, revised and expanded, edition of Power in Movement and
completed a collection of essays, Strangers at the Gates: States and Social
Movements in Contentious Politics, both with Cambridge University Press. He is
working on a project on human rights at war.

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