Breaking the Wave: Repression, Identity and the Seattle Tactics

BREAKING THE WAVE: REPRESSION, IDENTITY, AND SEATTLE TACTICS* Lesley J. Wood† Using interviews with thirty-two direct action activists and field notes from the period, this article argues that repression limited the diffusion of the tactics used in the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle to activists in New York City and Toronto. The tactics under review are affinity groups, blockading, jail solidarity, black bloc, and giant puppets. I argue that repression highlighted the ways that poor activists and activists of color were different from the archetypical white, middle-class, Seattle protester. Repression made it less likely that these activists would identify with the Seattle protesters, and less likely to deliberate about the tactics. Thus, repression and identity questions made incorporation of these tactics less likely. I also argue that repression, by limiting the diffusion of these tactics, interrupted the cycle of protest associated with the Seattle demonstrations. I mean, Seattle was one thing where you had a quarter of a million people [sic] in the street and the police were overwhelmed, meetings shut down, it’s great. But we were outnumbered by the cops in Windsor, and we had over 3,000 people. And at that point, there was really no point in playing this game anymore. We lost. So I was like, that’s the time when you have a meeting and you shift tactics. (Interview with OPIRG-Toronto activist, 2003) The demonstrations in Seattle inspired both innovation and imitation. Police saw the event as a massive failure, the chief of the Seattle Police Department resigned, officers across Canada and the United States vowed never to repeat the same mistakes, and many began to reevaluate their approach to protest policing (Beasley, Graham, and Holmberg 2000; Quenzer 2000). Protesters had the opposite reaction. Inspired by the events in Seattle they began to experiment in their own cities with the tactics that had successfully shut down the WTO meetings. Despite the efforts of these activists, the diffusion of the tactics into the local arena faced obstacles. One of these obstacles was police repression, which limited the localization of the Seattle tactics by interrupting how New York and Toronto activists identified with Seattle demonstrators, and with the global justice movement more generally. Repression had a particular negative effect on protesters who were poor or people of color, namely, unlike those Seattle protesters typically portrayed by the media as middle-class whites. Repression highlighted differences of race and class among protesters, fragmented relationships among those with different identities, and limited opportunities for potential adopters to deliberate about how they might adapt and incorporate the Seattle tactics into their local practices. As a result, the local experiments with the Seattle tactics were mostly brief and limited to groups that were most similar to the Seattle demonstrators. While none of the tactics used in Seattle were new, the tactics of affinity groups, black bloc, blockading, jail solidarity, and protest puppetry were recoded as successful and exciting through being associated with those protests, and were thus bundled together as “Seattle tactics” (Ferguson 1994; Marcos 2004). Affinity groups are small groups of activists who make * The author thanks Dana Fisher, Pat Gillham, Kelly Moore, John Noakes, Francesca Polletta, Jackie Smith, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly, and the anonymous reviewers. † Please direct correspondence to Lesley J. Wood, Department of Sociology, 2067 Vari Hall, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, email: [email protected]. © 2007 Mobilization: The International Quarterly 12(4): 377-388 377 Mobilization 378 decisions and act as a unit within street protest, sometimes linking their actions to other affinity groups through “spokescouncil” meetings. Black blocs are street formations that involve protesters wearing masks and black clothing and moving in tight formation, in order to better protect members of the bloc from being apprehended by the police. A bloc will sometimes engage in property destruction. Blockading involves stopping movement along a particular road, building or through an entrance. This is achieved through “soft blocks,” which involve protesters holding on to each other, or “hard blocks,” which involve protesters locking themselves to one another, to objects, or locking together objects to prevent free movement in an area. Jail solidarity is a set of noncooperation techniques that protesters use after arrest, such as refusing to identify oneself to the police. The goal is to disrupt the usual functioning of the court and police system, and to protect the most vulnerable from being separated from the group or targeted. Protest puppetry involves the use of large puppets to visually portray the issues to bystanders, the media, and others. To understand how police repression influenced how local activists incorporated these tactics into their protests, or refused to do so, I interviewed thirty-two activists from New York and Toronto, and combined these data with my field notes from participation in activist group meetings and activities from the period 2001-2004. The activists were members of six organizations who had used direct action in their past protests and thus were groups that were likely to consider incorporating these tactics. Three of the organizations were in New York City: the community gardening organization More Gardens, the people-of-color-led, Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM) at Hunter College, and the Direct Action Network (DAN). The activists from Toronto were members of the poor people’s organization Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) at the University of Toronto, and Mobilization for Global Justice Toronto (Mob4Glob). THE IMPACT OF REPRESSION It is widely understood that police repression affects the activities of protesters. Past research has shown that police intervention has a strong impact on protesters’ perceptions of the state’s intentions (della Porta 1995), which in turn affects the level of mobilization. However, the direction of the connection is contested. Sometimes repression appears to demobilize protesters, sometimes it mobilizes them, and sometimes it does both (Beissinger 2002; Brockett 2005, Davenport 2005; Gurr 1969; Rasler 1996; Tilly 2004), depending on the social, political, repressive and economic context. Studies also have found that repression absorbs scarce organizational resources (Marx 1979), and fractures social and political solidarity among activists (Gamson 1990; Opp 1994). It is also widely recognized that protesters adapt their tactics in response to police repression (della Porta 1998; Francisco 1996; Lichbach 1987). However, there has been little written on the effect of repression on tactical diffusion. Like McAdam and Rucht (1993), I follow Katz’s definition of diffusion because it focuses on the process of reception: “Diffusion . . . [is] defined as the acceptance of some specific item, over time, by adopting units—individuals, groups, communities—that are linked both to external channels of communication and to each other by means of both a structure of social relations and a system of values, or culture” (Katz 1968). The acceptance of new or newly energized tactics such as the Seattle tactics is dependent on a number of processes including identification. To adopt a tactic, activists must be able to identify with the original users of a tactic in some way. Chabot and Duyvendak have underscored this observation, emphasizing potential adopters’ identification with the transmitters if diffusion is to be successful. They argue that transmitting and receiving organizations are most likely to see themselves as similar when they share “common meanings, a mutual subcultural language, and are alike in personal and social characteristics” (Chabot and Duyvendak 2002: 699). For this identification to be possible, potential adopters must also have enough strategic Repression, Identity, and Seattle Tactics 379 capacity to engage in tactical experiments. Marshall Ganz argues that strategic capacity correlates with particular organizational characteristics. He argues that organizational structures that allow organizations to draw resources from a diversity of salient constituencies and that afford leaders venues for regular, open, and authoritative deliberation, are more likely to generate effective strategies than those that do not (Ganz 2000: 1016). By analyzing activist descriptions of events in the period after Seattle, it quickly becomes apparent that repression interrupted both the process of identification and limited the strategic capacity of these activist organizations, by limiting the diversity of participants involved in discussing whether and how to adapt the tactics for the local environment. This is particularly true with regard to activists who differed from the archetypical Seattle protesters in terms of race or class. LOCAL EXPERIMENTS After the success of the protests against the WTO, activists in many cities, including Toronto and New York, experimented with the Seattle tactics, suggesting the beginning of tactical diffusion. Some of these local experiments were demonstrations that took place in solidarity with protests against the summits of international financial institutions, much like those in Seattle. When arrestees were beaten in custody after demonstrations against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington, D.C. in April 2000, Toronto activists organized a demonstration in support of those victimized. At that demonstration, they experimented with the Seattle tactics, forming a black bloc and displaying a giant pig puppet. Although these tactics had been used in Toronto previously, they were not common and were never been used together. A press release by the organizers explained: Most protesters wore black to lend support to members of the Black Bloc who according to our reports have been subjected to particularly harsh treatment by the DC police. Banners [were visible] . . . while a giant police/pig puppet also made an appearance. As the protest moved away from 52 Division [the closest police station] the police began roughing up protesters for marching on the streets. . . . Four people were arrested and one individual was pepper sprayed. (Kole 2000) These protesters identified with the protesters in Washington, D.C., and this identification allowed the Toronto protesters to experiment with the Seattle tactics. New York activists engaged in a similar process of emulation. In preparation for the April 2000 demonstrations in Washington, D.C., the NYC Direct Action Network hosted training sessions in blockading and creating affinity groups, and held discussions about property destruction. They were also using the Seattle tactics locally. In February, DAN activists from New York City joined More Gardens activists in defending a community garden using blockading and puppetry. An activist with More Gardens explained how the Seattle tactics were being used in community garden struggles. She said: I think Seattle had happened a little before and everybody is really excited about the actions . . . and so I had to convince a lot of people, “Look, Esperanza is an encampment right in your back yard. You don’t have to go six hours to D.C. or eight hours to Canada, or whatever else is going on. Come help people locally and that’s the best reward.” (author interview, New York City, 2003) Activists from Toronto and New York argued that when they used Seattle tactics locally, they attracted increased levels of police repression. By examining the four protest events identified by the respondents as most repressive, the way that the localization of the Seattle tactics was influenced by such police repression will become clear. Mobilization 380 REPRESSIVE EVENTS Protest for Immigrant Workers’ Rights by More Gardens (May 1, 2000, New York City) On May 1, 2000, the People’s Global Action network called for a global day of action. Protests planned for this day provided the first opportunity since the Seattle demonstrations for New York activists in the global justice movement to take a leadership role at a local level. The Direct Action Network-New York City (DAN-NYC) worked with the MexicanAmerican organization Tepeyac and the Coalition for the Human Rights of Immigrants to organize a march and rally advocating for the rights of immigrant workers. Approximately 600 people gathered and prepared to perform street theater using elaborate puppets (Butterfield 2000). The police had received a briefing from a New York Police Department “disorder expert” that the crowd could include “WTO-Seattle-type protesters” (Laursen 2001). The police reaction was strong and visible. Hundreds of police officers surrounded the gathering point and showed their readiness to arrest the demonstrators by displaying clusters of flexicuffs. They searched arriving demonstrators and refused to allow many of the puppets and placards to enter the park. Then a “snatch squad” of police moved in and arrested the nineteen people who were wearing black bloc style bandannas on their faces (RTS-NYC 2000). The defendants were held in jail for up to thirty-six hours on a range of charges including the violation of a long unused mask law, which prohibits two or more persons from congregating in public while wearing masks to obscure their identities (Laursen 2001). Protest Against Summit of Organization of American States (June 3-5, 2000, Windsor, Ontario) From June 3 to 5, over two thousand activists (many from Toronto) participated in protests against the Organization of American States (OAS) summit meeting in Windsor, Ontario, a small city across the U.S.-Canadian border from Detroit. The summit included discussions about the development and implementation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, thus attracting the attention of the global justice movement. Many of the protest organizers had attended the Washington D.C. protests in April, and in Windsor they attempted to use the Seattle tactics learned there, including puppetry, affinity groups and blockading (author’s field notes 2000). At the event, 3,700 officers from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), Peel Regional, Toronto, Chatham and Windsor Police Services provided security (deLint 2005: 19). (Other reports have 2,000 to 5,000 police on site). The total cost was $3.34 million (deLint 2005). The police erected an eight-foot-high fence around the site of the summit, an innovation that police would later replicate for the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, in April 2001. The police strategy made it almost impossible for protesters to disrupt the summit. Seventy-eight people were arrested during the days of action, sixty-three of them for the noncriminal holding charge of breach of the peace (deLint 2005). Activists reported police beatings and a sexual assault while in custody (Gude 2000). Arrestees tried to use jail solidarity in order to operate collectively and to protect those with higher charges, but they failed to gain any concessions. Most participants saw the Windsor protests as a failure. Internal tensions, including those around racial differences ripped the organizing body apart, which never met as a group again. OCAP Protests Versus Ontario Government (June 15, 2000, Toronto) On June 15, 2000, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) marched to the Ontario legislature building and attempted to have a delegation of members address the provincial parliament on the issues of homelessness and poverty. While not explicitly identified with Seattle or the global justice movement, many respondents told me that that the event took Repression, Identity, and Seattle Tactics 381 some of its energy from the increase in protest activity that had taken place in the preceding weeks and months. As in Seattle they wore masks and goggles in preparation for tear gas or pepper spray, and teams of activist medics were organized to support injured protesters. When one activist medic was asked in court why organizers had prepared to respond to pepper spray, she answered, “Because of Seattle” (author’s field notes 2002). As one OCAP activist later explained to me in a 2004 interview: “June 15, of course, was all on the context of all of the global justice work that was going on, and so tactically, and in terms of level of militancy and stuff, it definitely borrowed from a lot of those things.” When the delegation was refused entry to the legislature building, tensions mounted. Fifteen hundred people participated in the march on the Ontario parliament and many remained to engage with the police. Police arrested forty-five people and beat many protesters. Thirtysix protesters reported injuries ranging from broken arms to cracked skulls. Reports also indicated that forty-two officers received minor injuries and nine police horses were injured (Queen’s Park Defendants 2000). Some of the people arrested were released on the condition that they not associate with OCAP or its members, while others, especially the homeless arrestees, spent months in jail. John Clarke, a leading organizer with OCAP was charged with “counseling to participate in a riot,” and two other OCAP members, Gaétan Heroux and Stefan Pilipa were charged with participating in a riot. All three were forced not to associate with OCAP or to attend protests for several months. The defendants wrote that “the repression after June 15th was at a level that had not been seen in Ontario for decades . . . the attack launched on the organization resulted in approximately 250 charges being laid against its members and allies” (Queen’s Park Defendants 2000) Five years later, after a lengthy jury trial, the courts dismissed or stayed all charges against the leadership of the organization. Protests at the Republican National Convention ( August 1, 2000, Philadelphia) During the summer of 2000, the Direct Action Network (DAN-NYC) and Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM) of New York City were involved in organizing protests against the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. In some ways, this was the first “summit-like protest” in which New York activists played a significant leading role. Just as the OAS summit allowed Toronto activists to experiment with the Seattle tactics in Windsor, the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia provided an opportunity for the New York activists. Philadelphia differed from Seattle in a number of ways including the fact that the targeted convention was not taking place in the center of the city. However, activists adopted a strategy for disruption that was similar to Seattle’s approach. Activists divided the city into sections, and the organizers of each section of the city strategized about how to disrupt the transportation of conventioneers. They planned to use all of the Seattle tactics in Philadelphia: a large black bloc was anticipated, puppets were built, street theater was choreographed, blockades were planned, jail solidarity trainings were organized and the affinity groupspokescouncil model was utilized. (author’s field notes 2000) However, the police had anticipated the protesters’ strategy. Like other protests of the period (Washington, D.C., New York, Windsor), the police engaged in preemptive arrests. On the morning of the protest, police arrested 75 activists at the “Puppet Warehouse,” and destroyed all the puppets and signs (Graeber 2004). Nevertheless, later the same day, groups of activists locked themselves together and blocked intersections and highway entrances. Other protesters roamed in “flying squads” or with the black bloc. Some protesters broke windows, slashed the tires of police cars, and spray painted bank buildings. Street theater performances and activist soccer games disrupted traffic, temporarily delaying the delegates. On that day and the days that followed, 420 activists were arrested, forty-three of them on felony charges. Those identified as leaders were charged with numerous offenses and held in isolation. Their release required bonds of up to one million dollars. Activists in police custody reported being Mobilization 382 beaten, sexually assaulted, denied access to medication. The vast majority of arrestees utilized the Seattle tactic of jail solidarity and refused to give their names. Unlike the protesters arrested in Seattle and Washington, D.C., however, activists in custody in Philadelphia were unsuccessful in achieving their demands of anonymous release, medical care for the injured, and reduced charges for those charged with felonies. The hundreds of activists who did not cooperate with police remained in custody as Jane and John Does for up to two weeks (ACT UP 2000; Boghosian 2004: 80). Initially, arrestees who went to trial plead guilty in an effort to put pressure on the court system and get the felony charges dropped. Others fought their charges, and in the end, 97 percent of those arrested had their charges dismissed at trial. Three years later, the last of the arrestees were acquitted (author’s field notes 2000; R2K Legal 2004). The activists I interviewed stated that the repressive actions in these four events were highly significant for them in the months after Seattle. That these events interrupted the diffusion of the Seattle tactics is clear, but how this happened has important consequences both our understanding of the global justice movement and of tactical diffusion. Although activists from all six organizations were initially interested in experimenting with the Seattle tactics, repression made many of them reevaluate the utility of these tactics and, for some, reject them altogether. Based on evidence from my interviews and field observations, it appears that differences in race and class mediated the effect of police repression, and made many poor activists and activists of color unwilling to identify with the archetypical white, middle-class Seattle demonstrators. This sometimes created conflicts within local activist groups. Also, as relationships among activists fragmented along race and class lines, local processes of tactical deliberation among activists became either more difficult and/or likely. REPRESSION AND IDENTITY For a new tactic to be incorporated locally, a potential adopter, whether a person or group, needs to be able to identify with the transmitter on some level (McAdam and Rucht 1993: 60; Strang and Meyer 1993). My data suggest that local activists identified with the Seattle protesters on three dimensions: (1) some as part of a new wave of youth protest, (2) some based on similarity in terms of racial and class identities, and (3) some because of the protesters’ militancy and creativity. This identification led some of these activists to consider themselves part of the global justice movement, and some of those people formed local coalitions like Mobilization for Global Justice in Toronto and the Direct Action Network in New York City. Other new activists joined local organizations, and student groups. Some became active in multiple groups, and some shifted between explicit antiglobalization activism and local organizations. One activist from OCAP explained to me the course of a 2004 interview: People came in . . . whose first entry point into activism was around antiglobalization and so . . . some of it transferred into more people getting involved and excited about OCAP. It had an impact on us tactically, that got played out in the June 15 demonstration and it had an impact in terms of people’s willingness or interest in engaging in militant conflict. In both New York and Toronto, activists who identified with the Seattle activists began to organize and train other activists on the Seattle tactics. They used these tactics in April 2000, when they organized solidarity demonstrations in their home cities, or when they traveled to Washington, D.C. to protest the meetings of the International Monetary Fund or World Bank. Many activists, including antipoverty activists and activists of color were excited by the success of these experiments. Kai Lumumba Barrow of SLAM argued that the protests had triggered a reevaluation of tactics for the black power movement (Kauffman 2000). In a 2003 interview, another SLAM activist of color commented to me, “We wanted to do what DAN was doing, with the masks and stuff. We were like ‘yeah, we want to do that.’“ (2003) Acti- Repression, Identity, and Seattle Tactics 383 vists across racial and class lines, saw themselves in the militancy and creativity of the Seattle demonstrators. Another SLAM activist argued that there was a natural identification between SLAM and the protests in Seattle, “SLAM from the beginning was a direct-action organization. But then there was this whole movement, a direct-action movement that officially had that name, but there wasn’t ever a moment that that wasn’t a natural part of our trajectory.” In the months after Seattle, activists experimenting with the tactics used there were arrested, beaten, and put under surveillance. This repression highlighted the difference between the Seattle and New York contexts and caused some activists to abandon the local use of the black bloc tactic. Activists in both cities argued that after the Seattle protests, police attention to their activities limited their willingness to experiment with the Seattle tactics. As one DAN activist explained to me in 2003, “It’s just too big, there are too many cops. You can do certain tactics, but there are serious limits to what you’re doing. You can’t shut down the city. . . . Even if you’ve got 500,000 people, you can’t shut down the city.” Interestingly, the Seattle tactics that did not attract police attention, affinity groups and spokescouncils were easily incorporated by New York activists, and continue to be used (BAAM 2007). Police repression also highlighted race and class differences among activists in the two cities, leading some to distance themselves from the global justice movement and its tactics. One way that both OCAP and SLAM activists explained their rejection of the Seattle tactics was by emphasizing the demographic differences between their members and the stereotype of the Seattle demonstrators as white, middle-class students. In an interview, one SLAM activist explained to me how his organization saw itself as both similar and different to the Seattle demonstrators. SLAM had made a commitment to doing this Republican Convention stuff in part because we wanted to get those skills of effective mass civil disobedience and learn how to do it, a la Seattle. And yet we confronted this, and SLAM has consistently confronted it, as a mainly young people of color organization. It means something very different for people to go to jail and so what tends to happen and has happened a number of times is that you have the initial enthusiasm for doing this and people are enthusiastic about the action but when it comes down to it, the number of people who are willing to actually go out and get arrested drops, as people consider their family situations, their job situations and what it means to go through life with a criminal record and it’s very different if you’re, you know, white, middle-class, you have certain options. You can take that kind of a hit and a number of SLAM members aren’t citizens, etc., etc. There are a bunch of things. Some members of SLAM made a similar argument about why they rejected some forms of blockading, “The whole bike-lock to a railing? We’re looking around the room and going, ‘Hell no, we’re not doing that. A cop will hurt us.’ We just couldn’t imagine putting that much trust in a cop.” (author interview, New York City, 2003) Yet differences in identity did not automatically result in people-of-color activists abandoning the Seattle tactics. Some argued that they needed to be adapted appropriately. One SLAM member explained how the organization had to be selective about the Seattle tactics because of the additional risk that people-of-color activists faced from the police. We made a political decision not to do the sort of stuff that required wearing a mask, so that we wouldn’t be running from the police per se but doing things that would be visible in the media and to other people in the street. So they could see that young people-of-color were taking a stand and getting arrested and taking direct action. (author interview, New York 2003) Similarly, OCAP argued that the police treat their members differently than they do the more privileged, middle-class, white, global justice protesters. This was a reason to reject the tactics. One member (2003) described the tactic of jail solidarity as “a tactic of the privileged.” Another argued that the black bloc tactic was inappropriate for OCAP because, of “the sort of the identification of it with a very, like white middle-class youth scene which is Mobilization 384 not, although it’s a piece of OCAP, for sure, it’s not where a lot of people are coming from and it’s not where we want to go organizationally too.” Another member continued: If you’re organizing white, middle-class youths who haven’t been to jail before, and you put them into the prison system, it doesn’t really worry them so much. They are going to get out the next day. The prison system works that way. Works to keep people like that out of it and put other people in. But we’re not organizing the people that it’s trying to keep out, just the people it’s trying to keep in. (author interview, Toronto, 2004) One OCAP member explained her rejection of blockading by emphasizing the demographics of their membership: I think if we were doing blockades, they would be more than happy to beat the living hell out of people, arrest them, abuse them in jail. You have to have a certain moral high ground with the police, I think, in part in order for some of those things to be effective and that’s difficult with the group of people that we’re made up of. (author interview, Toronto, 2004) Activists from other organizations who wished to support the critique of white, middle-class domination within the global justice movement also used this analysis to limit their identification with the Seattle activists, and to reject the Seattle tactics. One activist from the Ontario Public Interest Research Group explained his reason for rejecting the black bloc tactic: If someone is going to be beat up, it’s going to be us [people of color]. And if someone gets arrested, you know who’s going to be spending longer time in jail? Getting harsher sentences? Getting rougher treatment? . . . You start to go, “Who are we [as whites] to be pushing that envelope? On whose behalf? Under what circumstances?” (author interview, Ontario, 2004) Even though members of all these organizations had initially identified with the militancy and creativity of global justice movement in Seattle, and had adopted its tactics in that period, they quickly abandoned many of these tactics. By highlighting differences in race and class among protesters, repression contributed to this distancing, making diffusion much less likely. REPRESSION AND DELIBERATION Repression also made successful diffusion much less likely because it made deliberation less likely. Generally speaking, deliberative discourse is characterized by participants’ equality, a diversity of viewpoints, claims that are backed up by reasoned arguments, and, for some theorists, reflexivity, the ability of participants to question the agenda and the procedures for discussion (Cohen 1989; Dryzek 1990; Fishkin 1991). Earlier research has noted that successful diffusion depends on part on such an opportunity to reflect, consider, and evaluate a tactic (Rogers 2003: 429). Even in the absence of cultural similarities or personal relationships among diffusers and adopters, the process of deliberation makes possible the transfer of foreign symbols and forms of action into a new context because it allows ideas to be “dislocated” and then “re-located” (Chabot 2002). Respondents told me that repression during the post-Seattle period limited opportunities for deliberation among groups who were attempting to incorporate the Seattle tactics in three ways: (1) by reducing the ability of their organizations to bring together diverse perspectives: (2) by absorbing scarce organizational resources; and (3) by reducing their ability to be reflexive about their tactical and strategic choices. Activists argued that repression made it more difficult for diverse groups of activists or potential activists to work together and discuss strategies and tactics. Direct-action activists from New York argued that the repression arising from jail solidarity tactics unfairly targeted the less privileged prisoners and thus damaged alliances between the imprisoned activists and the other prisoners. As a result, New York City activists abandoned the tactic. One DANNYC activist explained: Repression, Identity, and Seattle Tactics 385 I was arrested in Philadelphia, and I guess jail solidarity may have achieved some things, but there was a general conversation about how our tactics were affecting other prisoners. What we got, other people were not gaining from it, and it [repression] was coming down harder on them. And what we gained out of it [jail solidarity] was in some cases so little that it didn’t seem worth it . . . It didn’t work. So it had to be reconsidered. (author interview, New York, 2003) An OCAP activist similarly argued that repression increased divisions among protesters, “within that situation of people having conditions and arrests and those things, people get worried, and those elements of, that sort of divisions between people sort of grow a little bit at some of those times.” (author interview, Toronto, 2004) Repression also fragmented alliances between targeted organizations and their allies. One OCAP activist explained that the increasing repression against the group after June 15, 2000, coincided with a withdrawal of financial and human support of OCAP by the labor movement. There was a very overt dividing of forces from things like the [union] flying squads, who had always been willing or eager to participate in our immigration work, withdrawing their support, and significantly cutting the number of people that we had to fill immigration offices, and also, the kinds of bodies, burly bodies, that they were, and their flags, etc. It had a very serious effect for us. (author interview, Toronto, 2004) Limiting the opportunity for such deliberation can lead to organizational collapse by exacerbating differences between members, while simultaneously making it harder to talk about those differences. One OCAP member explained: “There have been a few times since I’ve been around where it looked like OCAP might end. Partly it’s been from people being arrested or on conditions and all that stuff and through the courts.” (author interview, Toronto, 2004) Repression, it seems, can seriously limit the strategic capacity necessary for successful diffusion by making deliberation between diverse groups less possible. Activists also argued that repression also made deliberation more difficult by absorbing scarce organizational resources, redirecting them away from other goal-seeking activities (Cunningham 2004: 153: Davenport 2005: xvi; Marx 1979). One OCAP organizer explained that repression led the organization to change its tactics after June 15, 2000. “We’ve had to pay a price, we’ve taken a lot of arrests, we’ve spent a lot of time in courts, and some people have spent significant amounts of time in jail. And dealing with that has been timeconsuming.” Another OCAP organizer said, Frankly, it forced us to take a big step back from large-scale militant action, at least for a certain time period, because so many people in the organization were facing charges, and also, that the police crackdown on OCAP was so massive that every subsequent thing that we did was very, very difficult. (author interview, Toronto, 2004) Fear, generated by surveillance and repression sucked energy away from organizing work. In the weeks before the OAS summit, protest organizers from OPIRG experienced harassment and intense surveillance. One organizer explained: They had our house bugged, and they’d come up and be like, ‘Hey, so I heard your girlfriend is sick.’ . . . cars circling the house all the time, you see it go down the street, and back down the alleyway, and again twenty minutes later. Always being tailed, looking over your shoulder. (author interview, Ontario, 2004) Another protest organizer told how one OAS protester was abducted by the police, beaten and interrogated about the activities of other organizers. Experiences like these had serious effects. One activist reported, The combination of Windsor and June 15th was a very big intimidation and scared people a lot. I know that the people immediately around me were definitely very intimidated by Windsor by the police tactics and people I think got scared for their lives in a way that they Mobilization 386 hadn’t before . . . I felt like everything I was, I just don’t know. I was just scared. I was just, ‘what am I doing with my life?’ Am I not going to not have a life because I am so committed to doing politics and the police are going to kill me psychologically, or kill me emotionally? (author interview, Toronto, 2004) Organizational resources are absorbed not only by trying to avoid police repression at protests, but also through court and legal proceedings. Court proceedings, sometimes lasting for years after the initial event, can absorb a great deal of resources. As Koopmans pointed out, such institutional repression can demobilize more than situational or street repression can. He argues that the reasons for the effectiveness of institutional repression in demobilizing movements include its degree of consistency and legitimacy (Koopmans 1997). One OCAP member said: “We had a year and a half to two years where we had hundreds of people going through the court system. So going to court, and the court drain, was an ever-present phenomenon, and you have to make a really concerted effort to jump free of that” ( author interview, Toronto, 2004). Repression also made deliberation more difficult by limiting the activists’ reflexivity about their tactics and strategy. The conditions of release imposed by the court on OCAP members after the demonstration on June 15th made it difficult for the group to meet and evaluate their situation. Initial conditions of release meant that defendants were prohibited from communicating with other members of the organization (Esmonde 2003: 345). One OCAP member explained: “For the majority of the time that I’ve been a member of OCAP, there have been serious restrictions on somebody or other in the executive, the leadership and also the general membership” (author interview, Toronto, 2004) One OPIRG respondent explained how repression affected the ability of organizers of the Windsor protests against the OAS to collectively reflect on their experience. “Coming out of that, we all just threw up our hands and were like ‘that’s that.’ And it kind of imploded at that point… Friendships had fallen apart and people had really been taken for a ride by the whole mindfuck of the CSIS, RCMP, OPP.” (author interview, Toronto, 2004) Similarly, when organizers at the OAS realized how well prepared the police were for their experiments with the Seattle tactics, they should have been able to reevaluate their utility. Paradoxically, according to one OPIRG organizer, the level of surveillance and repression made such reflexivity impossible. Some OCAP members also argued that repression affected the ability of that organization to be reflexive about its experience, at least in the short term: I think [repression] has really seriously affected the way that we think about things. One of the things that we don’t talk about when we talk about the jury trial [is] the effect of having 45 people take a vicious beating in the court system. . . . The things that we don’t talk about still are what has happened to the way that we think about the cops and how that affects the way that we organize on the street and how it affects where we put our main organizers and how it affects like, the length to which we’re willing to go, to be frank. I think it’s a serious discussion that hasn’t happened that needs to happen. (author interview, Toronto, 2004) The testimonies of activists in New York and Toronto show how repression limited the possibility of identifying with the Seattle demonstrators, especially for poor and people of color activists. Arrests, police violence and court conditions had this effect by highlighting differences of race and class among protesters, and by making reflexive, diverse, strategic conversations between participants much more difficult. CONCLUSION Repression affects poor activists and activists of color differently than white, middle-class protesters. This is not news. What is more interesting is that repression seems to have an intermediary differential effect regarding the diffusion of new protest tactics, leading to some Repression, Identity, and Seattle Tactics 387 groups adopting new tactics and others not. When local activists in New York City and Toronto experimented with the tactics of black bloc, blockading, and jail solidarity that had been so successful during the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, they were the focus of higher levels of police repression. Interviews with activists and fieldwork in those cities suggest that poor activists and activists of color were targeted for repression to a greater extent that Seattle protesters. As a result, adoption of Seattle tactics became less likely, despite reports of strong solidarity with the aims of the Seattle actions. My analysis suggests that identification of activists in Toronto and New York City with those in Seattle on some dimensions was mitigated by class- and race-based repression, with the result that some local activists became less interested in experimenting with the Seattle tactics. Repression also influenced diffusion by limiting the strategic capacity of these potential adopters by making deliberation more difficult. It did so by fragmenting relationships between activists, especially along race and class lines, which made discussions among diverse participants less likely. In addition, repression absorbed the scarce organizational resources that might have been used to build or maintain ties across these differences, and limited the ability of these potential adopters to have reflexive conversations about their tactics and strategy. Thus, repression limited the ability and willingness of activists of color and poor activists to incorporate these tactics into their local repertoire. By showing how repression interrupted diffusion, we can better understand the way that the wave of contention identified with the Seattle protests diminished as it spread into new contexts in North America. Past research has shown that repression influences processes of mobilization, organization, identity formation, and activist repertoires. 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