Repression and Social Movements

Abstract

With the events of the “Arab Spring ” revolutions fresh in our minds, an Interface issue dedicated to repression and social movements may seem very timely. But the fact is that any time is a good time to reflect on repression and social movements. The two realities go hand in hand and have always done so. Any reader can cast their minds back and call up their own memories of social movement repression, whether experienced first-hand, handed down as oral history, witnessed on TV from the relative comfort of a living room sofa, or drawn from a passage in a history book. Suffragettes being force-fed in prison in the UK in the early 1900s, vicious dogs attacking civil rights protesters in the Southern United States, the execution of environmental and indigenous rights activist Ken Saro Wiwa in Nigeria, the systematic kidnapping, torture and assassination of political activists in Argentina’s Dirty War, the massacre of students in Tlatelolco and Tiananmen Square: the list, unfortunately, goes on and on. While these examples are striking representations of repression, the repression