"A fascinating look at a vitally important movement for social change--and the obstacles it faces. Important reading for self-reflective activists."—Starhawk

"This book is frightening, urgent—crucial reading."—Christian Parenti, author of Lockdown America and The Soft Cage

“Policing Dissent is one of the best books I’ve come across in any field that examines the intersections of globalization, dissent, and late-modern social control.”—Peter Kraska, Senior Research Fellow, and author of Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System

“Fernandez’s survey of new protest policing helps us all feel the chill—not just of mass mobilizations but of dissent itself.”—Amory Starr, author of Naming the Enemy and Global Revolt

“An important contribution to our understanding of the state’s response to unrest that puts the scholarship on protest policing into contact with the repressive reality.”—Kristian Williams, author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America

“Luis Fernandez’s Policing Dissent is a fascinating and courageous book—a book where the crackling energy of contemporary street protest animates a careful analysis of late modern social control.”—Jeff Ferrell, author of Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy

In November 1999, fifty-thousand anti-globalization activists converged on Seattle to shut down the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Meeting. Using innovative and network-based strategies, the protesters left police flummoxed, desperately searching for ways to control the crowds in Seattle and the emerging anti-corporate globalization movement.  Faced with these network-based tactics, law enforcement agencies transformed their policing and social control mechanisms to manage this new threat
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In Policing Dissent, sociologist Luis A. Fernandez provides a firsthand account of the changing nature of control efforts employed by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies when confronted with mass activism. Based on ethnographic research, and using an incisive, cutting-edge theoretical framework, Fernandez maps the use of legal, physical, and psychological approaches.
 
Policing Dissent also offers readers the richness of experiential detail and engaging stories often lacking in studies of police practices and social movements. This book does not merely seek to explain the causal relationship between repression and mobilization. Rather, it shows how social control strategies act on the mind and body of protesters.

Luiz A. Fernandez is an assistant professor at Northern Arizona University

Visit the author's website at http://www.policingdissent.info