New book by Florian Hessdörfer, Andrea Pabst, Peter Ullrich is out, and free for download here or here (pdf). You can also order a copy at your local bookstore.

In the book there’s also a chapter by Andrej Holm and me, reflecting life with surveillance.

The details:

Prevent and Tame.
Protest under (Self)Control

Florian Heßdörfer, Andrea Pabst, Peter Ullrich (Eds.)

The common dualistic approach to social movements tends to see power and resistance as separate and independent antagonists. The contributors to this book aim to transcend that approach, arguing that to adequately analyze ongoing struggles, it is also critically important to trace the constitutive interconnectedness between social movements and power. This is the aim of the title “Prevent and Tame”: emergent strategies to prevent and tame protest―whether they are undertaken by the state or by factions within the movements themselves―have given rise to new kinds of social relations and regulations that call for a new approach to research on social movements and protest.

Inspired by Foucault and others, this book offers theoretical and empirical investigation into the implications that governmentality studies and subjectivation perspectives may have for a deeper understanding of the dynamics in the relationship between power and movements. The articles reflect on the effects of current neo-liberal or neo-social transformations on social movement practice, including the impact of surveillance, the criminalization and stigmatization of protest, and how these can lead movements to engage in self-taming behavior amongst themselves.

Taken as a whole, this book suggests that to take the struggles of social movements seriously, requires to acknowledge the complexity of the power dynamics in which they are involved. In so doing, the authors‘ aim is not to tame protest by over-amplifying its apparent obstacles, but to prevent its energy from being pointlessly wasted or misdirected (i.e. by being spent in the wrong places, in false conflicts, or even in fighting the clouds they cast themselves).

Includes contributions by
Stephen Gill, Peter Ullrich, Florian Heßdörfer, Andrej Holm, Anne Roth, Marco Tullney, Michael Shane Boyle, Darcy K. Leach, Sebastian Haunss and Nick Montgomery

Bibliographic Information
Heßdörfer, Florian; Pabst, Andrea; Ullrich, Peter (eds.) 2010: Prevent and Tame. Protest under (Self)Control, Berlin: Dietz, ISBN 978-3-320-02246-4, 122 pp., € 9.90.

Free download
http://www.rosalux.de/publication/37206/prevent-and-tame-protest-under-selfcontrol.html

order your copy (free copy for reviews)
info@dietzberlin.de
Table of contents

Stephen Gill
 Preface: Political Protest in the Age of Neoliberal Austerity

Peter Ullrich, Andrea Pabst, and Florian Heßdörfer
Introduction: Prevent and Tame.
Ideas for a New Perspective on Social Movements and Protest

Peter Ullrich
Preventionism and Obstacles for Protest in Neoliberalism.
Linking Governmentality Studies and Protest Research

Florian Heßdörfer
Anti-Social or Childish:
Protest and Youth under the Eye of Prevention

Marco Tullney
Organizing Employees Under Surveillance:
My Boss is Spying on Me, So I Better Keep My Mouth Shut

Andrej Holm and Anne Roth
Anti-Terror Investigations against Social Movements―
A Personal Experience of a Preventive Threat

Michael Shane Boyle
The Criminalization of Dissent: Protest Violence, Activist Performance,
and the Curious Case of the VolxTheaterKarawane in Genoa

Darcy K. Leach and Sebastian Haunss
»Wichtig ist der Widerstand«: Rituals of Taming and Tolerance
in Movement Responses to the Violence Question

Nick Montgomery
Beyond Civil Disobedience and Counter-hegemony:
Legitimacy, Strategy and Tactics in the 2010 Anti-Olympics Movement