Review Article: Rebellious politics and the social control of civil disobedience
Abstract
Rebellious politics and the social control of civil disobedience Jarret S. Lovell, Crimes of Dissent: Civil Disobedience, Criminal Justice, and the Politics of Conscience, New York University Press: New York, 2009; 237 pp.: 13:9780814752265, $23.00 (hbk), 13:9780814752272 (pbk) SAGE Publications, Inc. 201010.1177/1362480610373302 © The Author(s), The Author(s) AlessandroDe Giorgi San José State University (California) The dawn of the 21st century has witnessed the unfolding of a new season of grassroots political activism across the world. Heralded by the mass- demonstrations that took place in 1999 in Seattle—where anti-globalization activists successfully blocked the negotiations of the World Trade Organization, physically preventing delegates from accessing the site of the meeting—in the last decade an intense wave of transnational protests has shaken the main insti- tutions of global governance, from the G8 to the IMF, from the World Bank to the G20. Thus, cities like Prague, Genoa, Gothenburg, Evian, Quebec City, London, New York, and San Francisco have become the theaters of new forms of direct action and mass-protest against corporate globalization, free-trade agreements, global poverty, environmental destruction, and (particularly since 2003) the ‘war on terror’. This resurgence of political radicalism, coupled with the strategies of public order deployed by law