On crowds and coin

Crowds can be mad, bad and dangerous to know. To keep control, you need a firm hand and a clear demonstration of resolve. Hence baton charges, tear gas, rubber bullets, and kettling.  From the streets of Athens to the burned out shopping malls of downtown Bangkok the lesson is that crowds can turn nasty, quickly, and that a robust response will be needed to maintain order.

Well, perhaps not always. In an interesting application of social identity theory, Clifford Stott and colleagues have put forward a compelling argument to HM Inspectorate of the Constabulary (see chapter 4 in their report on Adapting to Protest [pdf]). Rather than seeing a crowd as a homogenous entity, teetering on the edge of a good punch up, they see it as a collection of different groups – some violent, some not. The traditional view that being in a crowd reduces the normal inhibitions on members is not quite right – we’re not all raging beasts waiting for a good excuse to lash out the moment we have some anonymity.

But those groups in the crowd aren’t fixed. If we see the police piling into those about us, we might well form a common bond with folks in the crowd with whom we otherwise wouldn’t have much common ground: robust police action defines new ‘us’ and ‘them’ groups in different ways to those consequent on a subtler, measured approach. At the same time, forming a closer bond with the violent group within the crowd diminishes our sense of shared identity with the brutal fascist scumba….  sorry, the forces of law and order.

What’s all that got to do with counterinsurgency? Quite a bit, I suspect. As Jacques Semelin argued in his magnificent Purify and Destroy, the same processes of group identity are at work in wartime. A riot, like a war, is just another type of group violence, subject to the same social psychological processes.  Groups are not static, and there is nothing inevitable about their formation and dissolution. But getting drawn into a violent backlash, as readers of The Accidental Guerrilla will know, is one very good way to redefine referent groups in less than optimal ways.

[h/t The Psychologist]