Journal Articles

Interactive Diffusion : The Coevolution of Police and Protest Behavior With an Application to Transnational Contention

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In this article, the authors focus attention on a poorly understood aspect of contentious politics: the interaction between the transnational diffusion of new forms of protest behavior and police practices in response to them. Studies of diffusion are usually limited to the diffusion of one kind of innovation by one set of actors to another, as in the diffusion of technical innovations from innovators to adopters. But collective action diffusion also produces a parallel and interactive sequence of “public order” reactions. Using the transnational countersummits that emerged around the turn of the century as their source of evidence, the authors focus on the coevolution of protester and police innovations across national boundaries. The authors’ major finding is that the mechanisms that cause protester and police innovations to diffuse are remarkably similar, even though they can combine in different ways at different moments: promotion, the proactive intervention by a sender actor aimed at deliberate diffusion of an innovation; assessment, the analysis of information on past events and their definition as successes or failures, which leads to adaption of the innovation to new sites and situations; and theorization, the location of technical innovations within broader normative and cognitive frameworks. The authors close with a speculative application of their findings to the recent diffusion of protester tactics and regime responses in the Middle East and North Africa.

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Detail Information

Series Title

Comparative Political Studies

Call Number

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Publisher

Thousand Oak : sage publisher., 2012

Collation

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Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

00104140

Classification

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Content Type

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Media Type

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Carrier Type

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Edition

Vol. 45 no. 1, January 2012,pp. 119-152

Subject(s)

Police
Diffusion
Interactive Diffusion
Countersummits
Transnational contention

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