Protests
The now former Columbia University President, Nemat Shafik promised Congress a crackdown on student protests in a spring 2024 hearing, which was just one of a series conducted in order for university presidents to address "antisemitism on campuses," as students protested Israel's war on Gaza and demanded divestment from companies with Israeli ties.
In April 2024, Representative Elise Stefanik asked university heads a calculated, inflammatory question about whether "calling for the genocide of Jews" would violate each university's code of conduct. While some before Shafik would hedge their answers, then president of the University of Pennsylvania Liz Magill answered: "it is a context-dependent decision." Shafik, however, unequivocally said yes. She incorrectly conflated, as many politicians like Stefanik had, students' anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist messaging with antisemitism. Days later, she called the NYPD on student protestors in a move that sent ripples across campuses globally, as students began their own protest encampments.
This was not the beginning of actions targeting pro-Palestine protestors. Surveillance and shutdown of pro-Palestine campus groups had been happening well before the spring 2024 protests. Columbia, for example, had suspended student groups Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace in 2023. Yale University, surveilled pro-Palestine student groups from 2023 onward and reported directly to the Yale and Connecticut police departments with times on their rallies and other activities. The criminalization of student protests in spring 2024 took place against a long-running backdrop wherein political and educational institutions had heightened, antagonistic, and even militarized responses to anti-imperial messaging. Emblematic of this are the commentators' observations that police crackdowns against student protests have not been this violent since actions taken against those in the Vietnam War-era.
The policing tactics used against protestors should be understood against this backdrop. However, they should also be understood within a broader context of militarized police or military-police response to global protests, including recently in Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Kenya. While this response was considered uniquely swift and violent to US and other Western observers, it is not unique. Protestors, student protestors included, who go against the state are often met with harsh repression, especially in the Global South. Militarized police responses, as noted in the response to US student protests, are part of a long history of colonial repression tactics, meant to quell disruptions in the state status quo.
Policing as "Imperial Feedback"
Policing was first developed as a tool of colonial management. And this history has continued to inform how policing has taken shape over the past century, especially in how it is deployed and who it is deployed against. Militaristic violence deployed against imperial enemies or racialized others is a throughline.
The first civilian police force was based on the Irish Constabulary. The Constabulary was created by English home secretary Robert Peel to replace army occupation and militarized forces. While the London Metropolitan Police was positioned as an alternative to a more confrontational, hostile occupying force, in practice, it was shaped and informed by military tactics. Centralization and professionalization methods, which were taken from the military, would be used for police, as well as surveillance and counterinsurgency trainings. As policing models were being formed, they would also be deployed as an imperial tool to European colonies, but with a more paramilitaristic bent. The more brutal methods used in colonies was justified by the need to quell unrest, which would form existential threats to the colonial order.
In Palestine, for example, during the Mandate years, British police forces were known to be violently repressive. In British India, police were highly concerned with counterintelligence and counterinsurgency campaigns to target any nascent Indian nationalisms.
The transfer and militarization of police tactics did not flow one way—from the metropole to the colonies, from North to South. It happened in an exchange, in which militarized police tactics, developed in the colonies, would sometimes make their way back into colonizer countries in what policing scholar Julian Go calls an "imperial feedback" loop. For example, French policing was developed in an exchange with its colonial military-police tactics in Algeria, an exchange that Go says happened "cross-nationally." So the Auxiliary Police Force, a counterinsurgency arm within the Police of Paris, borrowed directly from anti-nationalist repression tactics undertaken in Algeria.
Not only were counterinsurgency tactics and officers borrowed from the colonies, but they were also deployed against people from colonized territories in the metropole. Go writes that the Auxiliary Police Force was specifically deployed to surveil people of Algerian origin in Paris, as they were thought to be "potential insurgents." Those deemed anticolonial threats to the state were over-policed via more militaristic arms of the civilian police. This culminated in actions such as a massacre of Algerian protestors by police in 1961. This was echoed in London, where more militarized arms of police were deployed to target only certain areas of London with "high crime," particularly those areas with racialized minorities made of formerly colonized peoples, such as Afro-Caribbean immigrant communities.
Targeted, heightened repression and militarization has also taken place in the US, most notably deployed against Black Americans. In the early days of policing, the militarized presence of police in Black communities was explicitly linked to imperial tactics. Mobile police forces, like riot police, were able to be deployed rapidly and were originally modeled after American military operations in the Philippines. They were most often meant to concentrate force in racialized communities, particularly Black ones. Today, military techniques and technologies, meant originally to be used against insurgents in war, have been transferred to the US in another imperial feedback loop. These include predictive policing technologies (with heightened use in racialized communities) and overenforcement in targeted communities. SWAT teams, for example, originally intended for emergencies like active shooter situations, have been deployed for small-scale drug crimes or non-emergency situations, disproportionately against Black and Latino communities. Black communities, especially those in Southern US states with higher rates of racial prejudice, tend to face police with increased militarization. This has resulted in increased lethal force and heightened violence by police against Black communities, with little effect on improving community safety, as purported to do. "Broken windows" over-policing and its ilk are colonial remnants, mirroring historical and contemporary methods of "management" of racialized communities with the manufacture of permanent emergency. Militarized tactics have also spread via policing transfers—notably between Israel and the US—in another loop that could be likened to explicitly colonial policing in the modern day. Often undertaken against protestors, militarized tactics are meant to destroy sentiments that would run counter to state imperatives.
Militarized police activity is nothing new, then. Post-9/11, there was another visible increase of police resources and military counterinsurgency tactics. Then, as in now, Islamophobic or anti-Palestinian sentiments were correlated with heightened police presence and biased media coverage. When deemed necessary via manufacture of emergency, police deploy means of control akin to colonial counterinsurgency tactics.
This can be seen in the response to the student protestors. First, the manufacture of emergency comes. This happened in different ways in the various universities. Indiana University, for example, strategically altered their code of conduct the night before students planned to create a protest encampment so said encampment would be against the code. There was no university-wide or public announcement of said change to the code. However, the code change was used to justify calling in the Indiana state troopers who pushed, dragged, and zip-tied student protestors, who were later arrested for trespassing. Later, state police leaders said that there were officers "with sniper capabilities" overlooking protestors as well. More commonly, however, university leadership used language that indicated that protestors were a disruption to the functioning of universities or that allegedly threatening language warranted police presence. President Shafik, for example, wrote to the NYPD in requesting their presence that she "determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University." This was despite the fact that even police had noted protestors at the time were peaceful and did not disrupt other students' daily activities. While trespass of buildings—like the occupation of Columbia University's Hamilton Hall— clearly violated the law regardless of a manufactured emergency, inordinate, militarized police and media responses characterizing students as hateful or disruptive showed unified bias against the anti-imperialist message of protestors.
Similarly, in justifying calling police to break up and arrest students at the Yale encampment, then President Peter Salovey wrote in a statement that after students rejected an offer from the University and remained in a University plaza, "[We] determined the situation was no longer safe." He continued: "[T]he campus environment had become increasingly difficult." He later said he had heard of "threatening language" from either Yale members or outsiders. "We will not tolerate such behavior nor any open violation of Yale policies that interrupts academic and campus operations," he wrote. Little other substantiation was provided for the alleged threats Salovey cites. And similar "outside agitator" language, whose presence or violence is similarly unsubstantiated, as was the case when New York City Mayor Eric Adams attempted to justify the NYPD's particularly harsh arrest tactics against Columbia and CUNY protestors. Rather than continued negotiation with student protestors, as was more common in university protests in the past, students were subjected to arrests, beatings, tear gas, and rubber bullets.
These patterns are similar across the world, though often show far more extreme police action. Take, for example, the recent Bangladeshi student protests. Students protested a job quota system emblematic of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's nationalism and apathy toward economic struggles. In the process, over 200 were killed by police and thousands were arrested in initial protests. Then, over 90 more were killed in ongoing protests against police brutality and the Prime Minister's party, the Awami League. Riot police instigated violent clashes and were called even while the protest was peaceful. Sheikh Hasina, however, justifying the brutality, brought forward an outside agitator justification. Students continued protesting, leading to her eventual ouster. Especially when deemed a deeper, existential threat to state interests—whether that is imperial interests or party control—police militarism is laundered through manufacture of emergency. It results in explosive violence and repression the world over. Informed by colonialism, police repression as seen in the student protests, while seemingly unique, is part of a continuum of "management" tactics against threats to the state.
Plans for the Future
In the wake of the spring US campus protests, thousands of students were arrested. Some campus leaders, such as President Shafik, have resigned as well, due to outcry that they over-policed students (or that they did not police them enough).
Students' fates are uncertain, as they have been caught in a tangled web of institutions: their universities, police, and now the legal system. Some are unsure of their futures and careers, as they may not receive their diplomas, if they were set to graduate.
Because of the lull in student activity due to summer break, protests have quieted down. However, there's no telling what will happen once things get back into full swing this fall. With the Presidential election coming up, there may be heightened political pressure to again crack down on protests, as this seemed to be a bipartisan stance in prior months.
While there is little indication of what student organizers plan to do, university responses seem to already be forming. As Indiana University did, it seems as though universities are planning to change their codes of conduct and policies regarding use of campus space to specifically ban the kind of encampment protest popularized by the spring protestors. Perhaps there could be enforcement of anti-BDS laws to manufacture conditions that warrant police response. Across the Southern US, legislators, who are following after university leaders, have attempted to pass legislation that would conflate criticisms of Israel with antisemitism. Some states are re-upping efforts to link pro-Palestine protests with terrorism in an attempt to stop them. In California, too, a proposed law would withhold state universities' funding unless they implemented stricter rules around campus protests, in a move that would disproportionately target pro-Palestine protestors.
Regardless of the means, it is clear that to protect the interests of imperial capital, institutions will find a way to justify harsh, militarized crackdowns. Student protests, as they did before, will need brace to withstand them yet again.