Contentious Conversation - )

Social Research, Fall, 1998 by Charles Tilly

The conversational analogy, applies to a wide range of political contention, we could pursue it across other instances of ethnic and religious conflict, expressions of nationalism, electoral campaigns, revolutions, parliamentary debates, industrial conflict, and much more. Let us, however, move the discussion onto familiar ground. In his analysis of thousands of demonstrations in Marseille, Nantes, Paris, and other parts of France between 1979 and 1993, Olivier Fillieule identifies the stylized but incessant interchanges that occur among demonstrators, spectators, police, officials, and other persons involved in any demonstration. Although observers, reporters, analysts, and critics often reduce such events to attitudes and actions of the persons who occupy the street with banners, chants, and other dramatizations of their demands, detailed accounts drawn from such sources as police blotters reveal continuous streams of mutual deliberations, taunts, threats, attacks, retreats, delegations, agreements, and much more--usually reported from a single viewpoint, but always reflecting participation in communicative interchange.

Consider the 1986 testimony of an experienced commander of riot police. When asked what would happen if he received contradictory orders from the local police commissioner and his own unit's superiors, he replied that it was unlikely, but added:

   At a moment like that I would probably decide for myself, as I actually
   once did for our buses. When we were setting ourselves up, the commissioner
   of the 16th [Parisian] arrondissement asked us, contrary to my view, to
   reinforce the street barriers with our vehicles. When I saw that the
   demonstrators were trying to set the barricades on fire, on my own
   initiative I had the vehicles moved to the middle of the bridge; my buses
   retreated. The other vehicles of the Parisian police that didn't retreat
   got burned (Fillieule, 1997, p. 257).

Torching buses and moving them back obviously constitutes a crude sort of dialogue. So do deploying shields against stone-throwers, wading into a crowd with flailing clubs, or even receiving delegations from demonstrators at a minister's office. Yet the dialogue involved is real and consequential. It engages two parties, or more. How one party responds to another affects what happens next. The conversation places unceasing improvisation within strongly defined conventions that mark the ongoing interchange as a demonstration rather than, say, a strike, a public meeting, an election rally, routine lobbying, or a coup d'etat.

As with all conversation, contentious conversation has a delightfully paradoxical property: improvisation within constraints that produce order. Demonstrators, counter-demonstrators, police, authorities, and other participants in demonstrations improvise incessantly, jockeying for surprise, effect, and strategic advantage. If they simply repeated the routines they had followed during a previous encounter, they would resemble people who utter bromides; they would cede all strategic advantage to their partners and come off as dull automata. Yet as compared with all the actions and interactions of which they are capable, they concentrate their efforts within a narrow range of symbols, utterances, and interactions. Demonstrators often march in ranks, display banners, shout slogans, and present petitions, but rarely carry machine guns, defecate in the street, strip naked, strangle spectators, sing nursery rhymes, stop to buy the day's groceries, or travel in taxis--except, of course, if they appear together in taxi drivers demanding protection from muggers. If participants in contentious conversation did not adopt recognizable idioms, they would undercut their own efforts to coordinate actions, convey messages, and influence objects of their claims.