By Jamie Nugent, PhD Candidate in History<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the aftermath of the Bristol protests against the Conservative government\u2019s new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, the Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees pinned the blame for the violence on what he called \u201crevolutionary tourists\u201d or \u201cprotest tourists\u201d who had come in from the outside itching for a fight. Regardless of the truth of his claims, it is interesting to note how common this claim has become in an era of global mobilities and ever-more global protests. It has more of a whiff of the claim of \u201coutside agitation\u201d used since the 19th<\/sup>\u00a0century to contrast \u2018respectable\u2019 locals with \u2018troublesome\u2019 outsiders. It also shows a shifting landscape in the meaning of protest itself \u2013 especially as authoritarian governments and even democratic states clamp down on street-based forms of expression as well as freedom of speech online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2019<\/a> the blogger and Experiences Ambassador for AirBnB, Sebastian Nieto Milevcic, explored the concept of \u201cProtest Tourism\u201d in the context of the Chilean \u2018Estallido Social<\/a>\u2019 (Social Outbreak) which erupted in response to corruption, privatisation, and widespread inequality in the South American nation. Milevcic noticed that the protestors were accompanied by a number of \u201cmere observers, blog enthusiasts, and selfie explorers,\u201d including Americans and Europeans who stood out from the crowd. He asked them why they were there, and they gave several responses:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI wanted to see something real.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201dI just want to tell my friends I was here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI was just too curious to watch what was going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Milevcic mused as to whether this was \u2018Dark Tourism\u2019, which draws millions to Chernobyl, Fukushima and Ground Zero in Manhattan, as well as genocide sites such as Rwanda and Cambodia\u2019s Killing Fields. He concludes \u201cmaybe it\u2019s just Travel itself that is innately voyeuristic?\u201d Although Milevcic\u2019s observers were just that, observers, the distinction can often be blurred in a digital age where the camera and microphone can be effective weapons \u2013 both for and against injustice. As for voyeurism, Nick Cohen in The Guardian<\/em><\/a> castigated \u201cRadical tourists\u201d who \u201ctrawl the world for revolutions to praise\u201d as \u201cno better than sex tourists\u201d in search of exotic thrills they cannot get at home. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPleasures sated, the tourists fly away from the poverty and the corruption. The lies they have lived and paid others to live on their behalf don\u2019t bother them,\u201d Cohen wrote. He was referring specifically to supporters of the regime in Venezuela, whose own economic mismanagement and political crisis has led to a mobility crisis of a different kind, with over four million<\/a> estimated to have left the country since 1999.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though it might be called \u2018voyeurism\u2019, the practice of \u2018outside interference\u2019 in domestic or local disputes has a long history loosely connected to espionage or power politics. Take for example the poet Lord Byron, who went voluntarily to fight in the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire; or the scores of British (and Irish) volunteers who fought against Franco\u2019s Falangists during the Spanish Civil War, not least George Orwell and the trade unionist Hans Beimler. Or with non-violent protests, take the example of Viola Liuzzo and James Reeb, white Americans who travelled from their homes in California and Kansas, respectively, in order to attend the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery (dramatised in the 2014 film Selma<\/em>). Both Liuzzo and Reeb lost their lives during the marches. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Mobile protestors can often be the tool of, or victims of, international events and political manoeuvres. Greenpeace\u2019s Rainbow Warrior<\/em>, a commercial trawler which travelled around the world protesting against whaling, seal-hunting and nuclear tests, was infamously sunk by French agents near New Zealand as it was setting out to protest nuclear testing in French Polynesia. Just before the Soviet Union invaded and occupied the Baltic States in 1939, demonstrators appeared in major cities on 18 July calling for incorporation into the Soviet Union, and under the threat of Soviet invasion, this call was swiftly followed by the national parliaments of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia applying for membership and being annexed. A similar tactic is suspected in the eastern part of the Ukraine which has seceded \u2013 so-called \u201cprotest tourists\u201d from Russia are often seen at rallies in Donetsk<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such actors, whether in military conflicts or political issues, often receive short shrift from the powers-that-be. Alan Shatter, Irish Minister for Justice in 2011 accused members of the anti-gas group \u2018Sea to Shell\u2019 of being \u201cself indulgent protest tourists<\/a>,\u201d much like Mayor Marvin Rees has accused the Bristol rioters. With the ever-increasing concerns to contain COVID-19, and public demonstrations in the firing line of public health restrictions on travel and assembly, it is impossible to say what impact the pandemic will have on \u201cprotest mobilities,\u201d as I coin it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Research suggests that there was \u201cno evidence<\/a>\u201d of a spike in infections after the Black Lives Matter Protests in the US last summer. But YouGov polling suggests that the UK public emphatically support almost every public control measure (such as water cannon, tear gas and plastic bullets) except live ammunition<\/a>. In a world of new, uncertain threats and an ongoing crisis of legitimacy in democratic nations, it can be expected that clampdowns on mobility (as seen during the pandemic) and public demonstrations (as seen with the new Bill) will be pursued by governments unable to admit that the situation is far from under control.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Jamie Nugent, PhD Candidate in History In the aftermath of the Bristol protests against the Conservative government\u2019s new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, the Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees pinned the blame for the violence on what he called \u201crevolutionary tourists\u201d or \u201cprotest tourists\u201d who had come in from the outside itching for a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":980,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis-of-impact-covid-19","category-history","category-lifeinlockdown"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/980"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=934"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":936,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions\/936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}