It is a spectacle that is becoming all too familiar. Captured on the ubiquitous smartphone, intimidated protesters scurry away from a scene of unprovoked police violence. ‘This is a peaceful protest,’ they declare – words uttered as much in anxious defence as they are in defiance of the batons, rubber bullets, pepper spray and teargas that come their way.1
Admirable as the words seem, the protesters are mistaken: by way of its fundamentalist approach to nonviolence, protest today is anything but peaceful.
