Aktuelles

CfP: Rethinking Police Violence during Civic Unrest

Institutional Practices, Challenges and Legitimization
7–8 November 2025, Berlin

Responses to collective dissent vary depending on political regimes, institutional structures, and cultural dynamics. While public protests have become increasingly common around the world over the past decade – with mass protests in places like Hong Kong, Turkey, Serbia, Belarus, and the USA – the government reactions have varied, including the different scenarios employed for deploying state violence. This wide range of responses to managing public unrest deserves significant scholarly attention and analysis from a comparative perspective.

This workshop aims to create a platform for scholarly exchange with a focus on understanding the police-protest-violence triangle. Its goal is to integrate diverse methodological and theoretical approaches for the analysis of civic protest across varying contexts. The workshop organizers are seeking to foster research that examines police violence at macro-, meso-, and micro-levels, exploring how structural, institutional, and situational factors intersect to shape policing practices and outcomes during protests. This approach will help develop a comprehensive understanding of police violence and to define possible points of intervention to prevent it in the future.

We invite papers from various disciplines, in particular, sociology, organizational studies, social psychology, political science, anthropology, legal studies, and history to encourage an interdisciplinary dialog. Questions that could be addressed include but are not limited to the following:

1. Micro-approaches to studying violence with a focus on interactions between law enforcers and citizens: what situational and psychological factors influence conflict escalation or de-escalation. How do communication strategies and embodied practices shape confrontational encounters?
2. Mechanisms of violence legitimation, including rituals that normalize the use of force, group solidarity among police workers, and the study of how everyday routine practices legitimize violence in the public realm.
3. Institutional practices of everyday interaction in repressive institutions. What mechanisms drive decision-making at the ground level in law enforcement? How do informal norms and practices influence police behavior and institutional functioning?
4. Police professionalism: What kind of variations in professional standards towards the use of sanctioned violence can be observed? How does police training evolve and contribute to professional competencies? What are the tensions between institutional loyalty and individual moral judgment? How do professional ethical codes mediate institutional behavior?
5. Gender and institutional power: How do gender dynamics shape institutional practices and interactions? What kinds of gendered experiences affect both law enforcement personnel and citizens exposed to state violence? How do institutional cultures reproduce or challenge gender hierarchies?
6. Historical continuity: How do historical legacies persist in contemporary institutional configurations? How do the mechanisms of institutional memory and path dependency shape contemporary practices of police violence? How do historical transformations reshape institutional logic?

We invite interdisciplinary research that employs various methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks. Comparative perspectives across different political regimes, historical contexts, and institutional configurations are particularly encouraged.

Submission Guideline

Interested participants should submit a title and a 350–450 word abstract for their proposed presentation using the submission form at https://forms.office.com/e/enyz8dPVvA.

The deadline for submission is 16 May 2025.

The decision regarding the selection of presentations will be communicated by 15 June 2025. If your proposal is accepted, you will be expected to submit a more comprehensive version of your paper at least one month before the scheduled workshop.

The FernUniversität in Hagen will provide accommodation for one night. Thanks to the support of Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, we can provide a limited number of subsidies to assist with travel expenses.

Contact: aryna.dzmitryieva