INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ‘The People’s Spring’: Covid-19, public protest and terrorism Covid-19 has set the scene for vehement public displays of non-confidence in governments around the Western world, writes Dr John Battersby. Are democracies of the West about to face their own ‘people’s spring?’
Dr John Battersby is the New Zealand Police National Intelligence Centre Teaching Fellow at the Centre for Defence and Security Studies, Massey University. He previously served in the New Zealand Police Wellington and Central Districts and at the School of Leadership, Management and Command at the Royal New Zealand Police College.
Over the last months Covid-19 has completely dominated the world’s media, and it is just possible that many terrorists will be watching in awe at the devastation, disruption and sheer power to compel comprehensive change that has been brought about by a tiny virus. The power to absolutely dislocate the status quo and create conditions for a ‘new normal’ is precisely what terrorists seeking to bring about change by violence have been attempting for as long as authority systems have existed. Most of the time the terrorists were doomed to fail, or were compelled to accept negotiated outcomes representing little
improvement on where they started from. On the occasions when terrorists did succeed, they never created change on a scale like this. Then, to add to the apparent impotence of terrorism, the bungled arrest of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police Officers has led to mass protests in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe, some of them devolving into violence and looting. The force used in the George Floyd arrest was horrifyingly unnecessary, with a predictably tragic outcome. But it was not the singularly unusual event that the world-wide reaction suggests it was. The US homicide rate is five per 100,000 (or 15,498 in 2018) –
Number of people shot to death by the police in the United States from 2017 to 2020, by race. Source: Washington Post/Statista.
36
Line of Defence
