Abstract:
The talk will present the findings from a recent study, which addressed the gap between the normative expectations of the right to protest in liberal democracies and the continued practice of repressive protest policing. The study presents a new framework that exposes how different legitimation mechanisms work together by analyzing the protocols of the Or State Commission of Inquiry, which investigated the clashes between Israeli police and the Arab minority in October 2000. The study develops a novel computational model of scaled reading that combines. a large-scale algorithmic topic modeling of the entire corpus, which identifies types of explanations of repressive protest policing; mid-scale analysis, which identifies which speakers group invoked which explanation; and a small-scale reading of computationally selected ‘most- representative’ testimonies that exposes the context in which each legitimation is invoked. Bringing together these different practices of textual analysis our model is able to encompass the multiple perspectives and narratives in the protocols and in the final report without losing sight of the singular point of views of specific actors involved: the protestors, the police and the state.
