Images from Los Angeles this week of demonstrators throwing rocks and police officers spraying tear gas mirror scenes of other recent confrontations between protesters and the authorities from around the world.
Los Angeles has been convulsed by public outrage since the Trump administration launched a series of immigration raids on Friday. In response to the protests, President Trump called in the National Guard and the military. By Tuesday, 700 Marines were expected to be in the city, along with 4,000 Guard troops.
For social scientists who study the intersection of protests, politics and law enforcement, the scenes unfolding in California broadly follow a script that has played out many times in many other countries. A strong government response to demonstrations that initially start peacefully, they say, often produce increasingly violent confrontations. In some instances, they add, leaders have used the prospect of civil unrest to use heavy-handed tactics or create pretexts to expand their grip on power.
Here are three lessons from international protests, which experts say can help make sense of what is unfolding in Los Angeles.
1. Crackdowns shape optics, and optics shape uprisings.
When states crack down on demonstrators, the images circulated online and in the news media of the resulting clashes shape the public’s understanding of what is happening.
Such optics, experts said, play a critical role in either bolstering or undermining the actions of a government amid unrest.
Harsh crackdowns may generate sympathy for protesters, said Omar Wasow, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley who studies protest movements. The “spectacle of violence and repression,” he said, can frame states as “bullies” unjustly squashing expression.
But those images can also act like a “double-edged sword,” Mr. Wasow said. When residents engage violently with the authorities, viral images — of burning cars or vandalized property, for example — can instead generate sympathy for the state.
Because most people are not at the protests, the public’s idea of the demonstrators can be colored by the images of violence that gain the most traction, even if the events are largely peaceful.
“It’s all about narrative,” said Laura Gamboa, an assistant professor of democracy and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame. To control their image in the face of state crackdown, movements need strong internal organization, she added. But spontaneous uprisings often lack such organization.
Ms. Gamboa pointed to Honduras, where protests broke out after a disputed election in 2017. When peaceful protests turned violent, the movement struggled to “overcome the narrative and gain the international support they needed.”
2. Heavy-handed responses can lead to more violent protests.
State repression inspires violence and increases the size of protests in general, said Ms. Gamboa, turning issue-based demonstrations into mass movements.
“You’re being repressed; gas is thrown at you,” she said. “It’s your natural instinct to protect yourself by fighting back.”
Beyond an immediate need to respond to violence, crackdowns inflame protests by broadening the cause to fight. What began, for instance, as opposition to the Colombian government’s tax overhaul in 2021 transformed into a much bigger campaign against police violence and the role of state force after a bloody crackdown on demonstrators.
Aggressive state responses to protests led to as many as 300 deaths in Mozambique last year, and hundreds of arrests in India in 2019 protests over a citizenship law.
3. Crackdowns can be steppingstones to wider power grabs.
A government’s decision to exercise force, the experts said, can be an opening for authoritarians to erode democratic checks.
Governments can violate norms to project power, said Andrew O’Donohue, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace who studies democratic backsliding. They can then use the “pushback to justify further crackdowns on institutions and protests,” he added.
After protesters and the police continually pushed the limits of what had been accepted tactics during a year of protests in Hong Kong, the mainland government ended the cycle of increasing violence in 2020 by stripping the semiautonomous territory of many of its rights.
The government in Beijing justified the passage that year of the National Security Law, which handed the mainland government broad powers to crack down on political activities, effectively outlawing pro-democracy parties and limiting free speech.
Amanda Taub contributed reporting.
