With this came a concomitant increase in opportunities and incentives for specious activism. This requires information and budgets for more informants, and the number increased significantly. Emphasis was placed on anticipatory control in which the goal is preventive rather than reactive after the fact. Following 9/11, national enforcement priorities gave greater attention to terrorism than to traditional crime. Yet specious activists have not disappeared. Control in many ways has become more technical, mechanical, softer, diffuse and less visible. In contemporary democratic societies laws, policies and the mass media are constraining and the more sophisticated control agents are aware of the challenges of controlling secret agents and the ever-present risks of backfire and blowback. labor union provocateur is today statistically atypical. The classical image of the 19th century European political, or U.S. The topic fits within a number of areas of inquiry-social movement studies with an emphasis on the repression and facilitation of protest and the environmental engineering of behavior to preclude or direct behavior the broader field of social control criminal justice with an emphasis on undercover policing and legal restrictions human rights protections and violations and mass communication, censorship, surveillance and public opinion.Ĭlaims about agents provocateurs must be carefully assessed given the deception and secrecy surrounding the topic, the vested interests of the parties involved (control agents do not wish to reveal operational tactics or behavior that might create bad public relations or harm a prosecution and activists with an interest in painting agents in a negative light.) Yet, much is known about agents provocateurs as a result of government hearings and court records, first person accounts from agents who publicly disavow their actions, leaks, Freedom of Information Act requests, archives, police training materials and investigative journalists. While history and broad social structural variables create contexts of constraint and possibility, the daily events of a social movement and its career path are very much dependent on the contingencies of interaction within movements and between movements and authorities. The phenomenon illustrates the often intricate interdependence between a social movement and its environment. Social movements in the United States in the 1960s saw many examples of provocation, some in conformity with the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO.) (Donner 1990 Cunningham 2005.) A New York detective helped open and headed the Bronx chapter of the Black Panthers, and Malcolm X's bodyguard, who tried to resuscitate him when he was shot, was an undercover police officer. Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent provides a fictional account. The English Cato Street conspiracy offers a classic case. Roman Malinovsky, a highly paid agent of the Russian secret police (Okhrana), was an important Bolshevik leader. Police responded by infiltrating existing groups and, in a strategy that could backfire, creating their own. Some of the most dramatic occurred in Russia where, lacking basic democratic rights, clandestine groups sought to overthrow the Tsar. The term has entered popular culture as the name of a lingerie brand and British electronica band. The concept initially referred to an activist secretly working with authorities who might provide information, sow suspicion and internal dissension, and/or provoke violent actions that would turn public opinion against a social movement and offer legal and moral grounds for its repression. The idea of the agent provocateur entered popular consciousness in the 19th century as Europe experienced dislocation and conflicts associated with industrialization and urbanization. One extreme form of the latter is provocation. When authorities or elites are challenged by a social movement, they may ignore it or respond with a variety of tools from cooptation to redirection to repression with many points in between. Marx | Bio | Back to Main Page | References and further reading (eds.) Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements. MarxĪgents Provocateurs as a Type of Faux Activist Agents Provocateurs as a Type of Faux Activist-Gary T.
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