Technologies of social control: crowd management in liberal democracy

Crowd protest activity within liberal democratic countries of the West brin gs into view a series of tensions within the liberal democratic mode of rul e. Crowds must be controlled, but at the same time the state should not lim it the right of communities to protest. In this paper we argue that these t ensions may be resolved by adopting a form of rule which seeks to manage cr owds through authority internal to the crowd, by means of strategies aimed to intensify the self-regulatory processes of crowds. Liberal strategies an d tactics of social control are identified in South African legislation dur ing the period of transition from apartheid's repressive mode of rule to th e democracy of the new South Africa. Throughout the paper it is argued that liberal democratic forms of crowd management find their conditions of poss ibility in recent developments: in crowd psychology, which treat crowds as relational, self-regulating and identified phenomena.