ABSTRACT
The police strategy of trying to negotiate with protesters before political protests, and to maintain continuous communication with them during these manifestations, is today widely used in many Western countries. However, with a few exceptions, such as P.A.J. Waddington’s Liberty and Order (1994) and McPhail, Schweingruber and McCarthy (1998), among others, this specifi c aspect of protest policing has remained relatively under-studied. This chapter will explore the practices of negotiation that occurred between police and protesters in connection with two EU summits in Scandinavia – in Gothenburg in June 2001 and in Copenhagen in December 2002. Our aim is to improve understanding of the role of negotiations in relation to these kinds of large protest events, and to provide some tools for analysing some of the problems that are likely to emerge.
