Yelling ‘Fire’ in a Crowded Occupation: Cynical Fire Hazard Claims and the Technocratic Containment of Dissent
| Author | Honor Brabazon |
| Published date | 01 August 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663919880303 |
| Date | 01 August 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Yelling ‘Fire’ in a Crowded
Occupation: Cynical Fire
Hazard Claims and the
Technocratic Containment
of Dissent
Honor Brabazon
University of Toronto, Canada
Abstract
While the privatisation of public space has been the subject of considerable research,
literature exploring the shifting boundaries between public and private law, and the role
of those shifts in the expansion of neo-liberal social relations, has been slower to
develop. This article explores the use of fire safety regulations to evict political occu-
pations in the context of these shifts. Two examples from the UK student occupation
movement and two from the US Occupy movement demonstrate how discourses and
logics of both private and public law are mobilised through fire hazard claims to create
the potent image of a neutral containment of dissent on technical grounds in the public
interest – an image that proves difficult to contest. However, the recourse to the public
interest and to expert opinion that underpins fire hazard claims is inconsistent with
principles governing the limited neo-liberal political sphere, which underscores the
pragmatic and continually negotiated implementation of neo-liberal ideas. The article
sheds light on the complexity of the extending reach of private law, on the resilience of
the public sphere and on the significance of occupations as a battleground on which
struggles over neo-liberal social relations and subjectivities play out.
Keywords
Fire hazards, neo-liberalism, occupy, public/private law, student occupations
Corresponding author:
Honor Brabazon, Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto, 14 Queen’s Park
Crescent West, Room 214A, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3K9, Canada.
Email: honorbrabazon@gmail.com
Social & Legal Studies
2020, Vol. 29(4) 549–573
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663919880303
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Introduction
Occupations, or sit-ins, have enjoyed a resurgence around the world in the past two
decades as a tactic of those fighting for social change (Brabazon, 2017c; Solomon and
Palmieri, 2011; van de Sande, 2013). As public space has become increasingly managed
and circumscribed in the neo-liberal period, physically occupying (often symbolic)
locations and building alternative social relations in those spaces has become an impor-
tant way to demonstrate opposition to neo-liberalism.
However, while the privatisation of public space, public institutions and other public
goods has been the subject of considerable research (Low and Smith, 2013; Mitchell,
2003; Parkinson, 2012), literature exploring the shifting boundaries between public and
private law, and the role of those shifts in the expansion of neo-liberal social relations,
has been far slower to develop. Recent scholarship in that area generatively has exam-
ined instances where the form and functions of public and private law have blurred and
overlapped (Barker and Jensen, 2013; Mac Amhlaigh et al., 2013). It has tended to focus
on the constitutionalisation (and thus ‘publicisation’) of private law (Barkhuysen and
Lindenbergh, 2006), but it has also begun to discuss ways in which private law increas-
ingly assumes public purpose and public authority, including in the governance of
dissent. This latter scholarship has ranged from accounts of the sta te’s treatment of
protest as trespass to courts’ acceptance of tort and land law litigation as acceptable
alternative avenues for political struggles. Through such examples, these discussions
have begun to demonstrate how public debate and dissent increasingly are governed
through private law (Enright, 2011; Enright and Wall, 2012).
However, as much of this research acknowledges, ‘the public’ has not disappeared
entirely, nor has it been an unequivocally benevolent and passive target of neo-liberal
policymakers, as it is often portrayed. This article explores the complexity of the shifting
public/private law divide and its role in the construction and contestation of neo-liberal
social relations through analysis of instances where discourses and logics of both private
and public law have been mobilised in tandem to structure and condition political
dissent. Broadly speaking, while private law more typically is seen as a technical and
apolitical arbiter between consenting and equal individuals, public law is traditionally
animated and legitimised by the notion that it represents a shared common interes t.
Through analysis of occupations that were evicted following claims by authorities that
they constituted fire hazards, the article explores this aspect of administrative law as a
site at which the confluence of these two legitimating discourses (that of public law and
that of private law) has been mobilised in the containment of dissent. The article exam-
ines how, in these examples, administrative law performed many of the same ideological
functions in the political sphere that private law performs in the private sphere while also
leveraging its traditional public law mandate to protect the public interest, which created
the potent image of a neutral containment of dissent on technical grounds in the public
interest.
The article identifies this recourse to fire hazards as a depoliticising, technocratic state
response to dissent, which it situates within a broader process of juridification through
which the images, logics and discourses of the liberal legal form increasingly structure
social relations in ways that constrict the political sphere and opportunities for debate
550 Social & Legal Studies 29(4)
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