Date of Award

Summer 8-22-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D. in International Studies

Organizational Unit

Josef Korbel School of International Studies

First Advisor

Marie Berry

Second Advisor

Aaron Schneider

Third Advisor

Deborah Avant

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Keywords

Police, Protest, Social movement, Variation, Violence

Abstract

Why do police engage in violence at some protests but not others? Existing research highlights the importance of protest characteristics, political context, police culture, organizational incentives, and interactions between protesters and law enforcement. While these factors help explain patterns of repression, they provide limited insight into why police responses can shift rapidly from restraint to widespread violence during the course of a protest event.

This dissertation examines variation in police violence during the 2020 George Floyd Uprising through a comparative analysis of protest events in Denver, Colorado and Seattle, Washington. Drawing on original event reconstructions based on livestreams, helicopter footage, police oversight reports, interviews, and archival materials, the study traces interactions between protesters and police across protest events. Police violence is conceptualized broadly to include arrests, chemical agents, impact munitions, physical force, and other coercive interventions.

The dissertation argues that police violence is shaped by changing interpretations of disorder. Building on scholarship on repression, policing, and political order, it develops a framework that distinguishes between material disorder, involving disruptions to physical space and property, and ontological disorder, involving perceived challenges to policing, state authority, and social order. Police violence escalates when disorder is interpreted as a threat to order and subsequently reframed through a state-of-exception logic that expands the range of actions deemed acceptable against protesters. As perceptions of disorder intensify, police move from targeted interventions to increasingly indiscriminate forms of violence.

Through detailed process tracing of protest events, this study demonstrates how police interpretations of disorder shape patterns of repression and explain substantial variation in violence across otherwise similar protests. More broadly, the findings contribute to scholarship on protest policing, state repression, and political order by highlighting the central role of threat interpretation in the production of police violence.

Copyright Date

8-2026

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Louis Pascarella

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

343 pgs

File Size

67.5 MB

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