The murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police over Memorial Day weekend ignited sustained protests across the country and placed the issue of race front and center. As we show in this chapter, by September, more than two-thirds of our survey respondents report positive views of the Black Lives Matter movement. While the salience of race began to fade as the general election campaign unfolded, we find that political characteristics of citizens, such as party attachment and partisan media exposure, influence support for the social justice movement and support for law enforcement. Further, psychological predispositions consistently and significantly influence views of social protests and policing. For example, people’s level of racial resentment produces powerful changes in their views of the protests and police from September to October. Finally, attitudes about racial justice and policing influence overall impressions of Biden and Trump, producing significant changes in people’s views of the candidates during the first months of the fall campaign.

This chapter discusses the current trends at the reformed Court against the backdrop of recent reform initiatives, as well as the general atmosphere of widespread negative feedback and backlash since the 2010s. To do so, it relies on the results of the content analysis carried out on the case law between 1967 and 2016, a close reading of some of the recent landmark judgments, and the insights gathered from elite interviews conducted with current and former judges. This assessment shows the extent to which the reformed Court resorts to selective forbearance. I find that the reformed Court, challenged by widespread negative feedback, selectively pays heed to member states’ concerns. That is, it continues a progressive line of reasoning when it comes to certain core obligations, such as the obligation to refrain from using excessive force while policing or the provision of legal protection and remedy. Yet, it adopts a more forbearing attitude towards certain other obligations, such as the obligation to uphold the non-refoulement principle, the provision of sufficient medical care in detention centers, or the provision of acceptable detention conditions to (irregular) migrants or asylum seekers.

This chapter challenges legislative and judicial efforts to immunize police officers from all but the most outrageous misconduct by finding “objectively reasonable” virtually all uses of force by officers and providing “qualified immunity” in the rare instance when the use of force is deemed excessive. This failure to provide any sort of check or deterrent against the use of force by armed, implicitly biased officers improperly strengthens the weapon in weaponized racial fear and further empowers bias-motivated individuals to act on their biases.

A new wave of global social movements is being led by young Africans. In the same way that a wave of European Baby Boomers took to the streets demanding social change as teenagers and young adults in the student protests of 1968, this cohort of young Africans are at the forefront of similar protests. And young sub-Saharan Africans are using social media to push back against tradition and fight for change, as exemplified by Nigeria’s #endSARS protests against police brutality. Driven by Twitter – at the movement’s peak in October 2020, 48 million #endSARS tweets were posted in just 10 days – #endSARS constituted the country’s most significant protest movement since pro-democracy rallies in the 1990s. Threatened by the power of platforms such as Twitter, the frequency and duration of internet shutdowns by governments across Africa is steadily increasing – in June 2021, the Nigerian government suspended Twitter in the country. For many young Nigerians #endSARS was a real political awakening. The protests created the recognition that young people could be a powerful political force, combined with the more brutal understanding that the establishment will respond violently to perceived challenges.

A new wave of global social movements is being led by young Africans. In the same way that a wave of European Baby Boomers took to the streets demanding social change as teenagers and young adults in the student protests of 1968, this cohort of young Africans are at the forefront of similar protests. And young sub-Saharan Africans are using social media to push back against tradition and fight for change, as exemplified by Nigeria’s #endSARS protests against police brutality. Driven by Twitter – at the movement’s peak in October 2020, 48 million #endSARS tweets were posted in just 10 days – #endSARS constituted the country’s most significant protest movement since pro-democracy rallies in the 1990s. Threatened by the power of platforms such as Twitter, the frequency and duration of internet shutdowns by governments across Africa is steadily increasing – in June 2021, the Nigerian government suspended Twitter in the country. For many young Nigerians #endSARS was a real political awakening. The protests created the recognition that young people could be a powerful political force, combined with the more brutal understanding that the establishment will respond violently to perceived challenges.

Chapter 8 investigates the effects of group empathy on attitudes regarding a variety of policy changes that took place after Trump’s election. We examine how group empathy affects support for the Trump administration’s border wall and family separation policies, as well as its attempts to end the Obama-era DACA program. We also revisit Trump’s travel and immigration ban on several Muslim countries after he turned his controversial campaign promise into government policy via executive order. We further explore how group empathy influences opinions about some other group-related political issues such as hurricane relief for Puerto Rico, misappropriation of Native American names, symbols, and imagery in sports, as well as removal of Confederate statues and monuments. Finally, we examine the relationship between group empathy and support for contemporary social movements, namely Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and LGBTQ rights. In all these tests, we find that group empathy is a powerful determinant of public reactions to the Trump administration’s policies above and beyond partisanship, ideology, and many other predispositions including racial resentment, even for issues concerning non-racial/ethnic marginalized outgroups.

Chapter four details the evolution of, and the repressive capacity and methods of Bahrain's security services. In particular it focuses on the police, for which most historical and current data is available. Ranging from the personalist explanations of repression, such as why Charles Belgrave himself engaged in beating detainees, to the institutionalisation of deviance, chapter three looks at how personal integrity violations in Bahrain are intrinsically tied up with the country’s institutional and political structures. It also explores how Al Khalifa conservatism underlined by Saudi fear of Iranian expansionism has informed a militant and coercive policy of repression. In particular, the chapter notes that while the British established the police and continued to play an important role concerning training and technical assistance, a shift in power occurred leading up to and following 1971. Following Independence, the increasing Al Khalifa and Saudi control, coupled with diminishing British influence on policy, led to a more systemically repressive coercive apparatus; one in which the British influence became hidden behind the legal distancing of ‘Independence’. As well as detailing the emergence of the police force, this chapter argues how tactics such as mass arrests and torture have emerged, not simply because of the criminalisation of the Shiʿa threat, but due to the embedded discrimination and sectarianism that pervades the security forces and the ruling regime.