Riot Platforms: Protest, Police, Planet.

A wave of urban uprisings swept the planet from 2018 to 2021, throwing protesters into violent collisions with police, confrontations fought out both in the streets and on digital platforms. This paper proposes successive cycles of digitally‐mediated social unrest are passing into a phase marked by protesters' assemblage of "riot platforms". It examines the development of such platforms by movements in France, Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, Ecuador and elsewhere, and the responses of a police power which is itself increasingly digitalised, examines how these contending dynamics played out in 2020 Black Lives Matter rising, discusses the alt‐right's Capitol Hill seizure as a digitally‐organised reactionary counter‐riot, and concludes by situating "riot platforms" in planet‐wide processes of political recomposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]