Anxiety and Paranoia among Activist Groups: Policing and the Repression of Political Dissent in Britain

Introduction

This article attends to the role of negative affects in shaping lived experience across activist groups in Britain to examine how affective responses and resources produce forms of political agency. In particular, it traces experiences of anxiety and paranoia triggered through policing practices and recent public order legislation that limit the space in which to stage dissent. Previous research on emotions in political movements has examined moral feelings such as pride, anger, loyalty and outrage, for their role in producing shared narratives and cultures, and driving engagement within organising networks (Flam, 2014; Goodwin et al., 2004; Jasper, 2014). This literature often focuses on feelings linked with particular movements and sites of protest (Ayata & Harders, 2024; Said, 2024), associated with intentional affects such as outrage, fear or joy that produce deliberate action (Aminzade & McAdam, 2012). While this scholarship conveys the centrality of affect for collective action, affect theorists extend these insights to more durable circulations of affect and its role in the emergence of ambiguous or alternative sites of agency. Within literature on activism, there has been less focus on paranoia and anxiety, affects that unfold in a different temporality to outrage, fear or joy – percolating through experience beyond embodied protest or encounters with police. Bloch defines anxiety as one of the future-oriented affects that ‘aim less at some specific object as the fetish of their desire than at the configuration of the world in general’ (quoted in Ngai, 2005, p. 410), having a different temporality to affects whose object is clearly attainable. Both emerge through the subject’s positioning in relation to power structures, though anxiety has a vaguer relational structure, not requiring a clearly defined object, while paranoia often has a specific object, more attuned to the present, thus allowing the world to become more legible (Ngai, 2005). I use this definition to frame anxiety and paranoia as overlapping, but with paranoia as more strongly interpretive (Barnwell, 2016).

In contrast to studies focusing on explicit, intentional feelings (Flam, 2014; Goodwin et al., 2004), this article argues that paranoia and anxiety are ‘minor’ affects that play a role in producing more ambiguous forms of agency. This ambiguity figures their salience for understanding how space for collective action is remade through cycles of repression. For Seigworth and Pedwell (2023, p. 26), minor affects designate those impulses and feelings that, while central to constantly unfolding shifts and nuances in experience, often remain unarticulated: ‘the minor loosely indexes the unpredictable, aleatory forces that run through it all, creating or signaling possibilities for established formations and tendencies to materialize differently’. Ngai includes anxiety, paranoia, disgust and irritation among minor affects that are more muted than the ‘classical political passions’ (Ngai, 2005, p. 5), less ‘object or goal-oriented’, and ‘therefore often politically ambiguous’ (p. 26). This article aims to demonstrate that anxiety and paranoia are vulnerable to appropriation, meaning that activists can redirect these durable feelings for developing critiques of the status quo, which underlines their relevance for affective agency. It draws on Rancière’s (1999) account of appropriation in which the act of reading and interpreting power relations is central to the potential for transformation, where agency appears through interpretive engagement with the world. This approach departs from studies cited above of political affects associated with deliberative actions and forms of experience that mark collective struggles in more distinct or clearly visible ways.

Research demonstrates that activism can be situated by fears of surveillance (Stevens et al., 2023; Storbeck et al., 2025), or fears triggered by government language describing activism as ‘domestic terrorism’ (Calvo & Echeverría, 2023). Such studies suggest repression leads to re-evaluation of the costs of political action, sometimes prompting withdrawal. The contemporary context for activism in Britain is shaped by recent laws targeting direct action movements, including Extinction Rebellion (Martin, 2025), which bring new obstacles to organising strategies by significantly heightening the risk of being criminalised. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 increases the police’s ability to set conditions on protests when ‘serious disruption’ is anticipated, granting police authority to determine when such conditions are warranted (Amnesty, 2025). The Public Order Act 2023 criminalises a wider array of protest actions, including ‘interfering with key national infrastructure’ (such as roads, railways and oil refineries), ‘locking-on’ by attaching oneself to land, objects or other people, and carrying equipment for this (Liberty, n.d.). Yet, while scholars demonstrate how the distribution of fear through public policy entrenches state control (Massumi, 1993), they also suggest that negative feelings can sustain resistance to an unjust status quo (Cvetkovich, 2012). As Honari (2018) shows, activists’ responses are central to how repressive policies take effect. Building on this research, the article conveys how forms of affective agency indicate a process of appropriation emerging through restrictive conditions, as activists channel negative feelings into critical collective positions.

Before outlining the methods, the article develops the theoretical framework through discussion of affect and agency. It presents findings first on how anxiety limited space for action by intensifying uncertainty about risk of protesting, demonstrating how policing targets collective affect. It then examines accounts of countersurveillance, which demonstrate affect’s ambivalence as constituting obstacles to participation in groups based on the persistence of suspicion and its overlap with anxiety, while also being mobilised for protection from possible surveillance. This ambivalence reflects paranoia as a structure of feeling that filters experience implicitly, without denying agency. In the third empirical section, the article addresses appropriation, as participants’ responses to affects circulating through surveillance and bureaucratic power suggest they could be directed in critical ways: amid obstacles to protest, the sharpening of sensibilities of suspicion and wariness of others, rather than initiating withdrawal, appeared as agency. The discussion and conclusion further consider how these affects were implicated in coming to know power relations through difficult encounters with the state, or anticipation of this, demonstrating how negative affects generate critical responses to repression of activism. The following section highlights the political dimensions of affect through its role in agency.

Politics, Affect and Agency

This section puts Rancière’s approach to politics into conversation with theories of affective agency. Rancière’s (1999) concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ refers to a society’s distribution of rights and roles based on taken-for-granted assumptions about who can access political speech and make demands. This distribution is maintained through reaffirming such assumptions about who has authority to contribute to and contest laws and public discourses, while politics is defined as oppositional to the apparently foundational nature of this way of organising social relations. Rancière (1999) shows that resistance manifests in the taking and reinventing of available material and affective resources, a process unfolding through aesthetic domains of experience, such as art (Frank, 2019), rather than political organising alone. Importantly, Rancière (2009) avoids a definition of political agency that would limit it to expressions of action that visibly challenge or critique social norms – rejecting assumptions about criteria for agency that rely on ‘the opposition of seeing and doing’ (p. 12), or ‘viewing and acting’ (p. 13). This challenges the dichotomy between actor and spectator that distinguishes agency from passivity, indicating how political subjectivity is made through capacity for (re)interpretation – as Rancière (2009) writes, ‘[e]very spectator is already an actor in her story’ (p. 17). Frank (2019) also demonstrates how subtle interventions to social worlds through acts of reinterpretation constitute an ‘ordinary’ politics that produces transformation at affective and aesthetic levels. In other words, affects circulating through channels of power can be appropriated through the subject’s interpretive capacities.

This approach to agency resonates with perspectives on the ambivalent dimension of affect that have been articulated through studies of its role both in challenging power relations and in techniques for policing the status quo (Ahmed, 2014; Anderson, 2010; McManus, 2011). Affect theory can thus develop Rancière’s insights on the affective and aesthetic dynamics of political struggle, and this is examined here through the role of negative feeling in enacting agency as part of subject making. In Berlant’s (2011) analysis of the uncertainty of life for ordinary people under contemporary capitalism, for example, the negotiation and survival of its precarious forms emerge as a model of agency. Ngai (2005), in particular, examines the significance of anxiety and paranoia as unexpected or overlooked sites that emerge from the ‘predicament of suspended agency’ (p. 12). Ngai attributes the oversight of minor affects to their lack of a singular attainable object, which makes them ill-fitted for ‘forceful or unambiguous action’, but does however position them to diagnose circumstances defined ‘by blocked or thwarted action in particular’ (p. 27). Because they are often less overt and ambient, Ngai views them as ‘noncathartic feelings’, associated with ‘a failure of emotional release’ (p. 9). Without clear resolution, they remain as part of the reproduction of ordinary life. In this view, paranoia becomes ‘an everyday structure of feeling’ (Ngai, 2005, p. 302), without necessarily becoming explicit. For Barnwell (2016), paranoia reflects phenomenological conditions of possibility for engaging the world, part of the creative repertoires through which people interpret events, making it both ‘symptomatic and generative of the very world it observes’ (p. 17). Previous readings of paranoia identify its political dimensions: Zalloua (2021) interprets Palestinian paranoia as an expression of anti-colonial critique, while Barnwell suggests suspicion can constitute a process ‘dedicated to speculation, to cartography, to taking itself and others apart to see how they work’ (2016, p. 15).

This literature de-medicalises paranoia, allowing it to be viewed as a structure of feeling that may ‘accurately reflect the problematics of people’s lives’ (Frosh, 2015, p. 14). Writing about anxiety as a persistent affective undercurrent shaping social worlds, Zevnik (2023) argues it too can be generative of new ways of perceiving the world when directly engaged rather than repressed. This literature avoids pathologising these affects, suggesting instead how they help to create space for critical reflection on the world. It highlights their part in forming the aesthetic, ambient dimensions of life, shaping encounters without needing to be identified or explicitly named as a problem. I draw from this work the insight that these affects, even if processed collectively, can remain in circulation among groups. In addressing their durability, the claim is not that anxiety and paranoia were completely ambient or left unsaid by activists. I suggest that, through their role in informing experience and perceptions of available resources and forms of action, and relations to the state and peers, they are part of processes of interpretation through which affects were channelled into and developed critiques of power. Agency therefore emerges in interpretive processes that are temporally distinct from the immediacy of spatial encounters marking particular political movements.

Drawing from this scholarship, the following sections investigate how affect is appropriated as part of evolving forms of resistance, identified in ways that activists affirmed or refined their positions on state power through experience of or feelings about policing that revealed power relations in new ways. The concept of appropriation suggests subjects can inhabit affects in ways that counter the wider functioning of those affective conditions mobilised by the state for repression. While affect is used to deter or co-opt dissent, its ambivalence allows it to be channelled in ways that transgress the function of repressive policies. Frustrated agency can produce ‘manoeuvres of affective ambivalence’ (McManus, 2011), with negative affects expanding analyses of injustice and the inadequacy of formal channels to express dissent. The focus of the analysis here is at the micro-level of lived experience, and while findings shed light on some organisational dynamics emerging from the work of these affects, a limitation is the lack of insight on the meso-level effects for different activist groups’ capacities for organising.

Methods

The article is based on 28 in-depth interviews (14 women, 14 men) conducted between January and September 2024 with people active in struggles involving climate activism, Palestine solidarity, animal rights and socialist groups. Many (17) were involved in the wider movement for environmental justice. The majority were London-based, and interviews were carried out in person or over Zoom. Participants were approached on the basis of participating in movements as a result of which they anticipated or suspected potential police surveillance, with some who had confirmed experience of surveillance. They ranged in age from university student to several who were retired. I recruited a number of participants through introductions by a colleague who had contacts with various campaign groups, by reaching out to political movements that had concerns about possible police surveillance, and by using the snowballing technique to contact further potential participants. The study received ethical approval from a committee at the university, and participants gave informed consent before interviews. Participation was anonymised, with names replaced with pseudonyms and any affiliations or identifying details removed from accounts. Regarding my positionality as researcher, the study was presented to participants as concerned about the right for campaigning movements to organise without interference through police monitoring. Therefore, while I was positioned as an outsider in relation to the movements that participants described, a shared critical perspective on policing and surveillance shaped conversations.

Interviews focused on reflections or experiences of surveillance and cultures of countersurveillance that shaped collective organising. Almost all were involved in movements that drew on nonviolent direct action as part of building a collective platform, including occupations of public space, creation of protest camps, mass demonstrations, performative or theatrical forms of protest, and arrestable actions such as damage to property or ‘locking-on’ to people or objects. Rather than authorised protests alone, most participants described protest actions planned with the aim of avoiding police intervention prior to the action – for some including property damage, locking-on, occupying public spaces – associated with uncertainty about criminalisation. Some expressed the concern that campaigning on certain issues, in particular climate justice and Palestine solidarity, would attract police attention, and given the latter’s power to interpret scenarios of ‘public nuisance’ (Amnesty, 2025), some felt there were few ‘low risk’ actions now available. Police strategy in recent decades has relied on the spread of fear to control crowds of protesters, as an example of targeted and explicit affective control (Wall, 2019). The focus here is how affects endured beyond discrete spaces of protest, helping to bring to light obstacles to agency within these conditions for organising.

After transcription, interviews were coded in NVivo according to emergent themes rather than a formalised thematic analysis. Analysis was based on inductive coding, with lived experience of surveillance guiding the mapping of concepts. This involved tracing affective patterns, as accounts conveyed aspects of ordinary responses and experiences of campaigning that resonated with literature on macro structures becoming inscribed in micro dynamics (Cvetkovich, 2007). Interpretation of codes was supported by research on affective politics, including conditions produced by state surveillance and role of collective affects in ordinary life. An important limitation of the study is the lack of diversity among participants. Only two were from racialised minorities. While race is central to understanding protesters’ encounters with police, as both participants spoke briefly of experiences or anticipation of racialisation, this is not discussed below. Several noted the wider environmentalist movement has been overrepresented by white middle-class groups, but none spoke explicitly about class in relation to campaigning experiences.

Affective Circulation Through Police Surveillance

This section examines how anxiety associated with uncertainty of how or whether police were monitoring groups, and how police might interpret protests under public order legislation, brought uncertainty about how to assess these risks, and therefore feelings of caution and hesitancy relating to taking action. Anxiety was linked with feeling unsafe and alert during protests, and with reflections on how to sustain groups’ momentum without participants putting themselves at high risk of being criminalised. Uncertainty also surrounded possible consequences for participants’ careers and material security relating to fines or a prison sentence, and how to safely calibrate this risk. While this section echoes research on reluctance to engage in activism due to surveillance concerns (Calvo & Echeverría, 2023; Starr et al., 2008), it primarily describes affects that shaped experiences of political protest and organising, which later sections build on through addressing the role of negative feeling in agency.

Maya, having participated in an environmentalist group, explained that the atmosphere of risk around direct action made it more difficult to ‘do anything, really. . . people are scared to join because of the surveillance that comes with it, or just the association of [the group] with police or. . . arrest’ (Zoom interview, September 2024). Experiences of arrest and stress associated with police targeting of climate action groups brought feelings of exhaustion. Maya linked an encounter with police shortly before she withdrew from the movement to this attenuation of energy: ‘I’d. . . come to the point where I. . . lost my groove with it, lost my energy and passion. . . So, I had less to bring me back up afterwards.’ Another participant involved in this campaign acknowledged the personal sacrifices involved in participation, noting that ‘there’s a finite number of people’ who can sustain involvement in actions now criminalised through fines or prison sentences (Zoom interview with Zack, June 2024).

Overlapping with anxiety about the potential for legal consequences of protesting, uncertainty about surveillance technologies contributed to a sense of unease for some participants. Although, for Michael, uncertainty about the precise nature of surveillance deployed in public space and at demonstrations via social media, surveillance cameras or facial recognition did not prevent his participation in demonstrations for various campaigns, the consequent anxiety produced hesitation. Michael worried about the extent to which police technology was monitoring activists like him who were involved in supporting campaigns without engaging in actions considered to be at high risk for arrest:

The fear they put in you by having this uncertainty of just expressing your thoughts, being part of something that could drive for better change. . . you’re not sure. . . what the ramifications of that would be. Was somebody. . . watching not just your face everywhere but also all of your activity? [This] brings back all the fears of what they’re going to do. (interview with Michael, London, September 2024)

The feelings associated with risk interlinked with the kind of sacrifice individuals were willing to accept. Elena’s account of establishing a climate campaign group illustrates how the negotiation of risk was shaped by anxiety about whether this work could be leveraged against her:

[We] always were kind of worried or prickly that the police could turn up at any stage and haul us off for alarming and distressing behaviour or something. . . even though all we were doing was handing out leaflets, shouting, standing with banners. . . it made me so worried that I felt sick going into every little demo. . . it makes you think my actions are watched and they could be consequential for me, particularly if there is someone hostile to me. (Zoom interview, February 2024)

Elena referred to how professional groups involved in campaigning faced employment-related risks if laws criminalising protesters were mobilised. Some participants had a nuanced approach to possibilities for arrest, which shifted after public order laws expanded the criteria for criminalisation, but Elena described how her group occupied an unambiguous relationship to actions risking arrest: ‘[the laws] had a. . . maybe not self-censoring but definitely. . . an effect on what activities the group are willing to participate in. . . [I]f someone presented an action to us which was. . . definitely arrestable, I know nobody from our group would sign up to it.’

Action had to be calibrated through risk assessments. Lily described this caution in relation to imprisonment of activists for crimes including ‘conspiracy to cause a public nuisance’ as a result of police practices of listening to online organising meetings (Hymer, 2024):

The threat is materialising in something very real. . . the thing I was planning was not illegal. . . but it still felt necessary to me to put in precautions to this thing that’s not even a protest, it’s just. . . about sharing your feelings to do with being criminalised. . . it came into my mind, how awful would it be if people ended up going to prison for this Zoom meeting we’re having about our feelings. (interview, London, September 2024)

Anxiety related to this uncertainty was not therefore confined to staging actions in public. For Dan, state encroachment on political space did not primarily manifest in policing protests but in bureaucratic control, where activists were targeted in spaces removed from public view. Repression was practised ‘in the courts. . . through injunctions, fines, [and] through all the fear that that creates’. ¹ To protest at an injuncted site risked the state ‘com[ing] after your life savings, your house’, so these channels had a similar effect to ‘just dragging people away’, given ‘how the fear of that stops people protesting’. This approach to repression ‘is drawn out; it’s hidden’ (interview with Dan, London, January 2024). Several others noted that unexpected arrests during protests or direct actions related to campaigns targeted by police, including Palestine solidarity groups and the now disbanded Just Stop Oil, where activists received court hearings or charges were eventually dropped, triggered anxiety and uncertainty.

Bob reflected that, before the recent public order laws, protest spaces were ‘so accessible to people’. During collective assemblies in London, ‘people could just wander by and drop in and join conversations. That’s really all gone. . . that’s painful for a movement that’s based on wanting enhanced democracy’ (interview with Bob, London, March 2024). With laws that criminalise occupying national infrastructure sites, protesters risked ‘being imprisoned just for walking along Whitehall, let alone people sitting down together and having discussions in the streets. . . that Reclaim the Streets thing’. This forced a level of retreat from public space that brought a more calculated approach to staging protests: as Bob explained, ‘you have to be more agile, less open’ in response.

Public order laws enable police to interpret when protests constitute ‘public nuisance’, now an offence (Amnesty, 2025). This uncertainty produced anxiety, Bob said, since ‘there’s very little we would do where we would be sure there’s no danger of arrest’. He described a previous ‘nondisruptive assembly’ within a London court, when an activist, who ‘knows the movement really well, has a bit of a panic, says “they’re going to accuse us of terrorism, they’re going to evacuate the building”, and that’s not real at all but it’s somebody feeling like that because that’s the mood of it’. Bob argued that groups who were already objects of suspicion for police were more likely to be impacted:

[T]he more you elevate the risk, the less accessible it is to people whose lives are already more precarious. . . you have to have either a strong background in activism or some kind of resource behind you to be able to take that risk. . . it really narrows it down. . . to escalate that risk of your own choosing, that’s a really, really hard thing to do. (Bob)

These accounts demonstrate how anxiety linked with recent public order legislation created uncertainty relating to the consequences of participating in protests, which led to caution and hesitation among activists regarding how to engage in organising. This affective response, as described above, could appear as feeling alert and unsafe during protests, or as a suspension in acting.

Anxiety and Suspicion in Countersurveillance

The previous section suggested that protest policing included the circulation of anxiety that discouraged forms of action. To convey the mutuality of affects that frustrate or constrain, and forms of appropriation, where suspicion and anxiety are channelled into affirming critiques, this section attends to how political groups were situated by Britain’s legal landscape. It examines experience of countersurveillance, understood to constitute practices that both facilitated the circulation of anxiety and suspicion among collectives, while providing resources to protect against police monitoring. Accounts of countersurveillance indicated a tension between desire to be open and participatory, complicated by public order laws, and a need to maintain secrecy around actions and strategies, which could reinforce suspicion. Some accounts indicated a mimetic expression of surveillance logics, as the labour of watching others for signs of threat reflected state monitoring of suspicious objects. Anxiety overlapped with paranoia in many reflections on the question of countersurveillance outlined below, as uncertainty about the potential for police infiltration could lead to distrust about peers not being who they claimed to be. Later, the article addresses appropriation to suggest that inhabiting affects in different ways allowed for expressions of agency.

Some participants reflected on the difficulty of acknowledging and responding to the possibility for police monitoring of groups without going too far in internalising the logic of suspicion and paranoia. Most highlighted the need for countersurveillance measures, such as vetting processes for joining subgroups within movements organising direct actions, compared to groups not engaged in arrestable actions and more open to newcomers. Although several spoke about personal encounters that produced suspicion, the latter did not rely on lived experience of surveillance. Eleanor described her struggle to manage anxiety within her group and with newcomers relating to potential criminalisation. Warning new members to be wary about risk of surveillance, rather than shifting anxiety, might mimic police by intensifying it: ‘it’s a difficult question, how much [to] tell people, how much do you put people off versus the urgency of actually doing something and not doing the state’s job for them by saying there’’ so much to be afraid of’ (interview with Eleanor, London, September 2024).

Awareness of the prevalence of covert policing that began filtering into activist networks from 2012 (Schlembach, 2018), and of more recent cases of police infiltration, helped suspicion of others to persist in varying degrees of intensity. Susan linked the need to be guarded in activist spaces to the documented practice of undercover policing of leftwing groups – ‘all the stories from the protest camps like Newbury Bypass and Twyford Down and the road protests of old. . . you don’t know who you’re trusting’. In the wider group she engaged with, ‘any one person. . . could be an infiltrator. You can never tell’ (interview in London, March 2024). In subgroups with access to information about direct actions, Susan explained, the convention was to ensure members were ‘recommended by somebody else. But you just need one person that’s a little bit naïve or maybe a bit susceptible’, which might increase the risk of police obtaining information about actions. Failure to be vigilant about possible police presence by being too open or trusting risked not being attentive enough to potential monitoring. Calculated scepticism was required to avoid being overly trusting. Maya, previously involved in climate activism, suggested that suspicion appeared intermittently, especially in encounters with new or potential members, intensified by awareness that a journalist had infiltrated her organisation: ‘[T]here is a thing of. . . someone’s acting weird with me, maybe they’re a mole. . . [a peer] had this person who she became really good friends with, and it turns out they were a mole for [a national newspaper]’ (Maya).

Suspicion of others could also be heightened by the sense of uncertainty about online behaviour, given the salience of social media sites for collective organising. Zara, working with several direct action organisations, described wariness of a person within a group, and raised doubts with others: ‘because of the previous conversations of “could he be a bit suspicious”, every time I come off Signal and he’s messaged me, I’m like, is that a coincidence or does he know when I’m on that app? Has something happened that he’s done in a surveillance world. . . I don’t know’ (interview with Zara, London, August 2024). Though suspicion was protective, navigating this unpredictable appearance of distrust required, for Zara, a ‘really horrible balancing act’. Paranoia could be triggered through social media group chats if members did not contribute as others did, Zara explained: if someone failed to participate in dialogue, ‘they’re then seen as hostile, or they could be a cop. Why aren’t you talking in the group chat?. . . you’ve been too quiet, and it’s like, well, I don’t feel comfortable. So, people getting suspicious.’ Sarah also pointed to behaviour on social media as a channel for suspicion, in particular how profiles were presented – ‘if it doesn’t have many pictures on it, then if there’s too much’. Sarah’s personal experience of surveillance led to intense distrust of the criminal system. ‘I just rely on my friends,’ she explained. ‘I assume I could trust them to come if I got mugged on the street or someone was in my house trying to shoot me, that they would come if I called them, but the likelihood is that if somebody was in my house trying to shoot me it would be the police’ (Zoom interview with Sarah, June 2024). Distrust was linked with persistent anxieties about being targeted by police – ‘[being] lied about [with] false charges’ – as part of repressive tactics to silence her: ‘I worry about getting set up a lot, saying I’ve done something. . . it’s your word against theirs’ (Sarah).

Descriptions of suspicion regarding police interest in subverting groups indicated their ambivalent role in maintaining alertness to the threat without providing a clear sense of safety. Echoing aspects of Sarah’s reflections on being the object of surveillance, Eleanor, having no direct experience of undercover policing, described the intersection of distrust, suspicion and anxiety linked with uncertainty about police tactics:

I worry about the spaces we meet in being bugged by the police. . . I worry about whether my phone conversations are listened to, whether I’m constantly being monitored. . . the worry of not knowing what will come of it is not ideal, and knowing that they can destroy your life, put you in prison, find other ways to affect you negatively. . . this isn’t coming from a position of someone who particularly struggles with anxiety or paranoia but I did think if I get too influential, maybe they’ll say I’m mad. . . lock me up. Because it’s something they’ve done in the past to political dissidents. . . do I think governments are above doing it now? No. I just think they’d be a lot more careful. . . (Eleanor, September 2024)

Dylan spoke about paranoia as functioning to acknowledge and address the uncertainty surrounding potential covert policing. Reflecting on revelations about the decades-long police infiltration of environmentalist groups, he conveyed how, in the period prior to these revelations, paranoia was part of activists’ ways of adapting to the risk: ‘it’s about having the right degree of paranoia; with hindsight, back in the ’90s, we were very paranoid about some things and not paranoid enough about others’ (Zoom interview with Dylan, May 2024). Implicit paranoia thus emerged within some activist spaces as a protective response, part of activists’ approach to dealing with the potential for police intervention.

Several participants expressed explicitly negative perspectives on the work of paranoia, describing it as a channel for police power to create division. Describing the contained spaces of a particular protest encampment, Lily noted how hypervigilance about anticipated eviction attempts by bailiffs, and covert surveillance by security personnel, allowed paranoia to spread rapidly: ‘people would keep an eye out and sometimes if you’d see something that someone found suspicious, everyone would be alerted. . . people would see something, and it would turn out to be absolutely nothing, but. . . it would spiral quite quickly’ (Lily, London, September 2024). Alice was emphatic that persistent paranoia was ‘by design. . . a good outcome for the opposition. If everyone’s really paranoid and suspicious of each other, fall out all the time over made up, projected bullshit then great because it makes all the groups really weak’ (interview with Alice, London, January 2024). Several agreed that police capacity to mobilise paranoia was effective at fragmenting groups if not managed. This reflected how despite some participants’ desires for campaigns to be more participatory, to avoid internalising discourses of the surveillance state as omniscient, vigilance about the state’s intentions and tactics nonetheless seeped into suspicion of others. Perspectives on countersurveillance as part of organisational cultures indicate how anxiety and paranoia formed part of the ground for organising, shaping experience without immobilising groups. These affects, involved in shaping affective worlds, were among the resources available for appropriation. Accounts demonstrated the ambivalence of perspectives on the need for countersurveillance. Guardedness and caution about sharing information about political actions and strategies reduced vulnerability to police monitoring, while anticipatory anxiety about infiltration also worked to encourage suspicion of other activists.

Appropriating Affects

Having demonstrated that anxiety and elements of paranoia continued to circulate through police repression, reflected in organisational practices and relational dynamics, this section examines how activists appropriated these affects in ways that supported political agency. Drawing on the assumption that people are constantly involved in interpretation that might subtly intervene in power dynamics (Rancière, 2009), allowing for manoeuvres in circumstances of obstructed agency, it examines how affects circulating through policing practices aiming to contain political groups were redirected to critical positions. Paranoia, discussed later, emerged more strongly as part of this process. Many participants described a growing sense of distrust towards the system of liberal democracy that had emerged through earlier experiences with the police or other institutions of authority. This in turn revealed the latter’s primary goal of shoring up relations of power. However, several accounts presented below suggest the discomfort of anxiety also allowed for reflection on how to deal with police surveillance.

In Sarah’s description of becoming aware of direct, intrusive police surveillance, anxiety and hypervigilance were more acute than in accounts by participants lacking this experience. Ongoing worry about state monitoring led to caution and heightened awareness of risks associated with participating in certain actions. Yet for Sarah, continuing to participate in actions ‘is my way of fighting back, if you like –defiance, not being knocked down. I’m probably more active now than I was in my 20s. . . because I believe in it. . . [and] because I’m not going to let them win.’ Anna, who supported actions organised by different groups, both traditional campaigns and higher risk direct action groups, described physical and digital monitoring as ‘the world we live in’ (interview in London, September 2024). After being unlawfully arrested during a London protest in 2024, she noted, regarding potential for being at increased risk of police surveillance, that ‘it does worry me but in a constructive way, again to take those measures for myself, for this not to deter me’ (Anna).

John, who had previously been arrested for participation in direct actions, described the sense of unease after realising he was being followed by a police officer before the start of a protest. Rather than escape, he decided to follow the man and eventually confront him and his commanding officer, demanding to know their rationale for monitoring him. This was a way of redirecting the unsettling feeling of being followed by momentarily making the officer the object of surveillance. John explained his decision in the following quote: ‘[being monitored] is not going to change me; it’s not going to scare me. . . I’m actually going to go back and find you. . . you’re not going to get me this way’. Maya similarly suggested that encounters with police helped to create a position from which anxiety could be channelled into commitment to an action. She suggested that experiences of anxiety at police presence during protests became a mode of learning about their tactics:

[During] protests. . . people around me would be like, no, we can’t, the police are here. . . we’re going to get arrested; I’m able to be like, no, we’re not. . . this is a fearmongering thing. For example, I now know that two police and a 30-person crowd means that they can’t arrest us because there’s only two of them and it’d be really unlikely for that to happen. So, in some ways it helped me use these skills of. . . learning loopholes and refusing authority. (Maya, September 2024)

Anxiety related to police could therefore play a role in learning about power dynamics and how to engage them. This also emerged in descriptions of encounters that reinforced distrust of the state, felt as a sometimes vaguely defined but real threat, reflecting how elements of paranoia shaped conditions for participating in activist groups. Ed spoke about encounters with police at climate protests as cementing his sense of the importance of taking a mistrustful position towards governments regarding the transparency of climate policies (Zoom interview, January 2024). John argued that police are portrayed through narratives of mutual consent, disguising their role in subverting dissent (Zoom interview, February 2024). In his account, a realisation that things are not as they appear, that the liberal order operates through distortions and manufactured visuality so that signs can easily slip from coercion to consent, violence to public order, was part of a reorientation away from these assumptions. Discussing his involvement in environmental activism in the 1990s, John suggested that facing police violence forced people engaging in activism to break from what he called liberalism’s ‘mythos’. This confrontation led to transformation for some activists, who gained a new understanding of ‘policing by consensus’ and channelled traumatic encounters with police into further collective action (John).

In an echo of this process, several participants reflected on the aftermath of revelations about undercover policing of groups from 2012, leaving traumatic effects for many. Tom explained that ‘everybody had to battle against that sense of paranoia, of suddenly not knowing whether they could trust the people around them’ (Zoom interview with Tom, February 2024). Speaking of the same period, John highlighted a particular group as a reparative space – ‘a place for people to connect and relearn and discuss radical stuff, so having that continuity was really important’. As a form of retreat, this emerged as a reparative practice in that distrust could be named as shared and political:

They needed to be able to process what was going on, so that was the drive at the time; what can we find out, who else was there, who can we trust? So many people stopped doing environmental direct action. . . for us it was a safe space; it had its protocols, no photography – so it was a place where people could come together because those of us who had been damaged or unsettled or disrupted by undercover policing knew that we could go [there]. It became a place where we could talk. . . the people who organised [the movement] were people I organised with for years and there was a degree of trust. (John)

Bob was involved in a climate campaign, and described paranoia as persistent but often implicit, made worse by higher risks of criminalisation for protest in the wake of public order legislation. The presence of paranoia was also symptomatic of injustice, an indication of the need for solidarity where it could be found. Bob thus framed paranoia as part of the work of questioning state discourses on foundations of authority that expected citizens to passively accept existing channels of power:

[There are] questions in the back of your mind about who you trust and who you don’t trust but it’s also a lot of binding together with people through the adversity. . . There’s strong relationships that form. . . [W]e all understand that we’re up against very powerful vested interests who have a lot of reach. . . it feels more like a mafia state that we’re up against and that’s never going to be easy. . . the healthy part of this is confronting what we’re really dealing with. . . [W]hat we’re doing is exposing state violence. . . the naïve idea that we’re living in. . . [an] authentic democracy where everybody’s got an equal say and equal vote and we’re going to do this by rational argument and once people understand the science, well, surely they’re going to act on it. That naïve position, it’s important to get beyond that. (Bob, March 2024)

For Bob, managing paranoia and sustaining political engagement required acceptance that police used surveillance techniques, which activists could never fully avoid:

I feel, psychologically, you can’t stay in this movement for that long if you allow yourself to get paranoid about the surveillance. The only thing that makes it feel comfortable is just to accept the risk of that. . . [otherwise it becomes] really chilling, oppressive, and not sure what conversations you can trust, so you’ve got to flip that. (Bob)

In Bob’s narrative, paranoia emerged as a corrective to naivety, which he defined as blindness to injurious economic structures. While a sense of anticipation of betrayal or being framed that appeared across accounts reflected persistent background suspicions, in several accounts, this could be overcome by redirecting these affects towards engagement with and negotiation of state power. Paranoia could make more tangible a partially visible state where power is rarely fully revealed, and helped to articulate injustice by giving it clearer political form, a way of making the macro legible in the everyday (see Barnwell, 2016).

Anxiety, based on uncertainty relating to possible bureaucratic punishment, was more strongly directed to relations with the state and police. Paranoia appeared through interpretations of partially visible power relations, in particular the state’s intentions to subvert political groups, but was also directed towards others in activist spaces. For this reason, this section examined how while in some accounts anxiety was linked with refusing to be the object of surveillance and claiming a political position during encounters with police, paranoia emerged more clearly as part of processes of analysing, rethinking and disavowing existing power dynamics. These findings portray how both affects could at times be appropriated as part of a refining and developing of critical analyses of forms of injustice carried out by the state. When both affects were directed at the state, and implicitly understood as a collective affective condition, their critical potential was articulated more clearly.

Discussion

The first empirical section addressed how the state’s framing of protesters, in particular climate activists, as threatening, and awareness of covert practices by police to monitor activist groups, reinforced feelings of anxiety about political action being criminalised. The uncertainty connected to the potential for this monitoring to appear in myriad forms also triggered paranoia. Uncertainty of when and how police surveillance might be taking place contributed to the circulation of suspicion among groups in relation to the anticipation of being watched by police, which could extend to ambivalence about trusting newcomers. Anxiety and paranoia both produced caution, though the latter was more likely to direct this to others in activist spaces compared to the former. The second section demonstrated some impacts of this for organisational dynamics, with the circulation of these affects associated with the ongoing significance of countersurveillance practices, referred to by some participants as ‘secrecy culture’. Suspicion, associated with the constant potential of police presence, often lacked a clearcut object: it might appear and attach to anyone in relation to possible presence of undercover officers. Paranoia was recognised by some as a negative, often damaging, affect that had to be managed, yet in some accounts emerged implicitly as a necessary form of vigilance against the constant potential for state monitoring, whether digital or material.

This ambivalence reflects what Ngai (2005) describes as the ‘remarkable capacity for duration’ that allows minor affects to persist without erupting in vividly visible ways (p. 7). The third section addressed how this unfixed, ambiguous quality allowed paranoia to be used for supporting critical readings of state policies. In some accounts, anxiety and unease were framed as symptomatic of policies to punish protesters, helping therein to more sharply understand power relations through lived experience. However, paranoia emerged more clearly as agentic in relation to interpreting the state and its protection of the status quo as unjust, a shared object of suspicion and distrust. This process can be understood as a form of appropriation – where affects circulating through repressive policing practices can be mobilised in ways that support collective efforts to challenge the latter.

Addressing interpretive agency is important when acknowledging that lived experience of contingent structures makes space for their reinterpretation, which has consequences for the extent to which they can be faithfully reproduced. The accounts suggested that, within circumstances emerging through state repression, participants were involved in producing critical readings of the social order by calibrating the movements of anxiety and paranoia in subtle ways. They therefore convey how agency appeared in ways that traversed and engaged rather than thwarted the presence of negative affects. Organising within political groups in these circumstances reflects the bind that Berlant (2011) describes in the difficulty of breaking from attachments to dominant structures and ways of being that are constraining and damaging but that overlap significantly with the forms of intelligibility within which transformation can take place. As Berlant (2011) conveys in readings of ordinary life under capitalism, economic norms that oppress people are also the conditions out of which appear subtly experimental forms of agency in response to demands of survival. Similarly, agency emerging in the context of surveillance and risk of criminalisation indicates the material restraints and power relations under which people acted.

Conclusion

The article argued that anxiety and paranoia emerged as part of the ground from which political agency appeared in the context of contemporary forms of activism. Both affects were linked with feelings of uncertainty and caution, with anxiety more associated with hesitation about how to participate in protest actions related to increased risks of criminalisation. Paranoia, traced in descriptions of suspicion, vigilance and guardedness in the context of possible police surveillance, was acknowledged as limiting but could also play a role in producing critical positions. These affects were part of interpretive processes through which negative feelings could be translated into ways of knowing about and resisting power relations. It is important to note that, given the relative lack of diversity among participants, with only two from racialised minorities, the role of race did not clearly emerge in interviews. As Ahmed (2014) outlines, atmospheres are not felt monolithically, bodies are seen through forms of difference, and corporeal experience of atmosphere is shaped by existing affective inscriptions. This is demonstrated in research on gendered and racialised dimensions of the movements of affects, including relating to surveillance (Browne, 2015). One participant referred to the persistence of anxiety for racialised groups relating to police attention, and another described racialising treatment by police during his involvement in a direct action. This dimension of experience was not addressed here given the limitation in the sample. However, the article demonstrated the appearance of agency and collective subjectivity in ways that reflect their entanglement with affective conditions of repression, where agency can be expressed through rather than erased by negative affects. Its sociological contribution is in insights into how paranoia and anxiety play a part not just in the policing of challenges to the status quo, but in sharpening activists’ interpretation and analyses of state power. It therefore highlights how affects emerging through repression of dissent can be both limiting and generative for political organising.