Authoritarian Turn and Temporal Control: Policing Strategies Against Emancipatory Movements in Spain

This article investigates the authoritarian turn of the Spanish state through three key policing strategies: hypervigilance, institutional racism and spatial control. Using a theoretical framework on temporalities and social movements, the study examines how these state tactics aim to dismantle the counter-temporalities that social movements attempt to construct in contestation to the capitalist timescape. The analysis traces the temporal dimensions of these policing strategies by focusing on how hyper-surveillance (through technologies of surveillance and infiltration), institutional racism (moral panic and persecution against racialised groups and specific protests such as Pro-Palestine) and spatial control (evictions and collaborations with far-right groups such as Desokupa) function as mechanisms to reinforce a capitalist hegemonic temporality. These state strategies are designed to accelerate and rigidify a capitalist timescape, obstructing the articulation of alternative, emancipatory temporalities. This research also delves into the temporal dimensions of social movement praxis, exploring how movements engage in temporal resistance through the creation of counter-temporalities. These counter-temporalities emerge from practices aimed at slowing down, disrupting, or reclaiming temporal spaces for political action, such as extended occupations or prolonged mobilisations. The study highlights how these temporal interventions challenge the state's attempt to normalise a singular and authoritarian temporality. The methodology consists of discursive and documentary analysis of state narratives, official reports, and social movement publications, complemented by semi-structured interviews with activists and experts, and supported by secondary quantitative data (on arrests, infiltrations, and eviction statistics). The findings illustrate how state policing strategies create a temporal framework that hinders social movements efforts to sustain emancipatory practices over time, but also reveal how movements resist by subverting imposed temporalities and reclaiming time as a site of political contestation and battlefield.