Tear Gas ─ From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today

Chemical weapons are banned from war zones. But today, tear gas has become the most commonly used form of “less-lethal” police force. In 2011, the year that protests exploded from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, tear gas sales tripled. The majority of tear gas is producted in the United States, and many images of protestors in Tahrir Square showed tear gas canisters with “Made in USA” printed on them. Police in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson deployed tear gas to disperse crowds protesting the killing of the unarmed teenager Michael Brown, while the yellow umbrellas that Hong Kong protestors used to shield themselves from these chemicals became an international symbol of resistance.

One hundred years ago, French troops fired tear-gas grenades into German trenches along the border between the two countries. Designed to force people out from behind barricades and trenches, tear gas causes burning of the eyes and skin, tearing, and gagging. As Amos Fries, chief of the US Army’s Chemical Warfare Service, put it in 1928, “It is easier for man to maintain morale in the face of bullets than in the presence of invisible gas.” 

In an engrossing century-spanning narrative, Tear Gas is the first history of this deadly poison, and takes us from military labs and chemical weapons expos to union assemblies and protest camps, drawing on declassified reports and witness testimonies to show how policing with poison came to be. More

Anna Feigenbaum is co-author of the book Protest Camps, and her work has appeared inVice, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera America, The Guardian,Salon, Financial Times, Open Democracy, New Internationalist, andWaging Nonviolence. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. Her website is www.annafeigenbaum.com. Follow her on Twitter: @drfigtree.