Controlling spaces to control dissent: A psychosocial analysis of WTO and G8 Protests

The aim of the presentation is to highlight psychosocial processes through which the institutions use the concession or the denial of access to urban public spaces as a strategy for control and negate forms of protest by the citizens . Moving from the thematic literature on the topic of institutional violence and the right to public spaces access, we will focus on some key assumptions: • spaces became places when something is acted and a specific meaning is attributed, acknowledged and socially shared ; • public space is where democracy is constructed ; • some democratic forms of dissent are acted through the use of spaces. This implies that, if the access to certain places is systematically denied, this take the form of silencing or negating alternative narratives-voices and democracy itself. The narrative of protest seems to always be discording with the public narrative, an anomaly that confuses, an extra-event, the deviance that must be controlled for an urban place to be called “public”. As protests are event perceived a priori as violent and disorderly, they should be ordered in order to remain public. When given ways of performing behaviours within a space are normed, the implicit pact between citizens and institutions is broken: the ones who should defend the right to dissent, are the ones who control and discourage it. Such situations can generate a “Psychopolitical trauma ”, when citizens experience an irreconcilable break with the institutions, a deep feeling of injustice, paradoxically perpetrated by the ones who should protect them and grant for their rights. The presentation will focus on two specific events from the recent Western history: protests during the G7 summit in Seattle (1999) and during the G8 in Genova (2001), when structural violence quickly escalated to explicit violence.