The most common view sees anti-capitalist/anti-globalisation protests as events at which protestors may on one hand more or less freely express their dissatisfaction with the current prevailing economic and socio-political system but which are, on the other hand, designated as sites of the violent and therefore inappropriate, even dangerous behaviour of participants. Through this double-bind, also being the starting point of the paper, we analyse whether such protests, as allegedly subversive events, can present some kind of a new democratic paradigm with the potential to break with the currently prevailing global coexistence of capitalism and liberal democracy. The central analytical question is analysed using Foucault's Gouvernementalité concept, through the interpretation of protest policing. We understand the latter as a strategy of constituting specific modes of subjectivities through which the entrepreneurial individual is shaped. The appearance and conduct of the police at protests are in this sense inherent to the neoliberalisation of social spaces and relations.
|
