DESCRIPCION DE PUESTOS

The physical features of each fence revealed the fears, predictions, expertise, expense, and technical skill involved in the overall security efforts at each summit. Fences both constrained and created possibilities for action, and the physical construction of fences mattered for the range of such possibilities. For example, the fence in Quebec City in 2001 made surmounting it possible:

50_{The reporter noted that Rostock Zoo and Hamburg Airport had put in bids to buy the “second-hand}

barrier” after the G8 Summit, signaling an additional market for fencing companies plugged into the protest security market.

51_{One of the first actions carried out in Heilingdamm was a street theater piece at the fence in which}

activists dressed up as bolt-cutters and lined up against the fence; several were arrested (Connolly 2007). (More on the fence as a prop for activist theater below.)

84 Photo by Stephan Savoia/AP (Source: Time 2001)

As did certain sections of the fence in Scotland in 2005:

(Source: Harvie et al. 2005, 11)

(Source: Caffentzis 2005, 57)

The location of each fence mattered as well for possibilities for action, for example, the rural location of much of the fencing in Scotland inspired dramatic protest theater in hay fields among cows and farmhouses, whereas most fence-focused activity at other summits took place in major urban intersections.

Ordering the protest experience

In addition to the strictly physical features of fences, the various roles they played within the larger policing strategy of each summit also directly shaped experiences of “being fenced”. Before fences became regular fixtures of summit security regimes, policing was often unpredictable, terrifyingly so in some cases. Especially after the pre-emptive and totally unexpected (and totally illegal, it turned out) mass arrest in April of 2000, in

Washington, D.C. on the day before the main demonstrations against the IMF and World Bank, the fear of being suddenly rounded up and arrested, or just picked off the sidewalk by police for no apparent reason, was always present; several activists described it to me as a feeling of being “hunted”. One story I was told by several different activists involved a small group of women walking together down the sidewalk in D.C. the day before the main march. The woman nearest the street was talking on her cell phone when a police car pulled up suddenly. Two officers jumped out, grabbed her, and pushed her into the police car; she

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was later released without charges, but was held “under suspicion of planning illegal activity with a cell phone.”

Another example of police unexpectedly rounding up activists was on the day after the largest demonstrations in Prague in 2000, when smaller marches were happening all over the central city, including a 7:00 am march to the police station to protest the previous day’s arrests. At one point, part of the march was suddenly surrounded and penned in by police. The protesters were forcibly contained by a large circle of officers, isolated from the rest of the march; the division between those trapped and those outside the trap appeared completely arbitrary to me. Other activists proceeded to surround the police, performing street theater, chanting, filming and taking photos, and demanding that the trapped activists be released. Meanwhile, I was watching the next street over fill with police, police cars, police buses, and German shepherd police dogs, and I was sure the build up of forces meant that those of us nearby were targets for the next round up. But after what felt like two extremely tense hours, the police finally released the trapped activists without

explanation, and the group rejoined the much larger crowd gathered in Namesti Miru plaza down the street. (This event was later celebrated as a successful “unarrest”.)

Anxieties about being suddenly attacked by police were also more common in summit settings with direct and intense confrontations between police and protesters. For example, I was part of several clashes with police in D.C. in which officers were trying to clear crowds of seated protesters from intersections by forcibly grabbing protesters’ arms and hair, using batons to lift/beat them to a standing position, and using pepper spray directly in their eyes and faces. But these direct clashes with police were far less common in D.C. and afterwards than they were in Seattle, where unmediated hand-to-hand (or boot to groin, bullhorn to bullhorn, or gun to body, etc.) combat was a primary policing tactic:

Photo by Thomas James Hurst (Source: Seattle Times 2000)

88 Photo by Harley Soltes (Source: Seattle Times 2000)

Seattle Times caption: King County Sheriff's officers threaten protesters with rubber bullets after firing tear gas into the crowd that had taken over the intersection of 4th Avenue and Union.

These kinds of direct encounters with police in Seattle and elsewhere were complemented, of course by those mediated by teargas, tanks, stun grenades, and rubber bullets, all of which persisted as common policing tools along with fences at later summit protests. Several activists shared with me in conversation that one good thing about a fence is that it made police more predictable; my own experience corroborates this (though surely those in Genoa during the 2001 G8 meetings would disagree)52_{. Referring to her experience} in Miami, one activist explained to me it this way:

The fence provided a clear sense of where to go; it set up a destination. It kind of established the rules of the game. Being away from the fence felt riskier because there was a sense of the unknown; there were laws about gathering in groups, and we didn’t know what police would do.

By ordering the physical space of a summit protest more clearly, fences had the capacity to reduce anxieties about being under heavy surveillance everywhere and always, vulnerable to being “nabbed” at any moment in any location. For example, once across the border into Canada for the 2001 protests in Quebec City, I didn’t feel a lot of anxiety about being caught totally off guard by police (even though the most high-profile police snatch happened during those protests53_{). As mentioned above, police primarily attacked protesters from the} opposite side of the fence, using it as a shield.

52_{In my own experience, I had grown so accustomed to the fence being the most intense zone of}

contact with police that when I went to the G8 Summit in Scotland in 2005, I decided to engage only in activities away from the fence because I was nearly five months pregnant. In other words, I used distance from the fence as my measure of personal safety.

53_{Jaggi Singh, a prominent Canadian anarchist activist was suddenly grabbed by undercover police}

officers from within the middle of a crowd gathered near the fence, and dragged into a waiting van; he was held for seventeen days. The charges against him were eventually dropped. (Fieldnotes, April 21, 2001; Klein 2002, 141-143)

90 (Source: Milstein 2001)

Here police were shooting water cannons from inside the fence to force “fence decorators” on the other side away from their project.

But even with this distance, and even without a pervasive feeling of being hunted, police in Quebec City engaged in many actions I would describe as belligerent, even reckless. For example, twice I saw police toss teargas canisters directly into the laps of protesters who were occupying narrow streets, fully seated, in tightly packed groups. On one occasion, I was standing directly behind a large group of seated protesters in a narrow alley when a line of cops in full riot gear entered the alley all of a sudden; before giving people a chance to move away, they shot teargas directly and at extremely close range—maybe 2 meters— into the laps of the people seated (an extremely dangerous tactic). Nobody could get out fast enough to escape the gas, which remained concentrated for a long time due to the smallness of the alley as we groped and gasped our way out. Experiences like this were traumatic for many people, especially those who weren’t accustomed to hostile encounters with police officers54_{. Despite the distance between police and protesters created by security fences in} many instances, and the greater predictability in police behavior fences generated in some settings, I am not suggesting that they ensured, in general, safety from police aggression (as evidenced also in Miami in 2003, and especially in Genoa in 2001).

54_{After the FTAA summit, there were dozens of accounts from youth and students who protested}

there for the first time and reported on their shock at police treatment (e.g., see Elmer and Opel 2008). One Canadian student protester I interviewed said their whole notion of what police are for was “turned upside down” in Quebec City.

One other aspect of activists’ experience of being fenced out during summit protests that I will just mention briefly was being emboldened to act aggressively towards police on the other side of a fence. For example, one activist I was with in Quebec City, who I will call Tony, was becoming increasingly infuriated about the teargas, the rubber bullets, and the police presence generally. He began taunting a group of police officers on the other side of the fence, shouting at them in a way that he might not have had there not been a fence between us and them. “You gettin’ a little OT!? Yeah!? You like the OT!?!” In this sense, the fence served not only to shield police from activists, but activists from police, encouraging more directly offensive behavior towards police by minimizing the risk of retaliation. Fencing in the Delegates

Protests, and protest policing, had a significant impact, of course, on the delegates, politicians, and support staff who traveled to attend summit meetings. For example, as mentioned above, political officials and delegates in Seattle were trapped in their hotel rooms and prevented from attending official WTO events because of mass protests in the streets. In other examples, several trade ministers and other officials had to spend the night inside the World Bank building in D.C. the night before the meetings in April of 2000; in Prague the following September, many of the meeting participants were trapped inside the Palace of Culture and then had to be secretly shuttled out on the underground public transit system, which was closed to the public for several hours for this purpose; and in Quebec City in 2001, as described above, meetings were delayed by teargas that was shot at protesters but carried by the wind into the air-conditioning system inside the building where delegates were supposed to meet. While security fences enabled more freedom of movement inside the protected area for those attending the summit meetings, this freedom had limits.

Most locations chosen for summit meetings are chosen, in part, because they are desirable places to visit. They are typically tourist destinations, with interesting buildings and scenery to appreciate, historical sites to visit, and recreational activities to experience.

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During some summits, however, being inside the fence must have felt like being in a police state, contained by the fence for one’s protection, prevented from fully experiencing the place. In 2005 ahead of the G8 Summit in Scotland, Tony Blair was interviewed on Sky News and then quoted widely on activist websites saying that most leaders would be happy to be in a “modest little place where we can mix with lots of people in a town and be able to meet the people whose concerns we're talking about.” He continued,

The problem is you get these small groups of international anarchists who just, I’m afraid, wreck the place. And therefore you have to have the security. It's a common myth that the leaders all love the fact that we've got to have, you know, a fence of steel around us and all the rest of it. We hate it. Most of us would prefer to be in a situation where we could engage with people. If you were to hold this in Edinburgh, which would have been fantastic, it would have brought the whole city to a halt. (Gipfelsoli 2005)

The impact of security fences on the experience of those attending summits became a focus for some activists early on in the post-Seattle period.

In a spirit of Situationist “détournement” (Debord 1995) many activists played with the notion that summit meeting participants were being “caged”.

Photo by Ken Gould (Source: Gould 2001)

With the first full perimeter fence in Quebec City, activists joked about the state spending huge amounts of money for fences that, in effect, trapped the global rulers and created a free zone for everyone else in the city. One announcement that circulated on several activist listservs (e.g., Anarchy-list, April 19, 2000) proposed that FTAA stood for “Fantastic Times for Anarchist Activists,” and explained this action plan:

It's simple. While most of our people - local, Quebec City resident ANARCHIST BLACK BLOC card carrying members are securing the enormous, FREE ZONE outside the official walled off SECURITY PERIMETER, the rest of us will focus our forces to

immobilize and apprehend the trapped members of the despised Ruling Class and their thousands of lackeys and armed bodyguards.

By 2005, this notion was elaborated more fully in the lead up to the G8 summit in Scotland that year with the plans—circulated on listservs and in pamphlets—for “Operation “H.A.H.A.H.A.A.”:

The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA) has been giggling

uncontrollably since we heard about a unique opportunity arising amidst the sadness of the world. For three sweet Scottish summer days (July 6-8), we will be given a

extraordinary chance to put an end to the misery of injustice, an end to the violence of greed and war, an end to the destruction of our lives and planet by those who prioritize money over love, life and laughter.

The leaders of the eight richest realms have their own exclusive and very important little club known as the G8, where they plan cunning ways to keep big corporations and very rich people very happy. This July they are coming to the Gleneagles luxury hotel, where they will pretend to sort out the problems of our planet while drinking chilled

champagne, eating scrumptious banquets, playing genteel rounds of golf, renewing their vows to the gods of the market and of course, refusing to see that their solutions to global problems are actually part of the problem.

CIRCA has always dreamt of getting the most dangerous men in the world together in one place (our big top?), distracting them with tea, cakes and silly games and then building big fences around them so they couldn't escape. We think we would all be a lot safer without the likes of George Bush, Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi, Vladimir Putin and Jacques Chirac loose in the world.

But even if we had got them into our big top we would never have been able to afford very tall sparkling fences toped with shinny razor wire or have thousands of policemen on hand in spanking new outfits with exciting toys like Belgian water cannons (oh! – sigh Rebel clowns, drool at the thought of playing with one of those) to keep guard and make sure they didn't break out.

This summer our dream will come true thanks to the great efforts of half of Scotland's police force who have kindly volunteered to build special high fences and enclose these dangerous men in a safe place where they will no longer be a threat to the world. To celebrate this propitious event, CIRCA is launching operation H.A.H.A.H.A.A (Helping Authorities House Arrest Half-witted Authoritarian Androids) during which we will do

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everything we can to help the security forces keep the G8 under indefinite house arrest (or rather luxury hotel arrest). (CIRCA 2005)

The notion of ‘locking them up for their crimes’ to protect greater society from the threats posed by political leaders suggested that fences could themselves become a physical liability to those inside, beyond the inconveniences and disappointments they already created.

E. Performing the Divide: The fence as a stage and a prop for performing resistance