Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the social control of protesters in four contexts: a) the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto, b) the 2012 Quebec student protests, c) the removal of Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park (2011), and d) the protests prior to the 2014 Fifa World Cup Final in Rio de Janeiro.

Paper long abstract:

Despite the reference in the anthropological, criminological and socio-legal imaginary to expressions such as the "criminalization of social movements", quite often quite often the social reaction processes mobilized to control protesters is unrelated to criminalization. The control of the new social movements changed drastically in the last decades, arguably since the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, and local authorities referred to (special) regulatory regimes as an alternative to criminal justice. This paper aims at exploring penal configurations mobilized in the control of protesters in four different contexts: a) the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto, b) the 2012 Quebec student protests, c) the removal of Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park (2011), and d) the protests prior to the 2014 Fifa World Cup Final in Rio de Janeiro. The social reaction to these events provides interesting insights not only on the uses of non criminal regimes in the securitization of great events, but also on how penal institutions may rearrange in given contexts, with more or less emphasis on different normative systems (military, copyright, by-laws, regulatory and even criminal law). I argue that there is an increasing use of administrative dispositifs that operate through low standards of evidence and a certain shrinking of criminal adjudication, even when criminal law is used. In that sense, I problematize the rationalities of such administrative regimes and the degradation of rights involved in such hybrid penal configurations as the legal guarantees present in one regime is not necessarily equivalent to the other.