After the NoG20 Protests in Hamburg: Political, Legal, and Cultural Outcomes

Analyzing the political, legal, and cultural outcomes of the protests against the 2017 G20 Summit in Hamburg (the NoG20 protests), this thesis departs from the observation that violent protests may produce outcomes that seem counterintuitive at first sight. After the NoG20 protests, Hamburg’s government introduced a police identification statute that required officers to wear individually assigned codes during riot police operations. This was intended to make police more accountable to the public by allowing recognition of specific officers in cases of alleged misbehavior. This policy change seemed surprising, given that the heavy escalations of violence that characterized the protests were primarily attributed to the NoG20 activists, rather than to police. This thesis examines this seeming paradox from three different perspectives: first, from a policy-process perspective that reconstructs the decision in its temporal context; second, from a legal perspective that focuses on the interplay of political decision-making and judicial review of the occurrences; and third, from a discourse-oriented perspective that analyzes changes in the discursive opportunity structure associated with the NoG20 protests. The overall analysis indicates that protests may have multiple outcomes that a) may be interlinked, b) may both constrain and enable collective and legislative action, c) may be unintended by both collective and institutional actors, and d) should be analyzed in their historical context, as they may be the result of processes that began well before a given protest. This thesis finds that the decision to introduce a police identification statute was the outcome of a complex meaning-making process—a series of “struggles over credibility” between state authorities and NoG20 activists as well as their supporters that were played out in various arenas, including parliament, the media, and the courts. The findings suggest that rather than “triggering” change or adding entirely new topics to decision-makers’ agendas, the NoG20 protests functioned as a “focusing event,” a “catalyst” for change, intervening in ongoing, long-term processes. In terms of methodology, this thesis contributes to the literature by demonstrating that a processual approach that pays particular attention to temporal sequence and the dynamic interactions among collective actors and other actors can help to address one of the major challenges of outcome research—to establish a link between collective action and an observed outcome. On the conceptual level, the thesis contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it demonstrates that moving beyond the “success” or “failure” understanding that is particularly dominant in policy-related outcome research can help overcome some of the field’s shortcomings and broaden its analytical scope as it draws our attention to potentially new phenomena, including the unintended effects of collective action. Second, it benefits our understanding of the outcomes of both collective action—violent or not—and repression by viewing outcomes as “snapshots” (i.e., intermediate results of a process in which change is still underway). Finally, it potentially helps to resolve some of the inconsistencies inherent in particular research on the effects of repression by promoting understanding of the temporality inherent in state responses to collective action, whether they are legal or political.