Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

86 States fight back
hair, infringement of legal rights, loss of personal property, inadequate
medical attention and misapplied deportation orders (Notes From Nowhere
2003). Five days after the raid on 25 July 2001, 90 of the 93 people initially
reported as detained were released on grounds of wrongful arrest.
At the time of writing these events remain the subject of an on-going trial
of 28 police, Carabinieri and revenue guards alleged to have been involved
in the raid. Those charged include Fransesco Gratteri who was subsequently
promoted to become head of the police ‘anti-terrorist unit’. Italian interior
Minister Giuseppe Pisnau welcomed the trial as in everyone’s interests
‘above all the police’ who he was confident would ‘be able to confront
and overcome even this test’ (The Guardian 13.12.04, p. 13). Further legal
action over alleged police brutality at a detention camp at Bolzanetto, used
after the main protest, reached a preliminary hearing in January 2005. The
47 named defendants included senior police, doctors, nurses and prison
guards including General Oronzo Doria. General Doria was promoted to
head Italy’s penitentiary guards, a force involved in the raid on the Diaz
school, after events in Genoa. Prosecution charges include the enforced
chanting of songs praising Mussolini and Pinochet, although torture
charges cannot be brought as Italian law lacks any relevant provisions. The
protracted nature of Italian legal proceedings makes it unclear whether the
cases will ever come to trial as the Italian parliament considers legislation
which would reduce the time available for legal action following an alleged
offence. Such legislation would exempt President Burlusconi from outstanding
charges relating to corruption (The Guardian 27.1.05, p. 17).
In the public sphere the complexity underlying the Genoa protests was
apparently reduced to law and order issues but this appearance conceals the
wider social responses sedimented at day-to-day levels. In line with precedents
established in ‘the south’ 19 marginal social groups in Genoa were
‘cleansed’ before the summit to present a positive urban image. As part of
this drive to conceal unsightly aspects of daily life (street prostitution) citizens
were also instructed not to hang laundry on the lines criss-crossing the
narrow streets. As the clashes in Genoa intensified, more and more washing
lines were bedecked with ‘pants’. In Havellian terms, these citizens of
Genoa were ‘living in truth’, symbolically declaring that the official edict to
cleanse the public sphere in the name of capitalism was ‘pants’.
The ‘siege of the signs’ identified as a major strategy of engagement in 1996
was responded to by the use of ‘decisive force’ in Genoa. Subsequent summit
sieges continued to be frustrated by the selection of remote heavily defended
locations. Police actions continued to jeopardise the lives of activists 20
increasing the sense of being at risk through participation. The decline in
summit actions can be explained in part through the adoption of more
extreme forms of policing but even in Italy the use of force has not blunted
the process of movement capacity building. Summit sieges were only part of
the network of networks activities and the founding of geo-regional social
forums has provided a focus for proactive nomadic mobility. Florence hosted