German riot police confront protest against the G20 summit in Hamburg, on July 6, 2017. Omer Messinger/Press Association. All rights reserved. Anyone who wishes to discuss the multiple world crises with the most important heads of state should not be surprised that global civil society wants to take part in the discussions. But summits don't provide for such participation, nor do they facilitate it. Quite the contrary.
This is why protests are building up transnationally. They are driven by the assumption that the decision-makers gathered at the summit are trying to solve problems which they are largely responsible for in the first place. As representative intersections of all the problems in the world, summits thus represent the ultimate platform of resistance. As a result, and as witnessed in Hamburg, an almost unsolvable and equally representative antagonism develops.
What logics are at work?
After the horror scenes of the G8 summit in Genoa (including a murder and several cases of torture and rape) summits were not supposed to take place in big cities any more. Rather, they were to be relocated to rural, remote locations that are comparatively easier to control – also with regard to their media coverage. Hence, the big shock among civil society actors when it was announced that Angela Merkel was planning a G20 Summit in Hamburg.
