"Hospitable" Protest: Tactics of Resistance and Movement Inflation

Abstract

The article is dedicated to non-conventional protest tactics used by citizens to gain their "right to the city", that is to say normalisation of their status. The normative system reproduces conventional styles of political forms, which also shapes the modes of protest activity. Traditional protests usually put forward a list of requirements addressed to a specific agent, this is usually one of the authoritative bodies in the area. Recent practices confirm that such forms of demonstrations turn out to be ineffective due to the fact that people’s discontent stems from structural problems, whose solution is impossible within the existing political and economic systems. This paper presents a case study of protest in Kyiv’s Gostynnyi Dvirin 2012, which was a struggle primarily for public space and spatial justice. The half-year long operation of the so-called "Hospitable Republic" showed that a protest against public space commercialization could act as a complex movement of resistance, especially when it refuses to adopt a narrow identity and take on traditional forms of public protest. Qualitative content analysis of the representation of the "Hospitable Republic" in Ukrainian newspapers and TV-news shows how an event, which violates normativity, is neutralized through describing it with the usual taxonomies. Three types of newspapers and TV-channels taken for this analysis represent different parts of the Ukrainian political sphere in the media and three different attitudes in regard to the protest: there is the pro-government media that ignores the "Hospitable Re-public", neutral media that seeks to represent both parts of the conflict, and the oppositional media that prioritizes protest voices. Despite providing different pieces of information on the issue in question, all the media outlets acted within the confines of conventional ways of representation, and, by doing so, contributed to the end of the "Hospitable Republic". It is through these representations that the movement turned in a mere conflict of interests, presented as an issue to be solved by legal means and governmental decisions. Subsequently, having abandoned this transgression of standards, the protest movement legitimized the existing system and contributed to its reproduction.