Abstrakt
Recent socio-cultural anthropology of resistance understands protests as a practice of prefigurative democracy. Movements like alter-globalization movements or Occupy prefigure during protest democratic practices which embody as much as echo upcoming/future societal reorganization.
But during my long-term ethnographic research with Black Bloc militants from Germany, it came up that this understanding needs an extension. Democracy is not so much prefigured in activities such as riots or direct actions, but the actually existing democratic order is reaffirmed, reestablished and even expands through varied repressive, preventive, legal, discursive, corrective protest management practices operated mostly by the state.
These practices compose so called technologies of political normalization which constantly perpetuate actually existing order through cultivating the crucial border between democratic citizens on one side and political extremists and deviants on the other. My paper explores this border with an ethnographic detail and argues that one can analyze power through studies of resistance as seen in an understanding of protest as a site of reestablishment and expansion of actually existing democracy.