Mapping #NoG20
Because of its complexity, the escalation of violence in the context of protests against the G20 summit in Hamburg in 2017 is difficult to grasp. To understand what happened, we must not only reconstruct the logic of action and interactions between various heterogeneous groups of actors but also how the protests developed in time and space and the situational dynamics of violent incidents.
The Mapping #NoG20 project is based on a detailed and data-saturated documentation of events to analyze, with the help of examples, which conditions led to violence and how these were framed and woven into competing narratives. The project aims to contribute to a better understanding of escalation dynamics in the context of protest events from a perspective of social science. At the same time, the publication of research findings in various forms, including an interactive website, is meant to support the fact-based public discussion of these events.
The project is being conducted by a network of scholars who work in research on social movements, protest, political violence, and police activities under the umbrella of the independent Institute for Social Movement Studies (ipb), the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (HIS), and the Center for Technology and Society (ZTG) at Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) in cooperation with ZEIT ONLINE. To ensure that researchers from different disciplines and using different methodological approaches will be able to use the data, data collection is being designed and carried out in cooperation with all researchers in this consortium. Information sources include interviews, press coverage, eyewitness reports, posts on social media, and official documents. In collaboration with ZEIT ONLINE, a concept has been developed to link and visualize important data electronically and to make information on the events accessible for further investigation.
Dr. Stefan Malthaner (HIS), Dr. Simon Teune (ipb/TU Berlin), and Dr. Dr. Peter Ullrich (ipb/ZTG) are the project’s coordinators. Prof. Donatella della Porta (Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence), Prof. Dieter Rucht (Berlin Social Science Center, WBZ), Prof. Wolfgang Knöbl (Hamburg Institute for Social Research), Prof. Rafael Behr (Police Academy in Hamburg) and Prof. Wilhelm Heitmeyer (Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, Bielefeld) make up the project’s advisory board. A list of the researchers involved is posted on the project’s website at IPB. The project is funded by the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Research and Culture, the Zeit Foundation, and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.