Pedestrians in Geneva walk past the boarded-up windows of a shop days before leaders arrive, the glass replaced by plywood that assumes what has not yet happened.
The summit itself brings tight security, not as a reaction but as a precondition. Authorities are not waiting to see whether violent protest occur; they are organizing the city as if it already has. That decision moves the line between anticipation and response, and once moved, it does not easily return.
At the border with France, police officers check people crossing into Geneva. The checks are specific, physical, and immediate. They turn movement into something that must be justified. The summit is still days away, but the infrastructure of suspicion is already in place, and it applies before any act has been committed.
Preparation becomes its own justification before any event unfolds
Workers board up a shop window in daylight, performing a calculation about risk that does not wait for confirmation. The cost of preparation is accepted as rational; the absence of damage would not make the boarding unnecessary in retrospect. It would confirm the logic that produced it.
That logic has precedent. In Hamburg, insurers counted the aftermath of a summit and found the cost of the damage caused by street battles between protesters and police may come in at about 12 million euros. Shop owners there went further, seeking 18 million euros in compensation after food markets and shops were looted and severely damaged. Those figures do not describe violence as an aberration. They fix it as a line item.
The memory of that accounting sharpens the present. Swiss authorities are not only hosting a meeting; they are managing a scenario in which protest, damage, and compensation are already part of the expected sequence. The summit is due to take place in Evian-les-Bains, where the upcoming G7 summit is due to take place June 15-17, but the consequences are already distributed across Geneva’s streets and its border crossings.
Once expectations harden, dissent itself is recast as a threat
Once preparation absorbs the expectation of disruption, it begins to shape how dissent itself is defined. The shift is visible elsewhere: pro-Palestine protesters are increasingly portrayed as security threats, and police violence is normalised alongside it. The classification comes first; the response follows with less resistance because it has been framed as necessary.
The framing is not isolated to policing. It sits within a broader pattern in which institutions apply their own standards unevenly. The same Europe that has rightly embraced Ukrainian refugees is also engaged in illegal pushbacks against those from war-stricken countries in the global south. The distinction is not procedural; it is selective.
At the institutional level, that selectivity extends further. The same EU institutions that are talking to the Taliban about deportations have spent more than two years doing little to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The divergence does not need to be reconciled internally to function externally. It only needs to be applied.
Selective application abroad returns home in the management of protest
Politicians reinforce the pattern in their responses. Those who speak passionately about defending the rules-based international order when it comes to Ukraine have responded meekly to the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran, and reduced other confrontations to little more than diplomatic theatre even when European citizens on Gaza aid flotillas are detained, mistreated and humiliated. The inconsistency is not hidden; it is sustained.
These are not identical cases, but they are connected by a common EU willingness to engage in a selective application of its rules and principles depending on who is affected. That willingness does not remain contained within foreign policy. It returns home in the way protest is anticipated and managed.
History has already mapped the trajectory. Once exceptions become normal, they acquire a momentum of their own. The boarding of windows, the checks at borders, and the classification of protesters as threats are not discrete measures. They are stages in a process that feeds on its own justification.
In Geneva, the plywood goes up before the first chant. The police checks begin before the first confrontation. The summit has not opened, but the response to its imagined disruption is already operational. What is being secured is not only the safety of leaders in Evian-les-Bains. It is the normalization of treating the expectation of dissent as sufficient cause for restriction, a condition that no longer requires the protests it was built to contain.
