This book has focused on eco-justice activism during the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing its policing and social control, as well as the transformative potential borne by its visual and performative practices of resistance. Drawing on an extensive ethnography of two eco-justice movements in the northern Italian city of Trento, this book has shown how the policing of eco-justice protest intensified during the pandemic, involving the deployment of larger numbers of police personnel and containment measures – the latter mostly to protect buildings symbolizing power and soon-tobe construction sites operated by private companies. Protest policing practices predicated on the maximizing of police visibility are in themselves not new: they have also been used by the police to police ‘transgressive’ protest before the pandemic. However, they were never used with that intensity against the two movements under study in spite of them being considered problematic by the police long before the pandemic began. Protest policing strategies like the ones described in this book help construct protesters as ‘enemies’ to be feared and legitimize the enhanced police control of activists, with their reach potentially extending to the pandemic aftermath.

The book has also demonstrated how, in Trento, governing eco-justice protest involved making activists and their grievances less visible to the public eye, including by displacing protesters outside the city centre. The book argued that such displacement mostly had an economic reasoning underpinning it: that of protecting local businesses from unwelcome protestrelated disruptions. Such reasoning is not unique to Trento's public order governance. As mentioned earlier in this book, other cities in Italy and Europe, and even whole countries, have also recently tightened their regulations on public protesting to safeguard the local economy from potentially disrupting mobilizations.

Even when their protests are displaced outside the urban centre, activists can always find ways to keep their grievances in public sight. For example, activists can march in the city centre in spite of the denied police permission, as the SC campaign did during my fieldwork (see Chapter One). Activists can also use social media to convey their otherwise-unheard messages (see, for example, Di Ronco et al, 2019; Ismangil and Lee, 2021) and populate the city with markers of visual resistance, including flags, graffiti, stickers and stencils, among other things (see Chapter Three).