Contested Urban Spaces: Justification Regimes in the Berlin 'Wagenplatz' Protest

The negotiation processes within social movements can be understood as potentially ambiguous situations of contention, where antagonistic actors clash with conflicting perceptions and demands. At the same time, they seek legitimacy for their arguments in order to attract fellow campaigners and to push their agenda in political arenas. In this context, the model of justification by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (1991) offers largely untapped potential for social movement research. It provides a theoretically informed framework for analyzing how participating actors justify their positions in disputes and thereby contributes to deeper insights into the conditions for movements’ success. Regimes of justification, as defined by Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), are universal forms of justification that actors use to make normative claims in conflicts. Each regime is based on an overarching principle, serving as a central criterion of judgment, and encompasses ideas of what is considered desirable as well as how fair evaluations are determined. Using the example of the dispute about the eviction of a ‘Wagenplatz’ in Berlin, we demonstrate the applicability of the model of justification regimes in the context of protests and social movements. We argue that this approach allows us to systematically capture the diversity of potential justifications and to categorize them into a limited number of justification regimes. Our analysis reveals that the activists protesting to preserve the ‘Wagenplatz’ deal with a variety of different justifications. Such justifications sometimes conflict and successful social movements have to find ways to synchronize the justifications in order to develop sustainable tactics and strategies. A recurring pattern that helps synchronization consists of an emphasis on the market regime and critiques of its inappropriate application to the constitution of urban space. However, forms of justification are not exclusively employed by social movement actors: The antagonistic actor, a group of real estate companies, adopts a strategy of silence. Consequently, our analysis underscores the value of justification regimes in social movement research, not only to understand the justifications used by actors but also to explore the strategic role of conflicting justification regimes as reflections of potential normative cleavages within societies.