Criminalising activist spaces: Privatisation, public order, and moral order

Drawing on critical criminology, this chapter analyses how the criminalisation of squatting was intertwined with economic and political interests reinforcing processes of hyper-commodification of urban spaces and the protection of private property rights. It argues that in the context of the criminalisation of squatting, security technologies were combined with moral landscapes: namely regulatory strategies and legal–moral ordering practices. The analysis of the criminalisation of squatting in the Netherlands aims at uncovering the complex process of criminalisation of squatting alongside and beyond its juridical apparatuses, focusing on the complex interplay between the different forces mobilised to enforce legal, political, and moral imperatives. The chapter also argues that the criminalisation of practices of resistance and of activists’ spaces served not only the affirmation of private property and capitalist modes of production, but also a more subtle creation of domesticated subjectivities and communities, as to turn them into easy subjects to manage, to control, and to govern.