Framing Activists as “Mafia”: The Criminalization of Housing and Neighborhood Protests in Italy

In this chapter we will focus on the disturbing establishment of a frame of “mafia” to criminalize housing activism in Italy, within the growing trend of framing activist groups as “organized crime” in several EU countries. We will focus on a recent case happened in Milan, where a group of housing activists in the peripheral neighborhood of Giambellino-Lorenteggio have been sentenced up to five years of imprisonment, after the Courts declared that their pro-housing network was an “associazione a delinquere”, an association to “commit crime”. The strategic use of a language of mafia and organized crime shows how the increased repression of dissent in a time of crisis may result into a shift in legal categories and frames of meaning that goes well beyond the intention that was behind their establishment.