When global politics reaches the shop window
In Geneva this week, some of the most interesting public affairs messages are not coming from a podium, a press room or an official communiqué. They are fixed to plywood.
Across parts of the city, shopfronts have disappeared behind wooden boards ahead of the G7 summit in Évian. On one of them, a small blue sign reads: “Ici nous créons de l’emploi.”Here, we create jobs.
A few streets away, Papeterie Brachard has taken a more poetic route: “Ici on vend du papier et des stylos, de quoi écrire l’histoire et faire la paix.” Here, we sell paper and pens, enough to write history and make peace.
Both signs are funny, in their own way. Both are also doing something serious.
The G7 is taking place across the lake, in France. The leaders will meet in Évian. The agenda will be global. The choreography will be diplomatic. Yet Geneva is already living part of the summit’s consequences at street level: border restrictions, security measures, transport disruption, protest planning, business anxiety, and the strange sight of a city center preparing itself for possible damage.
The boards are there to protect windows. But the words placed on them go further. Beyond the “please do not break our glass” message, they are saying: look at what we contribute. We employ people.
In moments of tension, organizations often think first about protection: shutters, security, protocols, legal lines, scenario plans. All are necessary. But protection does not answer the deeper question that often sits underneath protest, pressure, and public anger: what role do you play in society? And that answer cannot be improvised once the plywood is already up.
Public affairs still involves policy, institutions, and decision-makers. Geneva knows that world better than most. But it also involves the social atmosphere around decisions: the local consequences of global politics, the legitimacy of business, the expectations placed on companies, and the speed at which a public mood can attach itself to a place, a sector, or a brand.
The G7 brings that tension into sharp focus. To some, it represents necessary coordination between major economies. To others, it is a symbol of exclusion, inequality, or a system they reject. Businesses caught in the middle may have no formal role in the summit at all. Yet their windows, employees, and reputations become part of the landscape around it.
In this context, the Geneva shopfronts feel all the more telling. They show how quickly a geopolitical moment can become operational. Then reputational. Then local. Then human.
There is also a communications lesson in the simplicity of the signs. We create jobs. We sell paper and pens to write history and make peace. These are not manifestos. They do not try to settle the debate around global governance. They make one concrete contribution visible.
In a low-trust environment, broad claims often struggle. Specific, human, verifiable contributions travel better. People rarely connect with abstract declarations about value creation. They understand jobs. They understand shops. They understand the person behind the counter, the supplier waiting for payment, the apprentice learning a trade, the family business trying to get through a difficult week.
From our Geneva office, the G7 is visible on our way to work, in conversations across the city, in the boarded-up streets around us. That proximity reminds us that public affairs is often most revealing at the edge of the official agenda: where diplomacy meets disruption, where protest meets commerce, and where global decisions are translated into local consequences.
You do not need to be the subject of a political moment to be affected by it. You do not need to be in the summit room to be pulled into the story around the summit. And when the world’s politics arrive at your front door, the narrative is already being written.
Sometimes, literally, on plywood…
Visual from the series «Seven Minutes to Midnight». — © Niels Ackermann, published in Le Temps
