SISP Conference 2022

In 2018, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg began a school strike that quickly spread across the globe. After a ritual strike every Friday by school pupils to call for urgent action against climate change had gone on for several months, what had become Fridays for Future (FFF) called for various global days of action throughout 2019, bringing millions of people out onto the streets in the largest climate protests in world history. Drawing on unique protest survey data on FFF events across European cities in 2019, this article explores the structural bases of organized collective mobilization for climate justice. Nuancing narratives that focus on either the privileged background of climate justice protesters or the environmentalism of the poor, our results show the heterogeneity of the social composition of the protests, suggesting the need for cross-class alliances for mass mobilizations. Moreover, our analysis reveals that the social background of protesters shaped their attitudes regarding what institutions and approaches can be relied upon to tackle climate and environmental challenges. This suggests an important and under-studied connection between social background and the strategic choices of environmental movements.

The explosion of youth climate protest since 2018 has sparked a renewed interest on the issue of climate-centred collective action. What has been happening in the last four years, with massive numbers of young people showing their concern and engagement with the issue of climate change in different venues, including the streets and squares of several countries around the world, has little precedent in history. Such a significant and widespread movement, of international characteristics, with a specific generational characterisation and a clear focus on the issue of climate change, represents an exceptional and exciting case for scholars interested in collective action. This movement was not born out of nothing; rather, it is rooted in a long trajectory of mobilisation. Research has been focusing for a long time on the emergence of the "climate justice" frame within this trajectory as a way out of post-political understanding of climate action. Furthermore, research has been pointing out internal tensions on the "radical" vs. "reformist" axis. Still, recent cases of climate action such as FFF and XR seem to call for a deeper analysis: while the climate justice framework is ubiquitous, internal tensions within the movement are far from over. This paper aims at addressing this issue focusing on the strategic choices of movement actors, and in particular on the ideational component of strategy, trying to shed light on the "theories of change", i.e. the meta-strategic visions/logics on which actors base their strategic choices, in the context of climate action. The paper draws on qualitative interviews of FFF and XR activists in Italy and Belgium and on the analysis of social media material.

The climatologist Michael E. Mann (2021) distinguishes between an “old climate war” and a “new climate war”. The first was started by the fossil fuel industry and its allies decades ago and it was aimed at delegitimizing climate science. This strategy has worked for many years but with time climate science has become mainstream so denialism is nowadays limited to the far-right. Hence, the “new climate war” of Big Oil is based on deflection, which includes blaming the citizens and promoting false technological solutions such as carbon capture and storage. The invasion of Ukraine and the consequent need to switch off from Russia has raised alarms about the possibility of increasing fossil fuels extraction in the European Union and boosting the use of coal. However, the production of fossil (and nuclear) energy is not the only source of conflict in the climate war. Beyond an apparent consensus, the ecological transition is also becoming a new battlefield. Last year’s massive protests against Rio Tinto’s lithium mine project in Serbia were a clear sign in this direction. More in general, the concept of ecological transition has become mainstream but its meaning is far from being consensual and it involves a plethora of political, social, environmental, and cultural conflicts. In the hegemonic conception, the ecological transition is a top-down, technocratic, post-political transition to a decarbonized economy and renewable energies. As it emerges for instance in the documents of Western governments and the European Union, it is considered a win-win strategy for post-pandemic recovery, economic growth and protection of the environment. The legitimation comes from the idea of decoupling economic growth from the use of natural resources. This focus on technocratic solutions ignores the root causes of the climate crisis: colonialism and capitalism. Finally, the ideology of “net zero” allows to lower ambitions since technology and nature-based solutions are considered powerful tools to offset or remove greenhouse emissions. For Quijano (1992), the “coloniality of power” is the relations of domination based on racial hierarchization and labour division that have survived the “end” of colonialism. On the other hand, Lugones (2007) uses the concept of “coloniality of gender” to mean the construction of gender roles and hierarchies by colonialism that produced a gendered division of labour. The hegemonic conception of the ecological transition risks reinforcing both forms of coloniality. An accelerated ecological transition is of course necessary and made more urgent by the perspective of switching off from Russia. However, when this is combined with a perspective of economic growth and the removal of procedural protections and democratic controls it presents several problems. It could produce massive pollution and water consumption in those territories where key natural resources for the transition are located, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, aluminium, zinc and so on. Plus, extractivism is generally linked with corruption, violence and labour exploitation. Another risk is the construction of huge hydroelectric dams which displace communities and destroy habitats. Hence, for the survival of growth-driven capitalism, green sacrifice zones (Zografos & Robbins, 2020) are created in Indigenous, marginalized, racialized and low-income territories, historically the most impacted by colonialism, mega-projects and by the climate crisis. This exploitation is not only produced by Western corporations and governments but also, increasingly, by Chinese enterprises and by the national government of those territories. With this massive extraction, capitalism can continue to grow and white, affluent, urban people can maintain their consumption levels without, this is the hope, social unrest. In other words, the ecological transition can be seen as a tool to re-legitimate the highly questioned economic and political system while all costs are discharged on peripheral territories, racialized people and women, mainly in the Global South but also in the Global North. A group of Fridays for Future’s activists has coined the acronym MAPA (Most Affected People and Areas) which includes those territories, mainly in the South but not only, most impacted by colonialism, extractivism and the climate crisis. In the hegemonic conception of the ecological transition, protecting and restoring Indigenous Peoples’ lands and reducing animal-based products are not a priority. On the contrary, instead of dropping their emissions, polluting companies, supported by conservationist organizations, can implement carbon offset projects on Indigenous lands, sometimes welcomed by the communities but in other times by appropriating lands, commodifying commons and applying violent evictions and forced displacements, what Vidal (2008) calls green land grabbing. The risk is that this ecological transition will reproduce what Lander (2000) calls the coloniality of knowledge, i.e. the hegemony of Western, white, male academia based on natural sciences, and what Mignolo (2004) calls the coloniality of being, the hegemony of Western, patriarchal and white way of being. Both in the political decision-making arena and climate research, including the IPCC’s reports, the adoption of a post-political discourse marginalizes social sciences and their contribution to understanding value systems, power relationships and structural causes (Dunlap & Brulle &, 2015). The same happens with Indigenous people, whose eco-centric cosmovisions, epistemologies and ways of being are underrepresented and tokenized (Deranger et al., 2022). This is a form of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007), a concept I believe we can extend whenever the voices of local communities opposing megaprojects are marginalized and silenced. To sum up, this hegemonic scenario of ecological transition sees a shift from fossil energy to renewable energy without threatening the pillars of capitalism and coloniality, a sort of Gramscian passive revolution, a top-down, non-participatory change that serves as a strategy of capital accumulation and does not undermines the status quo. Mainstream environmentalism pushes for the ecological transition without decolonialising it. For communicative purposes, it focuses on its positive impact but obscures the catastrophic implications of green growth. On the other hand, radical movements such as the Indigenous Climate Action in Canada or Fridays for Future MAPA emphasize that extractivist capitalism has always been linked with colonialism. They do not only claim for decarbonization but they defy the ideology of growth-driven extractivist capitalism with post-extractivist, post-growth, decolonialized proposals which include climate reparations, the cancellation of debts, redistribution, an ethic of care, the right to self-determination of communities and the inclusion of most affected people in the decision-making. Moreover, intersectionality is incorporated into the climate justice frame. This demand for Northern environmentalism to decolonialize itself has played a considerable influence on Greta Thunberg and FFF Italy which have dropped the scientism of the beginning and whose last two global climate strikes included the decolonial narrative produced by FFF MAPA. However, the call of FFF MAPA is also to recognize the privileges of Northern climate activists and to act consequently by democratizing the movement’s structure, decision-making and redistributing internally economic resources and public visibility. This process of decolonialising the narrative, structure and practices is not easy and can generate internal conflicts and resistance not only from Western governments but also from those layers of the population which are not ready to give up their privileges. My final remark concerns the necessity to decolonialize our research on climate activism. We cannot decolonialize our mind and analysis and then reproduce coloniality and our privilege inside the academy. A decolonialized thought cannot be separated from a decolonialized practice. We need to bury epistemic extractivism (Grosfoguel, 2019) which appropriates the knowledge from activists for the only benefit of the researcher and the academy, without any accountability or attempt to produce something valuable for social movements or to take care of the activists. This way of researching reproduces again and again the coloniality of power and the coloniality of knowledge, even when the scholar is sympathetic with the struggle. We need to put at the centre a self-reflection on our privilege as researchers and promote participatory and empowering methods. We need to break the coloniality of knowledge and legitimize all those thinkers that do not belong to the Western, white and male academy. We need to take care of ourselves, our colleagues and the subjects involved in our research. We need to fight against the culture of speed and competition and focus on the process, quality and collaboration. Finally, all our results should be accessible for activists.

Maria Chiara Franceschelli PhD Candidate in Political Science and Sociology Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy Paper Proposal for the 2022 SISP Conference Section 4, Panel 1 Anti-Colonial Environmentalism in Russian Regions: the Litmus Test for a Failed Federalism This paper considers environmental struggles in contemporary Russia from a postcolonial perspective and analyses the anti-colonial frame that characterises environmental mobilisations vis à vis regional governance in peripheral regions of the Russian federation. Drawing from the emerging field of research considering Russian internal and external colonialism, this paper merges studies of post-Soviet space with a postcolonial perspective: it scrutinises the power relations between centre and periphery, and how they are framed within civil society participation. Unveiling the anti-colonial frames of environmental mobilisation in regions that have been consistently subject to patterns of colonial and extractivist behaviour on behalf of the centre in modern and contemporary Russia, the paper presents contemporary Russian “failed federalism” as the arena in which these colonial patterns take place today. The relationship between colonialism, environmental mobilisation and state institutions is investigated within the frame of the consistent stiffening of the Russian political system in the Putin regime. Using a qualitative methodology, the paper ultimately aims to contribute to the understanding of social movements and political participation in authoritarian political systems, and of under-researched experiences of coloniality in non-Western contexts.

Youth activism for the climate has attracted increasing attention in recent years. The emergence of Fridays For Future and Extinction Rebellion between 2018 and 2019 has brought to the fore a new generation of activists and provided the issue of climate change with unprecedented saliency and visibility in the public sphere. Nevertheless, student climate strikes are far from being the first occurrence of mass mobilisation on climate change. Rather, they sit within a long trajectory of climate justice mobilisation, rooted in different strands of environmentalism, as well as in the climatisation of global justice struggles. Research on social movements has analysed different stages of these developments and assessed breaks and continuities on this path. One component still missing is a systematic comparison between youth climate strikes and “traditional” climate justice marches. Our paper aims to contribute to this gap in the literature, focusing on the framing of climate change in protest activities that took place in Milan, Italy, in October 2021 during the Youth Pre-COP 26 of the UNFCCC: a student climate strike was organised by FFF, as was a “traditional” climate justice march by a wide coalition of actors, and both a climate camp and an eco-social forum acted as counter-summits. The paper, relying on protest surveys and qualitative interviews, discusses the differences, similarities and spaces for convergence among activists in these different forums, focusing on the framing of climate change, and in particular on the different meanings attached to the “climate justice” concept. The survey data shows that, even if “system change” was the clearly predominant prognostic frame at both protest events, it was much more so in the “traditional” climate justice march than in the student climate strike. We further investigate these analogies and differences through the analysis of qualitative interviews.

The 9th July of 2021 the trade union representative unit (RSU) of the automotive plant located in a city close to Florence (Campi Bisenzio) received via e-mail the request by the GKN firm to inform all metalworkers (422) that they all have been fired and that the plant will be closed since the day after (Collectivo di Fabbrica GKN 2022, 9 ). By the same day the GKN trade union organization started a still on-going mobilization which is not only resisting the attempt to close the plant but also redefine the social movement field in Italy. Not only, the resistance of the GKN workers has triggered out a new wave of labour mobilization in Italy and become a symbol of an attempt to bring class conflict back in, but represents an attempt to build a new neo-materialist movement by welding different movement and negotiating a new larger collective identity to produce social and political changes (Andretta and Imperatore 2022). This is being possible by activating a long and intense process of collective identity building (Diani 2013, 2015) which also entails the use of collective memory and generation of mobilizing emotions. This is what we will try to show, by means of in depth interviews, newspapers articles, documents and FB posts analysis.

The role played by female illustrators within the various Italian feminist movements is the subject of this research. Consultation of various women's archives (Turin, Milan, Bologna, Pisa, Rome) enabled identifying some specific modes of operation, particularly the representation of women's bodies. Themes such as motherhood, female sexuality, abortion, and the representation of different moments in women's lives were dealt with by various women artists, who collaborated with feminist magazines and newspapers for a wider public. Effe and Strix brought into the homes of Italian feminists reflections and themes never before addressed with the determination and secular gaze that characterized the battles of the 1970s. Similarly, in Corriere dei Piccoli and Amica, the authors Nidasio and Ghigliano encouraged a broader audience to reflect on gender stereotypes and the difficulty of breaking the barriers of the prevailing patriarchy. What did these authors emphasize above all? They underlined the invisibility of a binary - male and female - model, which imposes itself as the only one possible for each individual. Gender identity then loses that character of performativity that it could have had in some pre-capitalist societies and identifies itself with belonging to a particular sex. The reflections of Italian feminisms (the plural maintains the distinction among various geographical and cultural matrices which, albeit with difficulty, tried to dialogue with each other) used these artists to convey their message of denunciation to the broadest possible world. Some graphic designers worked alongside the movements in the production of posters supporting struggles for women's civil and social rights, first and foremost abortion. The 1970s was a prosperous period of civil commitment and production from below. The need and urgency to communicate revolutionary messages offered the opportunity for many women to engage in artistic production that they would not otherwise have approached. Alongside established female illustrators who became famous even before their civil commitment, women emerged who found in graphic expression a medium capable of transforming their imagery and, above all, their vision of the woman of the future into images. The research has thus highlighted the reciprocal influence that these women, whether professionals or self-taught, exerted on feminist movements, but also how the movements themselves fuelled the artistic vein of these illustrators and fostered a deeper reflection on the themes they dealt with.

My contribution analyzes memory and legacies of 1970s feminist health practices in Italy for contemporary feminist and lgbtqia groups. Based on fieldwork in Rome and Milan, the paper takes as a starting point the history of counseling centers (consultori) in the Italian context: emerged as self-managed feminist health clinics aimed at re-appropriating and sharing autonomous knowledge and practices against medical monopoly, these experiences rapidly went through a process of institutionalization which gave birth to a new public service, family counseling centers. Looking at how contemporary feminist and lgbtqia groups engage with the legacies of this history, we shed light on the twofold approach towards health and health-care shaping these struggle in the present. Indeed, contemporary feminist groups are deeply engaged in defending counseling centers as a key welfare provision and as an outcome of past feminist mobilization. At the same time they attempt to further expand and transform the legacy of feminist health practices with new forms of self-management in the field. A major case has been that of transfeminist consultorie, which drew from the history of feminist self-managed counseling centers while at the same time adapting and innovating that practice in a transfeminist perspective. By looking at how contemporary feminist and lgbtqia groups both defend and transform legacies of past struggles, the paper adopts a genealogical approach. Combining the study of collective memory with social movement studies, the contribution highlights how practices can travel over time and be re-adapted to a different context and thanks to different subjectivities and movements’ traditions.

This contribution investigates migrants movements as an extreme case for the study of collective memory and the role it plays in strengthening group boundaries and collective identities. The puzzle addressed here asks how people with very heterogeneous life trajectories, who do not share a common social past nor longstanding political traditions, get together through practices of collective memory building. The research draws on extensive fieldwork in Italy and combines life history interviews with participant observation to investigate the ways in which memories are deployed inside movement groups and focuses on implicit memories, that remain generally underinvestigated to these days. The contribution sheds light on how migrants’ groups interact as affective communities. On one hand, emotions and affective ties stir reminiscences that compose the ‘political biographies’ of participants and, on the other hand, memory work practices within groups contribute to build up unprecedented assemblages of memory, which enable collective action within super diverse groups. In particular, the paper discusses how processes of collective memory constrution change with the passing of time, by comparing three cases of migrants groups who started mobilizing in different moments in time across the last twenty year. Finally, the paper aimes bridges the literature on collective memory, collective identity and recruitment within the field of Social Movement studies to show how the practices aimed at expanding group participation do not rest exclusively on the capacity of a few actors, more rational and strategic than others and on their capacity to articulate discourses that resonate with broader publics. Rather, a complex and participatory process is at play, a memory work that incorporates multiple stories mediated by affective ties and built into the collective memories of the groups.

The approach of Community Organizing to building and empowering local communities has become increasingly popular in the last decades, both because of the past involvement in community organizing of popular personalities such as Barack Obama, and because of the crisis of more traditional practices of civil society building. The main promoter of this approach worldwide is today the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), based in Chicago, which was founded in 1940 by Saul D. Alinsky, who has also systematized the main principles of community organizing. Thanks to the IAF activity, since the 1990s the community organizing method has also spread to western Europe, first in the UK and Germany, and later in several other countries. After sketching the history and methodology of the broad based community organizing approach adopted by the IAF, this paper will try to analyze the community organizing initiatives developed in western Europe during the last 30 years under the supervision of the Industrial Areas Foundation network, singling out the main problems and issues at stake in adopting and translating the method outside the US, in different social, political and cultural contexts. The analysis will be based both on semi-structured interviews to several US- and Europe-based organizers and to the participant observation carried out since 2019, during the development of a community organizing initiative in the city of Turin, in northern Italy.

Community Organizing is a method created in 1930s Chicago for the purpose of creating organizations capable of carrying out territorial "unionism" activities (Community Organizing was the brainchild of a sociologist and student of Clifford Shaw, Saul Alinsky). It is -a form of political self-organization widespread in poor and disadvantaged communities in the country, especially among urban communities. A community-based (solidarity-inspired) trade unionism that mobilizes, through the establishment of formally structured organizations, on specific goals of relatively limited scope. Great emphasis is placed precisely on the organizational continuity of these groups, which self-perceive themselves as "public interest groups" defending local communities. Although the means of mobilization can lead to even quite bitter conflicts with local governments, the ultimate goal is to influence decision-making processes in their own favor, even helping to determine the electoral success of this or that political candidate. Another characteristic of these organizations is the mutualistic, self-help function they perform in anticipation of achieving their goal. Finally, community leaders usually undergo management-type training aimed at optimizing their organizational skills: community empowerment and local leadership training is one of the goals of these types of groups (Diletti, Coppola, 2020). Large voter registration organizations such as ACORN have used the engagement and training techniques of community organizing, while several political figures refer to it explicitly as a model for political organizing, and others have undergone the training of the "Alinsky model," which is also the title of a text written in her college years by Hillary Clinton, who declined Alinsky's own invitation to join the IAF. Barack Obama served as a community organizer in Chicago in the mid-1980s, during which time Mayor Harold Washington, the first citizen closest to the community organizing experience in Chicago's history, ruled over the city. Saul Alinsky's main legacy, then, consists in the dissemination of his "pragmatic knowledge," the organizing precepts aimed at building "community unions" (as open and inclusive as an organization forced to coexist with very composite ethnic groups and cultures can be). Organizations such as Seiu (Service Employees International Union) and United Here have used "Alinsky-like" techniques in unionizing labor-intensive sectors-the backward service industry: trade, tourism, care work, etc. - and of marginal social groups: Hispanics and African-Americans, first and foremost. Despite this resurgence of interest of Community Organizing in the U.S., Community Organizing has always been the subject of criticism. Because it is extremely time consuming, because it is too based on all-local forms of organizing, that is, making it complex to find forms of impact in the federal policy dimensions (Exley, Bond 2016). The paper aims to reconstruct the U.S. debate around the topic of Community Organizing, both the theoretical and those involving activists and community organizers.

Modern processes of Community Organizing are mostly based on the work of several large networks in the US. These networks structure practice and education of Community Organizing by training organizers and leaders as well as forming the narrative within the broader society. Namely Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), Faith in Action, Gamaliel, ACORN or Leading Change Network are therefore to be seen as important brokers of knowledge and resources. Out of the work of these networks, the institution-based community organizing (IBCO) approach development within the 20th century by realizing that not only workers and residents but also community groups could enlarge the power base for local democratic engagement. Formalized by documents such as “Organizing For Family and Congregation” in 1978 by IAF (Industrial Areas Foundation 1978), there was also a strong strategic focus to mostly working with congregations on the local level. Using the resources, networks and experiences of congregations has provided a sustainable power base for decades. Since the 1980s, some CO-networks became active in Europe and implemented the experiences of IBCO along the process. The exchange was done in two ways: either European organizers traveled to the US and learned the craft there or there was direct engagement from US networks within European organizations by training and mentoring. Due to the shared language, the oldest traditions were found in England where social worker Neil Jameson started building up community organizations since the 1980s together with IAF (Warren 2009). Also, Leo Penta started transferring IAF-Organizing methodology in the 1990s to Germany by using his experience as an US-Organizer and scholar that he gained in the 1980s (Penta 1999). Other Germans paralleled this process by forming an additional organization in the same time with close connection to National People’s Power (foco e.V. 1996). Organizers like Chuck Hirt also implemented first organizations in Eastern Europe in this time. Since then, community organizing spread throughout Europe and could be found in countries like England, Wales, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Slovakia, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Lithuania. With more people and organizations involved, there were also new coalitions formed that i.e. lead to building up the European Community Organizing Network (ECON). ECON first assembled mostly Eastern European organizing efforts but shortly after also expanded to Western Europe as well. Additionally, more US networks became active within Europe in the last 10 years, engaging with the local organizations or even forming new networks and coalitions. Within this spread of community organizing, the methodology also widened and newer approaches like Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) (Kretzmann, McKnight 1993) or Transformative Organizing (Mann 2011) were discussed or implemented. Also, more US networks like National People’s Action, ACORN, Leading Change Network or Faith in Action but also union organizing begun to relate to European organizing projects. With this new diversity, the IBCO-approaches has still been the dominate one but is also questioned in its plausibility. There could be seen three fields of discussion: 1) The first discussion focuses on the traditional power base of IBCO and the changes that are currently occurring. So, in most of Europe (and in a different way also in the US), the long-term community engagement of congregations and neighborhood associations is put in tension for several years due to member loss. Also, especially for congregations in Germany, most Lutheran and Catholic churches begun to merge their parishes out of financial needs, so there is no time and openness for additional community based work. Out of that situation, the question arose if institutions could still be the main power base for community organizations or shouldn’t there, at least, a slight shift in focus. 2) The second discussion focuses on the tradition of IBCO that, out of the main traditions of its congregations and neighborhood associations, has been seen by union and transformative organizers as too conservative and reactionary. Their critique focuses mostly on the question how women, people of color or marginalized groups are integrated as well as the local level of engagement of IBCO would suit their urgent issues around discrimination, poverty and political voice (Maruschke 2014; McAlevey 2019). 3) Whereas the first and second discussion is also present in the US, the third discussion is an European one as it criticizes IBCO as been too American and fails to adapt to European political situation. Mostly discussed around the role of the European welfare state for political engagement, there is even deeper question of transformation as texts and materials of the US networks that were traditionally used in training organizers and leaders in IBCO don’t fit any more with the background and experiences of younger Europeans. European organizers are mostly aware of these challenges and have started to assemble in ECON and other European network structures to reflect on reforming IBCO or even finding a new model of community organizing in Europe. The main shift in practice that arose out of this exchange within the last years is the change from an institutional power base to more open networks of engagement that nevertheless form, in the end, an enduring community organization. Especially the performance of the current campaigns show in detail, that CO in Europe seems more as a network of engagement around certain issues and leaders than a “organization of organizations”. Within these development, there are solutions found for the problems of IBCO: 1) By integrating more and more people outside institution but integrated in personal or functional networks, the weakening of institutions is tackled and complemented by other forms of engagement. Also, being more of a network, community organizations could more easily integrate temporary partners to form broader coalitions and activate a broader array of power resources. 2) With the stronger focus on issues and leaders, the role of place is substantially changed within the networks. Still, there is a urgent need for a certain place and its traditions of engagement to start a community organization but within the campaigns this role could be seen more fluid and relational to the issues and leaders. So, other levels of engagement as well as the integration of groups that are formerly left out is possible. 3) Lastly, the openness of working in networks liberalizes the process of learning within the community organizations. By forming an ever changing network of people and issues, there is no place for only one orthodoxy or philosophy but for a wide array of (also European) traditions and philosophies of engagement (activist, traditional, …). In addition, the tradition of exclusive loyalty to one US network of CO and its orthodoxy is not suitable anymore. This elements of this new approach to community organizing doesn’t mean a revolution but more likely a re-focus on the key elements that defines community organizing that is formed by some key methods like is formed 1:1s, housemeetings, power analysis, storytelling and actions. By referring to three cases in Cologne, Duisburg and Berlin, the characteristics of such newer forms of organizing processes will be described and put in context to a worldwide discussion of the future of community organizing. ? Literature foco e.V. (Hg.), 1996: Forward to the Roots. Community Organizing in den USA - eine Perspektive für Deutschland?., Bonn: Stiftung Mitarbeit. Industrial Areas Foundation, 1978: Organizing For Family and Congregation. Kretzmann, J.P. und J.L. McKnight, 1993: Building Communities From the Inside Out. A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing A Community’s Assets., Chicago: ACTA Publications. Mann, E., 2011: Playbook for progressives: 16 qualities of the successful organizer., Boston: Beacon Press. Maruschke, R., 2014: Community Organizing: zwischen Revolution und Herrschaftssicherung - Eine kritische Einfu?hrung., Münster: Edition assemblage. McAlevey, J., 2019: Keine halben Sachen. Machtaufbau durch Organizing. (F. Wilde, Hg.), Hamburg: VSA-Verlag. Penta, L., 1999: Islands of Democratic Practice: Organizing for Local and Regional Power in the USA. The Industrial Areas Foundation and its Organizing Network as an Example. in: Biannual European Conference of the Inter-University Consortium for International Social Development. Warren, M.R., 2009: Community organizing in britain: The political engagement of faith-based social capital. City and Community 8: 99–127.

Introduction to Community Organizing framework The essence of the methodology is leadership development and is anchored in practices that motivate the head, heart and hands to achieve change. Building a growing community and empowering others is at the core of it. Community organizing has proven successful for both social and political change. It works for electoral campaigns as well as environmental, health and education campaigns. As an approach it has succeeded in bringing community leadership to reform. The framework used is the one which Marshall Ganz, Harvard Kennedy School evolved. It’s anchored on Six main leadership practices, which are Coaching, public narrative, developing relational commitments, evolving a strategy, creating a snowflake structure, and designing motivational action. Based on this framework the following workshop will be conducted: It is especially useful for people launching collective action for change and development or non-profit sectors. It is useful for those interested in evolving their leadership skills although not currently leading a campaign or part of a movement. The intervention in the session will be an engaging session that shows people the difference between organising and mobilizing. As well as between organizing and disorganization where people work with lack of purpose and proper relational infrastructure. Exampels from Europe will be shared to bring the theory into practice and reality.

L’articolo presenta i primi risultati di una ricerca sul campo svolta nel 2022 a Brindisi presso un dormitorio pubblico occupato da alcuni anni da un gruppo di braccianti, principalmente di origine migrante. Nel 2021 l’amministrazione comunale brindisina ha lanciato un progetto finanziato da fondi europei per la riqualificazione della struttura e la sua trasformazione in una “Casa delle Culture” – un centro polifunzionale adibito ad offrire una serie di servizi per i migranti presenti sul territorio e un centro di incontro con la cittadinanza. Per far ciò, il primo obiettivo del progetto è di trovare un’abitazione alternativa agli occupanti del dormitorio attraverso un percorso partecipativo dal basso che non imponga soluzioni ma risponda alle necessità particolari delle persone coinvolte. La ricerca, svolta con una serie di interviste qualitative con operatori e amministratori coinvolti nel progetto e con gli abitanti del dormitorio, si pone l’obiettivo di analizzare come bisogni abitativi particolari interagiscano con processi decisionali collettivi e quale sia l’impatto di preconcetti e strutture razziste nella definizione dei processi partecipativi e delle relazioni con i beneficiari. Queste domande di ricerca partono da alcuni dei risultati di una ricerca svolta tra il 2016 e il 2018 durante il percorso di dottorato su iniziative di superamento dei campi rom. L’analisi dei progetti considerati dallo studio ha fatto emergere come la riuscita di processi decisionali collettivi dal basso siano stati compromessi dalla presenza di bisogni abitativi particolari, non conciliabili con processi collettivi, oltre che dall’impatto di condizionamenti razzisti sui rapporti di potere, anche quando questi si volevano “neutri”. Il nuovo studio intende quindi approfondire questi aspetti analizzando come bisogni particolari e razzismo condizionino processi partecipativi comunitari e dal basso, offrendo alcuni spunti per un’analisi delle condizioni necessarie al riconoscimento di bisogni abitativi individuali e all’inclusione nei processi decisionali di persone appartenenti a gruppi razzializzati. Lo studio condotto presso la Casa delle Culture a Brindisi rappresenta il primo step di uno studio che intenderà allargare la ricerca ad altri casi. L’obiettivo generale è contribuire all’emergente (e a volte ritrovato) dibattito sui movimenti dal basso per la casa e il vivere comunitario – diritto alla città (Harvey 2008; Basta 2017; Aalbers & Gibb, 2014), community organizing (Bradley, 2020; Foster-Fishman et al., 2007; Miraftab, 2003; Ohmer & Beck, s.d.; Walker, 2015). L’analisi dei risultati è supportata da un’analisi critica dei concetti di comunità, partecipazione e cultura, e dei rapporti di forza in contesti di subalternità razziale (Benhabib, 2002; Cornwall, 2008; Henry, 2000; Spivak, 1988; Vajda, 2015), oltre che dalla più recente letteratura sull’abitare “migrante” (Cancellieri, 2017; Boccagni, 2017; Kreichauf et al., 2020).

Sempre più frequentemente la pianificazione urbanistica sta tentando di superare il gap tra cittadini ed istituzioni, cercando di riequilibrare le dinamiche di potere nelle scelte decisionali di governo del territorio. Il contributo tenta di tracciare le potenzialità del recente sviluppo in Italia del metodo del Community Organizing (CO), concentrando l’attenzione sugli strumenti urbanistici a carattere pattizio e con focus sul processo di costruzione di una comunità. Il CO, fondato e sperimentato dal sociologo Saul David Alinsky per organizzare i senza potere, è attualmente utilizzato per rispondere a quel vuoto di fiducia che si è creato tra partiti/istituzioni e comunità, con l’obiettivo di generare potere diffuso e riequilibrare le simmetrie di potere. Organizzare una comunità significa creare relazioni ed incoraggiare alla fiducia attraverso l’ascolto, con lo scopo di costruire una nuova coscienza collettiva e conquistare un ruolo nei processi decisionali. In questi termini può il CO rappresentare un nuovo fronte di sperimentazione di pratiche per co-creare politiche pubbliche di governo del territorio? Attualmente in Italia sono presenti numerose esperienze di comunità locali che, affiancando strumenti di natura top-down, tentano di costruire dal basso delle comunità consapevoli attraverso processi di apprendimento e sperimentando nuove forme pattizie. È in questa cornice che si muovono i Contratti di Fiume. I Contratti di Fiume (CdF) nascono in Francia all’inizio degli anni ’80 come strumenti cardine della politica francese in materia di gestione integrata delle acque. A seguito delle esperienze internazionali di Francia, Belgio, Lussemburgo, Paesi Bassi e Spagna si diffondono anche in Italia, a partire dagli anni 2000 in alcune regioni del nord come la Lombardia e il Piemonte. La recente diffusione dei CdF è da ricercare nel forte riferimento metodologico e nella flessibilità del processo; si tratta di uno strumento di programmazione negoziata, con valenza pattizia, caratterizzato da sussidiarietà orizzontale e verticale. Rappresenta, infatti, una delle realtà più interessanti di sperimentazione di forme di democrazia diretta e di pianificazione integrata. In questo senso il CdF assume un interessante campo di osservazione e di indagine per due componenti principali in termini di organizzazione di una comunità: la natura pattizia utile per analizzare il rapporto tra comunità locali ed istituzioni; l’attitudine a costruire attorno al fiume una comunità fortemente identitaria. Muovendo da questi presupposti il contributo si interroga sul ruolo che il CO può avere nella costruzione di una comunità organizzata che interagisce con gli attori istituzionali, comparando due esperienze che tentano di riequilibrare il potere nel processo di costruzione di un CdF e mettendo in luce i punti di forza e di criticità. Il primo caso è il Contratto di Fiume Ombrone in Toscana: nasce da un piccolo comitato della provincia di Siena in contrapposizione alla proposta di insediamento di un impianto di biogas nel Comune di Buonconvento. A seguito di due eventi alluvionali l’operato del Comitato diventa continuativo, concentra le sue attività sul tema fluviale e attiva un percorso di partecipazione per la costruzione di un CdF con il finanziamento dell’Autorità regionale per la garanzia e la promozione della partecipazione della Regione Toscana e con la partnership del Dipartimento di Architettura dell’Università di Firenze. Il secondo caso riguarda il Patto di Fiume Simeto in Sicilia, che nasce da un piccolo gruppo di attivisti della provincia di Catania e da una campagna anti-inceneritore attivata nel 2002 che, in partnership con il Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile e Architettura dell’Università di Catania, avvia un percorso ultradecennale che promuove la partecipazione dei cittadini, coordinando e monitorando le attività di tutela e valorizzazione della Valle. Si tratta della prima esperienza italiana che tenta di adottare il metodo del CO per costruire una comunità e per attuare uno strumento pattizio. Ambedue i casi, nati dal basso da situazioni conflittuali, evolvono nel tempo grazie anche alla partnership dell’università, trovando la loro forza nel percorso di empowerment della comunità stessa che riesce a trasformare le criticità di partenza in opportunità di crescita. Le azioni delle comunità rivierasche innescano una fitta rete di legami, determinando un lungo approccio di confronto e di mediazione istituzionale. Dall’indagine del caso del fiume Simeto in particolare, risulta evidente come l’applicazione del metodo del CO per la costruzione della comunità simetina abbia determinato un approccio generativo diretto ad avere un impatto concreto sulle istituzioni e destinato a durare nel tempo. Il contributo si pone due principali obiettivi: evidenziare gli elementi di forza del CO inserito in un processo di costruzione di uno strumento di governo del territorio; tracciare alcune riflessioni sulla possibile applicabilità del CO in Italia, tentando di individuare quali elementi sia possibile introdurre per una rielaborazione del metodo stesso, in grado di ripensare le simmetrie del potere e creare uno spazio di collaborazione efficace tra comunità ed istituzioni.

Considerare il lavoro come il primo organizzatore della comunità è un principio dell'Organizzazione Internazionale del Lavoro e dell'Agenda 2030 delle Nazioni Unite. Tuttavia, la condizione di possibilità per l'avvio di questo processo è l'unità. La massa diventa popolo come Community Organizing nel momento in cui prende la decisione di unirsi di fronte a un bisogno. Poi arriva la strategia. Ma il lavoro è allo stesso tempo l'inizio e la fine dell'organizzazione comunitaria. La sua mancanza muove a l'unità, e senza unità è impossibile generare condizioni di lavoro dignitose. Vedremmo quale ruolo gioca il lavoro nel processo di discernimento sociale comunitario dall'esperienza latinoamericana, oggi presente nel discorso dell'attuale pontefice argentino. Il caso specifico degli insediamenti di quartiere nelle periferie sarà affrontato come una comunità organizzata di successo.

La diffusione del Covid-19 ha portato una parte significativa della popolazione mondiale a vivere in una condizione di emergenza. Gli Stati di tutto il mondo hanno adottato diverse misure emergenziali per farvi fronte. Distanziamento sociale, coprifuoco, confinamento domestico, lockdown parziale e generalizzato. Pioniera di sofferenze, l’Italia è stata uno dei primi Stati a instituire il lockdown generalizzato. Tale misura ha comportato una totale deroutinizzazione della vita quotidiana, sia a livello individuale che collettivo. Le normali funzioni sociali quotidiane sono state sospese, interrotte o riarticolate in specifiche forme autorizzate. Esplicativa in questo senso è stata la divisione tra funzioni ‘essenziali’ e ‘non essenziali’ nella società. Alla luce di ciò, si è preferito dare più importanza a determinate situazioni di socialità rispetto ad altre. La maggior parte delle quali mediate dal vincolo della produzione e del consumo. Pizzorno, usando il termine socialità, si riferiva a tutti quei rapporti tra due o più individui che, grazie al proprio reciproco riconoscimento, escono dallo stato di isolamento o solitudine. In questo senso, alla luce delle misure di restrizione imposte dalla pandemia, possiamo affermare che lo spazio di uscita dallo stato di solitudine o isolamento, già radicato nel nostro sistema sociale, ha subito un ulteriore assottigliamento e ri-articolazione. Diverse sono state le strategie utilizzate dagli attori sociali per uscire da questo stato. Gli studenti delle scuole superiori hanno per esempio lanciato una campagna di occupazioni studentesche, fenomeno che, alla luce della situazione, desta particolare interesse per gli studiosi di scienze sociali. L’obiettivo di questo lavoro è quello di rispondere a una domanda persistente nella letteratura dei movimenti sociali, ovvero: cosa ha influenzato la scelta di questa forma d’azione? E di conseguenza: perché gli studenti hanno deciso di occupare le scuole? Cosa significa occupare una scuola? Quali erano le ragioni della loro scelta? La protesta è legata esclusivamente alla situazione pandemica o quest’ultima, come per altri settori e situazioni, ha avuto il ruolo di evidenziatore e acceleratore di alcune tendenze già presenti nella società?

Il Community Organizing è un approccio di attivazione dal basso della società civile che mira a costruire leadership locale e all’empowerment delle comunità locali, creato fra gli anni 1930 e 1940 a Chicago da Saul D. Alinsky. Nei decenni successivi questa metodologia si è diffusa in buona parte degli Stati Uniti – in gran parte grazie all’iniziativa dell’Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), creata da Alinsky – e, più recentemente, anche in Europa e in Italia. Questo paper intende discutere la concezione di potere proposta nell’approccio del Community Organizing, in particolare dalla versione proposta oggi dalla IAF e dalle organizzazioni sue affiliate, nel contesto delle principali categorie proposte dalla scienza politica e dalla sociologie contemporanee. Si mostrerà come la IAF proponga una versione dell’idea di potere (definito come “capacità di agire insieme”) inteso in senso relazionale e ‘dal basso’, con un focus sulla società civile e sul ruolo dei leader locali del territorio. Gli organizer affiliati e ispirati alla IAF propongono un mix di diverse tattiche, che affiancano a componenti ‘soft’ (in particolare grazie all’autorevolezza delle istituzioni religiose, spesso coinvolte in modo significativo nelle organizzazioni locali promosse dalla IAF) frequenti campagne di azione politica grassroots più ‘tradizionali’ (spesso mirate in modo specifico su alcuni decisori) ed incentivi/disincentivi economici (per esempio con l’uso della pratica del boicottaggio).

Di fronte ad una crisi sistemica della politica diviene fondamentale il ruolo che vari attori della società vogliono avere nell'affrontare tale crisi, in particolare le nuove generazioni. Partendo dal riconoscimento del proprio ruolo politico prende avvio lo sviluppo di un pensiero e di un'azione politica. In un contesto storico di generale sfiducia verso i processi decisionali, le istituzioni e i tradizionali organi rappresentativi diviene essenziale studiare forme di attivazione e rappresentazione politica a livello locale. I giovani utilizzano strumenti nuovi tanto per la comunicazione (es. social network) quanto per il coinvolgimento peer to peer. Sviluppare un'alleanza civica coinvolgendo in primis le nuove generazioni può garantire una maggiore sostenibilità a processi di trasformazione locale? L'analisi è sviluppata sul caso studio a Torino Nord, con il progetto di ricerca-azione sul community organizing avviato nel 2019 dall'Università degli Studi di Torino. Parole chiave: coinvolgimento giovanile, empowerment, disobbedienza civile, ateismo pratico e politico

A decade of years ago John Street and colleagues revealed how entertainment media, and the world of popular culture more generally, can have an impact on the constitution of political citizenship and political thought and action. This article is intended to be a further contribution to this research agenda, by focusing on pop music and populism. While in the last few years there have been an explosion of studies dealing with the recent rise of European populism, almost all of them focus on the (structural) economic, political and cultural (in terms of attitude) factors related to this major phenomenon. However, the role of music as part of popular culture as an important medium in the production and reproduction of populism as a political phenomenon has been vastly neglected. Yet the importance of popular culture in various political processes (from the formation of collective political identities to frames supporting them, to their function as stimuli of critical political engagement and participation) has been underlined – particularly for what concerning radical politics. Populist movements, on the other hand, heavily rely on socio-cultural aspects for assuring their political appeal. In this article, we address these issues exploring the potential relationship between populism and pop music. The study is based on eleven focus groups conducted from September to October 2020 all around Italy with ordinary citizens, populist and non-populist voters and populist and non-populist militants. We explore how in Italy people use, and starts from, pop music to reflect upon the wider world of populist politics and the role of pop music within it. It reveals that, apart from more or less explicit populist ‘tropes’ that may act as a source of political knowledge, as a trigger of emotional mechanisms helping the political positioning of citizens or as further justification of political stances, people perceive, communicate and debate on pop music by widely adopting the lens of populism to describe and make sense of the pop music sphere. This has strong normative implications for the attempts of political (populist and non-populist) actors to use pop music and, more broadly, pop culture as a key tool in their political activities. Several interactions and parallels between music and (populist) politics in current ‘celebrity politics’ and ‘fandom’ democracies also clearly emerged from our research.

Several western European countries recently experienced the establishment of more than one populist actor in the national party system. While we know how populists rhetorically attack the political mainstream, we lack knowledge about how populists talk about other populist actors. Using quantitative and qualitative content analyses of communication on Twitter and interviews with populist MPs in Germany, Italy and Spain, we observe that populists consider themselves as opponents trying to distance themselves from the respective populist competitor. Predominantly, populists attribute a malicious, anti-democratic and extremist character to the opponent when the latter is ideologically distant indicating the decisive role of host ideologies. Positive evaluations only occur by overlapping policy position. We confirm that established populists behave differently than populist newcomers, however, mostly in Italy. In sum, the findings indicate that populists are more hostile towards other anti-establishment parties than towards the political mainstream due to their ideological distance.

Non-mainstream parties are often portrayed in the literature as loosely organised and ideologically extreme. Among them, populist parties in particular are expected to emphasise the role of the leader, either by weakening intermediate party structures and centralising the powers of the secretary or by relying on (quasi-)plebiscitary decision-making. However, such organisational features (or the lack thereof) are often assumed, rather than measured directly. Indeed, the existing evidence on the internal structures of non-mainstream and populist parties is contradictory. Moreover, populist parties’ organisational change over time is hardly ever addressed by the literature, particularly in a comparative and cross-national perspective. Party organisation is relevant also because it has implications for the ideological evolution of non-mainstream actors. In general, previous contributions have hypothesised that those parties are less likely to shift position following the preferences of the median voter compared to mainstream actors, which enjoy more resources for campaigns and fear less potential vote losses. However, non-mainstream parties might also face incentives towards ideological moderation – for instance, to present themselves as viable partners for a coalition government. In the proposed paper, I jointly examine ideological and organisational change among non-mainstream and in particular populist parties, arguing that these actors might indeed shift their ideological position over time, and that the extent that they do so depends on their internal structure. My analysis will estimate the effect of intra-party democracy on party ideological change using multi-level regression models applied to 10 European countries. I will use alternative measures of the relevant variables, to assess the consistency of measurements based on official party documents and on expert surveys. Accordingly, I will rely on the PPDB and DALP datasets to measure the independent variable (intra-party democracy) and on CMP/MARPOR and CHES for the dependent variables (issue position and issue salience). This allows me to study the effect of more inclusive and democratic decision-making procedures on parties’ ideological flexibility, showing that populist parties could indeed follow different patterns of ideological change, depending on their internal organisation. By doing so, consequently, this paper also aims to show: (i) whether populist parties take up some features of mainstream parties (either in terms of organisation or ideology) over time and (ii) whether these changes are encouraged by external (e.g. government participation or vote loss) and/or internal factors (intra-party democracy). Overall, this research sheds light on party organisation as a pivotal, although often neglected, driver of ideological change. This is particularly crucial to study for populist parties, which are deemed to be new and still unstructured components of the party system, yet are increasingly recognized as powerful determinants of its characteristics. Moreover, the extent to which parties can shift position has additional implications for the responsiveness and representativeness of the whole party system. In fact, by taking up issues that were previously not salient or accommodating the prevalent position of public opinion, parties might increase their responsiveness to citizens’ priorities and improve the overall representation of voters’ preferences.

Considerate storicamente una fucina di partecipazione politica, di antagonismo sociale e di azione potenzialmente sovversiva, la vasta cintura delle periferie romane non si è risparmiata, nella sua lunga storia, neanche ruoli meno “reclamizzati” (forse perché poco fotogenici) di sostegno a opzioni politiche conservatrici, se non addirittura reazionarie, spesso giocati intono a capi-bastioni, arruffa-popolo di quartiere e locali “signori delle tessere”. Anche nel panorama apparentemente immobile della “Prima Repubblica”, diversi casi di suburbia hanno derogato, negli anni, all’egemonia comunista, producendo un travaso di voti verso la Democrazia Cristiana, persino con sporadici exploit elettorali del Msi. E oggi? Il presente paper prova a fornire una risposta a partire dal voto dei cittadini romani, unendo l’analisi degli archivi elettorali di ieri con l’elaborazione dei più recenti risultati scaturiti dalle urne, nel momento in cui la forma più “istituzionale” della partecipazione politica, cioè la delega liberal-democratica mediante il voto, è stata sottoposta allo stress-test della pandemia. Nel suo procedere, il lavoro offre inizialmente una panoramica delle vicende elettorali romane a partire dalla fine del fascismo, per poi addentrarsi nelle espressioni di voto, “calandole” non a livello di Municipio, ma di zona urbanistica. Qui si situa il carattere inedito della presente indagine empirica: per capire i comportamenti elettorali e l’identità politica dei quartieri romani, nelle linee di frattura o di continuità, le ex ‘circoscrizioni’, ciascuna delle quali grande come una media città italiana, forniscono un contesto troppo ampio e diversificato (socialmente ed economicamente), tale da indebolirne l’affidabilità euristica. Gli Autori hanno quindi scorporato i dati elettorali dei Municipi nelle 155 zone urbanistiche che dalla fine degli anni Settanta presiedono l’organizzazione territoriale della città di Roma, producendo una mappatura che colloca fedelmente le 2.600 sezioni elettorali della Capitale nello scrigno di una precisa identità politica, per quanto – ai giorni nostri – molto più volatile e contradditoria rispetto al passato. Il focus principale dell’indagine è rappresentato dal comportamento elettorale delle periferie romane, nell’inevitabile intersecarsi con l’ulteriore issue costituita dalle fortune politiche del Partito Comunista Italiano che dal voto romano “fuori le mura” traeva la maggior parte del suo consenso, ereditato a fatica dalle sigle politiche succedute al Pci. Ne consegue che l’obiettivo più immediato del presente paper consista nell’evidenziare come la decisione presa dal maggior partito dell’area progressista di allentare il suo radicamento territoriale abbia prodotto la perdita del legame privilegiato con i residenti nelle periferie romane e la sua sostituzione con un’attenzione particolare verso “il ceto medio riflessivo”. Più in profondità, la ricerca illustra l’opportunità di validare con il setaccio dei dati alcuni dei luoghi comuni che sono soliti sintetizzare rozzamente le vicende elettorali romane: a quelli consueti (“a Roma i quartieri-bene votano a destra, mentre le periferie fanno valere l’origine popolare e sono di sinistra”; “a Roma i giovani sono attratti dall’immagine dell’uomo-forte e seguono chi propone una svolta autoritaria”; “a Roma i quartieri del centro approvano la retorica dell’ordine-e-disciplina , mentre le periferie sono ostili a chi chiede una maggiore presenza delle forze dell’ordine”) se ne è aggiunto un altro, dopo le elezioni comunali del 21 ottobre 2021: “Il Pd ha riconquistato le periferie romane, togliendole al voto populista”. Il paper dimostrerà quanto ci sia di vero in questa trionfante affermazione.

Participation in left-wing populism From the Indignados to the institutional challenge of Podemos Abstract An increasing number of populist parties are no longer on the fringes of the party system, but are strongly integrated within their respective national political contexts. Academic and scientific research on populism has expanded exponentially in recent years and has largely dealt with the analysis of the discussed phenomenon of so-called 'right-wing populisms'. In response to the political and social changes of the 2008 economic crisis, so-called 'left-wing populist' forces have also gained consensus and media attention in the US and European context. This phenomenon has therefore also gained greater prominence within scholarly and academic analyses, although it does not yet hold the space commensurate with the importance that some of these forces currently hold in their respective countries. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to contribute to this reflection by analysing the change in political participation that has taken place from the post-crisis social movements of 2008, the basis for the emergence of left-wing populisms, to their institutionalisation. The analysis therefore aims to analyse the evolution of political participation in the transition from social movement to institutionalised party-movement. More specifically, it aims to highlight the changes that occur within a populist movement-party when it reaches important governmental positions. The most exemplary case is undoubtedly Podemos: the party-movement was founded in 2014 as a result of the strong political mobilisation of the 15M social movement, also known as the Indignados movement, which has developed in the Spanish state since 2011. Since January 2020 the Spanish movement-party is part of the Sánchez II government in which the secretary of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, held the position of Vice-President of the Council and Minister of Social Policies. The analysis will use a comparative method, highlighting the transformations and points of convergence that occurred in political participation in Spain from social movements to the entry of Podemos into the Sánchez II government. In particular, we will analyze the organizational dimensions and the changes in the consensus of the party-movement at national level. Podemos is a 'mutant gene', a fluid organization that has made the 'populist moment' and the bottom-up participation an essential instrument of its initial electoral and media success. Exogenous and endogenous causes have led to a repositioning on the left-right axis and, once in government, to a need for discursive, communicative and organizational change. The future of Podemos will depend on its ability to readjust to these changes, especially the need for greater participation and territorial presence and the change in leadership.

The current literature posits that national-level income inequality shapes individuals’ traditional political participation choices based differences in individuals’ income levels. However, the study of individuals’ normative attitudes toward inequality has undermined two essential assumptions of this relationship, namely that all individuals can both correctly assess national-level inequality and respond to inequality in accordance with their socio-economic group. Using the European Values Surveys (1990-2017) in more than 40 countries, we test these separate literatures simultaneously and expand the examination to include non-traditional political participation. We find that when individuals’ normative inequality attitudes are introduced, the current literature’s necessary interaction between individuals’ income levels and changes in national-level income inequality nearly universally disappears. These normative attitudes also have significant and consistent effects on political participation choices. Such findings support a theoretical alternative in which normative attitudes toward inequality offer insight into individuals’ orientations to inequality that may better explain political participation choices.

Turkish politics has been experiencing a neo-Ottomanist shift in the past decade following the country’s democratic backsliding. However, this shift was not only limited to foreign and domestic politics of the current Turkish government but spread to the site of cultural production. While the representation of “Turkishness” has gained retrospect due to the neo-Ottoman turn mostly at the domestic policy level following the nationalist-populist policies of the Turkish government, the cultural production site has become a site of contestation for Turkish identity. In the last ten years, the number of Ottoman-themed soap operas has risen dramatically, including the ones that are created and supported by the Turkish government. Cultural production, especially TV shows became the means to (re)produce the populist discourses in Turkey. However, these discourses and aesthetic practices went beyond the national borders and influenced Turkey’s international position and its relations with the former Ottoman domains. By drawing on the literature on the aesthetic turn in IR and postcolonial theory, this paper aims to explore the role of cultural production in shaping public images, political identities, and international politics. In addition to exploring the production process of these aesthetic practices and their function in recreating political identities, this research also engages with the cultural production networks. While exploring the suitable theoretical approaches, this paper engages with the empirical case of Turkey and presents visual illustrations and their analysis regarding the Turkish identity representations that take part in Turkish TV shows after 2011 and their international resonance.

**Note to the Chair of the Panel: We are very happy to present in either English or Italiano for our presentation** Abstract: This paper examines the electoral decline of the Valence Populist Italian Five Star Movement Party (M5S) post-2018 Italian General Election via an empirical analysis at the sub-national level. The paper draws on a mixed methods triangulation research design approach which consists of expert survey data across time from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) (2014, 2017, 2019 & 2020 waves) alongside original elite-led interviews with M5S Party politicians and regional level elections (2015-2021) that coincides with the ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic. We find that (a) M5S’s ideological ambiguity and (b) ‘catch’ all nature has hindered the party electorally in recent years. On a number of key issue positions (‘supply-side’) M5S has ‘blurred’ their issue positions (ambiguity), with its main right-wing ‘populist’ rivals (Lega & Fratelli d’Italia) capitalizing, through offering clear stances (clarity) on a number of key socio-cultural issue-based positions, such as immigration & EU integration (‘hard’ Euroscepticism). The paper also finds strong negative anti-incumbency effects (‘demand-side’) for the M5S Party at the regional level of analysis, alongside a high degree of internal party dissent over socio-economic issues for the M5S Party during the COVID-19 Pandemic at the regional level. M5S is neither a 'populist' left-wing nor a right-wing party. We argue that the very strength of the grassroots activist movement (decentralized party structure and democratic mass mobilization) that propelled and led to the systematic rise of M5S at the national level in Italian politics has now become the party's weakness and fundamental Achilles heel. Furthermore, we also argue in the paper that M5s’s future as both a governing and outright ‘populist’ party is both unclear and highly debatable. M5S's vote share at the national level via opinion polls has also collapsed in recent times (2018-2022). Though M5S has been in Coalition Government and served in three successive terms, the future of M5S looks increasingly uncertain, especially amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and a severely declining economic situation in contemporary Italian politics.

Policy measures to contrast the spread of COVID-19 pandemic, including public vaccination campaigns, have sparked large protests all around Europe. Mass media and, in Western Europe, leading governments often describe the protesters as anti-science, uneducated right-wing populists, prone to believe in conspiracy theories (for a discussion, Bertuzzi 2021). Yet, research evidence points to a more diverse composition, and scholars struggle to grasp the phenomenon. On the one side, in fact, studies confirm the assumptions: a high correlation between voting for, or supporting, populist parties and vaccine hesitancy, in Western Europe (Kennedy 2019), and between low education and vaccine scepticism (Egin and Vezzoni 2020). Also, research points out the relationship of vaccine hesitancy with distrust towards established medicine (Trujillo and Motta 2020), as well as with the spread of misinformation about vaccines (Carrieri et al. 2019). On the other, though, research also reveals a positive correlation between vaccine hesitancy and educational level and to high levels of commitment towards taking responsibility for one’s own health (Peretti-Watel et al. 2019), and points out that people opposing vaccinations conceive of themselves as pro-science (Rozbroj et al. 2020). Broadly speaking, in fact, warnings against vaccines, even before the protests related to the COVID-19, are often accompanied by the call for more science – more independent studies, more research (Lello 2020) – and the invitation to engage with non-mainstream medical literature, framed as freer from financial and political constraints than institutional or academic knowledge production. Also, vaccine hesitancy is often combined with the positive appraisal of traditional or alternative medicine, homeopathy, organic diets (Moran et al. 2016). More broadly, vaccine-related protests have refuelled long-term struggles against compulsory vaccinations and have been combined with claims related to a variety of concerns, including the dangers of science (such as 5G, Berman 2020), technocracy and political freedom (see the discussion in Alteri et al. 2021). In other words, concerns over vaccines have mobilized political activism from all the political spectrum, bridging traditionally opposing positions in a composite milieu loosely connecting diverse actors. This milieu gathering those concerned over the vaccines includes actors with different political backgrounds expressing with various degrees of intensity concerns over variously interconnected issues – and its composition varies in relation to the specific country-related (and, often, local) political culture (see for example Raffini and Penalva 2022). The politicized challenges to institutionalized epistemic authorities and (deductive) scientific epistemology (or both – see Mede and Schafer 2020 for a discussion) work as the common grammar that articulates such diversity. This contribution focuses specifically on the left-leaning participants to this milieu in the Italian case: our working hypothesis is that they are mostly the expression of the leftist area concerned over issues (such as ecology, sustainability, circular economy) whose articulation in radical terms have been neglected by the institutionalized centre-left politics in the last twenty years – and that takes instead the form of radical ecological alternatives and prefiguration (see for example Centemeri and Asara 2020; Centemeri 2018), and sometimes adopt the vocabulary of spirituality (Castagnetto and Palmisano 2021; Palmisano and Pannofino 2021). From a socio-constructivist perspective, we want to investigate different aspects of the left-leaning area of the vaccine-related milieu: (1) considering the proximity between the vocabulary of spirituality and conspiracy ideation (Murru 2022), we focus on how the participants describe the milieu and its composition, paying attention to the emergence of conspirituality thinking and practices (Ward and Voas 2011) and to the processes of border-making, of identification and/or differentiation towards the various positions fuelling vaccines-related protests. (2) considering the complex transformations of the political status of truth (Giorgi 2022), we are interested in analysing what are the epistemic authorities and the epistemologies praised and validated by the milieu participants. (3) considering the diverse forms of participation within this milieu (which involve both cognitive and aesthetic dimension, Parmigiani 2021), we are interested in exploring the range of engagement practiced by the participants. Data are based on field ethnography and interviews (in the perspective of mundane interactions, Rapley 2007). The purposive sampling follows the saturation principle (considering educational level and age groups) and draws on snowball technique (Emmel 2014).

During the phase of sanitarian crisis preceding the outbreak of the Ukraine war, hundreds of groups and collectives making up the section of the Italian left rooted in civil society went through implicit and explicit fractures. Some of these fractures were revelatory of a cultural-historical condition that, far from being determined by the (new and disruptive) characters of the pandemic, has to do with remote historical events, deep-rooted cultural ruptures and the longue-durée. The paper intends first to define two opposing political attitudes towards the Italian pandemic policies of 2020-2022. Such attitudes come from different areas of the contemporary western (and Italian) left. Secondly, aims at qualifying the characters of the political cultures inspiring such attitudes, providing an historical context. Thirdly and finally, it proposes a general interpretation of such political fractures and the philosophical odds they highlight. These latter are indeed located in the inability to reconcile the notion of critique with that of government. The two left-wing factions this research is singling out are (a) the main parties in the Conte II and the main centre-leftist ones in the Draghi governments, who voted in parliament for laws and mandates shaping the Italian pandemic policy (formations such as the PD or LEU); and (b) the universe of affinity groups acting outside the parliament who criticized those policies on the other (post-autonomous groups stemming from the 70s, neo-communist networks and, to a lesser extent, anarchists). The street mobilizations to which the second faction under scrutiny has sometimes converged had as their objective (1) the contestation of the early closures of restaurants and cafés in October 2020 and “lock-down” measures since the previous March; (2) the vaccination campaigns and the juristic form they assumed from July 2021. This research focuses on (1). All the collectives and groups entailed in (b) if not fully nor always, often adhered to these mobilizations. The research relies on direct documentary sources to show that hardly any organized group of this kind explicitly supported lockdowns measures, though not providing alternative governing policies’ proposals for the ongoing emergency. We need to question the historical reasons for this state of affairs. What are the ideological defining features of the «Italian lefts», in favor or critical to the government’s pandemic policies? The argument proposed is that it is impossible to understand these political spectrums if one assumes the history of the left as continuous despite changes. Instead, its historic timeline must be broken at a decisive historical point, especially in North America and Western Europe: Second World War. The affirmation of peace, geopolitical coexistence (Bongiovanni 1995; Graziosi 2008) and of spectacular and consumerist society in its aftermath (Horkheimer-Adorno 1944; Debord 1967; 1984) decreed the end of the previous leftist cultures in the western world. These had been either revolutionary, and predominantly Bolshevik-inspired, or reformist, and predominantly social-democratic. Since the mid-20th century, nevertheless, such “classic” denominations haven’t disappeared (despite the disappearance of the phenomenons they denoted). Just the cultural core of their project had. It consisted in two different perspectives of government. The two aforementioned denominations (“revolutionaries” and “reformists”, both referred to governmental sorts of action) have survived in the Sixties to denote substantively different, newly born forms of left, post-classical and incompatible with the previous ones (Grasso 2022). The new lefts’ development culminated respectively (a) in the Prague 1968 events (technocratic left: repressive, administrative and capitalist, whether in liberal or socialist fashion: see Crainz 2018; Grasso 2019; Friedman 2019); and (b) in the Paris events of the same year (imaginary left: prefigurative, dreamlike and symbolic, either through street agitation, expressive arts or armed struggle: Foucault 1977; Eco 1977; Balestrini-Moroni 1988). Since the 1989 events, skills accumulated by leftist-technocratic personnel in administration and conflict containment elevated them to manifestation par excellence of an elitarian ruling class both in the eyes of newly globalized economic powers and oppressed classes (Lazzarato 2008; Rupnik 2019). With the fall of the late simulacrums of communism, on the other side, the only conceivable mode of existence of western leftist “dissent” became even more “imaginary” (Bauman-Bordoni 2014). As shown by the pandemics, the technocratic left qualifies as a reservoir of technical-administrative skills for national, supranational and international bureaucracies/private companies and corporations. The imaginary left, in turn, is a reservoir of social relations and lifestyles mostly parasitizing the symbolic legacy of past or extra-western cultures or revolutions. Faced with the real emergency caused by an event of global importance such as the pandemic, the technocratic left protected the neoliberal set-up of the economy and prevented health damage only insofar and to the extent in which it could have provoked mass unrest (Navarro 2020; Horton 2020). The imaginary left has instead divided itself into two attitudes: (1) inaction/silence in analytic or assertive terms, possibly companied by local welfare activation and voluntary social assistance; (2) denunciation of the technocratic left’s policies and subsequent digital and street mobilizations (Bratton 2021; Bologna 2021). This typical opposing attitudes have had in the Covid-19 crisis a climax, but were in place before (1989 velvet revolutions, 2011 peoples’ springs, US or Russian wars, economic crises). The paper’s concluding thesis is that the essential binomial of the classical left (revolutionary or reformist; partly still present in the post-colonial world) had been (1) governing processes (of social and historical character, grounded on some ethical and theoretical auctoritas: Cerroni 1995) and (2) doing it differently from antagonistic ruling classes (overall critical approach in political terms: Fetscher 1979; Strada 1979). The fadeaway of such combination qualifies the post-classical left, be it technocratic or imaginary. The technocratic left cannot exist indeed unless it governs something – government and administration is its only and self-referring goal – but it neither thinks about, nor promotes, critical-historical ruptures. The imaginary left thinks instead of ruptures and formulates critiques – imagining theoretical ruptures as its self-sufficient goal – but does not promote change, disqualifying the very notion of government at the most theoretical level (Grasso 2020; Nancy 2020; see also Virno 1989). The studies on the notion of government by Michel Foucault (1978; 1979; 1982) and, to a lesser extent, those proposed by Giorgio Agamben (1995; 2003; 2020; 2021a; 2021b) are animating, in various ways, the analysis of the pandemic phase by most Italian blogs and subgroups of the extra-parliamentary left, that this study has analyzed.

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused a number of transformations and effects at a social (and psychological) level over the past two years. In addition to the severe health and economic impacts that have seriously challenged the solidity of the market system and the ability of states to cope with emergencies of this magnitude, the pandemic has also produced consequences and innovations in terms of participation in social movements and protest groups. While in many cities and local communities collective initiatives of solidarity and mutual aid have developed (distribution of meals and medicines, free covid-test, etc.), especially to support the most vulnerable (the elderly, the sick, the homeless, etc.), within movements and protest groups organizational forms, strategies and tactics, frames and emotional dynamics have changed, more or less markedly, depending on the socio-territorial context and the ability of activists to deal with the emergency. The paper explores some transformations that occurred in the LULU protest groups following the spread of the virus and the government's adoption of measures to contain the contagion (lockdown, vaccination, green pass), highlighting how activists perceived the emergency and how this perception - and related emotions - affected collective action. Adopting a sociological approach to emotions and drawing on studies on emotions and protest, I'll show how emotions related to the pandemic (emotions of trauma) interact with emotions generated during the protest (emotions of resistance and reciprocal/shared emotions) producing different responses among activists. More specifically, the research focuses on activists' perceptions of two central aspects of the pandemic - the spread of the virus and the adoption of measures to contain the contagion - and is guided by the following questions: Which emotions felt during the pandemic had an impact on collective protest action? How did the perception of the health emergency (and related emotions) transform the political discourses of the movement? The analysis is based on data collected through interviews and participant observation carried out in 2022 in the context of a local mobilization against an international gas pipeline in Apulia (Italy). In addition, written documents (websites, posts) and audiovisual material (mostly produced by the activists themselves) were analyzed. In general, the results show how the emotional dynamics that developed during the pandemic increased the difficulty for activists to continue their protest activities. If, on the one hand, the shared emotions of fear and anxiety generated by the perception of the danger of the virus strengthened the affective bonds and solidarity between group members, on the other hand, the measures imposed by the public authorities to limit the spread of the contagion produced different emotional and cognitive responses among activists, also generating internal disagreements based on different interpretations of the pandemic context and how to deal with it.

The outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic determined the acceleration of dynamics of change involving the landscape and opportunities for political mobilization. In particular, some of the most distinctive flagships of the Left – e.g. the promotion of science and rationalism, public health, and environmental protection – where progressive instances used to find a counterbalance in conservative and neoliberal positions until some decades ago, are now becoming battlefields where new actors and alliances are taking place, thus possibly resulting in re-politicization processes and in a redefinition of the lines of the political conflict. Relevant and rapid changes in the global neoliberal governance and in the strategies of (science) lobbyism have a relevant role in processes that have been described through the labels of green-(but also ethics- and participatory-) washing (Saltelli et al. 2022; Dentico 2020; Osimani et al. 2020; Oreskes and Conway 2010). Particular and corporate sector interests may thus be promoted in the name of modernization, rationalism, and sustainable development, while it may happen that genuinely emancipatory mobilizations fighting against those interests are labeled as enemies of science and reason (Walker 2014; Foucart, Horel and Laurens 2020), their reasons being consequently dismissed - without even being listened to - through their assimilation to the Radical Right and/or to populism or possibly through a pathologizing interpretation of their claims. A frequent strategy of de-politicizing (and consequently de-legitimizing) their claims consists in assimilating them as a whole to conspiracy theories, highlighting a use of conspiracism as a political weapon that should be critically addressed in the light of the power relations behind the labelling processes bringing only some critical theories to be considered as conspiracy ones (Pelkmans e Machold, 2011). This perspective may be usefully applied to “eco-activism”, a label we use to refer to a wide range of socio- political engagements ranging from radical ecology to neo-peasantry, agro-ecology, and anti-speciesism. Within these networks, different and contrasting evaluations of pandemic policies – including vaccines and digital certificates – have determined conflicts and divisions. Relevant fractions of these movements have expressed critical positions towards the pandemic management, but they did not receive enough attention from scholars as well as from the public and media debate. We argue that a shift is taking place within these mobilization areas, where traditional claims of ecological and food (but also feminist) self-determination translate into analogous revendications based on a frame of self-determination, which is linked to peculiar ideas of health, body, and medicine. Consequently, also the enemy tends to shift from the corporations of industrial agriculture towards the pharmaceutical companies. Based on 70 semi-structured interviews collected during the last 18 months among Italian vaccine-hesitant citizens, we focus, to test this hypothesis, on the relevant part of the interviewees close to eco-activism, mainly concentrating on the relationship between their ideas about the environment, health, and care. The empirical part is complemented with a documental analysis of texts produced by environmentalist networks about the pandemic.

In November 17th 2018, the Yellow Vests Movement challenged political representation and participation. The gilets jaunes protest movement was surprising in its scope, forms of organization, and duration from 2018 until today (2022). The French Ministry of Interior reports that 287,000 people participated in actions at one of 2,000 blockades or demonstrations that day. The mobilization went on for several weeks with a high level of intensity. Researchers estimate that nearly three million people took part, occasionally or regularly, in a Yellow Vests (YV) action (Dormagen, Michel, et Reungoat 2021). It challenges the established analyses of social movements, raising many questions about its composition, its characterization, and the methodology to be used to understand its complexity(Collectif d’enquête sur les Gilets Jaunes et al. 2019). From our data, it became clear that the majority of participants were from the working classes. The gilets jaunes’ demands—initially to pull-off the domestic tax on the consumption of energy products — gradually broadened to include demands relating to social justice, as well as to representation and democracy(Bedock et al. 2020; Alexandre et al. 2021). This (apparent) heterogeneity of demands has given rise to contradictory interpretations of the movement, which is seen sometimes as reactionary or populist, and sometimes as revolutionary. Rather, the YVM seems to be related to a broader cycle of contention, anti-austerity protest and global justice movement (Bertuzzi et al. 2022;Snow 2013, 12). Occupy Wall Street (2011), places occupations appeared in Mediterranean countries - the Tahrir Place (2011), Gehzi Park in Istambul, the Indignant citizens of Madrid or Athens, the Sicilian Forconi – raising the issue of the current phase of global capitalism and neo-liberal policies. Its French declination, “Nuit Debout” arose in 2016 against the reform of labor market, gathering urban, educated people in Paris and most French big cities (Baciocchi et al. 2020). The YV also shares with Anti-austerity movement its heterogeneous social base feature, bringing together precariat workers, employees and small business, but also “pink collars” – care-workers – and retirees. While the movement developed in terms of its demands, it was also characterized by unique and evolving set of collective actions, without a national coordination center, which is very peculiar for a national broad social movement in France. The continuous occupation of roundabouts was often coupled with free toll operations and blockades (of roads, hypermarkets, freight, and refineries) and was accompanied, from the end of November 2018, by weekly demonstrations that sometimes targeted places of political power. These Saturday gatherings, known as “Acts” question the established codes of the demonstration, as for a long time they had no pre-planned route, no organization, no police contingent, and none of the traditional symbolic attributes usually seen at demonstrations (a structured procession, banners, flags, and so on).?YVM also challenged public policing order with coercive tactics and massive use of “on lethal weapons”. Citizens’ assemblies on roundabouts and in town centers, petitions, volunteer-led pop-up help points for disabled individuals, and farmers’ markets also added to the movement’s repertoire of collective action. The movement went on in 2020, facing COVID crisis and strategical dilemmas about municipal elections that took place in March and June 2020. Recently, our data show a renewed interest for legislative election among YVM and Anti-Green Pass participants. Did the pandemic favor legal and electoral tactics? How does it shape YVM, its demands, repertoires and frames? Some of our data suggest that freedom restrictions due to the pandemic made usual forms of protest impossible to cary out. Participation went on-line, bridging individuals to new networks. Pandemic, vaccine and surveillance became dominant issues for the YVM. Our paper will thus address the issue of continuity and discontinuity of social movement in pandemic time following though the lens of specific configuration. Our research design is based on comparisons within the YVSM participants and network, demands and frames, and reprertoire and sites of protest. The capacity of the YVM to continue during the COVID crisis could be explained by three hypothesis 1) the participation before COVID crisis and post-lock down is slighly different. We will examine according the context who stays, who comes back after the first lock-down and who is a new comer if so, agregating new networks to former ones. 2) Some analysis show two distinct groups and attitudes toward representation, the “populist” ones - new comers, less politicized yellow vests tend - to endorse more coercitive and suspicious views on representation, whereas former left-wing activist, more politicized tend to promote political participation. We will examine if the former will be more incline to participate into Anti-Green Pass demonstrations, whereas the later enter in abeyance and dropped off, reflecting different values; 3) As noted, the SMO evolves in different sites, suggesting differences in “collective action performances” and various appropriations of space. We make the hypothesis that space issues reveal continuity and discontinuity within the movement in time of the pandemic. Our paper will provide a new insight on key concepts of social movement analysis such as abeyance, spin-off movement by analyzing the YVM, a long-time protest that occurred in France mainland and oversea territories from autumn 2018 until now. In order to do so, we will rely on a case study (Trom & David A. Snow 2002). Indeed, the YVM offers a unique point of view to observe how social movement participant dealt with freedom restriction, new issues, framed new demands that replace or complete former demands. During the first lock-down (March 17th 2020-May 11th 2020), street protests went off the street – with few exceptions – and many activists went on line. In May, new protests occurred between the two rounds of the municipal elections, with a significant decrease in participation. After a declining phase, a new sequence began after the announce of the Green Pass. On July 14th 2021 the French national day, center-right wing President Emmanuel Macron, announced a new policy on COVID, provoking a new wave of contention. Some former YV participants went back in the streets, joined by newcomers who did not take part in the YV. Other YV refused to join the demonstrations to avoid collective action with supposed far-right wing activists, anti-vaccines or conspiracy adepts. We choose three site of mobilization: a national scene (Paris), a local context in a hotspot (Bordeaux) and a colonial context i.e. the French Island of La Réunion in the Indian Ocean. These three sites share different characteristics. In Paris, YV and Anti-Green Pass street protests did not follow the same paths, gathering participant in different points of the capital following tensions with the movement. In Bordeaux we could observe merging and spin-off movement, whereas in La Réunion, social and racialized dynamics gave rise to different kind of protest during the pandemic. Since 2018, we gathered different data set : 1) On-site survey (n=1477 questionnaires) in various sites of action from November 2018 until March 2019; Saturday “Acts” observations in Paris and Bordeaux, two hot-spots of the protest; 3) In-depth interviews with participants in Paris, Bordeaux, La Réunion. At organizational level, our paper brings some insight about on-site and on-line networks and activities. Multi-site observations allow us to identify specific configurations, networks, frames and repertoires of actions. At individual level, in-depth interviews with participants of the YVM and the Anti-Green Pass and Anti-Vaccine protests will give hints on the specific configuration – understood as participant, institution response, temporality and space -, continuity, abeyance and withdraw of protest. Bibliography Alexandre, Chloé, Stéphanie Abrial, Camille Bedock, Frédéric Gonthier, et Tristan Guerra. 2021. « Punish or partake? The Yellow Vests’ democratic aspirations ». Communication présenté à Understanding the French Yellow Vest Movement through the lens of mixed methods”, Paris-On-line, septembre 29. https://giletsjaunes.hypotheses.org/187. Baciocchi, Stéphane, Alexandra Bidet, Pierre Blavier, Carole Gayet-Viaud, et Erwan Le Méner. 2020. « Who comes to Nuit Debout? Paris, place de la République, April-June 2016. Three methods for a question ». Sociologie 11 (3): 251?66. Bedock, Camille, Loïc Bonin, Pauline Liochon, et Tinette Schnatterer. 2020. « Controlling representation: Visions of the political system and institutional reforms in the gilets jaunes movement ». Participations 28 (3): 221?46. Bertuzzi, Niccolò, Daniela Chironi, Donatella della Porta, Chiara Milan, Martín Portos, et Lorenzo Zamponi. 2022. « Bringing grievances back in? Socio-economic inequalities and the political participation of protesters ». In Resisting the Backlash. Routledge. Collectif d’enquête sur les Gilets Jaunes, Camille Bedock, Zakaria Bendali, Antoine Bernard de Bernard de Raymond, Anne-Gaëlle Beurier, Pierre Blavier, Loïc Bonin, et al. 2019. « Investigating a Protest Movement in the Heat of the Moment ». Revue Francaise de Science Politique 69 (5): 869?92. Dormagen, Jean-Yves, Laura Michel, et Emmanuelle Reungoat. 2021. « Quand le vert divise le jaune ». Ecologie politique 1 (62): 25?47. Trom, Danny et David A. Snow. 2002. « The Case Study and the Study of Social Movements ». In Methods of social movement research, édité par Suzanne Staggenborg et Bert Klandermans, 146?72. Social movements, protest, and contention 16. Minneapolis (Minn.): University of Minnesota press.

This article explores a specific type of solidarity movement actors that provides grassroots and independent support to people on the move outside the official refugee reception system, which I have termed “Emergency Solidarity Groups” (ESGs). Specifically, it investigates how ESGs have adapted and reshaped their solidarity practices to cope with the unprecedented challenges posed by the COVID-19 outbreak and the pandemic-related restrictions in place since March 2020. The spatial setting in which the analysis is situated is the Western Balkans migratory route, a path increasingly crossed by people on the move on their journey towards the EU. Based on virtual participant observation and in-depth interviews with spokespersons of these groups, this article finds evidence that during the pandemic ESGs continued to pursue their goals by adapting their solidarity practices to the changed circumstances. This was possible thanks to the adoption of a blended mode of action, which combined online and offline activities, and the reliance on social connections, meaning an established support structure composed by a network of local and international contacts built prior to the pandemic outbreak, which I term “reservoir of trust”. By adopting an interactionist perspective that attributes importance to both the political environment in which social movements operate and their agency, therefore approaching ESGs as dynamic configurations of players which are neither static nor homogeneous, this study contributes to understanding how refugee solidarity groups adapt their practices in times of pandemic.

Recent crises and the Covid-19 pandemic have brought to the fore the role of scarcity for political engagement. This paper investigates the effects of situations of systemic crisis on political engagement, specifically political interest, electoral participation, and membership in various political organizations. We compare two main kinds of crisis: the economic crisis that started in 2008 and the Covid-19 pandemic. Concerning economic crises, while a withdrawal hypothesis might suggest declining participation through economic scarcity and inequality, these could also be seen to mobilize people through politicization. Previous work has shown that relative deprivation may stimulate certain forms of collective action and political engagement such as protest particularly given certain conditioning effects at the macro-level. A similar divergent effect may be hypothesized for sanitary crises: on one hand, they might deter political engagement, but on the other hand they might also lead to a greater politicization and therefore also more engagement. We will also explore the extent to which the impact of economic and sanitary crises on political voice and engagement is mediated by the emergence of a political crisis, itself generated by the crisis. To address these issues, we exploit data from the Swiss household panel. These data include measures of economic scarcity and inequality. Moreover, the three more recent waves include a question on the government’s management of the pandemic and another on the perception of restrictions of civil rights imposed.

The Era of Pandemics is a sure breakdown for the conventional forms, institutions and relations of civil society. This breakdown may turn an anti-political social movement with a title and formational features of political party - due to its legal safeguard and political effectivity. In November 2021, a new party, Party of Life Without Coercion, was established in Turkey as the main representor of anti-vax movement, after a couple of civil demonstrations in the country. The cardinal argument of it is to “resist for obligations and impositions … of WHO” in relation to the worldwide compulsory vaccination policies. Independently from its existential argument, which is a democratic right and a view of freedom of expression, the existence of the party is quite paradoxical regarding that it has no “political colour in the spectrum”, that is stated as “being supra-political” in Turkish language. This case is convenient to be evaluated as parodic or absurd regarding its incompatibility of meeting the main functions of a political party while its main argument is permitting to be formulated as a salient pressure group. And absurdity arises from the incompatibility between the definition, functions and tools of this party. Main point of this presentation is to shed light to the reflexive relations between the lack of prepotent and reverenced civil society, the need of safeguarded and effective representation and a possible deformation through the forms and institutions of social movements - regarding the running Turkish case.

The Covid-19 epidemic has legitimized governments worldwide to ban national rallies and demonstrations with the justification of a health emergency. This measure, however, sounds rather sneaky in those countries characterized by a faltering rule of law and facing anti-regime mobilizations. This article sheds light on the case study of Algeria, a hybrid regime that has been hit hard by the pandemic over the past two years and has been characterized by increasing restrictions on civil liberties in times of profound political change. Based on semi-structured interviews with civil society activists engaged in the anti-regime movement since 2019 and on the analysis of the securitization strategies of national authorities, this article focuses on the following research questions: How did the pandemic transform the political opportunities of civil society in a country characterized by a revolutionary process - the Hirak movement? In other words, how did the movement, its ideas, and practices transform during the pandemic? How did the power relations between the national authorities and their internal opponents change after the pandemic outbreak? Findings show the challenges of civil society actors in overcoming the autocratic restrictions of national authorities, focusing on the role of digital media and the support of transnational solidarity networks. Overall, drawing on social movement literature on transnational activism, the paper contributes to a broader investigation of the impact of global challenges on the reconfiguration of domestic power relations from a theoretical and empirical perspective.

This study proposes a new analytical framework to assess civic and political participation in developing countries, with special regard to Sub-Saharan Africa. Our contribution addresses a twofold literature limitation: a research gap in policy studies on what drives success of civic engagement in policy processes; a weak understanding of what drives successful participatory experiences in the literature on social movements and political participation. Drawing on contemporary empirical evidence from developing countries, the framework allows a preliminary identification of the enablers of successful civic and political participatory experiences, as well as a better understanding of their challenges and failures. Two main categories of enablers, “Resources” and “Capabilities”, emerge as of paramount importance for success, as well as their interaction. These categories are both composed of four sub-sets, each of them representing a specific resource or capability-related enabler of successful civic and political participation. In order to test its validity and explanatory potential, we apply the framework by testing its key hypotheses on two case studies in Sub-Saharan Africa: (i) Community participation in water service delivery in Uganda; (ii) The Resistance Committees' mobilisation during the political transition in Sudan. The results from the case studies confirm our hypotheses, enhance the understanding of these participatory experiences and their outcomes, and suggest interesting research avenues for the framework's further development and application in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.