Tuesday, June 25, 2013
C2.17 (Oudemanhuispoort)
The years 2011 and 2012 have been extremely interesting from a social movements point of view. Huge mobilisations in several countries have made street politics a crucial element of national political life. Is it possible to make global sense of these different movements? Do they belong to the same family type? In other words, beyond differences among them, is it possible to say that a new cycle of protest has emerged in Europe since 2010? To address this issue, we argue that we need not a juxtaposition of different cases but a genuine comparative perspective to begin to account for variation across European countries and across episodes of mobilization and protest. Building on different empirical cases already documented by us and others (Spain, France, Greece, Ireland), we propose a comparative framework of analysis, stressing three dimensions: the sociology of activists (who is mobilizing, on the basis of which activist trajectory, at what moment) ; the genealogy of protests in each society and how it is related or not to previous cycles of protest ; the space of protest in order to consider the issue of circulation, diffusion of people, ideas and practices at different scales as well as the material existence of movements, their physical forms and their concrete relationships to the context in which they emerge and develop.
