Eduardo Romanos

Evictions, Petitions and Escraches: Contentious Housing in Austerity Spain

In the context of the new period of mobilization begun in Spain with the rise of the indignados in May 2011, protests against home evictions are today at the center of local and international discussions. This article seeks to make an initial examination of these mobilizations and their relationship with routine politics in Spain. After a brief historical introduction the article looks at the different kinds of action, both contentious and conventional, employed by the movement against the evictions, as well as the various scale shift mechanisms that have diversified the number and range of actors involved in this particular case of contentious politics. The conclusions look at the question of as to what point recent developments have broken with the deep-rooted tendency toward a lack of interaction between protest movements and institutional actors.

Immigrants as brokers: dialogical diffusion from Spanish indignados to Occupy Wall Street

Abstract This article analyses the role played by Spanish immigrants in the diffusion of the indignados movement in Occupy Wall Street (OWS). I argue that Spanish residents in New York City acted as brokers between the two movements, and that their behaviour had a significant impact on OWS’s understanding of itself as an expansive, inclusive and empathic phenomenon. Building on recent theoretical developments, which stress the importance of dialogue and collective learning in the transnational diffusion of historical social movements, this research produces results at different levels. At the empirical level, the problems faced by the immigrants reveal the cultural complexity of transnational diffusion within the recent wave of contention. At the analytical level, the personal contact and intergroup dialogue established between immigrants and local activists challenge accounts stressing the role of social media and the internet within the transnational diffusion of this protest. At the theoretical level, the article develops a process-oriented perspective on brokerage, improving our understanding of its implications concerning diffusion. I argue that a longitudinal analysis of brokerage shows how interaction can modify role identity and movement diffusion: diffusion develops where brokers maintain a coordinating role in the movement, and ceases to do so where brokers are displaced from this central position.

Late Neoliberalism and Its Indignados: Contention in Austerity Spain

In May 2011, the so-called Indignados movement emerged in Spain, the mobilizing capacity, visibility and impact of which had no precedent in the country’s recent history. Activists demanded that authorities reverse the cuts in public services and civil rights, strengthen mechanisms of control and transparency, and create new channels of citizens’ access to decision making. Four years later, some of those Indignados participated in the emergence of new political parties that are nowadays ruling some important cities and became an important actor at the national level after elections in December 2015. In the meantime, a strong contentious cycle took place in the country. This chapter analyses this protest cycle, focusing on the socio-economic context, the political opportunities, the forms of action and organization, and the activists’ aims, identities and frames.

Redes anarquistas en la Europa de posguerra: latencia y renovación entre ciclos de protesta

This article examines international anarchism after 1945 by focusing on two networks particularly active in Western Europe: a network of young anarchists critical of the ineffectiveness of their respective national anarchist federations, and a network of libertarian publications which spread the work of a set of intellectuals critical of the traditional principles, tactics and goals of social anarchism. These networks of exchange and communication helped to renew anarchism in a political context that was particularly unreceptive to their demands. Analysing them will allow us to better define the postwar period as a phase of low visibility within the history of anarchism that, however, saw the elaboration of new ideological principles and strategic options. In the end, this article suggests that some of these developments appeared later in protest movements that prefigured and armed the 1968 international mobilization. The working hypothesis is that the postwar latency phase bridged the contentious 1930s with the new visibility of anarchism around 1968.