Massimiliano Andretta

Protesting for justice and democracy: Italian Indignados?

This article analyses anti-austerity protest in Italy as a sort of ‘functional equivalent’ of the Indignados movements in other countries. While the typical forms of action of these movements, the acampada, were not very widespread in Italy in 2011, there were mobilisations for social justice and participatory democracy which indeed resonated with the frames that developed in Spain, Greece and the United States. Research based on surveys at three protest events indicates in fact that, in Italy too, protest concerning social issues is linked with extremely low and declining levels of trust in institutions, but also with calls for more political intervention to address social inequalities. After briefly presenting the methodology used in the surveys, the authors empirically substantiate this statement by looking at the political positions as well as the framing processes of the protestors interviewed. While similar capitalist evolution and cross-national diffusion explain the similarities, some peculiar features of the Italian movement are linked with the specific political opportunities present in the Italian case.

Contentious precarious generation in anti-austerity movements in Spain and Italy

This article focuses on the precarious generation protesting in Spain and Italy in times of crisis and austerity (2010-2012). Their many similarities notwithstanding, the two countries have experienced different types of mobilization against austerity measures. In Spain, a relatively autonomous mobilization –characterized by new collective actors and new forms of action– has made possible the building of a political actor, Podemos, able to seriously challenge the established political parties. In Italy, instead, the mobilization was dominated by established political actors, especially trade unions, did not produce innovative forms of action and has not been able to overcome (so far) the fragmentation of the social movement sector. In both countries, however, the anti-austerity protests have been characterized by a strong presence of what we call hear the “precarious generation”, particularly exposed to the economic crisis and the austerity measures. By relying on data from several surveys conducted in demonstrations on social, economic and labor issues in the two countries from 2010 to 2011, in this article we single out differences and the similarities in terms of presence, social composition, grievances and emotion, collective identity and network embeddedness of the precarious generation. Our findings show that the precarious generation was almost equally present in the selected demonstrations in the two countries, share similar socio-graphic features and similar types of grievance and emotions. Nonetheless, in Spain it seems to have built a more cohesive and radical collective identity based upon a more informal and internet based network integration while in Italy it seems embedded in a more traditional and formal network, which prevented the formation of a strong collective identity. Moreover, while in Spain the differences between the older and the precarious generation reveal that, both have a strong identity based on different networks; more formal the older and more related to informal and online instruments the latter; in Italy, the older generation has a much stronger collective identity based on a organizational network, while the precarious one is less but still integrated in organizational network. We conclude that the more autonomous civil society tradition in Spain, together with the particular political opportunities, under the pressure of a harsher economic crisis, may account for the differences we found.

Dynamics of individual participation : surveying Italian protestors

Abstract This article investigates the factors that explain differential individual involvement in political demonstrations. Though the question of who actually participates in (protest) politics is by no means new, the authors build here upon existing literature in social movement studies in order to test some of the existing hypotheses. Reviewing existing research on individual participation in contentious politics, four theoretical arguments used to explain participation differentials were highlighted: the socio-biographical argument pointing to either social centrality or biographical availability; the collective identity process based on the interaction between norms, values, and actions; the network integration argument; and the argument that emotions are in the drivers seat. The article proposes an original analysis based on surveys carried out during nine demonstrations that occurred in Italy between 2011 and 2013 on a variety of issues, some directly related to the economic crisis and the consequent austerity policies, others mainly addressing new social movements claims. Looking at the participation in demonstrations of 1624 protestors, we conclude that social centrality and collective identity formation have higher explanatory power in examining degrees of participation in protest.

Movimenti sociali e sfide globali: politica, antipolitica e nuova politica dopo l'11 settembre

This article discusses the effects of the terroristic attacks of September 11 t h 2001 on social movements, in particular on peace activism. It presents the results of an empirical research carried out through structured questionnaires, administered to participants at the peace march (PerugiaAssisi) that took place on October 2001, that are compared with those collected among activists of the protest against the G8 in July 2001 in Genoa. September 11 t h had considerable effects on the conditions of movements development, focusing attention on the issue of peace, emphasizing the need for nonviolent strategies, stressing the urgency of a «politics from below». If the opposition to the war and terrorism became a common discoursive frame, there is still a tension an interpretation of the war as a consequence of imperialistic relations and a more nuanced cultural and ethical interpretation. In the field of the action repertoires, both the experiences in Genoa and the need to also symbolically differentiating the movement strategies from both «militaristic» and terrorist behaviors pushed towards a more decisive choice for non-violent tactics, without however excluding direct action as unconventional, disruptive forms of protest, such as occupations, go-ins end, more in general, acts of civil disobedience. With respect to the organizational structure, the local social forum represents experiments in deliberative democracy and the search for local solution to global problems. Efforts towards permanent coordination and intervention in national politics produced, however, tensions and competition within the movement. The attitudes of the peace activists confirm a criticism towards representative forms of democracy and a criticism of the «institutional Left», already emerged in Genoa - a criticism reflected in the mistrust of the center-left parties towards the aims and the forms of the mobilization against neoliberal globalization. The article concludes with a reflection upon the emerging characters of the movement for globalization from below, and therefore the need to adapt some concepts and hypotheses coming from the sociology of social movement.

Participants in trade union-staged demonstrations: a cross-country comparison

Drawing both on social movement studies and labour studies, this article investigates the kind of people who join trade union-staged marches during the current crisis, looking at the presence of (politicized) grievances, collective identity and the embeddedness of mobilization. Data were taken from surveys conducted during 13 marches organized by the main trade unions in five European countries. They show that participants in union-staged demonstrations in countries in which a corporatist model dominates and trade unions have a tradition of business unionism (Belgium and the Netherlands) are characterized by higher political trust, more moderate positions on the left–right continuum and stronger organizational ties. On the other hand, in countries in which unions are less institutionally recognized and with a tradition of oppositional unionism (Italy and Spain), participants in union-staged demonstrations are more mistrustful of politics, located more to the left and rely more upon informal social networks to mobilize. The United Kingdom falls between these two poles.

Mapping Protest on the Refugee Crisis: Insights from Online Protest Event Analysis

In this chapter, we use a protest field approach to explore the main facets of the contentious dynamics triggered in three hotspots of the refugee crisis—Greece, Italy, and Spain. To this aim, we employ protest event analysis, a consolidated method to explore the relations between protest and the political environment. In comparison to traditional applications of this method, we make systematic use of Google News to retrieve news about protests on migration issues and to reconstruct the three protest fields. Results of our analysis suggest that the three countries did in fact provide different political opportunities for protest on migration issues to emerge side by side with solidarity initiatives and for different sets of actors to network and engage in these protests.

Neoliberalism and Its Discontents in Italy: Protests Without Movement?

The still ongoing economic crisis has triggered widespread protest, especially against the Italian governments’ austerity measures. In this chapter, I single out the main characteristics of Italian anti-austerity mobilization from 2009 to 2014, making use of different types of sources and integrating qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis. The aims of this chapter are, first, to contextualize the Italian anti-austerity mobilization in its economic, social and political context; second, to describe its main characteristics; and, finally, to provide an explanation for the comparative weakness of such mobilization in terms of political outcomes. The empirical findings of this chapter reveal the importance of the political opportunity structure, which operated as a filter between ‘threats’ or ‘grievances’ and protest mobilization in the Italian social movement tradition.