Towards "Local Justice Movement(s)"? Re-scaling of the Social Justice Protest in the Czech Republic

The paper seeks to find out whether and why the claims of contemporary left social movements miss the transnational dimension of recent social movements for global democracy. It is a case study of leftist protest politics in the Czech Republic but it traces on the process that might have taken place also in other countries. First, it focuses on the re-scaling of claim-making of Czech Left activism between 2000 and 2010 and suggests that in the midst of the global justice actors´ massive engagement in domestic anti-war activism (2006) the scale of claims suddenly shifted downwards. Here the paper builds upon the analysis of protest events organized by leftist groups in the Czech Republic between 2000 and 2010 (N=677). We integrate protest event and claim analysis and code the content and the scale of the claims that were raised at the recorded events. Second, based on the detailed study of Czech anti-war activism (2003-2008) the paper attempts to understand the particular mechanisms of how and why the trajectory of claim-making of Czech left activism changed and remained “nationalized” even during the times of global economic crisis. This part of paper relies on the network analysis of inter-organizational cooperation and on the frame analysis of protest events and suggests that it was the character of inter-organizational networks and the revived conception of “national democracy” that played the crucial role in the process.