Building ‘Virtual’ and ‘Globalised’ Networks. New Technologies and Personalised Engagement in the Current ‘New’ Wave of Anti-Mafia Grassroots Mobilisation

This paper discusses the social mechanisms set in motion by a new anti-mafia organization called Addiopizzo (Goodbye Pizzo*) which has been able to successfully encourage a growing number of entrepreneurs and shopkeepers to refuse to pay racket fees to local mobs in the city of Palermo, Italy. By using communication technologies that enable personalized public engagement as part of a new interpretative frame which has introduced political consumerism into the repertoire of the anti-mafia movement, Addiopizzo activists – a group of post-grad students formed in 2004 – succeeded in creating a range of collective and selective incentives that made it possible for local businesspeople to overcome the problems of collective action and build new social bonds of solidarity. Referring to social movements and diffusion theories, the paper discusses how a relatively small local-based SMO succeeded in bringing about important changes by organizing itself locally as well as globally, and via Internet. Data for the analysis came from several sources of information, such as interviews with activists themselves, participant observation, and a unique dataset reporting the answers given to a structured questionnaire with more than 70 closed questions, distributed in 2011 to 277 entrepreneurs that had joined the mobilization campaign entitled “change your shopping habits to fight the pizzo” at various points in time**. -- *Extortion racket money. **This project is financed by the Swedish Research Council (2010-2013). The project is a collaboration between Uppsala University and University of Bergamo.