The Politics of Social Change: Resilience and Contention in Times of Crises (Greece, 2009-2016)

With the outbreak of the global financial crisis, and the austerity policies as the uniform response at the European level, a transnational wave of contentious forms of protest arose, putting new actors and forms of claims-making at the forefront and, in many cases –such as Greece and Spain- causing deep rifts within existing institutions of social representation and to the established balances of Western party systems. At the same time, and almost concurrently with the social and geographic diffusion of contentiousness through practices and organizational templates that routinely orchestrate the social movements’ repertoires (demonstrations, occupations, networks and coordinating structures), new and variable forms of political participation and social resilience were also flourishing. Within this context, a particular cluster of collective action practices claiming social solidarity (social grocery shops and associations, social clinics, social kitchens etc) has emerged usually referred to in the literature as being absolutely original. Oriented towards devising new collective patterns for the self-organization of social and economic life at the grassroots and local level, and aiming to alleviate the dramatic effects of the crisis, these actions have been described as replacing (or displacing) more traditional forms of social protest thereby fundamentally altering the landscape of contemporary collective action. Yet, is this truly the case? The perspective of “absolute originality” considers neither the fact that cooperative solidarity actions follow a long historical trajectory (cooperative associations were the forebears of modern trade unionism), nor the fact that, while these forms become particularly pronounced during the times of the Great Recession, they first appeared at times of relative economic prosperity (as manifestations of emerging post-materialist societies). Critically exploring the existing literature, and with an empirical emphasis on solidarity actions oriented towards socially vulnerable groups during the time of two consecutive, partially overlapping crises ‒the economic and the refugee in Greece‒ this paper sets out to accomplish two interrelated goals. On the one hand, it seeks to identify innovations in the collective action repertoires emerging after the imposition of harsh austerity policies beginning in 2009-10. On the other hand, it aspires to create an analytical framework capable of shedding light on robust processes (i.e., processes triggering sociopolitical and cultural change) that become manifest in actions which, though usually treated as isolated, in reality coexist during the same protest cycle. Starting off from the hypothesis that actions of social resilience are not fundamentally incompatible with more traditional forms of social-movement activities, and adopting a meso-level analytical perspective, the paper attempts a “political sociology of interactions” between mobilized organizations, grassroots groups, state and non-state institutional actors, and local authorities with a specific focus on three different local contexts (Athens, Thessaloniki, and Lesvos).