First-time activated? Analyzing the heterogeneity of the opposition against Covid-19 restrictions through a focus on activist/political biographies

During the period 2020-2022, the landscape of collective mobilizations underwent some major changes, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the individual and collective traumas it entailed, the possible change of priorities occurred to some activists, and obviously also due to the pandemic policies which have had an effect on the possibilities to protest in the streets and more generally on political opportunity structures and contentious politics. The discourse is valid on a global level (or at least in the global North, less used to such dramatic events and more overwhelmed by the changes linked to Covid-19), but with different specificities in the different national contexts. The changes for mobilization and participation dynamics can be divided into two main cases. On the one hand, some existing movements have had to review their forms of mobilization and also their frames: the paradigmatic case is that of Fridays For Future and other movements for climate justice which were experiencing a phase of strong growth in 2019, and which particularly suffered the spread of Covid-19. On the other hand, new mobilizations have emerged, criticizing the measures adopted by governments to contain the pandemic, in particular the restrictions and lockdowns, and later on, the vaccination policies. The novelty of these mobilizations was linked to the contents (only partially attributable to classic vaccine-hesitancy-related mobilizations) but above all to their composition, as citizens/activists with different political orientations and biographies found themselves sharing some frames (above all the diagnostic frames, while they remained distant in terms of prognostic and motivational frames). Through an empirical research conducted between the end of 2020 and the first months of 2022 among vaccine hesitants/refusers in Italy and based on 67 qualitative interviews, we focus on the biographical, activist and political trajectories of the respondents, investigating different backgrounds and motivations to protest. A considerable part of the respondents, for example, comes from the fields of environmental activism, critical consumption and agro-ecology. They explicitly bridge some of their positions on food sovereignty to other types of sovereignty (energy, territorial and body sovereignty). Further, we will focus on some relevant transformations involving the forms of protests. Some interviewees claimed the choice of voluntarily contracting the virus as a form of political action, explicitly meant to overcome the restrictions related to Covid-19 certificates. In this way, they made explicit a mode of protest that deeply involves their own bodies to such an extent as to recall, to some extent, the so-called barebacking, a practice diffused in the past among the gay communities. The longitudinal perspective based on individuals’ biographies, will be accompanied by the attempt to identify some ideal-types of vaccine hesitants/refusers, with the aim of rigorously analyzing a social phenomenon too often hastily assimilated to selfishness/ignorance and unilaterally associated with right-wing political positions. Moments of crisis and uncertainty are notoriously a source of change in political opportunity structures and also – as the current contingency seems to confirm – an occasion to make some latent dynamics among civil society and social movements manifest.