Constructing Collective Action for Digital Rights in Europe: Addressing the Relevance of Events in Collective Action Processes

Over the years, the study of events has acquired considerable relevance in sociological investigation and, more specifically, in the study of collective action and social movements. It is no coincidence that the need in any social research to simultaneously develop ‘two interdependent bodies of theory’ – one to explain the phenomenon itself and one to explain the evidence concerning it – has been emphasised precisely when referring to the study of events. Indeed, the growing interest in events has confronted social researchers with problems that are as much theoretical as methodological. Part of an ongoing doctoral dissertation, this contribution aims to address these issues by proposing a theoretical and analytical framework for the study of the role of events in collective action processes. First, I propose to adopt an understanding of collective action based on processual social ontology, considered as inherently relational and rooted in the semiotic-in-action theoretical tradition. Events are understood as constitutive of collective action construction processes. On one side, events are understood as social situations that shape the systems of relations between actors involved in a commonly oriented action, constituting it over time through mechanisms related to co-participation. Furthermore, the occurring events – even those exogenous to the action – represent discursive resources that, being interpreted through framing processes, constitute elements in the narratives of the actors involved. Indeed, adopting this perspective, the temporal dimension emerges as fundamental, raising the need for a major interpretive shift: from a focus on a event-structure duality to an event-time duality, towards a definition of collective action as both event-driven and event-constructed. In this sense, the duality is shifted towards a relation that ties events and time as co-constitutive: time is experienced through finite events, that are nevertheless in constant and evolving relations. The gaze should thus be turned on modes and mechanisms by which events relate, constituting in turn lineages of collective action, both from a discrete perspective (forms) and a continuous one (flows). In order to explore this duality, I propose to approach the issue from a network perspective, introducing two conceptual tools: ‘events as networks’ and ‘networks of events’. The first focuses on individual events, tracing relations among the main elements involved in these situations: agentic entities, (inter)actions, and meanings. With the second, I propose to look at the dynamic dimension of the construction and development of networks of events over time, exploring the possibility and implications of adapting dynamic network models to the analysis of collective action processes. To do so, I examine the development of the digital rights field in Europe over the last two decades, presenting an empirical application drawn from the study of the trajectories of the civil society organisations belonging to the European Digital Rights (EDRi) network.