Which elements do the Arab Spring, the Indignados and Occupy Wall Street have in common? How do they differ? What do they share with social movements of the past?This book discusses the recent wave of global mobilisations from an unusual angle, explaining what aspects of protests spread from one country to another, how this happened, and why diffusion occurred in certain contexts but not in others. In doing this, the book casts light on the more general mechanisms of protest diffusion in contemporary societies, explaining how mobilisations travel from one country to another and, also, from past to present times.Bridging different fields of the social sciences, and covering a broad range of empirical cases, this book develops new theoretical perspectives.
This rich, punchy volume is the best overview yet of the extraordinary wave of movements that began in Iceland in 2008 and exploded around the world in 2011. It goes at the protests from many angles, but it especially shows how the movements are both transnational and yet very national at one and the same time, learning from each other and yet inventing their own paths. -- James M Jasper, City University of New York
In this rich and challenging volume, Donatella della Porta, Alice Mattoni and their collaborators interrogate the transnational dimensions of the events of 2011 and find a high degree of coherence in them, despite their broad diversity and the heterogeneity of their settings. There were striking similarities in these movements: their response to the global financial and economic crisis; the degree to which they directly challenged elites; their common use of the tactic of the camp-out in public space. Most enticing was what della Porta, in her contribution, calls 'Learning Democracy – the transnational and cross-time diffusion of organisational repertoires'.
The heady days of the indignados, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street are gone, but the lessons those movements pose to theories of contentious politics are advanced in this important book. -- Sidney Tarrow, Cornell University
This empirically rich and theoretically innovative comparative volume interrogates the recent transnational wave of anti-austerity and pro-democracy mobilisations, reflecting thoughtfully on the nature of the transnational dimension in these current mobilisations in relation to the former wave of protests against global capitalism. The chapters shed light on the complex and multi-levelled mechanisms of protest diffusion – what were the ideas that travelled, how and why the protests occurred in such different contexts across time and space, and why they did not occur in other contexts. The volume makes a major contribution to the literature on diffusion in social movements, inviting readers to critically assess the traditional models of diffusion. Essential reading for social movement researchers, students and general readers interested in the phenomenon of transnational protest. -- Abby Peterson, University of Gothenburg
This important book is essential reading for anyone interested in the transnational wave of “horizontalist” protest which arose in response to the Great Recession and to the austerity policies which so many governments enacted in response to it. It explains the variety of ways in which dissident ideas, practices, and tactics have diffused across borders and been adapted to local contexts. The volume is sweeping in its coverage, with case studies on the Arab Spring Iran, Argentina, Spain, Greece, the United States, Britain, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Turkey. -- Jeff Goodwin, New York University
This important and fascinating collection is one of the most comprehensive treatments of the post-2008 global anti-austerity struggles, providing a much-needed comparative analysis of the political economic context and a critical assessment of the transnational dimension of the protests. Empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated, it is a must-read for anyone interested in transnational social movements, the diffusion of protest, and the prospects for democratic social, political, and economic change.
-- Jeffrey S. Juris, Northwestern University
Ultimately, della Porta and Mattoni’s collection is well worth adding to your book shelf, especially for those concerned with the nature of protest and the dissemination of dissent, both in modern and more general theoretical context. Their work is appropriately concomitant with the general academic tendency toward transnational explanations, and the volume is largely an effective example of why transnational approaches can be beneficial to our understanding of wider issues such as social movements and societal discontent. -- Calum White, 'LSE Review of Books'
Donatella della Porta is Professor of Political Science at the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane (on leave of absence) and Professor of Sociology in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. In 2011, she was awarded the Mattei Dogan Prize for distinguished achievements in the field of political sociology. Her main fields of research are social movements, the policing of public order, participatory democracy, and political corruption. Among her very recent publications are: Mobilizing for Democracy. Comparing 1989 and 2011 (Oxford University Press 2014); Can Democracy be Saved? (Polity Press 2013); Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Social and Political Movements (edited with D. Snow, B. Klandermans, and D. McAdam, Blackwell 2013); Clandestine Political Violence (Cambridge University Press 2013); Mobilizing on the Extreme Right (with M. Caiani and C. Wagemann, Oxford University Press 2012); Meeting Democracy (co-edited with D. Rucht, Cambridge University Press 2012).
Alice Mattoni is a research fellow in the Centre for Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) at the European University Institute, working with the Anticorrpt research team. Before joining COSMOS, she was a Postdoctoral Associate Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Alice obtained her Master of Research and PhD in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. She is a co-convener of the ECPR Standing Group Participation and Mobilization and an editor of Interface: a Journal for and about Social Movements. Among her recent publications are Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change: Advances in the visual analysis of social movements (co-edited with N. Doerr and S. Teune, Emerald 2013); Mediation and Protest Movements (co-edited with B. Cammaerts and P. McCurdy, Intellect 2013); and Media Practices and Protest Politics. How precarious workers mobilise (Ashgate 2012).
Kivanç Atak obtained his PhD in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in 2013. Currently, he is working as a research fellow for the ERC project ‘Mobilizing for Democracy’ run by Donatella della Porta in the Centre for Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) at European University Institute. His research interests include the politics of the police and crime, protests and social movements, and the sociology of the state.
Ondrej Císar is Associate Professor at Charles University, Prague and is also affiliated to the Institute of Sociology at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He is editor-in-chief of the Czech edition of Czech Sociological Review. His research focus is on political mobilisation, social movements and political sociology. He is author or co-author of four books and numerous papers. Recent publications include: ‘Promoting competition or cooperation? The impact of EU funding on Czech advocacy organizations’ (with J. Navrátil, Democratization 2014); ‘Transnational activism of social movement organizations: the effect of European Union funding on local groups in the Czech Republic’ (with K. Vráblíková, European Union Politics 2013); ‘The diffusion of public interest mobilization: a historical sociology view on the advocates without members in the post-Communist Czech Republic’ (East European Politics 2013).
Priska Daphi has an MSc in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA summa cum laude from University College Maastricht in the Netherlands. She recently finished her PhD at Humboldt University Berlin (Germany), funded by a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation. Her research interests include collective identity, memory, transnationalisation and the culture of social movements. She is a founding member of the Institute for Protest and Social Movement Studies in Berlin. Her recent publications include: Conceptualizing Culture in Social Movement Research (edited with B Baumgarten and P Ullrich, Palgrave Macmillan 2014); ‘Images of surveillance: contested visual language of anti-surveillance protests’ (with A. Lê and P. Ullrich, Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 2013); ‘Collective identity across borders: bridging local and transnational memories in the Italian and German Global Justice Movement’ (in L Cox and C Flesher Fominaya (eds).
Cristina Flesher Fominaya has an MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA summa cum laude in International Relations from the University of Minnesota. She is currently Senior Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. She has won numerous international awards, including the National Science Foundation Fellowship, the German Marshall Fellowship, and the Marie Curie IEF Fellowship. She has been researching and participating in European social movements since the early 1990s. Beginning in September 2013 she will be a Marie Curie Fellow at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, for a two-year research project on anti-austerity mobilisations in Ireland and Spain. She is a founding editor of Interface journal, an editor of Social Movement Studies and founding co-chair (with Laurence Cox) of the Council for European Studies Research Network on European Social Movements. Her book Social Movements and Globalization will be available from Palgrave MacMillan in 2014.
Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and a researcher at the Tampere Peace Research Institute (TAPRI), Finland. He has an MSocSc from the University of Tampere (International Relations). His research interests include contemporary and twentieth-century political theory, especially the thought of Hannah Arendt, international relations, critical studies of the EU and questions of political temporalities.
Maria Kousis (PhD, University of Michigan, 1984) is Professor of Sociology (Development and the Environment) at the University of Crete. She has been Chair of the Sociology Department (2002–6), Director of the MSc and PhD programme (2004–8) and Vice-Director of the MSc in Bioethics since 2010. She was co-ordinator of the EC DGXII project ‘Grassroots Environmental Action & Sustainable Development in the Southern European Union’ and partner in EC projects including TEA, PAGANINI, and MEDVOICES. Recent publications include Social Aspects of the Crisis in Greece (co-edited with S. Zambarloukou, Pedio Press 2014, in Greek); Contested Mediterranean Spaces (co-edited with T Selwyn and D Clark, Berghahn Books 2011). Her areas of specialisation focus on social change, social movements and contentious politics, environmental politics, bioethics and society and Southern Europe. She is currently partner in the FP7, EC project LIVEWHAT (http://www.livewhat.unige.ch) and co-ordinator of the Greek team in the bi-national project ‘The Greeks, the Germans and the Crisis’ (ggcrisi.edu) (Freie Universität Berlin and University of Crete).
Antonio Montañés Jimenez is European PhD Candidate at the University Complutense of Madrid and Pre-Doctoral Researcher (FPI Spanish National Programme). He is a member of GRESCO (Grupo de Estudios Socio-Culturales Contemporáneos-Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and has won several honourable mentions based on excellence in scholarship from the Autonomous Community of Madrid Higher Education Council. Likewise, he has held training internships at Spain’s two leading survey and research centres, Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS-Science Research Grant Programme) and Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC-JAE-Programme). He has held an Honorary Research Assistant position within the Department of Sociology at University of Aberdeen and has been appointed to a Visiting Scholarship at National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Currently, he is developing a dissertation thesis about political-religious movements among Spanish gypsies/Roma in the twenty-first century.
Jirí Navrátil is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Public Economics, Masaryk University in Brno, and Assistant Professor at the Department of Civil Society Studies, Charles University in Prague. His research focus is on social movements, political culture and civil society, and inter-organisational networks. He has published on the Global Justice Movement and political activism in CEE. His recent publications include ‘Promoting competition or cooperation? The impact of EU funding on Czech advocacy organizations’ (with O. Císar, Democratization 2014) and Dreams of Civil Society Two Decades Later: Civic advocacy in the Czech Republic (with M. Pospíšil, available from Masaryk University Press in 2014).
Leonidas Oikonomakis is a PhD researcher at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the European University Institute in Florence. His research focuses on the different political strategies that social movements adopt in their struggle for social change (case studies: the Zapatistas of Mexico and the Cocaleros of Bolivia). He is a member of the Greek hip-hop collective Social Waste, a contributing editor of ROAR magazine, and was an active participant in the occupation of Syntagma Square. Throughout 2011 and 2012 he also participated in demonstrations and occupations in several other countries, including Italy, Spain, and Mexico. Together with Jerome Roos, he is co-director of Utopia on the Horizon (2012), a short documentary on the occupation of Syntagma Square in Greece. He writes in English and his native Greek, but his articles have also been translated into French, Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, and Portuguese.
Thomas Olesen is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and Government, Aarhus University, Denmark. His current research focuses on activism, solidarity and symbols in global contexts. Recent publications include: ‘Televised media performance for HIV/AIDS sufferers in Africa: distance reduction and national community in two Danish fundraising shows’ (Communication, Culture & Critique 2012); ‘Global injustice memories: the case of Rwanda’ (International Political Sociology 2012); ‘The transnational complexity of domestic solidarity campaigns: a cross-time comparison of Burma debates in Denmark, 1988 & 2007’ (Acta Sociologica 2011); ‘Transnational injustice symbols and communities: the case of al-Qaeda and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp’ (Current Sociology 2011).
Jerome Roos is a PhD researcher in International Political Economy at the European University Institute in Florence. His research focuses on the structural power of finance in sovereign debt crises and the implications for the quality of democracy. He is the founder and editor of ROAR magazine – an online journal of the radical imagination providing grassroots perspectives from the front lines of the global struggle for real democracy – and has been an organiser with Take The Square, the international commission of the 15-M movement in Spain. With Leonidas Oikonomakis, he is co-director of Utopia on the Horizon (2012), a short documentary on the occupation of Syntagma Square in Greece. Jerome has appeared on Al Jazeera, BBC World and RT News to comment on the global financial crisis and the social movements that have since emerged in response. His articles have been translated into dozens of languages and republished on hundreds of blogs and independent news sites.
Christopher Rootes is Professor of Environmental Politics and Political Sociology, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Social and Political Movements, at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Environmental Politics, and a member of the editorial boards of Mobilization and Social Movement Studies. As well as publishing many articles and chapters on social movement theory, student and environmental movements, protest, Green parties, the politics of climate change, and the global justice movement, he has recently edited: ‘The environmental movement in Great Britain’, in Environmental Movements around the World (T Doyle and S MacGregor, eds, 2014); ‘Framing “the climate issue”: patterns of participation and prognostic frames among climate summit protesters’ (with M Wahlström and M Wennerhag, Global Environmental Politics 2013); and ‘From local conflict to national issue: when and how environmental campaigns succeed in transcending the local’ (Environmental Politics 2013).
Nikos Sotirakopoulos is a PhD candidate and Assistant Lecturer in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent. He holds a bachelor degree in European and International Studies from Panteion University of Athens and an LLB and an LLM in Environmental Law and Policy from the University of Kent. His PhD research is on the influence of lifestyle anarchism in modern social movements and, more specifically, in the case of the protest camps, such as the Camp for Climate Action and the Occupy movement. He is also interested in Marxist theory, Greek politics and the international anti-capitalist and communist movements.
Lorenzo Zamponi is a PhD candidate in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute, working on a research project on the relationship between collective memories and social movements. His research interests include public memory, contentious politics, student movements, anti-austerity activism and media analysis. Among his most recent publications: ‘“Why don’t Italians occupy?” Hypotheses on a failed mobilisation’ (Social Movement Studies 2012); ‘Protest and policing on October 15th, global day of action: the Italian case’ (with Donatella della Porta, Policing and Society 2013).
