Movements@Manchester

Abstract: The determination of whether a social movement has been a ‘success’ or a ‘failure’ is highly subjective and contentious (Plows, 2008, p.92; Giugni, 1998, p.383). There are all number of factors that contribute to whether a movement is considered to be a ‘success’ or ‘failure’ where scholars have to confront the theoretical and methodological challenges inherent to their study. Confronting these challenges, this paper seeks to argue using a ‘process tracing’ approach (Beach, 2017) that judging by a number of different metrics, the anti-fracking movement has been a resounding success. This paper will begin by using the mainstream definition of a successful change in policy (as advocated by (Giugni, 1998, p.386; Amenta and Caren, 2004) to appreciate the significant role the movement against fracking has had in pushing the UK government to decide on a moratorium against fracking (UK Govt, 2019). Economic and societal factors will be considered as highly significant but it will be understood that these can’t be taken alone removed from the movement that greatly influenced them. With the aid of literature looking at other measures of ‘influence,’ ‘change’ and ‘success’ I will then argue that the anti-fracking movement has had a tangible impact on the lives of activists involved; has actively shaped public opinion on fracking; has broadened the dissemination of direct action tactics to a particular section of society in the areas affected and has produced lasting linkages between SMOs.

Abstract: This paper tells the inside story of a spontaneous uprising in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 2017, in which indigenous communities confronted a multinational oil company. A labor dispute quickly escalated into a more serious and generalized conflict, involving the blockading of the production complex, the detention of the strike organizers, the kidnapping of the company manager, the launch of a military operation to break the blockade, the revelation of a plot to assassinate the leaders of the uprising, and the unleashing of a rapidly evolving battle against seemingly impossible odds that was destined to end in a remarkable victory. The paper traces the twists and turns of this fluid and chaotic process, drawing out its traversal by a steadily ascending arc of radicalization and political subjectivation. In presenting a personal account of a particular struggle, it simultaneously bears witness to the fleeting emergence of an insurgent form of universality. This was not a dry universalism drawn from dogmatic manifestos, but a living universality that leapt from the flames of a sudden conflagration. Not a working class of white men defending their privileged position in the stable core of the global system, but a ragtag gang of women and men, black and white, indigenous and mestizo, fighting tooth and nail on the untamed frontier. Not the steady march of historical progress toward a universal future, but a moment of rupture in which universality was immediately present. And not the imported ideology of foreign intellectuals, but the boisterous self-expression of unschooled renegades. The paper suggests that the dichotomy that decolonial critique has tended to establish between top-down universalism and bottom-up pluriversality might blind it to such manifestations of insurgent universality performed by subaltern subjects in their confrontations with extractive capital.

Abstract: Activists organise protests with an understanding of how police are likely to respond. Their expected response informs activists’ strategies and tactics, including anticipating how protests will escalate and finish. In New Zealand Extinction Rebellion, a protest group with UK origins, has organised a number of protests which draw upon global and local understandings of protest policing. These protests have included occupation of streets in the capital, blockading corporate conferences, and direct action against fossil fuel production and transport systems. However variable police responses, particularly the reluctance to arrest and charge protesters, has foiled protester plans on several occasions leading to uncertain outcomes. This variability is not only the result of the complexity of the institutions and practices of policing but also a transition towards a police policy of ‘mutual respect’ rather than ‘intervention’ in protests. Drawing on preliminary results from my PhD which explores radicalism in social movements in New Zealand I argue that: context matters for activist strategies and police responses; that activist strategies and understandings of protest policing imported from other countries can inhibit rather than enhance the work of activism; and that protesters tend to fixate on how they believe police will respond, rather than adopting flexible strategies that can adapt to the variability of policing on the day. Looking ahead, I speculate on what a police policy of engagement through ‘mutual respect’ may mean for the future of protest and civil disobedience in New Zealand.

Abstract: Civil resistance against climate change burst into the Australian public arena in 2019 with the rise of Extinction Rebellion and School Strike for Climate. However, this resistance has a much longer pedigree with long running campaigns against coalmines, blockades against coal ports and corporations, and multiple divestment campaigns against banks, universities and businesses just some examples of where resistance has emerged over the last few decades. Yet despite this activity, we have comparatively little empirical data capturing the full range and features of civil resistance used in the climate movement, nor evidence of the effectiveness of such tactics to achieve urgent and meaningful action on climate change. This presentation uses a large dataset about the Australian environmental movement to investigate what civil resistance against climate change looks like, how it has developed over time, who it targets, what it has achieved, and how it is evolving and adapting to external and internal pressures. The first section of the presentation will highlight the spatial and temporal emergence of civil resistance tactics against climate change in Australia. Section two will situate this historical evolution within a large empirical dataset of 500 Australian environmental groups, 900 campaigns and 36,800 environmental advocacy events (2010 and 2010) and consider the effects of civil resistance through two campaign case studies (the ‘Stop Adani’ and ‘Divestment’ campaigns). The final section of the presentation will consider what this data tells us about how civil resistance tactics are being used in democratic contexts and what mechanisms are deployed by authorities to suppress these tactics. Environmental activism has demonstrated the capability to shape our response to urgent global environmental crises in the past. This data helps us understand whether civil resistance may be capable of driving solutions to the current climate emergency before it is too late.

Abstract: İstanbul is the city where Turkish government have intensified the neoliberal urbanization under the name of construction, infrastructure, transportation and urban transformation projects. These projects are used as a tool for hegemony building process for the government. On the other hand, these projects generate discontent and opposition; many grassroots movements have emerged to defend the city against the projects of the government commercializing the parks, coasts, forests and other urban commons in the city. Northern Forests Defence is one of the oppositional movements aiming at protecting the urban and ecological commons and struggling against the projects that destroy ecosystems in İstanbul. This presentation will introduce main findings of my research on Northern Forest Defence, as a part of my Ph.D. research. The empirical dimension of this thesis is based on the data gathered from the field research, combining in-depth semi-structured interviews with 25 activists with participant observation between January and June 2017 in İstanbul in Turkey. In this presentation, I will discuss the social basis, organizational characteristics and protest repertoire of the movement and the motivations of the actors with respect to the urban movements that aim to protect commons against neoliberal destruction of the cities and the nature, as a part of anti- neoliberal protest waves in different parts of the world.

Abstract: A ‘new municipalist’ movement has been emerging across different towns, cities, and communities worldwide, aiming to contesting the effects of neoliberalisation processes (Peck and Theodore 2019). Through local activism and citizens’ initiatives, these movements critically work towards local commoning practices, economic democracy, democratic ownership of the commons, transforming state institutions and promote alternatives modes of local governance (Cumbers and Traill 2021; Russell 2019; Cumbers 2015; Thompson, 2020; Janoschka & Mota, 2020; Durand Folco, 2017). Simultaneously, re/municipalisation has been on the rise. This is a process where local authorities and communities bring formerly privatised assets and services back into public ownership, with more than 1,460 cases since 2000 (Transnational Institute 2021). In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and a looming climate catastrophe, the causes advocated by these movements are more pressing than before. Universal access to services such as energy, water, health care and food is both of socioeconomic, environmental and political importance. Building on the argument that the form of (new) municipalism is locally situated, (Cumbers & Paul, 2020), this article conducts a comparative case study to analyse and compare the specific dynamics that shape re/municipalisation in Argentina, Germany and the United States. Drawing on local press reports, websites, official documents, social media posts and radio interviews, the analysis focuses on the degree to which social movements, civil society and state actors have pushed and implemented re/municipalisation, specifically analysing how municipalism unfolds in, against and beyond neoliberal local state structures, institutions, and agencies. The findings suggest that municipalism and activist campaigns in Argentina engage with and work to transform local state structures. In the United States, municipalist initiatives unfold mainly ‘in’ the state to engage with local balances of power. Local authorities are the main drivers of a ‘conservative municipalism’ in the German example. The analysis furthermore underlines the importance of understanding municipalism as a varied global counter movement to neoliberalisation, whose form, potential and effect differs across institutional and geographical settings.

Abstract: Five years after a huge protest movement known as 15M had appeared in Spanish cities, municipalist confluences caused a shockwave during the local elections in May 2015. Several of these confluences won the elections and would govern major cities like Madrid and Barcelona. The transformation of 15M into (new) municipalism meant the start of an experiment in ‘real democracy’. (New) municipalism does not only refer to a form of territorial politics, but it also entails a method about redesigning democracy in order to obtain radical change. It is considered as a strategy to deal with the impact of globalization and to challenge the neoliberal order. Four years later, the elections were less successful for the municipalist forces. In Madrid, the municipalist experiment even came to an end: before the elections, the municipalist platform of Ahora Madrid had broken up and the city council was lost. Many adherents of municipalism were not only disappointed in the policy results, but also about how the municipalist method was put into practice. In this paper, I will answer the following question: what factors impede or facilitate attempts to disrupt dominant political-economic configurations and enable alternative projects like municipalism? The method entails an analysis of interviews and written excerpts by people involved in the municipalist movement and how they reflect back on the municipalist experiment in Madrid (and beyond). I will elaborate on two categories of limits: (1) limits that are external to the municipalist project and are merely considered as problems of implementation; (2) limits that are intrinsic to municipalism. The municipalist experiment (in Madrid) does not only raise questions about its own viability to bring radical change, but also about the eligibility of democracy in creating a post-neoliberal world.

Abstract: How does urban space matter for the emergence of populist social movements? Urban spaces have been used by social movements of all colours. This paper shows how far-left and far-right movements have appropriated the same space – the Square – and managed to have electoral success by making it their trademark. In particular, this paper focuses on Barcelona and Athens as two emblematic protest sites and unpacks the discursive strategies of two opposed populist movements: Barcelona en Comú (BeC), a municipalist left-wing platform born out of the Indignados movement in Spain and Golden Dawn (GD), an extreme-right movement in Greece. Both used the city squares as a privileged site to successfully politicise their demands and gain political prominence: BeC won the 2015 municipal elections while GD managed first to sent a representative to the city council in 2010 and then to enter the Greek parliament as the fifth biggest political force in 2012. We apply discourse and visual analysis and critical discourse analysis on original data from interviews that the authors conducted with BeC and GD activists and supporters, as well as on data from documentaries, photos, videos, newspapers, and social media. We argue that space can be understood as an empty signifier that can be used by both movements of the far left and the far right, in order to promote their claims and construct a particular notion of ‘the people’. When movements manage to self-identify with a particular urban public space and connect their name to it, movements unavoidably attract media and public attention and may gain significant electoral advantages. Our paper is situated in the intersection of social movement studies and geography and covers an existing gap in the literature on urban populist movements that remain largely understudied.

Abstract: While Western companies have operated in the African mining sector for decades, Chinese companies are newcomers. They reportedly perform worse in social and environmental standards than their Western counterparts. This could lead to more intense contestations at Chinese mining sites. Yet, scholars have hardly studied whether affected communities and civil society networks contest Chinese and Western mining projects differently. More broadly, the role of investor origin for local and transnational activism against mining companies has been largely overlooked. To address these gaps, I examine a medium-sized sample of investments from two African mining hotspots: Guinea’s bauxite sector and the copper and cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Conducting a comparative analysis, this study applies contentious politics theories and conducts content analysis through MAXQDA. As preliminary findings show, Chinese and Western mining projects do not become much differently contested. The protest incidence, tactics, and political opportunities for contention are similar in most regards. While the analysis also highlights differences of political opportunities and framing processes, these seem to hardly affect the occurrence of protest. Rather than investor origin, I argue that the country-level political context, place-based circumstances at the mine site, and political opportunities related to the mined resources shape these contestations.

Abstract: This paper explores the ways in which collective awareness of possibilities to act in the face of social and environmental justice became activated in a community in Uganda. We concentrate on community participants’ joint reflections around the operations of a foreign-owned factory that was set up in Koch Goma Subcounty, Nwoya District in northern Uganda. The factory was set up for the purposes of agroprocessing of fresh cassava to produce denatured alcohol that could be used for cooking and lighting purposes. In principle, the (constructive) idea as mooted to the locals was that the company would contribute to the local economy in various ways, for example, by employing workers in the processing factory and also by paying for the production by local farmers of the needed cassava. However, our research – based on the facilitation of four focus groups in the area – led to the conclusion that the mode of operandi of the factory turned out in the main to be a source of anguish to the locals. Their experiences, as reflected upon in their community meetings and further discussed in the focus group fora that we set up, have demonstrated that unregulated operation of foreign owned investments can become a major source of poverty, economic disempowerment, and public health concern. The paper focuses on some of the ways in which community participants developed a sense of collective agency to draw the attention of the district leadership and national environmental protection agencies to the disruptive effects of this factory (as well as by a road construction company that was also foreign-owned) and how this panned out to date.

Abstract: This paper aims at giving visibility to a process of struggle that oppose the new phase of extractivism in south Brazil. In a context in which environmental legislation is being dismantled, in the last years, more than 5 thousand mining research requirements were made in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Among these, 166 projects are moving forward, and four of them are of huge impact in nature and livelihood: Retiro (extraction of titanium); Três Estradas (phosphate); Caçapava (lead, zinc and copper); and Mina Guaíba (extraction of coal mining). The last would be the largest open-pit mineral coal mine in Brazil, despite international tendencies shown by some countries that have started to shut down their coal mines, seeking for cleaner and renewable energy sources. In this scenario, since 2019, different entities (environmental organizations, researchers, parliamentarians, social movements, unions, student collectives etc.) have organized around an anti-mining committee to articulate different processes of struggle in the state, the Comitê de Combate à Megamineração no Rio Grande do Sul. The Committee organizes in three fronts: technical/legal, communication and mobilization. The main actions realized by the Committee are awareness activities at fairs and events, production of technical analyses and participation and promotion of events such as seminars, workshops and public hearings. In this process, the Committee has become the main social actor in the mobilization against the Mina Guaíba, and an important space to catalyse the struggle against mining in Rio Grande do Sul.

Abstract: This paper looks at the ways in which the Muslim Movements after 1990s respond to the question of ecological crisis and crisis democracy in India by invoking their own resources as a claim to belonging and social performance. For that purpose this paper will try to understand the South Indian Muslim Youth organization, Solidarity youth movement Kerala’s attempt to engage environmental discourse by radically reinterpreting their ideological stand point in response to changing social process. South Indian state Kerala is known as role model for social and political development for Global south. It is well recognized that unique characteristics of Kerala model was the result of public action/public politics. The internal contradiction with in a late socialist model, global decline of left and changing political scenario after 1990 have led to the emergence post left political activism in Kerala. 1990s also marks the one of the changing moment in Indian History, politics and social life as well by the emergence of various new social actors in public sphere. Solidarity Youth Movement emerged in Kerala during this period with unique style of Islamic activism by absorbing emancipatory aspect of religion and radical form of eco politics. Solidarity youth movement evolved a distinct language of Muslim politics by involving many grass root people struggle across Kerala against Neo Liberal Developmental practices, Human Right Violations, Ecological issues , Land right struggles by Dalit and Tribal. Solidarity claimed that their idea is to recognizes the search for social liberation from all power organized as inequality, discrimination, exploitation, and domination and charting a de-colonial future and in essence rediscovering and trying to put into praxis a theology of Islamic liberation. Hence, solidarity identifies the ecological crisis and social political implications as violation of divine guidance and ones who couldn't absorb ecological morality. Proper care of earth is not possible without ecological morality. And care of earth is entitled upon human beings as Khalifa (vicergent) of Allah. Some of their Theo political articulation and mediations with traditions is very novel and innovative and some of them are they are absorbing from existing literature. Based on my field materials will examine the Muslim Movements’ contribution and engagements in environmental movements and how Muslim identity conceptualizes the environmental discourse within the larger eco political discourse. And it will critically look how the Muslim actors use their own resources to interpret/reinterpret their new political articulation. I will argue that the emergence of this new Muslim green politics should be understood in the context of citizenship politics that evolve around ethical considerations in a risk society. Chapter also looks how this movement would also manoeuvre between the various imaginations of social action and transformation available to us, especially in the context of social movements and reflect on the limitations and possibilities of this transformation itself by drawing insight from social movement theory, debates on Islam, secularism, citizenship and political theology.

Abstract: In Vienna, like in other cities around the globe, a new wave of self-initiated groups who realise collaborative housing (so-called Baugruppen) has recently emerged (Lang & Stoeger, 2018; Mullins & Moore, 2018; Tummers, 2015, 2016). Most of them describe themselves as creating and experimenting with alternative ways of housing and living: They want to create different or alternative spaces, and they want to create space differently – they strive for self-management, collective ownership, different kinds of architectures and different distributions of space between private and collective use, housing, working and public space, etc. In this paper, we analyse how ‘alternativeness’ as a self-identifier is related to quite different constellations of relations and demarcations both within the groups and to other actors, such as professionals, administration or civil society. Using Thévenot’s grammars of commonality (Thévenot, 2014) and ‘diverse economies’ approaches (Gibson-Graham, 1996; Gritzas & Kavoulakos, 2016) as sensitizing concepts, we empirically analyse collaborative housing projects in Vienna and elaborate three different ways of ‘doing alternativeness’. We employ a relational understanding of alternativeness that considers different orientations vis-a-vis the mainstream, regarding a group’s sense-making of and relations to internal and external actors as constitutive for its specific transformative potential as well as in- and exclusions. The empirical data which was produced through a multi-sited ethnography (Hine, 2007) between 2018 and 2020 consists of documents, media articles, interviews and ethnographic observation of public and internal events of Baugruppen in Vienna. For data analysis, we apply qualitative mapping approaches based on situational analysis (Clarke, 2005) and controversy mapping (Marres, 2007, 2015; Venturini, 2010; Whatmore, 2009; Yaneva, 2012) for specifically paying attention to relations between actors and issues.

Abstract: The transitional period to a recovered democratic regime in Spain during the late 1970s was substantially shaped by large working-class mobilizations in the domains of socioeconomic production and reproduction. The so-called ‘citizen movement’ championed urban struggles in combination with housing and local political affairs. Despite their decline in the early 1980s, they left a significant mark in the process of democratization. The 1986 integration of Spain in supranational European institutions entailed new stages of capitalist development and social protest. Real estate speculation became the main driver of urban change and shaped the conditions for the emergence and growth of a radical squatting movement. Squatters established self-managed social centers to aggregate various social movements and challenged the 1990s and 2000s cycle of capitalist accumulation. As a response to the 2008 global financial crisis, housing groups associated with neighborhood assemblies, the PAH (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages) and new tenants’ unions took the lead in urban grassroots struggles. This paper provides a general account of the features of these mobilizations and the political economy context with which they interacted. I argue that these expressions of housing activism were not only closely related to other social movements, but, above all, were dependent on specific structural conditions of the Spanish political, economic and housing systems. My analysis also contributes to the interpretations of the changing sociological components of housing struggles in relation to the societal context at large.

Abstract: The ongoing farmers’ protests in India against the implementation of a set of neo-liberal farm laws have become one of the longest and most vibrant anti-capitalist movements in recent Indian history. The movement, which has been going on for more than six months as of March 2021, is led by a heterogenous corpus of organisations, ranging from mass organisations under various left-wing political formations to different caste and creed-based organisations. Some of these organisations have also been active perpetrators of gender and caste violence in recent times in addition to being supporters of the ruling government until a few months ago. This diversity in participation, which has been instrumental in taking the movement forward, thus has also raised some pertinent questions about the methodological implementation of Marxist theory in situations where a heterodox set of ideas align for a particular demand-based movement with a variety of ‘subject positions’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2014: 27, emphasis original), especially in a context as diverse as India. The involvement of the left has failed to generate an overtly leftist consciousness within the movement. The inability of the political formations to ‘control and lead’ the spontaneous activities of the protesting people has resulted in the movement lacking a political legitimacy and finding itself in a quandary in spite of capturing ‘a popular collective will’ (Mouffe, 2018: 21) both among the Indian nationals and the diaspora. This paper analyses the movement through the Post-Marxist and Left-Populism frameworks developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and examines whether they can provide an alternative understanding of the farmers’ movement, which can further the integration of the protesting subjects within a progressive agenda that goes beyond the contours of this particular movement.

Abstract: In this article, I examine how social movements for the right to housing have responded to the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. Particularly, it sheds light on the protagonism of activists and housing groups as producers of political innovation, knowledge, resistance and transformative possibilities. To this end, I compare two cities, Fortaleza (Brazil) and Lisbon (Portugal). The research provides a fresh approach to changes in social movements and to their concrete contributions to pandemic responses. In this way, this contribution attempts to overcome the current North/South dichotomy or centre/periphery divide in housing and social movements studies that have limited cross-continental approaches. The study shows that groups focused on the right to housing were particularly active in three main models of action: anti-evictions campaigns, new ways of organisation protest, and the creation and expansion of solidarity networks and, in addition to new alternative futures.

Abstract: In this paper, I will present nine intertwined dimensions/categories/challenges to be taken into account when embarking in collaborative research with social movement networks. Social movements often operate as reflexive/epistemic communities that conduct research, broadly conceived, as a key element of their political praxis. As scholars, what does it simply to do research with non-academic actors who are ‘expert’ knowledge producers themselves? Can our projects be articulated as a collaborative encounter for the coproduction of knowledge, a dialogue between different types of knowledge and knowledge producers? Can research be designed around questions and problems posed by movement organizations instead of (solely) around disciplinary interests? What ethical, epistemic and methodological challenges arise in this engagement? Collaborative frameworks, shifting from studying social movements to working and thinking together with activists as co-researchers, centrally address the politics of knowledge production, raising critical questions about what the purpose of research is, who is it useful/relevant for, how it is conducted, what knowledges are taken seriously, and who we write for and how. Thus, the in-fieldwork encounter will become a space for critical dialogue, reciprocity, shared authority, co-analysis and co-theorization. The goal/challenge of this ‘collaborative turn’ is threefold. First, collaborative projects must produce knowledge meaningful in scholarly terms, empirically grounded analysis advancing our comprehension of contemporary collective action. Second, by connecting with our co-researchers’ interests and questions, the research project/process must be useful for them, they must be able to use it as they see fit. Finally, by problematizing traditional forms of knowledge production, research collaboration addresses salient debates in social science, and may bring about epistemic and methodological innovation. This is what research collaboration can contribute to the field of social movement studies.

Abstract: The 15M –or Indignados– Movement was a cross-cutting social response to the economic, social and political crisis experienced in Spain since 2008. The demonstrations of 15 May 2011 led to the "tent-city" of Puerta del Sol in Madrid and in many other "tent-cities" which was created in other Spanish cities and in other countries. From then on, the movement was characterised by an intense activity that allowed the emergence of grassroots collectives, sectoral demands (health, education, social services, housing, etc.) and the creation of projects on different areas. 15M was an explosion of creativity that opened windows of opportunity for the expression of citizens and the production of knowledge, and whose social and political impact has become increasingly noticeable over the years. On its tenth anniversary, this paper focuses on a specific angle of 15M as a producer of knowledge: the creation of activist and independent media. From a conceptual framework based on both social movements knowledge production studies and activist media practices theories, fieldwork was carried out in two main phases: firstly, 23 activist communication projects that emerged directly from the 15M Movement were explored; and secondly, the influence of 15M on the creation of independent media was investigated. Through an ethnographic approach, research process included document analysis, participant observation and in-depth interviews with activists and journalists. In our conclusions we highlight that the 15M represented a citizens’ reaction that strengthened the mutual influences between activism and alternative media and established the conditions of possibility for media innovation. We argue that all of this process have allowed the creation of a new media ecology composed by independent critical media which sustain on a social contract between media and users and characterized by a commitment to journalistic ethics, public service values and civic engagement for radical democracy.

Abstract: The Ulex Project activist training centre runs courses across Europe supporting radical social movements. Our “Strengthening European Social Movement Ecology” (SESME) project aims to create a container for continuous movement learning, responding to the deep challenges facing struggles for a better world. The goal is a space to support in-depth action learning that ideally builds lasting relationships of learning and reflection in a community of practice. This comes out of our own action learning: our dialogues with movement organisations, course participants’ structured feedback and reshaping of courses in progress, and our own group reflections as trainers. As a training team we have worked on several iterations of an “Ecology of Social Movements” course, supporting activists to reflect on their own practice and organisations in the context of their wider movement and other struggles. SESME aims to develop this experience on a greater scale, perhaps as a year-long blended learning course with a substantially larger number of participants to make a more powerful contribution. The paper reports on our participatory action research process where we are taking the year to develop a community of inquiry around what kinds of training and support movements most need to face existing challenges and bring about wider change. Research began with a seven-language survey of organisers, trainers and others involved in movements across Europe. The paper discusses the findings and limitations of this survey. We have now started small-group conversations with people from different movements, types of organisations, countries and political identities, and the paper discusses the emerging findings. We are also developing a feedback cycle (including this paper), and moving towards creating an advisory group for the project from the research. We hope this paper will contribute not just to SESME but to others thinking strategically about movement learning and development.

Abstract: After a short-lived interlude of democratization ushered in by the Arab uprisings in 2011, Egypt has reverted to a harsher authoritarianism which expanded the role of the military in politics and civil domains in ways unseen before. Following the popularly-backed putsch in 2013, Egypt’s new leadership has taken great pains to consolidate its rule, curbing in the process dissent and curtailing freedom of speech. Various political and legislative measures have been introduced to clamp down on popular mobilization, free speech, civil society, unions and any form of grassroots organizing. But whilst political repression has disintegrated social movements and demobilized seasoned activists, forcing many into exile or silence, new voices from the political peripheries of the Egyptian society responded to a combination of grinding socioeconomic pressure and recurring acts of whistleblowing by taking to the streets in September and October of 2019 and 2020. This new cycle of contentious mobilization in Egypt was later joined by healthcare workers who were encouraged by the outbreak of the coronavirus to speak out against the government publicly, first by taking to social media to expose mismanagement and malpractice within the healthcare sector. These whistleblowing acts by Egyptian healthcare workers eventually escalated to collective claim making and, in some instances, direct action in the form of strikes, sit-ins and protests staged outside Cairo. This paper examines this new cycle of protest in Egypt drawing on qualitative research materials collected from social media, trade union press releases, and interviews conducted with small groups of protesters, activists, trade unionists and healthcare workers. The paper engages with social movement scholarship to argue that individual acts of whistleblowing can coalesce into unconventional forms of collective action that are capable of contentious mobilization that can be effective in a prohibitive authoritarian environment like Egypt.

Abstract: Activists of the October 2019 revolt performed acts of resistance to open spaces of freedom and expression. When protests and activists' commitment is fluid rather than a permanent occupation, how does the street and the walls address people transit through it? How do they prolong activists claims and battles and embody their beliefs in an alternative future? Results: This contribution analyses the street as a repository of traces of different forms of protests, claims, dreams of alternative future and contribute to the construction of a shared identity among protesters. since the 18th of October 2019. Activist street arts have become symbols of struggle and contents that feed experiences of popular education for individual reflection, give meaning to squares and spaces of egosyntonic participation (meaning for the self) in a context shaped by high state and police control and reduction of freedom by confinement. The experiences of the popular revolt of October 2019 shows that politics was detraditionalized and installed in people's daily lives, emotional experiences, feelings and reflections on social demands are now topics of conversation in daily routines. Conclusion: With the pandemic outbreak, activism moved from public to private spaces. It has opened spaces for individual and collective reflexivity that are at the core of the new culture of activism and its strong cognitive/introspective dimensions that prolong the experience they had in the street. Method: multimethod, observations and interviews between October 2019 and June 2020.

Abstract: From the Liberty Puppet floating in Manhattan and guerilla projections during the Occupy Wall Street in 2011 to the spontaneous shrines following the Paris attacks in 2015, from the barricaded streets and graffitied walls of Istanbul during Gezi Movement in 2013, to the refugee-tent-occupied Republic Square of Paris in 2020, the mise-en-scène of precarity and spatio-temporal resistance within the neoliberal globalization is performed in the shape of temporary installations and vanishing countermonuments. The installation (Groys, 2009) and the counter-monument (Young, 1992) provide an alternative framework for ephemeral performative occupations of space-time in multiple occurrences. One the one hand, they represent the people's standing up against the precarious conditions and disrupting the hierarchical relationships within the neoliberal organization of the cities. On the other, they provoke a perpetual change, unexpected appearance and disappearance challenging the very idea of planned public space and leading accordingly to the discovery of a lived space-time (Lefebvre, 1971, 1974, Harvey, 1994, 2006.) Finally, the vulnerability appears as a condition for resistance through which the temporary installations of bodies and objects are composed (Butler, Gambetti, Sabsay, 2016.) In that equation, I question whether or not the embodied action precedes the material objects in the creation of lived space-time, and if so, in which ways. In a relational approach (Löw, 2016) to understand and analyze the data, I will employ qualitative methodology based on observant participation, semi-structured interviews and visual analysis.

Abstract: The notion of performative public assemblies has, so far, been a matter of intense debate within social and political theory. From Hannah Arendt (1958) to Judith Butler (2015), the idea of a public assembly is largely centred around a visible, performative category that occupies a certain space, and whose units share common concerns and/or goals. A public is essentially described in terms of its performativity, which in turn is bound to the images of mobilization and/or collective occupation of a certain space. By critically examining a certain precedent of non-performative publics, the aim of our paper is to remove the idea of public assembly from its overwhelmingly performative and visible characterization. While staying aware of the distinctive power of its performative modes, we argue that, intense, oftentimes deadly, state or non-state repression, can lead to a creation of what we call non-performative public assemblies and popular resistance. Taking the example of India-controlled region of Kashmir, the paper sets out to explain how the state’s violent crackdown on all forms of dissentious, and even non-dissentious, assembly has led to a situation where people often collectively disappear from the public spaces altogether and stay confined in their homes, in order to express their resentment against Indian rule. This collective disappearance of people from both normal, day-to-day activities while simultaneously unwilling to participate in public assemblies, that always face violent state crackdown, amounts to what the is described as non-performative assembly. In the paper, the non-performative is being placed within the domain of gendered resistance and we argue, through ethnographic fieldwork, that women in Kashmir are one of the primary agents of this mode of popular politics. Furthermore, an attempt has been made to place this notion of non-performative assembly within social theory and engage with the epistemological and ethical complexities that the former presents

Abstract: The paper takes Czech research on the social movements as a starting point. There are two main approaches present in the Czech literature on the autonomous radical movements. The first one works with the “usual suspects”: methodology based on the protest event analysis, resource mobilization theory and political process model (mainly, political opportunity structure). While this approach in prominent in the social movement studies, it has been criticized by autonomous movement scholars as not sufficiently respecting the inner dynamic of the movement, as well as activists’ perception of a social change. Such concepts as prefiguration and politics of act emphasized the change in temporal and spatial conditions of the social change (happening here and now), as well as activists’ reluctance to the politics of demands. On the case of the Czech autonomous movement and by application of the pragmatic sociology of critique, the paper shows that both approaches are not conflictual, but complementary. Protests, political opportunity structure, politics of demands exist on a general level of reality: on the level of public disputes where social actors need to justify themselves with the reference to the common good. Prefiguration and politics of act exist on a more familiar level, where affinity plays a major role. Based on that difference, the paper develops the meaning of urban space which the activists articulate on the both levels of engagement in the reality. On the level of public disputes, they justify the demand for space by the efficient use, different requirements to different types of property (e.g. public and private) and good price. On the level of familiarity the space plays a symbolic (spaces are “speaking heads of the movement”), strategical (movement’s infrastructure leading to movements’ consolidation and growth) and prefigurative meaning (the secure place where the values might be practiced).

Abstract: This paper aims to explore the temporal underpinnings of democracy by examining how two different political regimes use time as an instrument of social and political control, and how their challengers shape and get shaped by the temporal orders of the respective regimes in which they operate. The paper is based on a comparative cross-national case study of the lead-up to and the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom (2016-2020) and the constitutional referendum of 2017 in Turkey (2016-2019), including the "remain" campaign in the UK and the "no" campaign in Turkey which were launched against the proposed changes. By analyzing a liberal democracy and a regime undergoing an authoritarian transition, at a time of political volatility that met with sustained mass mobilization in both contexts, this study reveals the explanatory power of temporality as a fundamental dimension of democratic governance and resistance.

Abstract: This study explores the relationship between long-term capitalist dynamics and protest waves in the global South over the long twentieth century (1870-2016). World-systems analyses have attempted to demonstrate a relationship between K-waves and revolutionary activities. While there are widely differing views regarding the relationships between K-waves and social movements, the empirical examination of this study between the peak periods of protest waves in the global South generating from protest event records in the New York Times and the upswing phases of K-waves shows no significant correlation. Instead of K-waves, this study singles out the historically specified long-term movement of the rate of profit in the U.S. economy as a prevalent indicator of capitalist dynamics to examine the rise and fall of protest waves in the global South. This study examines that the peak periods of the protest wave in the global South and contractions of the U.S. profit rate show significant correspondence. This study also reveals that the relationship between popular protests in the global South and the long-term trend of profit rate in the U.S. have been strongly influenced by the geo-economical point of reference. Countries and regions in the semiperiphery and Latin America where are more dependent on the core hegemonic states in the global South show a more prevalent relationship between the cycles of popular protest and the contractions of the rate of profit in the U.S. economy. This finding concludes that the movement of the profit rate and capital productivity in core hegemonic regions is highly linked to changing conditions for political processes and to outcomes such as popular protests and antisystemic movements adapting to capitalist dynamics of contraction in and expansion of the capitalist world-economy in the global South.

Abstract: In this article, I respond to the work of Barker and of Nilsen & Cox in their volume Marxism and Social Movements on the differences between liberal and Marxist social movement theories, and go on to distinguish between what I’ve called humanist and structuralist Marxist theories. On the differences between liberal and Marxist theories, and while largely agreeing with the authors, I seek to develop a more precise understanding of these differences as their different purposes in explaining and changing the world, by their different views of the roles of social movements under capitalism, by their emphases on ecological, economic and political levels of the social formation, and by their different historical perspectives. On humanist and structuralist Marxist theories, I specifically distance myself from Barker’s infamous statement that structuralist Marxism has “contributed nothing to Marxism as a theory of emancipation” and attempt to explain the contributions of Althusser and of structuralist Marxism to our understandings of the conditions under which people make history. I thus distinguish between humanist and structuralist Marxist theories by their different understandings of the complexities of social formations, by their different views of the importance of human agencies, by their different understandings of organic crises, by their different views of social stabilities and of the frequency of revolutions and by their different views of the roles of ideas and of social interactions in bringing about social transformations. I conclude by explaining the consequences of these differences for debates and for deliberative democracies in social movements.

Abstract: From 2012 to 2014, refugees occupied several spaces, in particular the public square Oranienplatz (Oplatz) in Berlin and transformed them into sites that provided visibility for their struggles against the German and the European border regimes (Azozomox and IWAS refugee women, 2013; Langa, 2015; Bhimji, 2016, Stierl, 2019). The last inhabitants of the occupied Gerart-Hauptmann school in the neighbourhood of Kreuzberg, left on 10 January 2018 before facing eviction. If the cycle of protest centred around Oranienplatz has been the focus of much scholarly attention, less is known about the mobilization against border regimes that followed that cycle. This paper draws on ethnographic research undertaken in Berlin between January and December 2018 and examines the movement against border regimes in the aftermath of the Oplatz cycle. The paper discusses changes of collective identities at both the movement and the group levels. It analyses the multiple identity formation process that occurred simultaneously at those levels. In particular, it examines if the refugee collective identity, which was crucial in Oplatz, continued to shape the movement against border regimes in 2018. Moreover, the paper investigates the multiple grievances formulated by different social movement organizations. The paper contends that universal freedom of movement continued to be one of the main claims of many of the social movement organizations that mobilized against border regimes in the post-Oplatz cycle. However, new social movement organizations with more ambiguous claims on freedom of movement emerged and alliances with human rights organizations who did not support universal freedom of movement were forged.