Late Neoliberalism and Its Discontents in the Economic Crisis ─ Comparing Social Movements in the European Periphery

This book analyses protests against the Great Recession in the European periphery. While social movements have long been considered as children of affluent times - or at least of times of opening opportunities - these protests defy such expectations, developing instead in moments of diminishing opportunities in both the economic and the political realms. Can social movement studies still be useful to understanding these movements of troubled times? The authors offer a positive answer to this question, although specify the need to bridge contentious politics with other fields, including political economy. They highlight differences in the social movements’ strength and breadth and attempt to understand them in terms of three sets of dimensions: a) the specific characteristics of the socio-economic crisis and its consequences in terms of mobilization potential; b) the political reactions to it, in what we can define as political opportunities and threats; and c) the social movement cultures and structures that characterize each country. The book discusses these topics through a contextualized analysis of anti-austerity protest in the European periphery.

Donatella Della Porta is Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Institute for Humanities and the Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy, where she directs the Center on Social Movement Studies (Cosmos). Her recent publications include Social Movements in Times of Austerity (2014) and Methodological Practices in Social Movement Research (2014).

Massimiliano Andretta is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Pisa, Italy. His recent publications include “Power and arguments in global justice movement settings” in D. della Porta and D. Rucht (eds) Meeting Democracy (2013) and “Dynamics of Individual Participation” (with D. della Porta, 2014).

Tiago Fernandes is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Nova University in Lisbon, Portugal. His recent publications include Civil Society (2014) and “Rethinking Pathways to Democracy: Civil Society in Spain and Portugal, 1960s – 2014” (2014).

Francis O’Connor is Post-Doctoral Researcher on the PRIME project at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His research areas include Kurdish politics and the conflict in Turkey, the trade union militancy in South Africa, and a forthcoming co-authored book on social movement participation in the campaign for independence in Scotland and Catalonia.

Eduardo Romanos is a Ramon y Cajal Fellow in the Department of Sociology I at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Among his most recent publications are articles in Social Movement Studies, Contemporary European History, and Journal of Historical Sociology.

Markos Vogiatzoglou is Special Adviser to the Greek Government’s Minister of State. He holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute. His recent publications include the articles “Lost in the Ocean of Deregulation? The Greek Labour Movement in a Time of Crisis” (with L. Kretsos, 2015) and “Workers’ transnational networks in austerity times: The case of Italy and Greece” (2015).