Ever since 2011, the world has been shaken by a global cycle of protest that also reached several... more Ever since 2011, the world has been shaken by a global cycle of protest that also reached several countries of the Balkans, including Greece, Turkey and Bosnia Herzegovina. While each of these countries experienced important single-issue protests, the movement of the Squares in Greece and the Occupy Gezi movement in Turkey managed to culminate into broad-based mass
mobilizations that subsequently challenged the legitimacy of representative democratic institutions at their very core, formulating alternative practices of direct democracy to prefigure different forms of autonomous selforganization. In Bosnia Herzegovina (hereinafter BiH), by contrast, a protest over the failure of the political system to solve a deadlock in the disbursement of national ID numbers, although inspiring massive mobilization and lasting
more than a month, failed to make the scale-shift (Tarrow and McAdam 2003) and formulate such a systemic critique of representation. Why did the movements in Greece and Turkey take off while the one in BiH did not?
First, we argue that while the Greek movement of the Squares and the çapulcular (looters) of Turkey managed to successfully connect their single issue protest over austerity and Gezi Park, respectively, to the structural context of a deepening crisis of representation, the Bosnian #JMBG movement failed to articulate a clear narrative connecting the political deadlock over national ID numbers to the failure of the post-Dayton political system to adequately respond to important salient popular concerns. Secondly, we observe that while both Greece and Turkey could count on extensive local horizontal movement experience and pre-existing activist
networks capable of formulating such a critique of representation, in the Bosnian case such networks and experience appeared largely absent, resulting in a reduced potential for sustained nationwide mobilization surrounding the question of democracy. Therefore, building on the concept of resonance (Oikonomakis and Roos 2013), we claim that the different outcome of the Bosnian case can be attributed to the absence of two critical conditions, namely strong movement networks and horizontal movement experience.
In sum, we argue that, even though the movements in Greece, Turkey and BiH were all faced with a crisis of representation, of which the austerity measures, the destruction of Gezi Park and the failure to disburse national ID numbers were but specific symptoms, the Bosnian movement ultimately did not see “the forest through the trees”, and as a result failed to light the prairie of social discontent. For single-issue protests to evolve into resonant
mass movements, they ultimately have to confront the structural context in which they arise.
Our paper is based on extensive participant observation (56 out of 72 popular assemblies at Syntagma Square), interviews with key-informants in Athens and Sarajevo, and in-depth analysis of the minutes of the Popular Assemblies of Syntagma Square.
This article explores collective identity frames and discursive strategies employed by social mov... more This article explores collective identity frames and discursive strategies employed by social movement actors mobilizing in ethnically divided societies, a context where ethnicity constitutes the primary collective category of identification. By using Bosnia and Herzegovina as a case study, it analyzes movement framing in three waves of social protests that occurred in the country in the last decade. Specifically, it investigates the diverse ways in which movement leaders tackled ethnicity in their discourses. The article shows that movement leaders’ narratives rested, respectively, on the primacy of human and citizenship rights, a common feeling of deprivation, and victimhood. Their approach toward ethnicity, however, differed in each wave. Ethnicity was openly rejected in 2013, avoided and not openly contested in 2014, and accepted and approached as an opportunity to bring further support to the movement in 2018. The article highlights that ethnicity can be tackled differently by ...
This article investigates the different types of emotions that result from participation in refug... more This article investigates the different types of emotions that result from participation in refugee solidarity activism, investigating how they change over time and to what extent they explain why individuals remain involved in action in spite of unfavorable circumstances. By bringing together scholarship on collective action with the literature on emotions, the article delves into the emotional response of sustained engagement in refugee solidarity activism. The study is based on the analysis of 40 in-depth interviews with solidarity activists and volunteers involved in grassroots refugee solidarity initiatives along the Western Balkans route between 2015 and 2021, as well as on participant observation conducted between 2016 and 2021 in North Macedonia,
Recent years have seen a new development in the growth and spread of popular protest: protests th... more Recent years have seen a new development in the growth and spread of popular protest: protests that began as local, homogeneous events-such as Occupy Wall Street or the protests of the Arab Spring-quickly left their original locations and local specificity behind and became global. This book looks at the development of this wave of protests, with an eye on protests against austerity and neoliberal economic policies, and offers a global view, covering events in Turkey, Brazil, Venezuela, South Africa, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and other locations.
In the last decade, urban social movements that emerged in the Yugoslav successor states decided ... more In the last decade, urban social movements that emerged in the Yugoslav successor states decided to form political platforms to enter the institutional arena, often after years of mobilisation for the right to the city. Their aim was to seize power at the local level, trying to provide an answer to the crisis of representative democracy and to oppose the process of centralisation of power. These platforms ran for elections in Zagreb (Croatia) and Belgrade (Serbia), to reclaim local autonomy on societal, environmental, economic and political matters. Based on ethnographic work, document analysis and a series of in-depth interviews with activists, this article explores the trajectories of two platforms, ‘Zagreb Is Ours’ (Zagreb je nasˇ) in Zagreb, Croatia, and ‘We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own’ (Ne davimo Beograd) in Belgrade, Serbia. It analyses the factors accounting for the choice of urban activists to embrace new municipalist ideas as strategic ideological and political positioning of their electoral platforms, arguing that the reasons are twofold: the embeddedness into regional and transnational activist networks, which facilitated the process of diffusion of new municipalist ideas across Europe and locally, and the resonance of new municipalism with socialist Yugoslavia’s decentralised system of self-management and direct democracy, an historical experience that the platforms’ initiators partially reappraised.
The article contributes to the understanding of contemporary urban commons by developing a renewe... more The article contributes to the understanding of contemporary urban commons by developing a renewed analytical framework which approaches them as dynamic configurations. By investigating different types of urban commons in Italy, the article disentangles the notion of urban commons along two axes that take into account their relationship with both local institutions and the surrounding environment. The combination of these two axes produces four possible configurations that allow to grasp the complexity of urban commons, accounting for their multifaceted and at times controversial nature. Moreover, this article identifies three functions that urban commons can perform in the contemporary European cities: as resilient spaces, as reclaimed spaces incorporated into capitalistic models of urban development, or contentious and transformative spaces that combine social reproduction with anti-capitalistic politics. The article is based on qualitative research and participant observation gro...
East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures
The article contributes to the urban studies literature and the study of social movements in divi... more The article contributes to the urban studies literature and the study of social movements in divided societies by disclosing the distinctive features and mobilizing potential that the notion of urban commons retains in a war-torn society with a socialist legacy. Specifically, it investigates how urban space and urban commons are reclaimed in a post-conflict and post-socialist country such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. By using Sarajevo as a case study, the article explores several grassroots initiatives undertaken by local urban activists to reappropriate cultural buildings and public space in the city. The study discloses that in a post-conflict and post-socialist society urban commons can bear a unifying potential as acts of commoning favor trust reconstruction processes and strengthen community ties. While the erosion of social ties and the legacy of the war might not encourage mobilization for the commons, the reference to socialist-era practices and language can represent a vantag...
Hit by the economic and political crisis, young people in Italy face increased labor precarity an... more Hit by the economic and political crisis, young people in Italy face increased labor precarity and the disillusionment derived from the disappearance of the radical Left from the parliamentary arena. In the Italian context, economic hardship, the decrease of resources available for collective action, and the weakened mobilizing capacity that traditional mass organizations (such as trade unions and political parties) retained in the first decade of the 2000s brought about a general decline in intensity and visibility of street protests, leading to an apparent retreat of activism to the local level of action. Although the crisis had a negative impact on collective action, evidence reveals that more creative and less visible forms of societal and political commitment were adopted by young generations in these years. This article explores how the Italian youth in times of crisis engaged actively in alternative and unconventional forms of political commitment aimed at re-appropriating sp...
Ever since 2011, the world has been shaken by a global cycle of protest that also reached several... more Ever since 2011, the world has been shaken by a global cycle of protest that also reached several countries of the Balkans, including Greece, Turkey and Bosnia Herzegovina. While each of these countries experienced important single-issue protests, the movement of the Squares in Greece and the Occupy Gezi movement in Turkey managed to culminate into broad-based mass
mobilizations that subsequently challenged the legitimacy of representative democratic institutions at their very core, formulating alternative practices of direct democracy to prefigure different forms of autonomous selforganization. In Bosnia Herzegovina (hereinafter BiH), by contrast, a protest over the failure of the political system to solve a deadlock in the disbursement of national ID numbers, although inspiring massive mobilization and lasting
more than a month, failed to make the scale-shift (Tarrow and McAdam 2003) and formulate such a systemic critique of representation. Why did the movements in Greece and Turkey take off while the one in BiH did not?
First, we argue that while the Greek movement of the Squares and the çapulcular (looters) of Turkey managed to successfully connect their single issue protest over austerity and Gezi Park, respectively, to the structural context of a deepening crisis of representation, the Bosnian #JMBG movement failed to articulate a clear narrative connecting the political deadlock over national ID numbers to the failure of the post-Dayton political system to adequately respond to important salient popular concerns. Secondly, we observe that while both Greece and Turkey could count on extensive local horizontal movement experience and pre-existing activist
networks capable of formulating such a critique of representation, in the Bosnian case such networks and experience appeared largely absent, resulting in a reduced potential for sustained nationwide mobilization surrounding the question of democracy. Therefore, building on the concept of resonance (Oikonomakis and Roos 2013), we claim that the different outcome of the Bosnian case can be attributed to the absence of two critical conditions, namely strong movement networks and horizontal movement experience.
In sum, we argue that, even though the movements in Greece, Turkey and BiH were all faced with a crisis of representation, of which the austerity measures, the destruction of Gezi Park and the failure to disburse national ID numbers were but specific symptoms, the Bosnian movement ultimately did not see “the forest through the trees”, and as a result failed to light the prairie of social discontent. For single-issue protests to evolve into resonant
mass movements, they ultimately have to confront the structural context in which they arise.
Our paper is based on extensive participant observation (56 out of 72 popular assemblies at Syntagma Square), interviews with key-informants in Athens and Sarajevo, and in-depth analysis of the minutes of the Popular Assemblies of Syntagma Square.
This article explores collective identity frames and discursive strategies employed by social mov... more This article explores collective identity frames and discursive strategies employed by social movement actors mobilizing in ethnically divided societies, a context where ethnicity constitutes the primary collective category of identification. By using Bosnia and Herzegovina as a case study, it analyzes movement framing in three waves of social protests that occurred in the country in the last decade. Specifically, it investigates the diverse ways in which movement leaders tackled ethnicity in their discourses. The article shows that movement leaders’ narratives rested, respectively, on the primacy of human and citizenship rights, a common feeling of deprivation, and victimhood. Their approach toward ethnicity, however, differed in each wave. Ethnicity was openly rejected in 2013, avoided and not openly contested in 2014, and accepted and approached as an opportunity to bring further support to the movement in 2018. The article highlights that ethnicity can be tackled differently by ...
This article investigates the different types of emotions that result from participation in refug... more This article investigates the different types of emotions that result from participation in refugee solidarity activism, investigating how they change over time and to what extent they explain why individuals remain involved in action in spite of unfavorable circumstances. By bringing together scholarship on collective action with the literature on emotions, the article delves into the emotional response of sustained engagement in refugee solidarity activism. The study is based on the analysis of 40 in-depth interviews with solidarity activists and volunteers involved in grassroots refugee solidarity initiatives along the Western Balkans route between 2015 and 2021, as well as on participant observation conducted between 2016 and 2021 in North Macedonia,
Recent years have seen a new development in the growth and spread of popular protest: protests th... more Recent years have seen a new development in the growth and spread of popular protest: protests that began as local, homogeneous events-such as Occupy Wall Street or the protests of the Arab Spring-quickly left their original locations and local specificity behind and became global. This book looks at the development of this wave of protests, with an eye on protests against austerity and neoliberal economic policies, and offers a global view, covering events in Turkey, Brazil, Venezuela, South Africa, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and other locations.
In the last decade, urban social movements that emerged in the Yugoslav successor states decided ... more In the last decade, urban social movements that emerged in the Yugoslav successor states decided to form political platforms to enter the institutional arena, often after years of mobilisation for the right to the city. Their aim was to seize power at the local level, trying to provide an answer to the crisis of representative democracy and to oppose the process of centralisation of power. These platforms ran for elections in Zagreb (Croatia) and Belgrade (Serbia), to reclaim local autonomy on societal, environmental, economic and political matters. Based on ethnographic work, document analysis and a series of in-depth interviews with activists, this article explores the trajectories of two platforms, ‘Zagreb Is Ours’ (Zagreb je nasˇ) in Zagreb, Croatia, and ‘We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own’ (Ne davimo Beograd) in Belgrade, Serbia. It analyses the factors accounting for the choice of urban activists to embrace new municipalist ideas as strategic ideological and political positioning of their electoral platforms, arguing that the reasons are twofold: the embeddedness into regional and transnational activist networks, which facilitated the process of diffusion of new municipalist ideas across Europe and locally, and the resonance of new municipalism with socialist Yugoslavia’s decentralised system of self-management and direct democracy, an historical experience that the platforms’ initiators partially reappraised.
The article contributes to the understanding of contemporary urban commons by developing a renewe... more The article contributes to the understanding of contemporary urban commons by developing a renewed analytical framework which approaches them as dynamic configurations. By investigating different types of urban commons in Italy, the article disentangles the notion of urban commons along two axes that take into account their relationship with both local institutions and the surrounding environment. The combination of these two axes produces four possible configurations that allow to grasp the complexity of urban commons, accounting for their multifaceted and at times controversial nature. Moreover, this article identifies three functions that urban commons can perform in the contemporary European cities: as resilient spaces, as reclaimed spaces incorporated into capitalistic models of urban development, or contentious and transformative spaces that combine social reproduction with anti-capitalistic politics. The article is based on qualitative research and participant observation gro...
East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures
The article contributes to the urban studies literature and the study of social movements in divi... more The article contributes to the urban studies literature and the study of social movements in divided societies by disclosing the distinctive features and mobilizing potential that the notion of urban commons retains in a war-torn society with a socialist legacy. Specifically, it investigates how urban space and urban commons are reclaimed in a post-conflict and post-socialist country such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. By using Sarajevo as a case study, the article explores several grassroots initiatives undertaken by local urban activists to reappropriate cultural buildings and public space in the city. The study discloses that in a post-conflict and post-socialist society urban commons can bear a unifying potential as acts of commoning favor trust reconstruction processes and strengthen community ties. While the erosion of social ties and the legacy of the war might not encourage mobilization for the commons, the reference to socialist-era practices and language can represent a vantag...
Hit by the economic and political crisis, young people in Italy face increased labor precarity an... more Hit by the economic and political crisis, young people in Italy face increased labor precarity and the disillusionment derived from the disappearance of the radical Left from the parliamentary arena. In the Italian context, economic hardship, the decrease of resources available for collective action, and the weakened mobilizing capacity that traditional mass organizations (such as trade unions and political parties) retained in the first decade of the 2000s brought about a general decline in intensity and visibility of street protests, leading to an apparent retreat of activism to the local level of action. Although the crisis had a negative impact on collective action, evidence reveals that more creative and less visible forms of societal and political commitment were adopted by young generations in these years. This article explores how the Italian youth in times of crisis engaged actively in alternative and unconventional forms of political commitment aimed at re-appropriating sp...
L'evolucio de la societat civil a Bosnia i Hercegovina ha estat marcada per una serie de fact... more L'evolucio de la societat civil a Bosnia i Hercegovina ha estat marcada per una serie de factors historics i politics. El regim socialista va influenciar la manera en que els ciutadans es van organitzar, mentre que la intervencio dels donants i agencies internacionals al final de la guerra va comportar la florida de organitzacions no governamentals locals. En el periode mes recent, van emergir i es van expandir pel pais protestes i practiques participatives, deixant una empremta indeleble en el teixit social i tenint influencia en les practiques de les organitzacions formals. Aquest article ofereix una perspectiva de l'evolucio de la societat civil local en el passat recent del pais, examinant la manera en que es va produir la seva evolucio des del final del periode socialista fins a l'actualitat. L'article comenca explorant les iniciatives de base i les protestes antibel·licistes de finals dels vuitanta, que van constituir exemples d'una societat civil "ext...
During the long summer of migration in 2015, Austria became a recipient country for almost 90,000... more During the long summer of migration in 2015, Austria became a recipient country for almost 90,000 migrants, most of whom got access to the country through the Western Balkans corridor. Against a backdrop of modest protest culture and largely hostile political attitudes towards asylum seekers, a part of civil society engaged in solidarity activism in support of the migrants. The chapter explores the emotional dimension of pro-refugee collective action, focusing in particular on the extent to which emotions informed the citizens’ decision to get involved in solidarity movements. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with solidarity actors, the analysis discloses the relevance of moral and reactive emotions in explaining citizens’ engagement, revealing that feelings of outrage, compassion, and humanity account for the most relevant resources of solidarity actions. Moreover, it demonstrates that public and personal events that provoked moral shocks, coupled with personal experiences of displacement and uprooting, constituted important predictors of volunteerism.
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Conference Papers by Chiara Milan
mobilizations that subsequently challenged the legitimacy of representative democratic institutions at their very core, formulating alternative practices of direct democracy to prefigure different forms of autonomous selforganization. In Bosnia Herzegovina (hereinafter BiH), by contrast, a protest over the failure of the political system to solve a deadlock in the disbursement of national ID numbers, although inspiring massive mobilization and lasting
more than a month, failed to make the scale-shift (Tarrow and McAdam 2003) and formulate such a systemic critique of representation. Why did the movements in Greece and Turkey take off while the one in BiH did not?
First, we argue that while the Greek movement of the Squares and the çapulcular (looters) of Turkey managed to successfully connect their single issue protest over austerity and Gezi Park, respectively, to the structural context of a deepening crisis of representation, the Bosnian #JMBG movement failed to articulate a clear narrative connecting the political deadlock over national ID numbers to the failure of the post-Dayton political system to adequately respond to important salient popular concerns. Secondly, we observe that while both Greece and Turkey could count on extensive local horizontal movement experience and pre-existing activist
networks capable of formulating such a critique of representation, in the Bosnian case such networks and experience appeared largely absent, resulting in a reduced potential for sustained nationwide mobilization surrounding the question of democracy. Therefore, building on the concept of resonance (Oikonomakis and Roos 2013), we claim that the different outcome of the Bosnian case can be attributed to the absence of two critical conditions, namely strong movement networks and horizontal movement experience.
In sum, we argue that, even though the movements in Greece, Turkey and BiH were all faced with a crisis of representation, of which the austerity measures, the destruction of Gezi Park and the failure to disburse national ID numbers were but specific symptoms, the Bosnian movement ultimately did not see “the forest through the trees”, and as a result failed to light the prairie of social discontent. For single-issue protests to evolve into resonant
mass movements, they ultimately have to confront the structural context in which they arise.
Our paper is based on extensive participant observation (56 out of 72 popular assemblies at Syntagma Square), interviews with key-informants in Athens and Sarajevo, and in-depth analysis of the minutes of the Popular Assemblies of Syntagma Square.
Papers by Chiara Milan
the trajectories of two platforms, ‘Zagreb Is Ours’ (Zagreb je nasˇ) in Zagreb, Croatia, and ‘We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own’ (Ne davimo Beograd) in Belgrade, Serbia. It analyses the factors accounting for the choice of urban activists to embrace new municipalist ideas as strategic ideological
and political positioning of their electoral platforms, arguing that the reasons are twofold: the embeddedness into regional and transnational activist networks, which facilitated the process of diffusion of new municipalist ideas across Europe and locally, and the resonance of new municipalism
with socialist Yugoslavia’s decentralised system of self-management and direct democracy, an historical experience that the platforms’ initiators partially reappraised.
mobilizations that subsequently challenged the legitimacy of representative democratic institutions at their very core, formulating alternative practices of direct democracy to prefigure different forms of autonomous selforganization. In Bosnia Herzegovina (hereinafter BiH), by contrast, a protest over the failure of the political system to solve a deadlock in the disbursement of national ID numbers, although inspiring massive mobilization and lasting
more than a month, failed to make the scale-shift (Tarrow and McAdam 2003) and formulate such a systemic critique of representation. Why did the movements in Greece and Turkey take off while the one in BiH did not?
First, we argue that while the Greek movement of the Squares and the çapulcular (looters) of Turkey managed to successfully connect their single issue protest over austerity and Gezi Park, respectively, to the structural context of a deepening crisis of representation, the Bosnian #JMBG movement failed to articulate a clear narrative connecting the political deadlock over national ID numbers to the failure of the post-Dayton political system to adequately respond to important salient popular concerns. Secondly, we observe that while both Greece and Turkey could count on extensive local horizontal movement experience and pre-existing activist
networks capable of formulating such a critique of representation, in the Bosnian case such networks and experience appeared largely absent, resulting in a reduced potential for sustained nationwide mobilization surrounding the question of democracy. Therefore, building on the concept of resonance (Oikonomakis and Roos 2013), we claim that the different outcome of the Bosnian case can be attributed to the absence of two critical conditions, namely strong movement networks and horizontal movement experience.
In sum, we argue that, even though the movements in Greece, Turkey and BiH were all faced with a crisis of representation, of which the austerity measures, the destruction of Gezi Park and the failure to disburse national ID numbers were but specific symptoms, the Bosnian movement ultimately did not see “the forest through the trees”, and as a result failed to light the prairie of social discontent. For single-issue protests to evolve into resonant
mass movements, they ultimately have to confront the structural context in which they arise.
Our paper is based on extensive participant observation (56 out of 72 popular assemblies at Syntagma Square), interviews with key-informants in Athens and Sarajevo, and in-depth analysis of the minutes of the Popular Assemblies of Syntagma Square.
the trajectories of two platforms, ‘Zagreb Is Ours’ (Zagreb je nasˇ) in Zagreb, Croatia, and ‘We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own’ (Ne davimo Beograd) in Belgrade, Serbia. It analyses the factors accounting for the choice of urban activists to embrace new municipalist ideas as strategic ideological
and political positioning of their electoral platforms, arguing that the reasons are twofold: the embeddedness into regional and transnational activist networks, which facilitated the process of diffusion of new municipalist ideas across Europe and locally, and the resonance of new municipalism
with socialist Yugoslavia’s decentralised system of self-management and direct democracy, an historical experience that the platforms’ initiators partially reappraised.