Lorenzo Zamponi

Zamponi, L. (2021) L’Italia dei movimenti tra berlusconismo, crisi strutturale della sinistra e nuovi populismi (2001-2021). In: Cantiere delle Idee and Fairwatch (eds.) Un altro mondo è ancora possibile? Lo spazio dell’alternativa vent’anni dopo Genova e Porto Alegre. Milano: Fondazione Feltrinelli, pp. 135-150.

In resisting climate change, to what extent can lifestyle forms of activism be considered to be political? What are their determinants and to what extent do they differ from the determinants of other forms of action? What role do generational factors play? Does the centrality of lifestyle changes for young participants translate into a disaffection towards more traditional forms of action? This article explores the forms of action adopted by participants in two Fridays For Future (FFF) strikes, focusing on the repertoires of action of (young) climate justice protesters. We draw on protest survey data covering the FFF demonstrations held in 15 European countries in March and September 2019. Starting from a sharp generational contrast between the importance given to individual lifestyle changes in addressing the climate emergency, we investigate whether this results in significant generational differences in the choice of the repertoires of action. Challenging the vision of young people as ‘disaffected citizens’, it is demonstrated that young protesters do not participate less in claim-based action than older cohorts. Furthermore, a process of politicisation can be seen to be unfolding that leads to increased commitment in both lifestyle and political forms of participation – at least among active milieus.

L'Italia della crisi appare schiacciata tra apatia e risentimento. Ma guardando in basso, si possono vedere forme di resistenza che raramente emergono sulla scena pubblica, e che riattualizzano l'azione collettiva, riposizionando l'individuo nella sfera pubblica. Dalle grandi organizzazioni sociali alle occupazioni abitative, dai gruppi di acquisto solidale alle fabbriche recuperate, passando per i circoli culturali e le sperimentazioni di welfare dal basso; gli autori indagano i percorsi seguiti dai diversi attori collettivi verso l'azione sociale diretta, e le loro conseguenze nel produrre cambiamento nella societ\ue0 e nella politica

This article analyses continuities and discontinuities across time in Italy in the use of direct social actions, defined as forms of action that focus upon directly transforming some specific aspects of society by means of the very action itself, instead of claiming something from the state or other power holders. In doing this, this article offers two main illustrative hypotheses. First, that direct social actions represent a significant part of the repertoire of contention - at least in Italy - and that while they tend to be less visible than protest actions, they should still not be overlooked and treated like something “new” every time they resurface. Second, this article claims that the socio-economic context plays an important role in influencing the extended use of DSAs: if the supply of these forms of action by political actors is constant across time, what changes is the demand, that in times of economic hardship tends to characterise a broader constituency. We conclude by ...

In the context of the economic crisis, research on collective action has increasingly focused direct social actions, that escape the traditional state-addressing repertoires of action and focus on a self-changing society: boycotts, solidarity action, political consumerism, alternative finance (e.g. crowdfunding, food banks), collective purchasing groups, occupations, self-management, free legal advice and medical services, to mention just a few. This article aims to address the issue of direct social action as a response to welfare retrenchment in the context of the economic crisis in Italy, focusing in particular on actors with a background in protest and social movement milieus. How do these actors keep protest and direct social action together? How do they justify the choice to engage in direct social action? How do they make sense of the contradiction between service-providing and claim-making? And what are the consequences of the choice of these forms of action on their identit...

This article analyses how contrasting movements compete over the issue of migration in Italy and points out a significant role of the state in shaping this competition. While the so-called \uabrefugee crisis\ubb paved the way to multiple forms of action in support and against the arrival of migrants and asylum seekers, traditional social movement approaches fall short in explaining the dynamics between opposing camps, as scholars tended to focus on individual movements as isolated actors. To address this gap, we look at movement-countermovement dynamics in the field of migration between 2015 and 2017, to understand how contrasting actors frame causes and solutions for the problems at stake. Based on new empirical data from over 30 face-to-face interviews with activists, the article shows that, while discursive opportunities trigger conflicting interpretations of the same themes, competition between the anti-refugee and solidarity camp is asymmetric, both with regard to the definition of the issue and to the identification of political opponents. We show that the ambiguous position of the centre-left government in the management of immigration in Italy between 2015 and 2017 tipped the balance of the competition in the migration battleground, ultimately giving a crucial advantage to anti-refugee actors in the promotion of hegemonic frames

Trade unions in Southern European’s austerity-ridden countries have been considerably weakened by the last six years of crisis. Labour’s loss of power in countries such as Greece and Italy is significant. First of all, the tri-partite systems of collective bargaining (state, employers, unions) that characterised the 1990s and early 2000s in both countries collapsed. Neither state nor employers have shown any concrete willingness to re-establish some sort of collective bargaining mechanisms. Governments in austerity-ridden countries do not seem to need unions anymore.1

This article aims to explore the forms of collective actions that are emerging in new sectors of digital capitalism. In particular, it enquires into the mobilisation of food delivery workers that has been developing since 2016 in four Italian cities: Milan, Turin, Bologna and Florence. Despite the high level of precarisation and atomisation that characterise this subset of gig economy jobs, the so-called riders were able to organise into self-organised workers' collectives, which not only gave rise to many protest events, but also drew the attention of the institutions and the media. What are the conditions and the strategies that made this possible? And, more broadly, what does this case tell us about the possibility of labour activism in gig economy work? We argue that the high level of activation of food delivery workers is to be related to their capability to provide resources for reconstructing social ties among workers and, in turn, for translating them into political enga...

Italy is both the ‘country of first arrival’ for many refugees who come to Europe by sea and a provisional stage in a longer route. This chapter reconstructs, through the analysis of 21 qualitative interviews with activists, the forms of action that have emerged during the ‘long summer of migration’ along the Italian migrant route.

ABSTRACT The question of identity narrative is at the core of the interaction between social movements and temporalities. In this paper, we draw on long-term qualitative research amongst activists engaged in Italian social movements and argue that identity narratives are often the result of a complex mnemonic, contradictory and open-ended process that spans through a life-time of engagement with multiple collectives. We then question whether the use of social media reshape these dynamics. The analysis shows that the construction of identity narratives on social media tends to take place with knowledge of the complexity and overlaps that characterise these processes online. Nevertheless, the temporality of social media, based on immediacy, archival and predictive time, challenges the unpredictable, contradictory, and open-ended nature of political identity construction offline. The need to escape the hegemonic temporalities of social media poses new challenges to activists in their creative agency.

In recent years, scholarly interest in the interconnections between social movements and memory has been growing significantly. In this article, we outline and discuss this emerging focus of research on the movement-memory nexus with the goal of systematizing it and pointing to ways forward. We begin by delineating the interdisciplinary nature of the field, its central characteristics, and its disciplinary and conceptual foundations. We then identify and discuss three major areas of research, namely, research on memories of movements, memory in movements, and movements about memory. We close by outlining the debates, insights and pose several questions with the aim of bringing the different strands of research on the movement-memory nexus into a closer dialogue.

Alternative action organizations (AAOs) are collective bodies engaged in carrying out alternatives to dominant socioeconomic and cultural practices through actions that aim to provide people with alternative ways of enduring day-to-day difficulties and challenges in hard economic times. They are often interpreted as merely “philanthropic” actors, although it is not rare to see them go beyond the provision of direct services to people in need and end up pursuing political goals through political means. This article focuses on the process of politicization, that is, the transition of issues from the private to the public sphere and thus the use of public forms of contention (e.g., protest) proposing public solutions at the collective level instead of private solutions at the individual level. We argue for the role of the crisis in the politicization of AAOs. In particular, we show that the appropriation of the context as a context of economic crisis in the discourse of AAOs has a visi...

Heterogeneous collective actors often select the same form of action, but there is no academic investigation into how and when this happens. This article does so focusing on direct social action, that is, a form of collective action that does not primarily focus upon claiming something from the state but instead focuses upon directly transforming some specific aspects of society. Building on conceptual categories developed by social movements’ scholars (context, organization, and identity) and relying on rich qualitative and quantitative data from collective actors in Italy in a time of crisis, this article identifies four paths toward direct social actions (DSA): the social path, the political-social path, the social-political path, and the political path. In doing so, our analysis shifts from the search for causal factors to the reconstruction of the dynamic, patterned sequences of events by which collective actors progress in adopting a certain form of action. The implications of...

In the context of activism in solidarity with refugees in Italy in the "long summer of migration", the article analyses the relationship between political claim-making and direct social actions, i.e. actions that do not primarily focus upon claiming something or other from the state or other power holders but that instead focus upon directly transforming some specific aspects of society by means of the very action itself. In this case, many different kinds of Dsa were put in place by Italian activists, from the emergency provision of food, clothes and blankets to migrants that have been blocked somewhere to the creation of officially recognised humanitarian corridors. Through the analysis of qualitative interviews to activists involved in solidarity with refugees in Italy between 2015 and 2017, the article identifies four different mechanisms of interaction between Dsa and political claim-making: the capacity of Dsa to provide a hub of shared experiences that fosters politicisation; the expression of political claims through direct social actions; the use of Dsa to produce legitimacy and credibility to be spent in the realm of political claim-making; the obstacles to political elaboration and political action that the engagement in Dsa pose. The analysis shows that direct social actions, far from being isolated and separated from political claim-making, has a dynamic relationship with it and should be investigated as part of the same repertoire of collective action.

Focusing on mobilizations around work, this article sheds light on generational identity as it emerges in activists involved in labor struggles in Italy in the past few years. Do Italian “millennial” activists perceive themselves as part of the same political generation? What are its main traits? And are the contextual elements that define it linked more to socioeconomic context or to experiences of collective action? The analysis shows a clear self-identification of Italian millennials, in the context of labor struggles, as “the precarious generation”: a generation mostly affected by the socioeconomic conditions of the past few years, with the explosion of labor precarity, of the economic crisis, and more generally, of neoliberal policies. While this shared identity refers to a specific socioeconomic context, there is a difference related to the experience of political mobilization: Activists are rather pessimistic when focusing on the youngest component of their generation, usuall...

Abstract Social movements do not appear spontaneously. They are rooted in cultures and contexts and their evolution depends both on macro structural factors and on the action and organisation of pre-existing actors. In particular, the anti-austerity protest events that characterised southern European countries in the last few years cannot be understood through a focus on them as isolated incidents. They need, instead, to be analysed as part of a cycle of protest. Furthermore, some of their components are rooted in the activity and elaboration of pre-existing actors. We contribute to this issue by analysing the role of the student movement in the lead up to the anti-austerity mobilisations in Italy and Spain. This analysis allows us to show that a relevant component of the discourse of anti-austerity mobilisation comes from a long-standing trajectory of critique of neoliberalism, and that specific actors in specific fields of action reshaped and recontextualised this heritage in the context of the economic crisis, paving the way, at least from the discursive point of view, for the emergence of anti-austerity mobilisations. Our analysis, based on qualitative interviews of Italian and Spanish activists, point outs how student activists acted as initiators of anti-austerity mobilisations and as brokers in the adaptation of the anti-neoliberal discourse in the new context, with the goal of addressing a wider audience. We stress that pre-existing political trajectories play a significant role in the development of social movements, we highlight the importance of discursive continuities of cycle of protest and we argue that this role needs to be taken into account, together with structural factors and political processes, in understanding protest. Furthermore, we aim to contribute to the study of social movement continuities and cross-temporal diffusion, pointing out the active role of movements in this process in a dialectic relationship with the structural context.

Where does the current wave of global mobilisation come from? How can we explain the last two years’ explosion of anti-austerity and anti-corporate contention? In this chapter we aim at contributing in answering these questions, focusing on a particular aspect: the legacies and memories of the Global Justice Movement (GJM). Though large protests often surprise observers, they hardly start from scratch. Mostly, they are rooted in previous mobilisations with respect to their diagnostic framing, repertoires, and forms of organisation. The way in which these previous mobilisations are remembered plays a crucial role in this continuity: it determines which actions were helpful or successful and which were not. It preselects possible strategies of organisation and mobilisation. In this way memories can be understood as channels of temporal diffusion. This chapter analyses activists’ memories of the GJM in Italy, in different phases of the anti-austerity mobilisations in 2011 and 2012, in the context of two initiatives of commemoration: the 10th anniversary of the Genoa G8 “Genova 2001-Genova 2011: loro la crisi, noi la speranza”, organised in Genoa in 2011, on the one hand; and the “Firenze 10+10”, a set of workshops and activities organised in Florence in 2012, 10 years after the European Social Forum, on the other. Both events refer to fundamental moments in the history of the GJM, with different focuses on commemoration and on the organisation of debates and initiative linked with the contemporary political context. We reconstruct the legacies of the GJM in activists’ memories through interviews with activists in the context of these two events of commemoration. The analysis reveals a limited number of changes in the memories of the GJM and in its perceived legacies between 2011 and 2012, highlighting the relative permanence of movement memory, and it links these changes to the altered political and social context (before and after crisis) and constellations of actors. These findings ask for further research on memory as a movement outcome and on the symbolic relationship between different cycles of protest

ABSTRACT Fifteenth October 2011, a global day of anti-austerity action called for by the Spanish indignados, saw hundreds of thousands of protestors converging on Rome for a national march. One of the largest, this Rome event was however one of the most problematic, as it was disrupted by violent protests and the lack of will or capacity by the police to protect peaceful demonstrators. In this article, based on interviews with social movement organisers and police officers as well as documentary analysis, we examine similarities and differences between the 2001 G8 Genoa counter-summit and the demonstration of October 15th in Rome by analysing the specific characteristics in the police use of coercive techniques on the street, negotiation (or lack thereof) and the gathering of information. We then try to explain those characteristics, addressing some aspects of the Italian police organisation, the protest itself and the political system.

In the context of the economic crisis, research on collective action has increasingly focused direct social actions, that escape the traditional state-addressing repertoires of action and focus on a self-changing society: boycotts, solidarity action, political consumerism, alternative finance (e.g. crowdfunding, food banks), collective purchasing groups, occupations, self-management, free legal advice and medical services, to mention just a few. This article aims to address the issue of direct social action as a response to welfare retrenchment in the context of the economic crisis in Italy, focusing in particular on actors with a background in protest and social movement milieus. How do these actors keep protest and direct social action together? How do they justify the choice to engage in direct social action? How do they make sense of the contradiction between service-providing and claim-making? And what are the consequences of the choice of these forms of action on their identity? The article answers these questions through the analysis of 20 qualitative interviews to representatives of organisations engaging in direct social actions in Italy. The analysis shows that investigating the transition in the form of action as a political process, rooted in the decline of political participation, and aiming at reconstructing identity and politicisation, is helpful to understand how actors address the risk of substitution and to assess the outcomes of direct social action.

Focusing on mobilizations around work, this article sheds light on generational identity as it emerges in activists involved in labor struggles in Italy in the past few years. Do Italian "millennial" activists perceive themselves as part of the same political generation? What are its main traits? And are the contextual elements that define it linked more to socioeconomic context or to experiences of collective action? The analysis shows a clear self-identification of Italian millennials, in the context of labor struggles, as "the precarious generation": a generation mostly affected by the socioeconomic conditions of the past few years, with the explosion of labor precarity, of the economic crisis, and more generally, of neoliberal policies. While this shared identity refers to a specific socioeconomic context, there is a difference related to the experience of political mobilization: Activists are rather pessimistic when focusing on the youngest component of their generation, usually described as more individualist, due to their lack of exposure to intense waves of political mobilization. The contribution explores the multidimensional nature of generational identity and its asymmetric nature: If both the socioeconomic context and the experience of political socialization play a role in shaping a political generation, these dynamics do not always go hand in hand, and activists tend to actively work to reconcile the different dimensions of their generational identity into a coherent narrative.

Composition, mobilization and motives of the participants in Fridays For Future climate protests on 15 March 2019, in 13 European cities. A multi-country collaboration report.

The #FridaysForFuture climate protests mobilised more than 1.6 million people around the globe in March 2019. Through a school strike, a new generation has been galvanised, representing a historical turn in climate activism. This wave of climate protest mobilisation is unique in its tactics, global scope and appeal to teenage school students. Media coverage of these protests and high-level national and international political meetings involving the movement’s icon, Greta Thunberg, illustrate a level of global attention that no previous youth movement has ever received.

A team of social scientists from universities across Europe organised a survey of the global FFF strike events on March 15. The team surveyed protesters in 13 cities in nine European countries using the same research design to collect data, following the well-established protest survey methodology used previously in the “Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation” (CCC) project.

Demographically, the 14-19 age group is significantly over-represented among the respondents. More surprising is the predominance of female participants, particularly among teenagers. The authors believe that the movement’s female leaders may have a strong mobilising effect on (particularly young) women. Education remains a strong predictor of participation. The movement’s ability to create engaged young citizens through their climate activism is also highly significant, with average figures for first- time participants (among school students) on March 15 at around 38% across all countries.

Despite the adults participating in solidarity with school students, the survey data shows that the involvement of peers seems to matter more for school students. 45% of all school students agreed with the statement that Greta Thunberg had been a factor in their decision to join the Climate Strike. Compared with the adults in the survey, school students are seldom engaged as financial contributors or active members of environmental NGOs. Activists showed strong identification with both instrumental and expressive motivations. To a higher degree than adults, young respondents stated a wish to defend their interests, although they did not take success in this aim for granted. We can observe that participants feel distrustful about their current national governments’ capacity to deal with global warming, but they still push these governments for climate policies. In almost every country, student and adult participants are extremely sceptical about relying on companies and the market to solve environmental problems. There are significant differences between countries, and between adults and school students, over stopping climate change through individual lifestyle changes, highlighting that the movement may actually be quite heterogeneous in some regards.

The significant presence of young first-timers in the strike signals the emergence of a new generation of climate activists and the possible development of FFF as a broader, grassroots movement, with a strong female presence and reliance on social media and peer networks. It highlights limited commitment to established environmental organisations, with varying interpretations of the importance of lifestyle politics and a hopeful attitude towards the future. Further research will be needed to follow the development of the first mass youth mobilisation on climate change.

To what extent does the economic crisis affect support for political protest? Since the outburst of the financial crisis in 2008 many protests have been mobilized against national governments and their austerity policies. In some countries, these actions were described in the media as having little support among the general public, while elsewhere these actions enjoyed significant public support. Surprisingly little scholarly work has examined this variation. We fill this research gap by investigating who approves of austerity protests, how bystanders' attitudes differ from the activists' approval of protests and how repertoires relate to the approval of austerity protests. The analysis uses original survey data from nine European countries affected by the recent economic crisis at varying degrees and demonstrates that protest experience, both at the country and individual level, relates to approval of anti-austerity protests. The severity of economic crisis increases is positively related to protest approval in general terms, but there are differences depending on the type of grievances and which forms of austerity protests are considered.

Cultural factors shape the symbolic environment in which contentious politics take place.
Among these factors, collective memories are particularly relevant: they can help collective action by providing symbolic material from the past, but at the same time they can constrain people's ability to mobilise by imposing proscriptions and prescriptions. This book analyses the relationship between social movements and collective memories: how do social movements participate in the building of public memory? And how does public memory, and in particular the media’s representation of a contentious past, influence strategic choices in contemporary movements? To answer these questions the book draws its focus on the evolution of the representation of specific events in the Italian and Spanish student movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Furthermore, through qualitative interviews to contemporary student activists in
both countries, it investigates the role of past waves of contention in shaping the present through the publicly discussed image of the past.

The question of identity narrative is at the core of the interaction between social movements and temporalities. In this paper, we draw on long-term qualitative research amongst activists engaged in Italian social movements and argue that identity narratives are often the result of a complex mnemonic, contradictory and open-ended process that spans through a life-time of engagement with multiple collectives. We then question whether the use of social media reshape these dynamics. The analysis shows that the construction of identity narratives on social media tends to take place with knowledge of the complexity and overlaps that characterise these processes online. Nevertheless, the temporality of social media, based on immediacy, archival and predictive time, challenges the unpredictable, contradictory, and open-ended nature of political identity construction offline. The need to escape the hegemonic temporalities of social media poses new challenges to activists in their creative agency.

The question of identity narrative is at the core of the interaction between social movements and temporalities. In this paper, we draw on long-term qualitative research amongst activists engaged in Italian social movements and argue that identity narratives are often the result of a complex mnemonic, contradictory and open-ended process that spans through a life-time of engagement with multiple collectives. We then question whether the use of social media reshape these dynamics. The analysis shows that the construction of identity narratives on social media tends to take place with knowledge of the complexity and overlaps that characterise these processes online. Nevertheless, the temporality of social media, based on immediacy, archival and predictive time, challenges the unpredictable, contradictory, and open-ended nature of political identity construction offline. The need to escape the hegemonic temporalities of social media poses new challenges to activists in their creative agency.

How has the experience of crisis, austerity, and precarity affected visions of Europe in the labour movement? The article answers this question through the analysis of interviews of representatives of organisations engaged in labour  struggles  in  Italy  and  of  documents  published  by  the  same organisations. The analysis shows that, although the crisis has challenged ‘critical Europeanism’ and radicalised vision of Europe, the border between calls for ‘another Europe’ and Eurosceptic claims seems resilient: Euro-criticism is in crisis, but has left more ground to a frustrated Euro-disenchantment than to Euro-scepticism. At the theoretical level, these findings contribute to the literature  on  strategic  adaptation,  pointing  out  that  the  reaction  of movements to the closing of opportunities is far from automatic. Regarding the evolution of the Italian civil society, the shift towards Euroscepticism reflects the utter lack of hope towards the EU as a force of progress determined by a decade of austerity.