Blurring the Lines Between Civil Society, Volunteering and Social Movements. A Reflection on Redrawing Boundaries Inspired by the Spanish Case (original) (raw)
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Citizen participation in Spain has significantly increased, and its repertoire has broadened as a result of the 15M Movement. From assemblies and acampadas (occupations) to the current proliferation of new political parties, there has been constant movement through a wide range of techno-political actions and experimentation with means and political tools used by civil society and activists. This article aims to reflect on this complex and novel political repertoire from a theoretical framework of civil society. This framework is complemented with the differentiation of (horizontal versus vertical) political logics used in social movement studies.
Revista Científica FOZ, 2018
This paper, recognizing the many ways of civil and institutional cooperation, briefly examines the concept of civic engagement and civil society and applies this understanding to a recent case about an association encouraging participation (Principos) of the civil society in the political sphere in Madrid, Spain.
Social Movement Studies, 2024
How do instruments of direct democracy affect the social movement organisations that sponsor them? Drawing on social movement studies and direct democracy research, we argue that direct democracy has a transformative effect on its sponsors because it triggers a triple process of movement building, learning, and bargaining with political elites. This triple process sets in motion enduring trends within the organisation that has undertaken the burden of promoting the initiative. We illustrate this argument with the case of a people's legislative initiative (a non-binding mechanism of direct democracy) organised by a housing rights organisation between 2011 and 2013 to counter the eviction crisis in Spain. This initiative did not result in the reform that activists demanded. Nevertheless, it contributed to consolidating the sponsor organisation, innovating its repertoire of action, and broadening its strategic options.
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This Section aims to bring together panels around current issues in the study of political participation and social movements. Scholars of democratic theory, participation, social movement mobilization and political parties have pointed to the fact that understandings and expectations of the (political) engagement of citizens are constantly evolving. As a consequence, pathways of critique and opposition to power assume new forms: movements and protests emerge and develop differently than they have in the past. The contemporary rise of right-wing populism as well as shifting movement landscapes and repertoires of political participation bear witness to these moving grounds. This ever-changing landscape of citizen participation demands ongoing research into who becomes active, why, how and to what effect. At the same time, citizen engagement is also hotly debated from various normative standpoints. Many theories of democracy consider citizen engagement to be the solution to multiple crises of democratic legitimation or efficiency. Others see it as a cause for democratic inequality, and point out that it can lead to decreasing democratic problem-solving capacities when the expectation of (direct) democratic influence by the people or social movement organizations make decision-making slow and consensus unlikely. With this section we want to take a closer look at topics that enable to better understand citizen's shifting demands for, and patterns of, participation, and how social movement organizations and other actors, including governments, media, and companies respond to these demands. We call for panels, which speak to both, the more established core interests in the study of political participation and social movements as well as the more recent or emerging areas of academic enquiry. In line with the scope of the standing group on participation and mobilization, this section particularly aims at bringing the literature on political participation and social movements closer together.
Normalizing Activism and Marginalizing Radical Youth in Spain’s Post-15M Social Movements
Social Analysis, 2021
In this article I compare the different forms of participation of young anti-capitalists in two post-15M Spanish social movements in Lleida: White Tide and Platform of those Affected by Mortgages. The objective of the article is to analyze how biopolitical normalization processes work within social movements themselves. The article explains the normalization processes that adult activists exercise against young anti-capitalists, and the ways in which young people resist and seek to break with these processes in post-15M movements. All this allows us to understand how this normalization affects current social movements, establishing what is seen to be the ‘correct’ way to be an activist and creating processes of marginalization and censorship of those activists who occupy non-hegemonic social positions and who use other political forms.
A Political Reconsideration of Social Movements: The Case 15M Movement in Spain
Hacı Bayram Veli Üniversitesi İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi Dergisi, 2019
The contemporary wave of protests and occupy-style mobilisations has been very influential in different parts of the world. Yet, though the economic accounts are available, not many studies have looked at the political factors behind the social movements. Analysing the case of 15M Movement in Spain, this paper aims to explain the emergence of protest movements from a political perspective by providing a party politics account. It contends that one of the central factors behind mass protests, if not the only one, has been the crisis of representation resulting not only from the lack of voter-party congruence, but also from the failure of political parties to meet the demands of responsiveness and responsibility-the core requisite of the party government model. After all what legitimizes the party government model has been governing party's ability to balance the demands of responsiveness and responsibility at the same time. As such, in accounting for the question of what factors brought about popular disaffection in Spain, it provides a rather neglected party politics perspective.
Field theory, media change and the new citizen movements: Spain’s ‘real democracy turn’, 2011-2014
Field theory can help to produce more nuanced analyses of the relationship between media change the rise of new citizen movements. In turn, this can be of invaluable assistance in our comparative understanding of the world’s current ‘crises of citizenship’. Taking as my example Spain’s indignados (15M) movement and its recent political offshoots, I explore the potential uses of a range of field concepts, including a pair of contrasting notions introduced here for the first time: ‘field of civic action’ vs. ‘unorganised civic space’. I argue that Spain’s 15M movement is best understood not as a continuous flow of events but rather as a series of discrete, ephemeral fields of civic action separated by a long hiatus of unorganised civic space. These transient, complexly mediated fields can be regarded as socio-political games of a certain kind, namely as contests in which civic ‘players’ with unique sets of skills, including ‘freedom technologists’ (Postill 2014a), enter into relationships with other individual and collective players in pursuit of common goals and rewards. Of particular salience in the Spanish case is the emergence of citizen-led initiatives (e.g. PAH, Podemos, Barcelona en Comú) that have learned how to bridge the civic vs. establishment media divide to great effect. Together, these initiatives – and their forerunners – have mobilised hundreds of thousands of Spanish citizens, imbuing them with a new agonistic vocabulary (‘us’ vs. ‘them’, ‘the citizenry’ vs. the caste’) and with a heightened awareness of their social rights that many have put into practice.
Understanding the latest social movements in Spain (2011-2015). A theoretical approach of the 15m
Citizenship was articulated as a social science concept by the differentiation between civil, politic and social rights that Marshall proposed in 1950. Nevertheless because of globalization, translational migrations, new social movements and the transformations of identities and their referents, Marshallian citizenship has been questioned. New claims, new demands of recognition and new social practices have transformed the classic references on which citizenship relays, such as time, space or nation. In this paper we explore the different academic proposals that aim to address the future of citizenship, social movements and political practices and systems of Western liberal democracies. We will focus our analysis in the Spanish context and the last well-known social movements as the 15M but always taking into account the complexity of the local-global realities.
Learning by Participating in Social Movements: Ethnographic Research in Madrid (Spain)
Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 2019
One explores the influence of social movements in formal education, with diverse approaches and little connection among them. The other studies learning in social movements, mostly inserted in the field of adult education and that form a corpus of interrelated and expanding knowledge. However, there are still few works that arise from an idea of complementarity or that have a double focus on citizen education that leads to activism, and activism as an 320 Héctor S. Melero and Inés Gil-Jaurena educational process (Davies, Evans, & Peterson, 2014). Our previous studies 1 arose from the idea of complementarity and an understanding that in order to formulate proposals for citizenship education, the object of study must be how citizenship and participation learning happens. That is, trying to understand the learning experiences of activists and the learning that takes place in spaces of participation, such as social movements, to formulate educational proposals (Gil-Jaurena,