Accademic Journal: Between Resilience and Resistance: Grassroots (Economic) Activism in Times of Crisis (original) (raw)
Related papers
Grassroots (Economic) Activism in Times of Crisis: Mapping the Redundancy of Collective Actions
Partecipazione e Conflitto, 2015
In the current economic crisis of industrialized society, social movements face two types of challenges: firstly, they are confronting institutions that are less capable of and have no propensity for mediating new socio-economic demands; secondly, they are experiencing difficulties in building strong and lasting bonds of solidarity and cooperation among people. The latter are fundamental resources for the emergence of collective action; however, the highly individualized structure of contemporary society makes the creation of social ties ever the more difficult. As a consequence, contemporary waves of protest are often short-lived. Nonetheless, in response to the multidimensional crises, the consolidation of grassroots mutualistic and cooperative experiences, within which new affiliations for collective action are experienced, is on the rise. Indeed, it is a fact that even though conditions are not favorable, social movements have continued to ex-pand and promote community-led initi...
In the current economic crisis of industrialized society, social movements face two types of challenges: firstly, they are confronting institutions that are less capable of and have no propensity for mediating new socio-economic demands; secondly, they are experiencing difficulties in building strong and lasting bonds of solidarity and cooperation among people. The latter are fundamental resources for the emergence of collective action; however, the highly individualized structure of contemporary society makes the creation of social ties ever the more difficult. As a consequence, contemporary waves of protest are often short-lived. Nonetheless, in response to the multidimensional crises, the consolidation of grassroots mutualistic and cooperative experiences, within which new affiliations for collective action are experienced, is on the rise. Indeed, it is a fact that even though conditions are not favorable, social movements have continued to ex-pand and promote community-led initiatives for social and economic sustainability. In some cases, these initiatives play a decisive role in the fight against poverty and in guaranteeing human livelihood. Solidarity-based exchanges and networks, such as barter groups, urban gardening, new consumer-producer net-works and cooperatives, time banks, local savings groups, urban squatting, and others similar experiences are typical examples of continuous reactivation of people’s desire to be agents of their own destiny. This combination of formal and informal networks are a testimony to an ability and an aspiration. Indeed, on one hand, they are indicative of citizens’ capacity to self-organize in order to tolerate, absorb, cope with and adjust to the environmental and social threats posed by neoliberal policies. On the other hand, they are attempting to change an economic system, increasingly perceived as unfair and ecological disruptive, by building an alternative in the cracks of the former, based on greater mutual solidarity between individ-uals and more sustainable connections with the environment. This special issue is a reflection, among the many that have being proposed of late, on some of these self-organized collective actions that have pass through and/or emerged from the aftermath of the crisis. It is the result of an attempt to cross various dis-ciplinary fields, in order to explore the redundancy of their respective explanations as to why and how some grassroots activities last and succeed, and turn this redundancy into the powerhouse for relaunching more robust and less aleatory initiatives. KEYWORDS: Resilience, Collective action, Degrowth, Sustainable Community Movement Organizations (SCMOs), Commons
A variety of theoretical and conceptual perspectives have been applied to studying collective citizen initiatives arising in response to hard economic times, such as solidarity-based exchanges and networks, cooperative structures, barter clubs, credit unions, ethical banks, time banks, alternative social currency, citizens' self-help groups, neighbourhood assemblies and social enterprises. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, scholarly attention on novel, alternative, resilient structures has increased, especially in regions that have been most affected. A comprehensive literature review is therefore needed on these initiatives which usually aim to meet basic needs such as food, shelter, health and education at the community level, or build and envision autonomous communities. This paper has four aims. First, it proposes a new, all-encompassing conceptual framework, alternative forms of resilience, to embrace all issues and groups related to such initiatives, during the new millennium and its economic and political challenges, while taking into account the impact of the 2008 crisis. Secondly, it offers a comprehensive literature review on collective citizen initiatives studied through different theoretical, methodological and conceptual understandings. Thirdly, it provides a new typology of several approaches on novel, collective and solidarity-oriented critical resilience initiatives which take into account political issues, be they policy or social-movement related. Finally, it points to future research areas which would aim to systematically address the political and non-political features of citizen-collective responses.
SocietàMutamentoPolitica, 2017
The global economic crisis of 2008 has fostered a new wave of de-politicization intended as the shifting of national policy making from the public political arena to the field of extra-political supranational and international actors. The public policy making has become tightly linked to criteria that are much more economic than political. This change has provoked a consequent mutation in the nature and behavior of social movements which has result in different kinds of crossbreeding. Traditional social movements with their State-addressed requests have given way to new forms of social conflict that do not directly address to the national government. These new forms of mobilization act primarily in the form of direct social actions aimed at impacting directly on the economy and the environment. The common element of such experiences can be identified in the mix of resilience and resistance that they express.
Mobilization of rights in times of crisis: a review of social movements theory
The research on social movements has observed the internal dynamics of movements, the construction of their identities, their forms of performance, as well as their organization and mobilized resources. From the continuous observation of movements in their local and transnational dynamics, the uses of law have been analyzed, on the one hand, as part of the strategies and resources mobilized by the movements and, on the other hand, as part of the institutional structures of opportunity and repression. This article aims to demonstrate the possible paths to be developed for an analysis of the forms of mobilization of rights from the point of view of social movements that also consider the complexity of the legal form. For this, the work is divided into three parts. The first will bring a summary of the different perspectives in the field of social movements. The second will focus on the current debates on social movements, protests and austerity policies. And finally, the third will present the discussion promoted in this special issue of the Law and Praxis Journal aiming at offering new questions for a research agenda on the matter. Key words: crisis; social movements; social rights; austerity
The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Change, 2023
Social movements embody broadly oppositional subjects and objects against governments and institutional decisions. But the studies about them are mostly used to focus on some cases and their basics. Instead, this study tries to draw a holistic and comprehensive vision, inspired by Ranciere and Hardt and Negri's concepts. These scholars show that the movements give a new meaning to existing politics in the near past, especially focusing on the last two decades globally. The changing subjects and objects of the movements constitute a new political basement. This study argues that post-2010 movements are the second wave of anti-globalization movements. It is a new democratic thought that grows from the bottom and searches for an institutional pattern to reflect upon. The flourishing of the issues of protests, the daily life affairs with the participation of ordinary people in demonstrations, and the global interaction via the internet network indicate that the movements constitute a new way of prefigurative politics. Despite differences among the cases indicated, the common point is about searching for new possibilities in politics.