Contemporary Italian Politics
ISSN: 2324-8823 (Print) 2324-8831 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rita20
Spreading protest: social movements in times of crisis, edited by Donatella della Porta and Alice Mattoni, Colchester, ECPR Press, 2014, 324 pp., € 62.30 (hardback), ISBN 978-19-102-5920-7 Margarita Zavadskaya To cite this article: Margarita Zavadskaya (2015) Spreading protest: social movements in times of crisis, edited by Donatella della Porta and Alice Mattoni, Colchester, ECPR Press, 2014, 324 pp., € 62.30 (hardback), ISBN 978-19-102-5920-7, Contemporary Italian Politics, 7:2, 203-205, DOI: 10.1080/23248823.2015.1039245 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23248823.2015.1039245
Published online: 30 Apr 2015.
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opposition of many enemies. ‘Renzi recalls them continuously’ (22). They are undefined classes that want to protect their powers and privileges; they are, also, the critics of his reforms; they are, simply, ‘owls’, people who want to bring bad luck to the country and to its bright future. Prime Minister Renzi does not feel obliged to respond to the critics with reasons and explanations: irony, sarcasm and conceit are incisive weapons to defeat the enemies, which he does not fear. Fourth, the (short) amount of time: The time factor plays a crucial role in the Government’s adventure, and so rhythm is an essential part of Renzi’s tale. Goals and dates go hand in hand, because, differently from the past, this government is willing and able to rescue the country. Fifth, (popular) legitimacy: Matteo Renzi, author and protagonist of his plot, continuously evokes the support of the Italian people, in whose name he is speaking and acting. And Italians, obviously, reciprocate by legitimising his government through the (European and ‘primary election’) votes. Straight after offering this clear critical interpretation of Renzi’s fairy tale, Ventura shows how the plot is penned by its author and exegete, Matteo Renzi himself. One of the defensive strategies consists of taking for granted the self-obviousness rightfulness of the course of the Government’s behaviour. The same goal is pursued through avoiding direct answers to interviewers’ questions using a redundant story that brings listeners inside Renzi’s plot. But the true ‘guardian’ of Renzi’s fairy tale is its co-protagonist: Minister Boschi. She offers the same framework: a past to be overcome; the need for change; many enemies to deal with; a continuous challenge; the short amount of time available for action; the exceptional nature of the Government’s action, and the high levels of popular legitimacy; but her communication style is calmer, clearer, prompter. Renzi’s tale is, therefore, built inside the logic of the media system, which monopolises the story and leaves no room to the analysis of reality. This, nonetheless, runs the risk of distancing people’s perceptions from the plot, lowering the Government’s approval ratings. The weakening of Renzi’s tale’s effectiveness is probably due to the increasing gap between the story and people’s everyday reality. Like every fairy tale, the story is closed, not permeable by reality, which, on the contrary, must be handled to fit the story. ‘However, as time goes by, the persistence of a problematic situation may make less and less plausible the world populated by heroes and owls’ (192). Marta Regalia University of Bologna
[email protected] © 2015, Marta Regalia http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23248823.2015.1040225
Spreading protest: social movements in times of crisis, edited by Donatella della Porta and Alice Mattoni, Colchester, ECPR Press, 2014, 324 pp., € 62.30 (hardback), ISBN 97819-102-5920-7 Waves of mass upheavals in the past 25 years remain a hot topic for social movement studies and political science in general, starting from the democratisation waves following the collapse of the USSR, transnational anti-globalisation movements in the late 1990s, electoral revolutions, the Arab spring and anti-austerity movements. The usual analytical approach is to separate every set of events, i.e. anti-austerity campaigns in Europe and the US from pro-democratic movements in the Middle East and North Africa region or Eastern Europe and scrutinise them as if they were unfolding independently of each other. One
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Book reviews
strand of the literature views the protests as a consequence of economic grievances and protesters as adaptive and somewhat myopic citizens, while a second one overestimates the role of imported protest technologies in defeating dictators, focusing exclusively on the successful ‘colour revolutions’ and assuming that the experience of the transmitters is almost universally applicable. To put it briefly, the recession literature downplays the political and normative aspects while the democratisation literature underestimates the role of imaginary, creative adoption, re-framing and potential re-appropriation of the protest agenda by transnational actors. The contributors to the collective monograph, Spreading Protest, take a somewhat different stance by bringing all contentious events under the same conceptual umbrella of protest diffusion, rightly assuming the mutual dependence between protest movements, refusing to attach purely economic labels to the anti-austerity protests and linking economic and anti-authoritarian movements to a global struggle for deeper and wider democracy worldwide. This edited volume seeks ‘to bring together these protests through the prism of spatial and temporal diffusion without distinguishing between agendas, regimes and geopolitical contexts’ (2). The declared purpose of the book is ‘to understand the movements of the crisis’ through questioning the very meaning of ‘diffusion’, grasping the qualities of the ‘transnational’ dimension in current mobilisations and the ways in which the diffusion unfolded from country to country, while the rise of the Global Justice Movement (GJM) in the late 1990s is taken as a discursive point of departure. Ten case studies (including Iran, Turkey, UK, US, Italy, Spain and the Czech Republic) offer insightful and sometimes controversial evidence from all over the world, highlighting the actors, discourses and practices as well as the modes of their emulation across borders. The volume has three main parts: the first part speaks to the transnational aspect of social movements, presented as a problematic concept; the second one spotlights the mechanisms of diffusion; while the third addresses the issues of causal inference, trying to summarise why some protests spread while others do not and focusing on socalled negative cases with failed protests. One of the strong sides of the volume is the variety of methods and epistemological approaches involving evidence from fieldwork research, semi-structured interviews, text analysis and protest event data. Donatella della Porta and Alice Mattoni brilliantly lay out the key insights from seemingly unrelated studies and strive to bring the empirical parts under the same conceptual umbrella. In the last chapter, three main prospects for future research are identified: uncharted territories of diffusion (the negative cases); selective diffusion (movements of crisis vs. movements of opportunities) with more attention to the role of supranational actors (e.g. the EU) and their ability to reframe the protest agenda and, lastly, the role of social media (284–285). The transnational channels of diffusion are nicely disentangled on page 281, where temporal and spatial dimensions of diffusion are cross-tabulated against different types of diffusion that clearly systematises the previous efforts to theorise contagion or spill-over effects and intentional import of technologies from one context to another. In the end, the authors suggest two paths for global protest, comparing the GJM with the anti-austerity-pro-democracy movements – thick diffusion with prevailing activists’ networks, organisations and social forums as the main intra-movement practice with a worldwide scale of spread – and thin diffusion with more stress on individual participation, protest camps as the main practice of deliberation and subsequent selective diffusion (286). As with most collective volumes, the effort to create a novel theoretical framework with coherently linked research results leaves questions unanswered. The first two parts
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tell the reader a nice story: in the first part, the reader delves into the variety of crosstemporally diffused protest repertoires and practices from the Argentinian escrache through the development of democratic practices within GJM forums and 99% acampadas to the violent person-events and discursive strategies by the EU of the Arab Spring contention. The second part, in turn, shows how the Indignados and Occupy movements spread in Greece and the UK. However, the third part looks the least congruent in terms of its initial goal of exploring the causal links, as there are only negative cases and, furthermore, their ‘negativity’ does not seem entirely clear. This part builds on the causes of selective diffusion by exploring the role of collective memories of previous protests, conceived as close to failing, and then takes us to the Czech Republic and Turkey, where the protests turned out to be highly localised and weakly linked to the global context. Here the question is due – what really failed in these cases? Protests, diffusion or protest transnationalisation? What are the criteria of failure? Meanwhile, most of the studies emphasise the structural conditions and importance of pre-existing networks of activists as major precursors of the successful resonance of protest campaigns, while the issues of causality have been fully addressed neither in the last part nor in the theoretical chapters. Another potential line of criticism could be that every single study represents original and self-contained contributions; some of the chapters (e.g. by Jerome Roos and Leonidas Oikonomakis) doubt the very relevance of diffusion as a concept assuming the ‘rhizomatic’ nature of the interdependence of movements (all is the cause and consequence, transmitter and adopter at the same time), which suggests an alternative vision of diffusion. The case of the Turkish grassroots Gezi Park movement represents an instance of isolated protests that diverge from the overall diffusion framework. Is it a failed case? Is it a failed transnationalised protest or failed diffusion? The cases of the Czech Republic and Turkey pose a fundamental question: Are they really examples of a common struggle that unifies people in a variety of countries around the world? Another point is that most of the studies contain state reaction and repression as one of the main determinants that shapes the protest frames, discourses and practices, which is mentioned only in passing. Finally, the GJM is assumed to be the reference case, while its relevance to some of the cases seems doubtful. Nevertheless, this provocative volume represents an outstanding collection of studies of the most recent and challenging wave of mass contention, a volume that takes us a bit further in the research into protest diffusion and that is a must-read book not only for students of social movements in particular but also for social science scholars more generally. Margarita Zavadskaya European University Institute
[email protected] © 2015, Margarita Zavadskaya http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23248823.2015.1039245
Protest elections and challenger parties. Italy and Greece in the economic crisis, edited by Susannah Verney and Anna Bosco, London, Routledge, 2015, 174 pp., €131.85 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-13-881360-1 This book – edited by Susannah Verney and Anna Bosco and originally published as a special issue of South European Society & Politics – proposes a convincing parallelism
