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Under regimes of austerity, social movements´ transformative eco-politics may appear endangered. What kinds of environmentalism and radical imaginaries can unfold in social movements in crisis-ridden societies? I focus on the 'movement of the squares' during its post-encampment phase, with a case study of three urban projects of the Indignados movement in Barcelona. Observation of these projects reveals the importance of three common and intertwined radical imaginaries embodied in participants' social practices and orienting their future visions: the commons, autonomy, and ecologism. The ecologism imaginary cannot be properly understood if disembedded from the other two: the 'Indignant' projects constitute community structures re-embedding (re)production, jointly covering and generating needs differently, in response to the global capitalist forces that are threatening their social reproduction. Eco-politics can only be plausibly transformative if it is able to articulate a politics of intersectionality linking social reproduction with ecological interconnectedness and struggles against dispossessions and social injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Spanish Political Attitudes Panel Dataset (POLAT) is an ongoing panel study carried out in Spain. The present research note introduces the dataset, and presents some results of the first six waves, fielded in political context defined by a prolonged economic recession, major corruption scandals and widespread mass protests (2010-2014). The longitudinal aspect of the dataset allows researchers to trace changes and exploit within-individual variation in a wide array of political, social and economic attitudes and behaviors. The note offers validity checks for some of the key empirical indicators against the benchmark of concurrent surveys, including the European Social Survey. Finally, the note illustrates the potential of POLAT for the analysis of change in political attitudes and behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the start of the democratic transition in 1975, Spanish politics, driven by the ghosts of the Civil War, has been characterised by a process of debate and consensus. However, since the 2000’s, this consensual system has been criticised: henceforth, ideological confluence no longer ensured the stability of democracy but instead jeopardizes it. In response to what is considered as an artificial political pluralism, two new political parties emerged in 2016 – Ciudadanos and Podemos. Both are determined to overcome the left-right division which has seemingly lost its identification strength. Therefore, to gain legitimacy they came up with new dichotomisations of the political arena either by claiming to represent « new politics » as opposed to « old politics ». As for Podemos, it adopted a populist strategy standing for the need of an « adversarial » system, thus implementing a fresh antagonism between the people and the elites. This chapter proposes to discuss the discursive strategies employed by the two political groups in order to reorganise the political arena by creating new dichotomies and developing their opponents’ image.

In spite of the widespread belief that firsthand experience with protest is able to change participants’ hearts and minds, the empirical evidence tracking actual changes after participation in protest events is scant and mixed. We examine whether participation in significant protest events increases political engagement in terms of both attitudes (interest, internal efficacy) and behaviors (later participation in demonstrations, overall political participation), and whether these effects persist over time. We use a unique panel survey that covers nine years (2010–2019) and tracks individuals before and after the major protests that took place in Spain in 2011, known as the Indignados or 15-M protests. Our results indicate that participating in the 15-M protests had a positive effect on all the studied political engagement indicators immediately after the protests and, in particular, about two years after they occurred. However, eight years after the protest events, most of these effects had faded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides a comparative analysis of collective meaning-making processes by unpacking activists' discourses (within and in relation to their polis) and online (on Facebook) during the financial, post-financial, and COVID-19 crises in Greece (2011–2021). By analyzing 71 semi-structured interviews with activists and 14,475 Facebook posts, we first evaluate actors' identity progression, then identify the differences and commonalities between activists' discourses attached to their collectivity, by investigating the role of Facebook therein. Our findings indicate that activists' efforts to delimitate their identity, primarily around the detachment of citizens from their polis, paved the way for the (re)invention of the meaning-making practices of each collectivity. Thus, the formation of an overarching identity of the citizen as an activist-subject unites subjects over power struggles, despite their political differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the biographical consequences of participation in 15 M by following the trajectories, from May 2011 to November 2019, of individuals who took part in the movement in Madrid. Based on a field study combining observations and repeat interviews, this follow-up of the trajectories of forty Indignados (22 in the period 2013–15 and 18 to 2019) reveals considerable biographical impacts on both representations and individual practices in the political, personal and professional spheres. These impacts were particularly salient among those who had experienced biographical disruptions, whether in relation to political socialization or a drop in social status, and those who had mobilized in an intense and lasting way. However, 15 M had also had a profound influence on the biographies of those with an activist background and those who had been less involved in the movement. This microsociological approach gives us a better understanding of the biographical trajectories of the Indignados and provides an account of the transformations in collective action in Madrid over the past ten years. The main legacy of 15 M is therefore that it created a new generation of activists who are now involved in a multitude of activist microspheres and institutional settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many recent protest movements, from the 2011 square occupation movements to the Gilets Jaunes display typical populist features, starting from an appeal to the people vs the elites. Drawing on my work on social movements in the 2010s in this article, I discuss the different components and implications of this 'populist turn' and its differences vis-à-vis other forms of populism, and in particular right-wing populism. I claim that social movements' populism involves the adoption of a 'popular identity' as a unifying notion as a means to compensate for identity fragmentation; an identification with social majorities evident in Occupy Wall Street's famous 'we are the 99%' slogan, which departs from the minoritarian identification of previous movements; and an appeal to common sense and the nation vis-à-vis the militant antagonism and cosmopolitanism prevalent in many previous social movement waves. This cultural transformation within social movements is, on the one hand, an indication of changing political opportunities and the unlocking of new areas of support for protest movements and, on the other hand, the product of social movements' self-reflection and the attempt to escape the self-ghettoising tendencies of previous protest waves. However, this populist turn has also raised concerns among some activists, especially concerning the association of the 'popular' with the 'national' and a perception that popular identity involves undermining internal diversity and pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As occupations of squares in Spain spread across Europe, the Spanish Indignados gave rise to a transnational movement of ordinary citizens united in their anger against the banks, corruption, the electoral system, the global financial system, and the press. In this article, we reflect upon the legacies of the Spanish and Greek Indignados and show how their collective self-understanding—that is, a sense of a "us"—is formed and articulated very differently in Spain and Greece through square politics. We argue that it is the dramaturgy of political protest that fundamentally constructs and shapes the collective self-understanding of the Indignados in Spain and Greece. We will see that while in Spain there is a clearer sense of a shared political project and a shared identity, in Greece social movement actors were divided by their particular agendas and sectarian identities, which resulted in different articulations of their collective identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 15-M, a protest movement emerged in Madrid in May 2011 as a reaction to the economic, social and political situation in Spain, became a catalyst for powerful symbolic expressions in which the discredit of institutions and representatives was revealed. In the following years, the memory of 15-M is constructed in an idealized way as if it were "a new Transition". The objective of this article is to study the practices of construction of the symbology around the 15-M carried out both in the mobilizations and in the media, as well as to establish the ways of configuring an idealized memory of those events.

María Salgado's Hacía un ruido: frases para un film político (2016) was advertised as being linked to the global protests triggered by the early twenty-first-century financial and socio-political crisis. Critics read it as being endowed with referential and representational clarity, as well as an identifiable sense of political dissent. Yet references to politics in this poetry book are obfuscated by a translation that points to a textual limit to political representation. Hacía un ruido can be read as being informed by a poetics of translation that invites long-standing questions about the location of poetry vis-à-vis the language of the polis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The iaioflautas movement, which emerged in the course of the indignados protests in Spain in 2011, is one of the few social movements that explicitly organize around a "grandparents' identity." This article analyzes the movement against the historical backdrop of the Spanish transición, in particular the characteristic absence of transitional justice and the pacto del olvido —the 'pact of oblivion' regarding the political violence of the civil war and the dictatorship. I argue, first, that the emergence of the movement indicates a general shift in the memory debate in Spain, problematizing the memory of transición itself against the backdrop of the crisis. The iaioflautas organize as active historical witnesses to support the younger protesters' mobilizations, not least by testifying to their historical legacy, that is the struggle for democracy. They thus draw on the hegemonic transition narrative and reframe it at the same time, echoing the indignados' slogan "Real Democracy Now." Second, I show that the iaioflautas' explicit organization around a generational identity on the one hand re-organizes this generational unit of activists that for long had been cast aside from public memory in Spain, while on the other hand it facilitates intergenerational transmission of collective memory and repertoires of contention within the indignados movement. In addition, the concomitant "family narrative" of generativity, that is, of caring for the younger generations, allows addressing a much broader audience, thus adapting to the constraints of the arena, in avoiding the acerbic political divisions that usually characterize an engagement with historical memory in this particular post-civil-war and post-dictatorship context. Third, the iaioflautas offer an example of "remembering hope," that is, they pass on their own experiences of solidarity, agency, and democratic opportunities in order to encourage the younger generations' protest and political imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While social movement studies have long focused on the formation and dynamics of social movement coalitions and "boundary spanning', much less attention has been paid to why and how social movement alliances break down and dissolve. Expanding theoretical reflections on the 'dark side of digital politics', the current paper bridges critical Internet research and research on movement coalitions and explores how subversive digital media practices deepened existing conflicts within the Indignados movement. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of activists' texts, I outline the specific digital practices that fuelled the unmaking of the movement: trolling discussions, creating fake profiles in order to infiltrate closed groups, hijacking social media accounts, and manipulating voting systems. On a more general level, the paper analyses also how conflicts between activists have been affected by the possibility to capture and 'save' internal discussions and to disseminate snippets of them with the help of screenshots. The use of screenshots as instruments of proof, persuasion and manipulation has become a crucial and often underestimated subversive digital practice in contemporary activism. At the same time, I find that activists have developed strategies to cope with digital subversion and to fix broken connections in the name of new political projects, such as Podemos. Thus, the paper argues first, that technology is political and can be used to dissolve alliances and construct boundaries, and second, that the very notion of the 'political' should be enriched to go beyond the friend-enemy distinction and take into account forgiveness and compromise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Progress. Journal of Young Researchers is the property of University of Gdansk / Uniwersytet Gdanskim and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A wealth of social innovations sprang up in recent years in Southern Europe in the bosom of urban movements to cover citizens´ needs from below. Reacting to the commodification of the neoliberal city and the increasing dismantling of the welfare state, they provide public services and interrelate in var-ious forms with state authorities. Drawing on the outstanding social innovation case of Can Batlló (CB) in the city of Barcelona, a 14-ha former factory including more than 30 different projects and involving more than 350 activists, this paper analyses how social movements are redefining "the public" in the articulation between institutionalization, public service co-production, disruptive repertoires of action, and autonomy. It argues that this multiplicity of strategies and the strength of the movement helped not only to avoid turning the CB social innovation into a neoliberal rollout strategy, but even to act as a safety cordon against austerity politics. Affecting the boundaries of the legal-institutional framework, and rejecting the conflation of "public goods" with "state goods", CB organizes public services provision and planning in a more democratic form, pressuring the government to deliver the promised public services, while reclaim-ing them as commons that activists contribute building and designing. CB´s movement dimension and rootedness in the neighbourhood ensure the prioritisation of public and neighbourhood concerns over short-term, particularistic, and organizational survival interests.

In this paper I look into the conventional side of protest street art in 2011-2012. I am particularly interested in the rules of formation of revolutionary and protest images, in large part consisting of the reproduction of existing images. Using the iconographical and comparative method of image analysis, I present three case studies of reusing and recycling certain symbols and artifacts during protests of the Indignados movement in Spain, the Occupy movement in the United States, and the Egyptian revolution during the Arab Spring. Thanks to supplementing my research with the situationist theory of détournement strategy, I was able to distinguish three modes of image and symbol reproduction: the historical, the external, and the internal. Reproducing in the historical mode consists of referring to certain symbols or images from the past--in the external mode--to symbols or images that are inherently neutral to the protest. The internal mode of reproduction works within the protest, producing its original symbols, images and mythology, specific to each social movement. In conclusion, the historical and the external modes of reproduction are generally responsible for the conventional visual components of protest; the internal mode on the other hand, is generally responsible for more distinctive, innovative ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the evolvement of the 'movement of the squares' following the end of the more visible cycles of mobilization of the squares´ occupations. We argue that a crucial aspect of this evolution lies in the creation of a social infrastructure of alternative (re)productive projects in the form of commons. We call this type of outcomes 'social' in order to distinguish them from the cultural, political and biographical outcomes underlined in typologies on the consequences of social movements. Bridging social movement studies with the literature on the commons, we build a conceptual framework of their relationship. Through a comparative analysis of the movements in Athens and Barcelona, we show how the commoning practices of the square encampments gave rise to more endurable commons disseminated across cities´ social fabrics. We identify both direct and indirect mechanisms of movements´ transmutation into commons, and distinguish the former into transplantation, ideation, and breeding processes. Our second aim is to scrutinize the political dimension of these commons in relation to what has been framed as the 'post-political condition'. We maintain that the post-square commons constitute political and politicizing actions for activists and users for their effects on everyday life, for their capacity to link their practices with broader, structural dynamics of injustice, inequality and exclusion, and for their selective engagement with counter-austerity politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Indignado protesters in the city of Valladolid (Spain) as a case study, drawing on retrospective qualitative interview research six years after the 'hype'. Our analysis explores how forms of interaction and participation during the events could have had an important influence not only on the motives of the participants' political engagement, but also the long-term durability of such engagement. The findings offer insights on the different forms of sociality present in the various types of activism and how these contribute to forming diverse understandings of collective action. Consequently, activists show tendencies for diverse forms of long-term engagement that appear to follow patterns that align with their experienced type of sociality and how it is remembered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on one hundred interviews with activists, this article examines the relationship between livestreaming and the democratic cultures of the 15M and Occupy movements. The article investigates how the technical affordances of livestreaming – immediacy, rawness, liveness and embedded/embodied perspective – connect with the movements' understandings of how democracy should be practiced, specifically in terms of political equality, participation and transparency. Our findings identify four sources of tension in the relationship between livestreaming and democratic cultures. Firstly, the use of livestreaming was associated with a radical interpretation of transparency as near-total visibility, which gave rise to tensions around self-surveillance. Secondly, the information overload created through the practice of radical transparency was in tension with the movement's accountability processes. Thirdly, live streamers attempted to offer an unvarnished access to truth by providing unedited and raw video from the streets. Yet their embodied and subjective first-person perspective was associated with tensions around their power to shape the broadcast. Finally, while livestreaming was used to facilitate equal participation in the movement, participation through the livestream took the meaning of equal access to the experience of the squares, rather than equal power in the decision-making process. Our research reveals that despite the national particularities of the contexts in which they arose, Occupy and the 15M were extremely similar in their interpretations and practices of livestreaming and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a critical overview of the central, yet frequently ambiguous role played by translation within the political cycle that began in Spain following the indignados or 15M movement of 2011. It argues that the crisis caused by the emergence of the 15M movement and its sustained critique of the previous political consensus (the so-called "Culture of the Transition") has left certain cultural and intellectual gaps within the public sphere, which are being partially filled through translation. By analyzing and contextualizing a series of translations and related paratextual materials, the article examines the potentially contradictory ways in which translation has contributed to debates on the definition and origins of the movement, the dissemination and exploration of innovative ideas within it, and the creation of new political figures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyses of the Spanish mobilization cycle between 2011 and 2013 concur with considering the critiques of corruption (and the growing discredit of traditional parties), one of the two key factors that has been determining in the emergence of the 15-M movement (the Indignados), the other being the economic crisis. This article investigates the link between anti-corruption from below and the claim for popular sovereignty in the Spanish case. In Spain movements' requests and discourses have found a clear translation on the electoral plan. Podemos, a party founded in 2014, considers itself the electoral expression of 15-M. For these reasons, the analysis focuses on Podemos and its anti-corruption discourse as well. The analysis is conducted in a historical perspective. Popular sovereignty has been the fundamental claim of the first social movements born in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. A historical comparison is carried out between the anti-corruption frames of democratic movements between 1760 and 1848 and the present ones, giving particular attention to their nexus with the claim for popular sovereignty.

The sovereign crisis of the Spanish state, along with the unprecedentedly severe economic crisis and the tide of mobilisations (Arab Spring), produced an extraordinarily vigorous popular response, which in turn drew attention to the crisis in the structure of communication between civil society and the public political sphere. The effects of this crisis can be seen in the established parties and in the appearance of new ones. One of these, Podemos, claims to be the expression of popular mobilisations, and this subjects it to considerable inter-territorial stress, for as a party that competes in general elections, it requires a good deal of centralisation. This political centralisation operates in every one of the different autonomous territories and also nationally, adding a degree of complexity which is further accentuated by the tendency to personalise positions of power. And to add to this complexity is the issue of corruption among political parties and the proliferation of new political media.

This article presents findings from an empirical study of repertoires of contention and communication engaged during anti-austerity protests by the Indignados in Spain, the precarious generation in Italy, and the Aganaktismenoi in Greece. Drawing on 60 semi­structured interviews with activists and independent media producers involved in the 2011 wave of contention, we bring together social movement and communications theoretical frameworks to present a comparative critical analysis of digital protest media imaginaries. After examining the different socio-political and protest media contexts of the three countries translocally, our critical analysis emphasizes the emergence of three different imaginaries: in Spain the digital protest media imaginary was technopolitical, grounded in the politics and political economies of communication technologies emerging from the free culture movement; in Italy this imaginary was techno-fragmented, lacking cohesion, and failed to bring together old and new protest media logics; and finally in Greece it was techno-pragmatic, envisioned according to practical objectives that reflected the diverse politics and desires of media makers rather than the strictly technological or political affordances of the digital media forms and platforms. This research reveals how pivotal the temporal and geographical dimensions are when analyzed using theoretical perspectives from both communications and social movement research; moreover it emphasizes the importance of studying translocal digital protest media imaginaries as they shape movement repertoires of contention and communication; both elements are crucial to better understanding the challenges, limitations, successes and opportunities for digital protest media.

In recent years, the restructuring of the party systems in several European countries was accompanied or preceded by massive waves of anti-austerity protests. Although the causal relation between these mobilizations and the rise of new parties has already been assessed, the organizational features remain understudied. To fill this gap, here we analyse the impact of the cycle of anti-austerity and pro-real democracy protests which emerged in 2011 with the birth and organizational development of the Spanish party Podemos. Bridging two subfields of social and political sciences—movement studies and party studies—we pay particular attention to the dichotomy between horizontality and verticality within Podemos' organization. In particular, we address the issues of social movement effects as well as party foundation and organizational development. Our main findings suggest that movement mobilization played a large role in shaping Podemos' foundational choices, particularly with reference to the fundamental principles of the party and its strategic positioning. Podemos is also experimenting new democratic methods internally. Nonetheless, empirical analysis shows that, overall, the influence of movements' organizational models on the organizational structure of the party has been limited. Yet, the result is a “hybrid” party that finds a balance between the horizontalism of social movements and the efficiency of parties.

Este trabajo trata la dialéctica de la represión y la Resistencia en la reciente ola de política contenciosa en Cataluña. Ponemos énfasis en el resurgir breve pero cierto del repertorio discursivo y performativo del recuerdo del pasado revolucionario de Cataluña durante esta ola que ha barrido la región desde hace una década, desde el inicio de la asi-llamada crisis de la Eurozona. El trabajo intenta proveer una interpretación del ciclo de política contenciosa de la región a través del enfoque de la represión estatal. Afilamos en un momento emblemático, de la primavera de 2011, asociado con el movimiento de los Indignados. Prestamos especial atención en su desalojo violento por parte de los Mossos d’Esquadra en mayo, y el intento en el mes siguiente del cerco al Parlament Catalán, con el fin de interrumpir en el debate presupuestario. Sostenemos que la represión violenta del movimiento de los Indignados en Cataluña por parte de las autoridades ‘regionales’ mejor se entiende como la respuesta a un desafío incipiente a las constelaciones jerárquicas de relaciones sociales oprimentes – un desafío que se hizo eco, de hecho amenazó con revivir, recuerdos largamente reprimidos del pasado revolucionario de la ‘región’, un desafió que pudo haber hecho “explotar” este pasado fuera del “continúo de la historia,” para “apropiarse de su memoria cómo se enciende en un momento de peligro” (Benjamín). Este momento de represión violenta por las autoridades catalanas demostró ser el precursor, la condición de posibilidad, para la posterior canalización de la política contenciosa dentro de los confines más cómodos de imaginarios nacionalistas – imaginarios, por supuesto, estructurados jerárquicamente.

While the rise of populism has been a global trend in recent years, it has been prevalent in Greece and Turkey for longer, leaving a strong imprint on the politics of both countries. Left-wing populism has become one of the constitutive elements of the Greek political party system since the collapse of the 1967–1974 military regime. The 2009 outbreak of the Greek economic crisis set the stage for the radicalization of Greek politics through the rise of extremist far-right and far-left populist parties that professed populist agendas of different hues. Such populists accused old-party personnel of being members of a "treacherous elite" that sacrificed Greek national interests against foreign powers. The 2011 "indignados" movement is key for the better understanding of the social dynamics that facilitated the rise of the unusual SYRIZA-ANEL coalition government. Debates on Greek constitutional reform also highlighted the relevance of populism, especially as the SYRIZA-ANEL government sought topics to resonate with its disenchanted voters. On the other hand, a right-wing populist rhetoric has been one of the key instruments for the rise of Turkish political Islam and the establishment of the AKP hegemony in Turkey. Establishing a Kulturkampf-based narrative about the "secularist, 'white-Turk' elites" versus the "conservative, 'black-Turk' people" was of great political significance. The constitutional reform process proved again crucial for manifesting the relevance of populism in Turkish political discourse. This article explores the circumstances under which left- and right-wing populism have emerged into a dominant feature of Greek and Turkish politics. It also discusses the decreasing relevance of the established left-right political divide in party politics and suggests alternative classifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Social movements often face tactic diversification. In otherwise nonviolent movements, some groups or radical flanks may resort to violent actions such as street rioting. This article analyzes the impact that these violent episodes can have on popular support for the movement as a whole. To estimate the causal effect of violence, it exploits an unexpected riot outbreak that occurred during the fieldwork of a face-to-face survey in Barcelona in May 2016, led by a squat group linked to the anti-austerity movement known as the 15-M or indignados that emerged during the financial crisis. By comparing respondents interviewed before and after the riots, it finds that the street violence episode reduced support for the 15-M movement by 12 percentage points on average. However, the magnitude of the effect is highly conditional on the respondents' predispositions towards the movement. Core supporters, that are expected to share the frame of the movement in justifying violent actions, are the least affected by the violent outbreak. On the other extreme, weak supporters, opposers, and non-aligned citizens reduce their support to a larger extent. Results are robust to different specifications and a wide range of robustness checks. These findings have potentially important implications for movements concerned with broadening their support base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

15M mobilizations represent the most relevant events of a broader cycle of collective actionsagainst austerity and the political status quo in the context of recession. This contribution introduces and explores an original dataset collected through protest event analysis conducted for Spain between 2007 and 2015. It allows us to pin down the longitudinal fluctuations of political contention over this period. Based on it, a chronology of the cycle of protest is established; moreover, the temporal dynamics of some aspects related to protests are analyzed, such as protest participants, organizers, levels of disruption, evolution of claims and territorial distribution.

Democratic society has historically been constructed around a separation of the civil and political spheres and a relation of communication between these two spheres. In Spain a serious economic crisis began around 2007; and this crisis, along with the crisis in communication between the two spheres produced a very powerful response from civil society: the indignados. Three other factors contributed to the emergence of this movement: the rise in level of education of the new generations, the spread of new technologies of communication and what amounted to an epidemic of social mobilisation. After the analysis of the first instants of the response of civil society, tis article considers the relation of the movement to conventional politics and concludes by endeavouring to discover the consequences of the irruption into the political sphere of the new party which has emerged from the social mobilisation: Podemos.

Based on theories of cycles of collective behavior, this piece establishes a periodization of the cycle of anti-austerity and anti-political status quo protests in the shadow of the Great Recession that Spain faced between 2007 and 2015. More specifically, it tries to explain why the peak of protests persisted for so long: radicalization was contained, institutionalization postponed and protesters’ divisions avoided. The crucial argument here, an innovation with regards to the classic theories of cycles, is that the high standards of mobilization persisted for a long time as the result of the issue specialization of a more gen-eral anti-austerity fight and the strategic alliances ––with varying degrees of formality–– that new civil organizations forged with the unions. For illustrating the longitudinal dynamics of the cycle of protests, we use original protest event data

The current economic and financial crisis manifests itself specifically in cities and metropolitan areas. As in other ­periods of recession throughout history, one of the characteristic features of this crisis was the bursting of a housing bubble. In Spain, the spectacular construction boom slowed down, and many families could not afford to pay the mortgages on their main or second homes. At the same time, welfare spending was slashed to meet the obligations of the banks and cajas (savings banks) ruined by the property slump. In addition, the unemployment rate rose to above 20 %. As a result of this process, urban space reflects the resurgence of social and political movements of different kinds, ranging from more defensive movements focused on a particular place (against the closure of a company or an eviction order issued to a mortgage victim) to more general movements demanding direct democracy and an end to corruption. These movements fuelled the indignados protest with its camps on the streets of all major cities. This article primarily aims to classify urban social movements in contemporary Spain on the basis of their motives and demands. Secondly, it proposes a presentation of the movements assessing their impact on cities and their preferred demonstration spaces inside the city. Finally, it analyses their political-urban character in relation to local resistance, e.g. in Burgos, demands for urban communal ownership, the occupation of squares and houses, and the focus on creating new political expressions such as mareas ciudadanas (citizen tides) and the Podemos phenomenon.

El movimiento de Indignados que surge en España en mayo de 2011 con el fenómeno 15M supone el revivir de la utopía política en el siglo XXI. En el actual contexto de crisis económica y desgaste político los ciudadanos deciden reagruparse para exponer un discurso utópico y emocional. A través de la utopía política que proponen reavivan discursos pasados que defienden la libertad, la igualdad, la fraternidad y la esperanza en la bondad del ser humano.

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This volume of the Oñati Socio-legal Series consists of revised versions of 15 of the 20 papers presented at a workshop hosted by the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL) in May 2013. The workshop took its theme from Stéphane Hessel’s cri de coeur, Indignez-vous! and the protest movements it inspired, which we saw as protests against the social inequality that necessarily follows from economic inequality and other power imbalances. This message continues to resonate. In 2015, for example, Oxfam International’s research paper entitled “Wealth: Having it all and wanting more” concludes that by 2016, the world’s richest 1% will have more of the world’s wealth than all of the remaining 99% of people. And a Canadian observer decries the effect of this – which he labels “trickle-down meanness” – on the socio-political fabric of a country.Because of the breadth of the workshop theme and the diversity of its participants – which included a critical mass of doctrinal legal scholars in the mix – participants were asked to choose topics which 1) raised their indignation, 2) reflected economic inequality, 3) led to a violation of socio-economic rights, and 4) involved a possible role for the law (or public policy) either in causing the violation or in providing a solution to it (or both). The papers in this volume show that the participants responded enthusiastically to this request. Este número de la revista Oñati Socio-legal Series recoge las versiones revisadas de 15 de las 20 ponencias que se presentaron en el workshop celebrado en el Instituto Internacional de Sociología Jurídica de Oñati (IISJ), en mayo de 2013. El tema del workshop giró alrededor del lema de Stéphane Hessel, Indignez-vous! y los movimientos de protesta que inspiró, que percibimos como protestas contra la desigualdad social que resulta inevitablemente de la desigualdad económica y otros desequilibrios de poder. Este mensaje sigue resonando. En 2015, por ejemplo, una investigación de Oxfam Internacional titulada “Wealth: Having it all and wanting more” (Riqueza: Tenerlo todo y querer más), concluye que en 2016, el 1% de la población mundial poseerá más riqueza que el 99% restante. Y un observador canadiense condena sus consecuencias -que él denomina “goteo de mezquindad”- en el tejido socio-político de un país. Debido a la amplitud del tema del workshop y la diversidad de sus participantes -que incluía una masa crítica de expertos en doctrinas legales- se pidió a los participantes que eligieran temas que 1) les indignaran, 2) reflejasen desigualdad económica, 3), diesen lugar a una violación de los derechos socioeconómicos, y 4) que implicasen un posible papel del derecho (o políticas públicas) tanto por causar el daño u ofrecer una solución al problema (o ambos). Los artículos de este volumen demuestran que los participantes respondieron con entusiasmo a esta solicitud. DOWNLOAD THIS PAPER FROM SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2572253

This text does not purpose a study of the Spanish “indignados” mobilization. We just want to clarify a particular focus mentioned in the introduction of the issue 2 of Socio about the violence (Larzillière, Petric, Wieviorka, 2013: 12). This paper only wants to focus on the management of violence by “indignados”, both inside mobilization between what Diani (2011) defines as usual suspects, potentially violent activists and unusual suspects from other social worlds and outward implying a constructivist perspective to analyze both the media policy of leaders shaping the perception and framing of movement but also the political, the State and law enforcement actors.

The global upsurge in protest, which has accompanied the current international financial crisis, has highlighted the extensive use of online social media in activism, leaving aside the extent to which citizenship is enacted, empowered and potentially transformed by social media use within these movements. Drawing on citizenship and communication theories, this study employs a cross-country analysis of the relationship between citizenship, civic practices and social media within the Indignados movement in Greece and France. By the use of semi-structured interviews, we attempt to discern the degree of involvement of actors with the political community in question and explore the complex layers of their motivations and goals around participation. Content analysis employed in the movement’s Facebook groups allows us to critically evaluate the potential of social media in (re)defining the meaning and practice of civic participation. Findings indicate that the failure of traditional forms of civic participation to attain and resolve everyday political issues becomes its potential to transfer the political activity in other sites of struggle. The role of Facebook is double: it can reinforce civic talk and debate through activists’ digital story telling (around shared feelings and personal stories) significant for meaningful activist participation online and offline. Second, it can support new forms of alternative politics inspired by more participatory modes of engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]