The Summer School will take place at the Scuola Normale Superiore, in Florence, from June 5th to June 16th 2023. Participants School will focus on how to analyse present and past forms of grassroots participation activated by social movement and civil society actors at the local, regional and transnational level. More in general, it aims […]

COSMOS TALK 23 November 2022 | h 14:00-15:30 (CET) The long fight for Iranian women’s self-determination: a generational and sociological perspective Aim of this presentation is to critically deepen some characteristics of the 2022 protests in Iran within an intersectional framework having gender and intergenerational relations as its analytical levels. Initially depicted as “anti-patriarchal” and […]

COSMOS TALK 17 December 2022 | h 14:00-15:30 (CET) Russian Military Culture, Civil-Military Relations, and Defense Reform in Putin’s Period: Searching for an Equilibrium

COSMOS TALK 7 December 2022 | h 11:30-13:00 (CET) Reframing Immigrant Resistance in Italy and Morocco: Studying social movements through an intersectional and decolonial perspective

COSMOS TALK 9 November 2022 | h 14:00-15:30 (CET) Gramsci, Leaderfulness, and Black Lives Matter

COSMOS TALK 25 October 2022 | h 17:00-18:30 (CET) Turning Centripetal Politics on its Head: How Italian Polarization in the 1950s and 1960s Helps to Understand America’s Crisis Today As a product of the American political science of the 1960s and 1970s, I grew up intellectually in an age of “American exceptionalism” (Almond and Verba) […]

COSMOS TALK 12 October 2022 | h 11:30-13:00 (CET) Conspiracist and far-right mobilization in Saxony: Insights from Telegram groups and channels

COSMOS TALK 5 October 2022 | h 14:00-15:30 (CET) The Legacy of Lynching as State-Sanctioned Racial Terror Abstract After the end of Reconstruction, lynching became an instrument to terrorize Black communities throughout the US South. Each lynching sent a clear message to the whole community about what kind of behavior would not be tolerated and […]

COSMOS TALK 21 June 2022 | h 14:30-15:30 (CET) Contested Legitimacies: Repression and Revolt in Post-Revolutionary Egypt, Janis Grimm, Freie Universität Berlin To participate, please fill out this form:

COSMOS ROUNDTABLE 14 June 2022 | h 10:30-13:30 (CET) Comparative political ecology: theories and methodologies for mapping and analysing social conflicts This roundtable will bring together, in a transdisciplinary dialogue, two distinct yet intersecting fields of study of social movements. Scholars from SNS and Cosmos have been studying social movements and contentious politics from the […]

Aron Buzogány (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences BOKU, Vienna) Marginal environmentalism: Local environmental activism and global trends in the European neighborhood One of the main ingredients for ecological transformations is citizen mobilization; citizenmobilization has often been at the core of the transformation of human relationship to nature. At thesame time, the paradox of […]

COSMOS LUNCH SEMINAR 18 May 2022 | h 13:00-14:30 (CET) Jonathan Hopkin, London School of Economics/Università di Bologna Anti-System Politics in Western Europe Abstract Recent elections in the advanced western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of party systems. I trace the evolution of this shift and argue that it is a long-term result of […]

The conference will feature three workshops designed and moderated in cooperation with the Marc Bloch Zentrum at Humboldt University in Berlin and the DRafting and Enacting the Revolutions in the Arab Mediterranean Project (DREAM) and Center for Social Movements Studies (COSMOS) at the Scuola Normale Superiore.

COSMOS TALK 4 MAy 2022 | h 12:30-14:00 (CET) Niall O’Dochartaigh, National University of Ireland, Galway Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland Abstract Niall Ó Dochartaigh’s new book, Deniable Contact: Back-channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press 2021) analyses the secret back-channels between the British government and the IRA that were used intermittently […]

COSMOS ONLINE TALK 11 May 2022 | h 14:00-15:30 (CET) Milada A. Vachudova, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill In Defense of Liberal Democracy: Countering Ethnopopulism and Authoritarian Rule in the European Union Professor Vachudova will explore how the rise in support for populist parties has shaped party systems in Europe over the last […]