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Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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2025-09-18

War, Peace and the World Order: scholars and activists at the SNS summer school

The programme will explore the causes and dynamics of warfare, pathways of conflict resolution and peace building, and grassroots mobilisations, through interdisciplinary lens

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COSMOS is pleased to announce that the Scuola Normale Superiore will hold the Summer
School “War, Peace and the World Order”, from 29 September to 3 October  at the Faculty of
Political and Social Sciences, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence.

The School brings together 20 international speakers and discussants, including from Cosmos, and
50 participants – mainly PhD students ­– from 13 different countries.
Find the full programmes and sessions’ details at the Summer School website

Over the course of five days, the programme will explore the causes and dynamics of warfare, pathways of conflict resolution and peace construction, and grassroots mobilisations, through an interdisciplinary lens that bridges international relations, political economy, and social movement studies. Special attention will be devoted to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the broader Palestinian–Israeli context, and the Russian war in Ukraine.

In particular, the afternoon session on 30 September will focus on the situation in Palestine and Gaza, exploring the history, context, and current dynamics of genocidal violence, with contributions from Francesca Albanese (UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, joining online) and the scholars and essayists Anna Foa and Paola Caridi.

The entire day on 3 October, featuring, among others, Donatella della Porta and Luciana Castellina, will be dedicated to examining grassroots peace movements and current mobilizations in solidarity with Palestine, with a special focus on the Italian and broader European context.

The final session on the afternoon of 3 October, “I movimenti per la pace”, will be held in Italian and open to the public, in hybrid format via this TEAMS link . Access to all other sessions is restricted to enrolled participants and a limited number of external auditors. Please note that video recordings of all sessions will later be made available on the Scuola Normale Superiore’s
YouTube channel and advertised here on the COSMOS website.

The event is organized as part of the SNS MERITA project.

News

18/09/2025

War, Peace and the World Order: scholars and activists at the SNS summer school
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11/09/2025

An interview on the protests in France, Nepal, Kenya, Indonesia
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08/09/2025

The "algorithmic wage discrimination" and its discontents
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05/09/2025

Social movement studies in intense times
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07/08/2025

Platform work precariousness and struggles against it
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05/08/2025

La precarietà del lavoro nelle piattaforme e le lotte per contrastarla
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Publications

Journal Article - 2025

Communication creates partial organization: A comparative analysis of the organizing practices of two climate action movements, Youth for Climate and Fridays for Future Italy
Marco Deseriis, Lorenzo Zamponi, Diego Ceccobelli
This article focuses on a neglected aspect of the climate action movement Fridays for Future, namely, the relationship between its mediated communication practices and its early organizational processes. Drawing from a strand of organizational communication that underscores the constitutive dimension of communication to organizing processes, we analyze the significance of mediatized leadership and networked communication for the foundation and early development of two national chapters of Fridays for Future: Youth for Climate (YFC) Belgium and Fridays for Future Italy (FFFI).

Journal Article - 2023

Resisting right-wing populism in power: a comparative analysis of the Facebook activities of social movements in Italy and the UK
Niccolò Pennucci
This paper aims to present a comparative study of the civil society reaction to right-wing populism in power through social media, by looking at cases in Italy and the United Kingdom.

Journal Article - 2023

Emotions in Action: the Role of Emotions in Refugee Solidarity Activism
Chiara Milan
This article investigates the different types of emotions that result from participation in refugee solidarity activism, investigating how they change over time and to what extent they explain why individuals remain involved in action in spite of unfavorable circumstances.

Journal Article - 2023

‘Love is over, this is going to be Turkey!’: cathartic resonance between the June 2013 protests in Turkey and Brazil
Batuhan Eren
This study addresses the question of why and how a protest can inspire individuals in distant countries. Taking the June 2013 protests in Turkey and Brazil as cases, it investigates the reasons why the Turkish protests were framed as one of the inspirational benchmarks by some Brazilian protesters.

Journal Article - 2023

Mutual aid and solidarity politics in times of emergency: direct social action and temporality in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic
Lorenzo Zamponi
From the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and the social distancing measures introduced created a series of social problems and needs that were partially addressed in Italy as well as in other countries by grassroots mutual aid initiatives. While many of these initiatives were strongly rooted in the Italian social movement and civil society landscape and the choice to engage in mutual aid activities was the result of long years of reflection and planning, the article shows how strongly the temporality of emergency affected the nature of these initiatives, their development and their outcomes, in particular with regard to the extraordinary number of people who volunteered and their relationship with politicisation processes.

Monograph - 2023

Populism and (Pop) Music
Manuela Caiani, Enrico Padoan
The book provides a detailed account of the links between production of popular culture to the rise of populism and contributes to studies on populism and popular culture in Italy, using a comparative approach and a cultural sociology perspective

Monograph - 2022

Labour conflicts in the digital age
Donatella della Porta, Riccardo Emilio Chesta, Lorenzo Cini
From Deliveroo to Amazon, digital platforms have drastically transformed the way we work. But how are these transformations being received and challenged by workers? This book provides a radical interpretation of the changing nature of worker movements in the digital age, developing an invaluable approach that combines social movement studies and industrial relations. Using case studies taken from Europe and North America, it offers a comparative perspective on the mobilizing trajectories of different platform workers and their distinct organizational forms and action repertoires.

Monograph - 2022

Resisting the Backlash: Street Protest in Italy
Donatella della Porta, Niccolò Bertuzzi, Daniela Chironi, Chiara Milan, Martín Portos & Lorenzo Zamponi
Drawing interview material, together with extensive data from the authors’ original social movement database, this book examines the development of social movements in resistance to perceived political "regression" and a growing right-wing backlash.

Journal Article - 2021

Learning from Democratic Practices: New Perspectives in Institutional Design
Andrea Felicetti
Drawing from literature on democratic practices in social movements and democratic innovations, the article illustrates three ways to advance institutional design in the wake of the systemic turn.

Journal Article - 2021

Populism between voting and non-electoral participation
Andrea Pirro & Martín Portos
The article focuses on a neglected aspect of populist mobilisation, i.e. non-electoral participation (NEP), and elaborates on the extent to which populist party voters engage politically outside the polling station. While challenging common understandings of populism as inherently distrustful and apathetic, and protest as an exclusive practice of the left, the study critically places NEP at the heart of populism in general, and populist right politics in particular.
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Faculty of Political and Social Sciences Scuola Normale Superiore Palazzo Strozzi Piazza degli Strozzi 50123 Firenze Italy
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