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The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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Julia Rone – “ ‘Don’t Worry: We are from the Internet’: Mobilizing against ACTA and TTIP in the Age of Austerity”

On April 6th, from 5 to 6 p.m., Julia Rone (European University Institute), will discuss her work entitled: “Don’t Worry: We are from the Internet”: Mobilizing against ACTA and TTIP in the Age of Austerity

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In my presentation I analyse how, far from being simply a tool for political mobilization, the Internet became a political cause in itself in the 2012 protests against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. I address three important questions related to movement diffusion and spill-over effects between different social movements. First, why did anti-ACTA protests spread in the North, East and West of Europe but not in the South (Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece)? Second, what types of frames and protest repertoires spread in the campaign against ACTA? Did information spread from protesters at the national level to Brussels-based NGOs or the other way round? Did the protesters in each country go to the streets for their own specific reasons or was there a common European dialogue? Finally, I explore how the campaign against ACTA paved the way and opened opportunities for subsequent mobilizations against free trade agreements, more specifically against TTIP. I trace what types of frames and repertoires diffused between the anti-ACTA and the anti-TTIP campaigns and to what extent did organizational communities and coalitions overlap, considering the much broader scope of TTIP.  Ultimately, I argue that the mobilization against TTIP has shifted the focus from the techno-utopianism of the Arab Spring, Occupy, and anti-ACTA to a more sober emphasis on issues of sovereignty and self-determination as sources of positive political change.

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