Legal mobilisation has been broadly theorised and empirically studied as a repertoire of contentious action within the inter-disciplinary scholarly field of social movements and the law. Even though it attracted significant interest from scholars across a number of disciplines, it has been studied to very different extents depending on the policy fields and social movements under consideration. All the more so, very rarely has the use of legal tactics been compared across these different policy fields and social movements, resulting in an overall issue-specific literature on legal mobilisation.

Laying at the intersection of social movement and legal studies, this workshop intends to promote multi-disciplinary and comparative cross-movement research on legal mobilisation. We aim to bring together scholars at any career stage, researching legal mobilisation from different angles and in different empirical fields, considering both progressive and regressive legal mobilisation, as well as pro-active and reactive ones. In doing this, we plan to engage with questions such as:

• Why, how, when and where do certain social movement organisations engage in legal mobilisation? Which country-specific characteristics of the legal system play a role?
• Which constraints and opportunities do they face?
• Who are the actors engaged in legal mobilisation and what is their relation to social movement fields?
• What tactics are associated with legal mobilisation and how are they influenced by environmental and organisational factors?
• Does the pre-existence of instances of legal repression influence the use of pro-active legal mobilisation?
• To what extent do the internal composition and characteristics of specific movements and movement organisations influence the choice of mobilising the law?
• Can we identify similarities and differences in the use of legal mobilisation by progressive and regressive social movements?
• What are the characteristics of legal mobilisation at the international level?
• What are the goals of this repertoire and how can we assess its ‘success’ – given that determining the ‘success’ of political contention is always a complex and debated task?
• How do different degrees of success and failure relate to other repertoires and influence the decision to engage in legal mobilisation?
• How does within- or cross-movement diffusion in the use of legal mobilisation take place?

We welcome proposals bridging theoretical and empirical contributions from the wide spectrum of the social, political and legal sciences, and which adopt diverse methodological approaches. We are especially – but not exclusively – interested in studies that address legal mobilisation in the environmental, labour, gender rights, civil rights, migration and pro-Palestinian movements.

If you wish to participate, please send a short abstract (max 300 words), your name and affiliation to federico.alagna@sns.it by 15 January 2025. There will be no registration fee and meals will be provided. While we will not cover travel and accommodation expenses, limited funds are available for those participants (especially early-career and non-affiliated researchers) who will exceptionally need financial support for their travel and/or accommodation and do not have access to other funding opportunities. In case you need such support, please state so in your submission.

COSMOS – The Centre on Social Movement Studies | Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Scuola
Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy
20-21 May 2025

Organisation committee

Donatella della Porta, Scuola Normale Superiore

Scott Cummings, University of California, Los Angeles

Federico Alagna, Scuola Normale Superiore