Cosmos
The Centre on Social Movement Studies
Journal Article - 2017
Author: Lorenzo Cini
After decades of political passivity, Italian students have massively mobilized in the years 2008 and 2010 to protest the implementation of two political measures fostering a neoliberal conception of higher education. More notably, the casus belli of these mobilizations concerned the implementation of a financial measure cutting public funding for higher education in 2008, accompanied… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Martín Portos
Traditional theories of collective action would predict that, after a triggering event, the trajectory of a wave of protest is determined by the institutionalisation–radicalisation tandem. Based on the Spanish cycle of anti-austerity and against the political status quo protest in the shadow of the Great Recession, this article contends with this approach, as a clear… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Andrea Felicetti
This article advances one of the most important debates in recent scholarship on democratic theory: the one on deliberative systems. In the wake of the systemic turn deliberative scholars agree that not all components of a deliberative system can or even need to be deliberative. However, there is little clarity about the role of non-deliberative… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Juan Masullo and Francis O’Connor
This article examines the logic of civilian targeting in the Turkish-Kurdish civil war. It analyzes two instances of PKK violence: against pro-state Village Guards’ families in the 1980s and school-teachers in the 1990s. Against original data, we evaluate the extent to which the dominant conceptual tools available in civil war literature help us make sense… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Lorenzo Zamponi
In the context of activism in solidarity with refugees in Italy in the "long summer of migration", the article analyses the relationship between political claim-making and direct social actions, i.e. actions that do not primarily focus upon claiming something or other from the state or other power holders but that instead focus upon directly transforming… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Lasse Lindekilde, Francis O’Connor and Bart Schuurman
This article explores the link between radicalization patterns and modes of attack planning and preparation among lone-actor terrorists. Building on theorized patterns of lone-actor radicalization, we discuss and compare their modes of pre-attack behavior, including target and weapon choice, observance of operational security measures, likeliness of engaging in leakage behavior, and the overall amount of… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Loris Caruso
With the worsening of the economic crisis, unemployment and social inequalities in Europe, an analogy spreads between the economic and political crisis of the Thirties and the current one. As in that period, it is argued, there is a risk that a systemic economic crisis will lead to a general crisis of the political dimension… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Donatella della Porta and Elena Pavan
Starting from the assumption that knowledge becomes all the more important for movements in times of crisis, as old structures are challenged and new ones envisaged and proved feasible, the purpose of this paper is to suggest ways to expand the toolkit of social movement studies in order to empirically address knowledge practices as a… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Chiara Milan
This essay analyses the strategic practices adopted by social movement actors during the 2013 and 2014 mobilisations in Bosnia & Hercegovina. By bridging critical citizenship studies with literature on social movements, it classifies them as belonging to the realm of activist citizenship, but also as having a performative and prefigurative dimension. While the strategies adopted… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Andrea L. P. Pirro
The article investigates engagement in anti-corruption activism in Bulgaria and Hungary. Since the late 2000s, protest events occurred in greater numbers in the two post-communist countries, addressing questions either directly or indirectly related to high-level or political corruption. Bulgarian and Hungarian collective anti-corruption actors share a common framing of the issue ('state corruption' or 'state… moreJournal Article - 2026
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Edited Volume - 2026
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Monograph - 2025
Journal Article - 2025
Journal Article - 2025
