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Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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Publications

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Discarding protests? Relating crisis experience to approval of protests among activists and bystanders

Journal Article - 2019

Author: Camilo Cristancho, Katrin Uba, Lorenzo Zamponi

To what extent does the economic crisis affect support for political protest? Since the outburst of the financial crisis in 2008 many protests have been mobilized against national governments and their austerity policies. In some countries, these actions were described in the media as having little support among the general public, while elsewhere these actions… more

Dynamiques de protestation politique des exilés afghans à Berlin: entre «silence» et «prise de parole»

Journal Article - 2019

Author: Elias Steinhilper

En Allemagne, l’« été des migrations » de l’année 2015 a entraîné une série de restrictions de la loi sur le droit d’asile et provoqué un débat public de plus en plus hostile envers les populations étrangères. Les Afghans, qui constituent l’une des principales communautés de migrants de ce pays, ont été particulièrement touchés par ces revirements politiques. Leurs… more

Exploring the Movement-Memory Nexus: Insights and Ways Forward

Journal Article - 2019

Author: Priska Daphi, Lorenzo Zamponi

In recent years, scholarly interest in the interconnections between social movements and memory has been growing significantly. In this article, we outline and discuss this emerging focus of research on the movement-memory nexus with the goal of systematizing it and pointing to ways forward. We begin by delineating the interdisciplinary nature of the field, its… more

From the Rainy Place to the Burnt Palace: How Social Movements Form their Political Strategies. The Case of the Six Federations of the Tropic of Cochabamba

Journal Article - 2019

Author: Leonidas Oikonomakis

How do social movements form their political strategies? The relevant theory pays considerable attention to structure, and argues that when political opportunities are open, movements are more likely to opt for a systemic political strategy; when they are closed, movements are expected to take a more revolutionary turn. However, political opportunities can make some options… more

Labour Activism and Social Movement Unionism in The Gig Economy. Food Delivery Workers’ Struggles in Italy

Journal Article - 2019

Author: Riccardo Emilio Chesta, Carlotta Caciagli, Lorenzo Zamponi

This article aims to explore the forms of collective actions that are emerging in new sectors of digital capitalism. In particular, it enquires into the mobilisation of food delivery workers that has been developing since 2016 in four Italian cities: Milan, Turin, Bologna and Florence. Despite the high level of precarisation and atomisation that characterise… more

Local Governments and Social Movements in the ‘Refugee Crisis’: Milan and Barcelona as ‘Cities of Welcome’

Journal Article - 2019

Author: Raffaele Bazurli

Amid the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, South European cities have experienced far-reaching societal transformations, magnified by flaws in multi-level governance. How can urban actors cope with such critical questions, which affect their communities and yet lie beyond their full jurisdiction? This article contends that left-leaning governments and ideologically sympathetic social-movement activists at the city-level are incentivised… more

The “Precarious Generation” and the “Natives of the Ruins”: The Multiple Dimensions of Generational Identity in Italian Labor Struggles in Times of Crisis

Journal Article - 2019

Author: Lorenzo Zamponi

Focusing on mobilizations around work, this article sheds light on generational identity as it emerges in activists involved in labor struggles in Italy in the past few years. Do Italian “millennial” activists perceive themselves as part of the same political generation? What are its main traits? And are the contextual elements that define it linked… more

The Modern Prince and the Sociological Imagination

Journal Article - 2019

Author: Riccardo Emilio Chesta, Michael Burawoy

In this conversation, Michael Burawoy discusses how he discovered the sociology of Gramsci in radically diverse contexts — from a vibrant post-colonial Zambia to Analytical Marxism in Chicago. The British sociologist reconnects the travels of these debates to contemporary public sociology, updating Gramsci’s key sociological concepts with the critical scholarship of Pierre Bourdieu, the social… more

Tokens or Stakeholders in Global Migration Governance? The Role of Affected Communities and Civil Society in the Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees

Journal Article - 2019

Author: Stefan Rother and Elias Steinhilper

Focussing on the inclusion of those primarily affected as stakeholders (refugees and other migrants), this article addresses a key ambition of the compacts themselves. We employ an ‘inside‐outside’ perspective and firstly ask: which groups participated in the consultative processes, what agenda did they set ‘inside’ the meetings, what alliances did they establish and how did… more

A Contested Crisis: Policy Narratives and Empirical Evidence on Border Deaths in the Mediterranean

Journal Article - 2018

Author: Elias Steinhilper and Rob Gruijters

Death and suffering of migrants at Europe’s Mediterranean Sea border has become one of the defining moral and political issues of our time. While humanitarian organizations argue that deaths result from Europe’s policy of exclusion and closure, those employing a deterrence-oriented narrative have argued for even stricter border controls. Perhaps because of its contentious nature,… more

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Publications

Edited Volume - 2026

Conspiracism and Political Conflict

Manuela Caiani, Marco Solinas, Hans-Jorg Trenz

Monograph - 2025

Free download for "Contentious Politics of Global Health Movements"

Donatella Della Porta, Stella Christou

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 - 2025

Power resources, territory and labour conflicts in the logistic sector

Donatella Della Porta, Marco Antonelli