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Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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Publications

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CasaPound Italia: Contempory Extreme Right Politics

Monograph - 2020

Author: Caterina Froio, Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Giorgia Bulli & Matteo Albanese

In 2003, the occupation of a state-owned building in Rome led to the emergence of a new extreme-right youth movement: CasaPound Italia (CPI). Its members described themselves as 'Fascists of the Third Millennium', and were unabashed about their admiration for Benito Mussolini. Over the next 15 years, they would take to the street, contest national… more

Challenging precarity, austerity and delocalisation: Italian labour struggles from Euro-criticism to Euro-disenchantment

Journal Article - 2020

Author: Lorenzo Zamponi

How has the experience of crisis, austerity, and precarity affected visions of Europe in the labour movement? The article answers this question through the analysis of interviews of representatives of organisations engaged in labour struggles in Italy and of documents published by the same organisations. The analysis shows that, although the crisis has challenged ‘critical… more

Chicha-Coronavirus: 1-0. On trust, natural disasters, and pandemics in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Journal Article - 2020

Author: Leonidas Oikonomakis

Sarayaku is an Amazonian Kichwa community on the shores of Río Bobonaza, Ecuador. There is no road connecting it to the rest of the country no electricity and no telephone network. I happened to be there on fieldwork during the times of a double disaster: the COVID19 crisis, and the biggest flood in the community’s… more

Discursive Turns and Critical Junctures: Debating Citizenship after the Charlie Hebdo Attacks

Monograph - 2020

Author: Donatella della Porta, Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Konstantinos Eleftheriadis & Andrea Felicetti

This volume focuses on the debate that developed in France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom after the terrorist attacks against Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket, in January 2015. The book offers an in-depth analysis of the unfolding of the public debate in terms of content of claims making, framing, and justifications as well… more

Don’t Call it Climate Populism: On Greta Thunberg’s Technocratic Ecocentrism

Journal Article - 2020

Author: Mattia Zulianello and Diego Ceccobelli

The growing popularity of Greta Thunberg has led an increasing number of pundits and scholars to consider her message to be an instance of ‘climate’ or ‘environmental’ populism. Following a qualitative content analysis of key speeches by the young activist, this paper challenges this view, and argues that her message is far from being a… more

Filling the Gaps in Populism Studies

Journal Article - 2020

Author: Manuela Caiani & Enrico Padoan

This article introduces the conceptual and analytical framework for the special issue, which explores the cultural side of populism: the relationships between politics, emotions, music, and subcultures in populist contexts. We highlight the role that cultural and symbolic 'products' (such as music, emotions, narratives, and visual symbols) play in the emergence and spread of populism.… more

How “Urban” Is Urban Policy Making?

Journal Article - 2020

Author: Raffaele Bazurli

Contemporary cities are both creators and receptors of global-scale collective problems. City-dwellers must cope with such far-reaching transformations that affect their communities and yet lie beyond the full jurisdiction of local administrations. Starting from this conundrum, this article seeks to answer the following questions: What is distinctive about urban policy making? What are its typical… more

How Social Movements can Save Democracy

Monograph - 2020

Author: Donatella della Porta

Life beyond the ballot box: the political participation and non-participation of electoral abstainers

Journal Article - 2020

Author: Martín Portos, Lorenzo Bosi, Lorenzo Zamponi

Drawing on electoral participation and social movement studies, we develop a typologyof abstainers on the basis of their forms of non-electoral participation, and explore thedeterminants that drive belonging to each of these sub-groups. Although there is a positive correlation between electoral turnout and non-electoral participation, throughapplying latent class analyses and regressions we find that there… more

Nationalism and populism on the left: The case of Podemos

Journal Article - 2020

Author: Jacopo Custodi

This article provides an empirical exploration of the relation between nationalism and populism on the left of the political spectrum. The Spanish party Podemos is a key case study for such an analysis, as it is a left‐populist actor that has made extensive use of nationalist rhetoric in its discourse. Through a discourse analysis on… 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