Abstract:

Recently some societies witnessed the emergence of anti-systemic popular mobilizations that adopted the occupation of city squares as the main form of collective action. Do these city square movements, which include the Indignation movement in Spain, the Aganaktismenoi movement in Greece, the popular mobilizations called Arab Spring, the Occupation movement in Europe and the US, and the Gezi movement in Turkey, mean a qualitative transformation in social movements? What is the relationship of continuity and change between these square movements and the 'old' and 'new' social movements? To what extent can mainstream social movement theories help us in understanding these movements? The present study addresses these questions. Focusing on the relationship of continuity and change between city square movements and 'old' and 'new' movements in the first part of the study, it demonstrates that, despite certain continuities, city square movements considerably differ from both types of movements. Although they have some similarities with the old movements in the sense of expressing a resistance to the hegemonic economic structures, they, unlike the old movements, do not conceive working class as the single revolutionary agent of radical change. In opposition to broad hegemonic structures, they, like new social movements, voice different social demands of various social groups. Yet, unlike new social movements, city square movements are not particular movements emerging around particular social demands, resisting in this way to be easily absorbed by the existing systems. The most important characteristic of city square movements is that they, in contrast to both old and new social movements, express various social demands and, in this way, mobilize heterogeneous masses. The second part of the study addresses the question of how to analyze city square movements. After demonstrating how mainstream social movement theories fail to provide an adequate conceptual framework within which to understand the dynamics of these movements, it is argued that Ernesto Laclau’s conceptualization of populism has much to offer to analysis of city square movements. Unlike mainstream social movement theories, Laclau's theory of populism casts analytical light on the issue of mobilization of divergent groups with various particular demands against the status quo

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