Bringing Capitalism Back into Social Movement Studies: An Agenda for Research and Action

⌘ This event is part of the UNRISD-FES Series Insights into Inequalities

Greater analytical attention is again being paid to intersectional inequalities as a trigger of and challenge for progressive social movements. Using historical and current examples, Donatella della Porta sketches out new conceptual thinking on the interactions between capitalist transformations and social movements.






While in the past social movement studies has explored the relationship between capitalism and contentious politics—that is, the use of disruptive techniques to make a political point, or to change government policy, and ranging from demonstrations, strikes, and civil disobedience, to radical forms of revolution or insurrection—this line of inquiry fell out of favour as neoliberalism came to dominate theory and policy, and all but disappeared during the 1990s.

But since the turn of the millennium, analytical attention has turned increasingly towards social inequalities as a trigger of and challenge for progressive social movements, as seen in research on the Global Justice Movement and anti-austerity protests. And in the past couple of years, consideration of class and intersectional inequalities has taken centre stage—in the study of the global wave of protests in 2019, from Hong Kong to Catalonia, from Lebanon to Chile, and collective mobilization during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In this seminar, Donatella della Porta builds from these historical and current examples to sketch out new conceptual thinking on the interactions between capitalist transformations and social movements.

About the speaker

Donatella Della Porta is Professor of Political Science, Dean of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, and Director of the PhD programme in Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy, where she also leads the Center on Social Movement Studies (Cosmos). Among the main topics of her research are social movements, political violence, terrorism, corruption, the police and protest policing. In 2011, she was the recipient of the Mattei Dogan Prize for distinguished achievements in the field of political sociology. Donatella Della Porta is Honorary Doctor of the universities of Lausanne, Bucharest, Goteborg, Jyvaskyla and the University of Peloponnese. She is the author or editor of 90 books, 150 journal articles and 150 contributions in edited volumes.

About the series

This event is part of the series "Insights into Inequalities", generously supported by the Geneva office of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, which will invite top-level speakers to share their cutting-edge research on inequalities, elites and social mobilization in various contexts. The series picks up the conversation from UNRISD's international conference, Overcoming Inequalities in a Fractured World: Between Elite Power and Social Mobilization.

Photo by Alex Radelich on Unsplash