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This article explores the attitude towards Europe of young activists in self-managed spaces in Italy, and the extent to which the crises the EU endured in the last decade shape their visions. Unlike pre-financial crisis social movements, in the second decade of the 2000s progressive social movements adopted radical Eurocritical attitudes and shifted towards Eurosceptic positions. The article indicates that young activists in Italian self-managed spaces mainly criticise the economic element of the European integration process and the functioning of the EU institutions. They still refer to the European sphere as the principal field of political intervention, but propose an alternative organisational model oriented by the principles of democratic confederalism and libertarian municipalism in which local, autonomous communities are horizontally connected. This article contributes to the study of Europeanisation and social movements literature by shedding light on a political alternative to the EU grounded on prefigurative practices and a self-managed society.

This article explores ‘community gyms’ as prefigurative counter spaces where sport is experienced as a political practice. Emerging in the framework of political squats in Italy and beyond, community gyms constitute an integral part of today’s right to the city mobilization, with two unique contributions. Firstly, they reclaim the right to leisure space as a fundamental component of the struggle against gentrification. Secondly, they introduce to a critical approach to urban development also individuals who would otherwise not embrace anti-systemic politics. Specifically, the article analyses the spatial dimension of community gyms. It exposes how they constitute a bulwark against the commodification and gentrification of the urban habitat, recovering vacant or abandoned buildings to return them to the locals and embodying an alternative model of urban development centered on people rather than profit. The article also explores the gyms’ relational dimension, showing how community gyms nurture novel relationships of care, in three ways: they include and give agency to marginalized subjects, they forge militants through sport practice, and seek to mitigate the socio-economic needs of their social surroundings. In so doing, the article shows that leisure, too, can create moments of disruption able to generate change, and that sport, when understood as a political act, can unsettle the capitalist logic of commodification of leisure. Inspired by a carnal sociology approach to social research, this article is based on original data gathered by means of in-depth interviewing, ethnographic observation and document analysis.

This article explores ‘community gyms as prefigurative counter spaces where sport is experienced as a political practice. Emerging in the framework of political squats in Italy and beyond, community gyms constitute an integral part of todays right to the city mobilization, with two unique contributions. Firstly, they reclaim the right to leisure space as a fundamental component of the struggle against gentrification. Secondly, they introduce to a critical approach to urban development also individuals who would otherwise not embrace anti-systemic politics. Specifically, the article analyses the spatial dimension of community gyms. It exposes how they constitute a bulwark against the commodification and gentrification of the urban habitat, recovering vacant or abandoned buildings to return them to the locals and embodying an alternative model of urban development centered on people rather than profit. The article also explores the gyms relational dimension, showing how community gyms nurture novel relationships of care, in three ways: they include and give agency to marginalized subjects, they forge militants through sport practice, and seek to mitigate the socio-economic needs of their social surroundings. In so doing, the article shows that leisure, too, can create moments of disruption able to generate change, and that sport, when understood as a political act, can unsettle the capitalist logic of commodification of leisure. Inspired by a carnal sociology approach to social research, this article is based on original data gathered by means of in-depth interviewing, ethnographic observation and document analysis. (VLID)5810709 Accepted version

This article explores the attitude towards Europe of young activists in self-managed spaces in Italy, and the extent to which the crises the EU endured in the last decade shape their visions. Unlike pre-financial crisis social movements, in the second decade of the 2000s progressive social movements adopted radical Eurocritical attitudes and shifted towards Eurosceptic positions. The article indicates that young activists in Italian self-managed spaces mainly criticise the economic element of the European integration process and the functioning of the EU institutions. They still refer to the European sphere as the principal field of political intervention, but propose an alternative organisational model oriented by the principles of democratic confederalism and libertarian municipalism in which local, autonomous communities are horizontally connected. This article contributes to the study of Europeanisation and social movements literature by shedding light on a political alternative to the EU grounded on prefigurative practices and a self-managed society. (VLID)5762959 Version of record

(VLID)5762966 Version of record

Defence date: 21 October 2016 Examining Board: Professor László Bruszt, European University Institute (Supervisor) ; Professor Donatella della Porta, formerly EUI, Scuola Normale Superiore ; Professor Florian Bieber, University of Graz ; Professor Adam Fagan, Queen Mary University of London This thesis examines the occurrence and spread of contentious collective action within a country, Bosnia Herzegovina, that historically does not bear a solid tradition of mobilization. In particular, the study focuses on the rise of mobilizations that transcend traditional ethno-nationalist cleavages, and involve individuals and groups that activate an identity other than the ethno-national one, still dominant in the Bosnian Herzegovinian society. I adopted the expression “beyond ethnicity” to label this type of mobilization, stressing that individuals and challenger groups involved in the protest overcame the centrality of ethnicity as social construct, privileging another commonality between individuals that deliberately superseded, and sometimes clashed with, the dominant ethno-national categories that had crystallized in the 1990s. This new, overarching identity is often grounded on feelings of deprivation. Informed by a five-year empirical research in the country, the study explores the variation in spatial and social scale of contention across three waves of mobilization that occurred between 2012 and 2014 and took divergent paths, despite similar socioeconomic structural conditions. Through a comparative case study approach, the thesis analyses three waves of protests, taken as manifestations of “mobilization beyond ethnicity”: “The Park is Ours” protests (2012), spawned from the defence of a public park of Banja Luka; the mobilization for civil rights of the children, which became known as #JMBG (2013); and the protests that erupted in Tuzla triggered by local workers, which turned into what activists defined as a “Social Uprising” (2014). The study explains why the waves of mobilization occurred between 2012 and 2014 spread unevenly across the national territory, involved diverse social groups, and entailed different degrees of disruption. The findings of this research demonstrate that a combination of factors both internal and external to the movements made the territorial and social shift upward more likely, and influenced the organizational patterns and action repertoires of the challengers. These factors are pre-existing networks among movement organizers; the resonance of “beyond ethnic” frames in certain cultural milieus; and a conducive political opportunity structure. In the conclusions, the thesis elucidates the implications of these findings for the study of social movements in the post-Yugoslav space.

This article investigates how the idea of European solidarity and the vision of Europe changed over time amongst Italian groups and individuals engaged in solidarity actions in support of Internally Displaced Persons (idp s) and refugees in the Western Balkans in the 1990s and 2020s. By means of document analysis and in-depth qualitative interviews, the article shows that individuals partaking in solidarity initiatives framed their action as European grassroots solidarity, enacted to replace the institutional solidarity that the EU failed to offer. While solidarity groups in the 1990s saw the EU-in-the-making as alternative to the power politics of member states worsening the conflicts in the region, those mobilising in the 2020s expressed a more critical and disenchanted vision characterised by rage, disillusionment, and disappointment towards an EU perceived as having betrayed its ideal foundations while dealing with migration along the Balkan route.

Hit by the economic and political crisis, young people in Italy face increased labor precarity and the disillusionment derived from the disappearance of the radical Left from the parliamentary arena. In the Italian context, economic hardship, the decrease of resources available for collective action, and the weakened mobilizing capacity that traditional mass organizations (such as trade unions and political parties) retained in the first decade of the 2000s brought about a general decline in intensity and visibility of street protests, leading to an apparent retreat of activism to the local level of action. Although the crisis had a negative impact on collective action, evidence reveals that more creative and less visible forms of societal and political commitment were adopted by young generations in these years. This article explores how the Italian youth in times of crisis engaged actively in alternative and unconventional forms of political commitment aimed at re-appropriating space, free time, and access to leisure, mainly by means of mutualistic practices. Based on data from qualitative semistructured interviews with key informants and activists, this article sheds light on recreational activism, adopted as a political practice by the Italian youth active in counter-cultural spaces, nowadays at the forefront of the struggle to oppose the commodification of free time and leisure.

This book offers an in-depth investigation of the emergence and spread of social mobilizations that transcend ethnicity in societies violently divided along ethno-national lines. Using Bosnia Herzegovina as a case study, the book explores episodes of mobilization which have superseded ethno-nationalist cleavages. Bosnia Herzegovina emerged from the 1992–95 war brutally impoverished and deeply ethnically divided, representing a critical and strategic case for the examination and understanding of the dynamics of mobilization in such divided societies. Despite difficult circumstances for civic-based collective action, social mobilizations in the country have grown in size, number and intensity in recent years. Marked by citizen demand for accountable governance, responsive urbanism, and access to basic human rights, these protests have been driven by economic, social and political problems which cut across religious and ethnic divides. Examining the variation in spatial and social scale of contention, the book investigates movements’ formation, their organizational structures and networking strategies and advances research on divided societies and social movements. -- Chapter 1: Researching Mobilization Beyond Ethnicity in Divided Societies. An Introduction -- Chapter 2: Understanding Mobilization Beyond Ethnicity in Divided Societies -- Chapter 3: Social Mobilization and Civic Activism In Bosnia And Herzegovina -- Chapter 4: "The Park Is Ours" Mobilization -- Chapter 5: The Baby Revolution -- Chapter 6: The 2014 Social Uprising -- Chapter 7: Conclusions Published version of EUI PhD thesis, 2016

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 during the 2013 wave had a performative dimension, as they disrupted routines and created opportunities for social change, the 2014 practices are to be considered prefigurative, as they developed modes of interaction embodying a new model of citizenship at odds with the existing one based on the institutionalisation of ethno-national categories.

At the height of the humanitarian crisis of 2015, the countries along the so-called Western Balkan route presented diverging opportunities for mobilisations in support of migrants. We interpret these opportunities as sequential and, thus, interwoven at the cross-national level. The adverse context presented by the Hungarian case essentially offered a favourable opportunity for mobilisations in neighbouring countries like Serbia. The turning point was intelligibly offered by the erection of fences first along the Hungarian-Serbian and then along the Croatian-Hungarian border—ultimate displays of a long-term war against multiculturalism waged by the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán. Therefore, while prospects for solidarity movements have been de facto exhausted in Hungary, mobilisations went on for longer in neighbouring countries. Despite the different opportunities provided by their contexts, solidarity movements along the Western Balkan route articulated similar collective action frames; their assessment of the problem, proposed solutions, and motivations delivered comparable themes throughout migratory flows into their countries. We reconstruct the sequentiality of these mobilisations and their similar frames by means of original interviews with collective solidarity actors.

The countries of former Yugoslavia have a long history of dealing with refugees. However, what had been termed in the media and in public discourse as the ‘2015-2016 European migrant crisis’ represented a phenomenon of unprecedented scale for the Western Balkan states. For the first time since the break-up of Yugoslavia, these countries found themselves handling a steep increase in arrivals of migrants who fled from the Middle East and Africa and crossed the Western Balkans migratory route in an attempt to reach Northern and Central Europe. To compensate for the lack of action on the part of their governments, from summer 2015 a number of individuals and domestic groups mobilized with the purpose of providing humanitarian assistance to migrants crossing their territory. Based on a series of in-depth interviews with key informants, this article explores the multiple solidarity initiatives organized at the local and transnational level along the Western Balkans route during the 2015-2016 migrant crisis, taking Serbia and Macedonia as case studies. Specifically, the study examines the extent to which emotional resources and discursive opportunities increased the prospects for altruistic mobilization in a context characterized by a low level of grassroots civic activism.