Search

This article investigates the different types of emotions that result from participation in refugee solidarity activism, investigating how they change over time and to what extent they explain why individuals remain involved in action in spite of unfavorable circumstances. By bringing together scholarship on collective action with the literature on emotions, the article delves into the emotional response of sustained engagement in refugee solidarity activism. The study is based on the analysis of 40 in‐depth interviews with solidarity activists and volunteers involved in grassroots refugee solidarity initiatives along the Western Balkans route between 2015 and 2021, as well as on participant observation conducted between 2016 and 2021 in North Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The diachronic perspective presented in the article suggests that contrasting reactive emotions emerged during the initial stage of mobilization, while moral emotions were activated at a later stage. In the long run enduring affective bonds that had been formed with both solidarity peers and people on the move proved decisive for keeping individuals involved in action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the different types of emotions that result from participation in refugee solidarity activism, investigating how they change over time and to what extent they explain why individuals remain involved in action in spite of unfavorable circumstances. By bringing together scholarship on collective action with the literature on emotions, the article delves into the emotional response of sustained engagement in refugee solidarity activism. The study is based on the analysis of 40 in‐depth interviews with solidarity activists and volunteers involved in grassroots refugee solidarity initiatives along the Western Balkans route between 2015 and 2021, as well as on participant observation conducted between 2016 and 2021 in North Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The diachronic perspective presented in the article suggests that contrasting reactive emotions emerged during the initial stage of mobilization, while moral emotions were activated at a later stage. In the long run enduring affective bonds that had been formed with both solidarity peers and people on the move proved decisive for keeping individuals involved in action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the political activism of youth of migrant descent mobilizing to achieve access to citizenship rights in Italy. Specifically, it focuses on the mobilizing practices and discursive strategies they employed throughout the 2017 campaign to reform the Italian citizenship law. By means of participant observation and in-depth interviews with representatives of the main groups involved in the campaign, the study shows that the so-called 'new Italians' claimed recognition and inclusion into the nation by relying on the idiom of legal rights and by using a language that rested upon the notion of deservingness and exceptionality. It also suggests that the youth constituted themselves as political actors by means of political engagement, as they performed acts of citizenship through which they enacted their right to that status even in absence of formal legal recognition. By putting studies on youth activism in conversation with critical citizenship literature, critical race theory and social movement scholarship, this study discloses how the 'new Italians' advocated for their rights, creating and appropriating their space within the discourse on nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]