Deconstructing Generations in Movements: Introduction

Abstract

This introductory article to the special issue presents a theoretical framework built on a bridging of youth studies and social movement studies. Building on some preliminary observations and empirical evidence, the article introduces the interrelated research questions that this issue addresses, based on the work of the CRY_OUT project: What leads a significant number of young people in times of more or less severe crisis to engage in collective initiatives, rather than to remain passive? What are the forms of social commitment that critical young people choose to use, in particular during periods of crisis? Which meanings are attached to these forms of social engagement? What kinds of resources are available to young people for social mobilization? And to what extent do they vary across different degrees of socioeconomic crisis, governmental constellation, and type of conflict, thereby shaping individual-level forms and levels of social participation? To what extent do differences in the impact of the crisis on national contexts, and related political transformations, result in differences in young people’s social engagement in terms of motivations and forms? After presenting the theoretical model and research design, the article summarizes some results across three main aspects: the meaning of generations in social movements, the self-definition of Millennials, and their forms of commitment. It then presents the research design and the content of the contributions that follow.

Keywords

generations social movements European politics youth activism

Young People in the Crisis: An Introduction

In academic and public debates, times of crisis have often been associated with the decline of political participation and civic engagement (della Porta, 2013, 2014). The erosion of identity, solidarity, and ideology as well as the decline of certain types of informal networks and resources (money, power, and status), and the closing of political opportunities are usually interpreted as factors that jeopardize political participation (Bauman, 1997). As all of these conditions have affected with particular virulence young people, expectations have spread about a disenchanted, frustrated, apathetic young cohort.

Challenging these expectations, today’s young people—who are suffering high levels of unemployment, precarization, decrease in credit access, cuts in social services, changes in consumption patterns, and a grim outlook for their future as a result of the economic crisis—are not in general apathetic, disengaged, antipolitical, or removed from political participation (Amnå & Ekman, 2013). Rather, from the Arab Spring to Indignados, from the mobilizations for global justice to the antiausterity protests, a new generation has joined contentious politics, developing, at least in part, creative ideas for a more just and inclusive society. Empirical research indicates that, especially in those countries that have been hit harder by the financial crisis, a substantial number of young citizens are reacting with increasing political and social mobilization, choosing predominantly intermittent, noninstitutionalized, horizontal forms of political participation, performed across hybrid public spaces (from the Web to town squares) (della Porta, 2014). Drawing on and empowered by new social media technologies (Sloam, 2014), young people appear to challenge mainstream perspectives and citizens’ roles as defined by political elites. While not, or not completely, disengaging from institutional politics, critical young people are developing alternative forms of social commitment, which enhance their engagement in public life and form part of a strategy for social change.

Far from being apathetic or passive, many young people apparently do have an interest in politics, even if they perceive the inadequacy of the existing institutions and practices of representative governments, as mainstream political parties and elites tend to ignore or are unable or unwilling to address the issues most relevant for the current youth generation (Loader, 2007; Loader et al., 2014). As a consequence of what they see as the degeneration of representative democracy, a substantial proportion of young people not only seem to withdraw from conventional forms of political action but also increasingly channel their political participation toward a wide variety of alternative ideas and practices oriented to reduce social inequalities. These not only take distinct forms of organization, action, and framing but also focus on alternative forms of commitments against austerity, for migrant rights, gender and sexual rights, and environmental protection.

Building on some preliminary observations and empirical evidence (e.g., della Porta, 2015; della Porta, Andretta, Fernandes, Romanos, & Vogiatzoglou, 2018; della Porta & Mattoni, 2014; Romanos, 2013a, 2013b, 2014; Yoruk, 2014), our research aimed at addressing several interrelated research questions:

What leads a significant number of young people in times of more or less severe crisis to engage in collective initiatives, rather than to remain passive?

What are the forms of social commitment that critical young people choose to use, in particular during periods of crisis? Which meanings are attached to these forms of social engagement?

What kinds of resources are available to young people for social mobilization? And to what extent do they vary across different degrees of socioeconomic crisis, governmental constellation, and type of conflict, thereby shaping individual-level forms and levels of social participation?

To what extent do differences in the impact of the crisis on national contexts, and related political transformations, result in differences in young people’s social engagement in terms of motivations and forms?

To address these questions, focusing on progressive social movements, our research has bridged concepts and theories coming from both youth studies and social movement studies. After presenting the theoretical model and research design, I will summarize some results across three main aspects: The meaning of generations in social movements, the self-definition of Millennials, and their forms of commitment.

Bridging Youth Studies and Social Movement Studies: The Toolkit for Investigation

If the participation of youth in contemporary progressive movements is a theoretically puzzling but politically refreshing phenomenon, there is only scant research on the topic. Notwithstanding the fact that young people tend to be overrepresented in unconventional politics, social movement studies have not dealt much with issues of age and, conversely, youth studies have rarely considered social movements’ forms of engagements. There are, however, exceptions, from which we can draw some inspiration for reflecting on the impact of some specific age issues on contentious politics. In this, a first step would be to conceptualize terms that allow for this reflection, such as youth, cohort, and generation.

Youth Studies

First of all, research on political participation has addressed the role of youth, considered as in general less prone to conventional action and more, instead, to protest action. Research on political participation has long suggested that political participation increases with social centrality as higher levels of participation were observed, ceteris paribus, for the better educated, middle-class, male, middle-age cohort, married people, city residents, ethnic majority, and citizens involved in voluntary associations (Milbrath & Goel, 1977). Usually, higher social status implies in fact more material resources (but also free time) to invest in political participation, as well as a higher sense of personal achievement. Psychological disadvantages overlap with social disadvantages, reducing the perception of one’s own “droit de parole” (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 180).

Social movement studies however have challenged this elitist vision, developed especially in the analysis of conventional forms of participation, by presenting protest as a resource of the powerless (Lipsky, 1965). They noted indeed that those who protest present some different characteristics to those who use conventional forms of political participation: If the middle classes do vote more, workers strike more often; and if those in middle age are more present in party-related activities, students often occupy their schools and universities and protest in various forms (della Porta, 2015). Social movement studies suggested that protesting requires some biographical availability that can be higher among young people (McAdam, 1986, 1989).

First of all, time availability and limited responsibilities are considered as relevant resources for protest politics. Initially, there was indeed an expectation that growing older (getting a job, marrying, having children) implied less flexibility in the use of one’s own time as well as increasing responsibility, which makes protest less likely. While research indicated however an effect of protesting on those socio-biographical conditions—delaying the formation of family or pushing toward some types of work rather than others—it could not definitively confirm that the taking up of work and family responsibility reduces the commitment to protest. While indeed married life tends to reduce the level of commitment (Corrigall-Brown, 2011), having a full-time job increases participation in voluntary organizations, and even in high-risk forms of participation (Nepstad & Smith, 1999; Passy & Giugni, 2001). In particular, growing older, getting a job, and building a family do not necessarily reduce participation in protest. Recent research noted however that some conditions that affect biographical availability can affect the step that precedes actual choices to participate: In particular, positive motivations toward protest seem to decline for married people and full-time or part-time employees (Beyerlein & Hipp, 2006). In addition, especially some types of social movements and protest events are populated overproportionally by young people (Andretta & della Porta, 2015; della Porta, 2013).

Emotional characteristics usually connected to youth have also been mentioned as facilitating commitment to various causes. In particular, young people have been presented as highly emotional, rebels, devoted to an ethic of absolute ends, irreverent, radicals (Lipset, 1976). The narratives presented for instance at the 1968 anniversaries tend to focus especially on the generational dynamics in what was defined as an “adolescence class” (della Porta, 2018; Morin, Lefort, C., & Coudray, 1968). The memory of those years has often stressed its generational character as rebellion by the youth (de Luna, 2009). Analyses of the youth pointed then at an oedipal revolt, but also at a moral rebellion against the loss of credibility of the previous generations, expressed through demystification, irreverence, and transgression (Ortoleva, 1988). In general, it has been noted that

“studentship,” i.e., the state of being a student, can be highly conducive to “acting collectively in a public sphere” to express interests, ideas, make demands on some authority, or hold that authority accountable. The propensity to collective student political engagement lies in the characteristics of studentship as a life stage, which is that of “being free and becoming”. Developmentally, studentship (as emerging adulthood) has been associated with higher levels of cognitive, emotional and practical maturity and also with nurturing idealist (and abstract) ideas . . . Unburdened by care for family or full-time work, the “typical” student has the leisure of time and peace of mind to engage in political action if so inclined. (Klemenčič, 2014, p. 399)

Developments in the relationship between the state and the market, in particular through neoliberal policies, seem however to have affected youth conditions. As we are going to see, the very characteristics of the youth tend to be influenced by specific contextual dimensions, among which political economic ones take a central role. This is, for instance, particularly relevant in higher education. First of all, students’ free and autonomous time is drastically reduced in neoliberal universities, where spaces and opportunities for aggregation are also reduced, while the student body becomes increasingly heterogeneous in terms of social background, age, country of origin, conditions as paying versus nonpaying students, and full versus part-time students (Smeltzer & Hearn, 2015, p. 353). Students tend to be less oriented to live in student residences, and there is an increasing number of student workers. So the diversities within the student body make it more difficult “to cultivate a collective student identity which helps student governments flourish and to uncover shared grievances and shared emotions which fuel student movements” (Klemenčič, 2014, p. 399). The very condition of precarity further reduces the opportunities to express one’s own voice. Rather than toward idealism, students become oriented toward conformist behaviors, with an increasing push against politicization. As the extent of marketization of higher education and the youth condition in general vary broadly across countries (della Porta, Cini, & Guzman, 2019), the specific conditions of the youth, their propensity for and forms of commitment, might be expected to vary as well.

Issues of age have been addressed in demographic analysis, which point toward the effect of age distribution on contentious politics. Particularly relevant for the amount and forms of protests is the size of the youth cohort. As Goldstone (2015) summarized,

An age cohort is simply a group of people of roughly the same age, who were born in a particular period. In the United States, it has become common to refer to those born between 1945 and 1960 as the “baby boomers;” those born from 1960 to 1980 as “Generation X;” and those born from 1980 to 2000 as “Millennials.” (p. 148)

However, cohorts do not always form systematic groups (Gen X in the United States is known mainly for being very diverse and hard to classify). Rather, their significance depends on whether a cohort experienced a major shift as far as size or education are concerned. In fact, the socialization of new generations is considered as less challenging

when the numbers of people in society are stable or changing slowly enough for growth in the economy and institutions to accommodate the change. However, rapid change in the size of cohorts, or of particular social groups, can easily disrupt this process and place great strains on institutions. Sudden increases in the number of young people, or of migrants, can place a burden on schools (and on government to finance them). Rapid urbanization and educational expansion can rapidly change outlooks and loyalties as people move out of familiar and traditional settings into more fluid ones, where they have a greater variety of choices to create and join voluntary organizations, including new religious and social movements. (Goldstone 2015, p. 150)

While the size of the young cohort might be relevant at times, protest is however not always carried out by baby boomer youth. Even if we focus on the very recent waves of protests, while the Arab Spring has been considered as developing in an environment characterized by a very large presence of young people, there has been no particular increase in the percentage of young people, for instance, in Southern Europe or in the United States. Looking at the demographic characteristics of protesters, it would be important to consider some other sociographic dimensions, such as the percentage unemployed (with, e.g., more than 50% unemployment among young people in Southern Europe) or ethnic distribution (with, e.g., non-White proportion rapidly increasing in youth cohorts in the United States).

Cohorts acquire more of an impact on collective action when they go through some shared, important event that contributes to shaping their norms, values, and behavior in their future lives. In Mannheim’s (1952) conceptualization we are talking of a political generation—that is “a particular kind of identity of location, embracing related ‘age groups’ embedded in a historical-social process” (p. 292). Goldstone summarized the effect of broad historical transformations upon those who were young in the times in which they happened:

The generations that went through World War I as young men and women, or that experienced the Great Depression of the 1930s, remained cautious, driven by a sense of loss, and drawn to political solutions that promised stability and security. The cohorts of young women who came of age in America and Europe in the 1940s and early 1950s, who were focused on rebuilding families and their roles as wives and mothers, were very different in their outlook and politics from the women who entered adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s with greater interests in careers, self-expression, and gender equality. And these were again different from the women who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, for whom aggressive feminism seemed outdated and who sought a different path to reconcile femininity and equality in a different, post–civil rights context. Activists of different generations thus formed their own persistent outlooks, identities, and modes of movement action. More recently, the advent of a global “war on terror” between Islamic Jihadists and the West, triggered by the attack on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, created a critical generational experience for those entering young adulthood and forming their impressions of politics throughout the Islamic world. (Goldstone, 2015, p. 149).

Besides the young age of their activists, youth movements reflect specific generational characteristics. Not by chance, 1968ers were named as a generation that came of age in a moment of affluence and reduced inequalities, endowed with “postmaterialist” values (Inglehardt, 1977) and broad political interests (Downtown & Wehr, 1997) as the young activists criticized their parents for their unfulfilled promises (Giugni, 2004). What was relevant for political participation in the 1960s was not only an increase in the number of young people but also a growing self-definition as youth, visible also in consumption habits, with a stress on generational diversity, with different language, values, and spaces (Passerini, 2008, p. 120), and an orientation toward progressive politics. The size of the cohort is mentioned as particularly relevant in terms of its political effects:

The baby-boomers, born into a period of exceptional peace and prosperity after the Great Depression and World War II, and being much larger than earlier cohorts, felt unusually free to define their goals in an idealistic fashion and to act defiantly of their elders. As the baby-boom generation matured, it thus spawned an unusual number of social movements. When the generation was in their 20s (the 1960s), they led the counter-culture, free love, anti-war, student, women’s liberation, Chicano and American Indian, women’s, environmental and anti-nuclear movements. (Goldstone, 2015, pp. 148-149)

From the generational point of view, research, in particular in the United States, has often lamented the political disengagement of the young in contrast with the generation that came of age during World War II, which was highly engaged in a duty-based citizenship (Dalton, 2008; Putnam, 2000). In particular,

more recent generations of Americans have been found to be less politically and civically engaged. Specifically, they are less likely to participate in various traditional political and civic activities, such as attending public meetings, writing their political representatives, and working for political parties (Fisher, 2012, p. 119)

as well as voting. In addition, those born between 1960 and 1980 emerged as less involved in protest activities (Caren, Ghoshal, & Ribas, 2011, p. 147). Recent studies have however noted in the United States changes in the patterns of civic and political participation of those younger than 30 years, which are said to protest as much as earlier cohorts, even if through alternative forms of commitments, such as consumer activism or petitions (e.g., Caren et al., 2011; Zukin, Keeter, Andolina, Jenkins, & Delli Carpini, 2006).

If the definition of a Millennial generation could be a useful starting point for research on the participation of young citizens, especially in nonconventional forms, social movement studies can help us in addressing questions about the specific contextual conditions that would affect it, as well as of the characteristics that mobilizations take.

Social Movement Studies

Social movement studies have traditionally looked at how contextual conditions affect repertoires of political participation, using concepts such as political opportunities, resource mobilization, and framing processes.

In social movement studies, at the macro level, the political opportunity structure approach pays systematic attention to the existing political system, state practices toward opposition, elite alliances, and prevailing socioeconomic conditions (della Porta & Diani, 2006, chap. 8). Recent contributions aimed to bring a reflection on capitalist developments back into social movement studies (della Porta, 2015) by investigating the specific effects of economic and market policies on young people’s societal visions and actions. Political legitimacy and economic crisis take place both at the macro and micro levels because they connect young people’s individual experiences and expectations to broader economic and political issues such as economic inequality (Habermas, 1971; Sloam, 2014). The contemporary crisis of neoliberalism (in particular, the financial crisis), which is accompanied by a political crisis as well, has transformed social settings to various degrees and in various ways, creating new grievances, reshaping opportunities and restraints on mobilization, and triggering or exacerbating social and political conflicts. This pertains not only to obvious effects of the crisis such as austerity measures eroding social and political institutions or the breakdown of labor markets, particularly for young people, but also to less obvious outcomes such as the redirection of flows of migration, shifting power balances among different social groups, and so on. The economic and concurrent legitimacy crisis is altering the societal participation of young people. It creates or exacerbates grievances among certain parts of the youth population and reshapes political opportunities in various ways, including discouragement or repression of alternative forms of action seen as challenging by political authorities.

Looking at their social characteristics, Millennials have been defined as a precarious generation, composed of people

who have minimal trust relations with capitalism or the state, making it quite different from the salariat. And it has none of the social contract relationship of the proletariat, whereby labor securities were provided in exchange for subordination and contingent loyalty, the unwritten deal underpinning welfare state. (Standing, 2011, p. 9)

As Standing noted, the precariat

is not just a matter of having insecure employment, of being in jobs of limited duration and with minimal labour protection . . . it is being in a status that offers no sense of career, no sense of secure occupational identity and few, if any, entitlements to the state and enterprise benefits that several generations of those who found themselves as belonging to the industrial proletariat or the salariat had come to expect as their due. (p. 24)

The conditions of the Millennials is in fact characterized by a sum of insecurity in the labor market, in employment (as regulations on hiring and dismissals give little protection to workers), on work (with weak provisions for accident and illness as well as reduced unions’ rights), on income (with very low pay), with all these conditions having effects in terms of an accumulation of anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation (Standing, 2011, 10 ff.).

Yet, in this context, young social activists also make use of resources they can mobilize, which have survived, have newly emerged, or have been created (including social networks, cultural/symbolic capital, new technologies). Therefore, in particular in time of crisis, we expect that young people’s visions and practices will be influenced by their individual location within broader social cleavages as well as by the country’s location within global capitalist development. In particular, creative forms of societal commitments by the young would tend to take on more radical repertoires and framing in contexts in which economic deprivation and social inequalities are generally higher and, moreover, a greater proportion of young people are severely hit by the crisis.

Besides contextual opportunities, organizational resources are necessary to mobilize. Civil society organizations emerge and operate in relational fields, interacting with other groups, government authorities, political opponents, and public bystanders. In particular, recent social, cultural, political, and technological transformations are important contextual elements shaping the ways in which youth participation develops and transforms, introducing alternative forms of societal participation. Focusing especially on the meso level, resource mobilization approach has argued that access to resources (e.g., moral, cultural, social–organizational, human, and material) enhances the likelihood of individuals’ mobilization. While the very neoliberal development weakened traditional locations of cat-netness (Tilly, 1978)—where the “cat” dimension refers to category traits (such as position in the labor market) and “net” to networks (built around the place of residence or the family)—“liquid societies” (Bauman, 2000) implied at the cultural level the trading of security for (assumed) freedom. At the same time, however, new technologies and increasing cognitive resources, available especially to young and well-educated people, seem to facilitate political engagement (Anduiza, Jensen, & Jorba, 2012; Xenos, Vromen, & Loader, 2014) and the development of connective forms of action, largely based on the use of social media (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013). Moreover, faced with the decline of corporatist forms of mobilization, other forms of action can be revisited or created anew. Second, while resource mobilization theory has stressed the presence of networks as a precondition for mobilization, alternative forms of political participation are actually able to build new networks (della Porta, 2017). During periods of crisis, traditional agents of socialization have much more difficulty in addressing young people who, however, may make use of other resources they can mobilize—resources that have survived, increased, and/or newly emerged (including networks, cultural/symbolic capital, new media). We expect that mobilization in times of rapid social and economic change and high mobility requires and fosters organizational forms capable of exploiting weak (even virtual) ties in intermittent forms of mobilizations around flexible and multiple identities. In particular, we expect that the forms of political participation will be affected by existing traditions of interest representation and neoliberal challenges to these. Young people take action in a social environment that makes only certain action forms appear adequate, whereas other forms appear to be unacceptable or futile. In particular, research on political socialization points toward tensions between supply in terms of social movement organizations and the generational taste for horizontal organizing (Earl, Maher, & Elliott, 2017). Internet technologies have made novel tactics, forms of mobilization, and targets possible (Juris, 2008; Micheletti & Stolle, 2009; Polletta, Chen, Gardner, & Motes, 2013; Rheingold, 2002), but the transformative capacity of online participation varies across political contexts (Anduiza et al., 2012) and across the protest logics that are used (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Cammaerts, 2012). Moreover, social context, in the form of personal networks and social milieus, shapes different pathways toward political participation and involvement in specific social movements and groups.

To have an impact on mobilization, opportunities and resources must be assessed through not only cognitive, but also emotional, mechanisms. Largely focused on the intersection between the meso and micro level, framing theory kept resource mobilization theorists’ focus on micromobilization, but shifted attention toward the cognitive appreciation of how opportunities, identities, and action repertoires are framed. According to this approach, framing helps individuals interpret the world based on their social position and their previous experiences. Linked to this focus on a cultural dimension, movement scholars have stressed the importance of collective identity, including the means for its expression in terms of cultural practices, rituals, symbols, and emotional expressions (Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta 2001; Melucci, 1996). These are important to understanding young people’s preferences for particular forms of action—especially those that provide room for self-expression, spontaneity, creativity, and sometimes joy and madness. In particular, as periods of crisis are often associated with the closing down of opportunities, which may motivate young people to look outside the conventional channels of political participation as ways to readdress their aims and goals, we can expect young people to privilege prefigurative forms of politics (della Porta, 2015). We consider that cultural capacities for collective mobilization is affected by the impact of social media on young people’s modes of feeling, judging, and thinking. In the countries most hit by crisis, “social media have become emotional conduits for reconstructing a sense of togetherness among a spatially dispersed constituency, so as to facilitate its physical coming together in public space” (Gerbaudo, 2012, p. 159). Virtual collective identification fostered online may not only be partial and ambiguous, but also easier, since the anonymity associated with social media minimizes the impact of differences with others. At the same time, new media lower the transaction costs of mobilization, and as a result we expect that the role played by formal organization and professional activists in strategic framing diminishes, to the detriment of the participants themselves (Polletta et al., 2013).

Considering young people not as a mere subset of the general population but as a specific group with its own particular life worlds and concerns, and its own definitions of politics and “the political,” we might expect specific forms of political engagement. In fact, generation effects arise from the fact that successive generations face new challenges that previous generations did not experience (Furlong & Cartmel, 1997). Thus, as O’Toole, Lister, Marsh, Jones, and McDonagh (2003) argue, “the political issues and arenas familiar to other, older, generations as foci and sites of political activity may well have little relevance to young people” (p. 48). In fact, while “around the turn of the century, a range of scholars began to worry that youth political engagement was at an unhealthy low,” others noted that “youth engagement was not declining, just changing form” (Earl et al., 2017, p. 1). An observation that seems applicable also outside of the United States is that “it is not that youth are disengaged, but rather that they do not engage in the same way that ‘dutiful’ generations have” (Earl et al., 2017; see also Sander & Putnam, 2010; Shea & Harris, 2006; Zukin et al., 2006). In particular, young people’s participation developed toward “engaged citizenship” in volunteering as well as embedding activism in their everyday life (Schlozman, Verba, & Brady, 2010; Shea & Harris, 2006; Zukin et al., 2006).

What is more, scholars have singled out in the Millennials a new generation—(Connery, 2008, Dalton, 2008, Winograd & Hais, 2008)—which has experienced “an unmistakable expansion of youth interest in politics and public affairs” (Sander & Putnam, 2010, p. 11), in the forms not only of volunteering but also of voting. Millennials have been characterized as carrying specific values: pluralism and tolerance, even if with low trust in political institutions (Brooks, 2016). Recent research has addressed the Millennials as a generation that faces indeed very different life expectations and/or conditions than previous ones, and is more seriously threatened by the current economic crisis. In fact, “2008 provides a baseline from which participation may expand as members of the millennial generation finish their studies, begin a career, purchase a home, and share the other life experiences that foster attention to government and politics” (Dalton, 2008, p. 196; see also Dalton, 2017, chap. 5).

Young people’s engagement with politics seems multifaceted and nuanced. Although there is a tendency in public debate to treat young people as a homogeneous group, there is no single uniform path to social participation. Discussions about what is perceived as young people’s passivity have tended to understand passivity as a unidimensional phenomenon (for a critique of the notion of young people’s passivity, see Marsh, O’Toole, & Jones, 2007; O’Toole et al., 2003; O’Toole & Richard, 2010). In contrast to the dominant understanding of passivity, Amnå and Ekman’s (2013) research on Swedish adolescents’ political orientations has identified not only unengaged as well as disillusioned young citizens but also a large group of “standby citizens” who stay alert, keep themselves informed about politics by bringing up political issues in everyday life contexts, and are willing and able to participate if needed. Most important, the ways in which they participate politically are linked to their backgrounds and life circumstances, as well as to socioeconomic and educational factors.

The Research Design

To understand young people’s political participation, we must examine them within their political, economic, and cultural contexts, which have been affected and possibly transformed by the recent economic crisis. The effects of this crisis, however, vary significantly across and within countries. We therefore used a cross-national comparative design, collecting data from European countries that represent different experiences in terms of socioeconomic development and crisis exposure: Besides Italy, we also looked at Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. These countries were selected to provide significant variation regarding political institutions, economic conditions, and political cultures, as well as representing differences with regard to the depth of economic and political crises to which they respond. Focused comparisons of selected countries allowed us to assess the role of contextual factors in facilitating or preventing young Europeans’ engagement in alternative forms of action, evaluating the impact of different contextual factors on levels, forms, and dynamic trajectories of young people’s political participation.

Attitudes and behaviors have traditionally been studied via surveys. However, solely relying on representative population surveys to capture the character of young people’s visions and practices of an inclusive and sustainable society is problematic. Mainstream studies operate with a very narrow notion of attitudes and behaviors. The reliance on survey techniques tends to confine the possible range of attitudes and behaviors to those offered by the researcher, potentially obscuring the political intentions behind many activities such as deliberate nonvoting.

While correlational analyses have been the focus of much survey-based research that has already singled out the nuanced and complex characteristics of young “dissenting citizens” (Harris, Wyn, & Younes, 2010; Hoskin, Villalba, & Saisana, 2012; O’Loughlin & Gillespie, 2012; Sloam, 2012), a qualitative analysis of collective processes must be embedded in social contexts such as political institutions, economic conditions, technological settings, and political culture.

Understanding youth participation in social movements requires a mixed-method methodological approach, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. The patterns of young people’s political participation mapped by survey data call for a deeper investigation. For the purposes of mapping out and theorizing youth responses to different degrees and types of crisis, qualitative tools are indispensable. By drawing on them, we go beyond the established view on current youth engagement in society to address more in-depth in the analysis of visions and practices. To understand the dynamics of youth commitment in societal change in different contexts, individual decisions to take action need to be observed, not merely inferred.

We proceeded then as follows:

Mapping: We first collected contextual background information on young people’s engagement in collective forms of commitment. This mapping was used, from the theoretical point of view, to develop classifications and typologies of commitment.

Semistructured interviews: We mainly focused on information obtained from semistructured interviews to analyse the various social movement organizations. These interviews have been carried out not only with people who are active participants in different forms of collective engagements. The interviews addressed the ways in which political contexts and alternative participation strategies are perceived by the organizers studied, since context hardly influences their action “objectively,” but always through their perceptions. To select respondents, we used a theoretical sampling of relevant experiences, involving not only young activists but also older ones. Additionally, we combined the analysis of different social movements, from the women’s movement to the environmental one, from alternative cultural initiatives to labor mobilizations.

This Double Issue

Focusing on mobilizations around work, the article on The “precarious generation” and the “natives of the ruins”: the multiple dimensions of generational identity in Italian labor struggles in times of crisis by Lorenzo Zamponi aims to shed light on the dynamics of the construction of a generational identity in collective action. To do so, it focuses on generational identity as it emerges in activists involved in labor struggles in Italy in the past few years. Do Italian “Millennial” activists perceive themselves as part of the same political generation? What are its main traits? And are the contextual elements that define it more linked to socioeconomic context or to experiences of collective action? The analysis shows a clear self-identification of Italian Millennials, in the context of labor struggles, as “the precarious generation”: a generation mostly affected by the socioeconomic conditions of the past few years, with the explosion of labor precarity, of the economic crisis and, more generally, of neoliberal policies. While this shared identity refers to a specific socioeconomic context, there is a difference related to the experience of political mobilization: Activists are rather pessimistic when focusing on the youngest component of their generation, usually described as more individualist, due to their lack of exposure to intense waves of political mobilization. The contribution sheds light on the multidimensional nature of generational identity and on its asymmetric nature: If both the socioeconomic context and the experience of political socialization play a role in shaping a political generation, these dynamics do not always go hand in hand, and activists tend to actively work to reconcile the different dimensions of their generational identity into a coherent narrative.

Three articles follow on a new wave of feminism.

Martin Portos’s article, titled Divided we stand, (oftentimes) united we fight: Generational bridging in Spain’s feminist movement and the cycle of antiausterity mobilizations, addresses a most successful case of mobilization. After a general campaign that aimed at changing the political and socioeconomic system, the 15M/Indignados abandoned the visible occupation of central squares decentralized through neighborhood assemblies, and specialized around different issues, such as housing, and the health and public education systems. Although often cohabitating amid tension, feminist activists of different generations forged internal and autonomous spaces that prioritized feminist aspirations and permeated dissent in the shadow of the Great Recession, sharing arenas with people who would not have been reached otherwise. Despite the feminist movement(s)’ heterogeneity, intersectional character, and organization through polycephalous networks, it has in recent times grown to stand out as the movement with the highest mobilization capacity in the country. Based on original qualitative data from 12 semistructured interviews with key informants and activists, the article sheds light on the tensions between different generations of feminists. It will explain the continuities and discontinuities between veteran and younger activists’ world views when it comes to their forms of politicization, theoretical underpinnings, strategic priorities, organizational configuration and resource mobilization, repertoires of action, cultural foundations, and patterns of diffusion. In addition, it contends that the ability of veteran and new activists to forge arenas of encounter, fostering debate and synergies during the antiausterity cycle of protest, was key to account for the cross-generational alliance-building processes, which have hitherto seldom been explored in the feminist movement(s) and beyond.

In her Generations in the feminist and LGBT movements in Italy: The case of Non Una Di Meno, Daniela Chironi addresses the Italian mobilization of a third wave of activism. The article focuses on the participation of young people in the feminist and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) movements in Italy and sheds light on the relationships between different generations of activists. Contradicting scholarly expectations of youth apathy in times of crisis, qualitative analysis reveals great vitality on the part of a young population engaged in gender struggles. Well-educated and culturally open, they played a major role in the construction of the Italian section of the Ni Una Menos movement against male violence born in Argentina. Massive and diffused, the Italian NUDM (Non Una Di Meno [not one less]) appears as a laboratory where Millennials met previous generations of activists, contributing to innovate existing organizational forms, frames and claims, and action repertoires. Critical toward institutional politics and its actors, Millennials opt for grassroots, radical horizontal organizing. Sensitive to new perspective developed abroad, they embrace intersectional feminism and queer theory, which imply fighting against all sorts of discrimination (of women, homosexuals, transsexuals, migrants, disabled people) and claiming more rights for disadvantaged categories, including sex workers. Finally, they tend to adopt a conflictual attitude toward the State, and dialogical, introspective dynamics of participation within the movement. Their action repertoire aims at reviving old struggles with new means, such as the Women’s Strike, constructing creative spaces for interaction and bringing forward educational activities. As in the Spanish case, generational differences brought about some tensions. While the “gender equality” perspective was substantially isolated, a contrast emerged between the “feminist of difference,” traditionally well rooted in Italy, and “intersectionality” and transfeminist queer theories. Even though plurality remains a movement value, generational replacement led to a final predominance of intersectional feminist and growing diffusion of queer perspectives. Disagreements, partially overlapping with generational dimensions, regard especially prefigurative practices, relationships with the State, sex work, and surrogate motherhood.

In Gendering resistance to right-wing populism: Black Protest and a new wave of feminist activism in Poland, Bogumila Hall investigates the mobilization of women in an East European case. The rise to power of the populist Law and Justice Party in 2015, and its growing authoritarianism, has politicized thousands of Poles, and brought large-scale protests back to Polish streets. Women have been at the forefront of these struggles, aligning the previously unpopular quest for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy with the larger resistance to the ruling party. In Poland, as elsewhere, women’s bodies have been a battleground for populist politics, which claims paternalistic care for women, for example, in the form of family subsidy programs and child care benefits, at the same time undermining gender equality and women’s rights. In particular, the proposal to restrict the abortion law sparked mass mobilization in 2016, with Black Protests turning into a formative experience for many of the previously nonactive participants. This work sheds light on this most recent wave of feminism in Poland and its forms of action. It scrutinizes in detail the narrative of a “new generation of activists,” who claim to change the contours of Polish feminism, making it more inclusive, more creative, and bolder. By doing so, it reports on the generational shift, unfolding slowly since the 2000s, from the institutionalized feminism of nongovernmental organizations to less formal, grassroots forms of engagement that combine online activism with organizing on the ground. However, while the latter is often assumed to be skeptical toward the European Union “gender mainstreaming,” the author shows how, within the context of growing authoritarianism, the youngest cohorts in particular return to the liberal strand of feminism, characterized by the language of human rights and an uncritical gaze toward the European Union. The article ends by reflecting on the proclaimed “newness” of feminism in Poland, as articulated by the activists. The absence of intergenerational dialogue and transmission of knowledge, it is argued, render past feminist struggles in Poland invisible and forgotten, and strikingly leaves unquestioned the legacy of previous neoliberal and patriarchal governments that led to the erosion of women’s rights in postsocialist Poland.

Two articles focus on countercultural forms of mobilization.

Chiara Milan’s piece, titled Rebelling against time: Recreational activism as political practice among Italian precarious youth, addresses critical recreational activism. Young people face increased labor precarity and the disillusionment derived from the disappearance of the radical Left from the parliamentary arena. In the Italian context, hit by the economic and political crisis, economic hardship, the decrease of resources available for collective action together with the weakened mobilizing capacity of traditional mass organizations (e.g., trade unions and political parties) brought about a general decline in intensity and visibility of street protests, leading to an apparent retreat of activism to the local level. Although the crisis had a negative impact on collective action, evidence reveals that more creative and less visible forms of societal and political commitment reemerged and were reappropriated by the youth in these years. This article explores how the Italian youth in times of crisis engaged actively in alternative forms of political commitment, aimed at reappropriating 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 young Italians active in countercultural spaces, nowadays at the forefront of the struggle to oppose the commodification of free time and leisure.

In her Coming of age in the “state of emergency”: Race, religion, and political imagination among Britain’s youth of color, Bogumila Hall looks at the specific perceptions of one of the most repressed group of young people. In a racial security state, Britain’s black and brown youth have been excluded from the national narrative. Construed as foreign, threatening, and alienated, young people of minority backgrounds have been the prime targets of the state’s counterterrorism legislation as well as surveillance, policing, and disciplining programs. At the same time, communities of color are among the most severely affected by austerity measures, suffering from the highest rates of unemployment, shoddy housing, cuts to public services, and closure of community centers. This article reveals how generational identity is tied to racial and class consciousness, dimensions rarely accounted for in the classical sociological work on generations. Shedding light on the mosaic of intersectional struggles, the article scrutinizes how activists of color, marginalized even within traditional leftist movements, carve out their own engagement, reclaim their terms of speaking, and forge wider alliances and solidarities to tackle racism, capitalism, and patriarchy. In doing so, they combine outward acts of resistance with inward-looking practices of self-affirmation, building community spaces and preserving memories. The author shows in particular how, within these various avenues—ranging from university campuses to DIY festivals—young racialized activists depart from the language of civil rights and the politics of recognition, typical for the generation of their parents. Instead, young activists question the multiple exclusions on which citizenship relies, turn away from state projects, and articulate a radical, decolonial vision of social justice, not contained by the nation-state framework.

In Political generations and the Italian Enviromental movement(s), Niccolò Bertuzzi addresses three different currents. During recent years, Italian social movements have experienced a period of crisis, in part due to diffuse antipolitical feelings and latent social conflict. However, environmental issues and especially territorial mobilizations remain relevant, due to the appearance of new contentious actors and to the permanence of long-standing organizations and important local grassroots campaigns. Based on 19 semistructured interviews with activists belonging to informal groups and formal associations, this article discusses the role of age and generations within the variegated Italian environmental archipelago, in which organizational and collective aspects prove to currently have a relevant role. Indeed, age does not represent an important fracture, this being a partial anomaly if confronted with the other case studies discussed in this special issue. The only diversities between cohorts are related to the forms of action preferred and (eventually) adopted, while the common perception of job precariousness among young activists is not translated into a single frame and common path of resistance. More than a Millennials’ identity, it is rather appropriate to speak of various and divergent political generations: Individuals belonging to different cohorts share some ideologies and visions of the world, especially related to territorial belongings or to specific ways of looking at environmental issues. Also for this reason, a final comparison between contemporary young activists and those of previous generations is proposed to address the generation(s) in movement(s) in a dynamic perspective.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The CRY_OUT research was financed in part by the Italian Ministery of Education.

Author Biography

Donatella della Porta is professor of political science, dean of the Department of Political and Social Sciences and Director of the PhD program in Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, where she also leads the Center on Social Movement Studies (Cosmos). Among the main topics of her research: social movements, political violence, terrorism, corruption, the police and protest policing. She has directed a major ERC project Mobilizing for Democracy,. In 2011, she was the recipient of the Mattei Dogan 14 American Behavioral Scientist Prize for distinguished achievements in the field of political sociology. She is Honorary Doctor of the universities of Lausanne, Bucharest and Goteborg.

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