Comparative research on unemployed activism, to date, is largely based on countries in the Global North although two outstanding cases of mobilization of jobless people can be found in the Global South: Argentina, which between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s experienced probably the strongest wave of mobilization of unemployed workers on record worldwide, and Tunisia, where unemployed have played a significant role in waves of protests since 2008, including during the national uprising of 2010/11 that brought down long-standing Dictator Ben Ali.
Written by Irene Weipert-Fenner and Jonas Wolff and drawing on general social movement theory, Working Paper No. 32 "Unemployed Movements in the Global South: the cases of Argentina and Tunisia" studies these two cases and systematically compares them with the findings on unemployed movements in the Global North. The analysis reveals important common features that characterize unemployed movements across countries and contexts, but also dynamics that a narrow North-Western focus tends to miss. Most importantly, changes in general political opportunity structures and the mobilization of unemployed prove to be strongly interrelated in Argentina and Tunisia. The effects of opening political opportunities, however, have had decidedly ambivalent effects on these unemployed movements.
This PRIF Working Paper is available as a free download.
Further recommended reading:
Blogpost the conceptualizing institutional responses to social challenges: Repertoires of Counter-Contention: Conceptualizing Institutional Responses to Social Movements
by Irene Weipert-Fenner und Jonas Wolff, 26th October 2016
The ways in which political authorities respond to societal challenges is a key element in the interaction between social movements and state institutions. Two conceptual distinctions are important when studying such repertoires of counter-contention: authorities’ responses may (1) aim at either including or excluding challengers, and they may (2) either respect their autonomy or try to control them.
Social movement research has produced rich empirical accounts and useful conceptual proposals which help understand the ways in which movements challenge authorities, including political ones (see, most prominently, the concept and analysis of repertoires of contention). But the interaction between social movements and state institutions – be they at the national or at the international level – obviously involves two types of actors. Still, we know much less about the strategies through which political authorities respond to the contentious challenges posed by social movements. In this contribution, we propose a conceptual framework that grasps the overall repertoire of counter-contention that is available to state institutions in this regard. Specifically, we suggest differentiating between two dimensions: In the dimension of inclusion/exclusion, authorities’ responses can range from incorporation of social movement organizations, representatives and claims to their outright exclusion. In the dimension of autonomy/control, state institutions may respect social movements as independent collective actors or they may try to gain direct influence on their agenda and behavior. As we have argued elsewhere, this distinction results in four ideal-type responses to social movements that combine “inclusion and autonomy (liberal-democratic inclusion), inclusion and control (cooptation), exclusion and control (repression) or exclusion and autonomy (marginalization)”. (…) Entire article
Read the entire article on Bretterblog, a platform for doctoral students and research associates in the Social Sciences who are affiliated to different universities and think tanks all over Germany.