https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4007-4843
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ABSTRACT
This article addresses the subject of social movements’ decision-making processes during cycles of contention through a study of the 2011 Chilean student movement. It identifies and lays out some crucial dilemmas that are key in order to properly understand how this movement defined its strategy. The article engages with the recent literature on social movements’ dilemmas, providing a fine-grained case study on how competing movement factions dealt with these dilemmas and how their resolution affected the definition of the movement’s strategy. The empirical analysis is based on press review, documentary analysis and 29 interviews to student leaders and political actors.
RESUMEN
Este artículo aborda el proceso de toma de decisiones de los movimientos sociales durante los ciclos de protesta a través del estudio del movimiento estudiantil chileno de 2011. Se identifican y desarrollan algunos dilemas cruciales que son clave para entender cómo este movimiento definió su estrategia. El artículo dialoga con la literatura reciente sobre dilemas de los movimientos sociales. Ofrece un estudio de caso en profundidad que muestra cómo grupos internos en competencia lidiaron con estos dilemas, y cómo la resolución de los dilemas afectó la estrategia del movimiento. El análisis empírico se basa en revisión de prensa, análisis documental y 29 entrevistas a líderes estudiantiles y políticos.
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Eduardo Silva, Marisa von Bülow, Indira Palacios-Valladares, and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. I also thank Joaquín Rozas for his help with the fieldwork.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For instance, Time Magazine selected the “Protester” as the Person of the Year. The magazine highlighted the importance of “Chile’s Student Protesters”, identifying Camila Vallejo as the main leader of the Chilean student movement (Padgett Citation2011).
2. The identity of the interviewees is omitted to preserve their anonymity.
3. For sure, Jasper’s strategic turn does not emerge from a void. However, as he points out, many social movements’ analysis perspectives that considered agency as an important factor progressively turned to more structural accounts. See Jasper (Citation2004, 2–5).
4. It can be argued that the cycle that began in 2011 continued in 2012 and 2013, but 2011 was the year with the highest levels of mobilization.
5. Secondary students were very active in 2011 but didn’t get much attention from the government, the press, or even from their university peers. Their leaders complained bitterly about this situation.
6. Chilean universities are divided among “traditional” and “non-traditional” ones. The traditional universities are the institutions that existed before Pinochet’s educational reforms in the 1980s or the institutions that resulted from splits of those universities. There are public and private traditional universities, and these are, in general terms, the most prestigious in Chile. The non-traditional universities are the institutions that were created after the 1980s educational reforms. All non-traditional universities are private.
7. The Mapuche is the largest group of Chilean indigenous peoples.
8. In Chile, regional universities are understood to be those outside of Santiago.
9. For an account on how different political identities and political currents evolved in the student movement in the 1990s and 2000s, see Palacios-Valladares (Citation2017).
10. An account of how the articulations inside CONFECH evolved in the following years can be found in Mella Polanco (Citation2016).
11. Due to this intermediate position, the Izquierda Autónoma leaders were not included in any one of the two blocks when codifying the different federations’ presidencies. This classification, as well as the coding of the rest of the federations, was performed through cross-checking the classification of the different federations provided by interviewees. This was an exercise I asked them to do in order to validate and eventually amend the original classification that I had created through CONFECH proceedings analysis and the press review. It is important to note that my sample included interviewees from all the political currents inside CONFECH. Further, there was an important degree of agreement among the interviewees’ answers regarding their classifications of the different federations’ presidents, regardless if they were independents or part of one of the two groups identified.
12. In Spanish SinFECH means “without the FECH”.
13. Interview with a member of the Sin FECH.Author’s own translation.
14. Two were members of the Christian Democratic Party, one was a member of the Socialist Youth, and one president was close to the Partido Por la Democracia (Party for Democracy, PPD), formally joining its youth wing in July.
15. The rest of the student federations could not be associated with any of the groups, as they were independents or due to a lack of information.
16. Interview with a 2011 student leader from the Universidad de Concepción, 30 August 2013. Author’s own translation.
17. Interview with a deposed student federation president, 17 April 2014. Author’s own translation.
18. In most cases, the deposed federation presidents were replaced by spokespeople of the universities’ takeovers or by a representative of the council of student presidents (each of whom represented a field of study), depending of each university’s process. In all cases, a new representative was appointed to attend to CONFECH meetings.
19. Interview with a 2011 student leader from the Universidad de la Frontera, 9 April 2014. Author’s own translation.
20. Interview with a 2011 student leader from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, student leader in 2011, 11 June 2013. Author’s own translation.
21. Interview with a 2011 student leader that requested full anonymity, 2014. Author’s own translation.
22. Personal interview with a 2011 ministerial advisor, 12 February 2014. Author’s own translation.
23. Personal interview with a 2011 ministerial advisor, 12 February 2014. Author’s own translation.
24. Personal interview with a SinFECH student federation president in 2011, 29 August 2013. Author’s own translation.
25. Personal interview with a Communist Youth leader, 5 December 2013. Author’s own translation.
26. Personal interview with the 2011 General Secretary of the Federation of the Universidad de Concepción (Concepción campus) and 2012 President of the Federation, 13 August 2013. Author’s own translation.
27. Personal interview with a 2011 communist student leader. Author’s own translation.
28. Personal interview with a 2011 SinFECH student leader, 30 August 2013. Author’s own translation.
29. Personal interview with a Communist 2011 student leader.
30. In addition to these two leaders from 2011, Karol Cariola (President of the Federation of the Universidad de Concepción in 2010) and Gabriel Boric (President of the Federation of Students of the Universidad de Chile in 2012) were also elected national representatives. Furthermore, the four leaders were reelected in 2018.
31. Personal interview with the General Secretary of the Federation of Students of the Universidad de Chile in 2004–2005, 18 October 2013. Author’s own translation.
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Germán Bidegain
Germán Bidegain is a professor at the Social Science Faculty of the Universidad de la República (Uruguay) and a researcher of the Centro de Informaciones y Estudios del Uruguay (CIESU). He is a member of the National Researchers System of Uruguay (researcher level 1). His academic interests are social movements’ theory, democratic theory, and comparative politics, especially in Latin American politics. His research has been published by Estudios Sociológicos, Latin American Politics and Society, Anuari del Conflicte Social, Revista de Ciencia Política, Colombia Internacional, Teoria e Cultura, and Pléyade.