A tale of two campaigns: understanding the role of short-term political context in Czech and Slovak counter/mobilizing on migration

ABSTRACT

This paper explores protest mobilizations related to the 2015 migrant crisis in the post-communist Czech Republic and Slovakia. Despite dominating anti-refugee sentiments and similar historical and political background in the two countries, the mobilization patterns were fairly different in both scale and organization of migration-related mobilizations. To systematically explore and account for these variances, we investigate the short-term political conditions, focusing on 1) key features of the national political environment – discursive opportunities and political space, and 2) movement/countermovement dynamics. We build on the original protest event data during the most intense protests over migration in 2015. We show how a different political space and a different extent of openness of discursive opportunities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and interactions between the anti-refugee movement and the solidarity countermovement played an important role in the timing and scale of protests and their organizers.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobilization
• countermovement
• protest event
• migration
• Eastern Europe

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editorial team of Social Movement Studies and the anonymous reviewers for their detailed and insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. However, there still may be another bias in data – events with controversial and violent content (e.g., events where solidarity activists were clashing with anti-immigration events) may be overrepresented. Generally, one has to keep in mind that a data set from the mainstream media may overrepresent events that attract a broader audience (Koopmans & Rucht, 2002, p. 247).

2. A selection of keywords was used to identify protest events for coding: barricade, blockade, boycott, demonstration, extremist, happening, strike, confrontation, manifestation, meeting, resistance, performance, petition, march, parade, protest, rally, gathering, squat.

Additional information

Funding

Jiří Navrátil acknowledges the support of Masaryk University (project MUNI/A/1567/2021). The work on this article by Alena Kluknavská was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (Project “Contestation of Truth: Public Discourses on Migration in Central Europe in the Post-truth Era”, grant number 19-14575Y).

Notes on contributors

Jiří Navrátil

Jiří Navrátil is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University (Czech Republic). His primary research focus is on social movements and political protest, inter-organizational networks, and civil societies in Eastern Europe.

Alena Kluknavská

Alena Kluknavská is a post-doctoral researcher at Masaryk University (Czech Republic). Her research focuses on political communication and mediated public and political discourses on migration and minority issues. She is also interested in understanding the communication strategies and successes of the populist radical right parties and movements in Central and Eastern Europe.