‘You are not a loan’: contentious debt politics since the North Atlantic Financial Crisis

ABSTRACT

Debt has constituted a pivotal theme of both older and more recent mobilizations and critical public debate. While academia has started new discussions about debt relations, literature on resistance against debt is relatively scarce and mostly focuses on the Global South before the North Atlantic Financial Crisis. The aim of this article is to contribute to filling this gap by studying debt-centered movements in recent anti-austerity politics. The article will argue that the 2007/2008 financial crisis has exacerbated debt-related grievances in the Global North to a degree already common across the Global South. I will argue that and show how in response to this spillover established debt abolition networks decided to now also work on Northern debt, while new movement networks for debt justice emerged from within and as a constitutive part of the 2010/2011 anti-austerity and pro-democracy protests.

KEYWORDS:

• Debt
• contentious politics
• anti-austerity movements
• financialization

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Donatella della Porta, John Krinsky, James Jasper, and Sabrina Zajak for comments that greatly improved this text.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 I define ‘contentious debt politics’ as ‘collective political struggle’ (McAdam et al., 2001) over debt and the rules that govern it.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christoph Sorg

Christoph Sorg is a Postdoc at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, with a PhD from Humboldt-University Berlin (and a scholarship by the Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence). For the research of this paper, he was a visiting researcher at the sociology departments of UC Berkeley and New York University and conducted fieldwork in Tunisia, Egypt, the US, and several European countries. His research links critical political economy and social movement studies, with a particular focus on struggles around debt and financialization. In other research, he also works on global value chains, worker rights, digitalization, participatory planning, and intersectional theories of capitalism.