The reconfiguration of social movements in post-2011 Romania

ABSTRACT

Since 2011, a series of citizen mobilizations have emerged in Romania, from local replicas of the ‘Occupy’ movement to the 2017 and 2018 mass protests against corruption. In this article, we develop three arguments for a better understanding of the successive waves of protests that have shaken the Romanian social and political landscape since 2011. First, while each protest has a specific claim and target, the forms of commitments, repertoire of actions and relationship to politics point to clear continuities between protest events that should be analyzed as part of the same cycle of protests. Second, while some analyses have emphasized the specificities of the Romanian context, we maintain that the actors and dynamics of this cycle of protest are simultaneously deeply national, embedded in the mutations of Eastern European civil society, and in resonance with the post-2011 global wave of movements. Third, while it is indispensable to analyze these citizen mobilizations as a whole, it is equally important to understand that they result from the convergence of diverse activist cultures, from left-wing autonomist activists to right-wing citizens and even nationalist militants. Each of these activist cultures has its own logic of action and its vision of democracy and of politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• Romania
• civil society
• activist cultures
• democracy
• Central and Eastern Europe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Liberal entrepreneurs’ and ‘alter-activists’ are analytical categories that we have built based on our interviews and fieldwork. These expressions are not used by the actors and refer to cultures of activism that are heuristic concepts that do not exist in a pure form in reality.

2. Expression used by the president Traian Basescu in the context of the adoption of austerity measures in 2010 and adopted by some activists.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme [FMSH/USPC Nuit Debout et nouvelles formes de mobil].

Notes on contributors

Raluca Abăseacă

Raluca Abăseacă is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (ICUB), Social Science Division and an Associate Researcher at SMAG, University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium (2016) with a thesis focusing on social movements in Central and Eastern Europe in the context of the economic crisis of 2008. She has recently published in journals such as Nationalities Papers and East European Politics.

Geoffrey Pleyers

Geoffrey Pleyers is a FNRS researcher and Professor at the UCLouvain, Belgium, where he chairs the SMAG (Social Movements in the Global Age) research team. He is the vice-president of the International Sociological Association (ISA), the former chair of the ISA Committee 47 ‘Social movements’ and an associated researcher at the Collège d’Etudes Mondiales (FMSH Paris). He is the founding editor (with Breno Bringel) of ‘Open Movements: For a global and public sociology of social movements’