Session 2: Social Movements and Political Mobilisation

5th Global Conference

Friday 6th November – Sunday 8th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Pro-Immigrant Political Mobilisation in Portugal and Italy: The Role of Civil Society
Sonia Pires
European University Institute, Italy

Few studies consider the role of immigrants as political actors. Despite the blindness of researchers and politicians, Portugal and Italy have witnessed the presence of immigrants and immigrant organisations in their public sphere. In this research, we found out that the type of civil society in host countries has an influential role in the position of actors in social movements and political mobilisation tissues. With a cross-national comparison, we present the results of this line of reasoning.

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Cynical Realism: Evoking the Past through Laughter and Ironic Bodily Performances
Tania Ganito
Institute of Social and Political Sciences – Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal

The economic growth and overall visibility that currently characterize China led to the emergence and development of a strong ‘industry of memory’. Experienced or imagined, commemorative and traumatic memories became important elements in the process of construction, interpretation and negotiation of collective and personal identities in this context of change.

This process of continuous reinvention has often been accompanied by the retrieving of unsettling memories that refer to several dark episodes of RPC’S recent history, which official memory has continuously trying to efface from public view as an effort of self-legitimation. There is, therefore, as in other post-socialist contexts, a fissure between official interpretations of certain historical events and the individual and collective memories of those same events.

The present paper will address these issues focusing on ‘Cynical Realism’ or ‘Sarcastic Realism’, an artistic movement that makes use of sarcasm as a way of expressing the disappointment felt in China in the post-Tian’anmen period. Characterized by cynicism which is represented through laughter and body movements that aim to touch the absurd, the artists that created and developed this movement have been using ironic humor and uncontrolled and unconstrained laughter as mechanisms of exteriorization of their individual as well as of the collective mental state and also as an instrument of contention and criticism, creating what can be defined as a process of ‘counter-memory’.

Through the analysis of the works of some of the main representatives of this artistic movement which encapsulate the spirit and the dilemmas of the generation of artists who lived the 1989 events and the period that followed, I intend to outline how this iconography based on mockery and dissimulated performances of faces and bodies that evoke a sense of total absence of commitment and engagement, have, however, come to challenge the existing political culture.

Explaining the Absence of Social Movements in Light of Unsuccessful Brokerage
Swetha Rao Dhananka
University of Lausanne, Institute of political and international studies, Switzerland

There is a general consensus among scholars of social movement studies on the relation between populations poor on resources, their potential to mobilize and the role of intermediary, brokering organizations. Nevertheless the specific constellation of an intermediary organization (e.g. NGO) being present in the process of translating grievances of the “resourceless” towards government authorities, leading to an unsuccessful brokerage where mobilization does not take place, has been to date not been examined in depth. Under what contextual conditions does mobilization of “resourceless” not occur and what mechanisms are at play to explain the unsuccessful brokerage -in other words the potential demobilizing effect? In this regard the literature will be reviewed in order to formulate hypothesis to explain the absence of social movements on the specific issue of the right to adequate housing that necessitates mobilization in order to bring about change, as other means of conventional grievance articulation as representational politics are dysfunctional. The context of urban India will serve as an illustrative example.

The literature review will result in identifying mainly three strands of arguments of demobilizing effects of brokerage: The first implies the tendency of professionalisation of intermediary organizations, where claims of “the natural constituents” get lost in loops of managing problems by applying technical expertise on specific matters rather than mobilization of people. The second argument consists of the distortion of collective identities in the process of appropriating the grievances of a constituency by the organization. The third argument is closely intertwined with the first two stating that brokering organizations that are in interaction with the state get co-opted, and that the organization might also favor to take in a clientilistic stand to further their own interest.

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