Contesting Austerity and Free Trade in the EU: Protest Diffusion in Complex Media and Political Arenas

The book explores the diffusion of protest against austerity and free trade agreements in the wave of contention that shook the EU following the 2008 economic crisis.

It discusses how protests against austerity and free trade agreements manifested a wider discontent with the constitutionalization of economic policy and the way economic decisions have been insulated from democratic debate. It also explores the differentiated politicization of these issues and the diffusion of protests across Western as well as Eastern Europe, which has often been neglected in studies of the post-crisis turmoil. Julia Rone emphasizes that far from being an automatic spontaneous process, protest diffusion is highly complex, and its success or failure can be impacted by the strategic agency and media practices of key political players involved such as bottom-up activists, as well as trade unions, political parties, NGOs, intellectuals and mainstream media.

This is an important resource for media and communications students and scholars with an interest in activism, political economy, social movement studies and protest movements.

Julia Rone is a Wiener-Anspach postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge and the Université libre de Bruxelles. She has a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence with a thesis on mobilizations against free trade agreements. Julia has taught and supervised at the University of Cambridge, University of Florence, the University of Sofia and the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. Her current research explores contestations over sovereignty in the UK, Poland and Belgium. She has written on hacktivism, digital disobedience, and more recently, the rise of far right media in Europe.