Spreading Protest: Social Movements in Times of Crisis

Which elements do the Arab Spring, the Indignados and Occupy Wall Street have in common? How do they differ? What do they share with social movements of the past? This book discusses the recent wave of global mobilisations from an unusual angle, explaining what aspects of protests spread from one country to another, how this happened, and why diffusion occurred in certain contexts but not in others. In doing this, the book casts light on the more general mechanisms of protest diffusion in contemporary societies, explaining how mobilisations travel from one country to another and, also, from past to present times.Bridging different fields of the social sciences, and covering a broad range of empirical cases, this book develops new theoretical perspectives.

Donatella della Porta is Professor of Political Science at the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane (on leave of absence) and Professor of Sociology in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. In 2011, she was awarded the Mattei Dogan Prize for distinguished achievements in the field of political sociology. Her main fields of research are social movements, the policing of public order, participatory democracy, and political corruption. Among her very recent publications are: Mobilizing for Democracy. Comparing 1989 and 2011 (Oxford University Press 2014); Can Democracy be Saved? (Polity Press 2013); Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Social and Political Movements (edited with D. Snow, B. Klandermans, and D. McAdam, Blackwell 2013); Clandestine Political Violence (Cambridge University Press 2013); Mobilizing on the Extreme Right (with M. Caiani and C. Wagemann, Oxford University Press 2012); Meeting Democracy (co-edited with D. Rucht, Cambridge University Press 2012).



Alice Mattoni is a research fellow in the Centre for Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) at the European University Institute, working with the Anticorrpt research team. Before joining COSMOS, she was a Postdoctoral Associate Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Alice obtained her Master of Research and PhD in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. She is a co-convener of the ECPR Standing Group Participation and Mobilization and an editor of Interface: a Journal for and about Social Movements. Among her recent publications are Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change: Advances in the visual analysis of social movements (co-edited with N. Doerr and S. Teune, Emerald 2013); Mediation and Protest Movements(co-edited with B. Cammaerts and P. McCurdy, Intellect 2013); and Media Practices and Protest Politics. How precarious workers mobilise (Ashgate 2012).