Abstract
This chapter introduces the social movement organisations (SMOs) staging the protest events reviewed in the book. The latter ranged from an activist protest festival to protest camps or synchronised demonstrations taking place across Europe on the same day of action. The organisations running them shared many traits discussed comparatively in the chapter. Ensuing reflections pinpoint the strategic choices about action repertoires made by the organisations as these interpreted their wider societal and communicational contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
In the latter case, one key agent that may facilitate that transfer are trans-national activists. They have been described as individuals or groups who act in support of ‘goals they hold in common with transnational allies’ (2005, p. 43) both within their own societies and internationally.
- 2.
Pseudonyms are used throughout this thesis to reference the interviews conducted by this author.
- 3.
‘Cooperating Partners of Alburnus Maior’ available on http://www.rosiamontana.org/ [01 March 2008].
- 4.
Badescu and his colleagues examined both the density of NGOs and the nature of their activities as well as the friendship networks stemming from them. They described activist infrastructures as a structural factor fundamental to the development of civil society as well as for mobilisation into collective action (2004, pp. 327–329).
- 5.
The Resource Center for Public Participation together with the Babeş-Bolyai University conducted a survey in August–September 2012 on a representative, multistage, stratified sample of 1100 individuals aged over 18 at the 95 % confidence level, with an error margin of ±3 %. Respondents were asked if they were members of sports, religious, environmental, animal rights, pensioners’, charity, cultural and professional organisations or any other volunteer organisations apart from political parties and trade unions.
- 6.
‘Maybe FânFest could have been a sort of…forum for all sort of organisations, or people or any sort of groups that want to do something for Rosia in the future, for the area or something like that…or a meeting forum for the broader social movement in Romania. But people have said, well, ‘but do we have an environmental movement in Romania? And haven’t we tried, in previous years, to bring environmental NGOs that could run exhibitions and have stalls and to’… And no, they didn’t come and they didn’t do it and (because there are very few militant NGOs, environmental ones, in Romania.. that would want to present their message and do, erm, mobilise people and collect signatures and, you know. I mean, people who would be interested in coming along to such an event because that’s why you come, in the first place, right?! Because the NGOs that get money from Coca-Cola to collect PET containers from the banks of the Dambovita don’t need to come because they don’t see any practical benefit in coming to FânFest’ (Galia 2008).
- 7.
The only prerequisite to participation in the protest festival at Roşia Montană was an interest to discover the village of Roşia Montană and a readiness to explore the festival’s rich programme (Keira 2012) comprising music concerts, theatre plays and activist workshops and culminating with a final demonstration against the mining project.
- 8.
Melucci described how music was instrumental to the spawning of activist groups that convened around the new cultural symbols of social movements. Such symbols would replace the purportedly jaded ‘political forms of collective action’ of the New Left. The latter had been drawing on the established tenets of socialist revolutionary politics. Melucci described the flagging support for the New Left as ‘the crisis of militantism which in turn reflected the steady withdrawal of individuals from Leninist-style politics in the name of self-realization, expressiveness, and affective communication’ (emphasis added, 1989, p. 58).
- 9.
Vernacularly also referred to as the Climate Camp.
- 10.
Radical ecology predicates the fundamental transformation of society that would not only stop but would also reverse those processes that threaten life on the planet (Earth First Journal 2009).
- 11.
The Climate Camp had an NGO policy designed as a consistent response to questions about the stake of large environmental NGOs in its protest. The policy reflected the already recognised scepticism of EDA groups towards such organisations (Larry 2008). The large EMOs, Greenpeace or FoE were not officially involved in the running of the actual camp. Objections to their involvement touched on the long-standing differences between EDA groups and EMOs: the former were organised as heterarchies, the latter as hierarchies. EMOs worked within the polity and sanctioned the conventional mechanisms of political decision-making while EDA groups resorted to using only public demonstrations and disruption in their actions. However, particularly Greenpeace assisted the camp by making available material resources. In part, this ‘background support’ (Larry 2008) may have been offered by Greenpeace as a result of a pragmatic calculation about the benefits of opening a larger protest front against plans to build a new power station at Kingsnorth (Tom 2008). Greenpeace had been running its own campaign against it and had first taken direct action at the power station two months prior to the start of the camp (Benjamin 2007). The Climate Camp was ready to welcome individual members from any environmental NGO, the Green Party, other parties and NGOs as long as they did not canvass the participants for their own benefit. Ultimately, the Camp for Climate Action seemed to be socially integrated into the ‘activist’—as opposed to the conservationist—environmental movement to which Doherty (2002) and Saunders (2007) alluded. Nevertheless, the camp chose to distance itself from that purported movement’s forms of action and organisation and embarked on developing a radical social movement on climate change.
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Mercea, D. (2016). The Protest Events. In: Civic Participation in Contentious Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50869-0_2
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