Post-crisis politics, social resistance, and equality policy paths: New social movements and forms of citizens’ cooperation for solidarity

The financial crisis and the anti-austerity social mobilizations generated new questions and concerns with regards to the sufficiency of earlier analytic frameworks in the studies of social movements and contentious politics. By providing an overview of the literature on social movements in the aftermath of the financial crisis, this report outlines recent attempts dedicated to framing the contemporary issues of social, economic and geopolitical inequalities within and also beyond the academic domain. As categories of mobilization, the people or the citizenry are extremely diverse and far-reaching, but the main social profile of protest waves after the crisis still seem to coagulate around the shared experiences of precarious populations, produced by neoliberal forms of governance. After the crisis, populist movements (whether more inclined to the left or the right) established anti-establishment platforms and they mobilized parts of society that have been politically marginalized beforehand. However, their program of popular sovereignty did not entail guarantees for a clear-cut program on social justice, as the reassertion of citizens’ participation could be diverted and channeled into both exclusionary and inclusionary agendas.