Chair: Klaus-Jürgen Nagel

Klaus-Jürgen Nagel is professor of Political Science. His research interests include political theory (nationalism, federalism) and comparative politics (nationalist parties and movements, European Integration). He has also worked on Catalan history (national movement, working class movement, history of the wine sector). He studied social sciences and history at the universities of Münster and Bielefeld and obtained his Staatsexamen in 1981 (in both history and social sciences) and his doctoral degree in 1989 (in philosophy). Before he changed to Pompeu Fabra University, Nagel had worked at Universität Bielefeld (history departament) and Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (social sciences department).

 

Ulrich Brand, University of Vienna, Beyond the imperial mode of living. Multiple crises and emerging alternatives from below.

In conjunction with the workshop “Managing crises from below? Civil society initiatives and social movements in the context of the current crises in Europe”, Professor Ulrich Brand, Head of the Department of Political Science at Vienna University (Austria) will give the keynote lecture.

Ulrich Brand will outline some key features of the current multiple crises of capitalism, focusing on the ecological crisis and its interaction with other crisis phenomena (financial crisis, crisis of democracy, economic crisis). Then he introduces the concept of an imperial mode of living in order to better understand the everyday practices and perceptions as well as the social relations of forces and institutional constellations that facilitate environmentally destructive patterns of production and consumption. The imperial mode of living is also interpreted a key cause for the crisis of crisis management.

Therefore, approaches from below are needed to develop new ideas how the multiple crises can be dealt with. What is the role of critical civil society and emancipatory social movements in Europe? Brand will particularly look at the Climate Justice Movement.

Ulrich Brand has taught at the Universities of Frankfurt/Main, Kassel and Bremen in Germany and at Rutgers University in New Jersey in USA. Since 2007 he has been Professor for International Politics at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Vienna. His main research interests are international politics, critical analyses of globalization and its political regulation, the role of the state and the economy, civil society and social movements in these processes, ecological crises, global environmental governance and socio-ecological transformation with a focus on resource, energy and climate policy. His regional focuses are on Latin America and South-east Asia, developments in Western and Eastern Europe and in the USA. He has spent extended periods of research in the USA, Mexico and Canada.

Chair: Klaus Stolz

Klaus Stolz is political scientist and professor of British and American Studies at Chemnitz University of Technology. He works in the field of comparative politics (with a special focus on the United Kingdom). His research interests include territorial politics, regionalism, nationalism, political careers and political professionalization. He studied English, history and politics at Universität Freiburg, where he also obtained his doctoral degree (1997, politics). Before joining Technische Universität Chemnitz he taught at Universität Mannheim, Universität Göttingen (habilitation 2007, politics) and Universität Freiburg before joining the Technische Universität Chemnitz in 2008.

Thomas Laux, TUC, What makes a global movement? Analyzing the conditions for a strong participation in the climate strike.

The protests of Fridays for Future and the related global climate strikes have put climate change on the political agenda worldwide and have generated a new generation of climate activists. The emergence of a global movement is a rare and contingent phenomenon that promises both insights for the sociology of globalization and social movement research. This study applies a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of 17 democracies to analyze the conditions of the strong mobilization for the third global climate strike. The findings include four equifinal mechanisms that are sufficient to explain the mobilization of the movement on a national level: path dependence; the availability of resources through INGOs; frame resonance; path dependence in combination with social movement spillover.

Thomas Laux is Juniorprofessor / Assistant Professor for European Culture and Civil Society at the Institute for European Studies and History of the Technische Universität Chemnitz. Before, he was postdoctoral researcher at Bamberg University and the TU Chemnitz. He recieved his doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Heidelberg. In 2017, Thomas Laux was visiting researcher (invited) at the Collège d'Études Mondiales of the Fondation Maison des Sciences l'Homme in Paris. He works in the field of political and comparative sociology and is interested in social movements, civil society, globalization and institutional change.

 

Marta Conde Puigmal, UPF, Degrowth as a possible path to address the multiple crisis.

The current climate crisis is just the tip of the iceberg of a multi-faceted crisis in the Global North. More and more thinkers are pointing to the imperative of growth and development as the root cause of this crisis. Why should GDP growth drive our society? GDP only measures economic throughput,  regardless if this is good or bad for us or our environment. In order to tackle the multiple crisis we are confronting degrowth is being put forward as an umbrella of alternative ideas and struggles. The underlying idea is a ruthless critique of the dogma of economic growth and the hypothesis that downscaling the economy is inevitable and desirable and can be a more convivial and equalitarian path. False solutions such as green growth are being currently put forward by industry lobbies and governments (in attempt to maintain profit) however, as I will explain, these will not solve the ecological crisis we are facing, let alone the increasing inequality in society. As a possible alternative path, I will explain the need for degrowth in relation to the current climate crisis and other societal needs such as wellbeing, democracy, justice and ecofeminism.

Marta Conde is currently co-PI in the Recercaixa project  ‘Activism Mobilising Science’ with the University Pompeu Fabra. Her research looks at social reactions to the expansion of extractive industries at the commodity frontiers. Her research has expanded to analyse the interaction between science and activism and knowledge co-production processes. She has linked her research to the environmental justice movement and degrowth, exploring how these groups are contesting successfully the imperative of endless economic growth.

 

Piotr Kocyba, TUC, Fridays for Future: A New Generation of Climate Activism. Findings Based on Protestsurvey Data.

Fridays for Future (FFF) has had a sustainable impact on the public discourse, drawing attention to the climate crisis in most Western democracies and beyond. As a consequence, the societal and political awareness for the huge challenge humankind is now facing has significantly grown, and the first major political decisions were taken – the Green Deal proclaimed by the new European Commission, envisaging net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, is one of the most prominent examples. FFF’s success – even though FFF was surely not the only or even main reason for the proclamation of political programs like the Green Deal – is based mainly on its ability to mobilize a large number of demonstrators in dozens of cities all over the globe.

The here presented paper will focus on these street protests and show who participated in the FFF demonstrations and why. Based on empirical data which was collected in four survey waves in more than 18 cities on three continents (nearly 20.000 approached demonstrators and 4.000 filled in questionnaires) we will discuss the sociodemographic background of the protestors, their mobilizations patterns, their motives, and problem-solving expectations. The international network of social scientists who collected the data used mainly the well-established Contextualizing Contestation: Caught in the Act of Protest project-methodology to survey FFF participants. This will allow not only to show who the Fridays for future demonstrators are and how they differ between the cities and mobilization waves but also to compare the data with data collected at 51 demonstrations (more than 15.000 responses). Thus, we will see how the specific FFF demonstrations differ besides the common mobilization flag and how the significant presence of young protest first-timers influences the character of those events.

Piotr Kocyba is working at the Chair for Central and Eastern European Studies at Chemnitz University of Technology and is affiliated with the Institute for Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He studied Political Science and Slavonic Studies at the University of Regensburg and earned his PhD at Technische Universität Dresden. His research focuses on (mainly right-wing) protests in post-communist Europe. He is currently realizing a grant that allows him to survey demonstrations in Poland (11/2018-10/2021).

Chair: Jaume López-Hernández.

Jaume López-Hernández. Lecturer of Political Science at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). PhD in Political Science (UPF), MSc in Philosophy of Social Sciences (London School of Economics and Political Science), BA in Political Science and Sociology (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). Research areas: right to self-determination, direct democracy and social innovation, collective action, and epistemology of social sciences.

 

Hanne Schneider, TUC, Bottom-up democracy? The role of civil society in small localities.

Civil society initiatives constitute an important part of democratic societies within communities through participation of citizen and can contribute to ‘crisis management’. As there is a wide range of forms of engagement many of them are founded locally and operate at the municipal level, e.g. non-governmental organisations (NGOs), trade unions, social movements, grassroot activist organisations, welfare organisations. Also, a German wide survey of volunteers showed that the numbers of citizens engaged in civil society initiatives are the highest at the local level. Most people engage within their neighbourhood or close to their place of residence. The survey shows that the engagement rates in rural areas are appreciably higher compared to larger cities. Therefore, this contribution considers – from a spatially sensitive perspective – the specifics of small communities and their local environments for civil society movements. Villages and small towns have a limited number of civil society initiatives; on the other hand, these initiatives may engage and impact directly into local politics and rely on strong personal community networks. Also, people from rural areas are more often part of charitable initiatives as shown in several surveys. In recent years, bottom-up initiatives arose especially in the context of the sharply increased refugee reception in Germany. In this so-called ‘refugee crisis’ the civil society was key to solve first reception and integration measurements for migrants directly on the ground. NGOs and other societal actors were confronted with new tasks but also with a series of changes in national and state level law.                                                    

Hence, the contribution contains an introduction to recent local civil society movements in Germany emphasising the local dimension. The lecture assumes that the civil society initiatives for refugees have driven new governmental approaches but also built new networks which are able to strengthen the local civil society. The lecture gives insights in empirical observations and field work in small localities from a joint research project in 40 German communities.

Hanne Schneider received her M.A. in International Migration from the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) in Osnabrück (Germany). Her major research interests are Local Integration Processes, Civil Society, European Migration Governance and Labour Migration. Before she started working at Chemnitz University of Technology in 2018, she was a Research Associate at the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) and worked in the non-profit-sector at Robert-Bosch-Foundation. Besides, she works as a freelancer e.g. for Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation or the International Centre for Migration Policy Development.

 

Ivan Serrano Balaguer, UPF, Rethinking the multilevel boundaries of solidarity.      

Universal solidarity is a pillar of the social-democratic tradition. Yet, at the same time, a rich sociological literature shows that solidarity is bounded. Hence, social-democratic parties often face a dilemma between the universalist ethos of their socialist tradition and the banal or hot nationalism that they share with other political actors of the specific territory where they act. The current literature on nationalism and welfare tends to examine the link between identity and welfare either with reference to the inclusion/exclusion of newcomers or by looking at the determination of separatist movements to withdraw from the system of ‘national’ solidarity of the parent state. So far the literature has not deeply discussed this tension between the particularism of nationalism and the universalism of egalitarianism which is at the core progressive ideologies, let alone to approach state-nationalism and sub-state nationalism under the same framework of analysis.

The boundaries of the community and the individual rights are intertwined dimensions in any political ideology. In the interaction between nationalism and leftist or progressive discourses, relevant tensions emerge between these two elements; at a temptative level we could enumerate elements such as the universal and the particular, equality and recognition, inter-personal and inter-group solidarity. These tensions take different forms when we focus on state-wide and regional pro-independence leftist parties, reflecting in different ways the tensions between the community and the individual.

More particularly, the way solidarity is justified from a state-nationalism perspective or somehow rejected from sub-state nationalisms has to do with the legitimization of political boundaries in national terms, and in this sense we would follow the framework already developed in Dalle Mulle & Serrano (2019) to the particular case of leftist ideologies both at the state and sub-state level.

Ivan Serrano is PhD in Political Science from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He is currently Senior Lecturer at the Department of Law and Political Science of the Opeen University of Catalonia (UOC). His areas of interest deal with political theory, nationalism and ethnicity, often combining normative and empirical approaches including electoral analysis. He has published in different journals such as Ethnicities, Nations and Nationalism, Regional and Federal Studies or Territory, Governance and Politics. 

 

Andreu Paneque Martin, UPF, Podemos, still a movement party? The effect of political party’s institutionalization.

After the irruption of Podemos in the European elections in May 2014 and their access to the Spanish parliament in 2015, the literature defined the new political organization as an example of movement party. In that sense, the researchers underlined the hybrid character of the new political actor, between a political party and an anti-austerity movement. Precisely, the literature defines their roots in the protests politics during the years of austerity, specifically with the 15M movement. And then, in terms of political organization, the literature underlines the horizontal and participatory organization of the political movement.

So, despite the fact that in the literature exist a general consensus that Podemos, at first, was a movement party, it is important to analyse, if after the political party gain several political position along the different levels Spanish state institutions, the political organization can still be considered a movement party.

In fact, the article wants to analyse if Podemos is suffering the same evolution as the Green’s parties suffered after they enter in the electoral political party competition, and they started to play the parties' political game of negotiation. In other words, we want to analyse if after the process of party institutionalization, Podemos changed its condition of movement party and became a professional-electoral party, changing their internal organizational, the political strategies and finally referring to the party frame strategy.

For that reason, the article analyses the effects that the process of institutionalization produces on the internal organization of Podemos. Analysing the evolution of the party institutionalization since 2014 to 2020, detecting changes on the internal organization and on political strategies.

Andreu Paneque Martin   is a pre-doctoral researcher in the research group on Institutions and Political actors at Pompeu Fabra University. His research interests include political parties, political elites and political professionalization. He gained the first Andorran scholarship called "Consell de la Terra" for his PhD investigation. He studied his BA and MA in political science at Pompeu Fabra University.

Chair: Cecile Sandten

Cecile Sandten is Professor for English Literatures at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. She is the author of Broken Mirrors: Interkulturalität am Beispiel der indischen Lyrikerin Sujata Bhatt (1998) and Shakespeare's Globe, Global Shakespeares: Transcultural Adaptations of Shakespeare in Postcolonial Literatures (2015). She published widely on Indian English, Asian British and postcolonial writing. She has edited and co-edited collected works on the representation of the (postcolonial) metropolis, on cities, on conceptualisations of ‘home’, or on crisis, asylum and refugeeism. She obtained her doctoral and postdoctoral degrees from the Bremen University (1997; 2007). Before she joined the TUC, she taught at the universities of Bremen, Aalborg (Denmark) and Hannover.

 

Stephan Liebscher, TUC/FU Berlin, Towards a municipalist transformation of the European border regime? Solidarity between local struggles on hegemony, translocal diffusion and pandemic-related legislation.

Solidarity movements and initiatives across Europe such as the grassroots network Solidarity City, the safe harbour initiatives and legislation to regularise undocumented migrants during the Covid-19-pandemic actively contribute to shaping an alternative solidarity-based Europe. As response to the crisis of the European border regime they formulate policy prototypes ‘from below’ that not only aim at welcoming refugees, but also strive to fostering social justice and institutional change in order to provide municipal services to all local residents regardless of their residence status.

The presentation elaborates on an analytical framework for this kind of ‘crisis management from below’. Thus, it reflects the current lack of research in two research fields: On the one hand, conventional research on the conception and implementation of integration and diversity policies neglects to reflect on the relevance of power relations and struggles of migration (Braun et al., 2018). On the other hand, contemporary critical migration and border regime research has comprehensively unveiled the spatio-political, administrative, legislative and discursive conditions of the European border regime as well as autonomous migrant practices evading state-led attempts to control, surveil and – lately also – criminalise transnational movements (Hess et al., 2017). However, the rather antagonistic view on the relationship between migration and the state cannot fully make sense of the emerging ties between radical social movements and municipal administrations.

Building on critical migration and border regime research, I will add concepts such as spatio-temporal articulation and transformation that originate in critical urban studies (Brenner, Peck, & Theodore, 2010) and critical transformation research (Brand & Brie, 2014), respectively. Discussing their conceptual potential to grasp the above-mentioned efforts to establish a counter-hegemonic figuration to the current European Border regime in crisis, I propose a threefold analytical lense: first, struggles on hegemony inside municipal institutions; second, the diffusion of visions of solidarity and concrete policy prototypes; and third, the role of ‘windows of opportunity’ – as observed during the Covid-19-pandemic - for progressive legislation. Relying on empirical data from qualitative interviews and policy documents, I want to give first impressions from the field.

Stephan Liebscher is a member of the working group “Globalisation, Transformation, Gender” at the Department of Geography at Freie Universität Berlin since October 2019. In his doctoral research, Stephan focusses on possibilities of shaping a plural, post-migrant society in urban spaces and through multiscalar practices. Previously, he worked at TU Chemnitz and as a consultant for municipalities focusing on young refugees (2016-2018). During his studies at the universities of Passau, Granada and Osnabrück, his main subjects have been social geography, migration theory and border regime research.

Gülce Safak Özdemir, UPF, Building pro-refugee solidarity in Barcelona: Rethinking multistakeholder relations.

The mode of solidarity is largely a function of the various resources of the society and how these resources are used by stakeholders within the existing structure of networks and institutions. Thereof, this theoretical-driven article seeks for a meso-level analysis by focusing on pro-refugee1 solidarity in Barcelona after 2015. The core question of this article is “How do stakeholders build pro-refugee solidarity by mobilizing resources at the local level?”.

Since the long summer of migration in 2015, Barcelona has been showing a welcoming attitude towards newcomers despite of the low numbers of arrivals. This pro-refugee attitude has been shaped by the strategic alliance between various stakeholders from Municipality of Barcelona to civil society organisations through mobilizing different resources (e.g. material, organisational, human resources and so on). Therefore, this article proposes a detailed exploration of these stakeholders and how they mobilize resources to promote pro-refugee solidarity within the case study in Barcelona. I argue that “Building strategic alliance between relevant stakeholders by mobilizing various resources strengthen pro-refugee solidarity at the local level.”.

Although bottom-up approach, local turn, and multi-stakeholder approach (MSA) have been promoted within agendas of the global level organisations (e.g. United Nations), a little attention has been paid on these particular subjects in the current literature. In this respect, this case study focuses on a bottom-up approach to understand pro-refugee building at the local level by combining Resource Mobilization Theory and Multi-stakeholder Approach. In the course of this exploration, I first analyse the policy narratives of Spain and EU policies as a background. Aftermath, I examine concrete levels of analysis: Catalan and Barcelona local governments, and then Non-Governmental Organisations and solidarity associations. All these content analyses enable me to propose a stakeholder analysis as a tool to understand the link between MSA and pro-refugee solidarity. The findings of this article are taken as theoretical background for the further investigation based on empirical data.

Gülce Safak Özdemir is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra(UPF), where she has finished her Master in Migration Studies. She is a member of Interdisciplinary Research Group on Immigration (GRITIM-UPF). Her Ph.D. project focuses on building pro-refugee solidarity in Barcelona by focusing on strategic partnership of various stakeholders and mobilized resources. Since March 2019, she has been working as a research assistant for the Euro-Mediterranean Research Network on Migration (EuroMedMig) funded by Erasmus + Jean Monnet Network Program. She is also part of IMISCOE (International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion) Ph.D. network, actively working on the Networking Group.

Olatz Ribera Almandoz, UPF, Social housing not social cleansing. Contemporary struggles for housing in Spain and the UK.

After a state-backed period of growing property and financial market expansion, promotion of mortgaged homeownership and abandonment of social housing policies, the collapse of housing and mortgage markets in 2007/8 aggravated a crisis of social reproduction that had been decades in the making. The credit shortage and a subsequent decrease in mortgage advances brought a sharp decrease in housing transactions and a sudden drop in housing prices. In addition, the escalation of unemployment and job precariousness facilitated by years of steady labour market deregulation and flexibilisation, and the imposition of drastic pro-cyclical austerity measures to reduce government budget deficits contributed to a fall in living standards and a growth in everyday vulnerability.

These trends were particularly significant in Spain and the United Kingdom, where housing inequalities were exacerbated and hundreds of thousands of households unable to pay their rents or mortgages faced repossession and eviction. This sparked a wave of community-based struggles that emerged to defend and self-enforce the right to decent and affordable housing. Through the adoption of practices of civil disobedience and direct action to stop evictions and re-house homeless people, these grassroots housing movements have responded to the double goal of mitigating the impact of the crisis on highly vulnerable individuals and families while actively contributing to the construction of community-centred and self-managed spaces of social reproduction. This paper builds on the qualitative research performed with two anti-evictions movements, the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) in Spain and Focus E15 in the UK, including interviews with key members and activist participant observation of actions and campaign meetings. It explores these housing struggles’ autonomous, prefigurative politics and forms of organising, their multi-scalar dynamics and the pragmatic (dis-)engagement with institutional politics in the midst of the ongoing processes of welfare state dismantling, financialization and privatisation of everyday lives.

Olatz Ribera-Almandoz is a Researcher at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB). Her research focuses on the interactions between social movements and public institutions in the context of multilevel states, with special focus on the (new) demands of social justice, welfare and housing. She completed a PhD in Political and Social Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and has been a visiting scholar at The University of Manchester, and a member of the Johns Hopkins University-Universitat Pompeu Fabra Public Policy Center.

Alberto Jiménez Iglesias, UPF, Organizing the political subject: the PAHC Sabadell.

The PAH has been one of the most salient social movement in Spain’s last two decades, with its outstanding capacities for organization and discourse generation built around emerging forms of debt-based precariousness and socio-economic exclusion. It has thus been largely seen as a success story but, has the PAH -in any of its multiple incarnations- been able to form a new political subject? This article aims to explore the relations between the different organizational forms and the different subjectivation capacities through the study of the PAHC Sabadell, as well as to provide the basis for a further substantive analysis of the resulting subjectivation processes. It does so by focusing on an analytic triangle formed by the movement's organization, its socio-economic context and its composition; and on the evolution through time of the combinations of these three elements and their relation to experiences of subalternity, antagonism and autonomy. This analysis identifies three phases (metaphorically named feint, parry and riposte) in the dialectical relation between the aforementioned elements, as well as two overarching processes of political re-composition and de-composition of a potentially class-relevant subject within the PAHC.

Albert Jiménez is a Phd. Candidate at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) with a thesis on social movements and the economic crisis structured around a case study on the Mortgage Victims Platform. He holds two BA's in Law and Political Science (UPF), an MA in Education (UAB). He has worked as both research and teaching assistant at the UPF, where he is currently the recipient of a PIPF grant. His current line of research, focuses on the effects of financialisation on housing and the articulation of political subjects within social movilisations. He recently patricipated and helped organize Historical Materialism’s 2019 International Conference in Barcelona.

Chair: Javier Astudillo

Javier Astudillo is associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain).  He is the author of various works on interest groups and political parties published in several international journals such as Politics & Society, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Party Politics, European Journal of Political Research and British Journal of Political Science among others. He is also one of the Spanish coordinators of the Political Party Database Project (https://www.politicalpartydb.org/). He is currently working on the relationship between party organization and chief executives at national and regional levels in Western parliamentary democracies.

 

Daniel Ziesche, TUC, From the street to the parliament: The ‘emotional turn’ in politics and the crisis of western democracies.

According to several commentators, we are currently experiencing an “age of protest”; we are living in a “protest society”. Starting in the 2000s, protest spiralled in numbers on a global scale. In Europe, at least partially, this is also due to a rise in right-wing, nationalist sentiments which have taken to the streets following the Greek “bail-out” process starting 2010 and the “refugee crisis” peak in 2015. On a different side of the political spectrum, anti-austerity protests, following closely in the footsteps of the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, made way to the recent surge of the environmental movement. In their essence, all of these movements criticize the globalised, exploitative character of capitalism and challenge the neoliberal hegemonic formation.

While the motives and general tone of the proclaimed “solutions” differ in many ways, there are certain characteristics which these movements share. All movements have been in some ways successful in bringing their topic to attention and defining the political agenda within crucial windows of opportunity. Also, many of them developed institutions which succeeded the open and flat hierarchies and decentralized organizational structures of their early days. And, most of all: Many formed parties which entered the political process directly and thus altered their respective political systems.

The more or less direct transition of the movements’ agendas into the political sphere has led to what has been called “the politicization of emotions” (Frevert 2019). By presenting and comparing cases from different countries and timeframes, the explorative paper asks whether the mode of combining movements and parties and the subsequent ‘emotional turn’ in politics is indeed the solution to prevent a state of “post-democracy” (Crouch 2008). Also, does this strategy improve the effective impact of movements, which are often regarded as rather unsuccessful in reaching their aims? Or, does this liquefaction of the borders between street and parliament pose yet another threat to the functionality and legitimacy of the democratic institutions?

Daniel Ziesche studied Political Science and British and American Studies at Chemnitz University of Technology. His doctoral thesis will be published in Spring 2017 by Palgrave Macmillan and is titled “Organizational Crisis and Issues of Legitimacy in Lower League Football”. Research interests include grass-roots organisations and self-governance, protest and direct action, as well as sports and collective identities.

 

Danny Coposescu, TUC, Ballismus, commercialism and giving wings to grassroots identities in the stands at RB Leipzig.

As even their most ardent supporters would admit, there is no more controversial and widely derided football club in Germany than RB Leipzig. Created from scratch by the energy drink firm Red Bull and part of a sprawling global franchise, it is seen as emblematic of the worst excesses in modern football. Critics argue that its underlying concept and penchant for legal loopholes endanger the foundations of traditional German football culture.

And yet, one of these loopholes could have inadvertently led to the blossoming of a distinct fan identity, one built and maintained in over and above – and sometimes in contrast to – the omnipresent principal sponsor. The term RasenBallsport (lawn ball sports) was chosen for its convenient abbreviation, since German sports legislation prohibits Red Bull from including the company name in the club’s official title. However, some active supporter groups have latched on to this compromise and claimed it as a basis for their attempts to establish an ultra-style culture in the stands. Aside from specific modes of organization and practices in supporting the team, the latter is mostly characterized by sustained political engagement with the issues of commercialization and democratic representation. As such, RB Leipzig ultras have often been critical of their own club structures, yet not fundamentally opposed to corporate sponsorship; politically active, yet not ideologically against commercialism. Consequently, they walk a fine line between the realities of modern elite football and the counterreaction to it.

This paper aims to examine the complex, often contradictory position of RB Leipzig ultras, both within their unique home environment and the wider ultra movement in European football. It will present these groups’ self-understanding and manifestations in the context of responses to what Kennedy and Kennedy (2015) have termed ‘the tumult in the European professional game caused by deregulation and liberalization’. Analysing the RB Leipzig ultras’ efforts to navigate these pressures can reveal much about the potential of the ultra phenomenon to successfully challenge the dominant economic forces in football, as well as its limits.

Danny Coposescu is a philosophy and European studies graduate who has been focusing on linking political theory and football. After completing my master’s degree with a dissertation on political concepts in football, I’m now continuing the theme in a PhD project examining politicized supporter groups (ultras) at RB Leipzig. This project focuses on the presence and development of an essentially anti-commercial fan culture at one of the most controversial commercially-geared clubs in European football, as well as its implications for the potential of the sport to politicize its adherents.

Chair: Jaume López-Hernández

Jaume López-Hernández. Lecturer of Political Science at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). PhD in Political Science (UPF), MSc in Philosophy of Social Sciences (London School of Economics and Political Science), BA in Political Science and Sociology (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). Research areas: right to self-determination, direct democracy and social innovation, collective action, and epistemology of social sciences.

 

Joana Pujol (ANC) & Elena Jimenez iBotias (OC), Multiple crises and crisis management from below – the example of Catalonia.

In the closing session of the workshop with the two activists from the Catalan independence movement, Joana Pujol (from the Assemblea Nacional Catalana - ANC) and Elena Jimenez i Botias (from Omnium Cultural – OC), the associate professor Jaume Lopez (from the UPF in Barcelona) will discuss the topic “Multiple crises and crisis management from below – the example of Catalonia”. Besides giving an assessment of the current situation of the Catalan movement and crisis the discussion will also be about proposed solutions and strategies as well as practices with regards to multiple crises. Public perception of the Catalan movement often reduces it to its striving for independence. This idea, however, falls short as the desire for independence is also linked to the desire for changes in society. The central questions are therefore how are the current crises (ecological, political, social and economic) evaluated on the part of the independence movement, what demands in this respect are being made by the movement, what current (socio-ecological) practices are there in Catalonia and what should a future, independent Catalan society look like?

Elena Jiménez-Botías (Barcelona, 1978). Associate Lecturer in Political Science at University of Barcelona (UB), teaching world politics and protection of civilians in armed conflicts. PhD in Political Science and BA in Law. Board Member- International Representative of Omnium Cultural, a cultural NGO based in Barcelona with more than 180,000 members and its president, Jordi Cuixart, in prison, sentenced to nine years for having organised a peaceful demonstration in 2017.