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Repertoires of counter-contention: conceptualizing institutional responses to social movements
(2016)
The ways in which political authorities respond to societal challenges is a key element in the interaction between social movements and state institutions. Two conceptual distinctions are important when studying such repertoires of counter-contention: authorities’ responses may (1) aim at either including or excluding challengers, and they may (2) either respect their autonomy or try to control them.
This is the ninth article in our series Trouble on the Far-Right.
Since around 1990, the state of the Austrian far right1 has been characterized by the strength of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ – Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, more precisely translated as Freedomite Party of Austria2) and the relative weakness of extra-parliamentarian far right activism. Far from a mere coincidence, these two features are to be understood as closely linked: the FPÖ’s electoral successes have brought far right causes and talking points unto the political center stage on a national level, given them ample media coverage and made street militancy increasingly pointless. Insofar, the Austrian far right spectrum could – at least until recently – be described as a photographic negative of the situation in Germany: successful party politics, weak bottom-up mobilizations and a comparatively low incidence of street violence. Currently, however, the long held hopes of German right-wingers for a party both in the mold, and strength, of the FPÖ are apparently being fulfilled by the emergence of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Conversely, both legal and illegal street activism have been on the rise in Austria in recent years, particularly since the start of the asylum crisis in Europe. Numerous violent incidents were reported in 2015, including a minimum of 25 attacks on housing facilities for asylum seekers.
Terrorism isn't new to the country; in its history, France has experienced a significant number of attacks. In 1995, the GIA-affiliated terrorist network of which Khaled Kelkal was part conducted several attacks, as did the Al Qaida-affiliated gang de Roubaix one year later; but until Mohammed Merah’s murders in 2012 in Toulouse and Montauban, terrorist attacks were treated as political violence in the context of anti-colonial struggles or connected to other kinds of violent conflicts abroad, such as the Bosnian War, rather than as religiously inspired or connected to social, societal and/or political issues within the country, or as some sort of atypical pathology. Terrorist perpetrators, their networks and milieus were met with repressive instruments – a wider angle of analysis which would have allowed to tackle the threat from a more holistic perspective had not been incorporated in a counter-terrorism policy design.
This is the last post in the blog series „Movements and Institutions“. Check out the introductory post for more information on the series and click here for all contributions.
This blog series reflected on the interactions between social movements and institutions. These interactions have proven to be among the most complicated areas of social movement research, especially because causality is very hard to establish: (how) do movements influence formal political institutions – and vice versa? How to study, understand and explain the consequences of the institutionalization of social movements? The difficulties of addressing these questions are also related to definitional problems as social movements and institutions can be understood and defined in various ways. All authors contributing to this blog series highlight the importance of studying interactions between social movements from one perspective or another.
This is the sixth article in our series Trouble on the Far-Right.
As everywhere else in Eastern Europe, ever since the fall of the communist regime, Romania’s political system has experienced dramatic changes from one electoral cycle to another, starting off with what was considered to be an inflation of political parties at the beginning of the 1990’s and arriving today at what seems to approximate a two-party system, with the Social-Democratic Party (PSD) on the left and the National Liberal Party (PNL) on the right side of the political spectrum. However, the fog surrounding the ideological identities of virtually all Romanian political parties has only intensified in time, leaving the party system in flux and creating the idea that there are no significant differences between the major political players. As was the case of many other countries, this situation has generated the (at least partial) success of a radical anti-establishment discourse. However, unlike other European countries, the far right in Romania did not benefit by the financial crisis...
This is the 13. article in our series Trouble on the Far-Right.
The environment for populist radical right (PRR) parties in Europe is favourable. Both the refugee crisis as well as the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels have ostensibly fuelled further xenophobic and anti-Islam sentiments among European publics, on the basis of which PRR parties have been shown to build their support. Recent elections in Europe have indeed seen good results for parties with an outspoken xenophobic message, the victories in March 2016 for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the German regional elections and two far right parties (SNS and L’SNS) in the Slovak national elections being cases in point. Opinion polls in countries such as France and the Netherlands look equally promising for PRR parties. Even though not all European countries have witnessed the successful mobilisation of the PRR, it is fair to conclude that this party family is going strong. It would be too quick to conclude, however, that PRR parties only thrive on the recent salience of the immigration issue.
This is the eighth article in our series Trouble on the Far-Right.
Trouble’s brewing for the European Union – also in Finland, where the next country-wide elections will see several new, EU-hostile nationalist groups attempt to establish themselves on the political map. At the same time, Finnish Fascism is seeking to entrench and normalize itself into a respectable part of the political framework.
With disaffection growing, the time appears to be ripe. As Heikki Hiilamo, professor of social policy in Helsinki University notes, Finland has been particularly hard hit by the most recent economic downturn. The middle and lower classes are seeing their expectations fade into uncertainty, as globalization is bringing new and intangible threats in the form of vanishing jobs. Finland is heading towards increasing social inequality, with the reality of the educated and the employed drifting further apart from “globalization’s losers”. With no self-evident owner in sight, the accumulating political capital is attracting radical nationalist utilizers...
We present techniques to prove termination of cycle rewriting, that is, string rewriting on cycles, which are strings in which the start and end are connected. Our main technique is to transform cycle rewriting into string rewriting and then apply state of the art techniques to prove termination of the string rewrite system. We present three such transformations, and prove for all of them that they are sound and complete. In this way not only termination of string rewriting of the transformed system implies termination of the original cycle rewrite system, a similar conclusion can be drawn for non-termination. Apart from this transformational approach, we present a uniform framework of matrix interpretations, covering most of the earlier approaches to automatically proving termination of cycle rewriting. All our techniques serve both for proving termination and relative termination. We present several experiments showing the power of our techniques.
This is the 15. article in our series Trouble on the Far-Right.
Germany’s political culture currently faces a shift to the right as anti-immigrant violence and attacks on refugee camps are on the brink of becoming a daily routine. The populist party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) did achieve successes in every recent federal state election. Through their success politics gained a new political quality. Anti-immigrant groups such as PEGIDA in Dresden regularly mobilize hundreds and sometimes thousands of people. The increased number of refugees that came to Germany in 2015 is instrumentalized to fuel racism and to spread nationalist sentiments...