TITLE:
New Actors on Stage: Analysis of the Emergent Forms of Collective Action in the European Context
AUTHORS:
Dora Fonseca
KEYWORDS:
Antagonism; Antagonistic Frontier; Civil Society; Conflict; Crisis; State
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.2 No.1,
December
31,
2013
ABSTRACT: In this article our focus will be on civil society’s responses triggered
by the imposition of the societies of austerity. The
analysis will be centred on an emerging collective actor, the indignados, and on the conditions that
fostered its formation and processes involved in the construction of its
identity. To accomplish this task, we retrieved Ernesto
Laclau’s political logic of populism and
the concept of political developed by
Chantal Mouffe and applied them to the formation of the indignados’
identity. This process is conceived in terms of the construction of
antagonistic frontiers which divide the social into two opposing fields. This conception allows us to develop an analysis
based on the notion of social conflict, as well as a reflection on the potentialities embodied by this new social actor, despite their
presentation by the dominant discourse as utopic and therefore impossible. In
this proposal, it is our aim to provide a better understanding of what is at
stake when we talk about the indignados and
a clearer perception of the political dimension of both struggle and resistance.