The thesis explores a 5-year period in the political history of Spain. It looks at a series of political processes and projects, beginning with the 15M/Indignados social movement. These projects go from 15M in 2011 to the creation of new digital platforms for participatory democracy for the city of Barcelona in 2016. The thesis defends the idea that these cases add up to a cycle of political contention, which is defined as “the 15M cycle of contention”. It supports the idea that a core thread throughout the cycle has been the challenging of the liberal representative model of democracy and some of its key social forms, primarily in discourse, but also in practice. The cases within the cycle vindicated, and experimented with, alternative forms and practices of democracy. Concretely, they tried to move away from the current liberal representative model, preeminent since XVIII century, towards a more participatory one. The thesis also defends the argument that a key driver of these democratic experiments has been “technopolitics”, otherwise, practices and processes that hybridize politics and technologies (particularly, information and communication technologies). The thesis focuses on three paradigmatic cases of the 15M cycle of contention: 15M itself, a social movement born in 2011; the X party, a new party created in 2013 by 15M activists; and Decidim.barcelona, a digital platform for participation, launched in early 2016 by the Barcelona City Council, designed by people involved in previous projects within the 15M cycle. The first of these three cases covers the sphere of social movements and civil society, the second, that of political parties, and the third, that of the State at the municipal level. I look at the discourses and the practices of democracy in these processes and projects, and whether they innovate or not in relation to pre-existing political forms in social movements, political parties, and the State. In every case I look at the technopolitics deployed by the actors involved. For analyzing such technopolitics, I look at three main elements: discourses, practices, and technological infrastructures. These are used, respectively, as the main entry into the semantics, the pragmatics and the syntax of technopolitics. As a complementary view, I look beyond the cases and into the cycle. Concretely, to the variations in discourses on democracy and technopolitical practices. I suggest that the cycle as a whole can be conceived as: a) a process of “reassembling of democracy”, a reassembling oriented towards a democratization of the political field (and society more broadly) beyond the liberal representative model; and b) as a case of “technopolitical contention”, in which political struggles have been organically connected to technological practices. Since, differently from traditional democratization processes from XVIII century onwards, this one has not been oriented to establish but to challenge the structures of liberal representative democracy (f.i.: the current structure and centrality of representation, traditional political parties, Parliaments, etc.), I define it as an attempt at “alter-democratization”. I also show that this alter-democratization process challenges not only the forms, but also the ontology of liberal representative democracy, concretely, some of its key subjective and collective forms, as well as its key modes of political relation. By looking at civil society, parties and State institutions I try to map changes in various areas of the political field in liberal democracies. In that sense, the cycle has pointed towards (although has not always succeeded in bringing about) alternative political ontologies and forms of life. In order to analyze both the cycle and the three key cases under study, I have recurred to a multi-method and multi-disciplinary approach. I have primarily relied on qualitative methods, such as participant observation, fieldwork, interviews, and digital materials (blog posts, journals, etc.). I spent more than 5 years as participant in various 15M cycle projects. Secondarily, I have used quantitative methods: along with fellow activists and researchers, in 2014 we ran a digital survey that gathered 1000+ responses among 15M participants. Finally, I have also used social network analysis methods to map activity on social networks. In terms of disciplines, I primarily draw resources from political science, sociology, philosophy, and STS.

Esta dissertação discorre sobre movimentos sociais e democracia com o objetivo de descrever e analisar o papel dos movimentos sociais na consolidação da democracia participativa no Brasil. Trata-se de um estudo exploratório, conduzido por meio de investigação teórica, mediante pesquisa bibliográfica e documental. Os resultados deste estudo revelaram que os movimentos sociais enfrentam muitas dificuldades, especialmente, em relação ao poder estatal. Dentre as conclusões, pode-se afirmar que, apesar de suas fragilidades, geralmente os movimentos sociais constituem uma resposta eficaz que contribui na consolidação da democracia e na efetivação de direitos fundamentais. / This dissertation discusses social movements and democracy in order to describe and analyze the role of social movements in the consolidation of participatory democracy in Brazil. It is an exploratory study, conducted through theoretical research, in bibliographical and documentary research. The results of this study revealed that social movements face many difficulties, especially in relation to state power. Among the conclusions, it can be said that, despite their weaknesses, social movements constitute an effective response that contributes to the consolidation of democracy and the realization of fundamental rights.

Nearly five years have passed since the political upheaval that swept through many Middle East and North African (MENA) countries began. Syria was caught in the grip of this revolutionary moment, one that drove the country to a civil war with no apparent way out. Analysts advanced a number of explanations for this event, which included the demographic profile of the younger generations and the economic difficulties they experienced, corruption of the government, the use of techniques from successful campaigns and the coordination of dissent through traditional/offline and new/online forms of contention. The employment of the new media by anti and pro-government groups has reached an unthinkable scale, to the point that the media have become instruments not limited to the purpose of informing, planning and coordinating the protest, but “performing” in the conflict, exacerbating the fight, instilling fear in the enemy and intimidating the adversary, while proselytising. By going beyond the dichotomy that frames the media as a deus ex machina of the uprising or, conversely, as a means of its expression, this thesis demonstrates how the new media did not simply play a crucial role at the time of the uprising and subsequent civil war, but an even more decisive role in the years that predated the uprising. The underlining argument of this research is that during the decade leading up to the uprising in Syria a (silent) form of mobilisation got underway as an effect of contextual factors (economic, institutional and social conditions), conditioned by people’s access to the new media. The new media became the mobilising structures of Syria’s pre-uprising social movement, the tools that changed people’s access to information and encouraged civic engagement in a period of structural friction and social ferment. The media are here contemplated as a microcosm, which affects and is affected by other different, hitherto unrelated (f)actors. Ultimately, in light of the growing popular mobilisations that are taking place around the globe and the leading role that the new media technologies are playing within these, the thesis offers perspectives of analysis on the role that the new media technologies are offering citizens to contest political authority as well as opposing social and economic inequalities worldwide.

This project explains Polish non-violence and Algerian violence under martial law following peaceful protests against comparable material deprivation and authoritarian political exclusion. From narratives of state formation, institutional performance, and social movement evolution in postwar Poland and postcolonial Algeria a conditional model derives violent and non-violent opposition strategies from divergent practical citizenship regimes in formally similar autocratic systems. It argues that distinct regimes of citizen-subjectivity under authoritarian governance foster divergent practices of resistance and evaluations of states before and during emergency conditions that reduce activists to biological life, tempting violence. Where citizenship regimes differentiate social resources (means of protest) from state resources (means or sovereignty), affording regime opponents actual or immanent systemic subjectivity, social agitation remains non-violent despite objectively comprehensive political and social dispossession; in contrast, by subordinating social to state resources, undifferentiated citizenship regimes under martial law wholly eliminate systemic subjectivity, provoking violence. Neither the formal political regime-type nor the immediate experience of social suffering or political abjection distinguishes violent from non-violent responses to despotism; rather, violent versus non-violent protest strategies express discrepant evaluations of regime coercion, reflecting the elimination versus endurance of the citizenship regime that formed the iterated systemic subjectivity of regime opponents. Poland's worker-based citizenship regime endured fiscal crisis and martial law because it provided differentiated social resources: regime opponents had means independent of state solvency to compel policy concessions by withdrawing labor power from industries pivotal to ruling-elite incumbency. But Algeria's client-based citizenship - based on undifferentiated resources - tied activists' systemic means of compulsion to state largesse. Differentiated citizenship regimes endure state crises because citizens retain the social resources, however suspended, of systemic-subjectivity that ground their evaluations of state actions, minimizing incentives to violent pressure on ruling classes. Undifferentiated citizenship regimes perish under state bankruptcy or force, eradicating social resources and channeling the recuperation of subjectivity to anti-systemic acts. In short, Polish workers could strike and threaten the state under martial law; Algerian clients were effectively expelled from political status. In forming opposition strategies, citizens judge state policies or legitimacy, but also their status as systemic subjects. Evaluations of systemic subjectivity reflect experiences in using social resources, not merely immediate material or political conditions. The research design does not test a general theoretical model linking citizenship-subjectivity regimes to experiential evaluations of objective dehumanization, but its conceptual and causal variable analyses may complement other studies of state institutions and social agitations by promoting subject formation over abstract human universals as the key mechanism in reliable social explanation.

This dissertation examines the roots of birth control's legitimacy in the United States. Americans were early adopters of fertility control: between 1790 and 1940, the average number of children born into U.S. families fell from seven to around two. During this period there were no major advances in contraceptive technology and very few outspoken advocates for reproductive rights. What changed were Americans' intimate ideas about the place of childrearing in a good life. The study uses letters, press items, and philanthropic field reports from the early twentieth century--when birthrates and birth control first became major civic issues in the U.S.--to uncover that transition, which has long perplexed scholars. Rather than focusing on the role of vocal activists or socioeconomic change, the dissertation emphasizes the changing "moral economy" of childbearing, as perceived by Americans addressing their own views and those of their peers and forebearers. It shows how economic calculations surrounding childbearing were embedded in matrices of morally-mediated ideas about progress, nature, God, and health--and how shifts in those ideas gave rise to a private, grassroots consensus which gradually nullified all attempts to make birth control illegal or taboo. The analysis pays special attention to the role of ideas about time. Birth control gained legitimacy, first, as Americans became progressively less concerned with eternal chains of being and more with the material present; and second, as they reevaluated birth control's place in history, impressionistically reframing a marker of collective decadence as a sign of individual modernity. Seeing the birth control movement through these Americans' eyes--as a quiet, gradual, furtive movement of living women (and men) who were not necessarily outspoken, feminist, or even civically active--helps us understand Americans' reproductive interests as they understood them, and the potential connections of everyday moral action to lasting historical consequence.

Since the end of the Cold War, the international system has become more cosmopolitan, communicative, and connected. These changes have taken place against a backdrop of intensifying processes of globalization, the unevenness of which has helped redefine possible fields of political action. This dissertation offers an interpretation of how we might go about understanding and representing the intercultural dynamics and forms of politics that constitute the transnational Tibet Movement.

This thesis draws on a Bourdieusian perspective to explore the organisational mechanisms and dynamics in Palestinian politically motivated social movement. The consequent body of literature often lacks an integrated comprehension of Bourdieusian theory, and his three main concepts: field, habitus, and capital. Little has been understood about Bourdieu’s concepts in social movement context to understand the activists’ behaviours, practices, and practical reasoning in structuring their choices and practices. Being inspired by Bourdieu, the researcher relationally analyses and bridges between different subjectivist and objectivist perspectives on social structures and agents’ practices through employing the relational tool-kit of Bourdieu. To further understand the dynamics, mechanisms, and interorganisational and intraorganisational relations in social movements, an interpretive approach was used to gather context-rich data from ordinary activists, core activists and organisers. Findings showed that fields of practices, both external and internal, have specific doxa and species of capital, which shape the rules of the game inside this field, and its relationship with other fields. Data collected found that the ‘state field’ enjoys the most dominant doxa in the Palestinian context, which is deployed to legitimise the oppression of the politically-motivated youth movements that were studied. The external and internal fields’ doxa have a crucial influence on agents’ early socialisation, forms of capital, and field’s positioning. This variation and difference between the activists’ habitus caused multiple modes of domination and conflictual dynamics inside the movement itself in relation to features such as political credibility, recruiting parochialism, ideological conflicts, and repertoires of contention. This study contributes to a more dynamic understanding of the habitus as an open mediating concept and a reflexive space which transforms the activists’ behaviours and actions in some incidents. The findings have implications for social movement practitioners, and other relevant stakeholders such as activism groups and bodies, pressure groups, unions, and human rights and civil society associations. It is suggested that future research examining politically-motivated social movements should consider ethnographic methods to capture multiple observational data and contextual findings. In addition, it is suggested further examine habitus mechanisms in reproduction, change and transformation times.

Framed within theoretical discussions on both New Public Management (NPM) theory and New Social Movement (NSM) theory, this thesis explores increasing religiosity in education delivery in secular Turkey. Particularly, it investigates the ways in which two Islamic religious groups, the Gulen Movement (GM) and the Iskenderpasa Cemaati (IC), engage with education as a result of neoliberalization in both the public sphere and public administration. Islam, and especially the Islamic Social Movements (ISMs), play an important role in politics and in the socio-economic spheres; therefore, it is necessary to consider their growing role in the delivery of public services such as education not only in Muslim countries, but also in secular societies. Since education is defined as a public service which has a significant role in the creation of social capital (Putnam, 1993), these movements increased their interest in education systems in order to make their own voice heard during the process of education delivery, or in other words, the creation of social capital. This research combines three different research methods: 1) documentary analysis of official papers from the public administration reforms, government archives, the GM and IC's own reports and web pages, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and World Bank reports on the Turkish education system; 2) in-depth interviews conducted with parents, teachers and alumni of GM an IC schools; 3) focus group analysis conducted with graduates from the IC and the GM schools. The data collected from the documents and field research suggest that in Turkey, NPM, which was applied to privatized public services and the deregulated public sphere, has created opportunity spaces for Muslims and ISMs to move upward in the social stratification ladder. The result is the emergence of an ISM controlled education service. The GM and the IC are the best examples of this process. The researcher used the GM and the IC as examples of a collective case study. Although both the GM and the IC have emerged in a similar socio-political and economic environment, in which there is an increasing trend of Islamisation in the social structure and neoliberalization in the economy and politics, these movements responded differently to the same changes. The GM has managed to integrate into the new conditions and produced a similar discourse to NPM. Therefore, rather than establishing an Islamic order, the GM focused on political, social and economic wealth by opening education institutions. However, by demonstrating a traditional form of Islam, the IC shows the other face of religious groups in Turkey. For this reason, the researcher refers to the GM as a 'movement' and the IC as a 'cemaat'. Additionally, by being visible in the public sphere and producing a neoliberal discourse, which is parallel with NPM doctrines, the GM managed to develop educational governance that increases secular and pious families' voices in the education system. This research provides an analysis of a new approach in public administration related to education, one that distances itself from the traditional, prescriptive structures, and instead engages in flexible and participative relationships. Finally, the findings of this research will provide a greater understanding of states where there are tensions between modernisation and democratisation, and demands for 'traditional values'.

The concept of the common, found in Hardt and Negri, provides the possibility of theorising struggle that avoids the critiques that suggest Empire remains intangible, ethereal and postmodern. The concept, however, remains fragmentarily developed by the authors themselves, and is rarely the subject of sustained analysis in the secondary literature. Therefore, in order to substantiate the concept, I consider the common through three distinct moments which I identify as the urban, digital and political moments. This task is achieved through theoretical interlocutions and reflections on the 2011 Occupy movement. Throughout this thesis, and through each moment of the common, I argue that the concept must be understood as distinctly physical. Firstly, struggles over the urban common revolve around the physical (re)production of ideas, knowledge, culture and relationships in urban environments. Whilst the digital common often implies a lack of physicality, I argue that the common offers a means of thinking social media and perpetual connectivity primarily as a process of transforming the way humans engage with one another and their environments, and the radical possibilities therein. I argue that these moments of the common necessitate the development of an appropriate political moment of the common. Through centring on the physicality of struggle, Hardt and Negria's concept of the common is substantiated whilst contributing to wider debates in the field of radical theory and social movements.

Orientador: Silvio Yasui / Banca: Cristina Amélia Luzio / Banca: Elizabeth Maria Freire de Araujo Lima / Banca: Roselania Francisconi Borges / Banca: Massimiliano Minelli / Resumo: Este estudo teve como objetivo historicizar a trajetória do Movimento da Reforma Psiquiátrica brasileira, enquanto processo social complexo, por meio da memória de pessoas que participaram de sua construção. Teve como premissa a ideia de que a construção do movimento social passa necessariamente pela dimensão do humano e de suas escolhas. Foram desenvolvidos estudos e posterior explanação sobre os principais marcadores da história da Reforma Psiquiátrica, a partir das categorias de trabalhador da saúde mental, Associação de Usuários e familiares, gestores em saúde mental e Organização da Reforma Psiquiátrica italiana. O levantamento bibliográfico realizado subsidiou a construção de seis narrativas divididas em função das categorias supracitadas, apresentadas por unidades de sentido e elaboradas com base em entrevistas abertas feitas com atores sociais (brasileiros e italianos) identificados como protagonistas desse processo. Com efeito, entendendo os níveis coleitvo e singular da história como interpenetráveis e intrinsecamente relacionados, concebe-se que a história contada em nível macro é construída dialeticamente, através das experiências dos sujeitos e dos coletivos. O trabalho se justifica por operar na preservação da memória, visando ao fortalecimento do movimento social, por intermédio da desnaturalização e humanização de seus feitos. Considera-se a importância do movimento da Luta Antimanicomial para o desenvolvimento da Reforma Psiquiátrica, no Brasil, e, em relação às trajetórias dos protagonistas, constrói-se a noção de escolhas de vida ética e politicamente orientadas, como fundamento da participação contínua no movimento / Abstract: This study aims to historicize the trajectory of the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform Movement as a complex social process, through the exploration of the memory of the people who participated in its construction. The premise is that the construction of the social movement is in part, a result of its necessary passage through the human dimension, specifically, individual human choices. We have developed studies and further explanation on the main markers of the history of psychiatric reform from the categories of: mental health worker, users and family members, mental health managers and the Italian psychiatric reform organization. The bibliographic survey supported the construction of six narratives, presented through sensory units and elaborated from open interviews with social actors (Brazilian and Italian) identified as protagonists of this process, understanding the macro and micro levels of history as impenetrable and intrinsically related. It is considered that history told at the macro level is constructed dialectically through the experiences of subjects as well as collectives. The work is justified by operating in the preservation of memory, aiming at strengthening the social movement through the denaturation and humanization of its achievements. It considers the importance of the Antimanicomial Struggle as a movement for the development of the Psychiatric Reform in Brazil in relation to the trajectories of the protagonists, the notion of ethical and politically oriented life choices and is built as a basis for the continuous participation in further development / Doutor