Populism, visual technologies, and the self-mediation of ‘the people’ from the 2002 Venezuelan coup to the 2021 US Capitol riots

with Clare McKendry, University of Waterloo

This article examines how political messengers, and not the message, influence attitudes toward renewable energy infrastructure amid an increasingly polarized climate change debate. Focusing on win...

Social movement scholarship has emphasized that progressive ‘Europeanization from below’ may be a breeding ground for major EU reform and democratization. Empirically, however, activists have found it difficult to make gains when targeting the EU. To understand the challenges that activists face in the context of transnational EU mobilization, our article draws from agency-oriented approaches in social movement studies to propose an ‘EU mobilization package’, comprising three recurring strategic dilemmas that activists encounter: (a) the formulation of goals that both address the transnational level and appeal to national or local constituencies, (b) the building of a transnational political organization that is both inclusive and effective, and (c) whether and how to interact with EU institutions, particularly in the context of European Parliament elections. We apply this framework to the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), an organization founded by Yanis Varoufakis in 2016, which is a key example of social movement dissensus to EU politics. Methodologically, we rely on comprehensive interview data, the analysis of a large corpus of DiEM25 online and offline publications, and participant observation of three public events. A discussion of the group’s strategic challenges provides important general lessons for our understanding of social movement mobilization targeting EU politics as well as transnational activism.

European Consortium for Political Research

European Consortium for Political Research

Far-right parties increasingly mobilize against climate action. While scholarship has initially focused on explicit climate denialism, by now research analyzes the opposition against specific clima...

Click on the article title to read more.

Seminar | May 20, 2025, 15h00 (GMT+1), Online