The Poor’s Struggle for Political Incorporation in Latin America
National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) at the National University of San Martín (UNSAM) in Buenos Aires
Latin America has seen the rise of social movements and conflicts in the streets in the last year. The continent is in turmoil. In his talk, Federico Rossi will draw on extensive research about the unemployed workers movement (the piqueteros) in Argentina as well as on related mobilizations across Latin America to shed light on these emerging dynamics. The piquetero movement has been the largest movement of unemployed people in the world and transformed Argentine politics to the extent of becoming part of the governing coalition for more than a decade. Based on his book ‘The Poor’s Struggle for Political Incorporation’ (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Federico Rossi will show that by analyzing the poor’s struggle in Latin America one can also add new insights to long-standing debates within social movement theory: How can we analyze the interactions of social movements with the state, allies, and antagonists without reducing the analysis to their public and contentious dimensions only? And, how can we put strategy making in a historical perspective?
Federico M. Rossi holds a Doctoral degree in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He has held visiting positions at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Florence), Singapore Management University, the American University in Cairo, New York University, the Universidade de Brasília. Currently, he is Humboldt Senior Fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA).
Discussant: Renata Campos Motta is Adjunct Professor in Sociology at the Institute for Latin American Studies from the Freie Universität Berlin and Associated Researcher at desiguALdades.net.
Moderated by: Swen Hutter is Vice Director of the Center for Civil Society Research at the Berlin Social Science Center WZB and Lichtenberg-Professor in Political Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin.
The event is part of the lecture series Civil Society and Political Conflict, organized by the Center for Civil Society Research.