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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

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Austerity

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Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Geographies Of Quiescence? Social Movements, Panoramas Of Struggle And Baltic Austerity Politics, Jokubas Salyga Mar 2023

Geographies Of Quiescence? Social Movements, Panoramas Of Struggle And Baltic Austerity Politics, Jokubas Salyga

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The recent thirtieth anniversaries of restored Baltic territorial sovereignties coincide with a quandary in which the region appears “highly unequal but classless.” This article revisits the conduct of the 2008–2011 crisis management operations through the prisms of class struggle and social movements. It conceptualizes the imposition of austerity measures as a class-constituted social movement from above. I argue that the latter has to be positioned relationally against locally articulated forms of resistance from below that have so far remained insufficiently explored. Therefore, the practice of unearthing Baltic “militant particularisms” carries the potential of subverting the “absent protest thesis” in the …


Anti-Austerity Between Militant Materialism And Real Democracy: Exploring Pragmatic Prefigurativism, Olatz Ribera-Almandoz, Nikolai Huke, Mònica Clua-Losada, David J. Bailey Feb 2020

Anti-Austerity Between Militant Materialism And Real Democracy: Exploring Pragmatic Prefigurativism, Olatz Ribera-Almandoz, Nikolai Huke, Mònica Clua-Losada, David J. Bailey

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The anti-austerity movement that emerged in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis and 2010 Eurozone crisis, and which forms part of the ‘age of austerity’ that came after those crises, was underpinned by a set of ideas and practices that we refer to here as ‘pragmatic prefigurativism’. Whilst the anti-austerity movements typically rejected formal ideologies such as Marxism and anarchism, nevertheless pragmatic prefigurativism can be understood as a ‘left convergence’ of sorts. The paper explores the features of this pragmatic prefigurativism, comparing the anti-austerity movements in the UK and Spain. In particular, we note the role of unresponsive …