A tale of two campaigns : understanding the role of short-term political context in Czech and Slovak counter/mobilizing on migration
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Social Movement Studies |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2022.2031958 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2022.2031958 |
| Keywords | Mobilization; countermovement; protest event; migration; Eastern Europe |
| Attached files | |
| Description | This paper explores protest mobilizations related to the 2015 migrant crisis in the post-communist Czech Republic and Slovakia. Despite dominating anti-refugee sentiments and similar historical and political background in the two countries, the mobilization patterns were fairly different in both scale and organization of migration-related mobilizations. To systematically explore and account for these variances, we investigate the short-term political conditions, focusing on 1) key features of the national political environment – discursive opportunities and political space, and 2) movement/countermovement dynamics. We build on the original protest event data during the most intense protests over migration in 2015. We show how a different political space and a different extent of openness of discursive opportunities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and interactions between the anti-refugee movement and the solidarity countermovement played an important role in the timing and scale of protests and their organizers. |
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