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Paper short abstract

Collective actors in post-collective Europe narrate crisis in ways that both deepen and unsettle political polarisation. This paper examines how these narratives shape mobilisation, responsibility, and possibilities for re-worlding amid social-ecological immiseration.

Paper long abstract

How do social movements make sense of crisis amidst political environments marked by growing polarisation? This paper examines the ambivalent role of crisis narratives in shaping mobilisation within three post-collective contexts: the tenant movement in Sweden, the food sovereignty movement in Hungary, and the climate movement in Czechia. Building on critiques of “crisis” as an episodic rupture, we adopt the concept of social-ecological immiseration to analyse how collective actors interpret worsening conditions as structural, relational, and historically embedded.

Across the three movements, actors draw on divergent relationships to the state and distinct post-collective legacies, ranging from Sweden’s social-democratic imaginaries to post-socialist suspicion toward the critique of capitalism. These situated experiences generate contrasting crisis narratives: some frame crisis as a technocratic or institutional problem, while others articulate it as a manifestation of long-term structural harm rooted in capitalism. Such narrative differences both intensify polarisation—by sharpening ideological boundaries—and enable mobilisation, as polarisation becomes a catalyst for articulating responsibility, alternative futures, and forms of collective action.

Rather than treating polarisation solely as divisive, the paper shows how it can function as a productive field of struggle, shaping when actors build alliances and collectively imagine social-ecological transformation. By foregrounding narratives and practices from below, the paper contributes to anthropological debates on how crisis and polarisation are lived, contested, and potentially re-worlded in a troubled, multipolar world.