Paper short abstract:

Relying mainly on an anthropological comparative frame of analysis I intend to illustrate, how different social struggles appeal to feelings of suffering, compassion, humanity, dignity and justice as pivotal to their demands. Structural violence and other types of violences are placed on the centre of some expressions of social protest. I will focus in the way the protagonists of social protest movements perceive themselves.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing mainly from an anthropological frame of analysis, I analyze different recent social protest events which will allow to discuss the kind of subjects and grievances involved. As a starting point, I contend that recent social developments can not be longer categorized in the same way as classical discussions on social movements used to do. Therefore, I will try to: 1) understand the main ideas and categories the social protesting actors use to build up the definition of their grievances, claims and actions. 2) to examine the meaning of appealing to emotions and feelings - especially anger, suffering, the claim of visibility for the victims of violence, and the demand of dignified justice, to mobilize different social groups. Since these phenomena can be studied by comparison to other movments in the world, in which young people and other sectors of civil society have played a major role -as in Chile, England, Egipt, in the differend kinds of occupy and indignant movements, or in the incidents that have taken place in the French banlieues in 2005 among others-, there are some specific objective to be pursued. It seems to me that the series of concepts, notions and prcatices that the protagonists of social protest movements produce, reveal important transformations in the way they perceive themselves, as well as in the kind of actions that appeal to categories that erode the moral character of neoliberal order.