'Why don't Italians Occupy?’ Hypotheses on a failed mobilisation

Abstract

In spite of the significant amount of anti-austerity mobilisations that Italy has hosted since 2008, all the attempts to develop an Italian version of the occupy/indignados protest that characterised 2011 at the global level, failed. This paper proposes some hypotheses aimed at partially understanding and explaining this failure, based on the political context, the eventful protest of 15 October and the complex interaction between social movement coalitions and diffusion in advanced stages of development of cycles of protest.