Prelims

Fragmented Powers: with a Prologue by Donatella della Porta

Fragmented Powers: Confrontation and Cooperation in the English-Speaking World

Edited by

Emmanuelle Avril

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France

Laurence Cossu-Beaumont

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France

David Fée

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France

And

Fabrice Mourlon

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Emerald Publishing Limited

Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL

First edition 2025

Editorial matter and selection © 2025 Emmanuelle Avril, Laurence Cossu-Beaumont, David Fée and Fabrice Mourlon.

Individual chapters © 2025 The authors.

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ISBN: 978-1-83608-412-9 (Online)

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Emmanuelle Avril is Professor of British Politics and Society at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University. She has published extensively on various aspects of the Labour party, with a particular focus on party reform, internal party democracy, party members and activists and the use of new technologies. Her publications include: Labour United and Divided from the 1830s to the Present, Manchester University Press, 2018 (co-ed with Y. Béliard); Democracy, Participation and Contestation: Civil Society, Governance and the Future of Liberal Democracy, Routledge, 2016 (co-ed with J. Neem); ‘Labour and the Interplay of Brexit and Electoral Politics’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 29 (3) 2021.

Laurence Cossu-Beaumont is Professor of American Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. She specialises in African American Studies, Book History and Cultural and Intellectual History from a Transnational Perspective. She is the author of a monograph entitled, Deux agents littéraires dans le siècle américain: William et Jenny Bradley, passeurs culturels transatlantiques, Lyon, ENS Editions, 2023 and she co-edited a special issue of Revue Française d'Etudes Américaines (RFEA), Cultural History, ‘Transatlantic Approaches to Cultural History’ (co-ed with J. Kempf (2018)).

David Fée is Professor of British Studies at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. He specialises in the study of housing and urban policies in the United Kingdom against the backdrop of the evolution of the British welfare state. He is the author of many articles on housing and planning in the United Kingdom, as well as a book on the housing crisis in the United Kingdom (La crise du logement en Angleterre: 40 ans de politiques du logement et de la ville, Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2013). He has also edited several books, including Paradise Lost? Lessons from the French and British New Towns (Emerald Publishing UK, 2021) and Inequalities in the UK: New Discourses, Evolutions and Actions (Emerald UK, 2017). His current topics of research include homelessness from a comparative and international perspective as well as the privatisation of public space in the United Kingdom.

Fabrice Mourlon is Professor of British and Irish studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. He has published numerous articles on political and social aspects of post-conflict Northern Ireland with a focus on conflict resolution theories and practices. He has published a monograph on victims and survivors testimonies, L'Urgence de dire: l’Irlande du Nord après le conflit, Peter Lang 2018 and co-edited two books, Civil War and Narrative, Palgrave, 2017, Pre-Trial Detention, Cambridge Scholars, 2014, and edited a journal issue ‘Ireland and Intangible Heritage’, Etudes Irlandaises, 2022. He is currently working on the anarchist movement in Northern Ireland.

Dena Arya is a Research Fellow (INSPIRE Project) at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, and holds a PhD in Politics. Her doctoral research explored the role of intersectional inequalities in shaping youth environmental political participation. Her current role on the INSPIRE Project funded by Horizon Europe aims to strengthen intersectional inclusion within participatory deliberative processes with a focus on Legislative Theatre. Dena is a Research Associate at the Centre for Asian Studies in Africa at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and Co-Principal Investigator on the Theatre of Climate Action (ToCA) project funded by the SOAS Feminist Centre for Racial Justice. ToCA uses Youth Participatory Action Research to develop educational tools to reflect Global Majority youth experiences of climate injustice in South Africa and Guadeloupe. Dena is a co-convenor of the Political Studies Association (PSA) Young People’s Politics Specialist Group and a youth personal development coach.

Donatella della Porta is Professor of Political Science, the founding Dean of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences and the Director of the PhD program in Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, where she also leads the Center on Social Movement Studies (Cosmos). Among the main topics of her research: social movements, political violence, terrorism, corruption, the police and protest.

Nathalie Duclos is Professor of British History and Politics, and joint Head of the research centre CAS (Centre for Anglophone Studies) at the University of Toulouse, France. She specialises in Scottish politics and is currently the Chair of the French Society for Scottish Studies (Société Française d’Etudes Ecossaises). Her research interests lie in Scottish nationalism, Scottish party politics and the Scottish independence movement. She has written a number of books, articles and chapters on these issues, including L'Ecosse en quête d'indépendance? Le référendum de 2014 (Paris: Sorbonne Université Presses, 2014).

Philip S. Golub is Professor of International Relations at the American University of Paris (AUP). His research focuses on the state, globalisation and empire in late-modern and contemporary international history. He obtained his MPhil (DEA) in International Relations and Contemporary History at University of Paris IV and his DPhil in International Relations at the University of Sussex. Prior to AUP, he taught at the Institute of European Studies, University of Paris 8, and in the graduate program of Sciences-Po Paris, as well as lecturing regularly in other institutions of higher learning. He has published East Asia's Reemergence (Polity Press, 2016) and Power, Profit and Prestige: a History of American Imperial Expansion (Pluto Press, 2010), which was translated into French and Chinese, as well as dozens of book chapters and scholarly articles on various issue-areas of world politics.

Christopher Griffin is Associate Professor (Maître de conférences) and the Head of the Applied Foreign Languages Department on the Nantes Campus of Université Catholique de l’Ouest. He has published on a number of topics having to do with contemporary American, British and French military strategy, in particular in the field of counterinsurgency warfare and counterterrorism.

Habiba Jelali is a Dr. in British Studies. She specialises in urban politics, the process of gentrification, as well as its impact in the United Kingdom, more precisely in London. She defended her thesis in 2023 at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her thesis tackles the process of gentrification and the implication of urban policies in the neighbourhood of Peckham, Southwark, London. She examines the major role played by urban policies since 1997 and also the different forms of resistance to the process and its impact on the residents of the neighbourhood.

Clémence Lévêque is a Doctor in British Studies and Politics. She defended her thesis in 2024 at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris, where she is part of the Centre for Research on the English-Speaking World. Her research focuses on election campaigns and internal party organisation. For her PhD, she researched multi-level cooperation and subversion within the Liberal Democrats for the 2021 GLA election campaign.

David Lipson is Associate Professor of American Studies in the Université de Strasbourg. His research focuses on history in the 20th and 21st century, with a special interest for documentary films, politainment, marginalised voices, political satire and Late Night TV.

Claire Palmiste is currently Associate Professor at the University of French Guiana. Her doctoral dissertation (2009) focused on the transracial adoption of Native American children in white families in the United States. She has published a book from her dissertation and also papers that explore the debatable practice of removing Native children from their families. Since 2017, she has extended her research field to include child welfare policies within colonial spaces in the French and English-speaking Caribbean. Her work broadly examines the policies implemented to control minors on the margin, with a focus on the Caribbean region. She has published papers on the major homes which handled juvenile delinquents during the colonial period in Martinique and Guadeloupe, but also in French Guiana after 1946.

Steven Parfitt is a History Teacher and an Independent Researcher in the United Kingdom. He is the author of numerous books and articles on working-class history, including Knights Across the Atlantic: the Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland (2017), as well as work in outlets such as the Guardian and Jacobin. He is working on the life and work of trade unionists Emma Patterson and Leonora Barry and books on the global and South African histories of the Knights of Labor.

Sarah Pickard is Professor of Contemporary British Politics and Society at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. Her research focuses on young people's civic and political participation from a holistic perspective, including policy, elections, protests and policing. She developed the concept ‘Do-It-Ourselves (DIO) politics’ to reflect young people becoming activists due to dissatisfaction with institutional politics and the need to act together and have a sense of belonging. Her recent research focuses on young climate and environmental activists, involving many interviews in Britain and France. Sarah Pickard is the author of Politics, Protest and Young People (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 501 pages). She has also published widely on youth engagement and edited several volumes and special issues. She is a co-convenor of the Political Studies Association (PSA) Young People's Politics specialist group. Sarah Pickard is part of a small team creating the Young People's Participation Index (YPPI) providing a new searchable website and database.

Bianca Polo del Vecchio is Lecturer in British and European politics at the Institut des Relations Internationales at the University of Strasbourg (IRIUS). She is a member of the Savoirs dans l’Espace Anglophone: Représentations, Culture, Histoire (SEARCH) research unit. Her research and teaching focus on UK politics, UK-EU relations pre- and post-Brexit, Europeanisation and Euroscepticism.

Amélie Ribieras is Associate Professor of Legal English at Paris 2-Panthéon Assas and holds a PhD in American Studies from Sorbonne Nouvelle University (France). Her research interests include women's history, US antifeminist and feminist movements, conservative discourse and gender. In particular, she studies Phyllis Schlafly's career and her organisation Eagle Forum. She has just co-edited Womanhoods and Equality in the United States: 20th-21st Century Perspectives (Routledge, 2024).

Sarah Rodriguez-Louette is professeure agrégée and a PhD candidate at Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris, within the Center for Research on the English-Speaking World (CREW). Her research interests encompass media studies and political science, focusing primarily on the mainstreaming strategies of white nationalism in the United States.

Eléana Sanchez is Professeure Agrégée at Université de Toulouse (Jean Jaurès) and a PhD candidate in British Contemporary History at Université de Toulouse (Jean Jaurès) and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris). Her work focuses on the institutional history of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, or CCCS (1964–1988), founded by Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall at the University of Birmingham (UK). Her PhD dissertation sheds light on the significance of the CCCS as the first academic research centre dedicated to the study of contemporary culture in shaping an emerging academic field, that of British cultural studies, and analyses the political, intellectual and academic networks both within and without the CCCS which allowed it to be born, to survive and to thrive to become known as the “Birmingham school”.

Cécilia Smith is Senior Lecturer in English (PRAG) and teach Business English and American Contemporary History at the University of Nice. She holds a PhD in American Studies entitled ‘The homeless in Greater Boston since the 1980s: a metonymy of urban policies in the United States?’ (December 2023). Her research focuses on homelessness and housing policies in the United States since the Reagan years.

Donia Touihri-Mebarek is Senior Lecturer in British Studies at Université Rennes 2. She earned her PhD in Anglophone Studies at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her current research explores the politics of diversity as well as issues of integration and national identity in the United Kingdom.

Marie-Pierre Vincent is Senior Lecturer of British Studies at Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne and affiliated with the European Centre of Sociology and Political Science. Her thesis focused on anti-gentrification resistance in Hoxton/Shoreditch in London (2008–2019). Her work also relates to art and anti-gentrification activism, political discourse and gentrification and socio-cultural diversity.

Mark Wickham-Jones is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. He has a long-standing research interest in labour politics and social democracy. Currently, he is working on the development of political science as an academic discipline in the decades after 1945. He is the author of Whatever Happened to Party Government? Controversies in American Political Science (University of Michigan Press, 2018).

Like many edited volumes, this volume started with a conference, which was held at Sorbonne Nouvelle University in June 2022. Therefore, our thanks first go to all those who helped prepare and organise this event, particularly James Cohen, Pierre Gervais and Sarah Pickard. We also want to acknowledge the financial support given to the event by Sorbonne Nouvelle University and more specifically by our research centre, the Centre for Research on the English-speaking World (CREW).

The three-day international multidisciplinary conference, which gathered over 50 participants, was a wonderful human experience in difficult times – it was the first large-scale event to be organised as we were starting to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Only a fraction of the papers given over the length of the conference resulted in a chapter in this volume, but the book owes of course a great deal to the exchanges between all the participants during the sessions and breaks. Among those, we extend special thanks to our keynote speakers, Donatella della Porta, Philip Golub and Gerry Stoker. The enthusiasm shown by all comforted us in the view that the issue of fragmentation was a timely and fruitful lense through which to analyse past and current phenomena.

We want to thank the authors in this volume not only for the quality of their chapters but also for their exceptional responsiveness and their patience with a long-drawn process, as well as our many colleagues who produced reports on early versions of the chapters and on the book proposal as a whole. Without their corrections and insightful comments, this volume would not be what it is. Any errors left are ours alone.

We also want to thank the editorial team at Emerald: first, Katy Mathers, who supported the project from the start, Lucy Loveday, as well as Siva Shiny. They made us feel we were in good hands throughout the process.

We hope that this volume will continue to generate conversations and debates on issues of fragmentation, conflict and cooperation in English-speaking democracies.

Emmanuelle Avril, Laurence Cossu-Beaumont, David Fée, Fabrice Mourlon

June 2024

Donatella della Porta

This volume addresses the concept of fragmentation from different angles, including reflections on transformations going from the multiplication of political parties to scale shifts at different territorial levels pointing at the connections between what I would define as institutional fragmentation and social fragmentation. It has done so by looking especially at transformations in the English-speaking world, which had been characterised by specific forms of divisions of power and a bipolar party system. I will consider these reflections in a cross-national comparative perspective, looking at social movement studies for ways to address fragmentation.

The reflection on institutional fragmentation as uncoordinated distribution of competences and powers helps to address some dramatic challenges to democratic developments in countries that – like the United Kingdom and the United States – had been considered as the most long lasting example of stable democracies. In the former, dissatisfaction with democratic performances has reached a high point with the political and social disasters caused or enhanced by Brexit. In the latter, the first Trump presidency has shown the fragility of internal checks and balances. In both countries, the racist legacies of the colonial and settlers' colonial history are reflected in institutional forms of racism that amount to social and economic discriminations.

Racism and inequalities have been embedded in both countries in a specific form of capitalism, with specific relations between the state and the market. In their typology on varieties of capitalism, Peter Hall and David Soskice (2001) have contrasted the liberal market economy which characterises the United States and, increasingly, the United Kingdom (defined by the prevalence of market relations) with the coordinated market economy, more typical of continental Europe (allowing for more consensual relations among enterprises and between them and social partners). Additionally, the English-speaking world has developed variants of the global economy: integration in a world economy based on the division of the world into hegemonic power and dependent economy (Arrighi et al., 1989; Wallerstein, 1990). These considerations are important in order to locate the research on fragmentation of power presented in this volume into a specific political-economic context, characterised by a lack (or weak) coordination between the state and the market. While neoliberal capitalism also became dominant in coordinated market economy, yet it took different forms.

Additionally, the reflection on the specific forms of institutional fragmentation should take into account the shifting movements and counter-movements between market liberalisation and social protection that have characterised much of capitalist history (Polanyi, 1957). In the Polanyian pendulum between market dominance and social protection, the English-speaking world has come to represent the worse expression of a blind trust in the market. Representing the most advanced experiments with neoliberal economic reforms and related commodification of citizens' rights, both the United Kingdom and the United States were especially hit by the unequal consequences of the global pandemic, which showed the deadly effects of social inequalities. The Black Lives Matter protests, that in the Summer of 2020 spread from the United States to the United Kingdom and then to all Europe, have pointed at the ways in which racialised groups have been denied social and political rights (della Porta et al., 2022).

The weakening of the welfare state in the United Kingdom, given a long history of neoliberal reform with dominance of market competition and new public management, and the traditional presence of a residual welfare state in the United States had in fact important effects on what I define as social fragmentation. This, I would consider in fact as most resonant with Zygmund Bauman's notion of liquid modernity, which implies insecurity and flexibility, which makes collective identities difficult to develop. In his view, postmodern men and women have ‘exchanged a portion of their possibilities of security for a portion of happiness. The discontents of modernity arose from a kind of security that tolerated too little freedom in the pursuit of individual happiness. The discontents of postmodernity arise from a kind of freedom of pleasure-seeking which tolerate too little individual security’ (1997, p. 3). With the end of the illusion of a collective telos (as a state of perfection to be reached), there is a deregulation and privatisation of tasks and duties from collective endowments to individual management. In this view, individualism wins over the community. Here as well, where these widespread trends increase social fragmentation, insecurity and precariousness are most present, the highest the reliance on free market versus social protection.

Reflecting on fragmentation from the perspective of social movement studies could help further disentangle different dimensions of the phenomena and connect it with other similar conceptualisations. First of all, it is to be noted that the challenges of fragmentation do not come from a division of power which, in social movement studies, is rather seen as opening channels of access to institutions for protestors. In fact, research on the political opportunities for contentious politics, has considered the functional division of power as well as territorial decentralisation as favouring protests and avoiding radicalisation even if they might reduce the capacity to implement changes (della Porta & Diani, 2020, Chap. 7). The presence of a strong and independent judiciary power as well as free and pluralistic media are most important for opening additional channels of accountability. Social movements themselves add another layer of democratic accountability in what Pierre Rosanvallon (2006) has defined as ‘counterdemocracies’, i.e. a democracy of controls. Representative conceptions of democracy have been the most challenged by the developments towards what has been defined as a ‘neoliberal’ conception of democracy, which reduces the role of citizens to that of electors if not of consumers (Crouch, 2004). The need has developed, therefore, to think about other democratic qualities that are better able to enhance citizens' capacity of surveillance (Rosanvallon, 2006). This does not imply a disavowal of the function of the state, but rather a request of politics as capable of reducing economic inequalities and their inefficiencies, together with unfairness. In fact, historically, democratic states have legitimated themselves not only in terms of political equality (and negative freedom) but also (in the output) because they claim to provide a modicum of welfare to their citizens (see also della Porta, 2013, 2015).

By the same token, the presence of a multiparty system reflects the historical structuration of different political cleavages: the class cleavage but also the cleavage between the city and the countryside, the Church and the State, the centre and the periphery. As Stein Rokkan stated, multiple cleavages emerged as main conflict lines in the development of European societies and politics.

While Rokkan thus singled out the social groups on which the structuration of political conflicts developed, looking at the class cleavage in particular, Stefano Bartolini and Peter Mair (Bartolini, 2000; Bartolini & Mair, 1990) contributed to a conceptualisation of cleavage as composed of three elements: (a) a socio-structural reference (referred to as ‘empirical’ element); (b) a cultural element, as informed by ‘the set of values and beliefs that provide a sense of identity and role to the empirical elements and reflects a self-awareness of the social group(s) involved’; and (c) an organizational/behavioural element, linked to a set of individual interactions, institutions, and organisations, such as political parties, that structures the cleavage (Bartolini, 2000, p. 17). The development of cleavages as a politicised divide is therefore a process composed of various twists and steps such as the generation of opposition due to different interests and values, the crystallisation of opposition lines into a conflict, the rise of alliances of political entrepreneurs engaged in mobilising support for some policies, then the choice of mobilisation strategy (community versus purpose specific) and conflict arena (electoral versus protest). The cleavage itself emerges through processes of politicisation, mobilisation, and democratisation in the nation-state: it is, that is, transferred into politics (rather than repressed or depoliticised) by the action of party translators. This implies that the presence of multiple parties representing multiple cleavages is not per se an instance of fragmentation, but rather could help forms of aggregation if the political systems facilitate this process. To the contrary, when these cleavages are still active, an artificial reduction in the number of parties might leave groups of citizens non-represented, without solving the problem of potential instability, often related to personal factions inside parties.

We can in fact note that in democracy, in order not to produce fragmentation, the division of power and the multiplicity of political parties have to be accompanied by the presence of informal practices and brokers which allows for building a general consensus and negotiate differences, often building collective identities or at least an awareness of the others' reasons. In this sense, political parties have traditionally acted as mediators between the state and the citizens, also facilitating the peaceful elaboration of compromise between different ethnic or religious groups or opposite ideologies. The development of deliberative forms of democracy requires the opening of discursive arenas, inside but also outside public institutions. The development of public spheres, including subaltern ones, is in fact most important in order to overcome social fragmentation by building collective (and political) identities (della Porta, 2013).

Some most recent developments in social movement studies also point at the importance not only of institutional coordination but also of the convergence of different struggles. In this direction, intersectional frames and practices have contributed to the acknowledgement of multiple sources of inequalities that potentially fragment the social bases. Against this background, the combined effects of capitalism, paternalism and racism are addressed through mobilisations that recognise diversities in forms of inequalities but also single out a common target and shared frames. In this sense, the concept of intersectionality coined in activist circles by women of colour has been defined in different ways, connecting to different concepts. In fact, at the macro-level, intersectionality has been connected to interlocking inequalities. It is important to note that the sources of these inequalities intersect in a capitalist system which affects positions in terms of class, gender, ethnicity by fuelling patriarchy and racism. These inequalities affect people's lives in different ways in different moments in time, being reflected in fluid types of identification. Intersectionality implies for social movement activists as well as scholars ‘(1) looking at the ideas, practices and repertoires of actions adopted internally by feminist movements and their organizations to counter the marginalisation of disadvantaged groups and (2) turning our gaze towards the characteristics of cross-movement alliances that connect feminist and other social justice struggles and goals etc. Therefore, we define intersectional solidarity as an ongoing political process of building cooperation by altering power asymmetries within and between organisations and groups located at different intersections of class, race, gender, sexuality, religion and able-bloodedness, and across geographical boundaries’ (Ciccia et al., 2021, p. 176). The intersectional framing points at inclusivity, as ‘attention to intersectional issues translates into coalitional practices which foster the representation and participation of multiply-marginalized groups within the coalition’ (Evans & Lépinard, 2019). The creation of a multiplicity of public spheres is an important step in the aggregation of different claims, interests and identities into broader ones.

The pandemic times have certainly affected social fragmentation. The spreading of fears and the scapegoating of the poorest and marginalised groups of the population has ignited individualistic trends as well as conspiracy theory (della Porta, 2023). Individual freedom has been opposed to solidarities in anti-vax protests that have often seen a large presence of far-right groupings. In this protest, the discourse of individual responsibilities has been taken as proof that those who were most exposed to contagious and related risks were themselves responsible for their destiny. The circulation of fake news has contributed to reducing trust in science, politics and society. Competition between different interests has been increased in times of scarcity in the face of increased needs. While often presented as heterogeneous in their social and political composition, anomalous in their ideological profile, and pre-modern in their repertoires of action, the anti-vax protests can be considered to be a form of regressive contentious politics during an emergency critical juncture. Indeed, in line with the conceptualisation of right-wing thinking, they privileged individual freedom over equality, as well as personal interest over the common good. They were also anti modernist in nature, aligning on anti-state positions. There was also a significant retrograde character to the protests, with anti-vax activists constructing a dystopian view that was heavily influenced by politicised conspiracy beliefs in the plots of Satanist cosmopolitan elites drinking the blood of innocent children (della Porta, 2023). In a context characterised by radicalisation in the forms and symbols of the anti-vax protests, regressive framing has focused on the defence of individual freedoms, with an actual denial of solidarity with the part of the population that was most exposed to the virus and its consequences; with health considered as a personal responsibility to be achieved through alternative practices and compliance with the so-called natural order.

At the same time, however, progressive social movements have developed forms of solidarity that have helped to overcome isolation and the fragmentation of individual needs. They have also shown that politicisation helps the convergence of claims around conceptions of justice and democracy. The very idea of creating commons is opposed to the commodification of public services. In fact, pandemic times have been times of social fragmentation and competition for scarce resources, but also of solidarity. Focusing on social movements that endeavour to expand social rights and political participation, my research indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly been a contentious period. While the lockdown initially seemed to have frozen all opportunities for protest, by confining people to their homes or at least heavily constraining their ability to move freely and assemble in groups, social movements proved capable of adapting to these external circumstances that were themselves rapidly changing. During the pandemic, the repertoires of contention by progressive social movements built upon previous experiences in forms that are influenced by specific challenges, such as a physical reduction of open spaces, limitations on freedoms and the growing urgency to provide for the material needs of an increasing number of people. Alongside protesting in the street, progressive social movements focused on mutual aid. Due to increasing inequalities and the growing demand from people in need, there was a rise in mutual aid activities, which were based on existing experiences of solidarity initiatives that were adapted to the constraints of the pandemic. The provision of food and shelter, social support and legal advice went beyond simple charity in a process of politicisation of claims but also a prefiguration of alternative ways to care for others. Last but not least, activists also engaged in knowledge building. They not only employed but also updated existing platforms and devices to spread counter-information on anti-contagion measures as well as on government policies, including acts of repression.

As research showed (della Porta, 2022; della Porta et al., 2024), collective action thus proved particularly important when faced with disruptive events, stimulating relational, cognitive and affective mechanisms which helped overcome social fragmentation. At the relational level, action itself tended to produce a sort of social capital, putting individuals and organisations in contact with each other as well as creating arenas for encounters to take place. Although the emergency restricted the amount of time available to find solutions to immediate needs, the lockdown also offered opportunities to engage in collective activities. There was, therefore, at the same time a need to offer alternative care but also an increased need to receive it. Intense emotions fuelled social participation as collective action was driven by indignation and compassion that motivated people to organise themselves and create solidarity networks in order to participate in the collective effort against the virus. At the cognitive level, the pandemic conditions disrupted normal routines and ways of thinking, driving the development of alternative knowledge, the importance of which increased in such uncertain times.

In sum, addressing the challenge of fragmentation requires a re-thinking of the conception of democracy, going beyond representative ones and searching instead for forms of participation that can help form collective identities. Moreover, it requires considering the connection between politics and the market.