Social protest during the Covid Pandemic: what’s changed?

ANA NATALUCCI; FERRERO JUAN PABLO

Bath

Congreso; Conference 2022; 2022

Society of Latin American Studies Latin America and University of Bath

In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared SARS-CoV-2 a pandemic. Subsequently, governments implemented restrictions on the movement of people and economic activities. The ILO warned about the catastrophic effects for the world of work and the need for governments to intervene to alleviate the crisis. The objective of this paper is twofold: to map and characterise social protest events identifying changes and continuities in social conflict, measuring three variables: organisations, demands and repertoires. Second, we aim to reflect about the rationality of collective action, i.e., to what extent spontaneous actions reveal the return of crowd [i]rationality in collective behaviour. The main questions are 1) has the pandemic changed the dynamics of social conflict and 2) what are the implications of these changes for social movement theory? The argument is that the protest dynamic adopted a “segmented dynamic”, maintaining a high level of organisation, with a predominance of the trade union organisations, with little capacity for coordination, generalisation, and low impact on the political system in the short term.