Breaking the mold: the changing modularity of protest forms during cycles of contention 

One crucial decision that every group of protestors needs to make regards the forms of action through which they want to convey their claims. While repertoires of contention can vary greatly across different sociopolitical contexts, we know little about why some protest forms may acquire or lose prominence within the same polity over relatively short periods. By applying a novel multimodal network analysis framework to an original protest event dataset covering political contention in Spain between 2007 and 2014 during the Great Recession, this research explores how the modularity of protest forms— that is, their transferability to different circumstances of contention— evolves in the short term. Our analyses demonstrate that the overall repertoire of contention becomes more flexible as the cycle unfolds, while political opportunities present weak and asymmetric effects on the transferability of different tactics, refining expectations from classic theories of contentious politics in several important ways. 

Program

30th October 2025
Martin Portos | Scuola Normale Superiore
with Alejandro Ciordia | Scuola Normale Superiore
Breaking the mold: the changing modularity of protest forms during cycles of contention 

Next Seminars:

11th November 2025
Emanuela Lombardo | Scuola Normale Superiore
Do feminist institutional responses address the ‘anti-gender regime’? 

03th December 2025
Naoto Higuchi | School of Human Sciences, Waseda University 
Far-right Movements in Japan: Contrasting Repertoires of Contention between Far-right Lobbyists and Hate Groups 

22th January 2026 
Chiara Milan | Scuola Normale Superiore
Intersectional Solidarity in Action: Social Movements Challenging Meloni’s Securitarism