This article focuses on informal control strategies and their effects on community-based organizations in Quebec (Canada). These organizations, highly institutionalized and rarely considered as radical actors, have a long tradition of political action in Quebec, intervening as interest groups to present grievances to the government, as well as social actors protesting in the streets. Many control strategies hinder this essential part of associations' mandate. Interviews conducted in 2021 with 14 groups show that, despite these associations' relatively uncontroversial repertoire of action, more than twenty forms of control can be exercised over them. Implemented by multiple actors, these strategies affect individuals, groups, and their missions. These data shed light on what informal control strategies do to the political action of community-based organizations, while informing about control strategies by actors other than the police. Drawing on a sociology of social movements and repression, this article demonstrates the informality integrated into multiple repressive tactics, highlighting the importance of taking it into account when thinking about repression and control practices and their effects, especially on marginalized individuals and groups.
This article analyses recent climate contention in Italy through an original dataset of 186 protest events collected between 2022 and 2024 using Online Protest Event Analysis (OPEA). Drawing on social movement theory and the concept of waves of contention, it examines the temporal rhythms, repertorial transformations, and spatial configurations of contemporary climate mobilization. Findings reveal a cyclical and intermittent pattern of protest, marked by alternating phases of intensification, latency, and strategic recomposition. While demonstrative practices remain dominant, the period is characterized by the temporary strategic centrality of civil disobedience, driven primarily by Ultima Generazione, which selectively reconfigures protest repertoires without producing a generalized escalation of conflict. Spatially, climate contention is concentrated in the metropolitan centres of Northern and Central Italy, while more territorially embedded forms of environmental mobilization appear rooted in distinct place-based ecologies of contention. Overall, the Italian case is interpreted as a specific wave of contention nested within a broader cycle of environmental contention, shaped by tactical innovation, internal differentiation, and shifting political opportunities.
This article reviews the main issues surrounding repression as covered in the existing literature. The main theoretical issues addressed include the forms of repression, their actors, and their potential effects. This issue brings together research on cases of discreet, informal, hidden, or even invisible repression and control, which nonetheless have a decisive impact on the capacity for political action among groups and the individuals who comprise them. In doing so, this article highlights the scientific and social relevance of the special issue on the infrapolitics of repression, explored through the lived experiences of nonprofits and activist groups. This issue presents different conceptualizations that seek to move beyond the most obvious theorizations of repression, situating it beyond its most visible forms and the obvious actors.
In July 2024, students from several universities in Bangladesh turned out to the streets to reform job quotas in government services. The government used excessive force to stop protest, leading to widespread violence in the country. Soon after the government's brutal actions, many people, including college students, took to the streets to demand justice for barbaric acts. This study examined Bangladeshi college students' protest participation and willingness to participate in future social movements. A survey was conducted with 125 college students after the July 2024 protest. Descriptive and inferential statistics were computed. All statistical analyses were done using SPSS (version 26). Most respondents were male (72%), with an average age of 18.31 years. Only 12.8% had personal income, and 71.2% were in Grade 12. About 66% were from a Bengali medium background, and 61.6% were science students. The study found that 77.6% participated in protests physically, while 91.2% were active on social media. Additionally, 90.4% expressed willingness to participate in future social movements. Regression analysis showed that age, sex, medium of instruction, faculties, and state repression significantly influence participation in the protest physically. On the other hand, kinship sentiment and state repression demonstrated a correlation with online protest participation. The willingness to participate in future social movements was found to be associated with social media engagement and the perceived well-being of the nation. These findings are very useful for researchers and policymakers to challenge the existing notion that youths are reluctant or have limited interest in social issues, civic engagement, and participation.
This article shows how understanding repressive phenomena in liberal democracies requires conceptualizing them within the framework of a deeper and more diffuse dynamic of institutional control and political neutralization of civil society organizations through funding and partnerships. To do so, we examine, through a research conducted in Lille, a municipality in northern France, what we propose to call a micro-politics of repression. We focus more specifically on the micro-political processes of control and repression in this city through two case studies that show how partnership relationships can, depending on events and conflicts linked to the asymmetrical nature of these relationships, tip the balance towards certain forms of more or less overt reprimand and repression. In conclusion, we open the discussion on the importance of a joint understanding of the phenomena of institutional control, political neutralization, and repression with a broader reflection on the restriction of civic space in Western democracies.
Scholars have debated whether state repression demobilizes or radicalizes social movements, but the conditions under which nonviolent direct action groups maintain confrontational tactics despite surveillance, particularly in the post-COINTELPRO era, remain underexplored. This paper addresses this gap through a 24-month ethnography of horizontalist direct action groups in New York City, complemented by interviews, oral histories, and internal documents from the New York City Police Department. Drawing on collective identity theory, it argues that nonviolent collective identity serves as a strategic shield against surveillance and infiltration. Through public visibility, transparent protocols, and collective discipline, this nonviolent collective identity protects groups from agents provocateurs, enables recruitment and retention, and counters soft repression – allowing activists to operate openly under surveillance while refusing to abandon confrontational tactics. The paper concludes that nonviolent collective identity constitutes an adaptive mechanism that sustains resistance within hostile surveillance environments, challenging prevailing demobilization theses. These insights expand our understanding of the repression-mobilization nexus by reconceptualizing nonviolence as a strategic adaptation that enables persistence rather than passivity.
Taking the 2019 Chilean social outburst as a case study, this article examines struggles over memory in post-authoritarian Chile. It analyses how official memory constrains how the past can be articulated, shaping political subjectivities and discouraging engagement, while also exploring how demonstrators resist and rework counter-memories during the mobilization. The article is structured in two parts. The first, drawing on James Scott, conceptualises official memory as part of a transitional transcript that functions as a form of infra-repression by demobilising dissent. Building on scholarship that has highlighted the role of transitional memory projects in stabilizing post-authoritarian elites, this dynamic is examined in the Chilean transition, particularly through the Concertación’s mnemonic project and its role in containing dissent after the dictatorship. The second part presents an abductive thematic analysis of forty semi-structured interviews with uprising participants, revealing three main processes. First, prior to the uprising, participants’ socialization was marked by a “transitional vacuum” in which primary socialization spaces failed to provide opportunities to thematize the past, potentially discouraging engagement while also prompting the search for alternative memories. Second, during the mobilizations, police brutality fractured the transitional narrative and the uprising functioned as a social space where counter-memories were reworked through collective assemblies, conversations with families, and self-directed information practices. Finally, in the post-uprising period, public discourse shifted toward more conservative framings, a development that does not indicate hegemonic consensus but instead propels the retreat of counter-memories into hidden transcripts. By theorising memory as infra-repression and analysing the interaction between official and counter-memories at the micro-level, this article sheds light on how repression and resistance operate within societies shaped by authoritarian legacies. These findings underscore the importance of recognizing and studying hidden forms of resistance, particularly in contexts of rising authoritarianism and far-right threats.
In a context of growing inequalities and institutional disaffection, young women in Italy are redefining political subjectivity through everyday practices of care, solidarity, and commoning. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted from 2019 to 2022 within the PRIN project “Mapping Youth Futures: Forms of Anticipation and Youth Agency”, this contribution explores the experiences of 20 women aged 25–34 from Milan, Naples, Cosenza, and Cagliari. Through an intersectional lens, it highlights how they build new political subjectivities in extra-institutional spaces, centres of daily life and meaning-making. Participants transform the margins into feminist commons, into spaces of political experimentation. Their prefigurative practices contest the neoliberal enclosures of care and time, revealing a shift from institutional allegiances to life-making as a form of politics. The article contributes to debates on youth participation by showing how gendered and generational inequalities can act as catalysts for insurgent agency.
This article conceptualises total incapacitation policing as a counter-insurgence strategy oriented towards the denial of protest rights to groups that are stigmatized as being extremist because opposed to the dominant raison d’État which claim moral superiority in the defence of Israeli security. In order to understand the development of a police strategy of total incapacitation, the analysis aims to fill a gap in social movement studies on repression in Western democracy by starting a dialogue with historical and contemporary analysis of the continuous impact of colonialism in its different forms. In fact, the strategy of total incapacitation is to be connected with a return to the metropolis of forms of colonial policing against the protests by the colonised subject, which go well beyond the policing of protest in the streets. The article first addresses the theoretical approach and methods used, introducing then some general characteristics of the policing of protests in solidarity with Palestine in Germany and then analyse in depth the case of the Palestine Congress looking at the specific strategy of total incapacitation, based upon the denial of the right to protest, the intimidation of protestors in their direct interactions with the police as well as forms of disinformation and stereotyping. It will then attempt to explain the emergence of this strategic incapacitation style of protest policing by looking at the internal characteristics of the police as well as the direct and indirect demands placed upon it by the government and the mobilization of a powerful law and order coalition.
This article examines how solidarity, typically understood as a relational resource for emancipation, can function instead as a mechanism of informal repression within far-right digital communities. Drawing on a 15-month netnographic study of Le Bastion, an online self-help network organized around a far-right influencer, the article introduces the concept of mutilated solidarity---a form of relational bonding that reproduces ideological conformity rather than enabling political subjectivation. Combined with a revised reading of Scott's infrapolitics, the study proposes the concept of inverted infrapolitics to describe horizontal, affective, and symbolic forms of control. Through discourse analysis and thematic mapping, it shows how emotions such as shame, pride, and fear are mobilized to normalize virilist, hierarchical values under the guise of fraternity. This article contributes to the critical sociology of solidarity by rethinking the affective infrastructures of ideological reproduction in far-right online spaces, and foregrounds the ambivalent role of care in contemporary political subjectivation.
In Quebec, “autonomous community organizations” are involved in the public health and social services network as autonomous and complementary partners. This partnership appears paradoxical, given that the movement claims an advocacy role vis-à-vis the state. It illustrates what Lamoureux (1994) describes as a relation of “conflictual cooperation” between the state and community organizations. How do actors navigate between cooperation with public institutions and conflict when necessary? Drawing on an ethnography conducted in two youth concertation tables, this article highlights the tensions inherent in conflictual cooperation and examines the conditions under which contestation can still be voiced by community actors. While concertation is framed as a site for collaboration, it also discourages community actors from “making things political” (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2018) by limiting their ability to challenge power relations with public institutions. The article argues that the absence of overt conflict in the performance of concertation often results less from alignment than from subtle control tactics – whether intentional or not – that channel and constrain dissent, although protest can still be reconfigured both backstage and outside concertation.
After Daesh terrorist attacks, the French State reinforced its securitarian policies, targeting – among others - Muslim associations (Kaya, 2011). The “War on Terror” has been accompanied by restrictions on civil liberties in the name of rapid and preventive repression (Vedaschi & Graziani, 2019). Yet repression does not operate solely through visible coercion. Alongside the use of force, authorities deploy less visible strategies aimed at weakening Civil Society organizations (Talpin, 2016). Among these, financial control constitutes a central mechanism of soft repression, understood as a non-violent form of repression that reduces the capacity for contestation available to subaltern actors. In France, where the non-profit sector is largely dependent on public funding (Archambault et al., 2013), the State can use budgetary resources as leverage. Authorities often mobilize discourses of “budgetary constraint” to pressure organizations into compliance or to fragment mobilization by fostering competition over scarce funds (Talpin & Bonneville, 2023). In extreme cases, security-related justifications are invoked to freeze organizations’ bank accounts, like after the introduction of the Law Against Separatism (2021) – later renamed Law Concerning the Respect of Republican Principles. Drawing on qualitative interviews with leaders of four Muslim associations, this paper addresses the following research questions: How and when does the French State enact soft repression through financial control over Muslim associations? How do targeted associations react? By analyzing both State strategies and the responses of affected organizations, before and after 2021’s law, the paper highlights how soft repression is deployed and when it prompts adaptive, infrapolitical, reactions by Muslim associations.
The growing securitization and criminalization of social movements in Europe raise concerns about the erosion of public freedoms. Yet scholarship often emphasizes overt repression, neglecting the effects of more covert strategies. This article examines post-Indignados Spain to analyze two such mechanisms taking an infra-political lens: administrative repression through fines and intensified police infiltration. Focusing on Madrid’s housing movement, climate activism, and squatted social centers, it investigates how these practices shape repertoires and organizational capacity. Drawing on interviews with activists, legislative analysis, and secondary data on protest rights, the study finds that both mechanisms foster demobilization, weaken civil disobedience, and undermine organizational structures. Administrative repression generates ambiguity and atomization, while infiltration breeds distrust, eroding horizontal and participatory organizing. Nevertheless, movements create new forms of solidarity and organizational capacity to counteract these effects. By advancing research on these underexplored strategies, the article illuminates the relationship between repression and movement dynamics, contributing to debates on securitization, public freedoms, and the resilience of collective action in contemporary Europe.
This article investigates how a community-based environmental mobilization in Eresos (Lesvos, Greece) turned a localized conflict over beach privatization into durable collective organization and everyday infrastructures of autonomy. Building on social movement scholarship on grassroots and “ad hoc” mobilization, and engaging Holloway’s notion of “cracks” alongside debates on territorialization, the article introduces creative resistance as a process through which negation is converted into sustained social forms. Empirically, the study draws on one year of ethnographic fieldwork conducted by two researchers, combining participant observation (assemblies, beach actions, public interventions, everyday practices) with five semi-structured interviews with long-term participants. The findings show that (1) conflict over Afentelli beach catalyzed a shift from episodic protest to organized community presence (blockade shifts and assemblies); (2) creativity operated as a practical mechanism for sustaining participation and broadening mobilization (cultural events, DIY practices, solidarity initiatives); and (3) institutionalization through the Environmental Association did not “close” mobilization but re-embedded it, enabling continuity, legitimacy, and collective control over resources.
This article explores how community action in Montréal‑Nord – a borough too often reduced to crisis in the urban imagination of Quebec (Canada) – navigates the paradoxes of funding, between institutional re-engagement and political repression. Drawing on interviews, we provide insights into how key politicized community actors reflect on and attempt to act upon the consequences of funding which, while urgently needed to support their local initiatives, also risks diluting their radical potential. Montréal-Nord – marked by racial stigma yet defined by deep-rooted solidarity – offers a critical case for examining these dynamics. Centring the experiences and perspectives of local actors, this paper argues that Montréal-Nord’s community networks are strong, that its political memory is long, and that its capacity for self‑organization is undeniable. Over the past two decades, the borough has been at the centre of two major waves of public and private funding. The first one followed the 2008 uprising sparked by the police killing of the young Fredy Villanueva—a moment that crystallized decades of racial profiling and systemic neglect. The second one emerged during the COVID‑19 pandemic, when local organizations once again filled the vacuum left by public institutions. During both waves, funding flowed not as a neutral resource designed to meet critical needs, but as a political tool with serious consequences: enabling community work while simultaneously shaping its boundaries and direction. Focusing on private funding, this article identifies core dynamics that help understand how the funding of community action in Montréal‑Nord navigates between control, transformation, and low-intensity political repression.
The concept of soft repression has broadened the study of social movement policing by drawing attention to strategies that go beyond states’ overt strategies to suppress or control activism. However, the most subtle and insidious practices are often examined in isolation from more coercive tactics, and the meaning of “soft” remains ambiguous – frequently conflated with extra-state, covert, or discursive forms of repression. This article draws on the case of British climate civil disobedience policing to argue for a more integrated approach. I propose that repression should be analysed along two dimensions: repression in the public space, which restricts movements’ access to the streets, and repression in the public sphere, which seeks to delegitimise them. I demonstrate that these distinct forms of repression can overlap, precede, or reinforce one another; operate with varying levels of visibility; be enacted by both state and non-state actors; and provoke specific responses from movements.
