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10 Promoting the Protest: The Organizational Embeddedness of the Demonstrators Mario Diani 194 Although they have been frequently associated with peace movements (and understandably so), the February 15 demonstrations were, first of all, speci fic protest events, as large and impressive as they were. As we know, the relationship between protest events and social movements is a complex one. Regardless of whether we define them as “sustained interactions between power holders and authorities,” à la Tilly (see, e.g., 1995, 369; 1994), or as “informal networks linking individuals and/or organizations, engaged in a conflict on the basis of a shared collective identity” (Diani 1992, 13; Diani and Bison 2004), social movements are usually associated with collective action, displaying substantial continuity over time. Specific events, no matter how big, do not necessarily make a movement. Rather than the peak of long-term mobilization efforts conducted by peace campaigners, the February 15 demonstrations might have been instead the outcome of one-off efforts conducted by ad hoc coalitions, set up precisely for those events. Therefore, looking at the composition of the coalitions that mobilized on February 15 may provide valuable insights about the nature of those marches. In general, those coalitions were highly heterogeneous, as their members ranged from established interest groups and political parties to environmental , human rights, development, women’s, and ethnic minority groups; global justice organizations; churches; and so forth. But what was the relative presence of peace activists and peace organizations in the different marches? Did these mainly attract people with long-lasting commitment to peace activism? Or, regardless of their numbers, did those people and their organizations play a central role in promoting the demonstrations? If that was the case, then the February 15 events could be most plausibly seen as peaks in longer waves of peace-movement mobilization, following in the wake of the campaigns originated by the attack on Afghanistan in fall 2001. If, however, the demonstrators came overwhelmingly from other sectors of social and political activism, then an interpretation of the demonstrations as a major expression of broader political conflicts within the specific countries might be in order. Similar conclusions might be reached if one discovered that organizations without peace profiles were most prominent among those promoting the marches. For example, if one found this to be the case in Italy, it would not be difficult to link the February 15 demonstration in Rome to the larger protest wave against Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing government (della Porta and Diani 2005). To address these questions, I will draw on our dataset from two different if integrated perspectives. First, I will look at the individual demonstrators ’ backgrounds in collective action and in associations. By doing so, it will be possible to present hypotheses about the sectors of civil society that contributed to the demonstrations, and their interdependence. Then, I will focus more specifically on demonstrators’ involvement in the organizations promoting the demonstrations. This will enable me to assess what types of organizations played the most central roles in which country, as well as the extent to which organizations central to the promotion of the marches were actually connected to peace activism, and thus were expressions of a longer term peace activist agenda, rather than actors linking the peace issues to other types of collective agendas. I shall also relate our findings to the characteristics of the political context in which the different mobilizations occurred. Since the 1980s, theories explaining the success and traits of social movements as a result of favorable “political opportunities” (della Porta 1995; Tarrow 1998[1994]; Kriesi 2004) have addressed at least three dimensions of the political context: the most permanent, structural features of a given polity. Among these are the institutional arrangements available to facilitate citizens’ access to the political system, the established cleavages, or the cultural traits of a society that may facilitate or hinder the spread of certain interpretations of reality and/or of certain identities (Kitschelt 1986; Rucht 1990; Diani 1996; Koopmans and Statham 1999; see also chapter 2 in this volume). These properties are the ones most closely associated with the concept of “political opportunity structure ” and are often differentiated from more volatile political opportunities (see, e.g., Gamson and Meyer 1996), such as those offered by changes in the configuration of political actors potentially supporting or opposing a certain movement (their alliance and conflict structure: Curtis and Zurcher 1973...

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