“Europeanization as Pragmatic Politics: Italy’s Civil Society Actors in the Face of Right-Wing Populism”

New article just published in Social Sciences and available online:

Europeanization as Pragmatic Politics: Italy’s Civil Society Actors Operating in the Face of Right-Wing Populism
by Fazila Mat, Luisa Chiodi and Oliver Schmidtke

“In Italy, civil society organizations have come under increasing pressure with regard to their advocacy for migrants and refugees. The rise of the populist–nationalist forces and governments over the past decade have severely restricted the political space in which they operate and instilled the need to pursue alternate venues of political advocacy.”

In this article the authors analyze how grassroots that are embedded in local socio-political realities, the progressively adverse domestic political environment has made the pursuit of transnational opportunities for these organizations’ advocacy increasingly attractive, if not an essential
element of their action repertoire.

The analysis of the interviews with representatives of Italy’s CSOs shows that, first, Europeanization highlights the closing of political opportunities at the national level where the success of populist politics and of its discriminatory policies, its fundamental rights violations, and its criminalization of solidarity drove CSOs to look for transnational
solutions…’ Read more https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/13/4/205

This publications is part of  the research project Populism and its Effects on Liberal Democracy: Minority Rights and Freedom of Speech funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and led by Dr. Oliver Schmidtke, director of the Centre for Global Studies and professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria.