Mobilizations and Social Movements in the Contentious Brazilian Public Sphere

In recent years we have witnessed several forms of protest in Brazil. June 2013 has become a kind of reference for new forms of social mobilizations and considered a watershed for contentious politics in the country. This proposal first aims to differentiate the various forms of mobilization and movements in order to understand the complexity of the political scenery. Secondly, it will be defended that the idea of rights is a powerful triggering factor to various forms of protests and is behind most of them: both to social movements based on demands of social and civil rights (such as the homeless or the gay movements), but also to several mobilizations whose motto is a diffuse list of claims which reflect the hardships of daily life in Brazilian cities. Finally, it is important to question which concepts dear to the theory of social movements have heuristic validity for the understanding of current mobilizations in the Brazilian public sphere.