Planning Strategy after an Emergency. the Case of Italian Social Centres

Four years ago, the health crisis brought in by the sudden outbreak of Covid-19 placed movements in front of the strategic dilemma of whether and how to respond. Literature suggested that movements mobilized in different forms, adapting to the constraints posed by the emergency conditions. They staged online protests; engaged in mutual aid activism; denounced the structural nature of the emergency linking it with pre-existing and long denounced crises. However, these analysis present two shortcomings. First, movements reactions are presented as self-evident, as snapshot of what happened in conditions in which agency was supposed to be on halt. Second, they are bound to the first pandemic year, 2020, thus leaving out of the scope of the analysis an understanding of how strategy evolved following the change in emergency context. This paper aims to fill these gaps and to unpack the process of movements’ strategy change against the pandemic context covering the period 2020-2023. This timeframe was indeed characterized by the outbreak of the emergency and, progressively, by its normalisation with the comeback of a presumed “normality”. How was strategy been adjusted in the meantime? Did the strategic choices taken on the short-term as emergency response sediment overtime and become part of a longer-term strategy planning? This paper examines the relationship between strategy negotiation and collective action outcomes over the course of the pandemic emergency. It focuses on the case of Italian social centres adopting direct social action during the lockdown. These actors mobilised to provide for the needs of the most vulnerable by organizing local Voluntary Solidarity Brigades. However, only some of them maintained the Brigade in the afterwards of the emergency. The paper addresses the pathways that led similar actors taking up the same form of action to eventually take on different strategic choices out of the emergency.