Geographies of Economic Contention: A Cross-Country Perspective

Several decades of neoliberal restructuring led to inquiries related to the societal responses to these economic transformations. Many aspects of socio-economic mobilizations became an object of inquiry: repertoires of action, effects of political and economic context, actors´ organizational attributes, or collective action frames. While acknowledging the importance of these inquiries, we aim to contribute to the research on a less studied yet important dimension of economic protest: the link between its collective coordination and geography. Previous studies have already addressed spatial aspects of economic protest, such as the diffusion of economic protest (Hedström 1994; Biggs 2005), its scaling up and down (Tarrow 2005; Della Porta, Mattoni 2014) or shift and concentration (Silver 2003; Beissinger 2022). Building primarily on the relational perspective in the study of collective action (Crossley 2011; Diani 2015), we aim to analyze the cooperation at economic protest in relation to the position of collective actors and events in physical space. We conceptualize economic contention as a collective action field where diverse collective actors follow their goals, make various claims, employ various repertoires and cooperate or compete. While such relational meso-level order of collective action represents a social space structured by relations and interactions among collective actors, it also has an irreducible geographical dimension: large urban areas and political centers attract “new social movement” tactics with broad protest coalitions, long ago industrialized regions on the semi-periphery are the storage of a traditional labor repertoire “managed” by the unions, and economic peripheries remain silent with occasional informally organized and atomized protest. To verify these expectations, we aim to link relational and spatial aspects of economic contention in two Eastern European countries – Czechia and Slovakia - and apply a network-analytic approach to protest event data (1989-2022) in Czechia (N= 2042) and Slovakia (N=2077).