“The Emergence of Autonomist Politics: European Radicalism after the Extreme Left, 1976-1985” (AutPo)

“The Emergence of Autonomist Politics: European Radicalism after the Extreme Left, 1976-1985” (AutPo)AbstractThis project will produce an original, comparative, and transnational study of the European autonomist movements of the late 1970s and 1980s, the most significant youth movement in the contemporary history of Western Europe after that of 1968.

The study will focus on autonomist currents in the major metropolitan centers of Paris, Milan, Rome, Zurich, Frankfurt, and West Berlin, focusing particularly on autonomist ideologies and practices and the response of institutions, including the far left, radical feminist movements, and the state, and on examining issues of protest and political violence.

The objectives of the project will be achieved by archival research in both state and social movement archives in France, West Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, including a secondment in Rome, but will also be amplified by the constitution of an oral history interview base and the use of questionnaires informed by the most recent sociological methods.

The study is relevant to the MSC-IF program because of the enduring impact of autonomism on radical political culture in Europe and because it will examine dynamics of political violence in protest movements, moving beyond the typical focus of studies of violence in the 1970s on terrorism and armed movements.

In so doing, it will facilitate better understanding of the dynamics of violence in contemporary protest by helping to identify the historical transformations of protest cultures and the interactions between protest movements and state institutions in a comparative and transnational lens focused on recent European history.