Networked resistance in the new conjuncture. Civil society and the future of human rights in the 21st century

As we witness a democratic decline on a global scale, this project aims to understand the role of civil society in the turbulent dynamics of present times.

We will examine the interplay between moral conservative advocacy networks and emancipatory protest movements, through the prism of gender and sexuality. Looking beyond states and public authorities, we focus our attention on the mobilization of civil society.

Pioneering a multimethod approach, combining multi-scalar and transnational ethnographic fieldwork with digital methods and comparative analysis, the purpose of the project is twofold: first, to capture the connective tactics, strategies and agendas of both moral conservative advocacy networks and emancipatory protest movements, and second, to evaluate whether the efforts to achieve their goals generate unanticipated, perverse effects.

An urgent need to develop deeper understandings of the role of civil society in populist mobilization and in opposition to populism motivates the project, which ultimately will capture how civil society itself is reconfigured by these mobilizations, and grasp the changing conceptualizations of human rights.

The project will run for four years and deepen the collaborations between a tightly integrated, interdisciplinary research team comprising three scholars working closely across all project years, creating a dynamic cutting-edge venture at the interface between sociology, gender studies and political science.