When millennials protest. Youth activism in Italy

Notwithstanding the several threats that the Millennial generation faces (from unemployment, to precariousness and uncertainty), many young citizens still engage in politics, though not necessarily through conventional patterns of participation. The economic crisis and the related austerity policies have triggered out protest mobilizations in all South European countries (della Porta, Andretta et al. 2017), in which young generations have played a crucial role. Though in Italy anti-austerity mobilizations have been leaded especially by the old and established trade unions (Andretta 2017; Andretta and della Porta 2015), Millennials have been very much involved in those and in other kinds of protests. This generation faces indeed a very different type of life expectations and/or conditions than the previous ones, and it is more seriously threatened by the current economic crisis. This makes particularly interesting to investigate how these citizens overcome barriers of marginalization, network and develop collective identities. Our chapter focuses on the dynamics of political commitment of young Italians, defined as made of those between 14 and 40 years old, during collective mobilizations in the last years. By relying on data from several surveys carried out during protest events on social, economic and labour issues from 2010 to 2011, in this chapter we single out differences and the similarities between young and “old” generations on those aspects that social movement studies underline as crucial in explaining individual participation; namely grievance and emotion, collective identity and network embeddedness (della Porta and Diani 1996). By comparing four different types of demonstrations--a May day march (held in Florence, 2011), a typical anti-austerity protest (in Rome in 2012); an anti-neoliberal type of protest (in Florence in 2012) and, finally, a new type of protest involving directly the precarious young generation (the Euro Mayday in Milan in 2011)--we aim at understanding if such mechanisms of political engagement vary according to the issue on which young people mobilize. The chapter is structured as following: in section 1 we introduce the context on which Italian Millennials mobilize and the theoretical framework of the analysis, in section 2, we present the research method and the logic guiding the selection of the demonstrations surveyed; section 3, 4, 5, and 6, introduced by a literature review on the dimensions we decided to focus on, deal respectively with the presence and the social composition of the Italian young generation; its type of grievances and emotions; its collective identity; and, finally, its network embeddedness. In each dimension we compare older and young generations, and young generations across types of demonstrations. In the conclusions, we will summarize the most important findings and suggest some tentative explanations.