Mapping Protest on the Refugee Crisis: Insights from Online Protest Event Analysis

The refugees crisis had a huge impact on the European political landscape. If many civil society organizations and social movements have dealt with this issue by helping and supporting refugees and migrants in general, other political actors and counter-movements have jumped on the crisis to politically exploit the media-driven citizens perception of an uncontrollable siege on the European boundaries. In this chapter we use a protest field approach in order to understand the contentious dynamics triggered out by refugees crisis in three South European countries, particularly exposed to the migration process; namely Greece, Spain and Italy. A protest field is defined as the social space in which actors make their claims by means of protest, and its structure is composed by the organizations and the social actors and who enter the field, the claims they make, their repertoire of action and their both cooperative and competitive interactions. Our argument draws on the political process approach, by relating the different structures of the three protest fields with their political environment (della Porta and Diani 1996; Tarrow 1994; Kriesi et al 1995). The method used is the protest event analysis, particularly suited to both explore the relations between protest and the political environment and to reconstruct the protest field (Hutter 2015; Kresi et al. 2012). By introducing an innovation in this well-established method in social movement studies, namely by using Google News as a new and powerful source to get protest news on the specific issue; we reconstruct the protest field in each selected country and show how the specific dynamics of protest on migration and refugees are shaped by the political context.