LAC Main Seminar Series: Building Mobilizing Capabilities for an Uprising: Citizenship and Community Organizing in Chile’s Urban Margins

Convener: David Doyle, University of Oxford

Speaker: Simón Escoffier, School of Social Work, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

In October 2019, unprecedented mobilizations in Chile took the world by surprise. They defied decades of deep inequality and opened new avenues for Chilean democracy. These demonstrations resembled the events that in the past couple of decades sought to expand democracy in places like the United States, Puerto Rico, Spain, Tunisia, Argentina, Egypt, and Hong Kong. Although these Chilean protests involved a myriad of organizations with different social backgrounds and demands, the organizational capabilities provided by the urban poor proved essential in sustaining collective action in an increasingly repressive environment. This event launches the book Mobilizing at the Urban Margins (Cambridge University Press), which is based on almost six years of fieldwork in Santiago’s urban excluded areas. The research features the compelling story of two underprivileged neighborhoods that had almost identical paths of development before Chile’s democratic transition. After 1990, however, these two neighborhoods embarked upon dramatically diverging paths. While one has sustained mobilization over the past 35 years, in the other neighborhood local organizing became depoliticized and was deactivated. To explain how communities in the urban margins sustain mobilization in very inhospitable conditions for collective action, the book outlines the novel framework of mobilizational citizenship. Through mobilizational citizenship those communities can also build the mobilizing capabilities needed to support large-scale protests and broader democratizing processes that extend beyond their immediate community, district, or city.

Simón Escoffier is a political sociologist exploring the controversial role of collective action and social movements in current democracies. With a focus on Latin America and the use of qualitative and mixed methods, he has studied how the urban poor build the mobilizing capabilities to support large-scale protests. His research also addresses urban marginality, political clientelism, movement’s policy impact, legal mobilization, and the tactics of conservative, right-wing movements in Latin America. His current research projects are supported by Chile’s National Research Council (ANID) and by the British Academy. He is the author of the book Mobilizing at the Urban Margins: Citizenship and Patronage Politics in Post-Dictatorial Chile (2023 with Cambridge University Press) and the co-editor of the volume The Right against Rights in Latin America (2023 with Oxford University Press). He has also published research articles and book chapters in reputed academic journals and editorials. He is an assistant professor at the School of Social Work at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Simón received his DPhil in Sociology from St Antony’s College, at the University of Oxford, and a master’s from the London School of Economics.