﻿Generation Z is a generation
that has been born and has developed
in moments of crisis that have been extremely intense
and have, say, interacted with each other.
Donatella Della Porta is a professor of political science
and dean of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences
at the Scuola Normale Superiore.
Her work is a world reference in the field of social movement studies.
What are the main findings of the research
you have conducted on the Millennials’ protests?
I think that the concept of generation is, in general, very important
in the development of a critical view on injustice of different types,
intersectionally addressing the issues of injustice
in social terms, in gender terms, in racial terms and so on.
And it has done so also starting from an acknowledgement
of some specific characteristics of Millennials’ own experiences.
So, what we have studied is especially the mobilised part of this generation.
Τhose who were politically active.
What we saw is that it is a generation that defines itself as precarious
not only in terms of the work conditions
but also, more generally, in terms of their life experience.
And it is so because there is at the same time
a reduction of the type of protections on the labour market,
but also a decline in general of social rights
that affects this generation in a very deep way,
changing the perceptions of what their life is going to be,
procrastinating the achievement of some of the main steps
in the process of entering societies.
It is also a generation that has a strong sense of betrayal,
of being betrayed not only from the previous generations
but mostly from the political and social system
that does not include the Millennial generation
in the political and social process.
And it feels betrayed not only from the government but also, often,
from those parties that are supposed to care about social injustice.
Nevertheless, it is a generation that doesn't despair
because it is very committed to transformation.
We know this because besides the research that we have done
on the most mobilised side of this generation,
what we learn looking at opinion polls
is that against the expectations of depoliticization,
in reality in many countries this generation
has been characterised by high sense of commitment,
high tolerance and sensibilities to issues of rights in general.
What are the differences
between the politicisation of Gen Zers and that of the Millennials?
What we pointed out in our research is that also for activists,
generations are short cohorts, smaller groups,
because their understanding of generations
is very much related to specific experiences
that have been living through adolescent life
and it is also very much affected by the specific characteristics
of social movements in that period.
For instance, what I mean is that the protests against austerity
had different types of effects for the Millennial generation
in Greece or in Germany
because they had different degrees of intensity,
and so also different capacity to involve the young generation.
Considering these differences
and the differences in the definition of generations itself,
I think that what we can say
is that the Millennial generation has been characterised by experiences
of very broad movements,
that have been able to have an impact
also on the political and social level,
but especially at the cultural level in several European countries.
Generation Z is a generation that has been born and has developed
in moments of crisis that have been extremely intense
and have interacted with each other.
So, the financial crisis was not yet over in several countries,
in particular in European peripheries like Southern Europe,
and the pandemic crisis arrived,
and the climate crisis became more and more visible
and now there is a military crisis.
So, it is a generation that has been embedded in a situation
not only of crisis but also of multiple crises.
In different countries it's this generation
that undergoes different types of experiences.
So the pandemic times
had a particularly high impact on this generation.
But also, in some countries the political experience of participation
has been quite important, think about Chile for instance,
that during the pandemic was able as a country
to put forward and develop the seeds of a change
that has been already developed in 2019 in pre-pandemic time.
Young Generation Z has been very much involved in Lebanon
in the protest for democracy, in Catalunya, in several countries,
so it has been also a mobilised generation.
But we still have to see which type of opportunities were created.
What psychological impact have the past decade’s crises,
such as the economic recession and the pandemic, had on the Millennials?
I am not a psychologist but what we see
in studying the mobilised part of this generation
is that the personal life conditions are very relevant for the mobilisations.
So, we have seen that many of the protests,
like the Fridays for Future and the Black Lives Matter
that we mentioned before, have been characterised
by a strong degree of reflections,
self-reflexivity on their own conditions of life.
While in the past, progressive movements and movement activists
tended to focus on the collective experiences,
these movements also put a lot of attention
on the ways in which people individually live through these experiences.
And the sufferance related to the multiple types of exclusions and insecurity
related also with all these crises has been part and parcels
also of the discourse of the Fridays for Future
that stress their own conditions as a generation that is denied a future,
the possibility to decide on a future life and so on.
Of course, at the individual level, then,
the way of reacting to these feelings of insecurity could be very different.
What we saw in the protests that I mentioned
is that this generation is not totally resourceless
because they have also been very much able
to use their skills in technological issues,
to trigger responses to these conditions,
also in quite inventive ways and effective ways.
What is the correlation
between the use of social media and youth movements?
The activists we interviewed were very explicit
in connecting their own general experience of social interactions
with their online experience.
And they did so also in criticising
the ways in which social movement organisations are often organised.
So, I remember one of the interviewees saying:
“Yes, we are the generation that is always texting
and is accustomed to very fast connections.
We are not a generation that can sit two hours in a room
to talk about let's say generic issues.”
And the experience with technologies pushes towards often the search
for very rapid responses but also on the positive sense of creativity.
And this is something that we have seen
in the Black Lives Matter protest for instance.
Pragmatic use of very different forms of communications
elaborated by young people.
From what we saw in our research,
there is much more attention also to politicise the private sphere of life.
Μany of the groups we studied made by young activists
were focusing their activities also on issues of sports and Art
and they said “we need to do this because this is a precarious generation,
is often a generation that doesn't have time,
that needs to have three jobs to attend universities
that are more and more requiring fast commitment in learning and so on.
So, we cannot ask people to sacrifice
the small amount of free time they have, we have to politicise it.”
I think this is important
and another general observation on communications
is the fact that the young activists are online doesn't mean
that they are not offline.
The communicational skills are influenced by the experiences online
but are also made by different forms of interactions offline.
And this is already a lesson from the 2011 protest
that the activists had already learned before.
So, the movements of the squares were such because the activists
had realised that they cannot mobilise only on facebook,
or only on twitter by tweeting,
that you have to use these instruments,
but you also have to meet other people.
And this is something that from the Millennial generation
went also into the Z generation with the presence very often
of forms of protest that are also forms
in which direct interactions are facilitated.
So, long types of protest
are also made of moments of interactions and exchanges
face to face by the activists.
How can social movements effectively defend civil liberties
and protect their protests from police violence?
I think communication is one of these forms.
What we saw in the protest against the assassination of George Floyd
is that what was very important was that the killing was documented.
This very skilled generation is also very careful
in acquiring and preserving saving knowledge
which is also particularly important
because it is a type of knowledge that is more able to stimulate emotions,
negative but also positive ones.
So, in a period of infodemic
that is produced on the several challenges
from the pandemic to the war,
I think that what is very important
in terms of documenting, of opposing repression
is documenting repression and making it visible
and providing alternative knowledge and counter-information.
The process of Assange is an example of how much repression
connects activism to the freedom of the Press.
The Black Lives Matter protest could also be taken as an example
of how repressions can be resisted
because it is not just a matter of denouncing what happened
and collecting evidence of repression itself,
but, then, it is also very much a matter of spreading this information.
And the successful global campaign around the assassination of George Floyd
was also indicating that the message had then to be spread
through different channels and in different forms.
For instance, what we saw in our research
was that memory was very important for young people,
connecting the memories of specific acts of repressions with previous ones
and also connecting generational experiences
with different forms of repressions.
And I think this is particularly relevant
because besides the state forms of repressions
that activists are more accustomed to, like repression of street protest,
there are, more and more, different forms of repressions
through harassment and stigmatisation in the mass media.
The pacifist movement is undergoing
this very strong forms of repressions in this moment.
And there are also what many movements denounce
as the broad forms of repressing rights.
From the new generations of women movements
denouncing violence on women
and other form of repression,
to the physical forms of assassinations,
like the assassinations of activists
related to the climate justice movement in the South
by the government but also by private actors.
I am also thinking about the racist assassinations and so on.
I think that resisting repressions goes also beyond resisting state repressions
and imply thinking about how to resist
and oppose private forms of repressions, cultural forms of repressions.