Research Seminar in Sociology of Law with Davide Rocchetti

Grassroots democratic defense in Italy

Anti-authoritarian learning and protest mobilisation against autocratic moves

Autocratization appears increasingly ubiquitous and is spreading rapidly even across consolidated democratic regimes. While scholars have become familiar with the agents and mechanisms underlying these recent processes, democratic defence has occupied only a marginal place in the study of responses to autocratization. In this work, we seek to redress this gap by focusing on the role of civil society. Drawing on the Italian case and the recent crackdown on civil society promoted by the far-right government, we reconstruct the mobilisation against a liberticidal decree approved in 2025. Specifically, we examine how civil society frames the criminalisation of protest, organises and develops strategies of democratic defense, and ultimately assesses its impact as autocratization unfolds.

Davide is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna. He is currently involved in the Horizon Europe-funded project Protest as a Democracy Test: Protest Culture under Transformation and as a Transformative Power.

He holds a PhD in Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento and is a member of the CoACT Research Group.