LATIN AMERICAN SOCIAL OUTBURSTS: POLITICAL EMOTIONS, CROWDS AND COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Since the late 2010s, Latin America has been the stage of an unprecedented wave of high-intensity social mobilizations: the Chilean estallido of October 2019, the Colombian protests of 2019 and 2021, the Venezuelan, Ecuadorian and Peruvian mobilizations, among other episodes that have shaken the region’s political systems. These phenomena challenge the conventional explanatory frameworks of political science and sociology, which have tended to privilege structural variables—inequality, crisis of representation, exhaustion of the progressive cycle—at the expense of an equally decisive dimension: that of political emotions and crowd psychology.
This symposium proposes to open an interdisciplinary and comparative dialogue on Latin American social outbursts from a perspective that integrates political theory, political psychology and studies of collective violence. Its premise is that understanding these phenomena requires attending not only to their structural determinants but also to the affective dynamics—indignation, fear, shame, collective euphoria—that mobilize crowds, transform public space and, under certain conditions, lead to episodes of political violence.
The symposium will be organized around three analytical axes. First, the emotional grammar of outbursts: what emotions predominate in contemporary Latin American mobilizations and how are they collectively organized? What role do moral grievance, social humiliation and hope play in the emergence of collective action? Second, the phenomenology of the crowd: drawing on the tradition of Le Bon, Canetti, Tarde and contemporary developments in mass psychology—including studies on the elaborated social identity model (ESIM) and recent research on collective behavior—the symposium will analyze how political crowds are constituted, sustained and dissolved in Latin American contexts. Third, the relationship between protest and violence: under what conditions does social mobilization turn into collective violence? How do repertoires of action, state response and shared emotions interact in the production or inhibition of political violence?
The symposium calls for papers addressing national or comparative cases, theoretical analyses and methodological reviews, including ethnographic, experimental and discourse-analytic approaches. The aim is to build a Latin Americanist agenda that engages critically with developments in European and Anglo-Saxon crowd psychology, thereby contributing to a political theory of social outbursts rooted in the memories and experiences of the Americas.
