“Montarse en la montaña rusa”: movilización estudiantil en el paro nacional colombiano, 2019-2020

Objective/context: In contrast to homogenizing views of the behavior of members of the student movement during the 2019-2020 National Strike, and to those analyses that infer student participation based on objective conditions common to all types of actors and prior to the emergence of the event, this text has two main purposes: to carry out a microsociological analysis of student participation that integrates the heterogeneity of the motivational repertoires and to analyze the strike exclusively based on the internal dynamics of the event and the variations, during its extension, of those same repertoires. Methodology: Following some proposals by Verweij and Vis, a time-based version of fuzzy sets of Comparative Qualitative Analysis (fs-QCA) is used to explain the participation of 56 activists from two large student platforms (UNEES and ACREES) during 4 moments of the strike. Conclusions: The oscillations and diversity of the motivational repertoires are identified; the variable intensity of militant activity; the alterations, over time, of the internal homogeneity of the movement. The overall trajectory of the strike is also reconstructed from the students’ perspective. Originality: Beyond offering a refreshing perspective with respect to the existing literature on the 2019-2020 National Strike, the text proposes a novel use of QCA that could be extrapolated to other cases.