Mass Protest and Civil Society Positioning in Romania

Romania's contentious politics has been undergoing significant change in recent times, most visibly marked by repeated cycles of mass protest. Based on political ethnographic research conducted in Romania, this study conceptualises this process by exploring activists’ meaning-making practices, using association/dissociation terminology from political difference theory. After a contextually determined momentum for mobilisation around 2010, outbreaks of spontaneous, self-organised and multi-thematic protests in the years since 2012 led to a liminal phase of civil society transformation, creating new networks of active people and enabling the appearance of political alternatives to the status quo. Since this disruption, the formation of a new, explicitly oppositional, branch of political civil society can be observed.