Refugee Housing, Activism and Movement Parties in Athens and Rome

The purpose of this project is to investigate the relationship between refugee housing movements in Greece and Italy with the two Movement Parties that have emerged in these countries, namely Syriza and the Five Star Movement. Moreover, I will seek to analyze how these refugee housing movements negotiated their relationship with the Movement Parties in power. I will seek to investigate whether housing movements cooperated with or contested the Syriza and the Five Star Movement governments respectively. I will, also, seek to analyze the role that refugees and migrants played directly within the refugee housing social movements in Italy and in Greece. In order to tackle these research questions, I will engage in qualitative fieldwork, conducting ten interviews with current and former local and national government officials in Greece, ten interviews with participants in anti-austerity and refugee housing movements, ten interviews. We select two typical cases - Greece and Italy - chosen both because they provide important insights into country cases where Movement Parties have emerged, become successful, and experienced subsequent episodes of decline, and because the nature of these developments in each country show sufficient diversity to warrant comparison, thereby allowing investigation into the key causal mechanisms of interest (Seawright and Gerring 2008). Specifically, the focus is on Rome and Athens, where activism around refugee and migrant housing, intersects visibly with social movements that have had some form of institutional or party support through local government. Both cities thus offer a compelling empirical base from which to understand how movements create and sustain housing initiatives such as squats, and whether they are sustained through city-level party politics. More generally, both case studies allow us to trace how movement parties undermine or support, grassroots social movements. The two cases also have important contrasting features. Athens saw a considerable wave of anti-austerity mobilisation after 2009. In 2015, as refugees and migrants arrived into Athens in large numbers, participants in anti-austerity movements and refugee housing often overlapped with each other, creating autonomous and self-governed communities. A large number of squats in Athens were not evicted whilst Syriza was in power - both in the national and city government - with some evidence suggesting that city authorities were indirectly supporting these refugee housing movements. This came to an abrupt end in 2019 when almost all such squats were evicted weeks after the right-wing New Democracy came to power. Rome is characterised by a history of squatting and housing rights movements, which experienced a revival after the 2008 economic crisis, with around 5,000 families living in 103 housing squats, many housing asylum seekers, refugees, migrant and Roma squatters (Grazioli, 2017; Maestri, 2019b). Further, Five Star Movement won the local elections in Rome in 2016, starting a period of (often informal) negotiations with housing rights activist groups. From 2018, however, these relationships were strained as a result of the national coalition government between Five Star Movement and Lega, which adopted an increasingly repressive approach.