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Cätälin Augustin Stoica, Vintilä Mihäilescu (ed.), lama vrajbei noastre: protéstele din România, ianuarie -febmarie 2012 [The Winter of our Discontent: Protests in Romania, JanuaryFebruary 2012], Bucureçti: Paidea, 2012.
The book edited by Cätälin Augustin Stoica and Vintilä Mihäilescu is a multiperspectival attempt to analyze protests that took place in Romania in early 2012. It draws a comprehensive map of the actors, claims, means of expression and, partially, consequences of these protests. The book is an anthology that brings together texts by several Romanian scholars and researchers in social and political sciences written shortly after the events that took place in the winter of 2012 in order to provide not a complete academic analysis but rather a "sociological sketch" (p. 20) of the events mentioned above.
The first chapter, entitled "Multiple Facets of Popular Discontent: A Sociological Sketch of the Plate Universitätii Protests in January 2012" ["Fatetele multiple ale nemultumirii populare: o schitä sociologicä a protestelor in Piata Universitätii din ianuarie 2012"], comprises a macro-structural approach to protest movements in question. Cätälin Augustin Stoica analyses these movements here starting from Neil Smelser's theory on conditions of the emergence of collective behaviours. This theory proposes a "progressive stadial model" of emergence of collective behaviours in general and of protests in particular (p. 27). A first element under review is that of "favouring structures", i.e. the institutional and political conditions of protests. The author argues that "structural conduciveness to protests in January 2012 has to be considered in the light of political-institutional pattern of contemporary Romania; main axes of this pattern are strong statism and societal fragmentation amid generalized social distrust" (p. 34). A second element analyzed is the "structural strains" that led to the protests of January 2012, strains caused primarily by the current economic difficulties and the lack of adequate political communication (p. 37). The next condition considered is "the emergence of generalized opinions and beliefs" (p. 38), which was favoured in the case of Romanian protests by TV broadcasting with a clear anti-government agenda (p. 40). Other elements analyzed are "precipitating factors" (the analysis identifying in "Arafat episode" the main triggering factor of protests), the way "mobilizing for action" took place, and the way "factors of social control" operated, i.e. the reaction of government decision-makers...