Political Identities in the Framework of Collective Action. Approaches on the Emergence and Institutionalization of the «piquetero» protest in Argentina

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze the potentials and limitations of the approach of the mobilization of resources and the perspective of the social movements in the constitution and the development of the political identity of the “piquetero” movement in Argentina. The selected authors as well as their production have answered to two criteria. On the one hand, the conceptual innovation on the concept of social protest and, on the other hand, to the findings in their empirical investigation.The articulated analysis of theoretical aspects and empirical findings in the “piqueteros” protest allowed to observe that the approach of the mobilization of resources favoured the political dimension of the collective action in detriment of the identity dimension. And the perspective of the social movements emphasized the processes of identification disregarding the political dimension of the collective action. This analytical imbalance between the terms politics and identity in the collective action offers the possibility to indicate orientations of analyses that should attend to the complex field of interactions between both terms. The mutual incident between the terms politics and identity in the collective
action would make possible to detect new situations as well as to exploit explanatory existing vacancies.