1. Introduction to the Handbook on Urban
Social Movements
Anna Domaradzka1 and Pierre Hamel
It has been more than half a century since the notion of urban social movement was first introduced by Manuel Castells (1972) to describe collective action in the context of increased severity of “urban problems” and their importance to the population as well as public policies. This Handbook focuses on better understanding how and to what extent collective action around urban issues remains relevant today. The dis- cussions of urban social movements from both empirical and theoretical perspectives in the following chapters provide not only a critical look at the transformations that have occurred in the urban landscape recently, but also an opportunity to shed light on the strategies implemented by social actors in various socio-political and cultural contexts.
While urban social movements are often discussed in reference to urban geogra- phy and/or urban studies, our approach is mainly sociological, with an emphasis on organizational and socio-political dimensions. This allows us to tackle the growing interaction between the structural components underlying urban conflicts and the normative orientations of action expressed through human agency (Maheu 2005). While the change driven by social actors is challenging the established institutional choices, the issue of scope and effects of urban social movements remains on the agenda.
Our goals are varied. First, we want to document the concrete forms of contem- porary urban movements; second, it is important to highlight the new developments in the field as collective action around urban issues is increasingly defined through new forms of communication; third, we want to stimulate the discussion about the specificity of contemporary urban movements in the context of emerging unexpected local and global challenges. Can movements’ actions make a difference in improving access to urban amenities and proximity services? Can they democratize city life and/ or strengthen the perspective of social justice in the formulation of urban policies?
Following Lefebvre’s idea of the ‘Right to the City’ (RTTC), at the outset we relate urban activism to the realm of the urban – “an abbreviation for the urban society” (Lefebvre 1970: 27) – including urban policies and urban politics. In the era of financialized economy, processes of capitalist accumulation have generated new forms of inequalities and social exclusion in addition to older ones, resulting from class divisions that have stratified in previous periods. In that respect, the RTTC does not have quite the same meaning nowadays in comparison to the Fordist era, when neoliberalism gained importance, resulting in the restructuring of cities at a global scale (Mayer 2009).
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2 Handbook on urban social movements
There is a need for a more open debate concerning grievances and inequalities embedded in the production of space. As underlined by Doreen Massey (2005: 55), beyond its materiality, space is articulated with its temporality. Apprehending space through its “dynamic temporality” – the presence of past conflicts leading to the reintroduction of the question of subjectivity – allows us to “understand space as an open ongoing production”. Inspired, to a certain extent, by postcolonial analyses and considering the ongoing debates in critical urban theories we assert that the future of research on urban social movements remains relevant. For that matter, the social movement outcomes largely discussed in the 1980s and 1990s are again worth considering nowadays, even though their content is less directly defined in political terms. These outcomes are situated on several terrains – social, economic, cultural – which often interact with one another. Thus, the narratives of urban social movements are much diversified, most of the time intersecting with other categories of collective action around environmental, gender and/or racial issues. If the context remains central to assess the consequences or the effects of mobilizations, we cannot forget the intention of the actors, the resources they have access to, as well as the role of opposing forces, including political opponents. For that, the notions of collective action and that of the RTTC deserve to be reconsidered.
Before presenting the structure of the book and the content of individual chapters – generally based on individual or multi-case studies in diverse regions of the world – this introduction is the occasion to start with definitions, considering both the notion of urban social movement and that of the RTTC. What is at stake is not only a matter of being specific about notions central for this Handbook, but also to consider the changes in content according to contexts and time frames.
We first introduce the main features of urban movements to highlight their diver- sity as well as the multiple scales through which they are implemented. We also discuss the material dimension of the urban realm, to which movements’ activities relate. Second, we introduce some elements in respect to the challenges for future research. Third, we present the structure of the book, paying attention to the diversity of theoretical perspectives reflected in the collected contributions. We conclude by bringing to the fore what we are learning from current research on urban movements.
URBAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY
Before the term ‘urban social movements’ was coined by Castells (1972), the work of Lefebvre (1967, 1970, 1974) concerned the relations between space and politics. The notions of RTTC and ‘space production’ defined by Lefebvre highlight the fact that it is more fruitful to pay attention to processes at work than to a given object in time. This allows us to revisit the history of urbanizing processes, describing urban society as a consequence of transformations induced by industrialization. In fact, for Lefebvre, the ‘urban’ was more than a simple notion. It was rather a paradigm shift. It is why he defined urban society “as a horizon, an illuminating virtuality” (2003:
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16–17), representing “the prodigious extension of the urban to the entire planet” (2003: 169).
In Castells’ perspective, urban society was subjected to domination established by economic and political elites. Consequently, as was the case during the industrial era, power struggles remain foundational to understanding the urban sphere as a site of contention and protest. As David Harvey pointed out, the right to the city potential lies in the fact that it allows movements to adopt it as “both working slogan and political idea, because it focuses on the question of who has control over urbanization processes and resources” (Harvey 2008: 40).
Based on a cross-historical and cross-national analysis of protests through the perspective of urban social movements, the theorization elaborated by Castells (1983) was dedicated to understanding the processes by which social actors produce urban meanings and urban change. Even though his analysis was subjected to harsh critique – see for example Chris Pickvance (1984a, 1984b, 1985) and Stuart Lowe (1986) – it has been largely recognized that his contribution regarding the study of urban movements is foundational. As Pickvance underlined, “without his work the field might not exist” (1985: 221).
Here, it is important to recall that with The City and the Grassroots (1983), Castells to a large extent abandoned the Marxist-structuralist perspective which he had applied to the study of urban problems and collective action a decade earlier. At that time, an urban social movement had not only to reflect the collective con- sumption contradictions in the economic, political and/or urban spheres, but also aim to change the power relations in the city through linkages with trade unions and/ or political organizations. It was only when such linkages effectively existed that urban social movements could materialize. In Castells’ new theoretical perspective, however, even though the urban remains defined in connection to issues of collective consumption, other important dimensions are added in relation to culture and the social actors’ self-assertion capacity to contribute to the definition of ‘local culture’. For instance, the specificity of an urban social movement is based on the following observation of its nature: “a conscious collective practice originating in urban issues, able to produce qualitative changes in the urban system, local culture, and political institutions in contradiction to the dominant social interests institutionalized as such at the societal level” (Castells 1983: 278).
As Margit Mayer (2006) pointed out, Castells’ view of urban social movements as a collective commitment combining community culture and political self-determina- tion with struggles around issues of collective consumption, is part of the specific dynamic of the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, urban social movements have under- gone a series of transformations in line with the global economic restructuring promoted by neoliberalism. In that context, collective actors have had to adapt their strategies, emphasizing the specific local character and fragmentation of some claims accompanied with the globalization of others.
Lefebvre’s and Castells’ ideas remain valid nowadays when considering the diversity of interests, and the multiplicity of actors involved according to their class belonging – sometimes broadening the social base of struggles to include actors
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previously considered as outsiders. By drawing attention to conflicts around social justice in the city, their research has highlighted the importance of struggles and grassroots activism around urban issues.
As the economy has been increasingly defined around tertiary economic activities, and the urban environment has turned into a factor of production, urban challenges are more relevant than ever. As processes of welfare are being constantly undermined and social exclusion is on the rise, new forms of cooperation and solidarity are none- theless experienced within civil society. This is occurring while collective action and social solidarity are promoted by the alter globalization movements challenging the neoliberalization of the public sphere. We also observe the continued presence of diversified socio-economic grievances resulting in protests regarding spatial and eco- nomic exclusion, privatization of public space, commercialization of urban services, increased surveillance, and lack of privacy.
The debates about the nature and role of social movements in cities as well as other collective actions concerning the urban experience have not ceased since the emergence of the industrial era. While defining urban social movements remains a concern, one must keep in mind that it is not simply a question of terms. It also converges with important theoretical issues. For example, to assess the effectiveness of an urban social movement, it is not sufficient to pay attention to the characteristics of the movement, to the amount of available resources mobilized or to the demands and values promoted by actors. Contextual features must be considered as well. As Pickvance (1984a, 1985) underlined, by promoting appropriate access to housing and urban services, asking for democratic control over city management or opposing the demolition of housing and neighborhoods, collective action relates to three aspects of the urban, namely collective consumption, local politics, and spatial proximity. However, Pickvance uses the term ‘urban social movement’ exclusively to account for the rare cases of a major change in urban power relations resulting from the action of urban movements (Van Haperen 2022).
More recently, Harvey (2008) and Saskia Sassen (2011) further described cities as a locus of class conflicts as well as a reference point for better understanding contentious politics around urban issues in the current globalizing era. While Sassen has been exploring how power and powerlessness are shaped in cities, Harvey’s work concerns the rise of the RTTC claims as both a political ideal as well as a working slogan for urban social movements.
Other defining works on urban social movements include the work of Susan Fainstein and Norman Fainstein (1985) who used the notion in the context of an economic policy analysis, as well as that of Mario Diani (2015) who describes the movements in cities as networks developing in certain localities.
For many years, urban social movements have been seen through the lens of local issues. However, migration flows and competition among companies and countries on a global scale have changed that. City-driven economic and cultural processes mean that the issues urban movements engage with are becoming more and more connected through international networks and less parochial.
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In this book we observe the transformation of urban movements in the context of ongoing social, economic, political, and ecological processes in reference to persis- tent globalizing trends. In this, we follow the work of Robert Sampson (2012) who examines how opportunities, social networks, and other important aspects of social life in contemporary cities are shaped by places and the so-called neighborhood effect. Following the tradition of the Chicago School, Sampson argues that urban life – including health, economic opportunities, social relations, and migration pat- terns – is persistently shaped by the place where one lives. It is thus unavoidable to analyze urban social movements in their specific context to better understand both the opportunity structures as well as challenges that actors are facing and the priori- ties that they define.
For the time being, we apprehend urban movements through the concept of social movement when citizens attempt to achieve some level of control over their urban environment, broadly defined as local political conditions, including the material and social fabric of the city. Thus, we employ the term ‘urban social movements’ to underline the social dimensions of urban mobilization as well as to encourage the application of social movements theory and perspective to an analysis of conflicts around urban issues. In this perspective, urban social movements often overlap with different RTTC initiatives, placing them in the conflictual democratic space of con- temporary modernity.
In recent years there has been a resurgence of interdisciplinary interest in urban conflicts. Researchers often point out that while their main characteristics are defined by a local focus, in some regions urban movements become actors of wider social change (Jacobsson 2016; Kowalewski 2016; Dolenec et al. 2017; Domaradzka 2018; Jezierska and Polanska 2018; Pixová 2018; Kubicki 2020; Nowak 2020). In empiri- cal studies, given the specific milieu within which the action takes place, but also the underlying theoretical perspective adopted by the researchers, different definitions of urban social movements are put forward with an emphasis on distinctive character- istics and effects.
As Van Haperen (2022) noted, cities are both a focus and locus for urban social movements’ action. Obviously, the socio-spatial characteristics of cities, making them distinct from rural areas, play an important role in the development of urban social movements. Cities offer both the diversity and the concentration of people, resources, and power, allowing identity and meaning to be defined and redefined. As a result, they have been key sites of contention and become prominent loci of protests and/or new forms of collective action.
Susana Finquelievich (1981) underlines that various urban social movements emerged as a result of conflicts caused by advanced capitalism – generating for instance deficits in public infrastructures and services – and/or deficiencies in state intervention as can be seen in the neoliberal urban policies. The resulting ‘urban crisis’ means that the urban system no longer achieves its main functions and creates deficits at a collective consumption level, at the same time undermining the ongoing democratization processes.
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In many ways current urban struggles are different from the workers’ protests of the industrial era. In Finquelievich words, “even if they coincide in some respects with the workers’ movements of trade-union type, or with some actions of the polit- ical organizations, they have their own and unique field of action, because they deal with urban matters, urban affairs” (1981: 239).
Over the years, urban conflicts have increased in importance in both developed and developing regions of the world. In Europe, the inhabitants of Barcelona, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Padua, Stockholm, or Warsaw mobilize to prevent the neg- ative transformations of their habitat as well as their wider environment, to defend their right to an open and safe public space or pressure political authorities to recog- nize civil society organizations as legitimate social and political instances. In coun- tries of the Global South, the specific contradictions embedded in the urban crisis are even more acute. Most of the time, urban conflicts take a more dramatic turn or face strong repression. Nevertheless, those movements continue to mobilize from Argentina to Mexico, and often succeed in forcing local authorities to act in favor of excluded citizens. In this book we go beyond the better-known struggles of Europe or Latin America and offer cases from Africa and Asia as well as North America.
FUTURE RESEARCH
In terms of future research, several issues deserve more attention. First is the chal- lenge concerning the fuzziness of the ‘movement’ lenses, which calls for a wider discussion about the defining features of movement-like urban mobilizations. This is related to another issue adding to the fuzziness of the notion, which is the intertwin- ing of urban mobilization with other social movements, especially countercultural, feminist, or ecological groups. Third, the resource mobilization theory is not com- pletely satisfactory here, as it is not concerned with the subjective and normative dimension of the collective action. This is why opening up to other theoretical approaches is required, allowing us to grasp the emotional, institutional, and inter- sectional aspects of urban social movements. Moreover, while some perspectives focus on movements’ leaders (e.g. theory of fields: see Fligstein and McAdam 2011), this may obscure important structural factors, thus restricting our understanding of collective action around urban issues.
Based on recent publications, including this Handbook, we also identified a series of questions worth asking in the future to continue the advancement of research in this area. Does the notion of social movement remain useful to understand urban mobilizations or does a new approach need to be elaborated? When analyzing the results of collective action on the local and supra-local levels we ask if and to what extent actors manage to be successful in preventing place-destroying policies or disruptive investments and create alternative narratives about the future of the city. Another important issue is about the representativeness of values and interests behind urban activism: Whose interests and needs do urban movements represent? Do
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they – because of those interests – challenge or rather strengthen the neoliberal and globalized development trends?
Another valuable line of research concerns the role of identity and place attach- ment in urban mobilization. As place-based activism, urban movements are often defined by the emotions and ties that places evoke in people. We therefore see merit in further developing the topics concerning the role of place-based affects for grass- roots’ city engagements.
Last, but not least, the growing role of technology should be considered. First, because social platforms are more and more important in enabling different forms of mobilization, common meaning creation or framing processes. Second, the attention of researchers is required because the cities rapidly change under the popular trend of urban ‘smartification’ (Domaradzka and Roszczyńska-Kurasińska 2021). Those changes, rarely open for public debates, strongly influence the privacy of residents as well as transparency of urban policies (Rychwalska et al. 2022; Oleksy et al. 2023). We therefore claim that the ‘right to the smart city’ should become a new topic to be included in the critical studies of urban digital transformations.
In terms of possible theoretical developments, we think it is necessary to address the social inequalities that are embedded in urban development to better understand the impact of movements’ actions. Similarly, the citizenship approach is promising as it responds to the modern migration flows (including refugee crises) and the growing multiculturalism of cities, struggling with new expectations and conflicts arising from hyper-diversity. Moreover, the rights-based approach offers an interest- ing perspective, allowing us to tackle not only the right to the city, including housing rights, and the issue of dignity, but also the increasingly important digital rights in the city. Despite the previous comments, it is also necessary to further explore the theory of fields approach (Bourdieu 1985; Martin 2003; Fligstein and McAdam 2011) for analyzing the impact of urban mobilization in the field of urban policies (Domaradzka and Wijkström 2016, 2019; Domaradzka 2017, 2018, 2021).
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK AND DIVERSITY OF THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
This book is a collection of chapters grouped around five topics. These are defined in relation to urban mobilization in the context of urban planning, social inequalities, city life, urban citizenship, and collective action around urban politics.
The multiple forms of collective action considered in the book’s chapters put emphasis on different features of urban mobilization. Taking into consideration both the structural determinants of the action and the normative dimensions involved in actors’ subjectivity, they refer us to the following three aspects of urban mobilization:
1. Intersectionality in the study of urban movements: as our chapters show, urban social movements can be approached from a variety of theoretical perspectives including social movement studies, research on contentious politics, organiza-
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tional studies, governance studies, spatial planning, social geography, social psy- chology, prefigurative action and protest analyses, as well as environmental and gender studies. Surely the list can be extended. It is worth mentioning, however, that the findings of the work on intersectionality are included in most cases.
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Scales of intervention: we observe how urban mobilization operates on different scales including global, continental, national, regional, urban/city, district, or neighborhood levels. While many of the initiatives grow from local community issues, some of them are transformed into city-wide or even country-wide net- works and organizations. In other instances, we see the process of norm transfer or norm cascade (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998), where the local initiatives connect to the global claims for the RTTC.
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Diversity of initiatives: diversity of values and identities together with the multi- dimensional character of urban environment makes mobilization tricky. It is often hard to find common ground as well as to overcome individualistic liberal values and ideology in the globalized urban environments. Studying urban movements can illustrate how the mechanisms of emerging ‘urban solidarities’ are deployed, but also offer a critical view of who the movements are serving and whose inter- ests they represent.
The diversity of submissions we received for this Handbook certainly illustrates a certain fuzziness of the concept, highlighting definitional issues. One must keep in mind that even if individual actors assert their identity by sharing a joint project with others, they still choose to express their difference. This diversity is reflected in the description of different forms of collective action. Those include RTTC alliances, anti-eviction movements, housing activism, anti-gentrification initiatives, urban gardening collectives, and social media campaigns.
Looking at the collected examples, we can observe that what makes the movement urban is the specific focus on urban grievances, inequalities, materiality of the urban fabric of the city, and concerns related to urban planning and political processes. Urban movements are engaged around material aspects of the city. But they also converge with other features of the urban landscape by connecting to various forms of collective action (women’s movements, environmental movements, anti-racist collective action, etc.). As a result, there is an overlap between mobilizations around urban issues and other concerns, bringing together actors who in the past tended to be exclusively motivated by one-dimensional issues.
Importantly, the materiality of the city becomes a platform that joins different activists and groups together. Space and place are related concerns that lead to mobi- lizations and are connected to the everyday experience of residents. Sticking to the ‘concrete narrative’ of local problems allows for mobilization around one common problem, despite diverse needs and values (Mergler 2008).
This Handbook bears witness to the diversity of theoretical perspectives present in the field. The authors apply different theoretical lenses, focusing on issues like citizenship, machine politics, opportunity structure, urban commons, and insur- gent collective actions. As far as similarities go, the authors’ reflections are often
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practice-oriented. Many chapters look at ongoing social struggles and political issues. At the same time, they touch upon universal problems concerning access to housing, inequality and/or injustice in access to urban services or control over urban public space. Housing issues are particularly significant and described from different angles: tenants’ rights, poor neighborhoods, informal settlements, gentrification, racial repression, gender perspective or place attachment. Importantly, the authors show how political engagement of urban activists results from everyday grassroots grievances. It also transpires that urban policies (including specific areas like spatial planning, gentrification, housing, public transport, and social services issues) are still very much on the agenda of social actors.
Part I of this Handbook reviews the right to the city concept in front of capitalist accumulation and state planning. Chapter 2 by Pierre Hamel discusses the issue of localism as this has been one of the central concerns and main entry points in the past for critique regarding the political effect of urban social movements. In Chapter 3, Ioana Florea, Agnes Gagyi and Kerstin Jacobsson analyze urban struggles as a struc- tural field of contention. In Chapter 4, Carlo Genova describes the strategies of action and drivers of participation in radical movements in Italy. Finally, in Chapter 5, Lisa Vollmer focuses on analyzing the tenants’ protests in Berlin from the regulation theory point of view.
Part II looks at struggles around social inequalities, racism, exclusion, and poverty in cities around the world. It starts with Antje Daniel’s Chapter 6 on spatial segre- gation during the ‘financial apartheid’ in Cape Town and analyzes the ‘reclaim the city’ struggles for housing rights. In Chapter 7, Dominika V. Polanska discusses the tenants’ movements in Europe, pointing out their different phases of development over time. Chapter 8, by Marcos Ancelovici and Montserrat Emperador Badimon, describes the anti-eviction mobilizations in Barcelona, Montreal, and New York. Chapter 9, by Mary Bernstein and Jordan McMillan, looks at struggles around urban safety, especially regarding gun violence. Finally, in Chapter 10, Eric Yankson and Ada Adoley Allotey focus on the informal settlements of Namibia and Ghana, study- ing rural–urban migration in the context of right to the city claims.
Part III analyzes urban movements and city life in retrospect. First, in Chapter 11, Abigail Friendly describes Brazil’s urban social movements and urban transfor- mation showing the importance of debates on the right to the city and the growing challenges in Brazil’s urban reform project. In Chapter 12, Hans Pruijt presents his analysis of squatting, based on the SWOT approach. After that, Tommaso Gravante’s Chapter 13 describes the role of emotions and prefigurative politics for urban grass- roots activism. Finally, in Chapter 14, S. Ashleigh Weeden and Kyle Rich touch on the role of new technologies in urban mobilization, analyzing the role of place-based social media in the process of gentrification as well as resistance to it.
Part IV looks at the issue of urban citizenship and various models of solidarity. It starts with Chapter 15 by Maciej Kowalewski who reviews the role of rights and practices in the process of claiming urban citizenship. In Chapter 16, Francisco Longa describes the experience of two Argentinean social organizations in the left turn context, to reflect on the issues of co-optation and autonomy of urban move-
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ments. Finally, in Chapter 17 by Aysegul Can, we find a reflection on spatialized oppression and the rise of urban resistance movement in Gezi and its legacy.
We conclude with Part V which contains chapters focusing on collective action, urban politics, and urban policies. In Chapter 18, Iolanda Bianchi tackles the issue of everyday politics of the urban commons, pointing out the ambivalent political possi- bilities in the dialectical, evolving, and selective urban contexts. In Chapter 19, Alicia Olivari and Manuela Badilla write about the emergence of a movement of urban memories using the example of the 2019–2020 Chilean urban protests. In Chapter 20, Stephanie Ternullo and Jeffrey Nathaniel Parker use the political machine concept to analyze the context of US urban politics of the twenty-first century and its inherent contradictions. In Chapter 21 by Chungse Jung, we find an analysis of the changing landscape of urban politics and urban activism in South Korea through the lens of discontent with neoliberal urbanization. Next, in Chapter 22, Tomasz Sowada analy- ses the case of Polish urban social movements from the perspective of decolonization or recolonization of urban management through political engagement. Finally, in Chapter 23 Joaquín Andrés Benitez, Maria Cristina Cravino, Maximiliano Duarte and Carla Fainstein present the dynamics between neoliberal urban governance and slum dweller movements in Buenos Aires, pointing out the mutual fragmentation of policies and community-based organizations.
Concluding, we should therefore warn readers that they will not find in this volume a single shared definition or understanding of urban movements. At the outset, it was not our ambition to overcome all the gaps or resolve all the aporias inherent in the empirical and theoretical challenges raised by the study of urban movements. To the contrary, it was thought that it would be better to enrich and stir the discussion around emerging urban issues and new forms of collective action. We posit that both go together with redefining processes regarding empirical exploration and theoretical innovation. The question remains as to whether we should look for more contextual theoretical efforts or focus on describing movements’ universal traits. Should we strive to build a universal framework or aim at better understanding the diversity of local experimentations?
As the editors of this volume, we think that a synthetic theoretical approach is better suited to the task of analyzing urban mobilization. Due to the intersectionality involved in shaping social relations and the highly diverse nature of urban contexts, studying citizens’ initiatives requires more than ever a sophisticated toolbox, in both theoretical and methodological terms.
Finally, we think that the most important role of urban movements is that they are involved in the process of building solidarities in the current context of modernity, where harsh inequalities often leave the most vulnerable social actors with increas- ingly limited access to public resources. Therefore, they inspire us to engage with ethical concerns that political elites have long been avoiding or only superficially addressing.
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NOTE
1. This work was financed by National Science Centre in Poland, grant no. 2018/30/E/ HS6/00379.
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