European democratic backsliding is usually examined from above, through institutional erosion, party-system change, and executive aggrandizement. This panel reverses the perspective by asking how democracy is performed, defended, contested, and sometimes hollowed out through everyday practices beyond formal institutions. It approaches mobilization as a relational process unfolding through organizations, informal groups, community initiatives, and less visible forms of participation, including among citizens who do not identify as activists or engage in open struggle.
The panel asks: under what conditions do contentious, prefigurative, and everyday collective practices foster democratization and democratic resilience, and when do they reproduce exclusion, polarization, or illiberal politics? Bringing social movement studies into dialogue with comparative politics, European studies, democratic theory, and scholarship on everyday and prefigurative politics, it examines three dimensions: the democratic quality of organizational and informal practices; interactions among movements, parties, public authorities, and democratic innovations; and the circulation of frames, networks, repertoires, and practices across local, national, and European arenas.
We welcome comparative and transnational contributions on the practices through which democracy is enacted, including direct action, mutual aid, commoning, community self-organization, informal deliberation, solidarity infrastructures, and prefigurative experiments often overlooked by conventional social movement approaches. Relevant settings include climate and just-transition activism; housing, labour, and anti-precarity organizing; feminist, anti-racist, and migrant-solidarity initiatives; peace and anti-war mobilization; grassroots legal action; pro-democracy and pro-European activism; and radical-right or authoritarian movement fields. Papers may also address repression, securitization, war, ecological crisis, digital transformation, disinformation, and countermovements.
The panel is methodologically pluralist. It welcomes cross-national comparisons, theoretically driven single-case studies, ethnographies of everyday participation, and analyses linking Europe to wider global processes, especially studies connecting claims to democratic practices, relationships, infrastructures, and political effects.
By shifting attention from declared goals and visible protest to both contentious and less visible practices, the panel develops a dynamic account of uncertain democracies. Europe's democratic future depends not only on institutional safeguards or openly mobilized citizens, but also on the everyday, informal, and prefigurative processes through which people imagine and practice democracy.
