Pietro Castelli Gattinara
Pietro Castelli Gattinara is Postdoctoral Fellow at C-Rex, University of Oslo. His research interests include party competition and protest politics in a comparative perspective, with a special focus on the study of migration and the far right.
From 2015 to 2017, he has been a Research Fellow at the Centre on Social Movement Studies, Scuola Normale Superiore. There, he worked on far right collective action during political crises. In previous years, he has been a teaching fellow of Comparative and European Politics at Sciences Po Paris and at Monash University. He holds a Master of Research and a PhD in Political and Social Sciences (2014) from the European University Institute, where he discussed a thesis on local politics and party competition on migration. He is a graduate of Political Science (University of Rome), and holds a Master of Science in Migration and Ethnic Relations from Utrecht University (2010).
Over the past years, he has collaborated on a number of national and international research projects on topics relating to political participation, immigration and far-right politics. He is proficient in both quantitative and qualitative methods.
He publishes in English, French and Italian. His work appeared in a number of international peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. He is the author of the monograph The politics of migration in Italy (Routledge, 2016), and co-author of Discursive Critical Junctures (OUP, in press) and CasaPound Italia: Contemporary Extreme Right Politics (Routledge, 2020).
Supervisors: Hanspeter Kriesi (PhD Supervisor, EUI)
From 2015 to 2017, he has been a Research Fellow at the Centre on Social Movement Studies, Scuola Normale Superiore. There, he worked on far right collective action during political crises. In previous years, he has been a teaching fellow of Comparative and European Politics at Sciences Po Paris and at Monash University. He holds a Master of Research and a PhD in Political and Social Sciences (2014) from the European University Institute, where he discussed a thesis on local politics and party competition on migration. He is a graduate of Political Science (University of Rome), and holds a Master of Science in Migration and Ethnic Relations from Utrecht University (2010).
Over the past years, he has collaborated on a number of national and international research projects on topics relating to political participation, immigration and far-right politics. He is proficient in both quantitative and qualitative methods.
He publishes in English, French and Italian. His work appeared in a number of international peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. He is the author of the monograph The politics of migration in Italy (Routledge, 2016), and co-author of Discursive Critical Junctures (OUP, in press) and CasaPound Italia: Contemporary Extreme Right Politics (Routledge, 2020).
Supervisors: Hanspeter Kriesi (PhD Supervisor, EUI)
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In this book, Caterina Froio, Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Giorgia Bulli and Matteo Albanese explore CasaPound Italia and its particular political strategy combining the organization and style of both political parties and social movements and bringing together extreme-right ideas and pop-culture symbols. They contend that this strategy of hybridization allowed a fringe organization like CasaPound to consolidate its position within the Italian far-right milieu, but also, crucially, to make extreme-right ideas routine in public debates. The authors illustrate this argument drawing on unique empirical material gathered during five years of research, including several months of overt observation at concerts and events, face-to-face interviews, and the qualitative and quantitative analysis of online and offline campaigns.
By describing how hybridization grants extremist groups the leeway to expand their reach and penetrate mainstream political debates, this book is core reading for anyone concerned about the nature and growth of far-right politics in contemporary democracies. Providing a fresh insight as to how contemporary extreme-right groups organize to capture public attention, this study will also be of interest to students, scholars and activists interested in the complex relationship between party competition and street protest more generally.
Attraverso un’inedita retorica del “Fascismo del Terzo Millennio”, CasaPound legge l’attuale crisi economica, politica e di partecipazione attraverso forme di attivismo deliberatamente alternative rispetto alla mobilitazione politica tradizionale della propria area. Categorie ideologiche ispirate al fascismo storico e rivitalizzate attraverso un connubio di idea-azione a cui non è estraneo l’uso della violenza hanno permesso al gruppo di far breccia tra le generazioni dei più giovani e le categorie sociali più colpite dalla crisi economica.
Questo volume analizza i percorsi di militanza, l’attivismo politico e le forme di mobilitazione di CasaPound Italia, ricostruendone le radici ideologiche e gli orizzonti valoriali, approfondendo il progetto identitario subculturale e discutendone le strategie politiche a livello nazionale ed europeo.
Un lavoro attento nato da interviste, conversazioni, partecipazione a riti collettivi, manifestazioni politiche del gruppo, che costituisce un contributo alla comprensione della natura politica dei nuovi fenomeni di coinvolgimento al tempo della crisi.
Revisori del volume: Prof. Marco Tarchi (UNIFI) e Dimitri Deliolanes (ERT, Grecia)
Journal Articles
illustrate how social movements contribute to the epistemic construction of ‘crises’ of European Integration. To tackle politicization,
we compare the framing and mobilization choices by grassroots
actors in solidarity with asylum-seekers and groups aiming to
defend national borders from them. Using original Protest Event
data and 21 face-to-face interviews, we find that the construction of
the crisis as a policy failure crucially reshaped mobilization on both
sides of the conflict. Specifically, direct social actions allowed the
two camps to respond to a context perceived as critical, politicizing
the crisis in light of the declining trust in representative institutions,
while also responding to the growing demand for efficacy and
concreteness. The findings offer novel empirical insight on movement–countermovement interactions and contribute to the scholarly debate on the relation between crises and the politicisation of
contentious issues in Europe
far-right politics, to date the communicative dimension of extreme
right mobilization received little rigorous scholarly attention. To
address this gap, this paper addresses the media practices of the
extreme right, offering an empirical study of two emerging social
movement organizations of this area: CasaPound Italia in Italy and
Les Identitaires in France. Rather than treating them as incidental
beneficiaries of media populism, the paper disentangles the
various ways in which these groups interact with the mass media,
discussing the forms and meaning of their activism in relation to
extreme right political culture, and differentiating between
inward-oriented and outward-oriented media practices. Based on
ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviews with farright
militants, the paper shows that media practices not only try
to respond to the demands of the media environment in which
the groups are embedded, but also seek to reinforce the groups’
internal organization and hierarchy, building collective symbolic
imagery, and ensuring ideological consistency among activists
and sympathizers. In so doing, the paper offers initial insight on
how protest movements of the extreme right consolidate their
profile and become recognizable in the public sphere.
Full article available at: https://rdcu.be/NWRv
"
legitimacy and visibility to their leaders and issues. In so doing, this scholarship reproduces the idea that far right actors are «hapless victims» of external circumstances, failing to see that they can at times be the shapers of their own fate, determining their own visibility and success with their media strategies. To address this issue, this article
looks at the interplay between internal supply-side factors and media coverage of CasaPound Italia (CPI), a non-established actor of the Italian far right. We use Political claims analysis (PCA) to analyse press releases and media reports of CPI’s activism. We conduct logistic regressions to look at whether issue characteristics (saliency and ownership), repertoires of action (conventional vs protest) and controversy (counter-mobilization) increase the likelihood that the activities of CasaPound Italia get coverage in the news. Our results indicate that media strategies by the far right increase the likelihood of news coverage, so that quality newspapers give attention to specific types of events promoted by CPI, such as when they mobilize on immigration, engage in street protest and create public controversy.
In this book, Caterina Froio, Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Giorgia Bulli and Matteo Albanese explore CasaPound Italia and its particular political strategy combining the organization and style of both political parties and social movements and bringing together extreme-right ideas and pop-culture symbols. They contend that this strategy of hybridization allowed a fringe organization like CasaPound to consolidate its position within the Italian far-right milieu, but also, crucially, to make extreme-right ideas routine in public debates. The authors illustrate this argument drawing on unique empirical material gathered during five years of research, including several months of overt observation at concerts and events, face-to-face interviews, and the qualitative and quantitative analysis of online and offline campaigns.
By describing how hybridization grants extremist groups the leeway to expand their reach and penetrate mainstream political debates, this book is core reading for anyone concerned about the nature and growth of far-right politics in contemporary democracies. Providing a fresh insight as to how contemporary extreme-right groups organize to capture public attention, this study will also be of interest to students, scholars and activists interested in the complex relationship between party competition and street protest more generally.
Attraverso un’inedita retorica del “Fascismo del Terzo Millennio”, CasaPound legge l’attuale crisi economica, politica e di partecipazione attraverso forme di attivismo deliberatamente alternative rispetto alla mobilitazione politica tradizionale della propria area. Categorie ideologiche ispirate al fascismo storico e rivitalizzate attraverso un connubio di idea-azione a cui non è estraneo l’uso della violenza hanno permesso al gruppo di far breccia tra le generazioni dei più giovani e le categorie sociali più colpite dalla crisi economica.
Questo volume analizza i percorsi di militanza, l’attivismo politico e le forme di mobilitazione di CasaPound Italia, ricostruendone le radici ideologiche e gli orizzonti valoriali, approfondendo il progetto identitario subculturale e discutendone le strategie politiche a livello nazionale ed europeo.
Un lavoro attento nato da interviste, conversazioni, partecipazione a riti collettivi, manifestazioni politiche del gruppo, che costituisce un contributo alla comprensione della natura politica dei nuovi fenomeni di coinvolgimento al tempo della crisi.
Revisori del volume: Prof. Marco Tarchi (UNIFI) e Dimitri Deliolanes (ERT, Grecia)
illustrate how social movements contribute to the epistemic construction of ‘crises’ of European Integration. To tackle politicization,
we compare the framing and mobilization choices by grassroots
actors in solidarity with asylum-seekers and groups aiming to
defend national borders from them. Using original Protest Event
data and 21 face-to-face interviews, we find that the construction of
the crisis as a policy failure crucially reshaped mobilization on both
sides of the conflict. Specifically, direct social actions allowed the
two camps to respond to a context perceived as critical, politicizing
the crisis in light of the declining trust in representative institutions,
while also responding to the growing demand for efficacy and
concreteness. The findings offer novel empirical insight on movement–countermovement interactions and contribute to the scholarly debate on the relation between crises and the politicisation of
contentious issues in Europe
far-right politics, to date the communicative dimension of extreme
right mobilization received little rigorous scholarly attention. To
address this gap, this paper addresses the media practices of the
extreme right, offering an empirical study of two emerging social
movement organizations of this area: CasaPound Italia in Italy and
Les Identitaires in France. Rather than treating them as incidental
beneficiaries of media populism, the paper disentangles the
various ways in which these groups interact with the mass media,
discussing the forms and meaning of their activism in relation to
extreme right political culture, and differentiating between
inward-oriented and outward-oriented media practices. Based on
ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviews with farright
militants, the paper shows that media practices not only try
to respond to the demands of the media environment in which
the groups are embedded, but also seek to reinforce the groups’
internal organization and hierarchy, building collective symbolic
imagery, and ensuring ideological consistency among activists
and sympathizers. In so doing, the paper offers initial insight on
how protest movements of the extreme right consolidate their
profile and become recognizable in the public sphere.
Full article available at: https://rdcu.be/NWRv
"
legitimacy and visibility to their leaders and issues. In so doing, this scholarship reproduces the idea that far right actors are «hapless victims» of external circumstances, failing to see that they can at times be the shapers of their own fate, determining their own visibility and success with their media strategies. To address this issue, this article
looks at the interplay between internal supply-side factors and media coverage of CasaPound Italia (CPI), a non-established actor of the Italian far right. We use Political claims analysis (PCA) to analyse press releases and media reports of CPI’s activism. We conduct logistic regressions to look at whether issue characteristics (saliency and ownership), repertoires of action (conventional vs protest) and controversy (counter-mobilization) increase the likelihood that the activities of CasaPound Italia get coverage in the news. Our results indicate that media strategies by the far right increase the likelihood of news coverage, so that quality newspapers give attention to specific types of events promoted by CPI, such as when they mobilize on immigration, engage in street protest and create public controversy.
breeding ground for xenophobic, populist reactions. The paper suggests that the refugee crisis is best understood in relation to other ongoing crises in the EU, and that the way it is handled will have significant consequences for future action, shaping the way European societies cope with forthcoming crises and transforming the relationship between states and citizens. Accordingly, it argues that the permanent state of emergency characterising governmental responses so far does not bode well for the future of liberal democracy in Europe.
Since few studies worked on the interactions between political parties and social movements on the far-right, FARPE focusses on both covering European countries with different vote shares for the far right (Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Sweden and the UK). FARPE is driven by the hypothesis that economic and social turmoil have changed far-right mobilization quantitatively, by increasing the magnitude and size of protest in most EU countries, but also qualitatively by diversifying the type of groups and people involved in these. In providing answers to these questions FARPE aims at improving the understanding of whether the Great Recession is creating favorable opportunities for right-wing extremism, radicalism and populism. The project uses existing data to study the context of the Great Recession (political, economic, cultural systems), and it offers original data to qualify far-right mobilization. The research notably relies on Protest Event Analysis using national quality newspaper and party websites (WP1), as well as first-hand information gathered through semi-structured interviews with key far-right figures (WP2).