Introduction: Strikebreaking During Europe's Belle Époque

The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism, 2018

Comparative Political Studies, 2013

Past & Present, 2020

Why do we think of social struggles as movements? What is in motion and where is it going? Has struggle been thought and practised otherwise? Not as movement but as disruption, arrest, stasis? If so, what are struggles trying to stop? Asking these questions pushes us to think about struggle kinetically: to analyse social struggle through the register of motion and its interruption. This article questions why we have come to understand the history of social struggle through the category of movement and the consequences and costs of this understanding for historical analysis. Against this association, it underscores how movement, as a practice and idea, was central to the establishment and legitimation of the capitalist economy and, using two case studies of labour and the New Left, examines how significant strands of these struggles sought freedom in the arrest of its coerced motion. Drawing from these examples, the final section discusses the usefulness of kinetic analysis for historical inquiry.

During the Popular Front of the mid 1930s, the longstanding political identities of French metalworkers were significantly transformed. For decades metalworker political identities had featured anti-patriotism and the rejection of cross-class alliances. But the tenor of the mass mobilizations and electoral behavior of metalworkers during the Popular Front reflected the emergence of a new political identity that combined class and national identities and support for cross-class political alliances. Through a study of metalworkers in the industrial city of Lyon this article argues that this new political identity emerged out of the intersection of industrial social relations and political opportunity structure.

Workers of the World. International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflicts, 6., 2015

This article focuses on how Spanish Civil War was experienced and understood by those who in the previous years declared themselves pacifist or antimilitarist, mainly the pacifist movement around War Resisters´ International (WRI) and the antimilitarist and anarchist trade union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). In the article we will deal with the different ways in which this men and women analysed war reality, starting with the use of violence and the attitude towards the creation of an army, following with recruitment and finishing with the ideological repression in the rear guard. These perspectives will help us understand the militarization process occurred in in the Republican Side, the way war culture was present there and the strategies that sometimes were carried out to prevent some of its consequences.

H-Diplo/ISSF, 2019

An analysis of the 2018-2019 "Yellow Vest" (Gilet jaune) protests in France, with papers by Emile Chabal, Valerie Charolles, and Daniel A. Gordon, and an introduction by Michael C. Behrent

III International Conference Strikes and Social Conflicts: Combined historical approaches to conflict. Proceedings, pp. 1067-1081, 2016

This paper looks at local and global effects of the strikes (in the sugar-cane and tobacco products sectors, as well as in the dockyards) and the cost-of-living protests in the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico between the two world wars. On the one hand, I assess these social struggles-and their wider regional and Atlantic context-by looking at how all this impacted the structures of domination in Puerto Rico and how the elites ("native" criollos and North American colonizers) responded to such social discontent and its protagonists.