Social movements, activism and welfare politics in Brexit Britain

Conference by Armine Ishkanian, associate professor at the London School of Economics, as part of the Social Movements in the Global Age research program by Geoffrey Pleyers.

We are living in an era that has been characterized as an "age of anger" (Mishra, 2017) and as a period of "uproar" (Milanovic, 2019) and "great regression" (Geiselberger, 2017). The initial grievances that brought people into the squares and streets in the early 2010s have not been addressed and instead, there has been a further retrenchment of neoliberal policies and slashing of welfare programmes and budgets. Unsurprisingly, there are continuous eruptions of protests across the globe, against austerity and around issues of redistribution and welfare. In this talk, drawing on research on the anti-austerity movement in Britain, Armine Ishkanian examines how political and socio-economic developments since the 2008 financial crisis helped create a fertile ground for Brexit and consider the relationship between social movements, activism, and welfare politics in Britain.