The Students' Rebellion in Chile: Occupy Protest or Classic Social Movement?

Abstract

This article gives an overview of the trajectory, components and repertory of the Chilean students' movement, which staged a series of protests during 2011. Although it started by contesting inequalities in the education system, the movement soon evolved into a challenge to the authoritarian character of political institutions, sharing similar goals with protests elsewhere around the world—including radical economical and political democratization. Should we therefore see the Chile students' protests as an Occupy-type protest? By analyzing the main interpretations over the movement, this article argues that the Occupy label is insufficient to understand the specificity of the conflict. In Chile, protests did not occur through small groups coordinated by loose networks; instead, they were spurred by traditional student organizations. This created a scenario of social unrest that resembles classical forms of contention, and in that respect differs from Occupy Wall Street, the indignados or the Arab Spring. This case shows that despite the crisis of neoliberal governance forming a common historical backdrop, the modularity (how?) and the composition (who?) of the movement are better explained by the historical configuration of national political systems.