A growing number of today’s conflicts are “local”, in the sense of having as their premise and target a given place, in its peculiar features, boundaries and connections with the “outside”. Yet are we in front of something really new, or do these conflicts belong to a long-established lineage of social mobilizations? The article begins with comparing new protests with those emerging in the 1970s, finding significant similarities (as regards for example the weak organizational structure, the single issue orientation, the diffidence for institutional politics and the value assigned to the concrete, lived experience) but also significant differences, both quantitative (for example in respect to the relevance of counter-expertise and of individual autonomy against delegation) and qualitative (for example about the declining relevance of the left/right cleavage and the reemergence of the centre/periphery and urban/rural ones, or about the ethicization of individual engagement). It is argued that, to properly understand new local mobilizations, one has to consider the change in the forms of government corresponding to the advent of “governance” and, behind it, of the neoliberal governmental rationality (or “governmentality”); this with special reference to the impacts of new processes of accumulation on territories and local governments, and to the surfacing of lines of fracture not amenable to the traditional cleavages but rather to the risks and opportunities of globalization. The role of environmental justice, science and ethics in new movements is discussed, showing that the stakes involved are ultimately set by the relationship between assimilation to the individual and collective anthropology implied in the neoliberalization of society and innovative impulses embedded in the practices and the production of sociality that animate social mobilizations.
