Collective Trauma and Identity Struggle: Underground Factors of the 2019 South American Demonstration Waves

Abstract

Collective trauma infuences the political scene in an often unnoticed way. By focusing on the cases of Argentina and Chile, this study analyses which consequences traumas, experienced simultaneously by a collective, may have over time on generations, the state and its institutions. Linking it with social mobilizations, it outlines how the updating of perceptions, having emerged through the narration of stories of the past, creates distrust towards the state's institutions. This, in turn, increases the likeliness of mobilizations and violent outbreak within them. Interactions between the crowd and institutions such as the police, the military or other political actors could thus change with the depictions' elder generations make of them. These descriptions themselves, as this study shows, are shaped according to one's own experiences, past and present. Through a mixed methodology of quantitative and qualitative tools, this thesis aims to underline how the new generations, having not lived these times, may still be affected by their elders' collective traumatic experiences. While social, economic and political reasons may trigger the rise of mobilizations within a country, collective traumas, and the ensuing perceptions they produce, will be described as an underlying factor, preparing the perfect...