Davide Rocchetti, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, will present his research at a seminar hosted by the Department of Sociology of Law at Lund University on 28 October 2026. The department organises research seminars that invite local and international social scientists to present state-of-the-art research in various areas of law and society.
Davide is currently involved in the Horizon Europe-funded project Protest as a Democracy Test: Protest Culture under Transformation and as a Transformative Power. He holds a PhD in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Trento and is a member of the CoACT Research Group.
His talk will focus on anti-authoritarian learning and protest mobilisation against autocratic moves. Autocratization appears increasingly ubiquitous and is spreading rapidly even across consolidated democratic regimes. While scholars have become familiar with the agents and mechanisms underlying these recent processes, democratic defence has occupied only a marginal place in the study of responses to autocratization. In this work, Davide and the project team seeks to redress this gap by focusing on the role of civil society. Drawing on the Italian case and the recent crackdown on civil society promoted by the far-right government, researchers reconstruct the mobilisation against a liberticidal decree approved in 2025. Specifically, Davide focuses on examining how civil society frames the criminalisation of protest, organises and develops strategies of democratic defense, and ultimately assesses its impact as autocratization unfolds.
The seminar will be held in room M331, 3rd floor, Allhelgona Kyrkogata 18 (House M), Lund, and online.