IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-032-02657-6_6.html

Crisis and Protest in Post-collapse Iceland: From Political Opportunity to Positive Feedback

In: Crisis in Context

Author

Listed:
  • Jón Gunnar Bernburg

    (University of Iceland)

Abstract

In the prolonged aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the public in Iceland twice rose in mass protest that was followed by early general elections. The 2008 bank crisis triggered the first episode. The 2016 Panama Papers scandal triggered the second episode. These episodes offer an opportunity to address a significant issue in research on protest and social movements: the role of crisis in mass demonstrations. I have conducted mixed-method research (surveys, interviews, discourse analysis, participant observations) to account for the dynamics of social context, activist initiatives, and popular protest participation during each episode. My work illustrates how the historical precedents of mass protest condition the dynamics of mass protest. When the banking crisis struck Iceland in 2008, such a precedent was lacking, and mass demonstrations broke out only after several months of escalating political activism. In contrast, as the 2016 Panama Papers scandal reawakened the themes of injustice and the shared memory of the first protest, mass protests emerged rapidly and spontaneously.

Suggested Citation

  • Jón Gunnar Bernburg, 2026. "Crisis and Protest in Post-collapse Iceland: From Political Opportunity to Positive Feedback," Springer Books, in: Throstur Olaf Sigurjonsson & Kristín Loftsdóttir & Stefan Wendt (ed.), Crisis in Context, pages 95-110, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-032-02657-6_6
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-02657-6_6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-032-02657-6_6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.