Discourses and Conditions of Possibility in Latin American Social Movements: The Cases of the Bolivian 'Water War' and the Movement of Opposition against the New Airport in Mexico City

This work presents a comparative analysis of two Latin American social movements. The first case is the movement of opposition against the privatisation of water and sanitation services (WSS) in Cochabamba, Bolivia and the second case is the movement of opposition against the project for a new international airport in Mexico City. Both case studies are used to illustrate how the study of collective discourses or collective action frames (CAFs) and the study of collective identities from a new social movement (NSM) perspective can be linked to improve our understanding of contemporary social movements. For these purposes, the work proposes the concept of conditions of possibility, defined as the contextual and organisational conditions that allow the resonance between constructed discourses and collective identities during the visible and the non-visible stages of a social movement.