Introduction

In 2011, while the Arab Spring was rapidly changing the political scenery of the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the Indignados were beginning to occupy the Spanish squares with the help of tents and innovative social media communication tactics, Italian society faced a different, yet linked, form of mobilization. Since the previous year, a broad and heterogeneous coalition of social movement organizations, gathered in the framework of the Forum Italiano dei Movimenti per l’Acqua (Italian Forum of Water Movements), had been promoting a referendum campaign against the privatization of water services, a popular issue in Italy for over a decade.