Civic engagement in Romania - testing the applicability of mainstream theories on the winter protests of 2012

The past few years have seen the emergence of new types of civic engagement. Citizens are now more capable to organize themselves than ever before and this creates a new pattern of social mobilization that has not previously been the centre of academic focus. This work analyses the particular case of the Romanian winter protests of 2012 in an attempt to prove that current mainstream theories of resource mobilization and framing do not fully explain the emergence of unstructured movements. The results aim to pave the way for a new theory of civic engagement that fits the newly observed realities and could be generalized to explain all forms of structured or unstructured participation to collective action