Abstract

The protest wave spearheaded by students in recent years has shaped the political agenda in Chile in ways that few would have anticipated before the year 2011. This chapter traces the development of the Student Movement since 1990, with a focus on the 2001, 2006, and 2011 protest waves. It emphasizes the movement’s strategy-making as a relational process in which the responses of the political establishment to movement demands shape the subsequent formulation of petitions and tactics to employ. It is argued that the Student Movement’s accumulation of experiences has motivated the concurrent employment of “outsider” and “insider” strategies. The chapter concludes that while always in tension, the development of the Student Movement has resulted in an increased capacity to use both types of strategies in complementary ways.