Public debt between legitimacy and legality

From the Third Worldb debt crisis in the 1980s to Greece in 2015, this article proposes to analyse the militant trajectory of public debt cancellation. We look back at cancellationist actors, their backgrounds, their resources, and above all how they strive to accredit illegitimate debt through symbolic law mobilization. Our aim is to analyse how law is used by activists as a symbolic resource to convince governments to cancel part of their public debt for the sake of social democracy. This is a contribution to the sociology of law, to the contentious uses of the law against economic policies, as well as to the existing work on anti-debt activists.