Showing papers in "Social Movement Studies in 2009"

Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence

Abstract: Jeremy M. Weinstein, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007 xx +402 pp. £43.00 ISBN 0-521-86077-6 (hardback); £16.99 ISBN 0-521-67797-1 (paperback) Inside Rebellion offers an insightful accoun...

Fun and Laughter: Culture Jamming and the Emotional Regime of Late Capitalism

Abstract: The fusion of means and ends is a characteristic of new social movements, but the literature on emotions in social movements tends to focus on the way that emotion management constitutes part of th ...

Activist Identity as a Motivational Resource: Dynamics of (Dis)empowerment at the G8 Direct Actions, Gleneagles, 2005

Abstract: This paper describes a study examining how different groups at some of the G8 protests, Gleneagles, 2005, negotiated experiences of (dis)empowerment. A recent survey of protest events speculated that, as a function of their social identities, experienced activists have available to them particular strategies to counter disempowerment and hence provide motivation for continued involvement. The G8 direct actions in Gleneagles provided an opportunity to examine such dynamics of (dis)empowerment in situ. An ethnographic study was carried out covering the duration of the Gleneagles events, including interviews with forty participants. Two key findings were as follows. First, across the protest group as a whole there was little unification and no agreed definition of success. Consequently, feelings of empowerment varied systematically across the sample. The second key finding concerned changes in definitions of success among some participants. For experienced activists, their activist identity entailed access to sets of arguments and discussions with fellow activists which allowed potentially disempowering events to be (re-)interpreted positively. An example was the re-evaluation of the importance of the Stirling campsite, which came to be seen by some as a key achievement. We argue in conclusion, however, that some activist strategies to maintain empowerment, while appearing to be based on a radical position, can operate as a break on escalation. The analysis as a whole suggests both the subjective and objective significance of identity and empowerment in movement dynamics.

‘The Anarchists' World Cup’: Respectable Protest and Media Panics

Abstract: In 2005 225,000 people marched through Edinburgh enjoining the G8 to ‘Make Poverty History’. The coalition's own assessment of their campaign highlighted the importance of media by focusing on the extent of media coverage. Media outlets, however, have their own agendas. Detailed analysis of newspaper coverage preceding the G8 Summit suggests a disjuncture between campaign objectives and media frames. This paper explores how far newspaper accounts of G8-related protests were ‘framed’ in terms of social movement aims, and how far in terms of anticipated violence. Our findings lead us to caution against an uncritical equation of ‘coverage’ and ‘success’, offering a more nuanced account of the interplay between social movements and media.

The December 2008 riots in Greece

Abstract: This paper offers a short overview of the civil unrest that marked December 2008 in Greece. It starts with a short detection exercise on the causes of the rioting and culminates in a more inclusive ascription of cause. It then deals with some recurring characteristics of youth protest politics in Greece by singling out and focusing on three interrelated nodal points: the legacy of Athens Polytechnic, school pupils' mobilizations, and the anarchist movement. This way, a memetic explanation is advanced. The paper concludes by suggesting that our understanding of similar episodes, which are very likely to take in different national settings globally in light of the global economic crisis, has very much to gain by an appraisal of nation-specific legacies of popular resistance.

Workers' Protest in Egypt: Neo-liberalism and Class Struggle in 21st Century

Abstract: From 1998 to 2008 some 2 million Egyptian workers participated in 2,623 factory occupations, strikes, demonstrations, or other collective actions. This social movement does not have a national leadership or program and has not been supported by the Egyptian Trade Union Federation. It is propelled by locally generated grievances that have been produced by the acceleration of the neo-liberal transformation of Egypt since 2004. This workers movement has not changed the existing structures of power that constrain Egyptian working people because the informal, local networks that have sustained the movement are, by their nature, unable to organize a national-scale political movement on their own.

A Comparative Framework for the Analysis of International Student Movements

Abstract: Recent theory and research on revolution indicate that leadership and ideology play crucial roles. Much of the leadership and ideology for contemporary revolutions developed within the context of student movements. But previous research on student movements has often been limited to developed Western societies and has yielded typologies of student activism that have little application to revolutionary movements worldwide. Based on an analysis of student movements in many societies during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a new typology of student movements is formulated. The typology, which allows differentiation among reform student movements, identity radicalism student movements, structural revolutionary student movements, and social revolutionary student movements, appears capable of identifying the essential contrasts as well as key similarities among a wide range of student movements in many societies. Conditions fostering each type of movement are described. The paper concludes with a...

Explaining How Political Culture Changes: Catholic Activism and the Secular Left in Italian Peace Movements

Abstract: Political cultures have usually been studied as static and perhaps monolithic. If any attention has been dedicated to how political cultures change it has been devoted to exogenous factors. In recent years, however, some authors have advocated exploring the role of endogenous factors. In this article, we reflect on the advantages of a comprehensive approach to explaining how political cultures change, embracing endogenous and exogenous factors. We look at peace mobilizations in Italy as a case study, which allows examination of the interactions of the two political cultures of Marxism and Catholicism. Our work suggests some provisional theories about the dynamics that lead to hybridization between different political families. These dynamics can be understood through the genealogy of a ‘grammar of responsibility’. We argue that the factors that condition change in political culture relate to both the national and the international political context. We also show how these processes of change occur as a re...

Framing Faith: Explaining Cooperation and Conflict in the US Conservative Christian Political Movement

Abstract: Despite the burgeoning literature on coalition work, very little is known about the cooperative potential within social movements. Drawing on archival, interview, and secondary data, we examine cooperation and conflict in the US conservative Christian political movement from 1970 to 1994. We highlight how framing, political elites and intramovement dynamics within the conservative Christian political movement altered the cooperative potential over time. Specifically, we find that the conservative Christian political movement initially had a strong coordinative potential and even engaged in organization building as a way to formalize cross-denominational cooperation. However, as the evangelical wing of the movement sought to build and consolidate its political power, it began to frame issues in ways that reflected a particularized world view regarding the role of the state in fostering a moral society. Other conservative Christian organizations responded by couching their understanding of political issues ...

Language and democracy 'in movement': multilingualism and the case of the European social forum process

Abstract: In recent years new cross-European protests and movements have developed on global justice and within the loose platform of the European Social Forum (ESF). One of the major challenges for transnational communication and grassroots democracy within the Social Forums is linguistic communication problems and the ‘work of translation’ required to create a democratic setting. In the willingness to provide open access beyond linguistic communication problems, activists and organizers involved in the ESF preparatory process therefore hold their regular European preparatory assemblies to the ESF summits within a multilingual setting. Given the potential challenges of working transnationally, and of multilingual meetings, the ESF provides a good case study to test whether such processes work effectively in practice in comparison with national social movement assemblies: to what extent is democratic discussion and decision making possible in such emerging multilingual meetings compared to national meetings in whic...

Thinking Outside the Master's House: New Knowledge Movements and the Emergence of Academic Disciplines

Abstract: This paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding emergent disciplines as knowledge-focused social movement phenomena called New Knowledge Movements, or NKMs The proposed theoretical framework is developed through a synthesis of new social movement theory and Frickel and Gross's Scientific/Intellectual Movements (SIMs) model In contrast to the SIMs model, this paper argues that many new disciplines emerge through contentious collective action on the part of political and intellectual outsiders rather than through the action of intellectual elites The framework is examined through historical narratives of two disciplines, women's studies and Asian American studies, in the USA This framework will be useful to scholars studying the emergence of other disciplines and their related social movement dynamics, particularly those disciplines connected to deeply held personal identities or belief systems

Radical Ground: Israeli and Palestinian Activists and Joint Protest Against the Wall

Abstract: This paper will seek to address a new and vibrant development within the field of Israeli–Palestinian socio-politics and social movement studies. By interrogating the received wisdom surrounding social movements as agents bearing collective claims as expressed by Charles Tilly (2004), this paper will suggest that the joint activism around the building of the Wall sees Israeli and Palestinian activists move beyond the traditional liberal/Marxist paradigm of counter-hegemonic action (Gramsci, 1971). Instead, understanding the activism of these activists belongs more within the field of post-structuralism where power is contested from all angles and its networks, extensions and connections identified (Foucault, 1980, p. 145). The activists' actions and motives revitalise the theories of protest-anarchism (Braidotti, 2002) with their insistence on creating change through direct action. They do not act to be granted emancipation by their oppressors (Day, 2005, p. 89), but their actions seek to bring about thei...

Parental Protest, Public Opinion, and War Termination: Israel's ‘Four Mothers’ Movement

Abstract: Peace movements that challenge national security policies typically remain politically marginal. However, the unusual cases that evince causal linkages among grass-roots activism, public opinion shifts, and a government's decision to change policy suggest hypotheses about the sorts of organizational characteristics and political conditions that can increase movements' prospects for influence. This article considers the case of Israel's Four Mothers – Leaving Lebanon in Peace that in the late 1990s successfully sought to end Israel's war in southern Lebanon. The article adopts a political-mediation model of peace movement outcomes that draws on Giugni's (2004) model of movements' policy impact. It finds support for the idea that when grass-roots activists and their elite supporters among politicians and the media act jointly, they can exert influence on policy outcomes. Anti-war movements led by soldiers' family members may have particularly abilities to shift public opinion against the war so as to create...

Theorizing Native American Land Seizure: An Analysis of Tactical Changes in the Late Twentieth Century

Abstract: This paper advances the existing literature on tactics by analyzing the persistence of land seizure as a particular strategy in Native American political activism over five decades. It examines the different types of spaces seized and the claims made during three distinct historical periods: public spaces on reservations during the recuperative phase (1950–69), surplus federal lands away from reservations during the expropriative phase (1969–75), and high-profile locales on and off tribal lands during the demonstrative phase (1975–2000). Land seizures were often means to make material demands or articulate normative claims, but always served to complicate the state's exercise of power over Native peoples. Through case studies the paper demonstrates how spatial disruption, resource availability, and dynamism affected the continued viability of land seizure as a tactic to advance Native Americans' political demands.

‘We're a Winner’: Popular Music and the Black Power Movement

Abstract: Ideological conviction and emotional courage are critical characteristics of successful political and social movements. The Black Power Movement (BPM), which rose out of the struggle for political and social rights associated with the Civil Rights Movement (CRM), possessed characteristics of ideological conviction and emotional courage. In contrast to the CRM, the BPM called for a more active political challenge and cultural consciousness-based programs to accompany the struggle for rights. The BPM, which called for blacks to unite and organize around a powerful sense of self and community, exemplifies influences that inspire and drive social movements, such as strong identification with cultural consciousness and political solidarity. Social movements are typically viewed through the lens of political systems and individual action, but culture is critical to movement analysis. This article links culture and politics by employing music to represent culture and political opportunity structure to explore so...

The Benefits of Frame Resonance Disputes for Transnational Movements: The Case of Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve

Abstract: Internal rifts over framing and tactics often hinder groups from mobilizing the degree of support and resources necessary to achieve their stated goals. As a result of disparities in political culture and ideology, the existence of such rifts may be especially frequent and disabling for forms of transnational collective action. However, using the case of the transnational movement lobbying on behalf of Botswana's minority groups, particularly the indigenous San, this paper argues that frame resonance disputes can sometimes facilitate the achievement of a movement's immediate goals. This is for two main reasons. First, by appealing to different audiences, the movement can gain complementary and reinforcing forms of legitimacy and support. Second, states and their societies may possess different points of vulnerability, which can be more effectively targeted through the simultaneous use of multiple frames. By helping minority groups receive legal entitlement to their ancestral lands and opening a debate abo...

Attack of the Butterfly Spirits: The Impact of Movement Framing by Community Garden Preservation Activists

Abstract: This study of the community garden preservation movement on the Lower East Side of New York examines the role of movement framing by activists in their struggle to save hundreds of gardens from destruction. In repeated confrontations with the Giuliani administration, gardeners successfully de-routinized the process of urban redevelopment by portraying the loss of a garden as an unimaginable violation against themselves, and the city. This process of re-framing urban development helped activists to compensate for their disempowered political status, and was instrumental in forcing the Giuliani administration to negotiate to save the gardens. Focusing on framing by movement activists demonstrates the purposive and strategic character of neighborhood identity. Emphasizing the strategy of neighborhood identities is a useful corrective to the many studies of community movements that emphasize their emergence from a relational, presumably non-strategic, local reality.

‘Being in the Spaces where Decisions are Made’: Reproductive Rights Advocacy and Policy Influence in Two Regions of Peru

Abstract: In the 1990s, some segments of Latin American feminist movements shifted to advocacy strategies to influence government policies. Long-standing social movement theories predict that this tactical c ...

Pursuing Political Persuasion: War and Peace Frames in the United States after September 11th

Abstract: Despite the prominence of framing analysis in social movement research, the ways that power-holders and challengers attempt to persuade the general public remain under-theorized. We develop a multidimensional typology of what content producers frequently anticipate will make their frames potent. Moreover, we argue that several contextual factors influence which of these dimensions are emphasized in frames. To assess these propositions, we conducted an analysis of statements issued by President Bush and 10 US peace movement organizations following the September 11th attacks. Both sides touched upon all dimensions. President Bush's statements took advantage of discursive and emotional opportunities in crafting messages supportive of war and repression. Illustrating their strategic nature, PMO statements either appropriated or rejected dominant discourses for any single dimension. While peace groups took advantage of emotional opportunities, oppositional cultures curtailed their use of discursive opportuniti...

Social Movements and Europeanization Processes: The Case of the French Associations Mobilizing around the Asylum Issue

Abstract: This paper seeks to analyse the process of Europeanization of social movements mobilizing around the asylum policy since the middle of the 1990s. Taking the example of the principal French associations which have mobilized on this topic, the paper explores the dynamics that lead these associations to increasingly address the European institutions since the launching of the process of harmonisation of asylum policies. In particular, it shows that particular attention shall be given to the relationship between the associations that have constituted at the national level and the set of actors that are mobilized on this issue exclusively at the European level (which is defined as a European advocacy coalition). Through the analysis of this relationship, it can be seen that the French associations follow different processes of Europeanization. Some follow a process of inclusion into the existing European advocacy coalition while others create alternative mobilizations at the European level. This study allows u...

Make Poverty History: Political Communication in Action

Abstract: Make Poverty History (MPH) was an extraordinary mobilization of people and organizations, part of a global campaign to get the world leaders assembled at the G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland in July 2005, to commit to more equitable terms of trade for developing countries, the cancellation of the debts of the poorest countries, and more and better international aid. The British campaign focused upon putting pressure on the host government in the year of the British presidency of the European Union. MPH, at its peak, assembled over 540 organizations and mobilized 225,000 people into the streets of Edinburgh, the largest demonstration the Scottish capital had ever seen. Nicolas Sireau is extraordinarily well-placed to write an analytical insider account of MPH. As Director of Communications for the Catholic Institute for International Relations, an important player in MPH’s Churches Working Group, he was able to observe meetings, monitor email communications, interview NGO leaders and conduct focus groups with activists and members of the public; as a PhD student, he was familiar with relevant social scientific literature and constrained to academic rigour. The book is as a result both well-informed and more analytical than might be expected of an insider account. It is not, however, a comprehensive study of the protests excited by the G8 meeting. Sireau reasonably claims that anti-globalization protesters have received more than their due share of scholarly attention whereas the much larger and more influential movement constituted by international aid and development NGOs and their supporters has been neglected. Certainly, the numbers mobilized by MPH were overwhelmingly greater than those of the other protesters at and around the 2005 summit. Because MPH was a complex campaign, a full account of it would require a much longer book. Sireau focuses upon the NGO elites at the core of the national campaign and does not consider the many local and regional groups and organizations that contributed greatly to the unexpectedly large turnout in Edinburgh. His vantage point is from the admittedly important church-affiliated element of MPH; the participation of environmental, labour movement and socialist organizations is scarcely mentioned even though Friends of the Earth, in particular, contributed significantly to MPH despite the omission of environmental change from its core claims. Conceptually, there is some unfortunate slippage in Sireau’s characterization of MPH variously as a campaign and as a movement. Distancing himself from conceptions of

Working Expectations: Frame Diagnosis and the Welfare Rights Movement

Abstract: This paper examines frame resonance dynamics internal to the contemporary US welfare rights movement. Frames diagnosing the problems of welfare as rooted in conceptions of caregiving and wage work were popular a generation ago among welfare rights activists. Today, this frame is favored among allies of the movement. Is it favored among grassroots activists? Forty-three interviews with welfare rights parent/activists in eight states around the USA reveal that activists have prioritized the immediate needs of welfare families. In examining the mechanisms underlying this disjuncture in frame resonance, I find that a caring labor frame ultimately lacks both credibility and salience among activists. Moreover, these established conceptions of resonance tend to minimize the intertwined role of power and identity in the perception of framing choices available to activists. This tendency of framing literature to present identity categories such as race, class and gender as ultimately interchangeable masks the crit...

Pandora's Box: The Implications of Social Movements on Development. Lessons from the Lacandona Jungle in Chiapas

Abstract: This paper's objective is twofold. First, it aims to demonstrate that the emergence of a powerful social movement in a rural region triggers a period of intense transformations with unpredictable outcomes and widely varied, even contradictory, implications for development – which can be positive and negative, intentional and unintentional. The second objective is to improve the understanding of causes explaining such diverse implications in order to identify the factors and processes that promote and thwart alternative development agendas. While social movements often strengthen traditionally excluded groups, they can also give rise to identities and events that limit a territory's economic prospects. Such is the case of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico. This social movement has won respect for the indigenous peoples and weakened political clientelism in the region. However, the EZLN has also hindered development initiatives involving cooperation with public institutions an...

Phantasy and Social Movements: An Ontology of Pro-Space Activism

Abstract: Psychoanalysis has a long history of influence in the study of collective behaviour, and this paper argues that it has a great deal to contribute to the study of one vitally important and under-researched aspect of social movement activity; the fantasies activists have about life in the social worlds they would like to see in the future. The paper uses empirical research findings to show that, in the case of activists campaigning to further the human exploration, development and settlement of outer space, these fantasies can be fundamental to activists' motivation. Psychoanalysis helps us understand these fantasies as conscious manifestations of unconscious phantasies. However, the paper also addresses the criticisms social movement theory has made of reductionist psychoanalysis, arguing that the study of activists' fantasies must include accounts of the ways in which social forces influence unconscious processes, the discourses used by activists to understand their cause, and the organization of the move...

From ‘Fighting Family’ to ‘Belligerent Families’: Family–Military–Nation Interrelationships and the Forming of Israeli Public Behavior among Families of Fallen Soldiers and Families of MIAs and POWs

Abstract: The army–family relationship is vital for control by a state aware that the family is the central agent influencing their son to enlist. A historically ‘affectionate’ relationship prevailed between Israel's army and families. During and after the Yom Kippur War, families of captive and missing soldiers, and bereaved families, adopted ‘new’ social behaviors. They organized in an institutionalized manner, clashing with the establishment. Our research highlights the changing behavior patterns. Previously, Israel's ‘fighting family’ had applied a ‘hegemonic behavior model’. Families could process their loss privately, or publicly – as cultural agents committed to state values. After the war, many spurned that model and entered the public space, calling senior government officials ‘enemies’, ‘guilty’ of their plight. The new behavior fell on fertile ground: the declining traditional ‘network of elites’ and the burgeoning social-civil arena. Families of captive and MIA soldiers, and of fallen soldiers, adopted ...

The Status of Identities: Racial Inclusion and Exclusion at West Coast Ports

Abstract: Left leadership, organizers, and industrial organization have been associated with union strategies of racial inclusion, yet unions exhibiting these characteristics have not always been inclusive in practice. Why did some industrial unions with left leadership and organizers implement racial inclusion while others resisted? I answer this question through an incorporated comparative analysis of racial inclusion among longshore unions at two West Coast ports. Building upon Castells' typology of identities, I argue that racial inclusion in these cases can best be explained by moving beyond economic interests to focus on (1) struggles among labor factions within the same union, (2) how status interests are exhibited through the ‘identity practices’ of labor factions, specifically how class, religious, and age identity practices increased the probability that labor factions would adopt inclusive strategies, and (3) the impact of extra-institutional networks and organizations, including the institutional contex...

Responding to Disaster: Two Logics of Demands and the Politics of Hybridity

Abstract: Two similar disastrous fires struck concert venues in the USA (The Station, 2003) and Argentina (Republica Cromanon, 2004). We explore similarities and contrasts in public responses to these tragedies to better understand two patterns of collective action. One pattern (‘insider’) revolves around the deployment of forms of action and organization aimed at working within the constraints and opportunities already available or easily attainable within prevailing institutional arrangements. The other (‘outsider’) involves a reliance on forms of action and organization that seek to gain leverage by challenging prevailing institutions, often by way of protest, direct action, and the threat to disrupt existing arrangements. These ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ patterns bear the imprint of accumulated repertoires of action and organization, are very often in tension, and involve trade-offs that participants in civil society organizations constantly weigh in considering alternative courses of action. Moreover, choices be...

The Logic of Risk Distribution: Site Fights and Resisting Global Toxics

Abstract: In 1992, an internal memo signed by then Chief Economist of the World Bank Lawrence Summers argued that the bank should encourage the poorest societies to accept the world’s most toxic industries: ‘ . . . shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LCDs? . . . The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that’ (Summers, 1992). The memo from inside the world’s leading development bank seemed to expose the callousness of its liberal trade agenda: the poorest would bear a majority of capitalisms risks because that was their ‘comparative advantage’. In the ensuing public outcry, Summers maintained that the memo was not a serious policy statement but was meant to be ironic; the World Bank had no intention of supporting such a policy mandate. For critics, however, the ugly truth of risk distribution both within and between nations, from global North to global South, from rich to poor, and from white to persons of color was tragically self-evident. Site Fights and Resisting Global Toxics are two very different efforts to empirically and theoretically address the logic of risk distribution that Summers euphemistically described

Riotous Citizens: Ethnic Conflict in Multicultural Britain

Abstract: Paul Bagguley & Yasmin Hussain, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008, vii +191 pp., £55.00, ISBN 978-075464-627-3 (hardback) This book is a study of the 2001 riots in northern England, involving mainly the Sou...

Rise of the Right: Exploring Conservative Movements in the United States

Abstract: New types of conservative politics appeared in the USA toward the conclusion of the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Spokespersons for these novel projects donned the mantel of democracy and insisted that they spoke for everyday people. They also asserted that the non-radical left in the United States (that is, ‘Liberals’) was a collection of out-of-touch intellectual elitists who disdained the values, needs, and circumstances of lowand middle-income and wage-earning Americans. Finally, the new American conservatives (sometimes dubbed ‘neo-conservatives’ by opponents across the ideological spectrum) argued that they would capture political power in a genuinely democratic way: through grass-roots ‘movements.’ The two books under review explore the rise of self-styled conservative ‘movements’ during the twilight of the twentieth century. Taking seriously the self-presentation of the neo-conservatives, the books show how modern academic theories about social movements can be applied to understand the politics of not only self-declared ‘progressives,’ but self-defined ‘conservatives’ as well. Because the books use different types of academic theories, they examine slightly different topics and explore different sorts of questions. How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism looks at stages in the ideological and organizational development of the new conservatism, and at how those