Showing papers on "Social movement published in 2023"

Shaping our collective futures: activism, analysis, solidarity

Abstract: ABSTRACT This paper offers a scholar/activist's reflections on some key conceptual and political articulations shaping current food systems analysis to illustrate that crucial knowledge about food systems and social transformation is generated in a variety of sites and ways. Drawing on personal experiences as one of the initial leaders in the global movement, La Via Campesina, the author explores the emergence of food sovereignty, the struggles of agrarian feminists for gender parity, the recognition of women's work, and agro-ecology as sites for the generation of knowledge needed for justice, food systems transformation and the restoration of rural environments.

Organization-as-Platform Activism: Theory and Evidence from the National Football League “Take a Knee” Movement

Abstract: Social activists sometimes engage in a form of workplace activism that involves using their employer organization as an unofficial platform to communicate social issue messages to external stakeholders. This type of activism follows a different logic from that of more-familiar citizen activism, in which citizens directly target society and its institutions, and that of organizational-change activism, in which employees aim to influence their employer organization. This article develops and tests theory to understand this phenomenon of organization-as-platform activism, using the National Football League “Take a Knee” employee athlete protests as an empirical context. Drawing on past research on social movements and employee activism, we offer a theoretical comparison of these three forms of activism—citizen, organizational-change, and organization-as-platform—to conceptually distinguish them and to theorize factors that uniquely predict the occurrence of platform activism. We find evidence of predictors associated with the attributes of the organizational platform and those of the intended stakeholder audience. Organization-as-platform activism is associated with the accessibility and openness of the organizational platform for messaging use, the visibility of the organizational platform for message transmission, and the receptivity of the targeted stakeholder audience. As employees increasingly bring their non-work identities and beliefs into the workplace, our findings invite new research on the outcomes of platform activism for organizations, the implications of such activism for organizational stakeholder strategy, and the relation between platform activism and employee prosocial voice.

La Lucha Continua: A Presentist Lens on Social Protest in Ecuador

Abstract: Ecuador has one of the most progressive constitutions in Latin America. It defines the state as plurinational and guarantees collective rights to Indigenous people and even to Nature itself. At the same time, the oil sector has been of strategic importance and “national interest” to both right‐ and left‐wing governments for the last decades, contributing with its rents and revenues to around one‐third of the state coffers. Therefore, the extractivist model remains unchallenged and still promises development—while reproducing systemic inequalities and a “continuum of violence.” In June 2022, the Indigenous movement called for a nationwide strike to draw attention to the socio‐economic crisis following the pandemic. The authorities harshly repressed the mobilization and a racializing media discourse demarcated the “Indigenous” agenda from the needs of “all Ecuadorians,” classifying the protesters as “terrorists” and thus, a threat to the nation. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article discusses the role of extractivism in social mobilization. Exploring the future of social protest in Ecuador in the face of new pressures like climate change and the energy transition, it argues that extractivist patterns will change globally and amplify social discontent and mobilization.

From Radical Jesus People to Virtual Religion

Abstract: The Family International (formerly the Children of God) emerged from the radical fringe of the Jesus People Movement in the late 1960s to establish a new religious movement with communities in ninety countries. Characterized from its early days by controversy due to its unconventional version of Christianity, countercultural practices, and high level of tension with society, the Family International created a communal society that endured for four decades. The movement's reinvention in 2010 as an online community offers insights into the dynamic nature of new religious movements, as they strategically adapt to evolving social contexts and emergent issues, and the negotiations of belief and identity this may entail. The Family International's transformation from a radical communal movement to a deradicalized virtual community highlights the novel challenges alternative religions may face in entering the mainstream and attaining legitimacy within the increasingly globalized context of online information dissemination in virtual spaces.

The framing of protest

Abstract: Framing is the process of selecting certain aspects from the perceived reality and placing them prominently within messages, in order to promote a particular definition of the situation , a certain causal interpretation , a certain moral evaluation and a proposal for some remedies. During social movements or protests , especially in an era of post truth, alternative facts and fake news , framing is relevant in different ways of constructing and interpreting messages. Framing is a dynamic process, consisting in collective and ongoing shaping and reshaping of frames by protesters and audiences, in order to mobilize adherents, appeal to authorities and silence opponents. Social media enables social movement activists and participants to organize offline protests and to expand repertoires of action. Online platforms (social networks, etc.) facilitate dissemination of collective action messages and recruiting of supporters. Also, social media influence frame alignment processes of social movements.

Lost in Corporate Translation: How Firms Mediate Between Social Mobilization and Regulatory Intervention in the Extractive Sector

Abstract: Firms should be considered as actors that potentially mediate between social movement pressures and policy outcomes. This article shows that at the mining project level, social mobilization can generate important changes in corporate practices toward nearby communities, and that these practices can undermine the cohesion of social movement coalitions advocating for regulatory intervention or reform, thus limiting their ability to make compelling claims on the state. In this way, company interpretations of and responses to protest are an important mediating process that conditions civil society efforts to activate state institutions in their favor. This argument extends recent work on the social foundations of regulation in Latin America by including corporate actors. The article is based on a comparative case study of the Pascua Lama/Veladero mining projects in both Argentina and Chile, using both secondary sources and primary field research.

Mobile Internet and Contentious Politics in Nigeria: Using the Organisational Tools of Mobile Social Networking Applications to Sustain Protest Movements

Abstract: This study investigates the impact of mobile social networking applications in the organisation of protest movements by examining how protesters documented their participation during the 2020 #EndSARS protests as well as evaluating the themes that emerged from online activists’ tweets during the 2022 #EndSARSMemorial2 protests in Nigeria. Data for this study was obtained from a survey conducted in 2020 during the protests in Lagos and Port Harcourt, Nigeria (N = 391), and a qualitative content analysis of tweets and replies (N = 67,691) from the 2022 #EndSARSMemorial2 protest in Nigeria. Results show that there is a substantial relationship between how protesters document their participation and their day of joining the protest. Findings also demonstrate that protesters used social media platforms accessed via mobile phones to display their anger and anguish, imprecate the authorities, and rouse solidarity contagion, which ignited a memorial march for fallen activists in Nigeria. Finally, data illustrate that activists in Nigeria use these successive memorial protests to sustain the #EndSARS protest movements and their demands.

Comparative study on digital inclusion among socially vulnerable activists and leaderships of organized social movements in Brazil

Abstract: This article analyses the challenges experienced by activists with social vulnerabilities who continued their activism online or face-to-face during the pandemic, focusing especially on Black and Indigenous women. I have also studied the types of resistance found in the period between March 2020 and July 2021. On the other hand, I will analyse leaders of organized social movements – or those in the process of formalization – to understand how these leaders organized themselves in the digital world. This qualitative and quantitative research was carried out through online questionnaires and online focus groups composed by activists with social vulnerabilities and leaders of organized social movements in different parts of Brazil. Due to a long period of turmoil, social division, self-isolation and perpetual stress have become the daily norm in our country. As we faced various political conflicts and social trials, the strength of our relationships and associations allowed us to endure. This research will also follow the digital difficulties in Brazil, finding levels of partial and total digital exclusion among the analysed groups. Despite the difficulties of navigating the digital world, activists and leaders of Brazilian social movements sought alternatives through resistance and solidarity, including sharing access to the internet via cell phones. This reflection is based on the research New Forms of Representation While Facing Digital Transformation finished in December 2021 for the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation.

The strength of pushback collective identity in a fragmented mass movement*

Abstract: This article examines how social movement actors can forge and sustain a collective identity despite heterogeneous backgrounds and the absence of pre-existing commonalities and networks. Based on an ethnography of the French yellow vest movement, we build on the concept of reactive identity to describe two key mechanisms. First, we show this movement’s collective identity crystallized through the actors’ shared reactions to the broader sociopolitical environment. Then, we describe how identification processes are reinforced when social movement actors feel rejected, stigmatized, and repressed in their interactions with national institutions, civil society, and individuals. We explain how these mechanisms are useful for understanding the development of collective identities within mass movements, which encompass individuals with various and fragmented identities. Exploring new dimensions of reaction beyond the us-versus-them mechanisms of identity formation, we show how collective identity can coalesce for groups who became stigmatized as they mobilize to oppose their environment.

Framing and social movements

Abstract: This article explores the notion and method of discourse and frame analysis in social movement studies. Different cases of frame analysis applied to various types of social movements and contentious politics in Europe are used to illustrate the argument. As stressed in the introduction to this special issue, although the concept of frame and framing is used in several disciplines and approaches in the cognitive, language and social sciences, research on social movements still presents some gaps. One is the prevalent application of frame analysis approach to progressive left wing movements, leaving aside actors on the Right. A second weakness is the scarcity of empirical research combining the micro (i.e. activists) and meso (i.e. organizations) level of framing and exploring dynamics of frame ‘(dis-)alignment’. Third, there is mainly a focus on the framing of national rather than transnational contention, although as this article shows, social movement research is increasing on this regard. The fourth weakness is the scarcity of applications of framing and frame analysis to collective actors and policies - a promising line of research to which social movement studies could make valuable contributions. This article will address these issues to highlight promising venues of research and application in social movement studies.

‘We bring in each other's wisdom’: liberatory praxis and political education for Black lives in Philadelphia

Abstract: Education is a central aspect of social movements' ability to build individual and collective participation in political struggle. But, how do these processes of learning and consciousness take place? As Choudry (Choudry, A. 2015. Learning Activism: The intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements. University of Toronto Press) argues, it is important to examine the intellectual life of contemporary social movements, their various forms and pedagogies of learning and knowledge production. In this article, we examine the role of ‘political education' in the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) global network. Rather than create educational spaces separate from the movement itself, BLM Philadelphia organisers approach political education as deeply embedded within a radical organising culture that focuses on integrating abolitionist principles within movement activities. Through in-depth interviews with BLM organisers, we find that practices of political education are built into the fibre of organising where activists ‘bring in each other's wisdom', cultivating a radical and organic culture of community support and intergenerational knowledge-making. We hope these findings contribute to a more expansive understanding of ‘political education' within Black social movements, building on Choudry’s call to centre the knowledge production and intellectual biography of contemporary social movements.

A win or a flop? Measuring mass protest successfulness in authoritarian settings

Abstract: Previously rare events, mass protest movements have become popular vehicles for those seeking political, economic, and social change. How do we evaluate movement success? Most studies addressing movement outcomes are grounded in the goal attainment approach, where movement success is dependent upon fulfilling one’s stated demands. The models derived from this approach heavily rely on visibility and transparency in the policymaking process. These offer limited analytical utility for scholars studying movements in authoritarian states, where policymaking is shrouded and media is state-controlled. Evaluating movements solely on their fulfillment of mission goals is highly problematic, as movements produce more outcomes than their intended goals. Movements also produce unintended benefits: concessions unrelated to the movement’s mission. These include negative consequences, or societal costs. Since movements produce both positive and negative unintended outcomes, any evaluation of a movement should also incorporate the costs associated with new gains. I argue a cost–benefit approach improves scholarly conceptualization and measurement of protest success. I conceptualize protest success as multidimensional and comprised of protest gains and societal costs. I develop a 21-point scale of protest success using Mokken Scale Analysis. AISP diagnostics indicate gains and costs comprise separate subscales, which are collapsed to produce total sum scores. I score 34 nonviolent movements in authoritarian states between 2002 and 2013 on an additive scale. Protests in authoritarian settings attain considerable accomplishments; however, those gains come with significant cost. Most total success scores are negative, indicating considerable backlash is common during and immediately after the demobilization of movements in authoritarian states. Success scores improve upon the canonical binary measure by: (1) offering improved discrimination between movements, (2) identifying cases of regime ‘ignoring’, and (3) pinpointing misclassified cases. By incorporating negative consequences into our evaluations, we advance our understanding why movements deemed successful by scholars are disappointments to their home publics.

“Frankly, My Dear, I Don’t Want a Dam” in the US or in Iran: Environmental Movements and Shared Strategies in Differing Political Economies

Abstract: In this comparative study, we explore why environmental movements against two neoliberal water transfer projects emerged and how they work in different political economies—a hegemonic capitalist democracy (Colorado, US) and a centralized authoritarian capitalist system (Iran). We apply Polanyi’s and Gramsci’s political–economic theories, using interviews and document analysis to examine and compare movement framing and mobilization and resistance strategies and tactics through this lens. The existing social movement literature leads us to expect fundamental differences, but although we find some differences, particularly in tactics, we find that these environmental movements have unexpected similarities in terms of framing and resistance strategies. Additionally, in both cases, outcomes remain uncertain despite the ostensibly large differences in political opportunities. In Colorado, project developers and social protesters may reach a compromise agreement through the civil society channel of the courts. In Iran, with a centralized state suppressing opponents whereas the project threatens local people’s livelihoods, the environmental movement has assumed a more radical face.

Taiwan's Same-Sex Marriage Legislation: Social Movement Strategies and Relational Dynamics

Abstract: Abstract In 2019, Taiwan became the first in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage (SSM). This article considers the social movement strategies and relational dynamics of three activist groups in the year leading to the landmark SSM legislation, respectively representing the “yes,” “no,” and “alternative” agendas in the public debates and social mobilization around the issue of equal marriage rights. Through a critical study of the three cases, this article examines how various campaigners shaped local SSM discourses and mobilized people to support, oppose, and question marriage equality, focusing on their social mobilization strategies and inter-group relational dynamics under Taiwan's political and legal structures. In so doing, it proposes a hybrid theoretical model to understand complex social movement and countermovement relations and dynamics.

How Tilly’s WUNC Works: Bystander Evaluations of Social Movement Signals Lead to Mobilization

Abstract: Social movements must mobilize participation from bystanders to survive, yet there is little research on how bystanders’ evaluations of social movements predict their likelihood to join. Charles Tilly offered a four-part theoretical “scorecard” by which people evaluate movements: worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. The authors created a novel and psychometrically valid measure (WUNC-12) and then used three online experiments to test its predictive validity for participatory action. They found broad support for WUNC as a mediating mechanism and show that WUNC perceptions are correlated with impressions of the legitimacy and efficacy of a movement. Finally, they found that movements that simultaneously signal a single-issue focus and the presence of a demographically heterogeneous set of members elicit greater WUNC perceptions and higher intentions to mobilize. With these results taken together, the authors demonstrate how social movement signaling translates into WUNC perceptions, which in turn mediate how signaling leads to social movement support and mobilization.

The Epistemology of Protest

Abstract: Abstract This book offers a polyphonic theory of protest as a mechanism for political communication, group constitution, and epistemic empowerment. The book analyzes the communicative power of protest to break social silences and disrupt insensitivity and complicity with injustice. Medina also elucidates the power of protest movements to transform social sensibilities and change the political imagination. Medina’s theory of protest examines the obligations that citizens and institutions have to give proper uptake to protests and to communicatively engage with protesting publics in all their diversity, without excluding or marginalizing radical voices and perspectives. Throughout the book, communicative and epistemic arguments are given for the value of imagining with protest movements and for taking seriously the radical political imagination exercised in social movements of liberation. Medina’s theory sheds light on the different ways in which protest can be silenced and the different communicative and epistemic injustices that protest movements can face, arguing for forms of epistemic activism that resist silencing and communicative/epistemic injustices while empowering protesting voices. While arguing for democratic obligations to give proper uptake to protest, the book underscores how demanding listening to protesting voices can be under conditions of oppression and epistemic injustice. A central claim of the book is that responsible citizens have an obligation to echo (or express communicative solidarity with) the protests of oppressed groups that have been silenced and epistemically marginalized. Studying social uprisings, the book further argues that citizens have a duty to join protesting publics when grave injustices are in the public eye.

Coordinated Dis-Coordination

Abstract: Dissidents mobilizing against a repressive regime benefit from using public information for tactical coordination since widespread knowledge about an upcoming event can increase participation. But public calls to protest make dissidents’ anticipated activities legible to the regime, allowing security forces to better stifle mobilization. I examine collective action during Sudan’s 2018–19 uprising and find that mobilization appeared to be publicly coordinated through social movement organizations and internet and communicative technology, consistent with common channels identified by existing literature. Yet embedded field research reveals that some dissidents independently used public calls to secretly organize simultaneous contentious events away from publicized protest sites, perceiving that their deviations would make the regime’s repressive response relatively less efficient than the resulting efficiency losses on the movement’s mobilization. These findings push future work to interrogate more deeply the mechanisms by which dissidents use coordination channels that are also legible to the regime they are mobilizing against.

Because the machine can discriminate: How machine learning serves and transforms biological explanations of human difference

Abstract: Research on scientific/intellectual movements, and social movements generally, tends to focus on resources and conditions outside the substance of the movements, such as funding and publication opportunities or the prestige and networks of movement actors. Drawing on Pinch’s theory of technologies as institutions, I argue that research methods can also serve as resources for scientific movements by institutionalizing their ideas in research practice. I demonstrate the argument with the case of neuroscience, where the adoption of machine learning changed how scientists think about measurement and modeling of group difference. This provided an opportunity for members of the sex difference movement by offering a ‘truly categorical’ quantitative methodology that aligned more closely with their understanding of male and female brains and bodies as categorically distinct. The result was a flurry of publications and symbiotic relationships with other researchers that rescued a scientific movement which had been growing increasingly untenable under the prior methodological regime of univariate, frequentist analyses. I call for increased sociological attention to the inner workings of technologies that we typically black box in light of their potential consequences for the social world. I also suggest that machine learning in particular might have wide-reaching implications for how we conceive of human groups beyond sex, including race, sexuality, criminality, and political position, where scientists are just beginning to adopt its methods.

Destabilizing Race in Political Communication: Social Movements as Sites of Political Imagination

Abstract: ABSTRACT How do social movement actors use consciousness-raising communicative practices to reconfigure political understandings of race? And how can such practices shape the analysis of political communication? We explore these questions by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, and archival materials to examine two case studies: an historical example of Grace Lee Boggs’ structural guidelines for creating a revolutionary study group in the Asian Political Alliance and a contemporary example of Equality Labs’ anti-caste political organizing by engaging across racial and caste social hierarchies. These cases illustrate the analytic value of engaging alternative theoretical frameworks of race and politics from critical ethnic studies, feminist of color scholarship, and social movements as rich sites of political theory through cultivating political consciousness in service of radical political imaginations. This article offers two main contributions to the field of political communication. First, by looking at the creative work of racial theorizing within social movements, we destabilize the limits of race as a demographic category. Second, we demonstrate the analytic value of studying political education and consciousness-raising as communicative practices that emphasize relational reconfigurations of race. This article recasts racial political discourse from public opinion and campaign messaging measured quantitatively to political imaginations that must be interpreted within historical and material contexts. As our cases demonstrate, centering the shifting category of race within movement building opens up the field of political communication to the communicative processes of consciousness-building and also offers dynamic understandings of race and racialization.

Negotiating Borders through a Politics of Scale: Municipalities and Urban Civil Society Initiatives in the Contested Field of Migration

Abstract: In contrast to the increasingly repressive migration policies at national and supranational scales, new pro-migrant policies, networks, and practices of support have been initiated at the local scale. In numerous European municipalities, political visions and concrete experiences of inclusive approaches in the field of migration have emerged in recent years that combine questions of the right to global freedom of movement and social rights. While numerous studies have examined these “politics of scale” and scale-making at the local level in different places, this forum aims to further these debates by reflecting the entanglement of social movements and civil society organisations with the local municipalities across Europe and by bringing the analyses and experiences of diverse initiatives into discussion. We therefore examine practices, relations and institutions of local migration politics that re-negotiate and bypass national and supranational borders at local scales, but also create new borders and boundaries in these processes. With this multidisciplinary forum, we aim at advancing empirical analysis as well as theoretical debates in the wider field of migration and geopolitics. Each contribution deals with a concrete empirical case of local politics and the challenges that emerge in these contexts – focusing on European “host societies” in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and Germany – as well as with analytical concepts that are key to understanding these cases and to linking them to broader societal structures and dynamics.

Exploring the Relationship Between Social Movement Organizations and the State in Latin America

Abstract: Under conditions of weak statehood, societal actors are supposed to assume functions usually attributed to the state. Social self-organization is expected to emerge when the state leaves important social problems unattended. Should social self-organization, therefore, be regarded as a reaction to state weakness and as compensation for state failure in the provision of basic services? Does society organize itself on its own in areas where the state is absent or ineffective? By the example of two Latin American social movements, this article aims to show that social self-organization—at least on a larger scale—is not independent of the state, but rather a result of a dynamic interaction with the state. The two examples this article explores are the middle-class Venezuelan neighborhood movement and the Argentine piquetero movement of unemployed workers. Both movements emerged as reactions to the state’s failure and retreat from essential social functions and both developed into extensive and influential social actors. For that reason, they can be regarded as crucial cases for observing the patterns and conditions of social self-organization and autonomous collective action within the specific Latin American context. Despite their different backgrounds and social bases, the two cases reveal remarkable similarities. They show that the emergence and development of self-organized social groups cannot be conceived simply as a reaction to state weakness, but rather should be viewed as a dynamic interaction with the state.

Some Refugees Welcome? Frame Disputes between Micro-Cohorts in the Refugee Solidarity Movement

Abstract: The transformation of social movement collective identity—the members shared under-standing of the movement’s purpose, goals and means—is a central concern of move-ment scholars. A main driver of such transformations is disputes over framing the movements’ purpose, which arise due to the entrance of new micro-cohorts of activists with different views than those of the veteran cohorts. This paper provides unique in-sight into the rarely studied process of such frame disputes by studying the entrance in-to the refugee solidarity movement of a new micro-cohort of activists mobilized in re-sponse to the 2022 war in Ukraine. While united in the endeavor to assist the victims of the war in Ukraine, veteran activists and newcomer activists strongly disagree on whether other groups of refugees should be entitled to the same relatively high level of help offered to the Ukrainian refugees. Online ethnography of movement activity on the social media of Facebook allows us to access the framing disputes as they unfold. While major ideological differences exist between the veteran and newcomer cohorts, frame disputes are rare. Rather than the expected clash between cohorts, we find that the contentious and humanitarian practices were compartmentalized into different Facebook fora.

Did the pandemic spread populism? comparative study on the transformations of citizen movements in Chile and Hong Kong

Abstract: This article analyses the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the citizen movements initiated in Hong Kong and Chile in 2019. Based on discourse analysis and interviews, the study argues that adapting the repertoires of protest to the mobility restrictions and the evolution of the political systems reinforced the populist dimension of the Anti-ELAB (anti-extradition law amendment bill) and the Chilean Spring movements. In Hong Kong, the restrictions of freedoms facilitated the constitution of a broad international network opposed to the Chinese Communist Party that comprises overseas organisations and public figures in exile dedicated to lobbying before western governments and providing a discourse frame to the diasporic communities. In Chile, the successive election campaigns that accompanied the constitutional process allowed new political actors with refoundation aspirations to access the institutions. This study found, in both cases, that rhetoric based on the antagonistic exaltation of the people’s signifier has become central to the movements’ discourses: a transformation accompanied by the consolidation of political leaders pretending to represent the movements’ demands. This study analyses the discourses and demands of the citizen movements in light of the institutional framework in which they appear and evolve to contribute to the growing literature where the study of contemporary social movements intersects with the studies of populism.

Joining forces: Social coalitions and democratic revolutions

Abstract: When are mass protest movements able to overthrow authoritarian regimes and promote democratic transitions? This article considers whether socially diverse protest movements are more conducive to democratization than movements restricted to one or a few social groups. Coalitions across social groups should impose higher costs on authoritarian regimes through access to a wide range of resources, strategies and sources of leverage. Heterogenous protest coalitions are also more likely to socially overlap with regime supporters and the security forces, which should encourage regime splits and defections. But, diverse protest movements may also be more vulnerable to fragmentation and in-fighting, which may particularly threaten prospects of democracy in the aftermath of an authoritarian regime breakdown. Analyzing new global data mapping the social group composition of anti-regime protest campaigns from 1900 to 2013, the article finds consistent evidence that socially diverse protest movements are more likely to overthrow authoritarian regimes, and this is not driven by protest size. Socially diverse movements are also more likely to end in the short- and long-run establishment of more democratic institutions, suggesting that heterogenous protest movements’ potential for bringing about democracy is more promising than expected. These findings speak to the importance of securing broad and not only large mass movements to promote democracy.

River Commoning and the State: A Cross‐Country Analysis of River Defense Collectives

Abstract: Grassroots initiatives that aim to defend, protect, or restore rivers and riverine environments have proliferated around the world in the last three decades. Some of the most emblematic initiatives are anti-dam and anti-mining movements that have been framed, by and large, as civil society versus the state movements. In this article, we aim to bring nuance to such framings by analyzing broader and diverse river-commoning initiatives and the state–citizens relations that underlie them. To study these relations we build on notions of communality, grassroots scalar politics, rooted water collectives, and water justice movements, which we use to analyze several collective practices, initiatives, and movements that aim to protect rivers in Thailand, Spain, Ecuador, and Mozambique. The analysis of these cases shows the myriad ways in which river collectives engage with different manifestations of the state at multiple scales. As we show, while some collectives strategically remain unnoticed, others actively seek and create diverse spaces of engagement with like-minded citizen initiatives, supportive non-governmental organizations, and state actors. Through these relations, alliances are made and political space is sought to advance river commoning initiatives. This leads to a variety of context-specific multi-scalar state–citizens relations and river commoning processes in water governance arenas.

Failures, Limits and Competition: Campaigns on Behalf of Eastern European Dissidents in Cold War Belgium, 1956–1989

Abstract: This article examines the ways in which campaigns supportive of dissidents and human rights in Eastern Europe developed in Belgium during the Cold War. The Belgian case study reveals the critical role of internationally oriented Catholic organizations and social movements in these campaigns. This Catholic activism has often been neglected in mainstream accounts focusing on left-wing or liberal support for Eastern European dissidents or human rights, but it is key to understanding the development of campaigns and their relationships, both real and imagined, with other causes, especially movements with a North – South orientation. Catholic ngo s and social movements constituted a site where activism on behalf of dissidents and human rights in Eastern Europe encountered and entangled with solidarity movements oriented toward the “Third World”. Revealing crossovers and connections, this article argues that the engagement with and images of Eastern European dissidents cannot be understood apart from the development of North – South movements. It also reveals tensions and limitations that have remained neglected in universalizing human rights narratives stressing connections and flows.

Persistent chemicals, persistent activism: scientific opportunity structures and social movement organizing on contamination by per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances

Abstract: Engagement with science is a prominent feature for many social movements, yet the dimensions of that scientific engagement and bidirectional relationships between science and advocacy are incompletely theorized in social movement scholarship. While social movement scholarship has previously demonstrated the importance of external political and economic factors for social movement processes and efficacy, we show that the emergence and success of environmental health activism is also dependent on dynamic relationships between scientific evidence and lay demands for particular types of knowledge production and application. Despite decades of industrial production and widespread contamination, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) were a politically obscure class of chemicals until a recent spike in attention from activist, regulatory, and scientific circles. Drawing from in-depth interviews with activists of PFAS-impacted communities, we develop the scientific opportunity concept to examine how activists create and mobilize scientific factors to support their goals, and how scientific factors, in turn, support the emergence of further activism. Dimensions of scientific opportunity include availability of funding streams, openness and receptivity of institutionalized scientific spaces, presence of collaborative or community-led research, methodological and technological advancements aligned with activist demands, availability of relevant scientific findings and datasets, and presence of prominent scientific allies. We conclude by discussing the relevance of our concept to a wide range of social movements addressing science and technology.

Justifying Dissent

Abstract: Abstract Dissent plays an important role in any society, but dissenters are often silenced through social sanctions. Beyond their persuasive effects, rationales providing arguments supporting dissenters’ causes can increase the public expression of dissent by providing a “social cover” for voicing otherwise stigmatized positions. Motivated by a simple theoretical framework, we experimentally show that liberals are more willing to post a tweet opposing the movement to defund the police, are seen as less prejudiced, and face lower social sanctions when their tweet implies they had first read credible scientific evidence supporting their position. Analogous experiments with conservatives demonstrate that the same mechanisms facilitate anti-immigrant expression. Our findings highlight both the power of rationales and their limitations in enabling dissent and shed light on phenomena such as social movements, political correctness, propaganda, and antiminority behavior.

Delegitimizing the Egyptian Regime: Negative Campaigning and Strategic Framing as Techniques to Demobilize Antagonists

Abstract: Islamist social movements are vital players in MENA’s political arena. This study explores how these movements attempt to delegitimize their rivals and the frames they assign to them in hotly contested situations. For this purpose, this study used content analysis to analyze the entire range of Arabic language communiqués issued by the Muslim Brotherhood from July 2013 to January 2019. The theoretical framework is based on negative campaigning literature and two concepts of social movements theory; legitimacy as a crucial moral resource and strategic framing as a technique to demobilize antagonists. This article demonstrates that the Brotherhood conducted a negative campaign to incriminate and undermine the post-2013 order and damage its image, credibility, and reputation. As part of this campaign, the movement deployed many strategies and negative frames to give harmful meaning to the regime, its institutions, ideas, and leaders. This study contributes to research in political communication by deepening the understanding of strategic framing as a technique to demobilize antagonists and demonstrating how moral resources lie at the heart of negative political communication campaigns. It argues that the Brotherhood uses strategic framing to raise doubts about the regime’s authenticity and sincerity.