Why social movements struggle to change the EU: the ‘EU mobilization package’ and the case of DiEM25

Legal institutions, elites, and norms played an important role in the development of social movements over the latter half of the twentieth century, yet social movement scholars have only recently begun to take notice. The subfield of law and social movements has developed in two separate but increasingly integrated fields – legal scholarship and social movement scholarship – and has developed around two broad sets of research questions. First, is litigation an effective strategy for social movements? Second, what role does law play in shaping the trajectories of social movements? Early research tended to focus on the question of effectiveness, but more recent scholarship has expanded to include analyses focusing on the dynamic role that law plays in shaping movement trajectories. This entry focuses on how legal institutions and strategies have been incorporated into existing social movement theories.

Coalitions that Clash: California's Climate Leadership and the Perpetuation of Environmental Inequality

Social movements engage in constant acts of localization. Their role as local actors that mediate local demands with supra-local actors (such as the nationstate) make necessary a permanent process of translation. Their ability to succeed in translating local demands into supra-local discourses and supra-local politics in local problems is one of the main factors of their development – if they can translate local demands into a coherent supra-local discourse while constituting broad alliances, they will prevail, grow and eventually be able to impose their ideas. Even if the concept of transnational social movements is relatively new (amongst the first in defining it were Della Porta and Tarrow 2005), in the sense developed above, most social movements are transnational to some extent. For the purposes of this study, social movements will be understood ascollective efforts to impose some kind of demand that can be formulated on a local, national or global (i.e. transnational) level, based to some degree on local structures. In almost all cases, those different levels are interrelated – that is, a local social movement has national and transnational contacts, structures or influences. Two central forms of localization can be detected: the installation of organizational structures on the local level that are inspired by other organizations or diffused globally through transnational networks, and the implementation of discursive content that allows for the translation of political ideas and demands between the different levels. In both cases, the reverse process, a globalization of local ideas or structures into transnational organizations or discourses is of central importance – transnational social movements are, in today’s world, a key instrument in order to reach determinate goals. Localization can be understood as ‘a complex process and outcome bywhich norm-takers build congruence between transnational norms (including norms previously institutionalized in a region) and local beliefs and practices’ (Acharya 2004, 241). The local actors are therefore an active part of the process of localization; diffusion, ‘the spread of movement ideas, practices, and frames from one country to another’ (Della Porta and Tarrow 2005, 2), isnot received passively, but rather met with ‘the active construction (through discourse, framing, grafting, and cultural selection) of foreign ideas by local actors, which results in the former developing significant congruence with local beliefs and practices’ (Acharya 2004, 245). Local social movements are transnational in the sense that they have more than just a say in whom they cooperate with, whose ideas, projects and materials they accept, and what they do with them. They are the key actors of localization and the first to be blamed (or congratulated) if the adaptation of ideas or structures fails or is successful. They actually use localization (and globalization) both as a tool to gain access to resources and as a resource itself – they accept foreign ideas or structures because they want something from them, usually the key resources for social movements: influence, members and infrastructure. If those potentially transnational local social movements engage with gen-uine transnational actors such as international development agencies in the broadest sense – including the Catholic Church, initiatives by political parties or social movements and other institutions – localization becomes an act of appropriation that is multifaceted and contradictory. Political power is always an issue for social movements which complicates the seemingly simple transmission of ideas and turns into an openly political act – social movements cannot simply be receivers without critique, they have to translate what they want to adapt and localize into something relevant to their cause. At the same time, many social movements, at least those in the Global South, depend to some degree on international actors to provide them with resources in order to preserve their existence and ability to act. This is why the relationship of social movements and development actors is interesting for research in a broad sense: the first party needs resources, ideas, structures, knowledge – things provided by the second party, but at a cost that usually has the potential to compromise the movement (such as, for instance, becoming perceived as agents of imperialism or instruments, and the first victims of, an elite attempt to demobilize the poor). Both sides try to impose their visions, resulting in a constant interchange of localizing and globalizing attempts in a transnational/local field that is crossed by relations of power. This chapter aims to explore the role of social movements in localizationand globalization of both organizational structures and the discursive contents of movements by examining the concrete example of the indigenous movement in Ecuador. This movement will be understood as the central actor in the process of localization that has since its inception engaged in alliances with international or transnational actors and in acts of localization of structures and discourses. Given the specific characteristics of the Ecuadorian case – a rather small country in the Global South with about 15 million inhabitants and with considerable ethnic and regional diversity or, even, fragmentation – the indigenous movement as a political structure parting from a group that is both economically exploited and ethnically oppressed is of considerable interest. While the organizational base of this movement – the indigenous population – is rather numerous, comprising between 10 and 30per cent of the total population, it remains in relative political isolation and is largely excluded from the economy which has an adverse effect on its longterm existence and ability to repeatedly mobilize. Nevertheless, the organizations of the indigenous movement were able to find and occasionally change transnational alliances that provided them with the resources necessary to survive as a political actor and actually develop an innovative and effective organizational structure and discursive expressions. This constant negotiation of transnational alliances in relation to the loca-lization and/or globalization of discursive contents and organizational structures will be analysed in a roughly chronological manner, focusing on the current indigenous movement that began in the 1970s. The concrete examples within the case of the indigenous movement in Ecuador will be: 1) the renovation of the movement via localizations of structures and discourses provided by the Catholic Church, independent intellectuals such as the Barbados Group, and the attempts of an ethnic revitalization in the context of the political current of Indianism; 2) the effort to create and institutionalize indigenous education that was supported by religious groups and international development actors; 3) the failed attempt to localize in a top-down manner certain organizational structures through a project run by the World Bank; 4) the creation or renovation of a new political concept in the discourse on development and quality of life supported by international development actors and its subsequent independence and globalization – buen vivir or “Good Life”. The idea of this structure is to include successful as well as unsuccessful examples of localization, to analyse the reasons for those results, and to open up a perspective on globalization of certain contents as a result of their successful localization.

The dominant American social movement scholarship has become detached from the concerns of actual social movements. But the dramatic growth of social movement activity in recent years, especially the global justice movement, is creating the conditions for an emerging new direction in social movement scholarship which prioritizes the relevance of such work to the movements themselves. A problem in the current social movement literature is that the different schools of thought tend to overemphasize particular variables and pit them against one another. Rather than simply seeking to emphasize a different variable in the lifecycle of a social movement, a movement-relevant approach has the potential to transcend these schisms (such as structure versus culture). At the same time, this approach does not categorically reject earlier theoretical perspectives, but instead seeks to glean what is most useful for movements from these earlier works. Likewise, this emergent direction entails a dynamic engagement with the research and theorizing already being done by movement participants. In this paper, we explore this growing convergence of movement-relevant scholarship, identifying the academic work being used by movement participants as well as the analysis taking place within the movements themselves, with a particular focus on the global justice movement.

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.

Over the last 30 years, intersectionality has become a prominent concept, but in social movement scholarship, its adoption has yet been limited. So far, the concept is primarily employed to analyze the mobilization of women of color and other gendered mobilizations. In this article, I argue that intersectionality matters for all social movements—both as an analytic and as a political strategy. It is important to understand that all social movements and movement organizations are shaped by multiple axes of privilege and discrimination, which influence who participates in these movements and how, what demands are pursued and which are neglected, and how the issues of the movements and movement organizations are framed. My review starts out with defining and distinguishing between structural intersectionality and political intersectionality. Then, I survey a range of social movements from an intersectional perspective. This is followed by a discussion of coalitions and other strategies to achieve political intersectionality. The article concludes with an outlook on future directions for intersectional analyses in social movement scholarship.

Understandings of social movements have changed dramatically from purportedly scientific but in fact heavily normative accounts that depicted mass action as anomic and irrational. Reification reached its peak in North American social science during the 1950s and 1960s when scholars made a sharp disciplinary and conceptual distinction between conventional and unconventional politics. William Gamson aptly notes, “Political science claimed ‘normal’ prescribed politics as its bailiwick, leaving social movements to the social psychologist whose intellectual tools prepare him to better understand the irrational.” Since the 1970s, social movement scholarship has taken several turns. First, the resource mobilization approach challenged assumptions about the irrational character of social movements by demonstrating the significance of their organizations, networks, and resources. Next, scholars argued that social movements emerge when political opportunities exist and sought to link the emergence and growth of social movements to changes in the political environment. Scholars then emphasized the cultural dimensions of protest by exploring how social movements framed their demands and drew upon earlier repertoires of contention. Social movements are collective actions that challenge authorities to effect change. Although their goals differ, many of their cultural repertoires are similar. They combine ideological appeals with symbolic acts and discourses to identify and interpret what they deem social injustice. Movements call on people to take personal risks even when the odds are against them. They crystallize deeply held identities and beliefs and simultaneously express popular anger, frustration, pride, and fear. They rouse people to action by providing them with a sense of efficacy, common purpose, and the possibility of a better, if idealized, world. They appeal to moral values to purify what is commonly seen as the dirty world of politics. Social movements are less constrained than parties in the ideologies they promote, the constituencies they represent, the demands they make, and the tactics and strategies they deploy. Social movements are simultaneously expressive and instrumental, and voluntaristic and organized. Their emotionally charged activity entails purposeful interactions with the state. David Meyer comments, “Unlike pigeons in Skinner's boxes, people who make movements are moral and instrumental actors, if not always narrowly ‘rational calculators.’” Movements often affirm established moral codes even as they question and subvert them.

Social movements can be important mechanisms of social change for vulnerable populations as the formal mechanisms of policy and legislation tend to be in the hands of the powerful in society. Academic scholarship can play an important role in challenging or reinforcing social power dynamics. This reality makes it important to critically interrogate social movement knowledge production and use anti-oppressive frameworks for social movement scholarship. Sociology has contributed greatly to social movement literature, and the American Sociological Association (ASA), especially the section of Collective Behavior and Social Movements (CBSM), is a central site of academic credibility and scholarship. This examination draws on critical race theory and intersectionality to analyze 10 years of award-winning books from the CBSM, specifically recipients of the Charles Tilly Award for Best Book. These books are prominently positioned with respect to the production of knowledge, as well as the study of social movements. This analysis shows the absence of critical race theory and intersectionality in core of social movement scholarship and identifies a pattern of erasure and marginalization of vulnerable populations in the award-winning books.

Legal institutions, elites, and norms played an important role in the development of social movements over the latter half of the twentieth century, yet social movement scholars have only recently begun to take notice. The subfield of law and social movements has developed in two separate but increasingly integrated fields—legal scholarship and social movement scholarship—and has developed around two broad sets of research questions. First, is litigation an effective strategy for social movements? Second, what role does law play in shaping the trajectories of social movements? Early research tended to focus on the question of effectiveness, but more recent scholarship has expanded to include analyses focusing on the dynamic role that law plays in shaping movement trajectories. Here we focus on how legal institutions and strategies have been incorporated into existing social movement theories.

Data has increased currency in contemporary activism and has become an integral part of the action repertoire of today’s social movements. But data and data infrastructure are not only tools to support a movement’s struggle: they are constitutive parts of the environment in which movements operate, and objects of contention in their own right. These developments challenge scholars of social movements and collective action. How are movements changing under the pressure of datafication? What ‘new’ mechanisms, actors and tactics meet the growing demand for citizen participation in an increasingly datafied society? Is social movement scholarship ‘fit’ to capture and interpret this evolution? This theoretical article puts social movement studies in dialogue with critical data studies with the aim of encouraging a much-needed cross-pollination. It advances the notion of ‘datafied movements’ to address the novel structural condition of contentious politics in the age of datafication and to explore the socio-technical, systemic effects of data and data infrastructure on movement dynamics. It reflects on how five key social movement dynamics, and the related elements in the conceptual toolbox of social movement studies – group formation, opportunity structures, action repertoires, meaning work, and collective identity – are altered by datafication and the advance of intelligent systems in society. In so doing, this article charts the building blocks of a future-proof research program in social movements.

This article investigates how social movement scholars construct the category of ‘religion’ within the discipline. Using some of the conceptual tools from the critical study of religion – namely, problematising the distinction between the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’ – it analyzes a sample of articles within the journals Social Movement Studies and Mobilization between 2010 and 2020 that deal with a broad range of religious, spiritual, and ‘religion-like’ or ‘secular sacred’ phenomena. I find three key trends within the data: social movements literature has a narrow construction of what constitutes ‘religion’; those things designated ‘religious’ are often instrumentalized in service to ‘political’ ends; and social movement scholars are more likely to study conservative and extreme politics where it intersects with groups considered ‘religious’ than with those considered ‘secular.’ The article invites scholars of social movements to consider how particular conceptions of both ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ are naturalised within the field.

The disciplinary fields of immigration and social movements have largely developed as two distinct subareas of sociology. Scholars contend that immigrant rights, compared to other movements, have been given less attention in social movement research. Studies of immigrant‐based movements in recent decades have reached a stage whereby we can now assess how immigrant movement scholarship informs the general social movement literature in several areas. In this article, we show the contributions of empirical studies of immigrant movements in four primary arenas of social movement scholarship: (a) emergence; (b) participation; (c) framing; and (d) outcomes. Contemporary immigrant struggles offer social movement scholarship opportunities to incorporate these campaigns and enhance current theories and concepts as earlier protest waves advanced studies of collective action.

As the national preoccupation with terrorism gives way to an unfolding, and likely enduring, economic crisis in the U.S. and globally, social research should focus more attention toward class‐based social movements, which have largely been neglected within sociology and social movement scholarship over the last few decades. Class analysis and labor organizing have historically been central to the social movement activities of anarchists. Anarchist social movements are relatively understudied, despite indicators of their resurgence in the last decade. Today, however, anarchist politics have diversified to address a variety of social issues. This study contributes to neglected areas of social movement research by examining the ways in which social class directly and indirectly informs the politics of a contemporary anarchist collective.

Drawing on debates on deliberative and participatory democracy, I argue that social movements can be considered to be promoting democratization when they are able to compel governments to increase effective participation in the policy-making process, and/or when their democratic claims are translated into an agenda and/or policy impact. This indicates that a social movement has increased the responsiveness of the government it is challenging. Based on this premise, in this paper, I trace the political impact of the Student Movement in Chile. Spearheading the largest protests since the reinstatement of democracy, in 2006, and most notably, in 2011, the Student Movement forced a debate on education and political reforms, and a series of policies to address these issues. The analysis is grounded on more than 50 interviews, and an exhaustive analysis of organizational documents and newspaper data. The case examined in this paper illustrates how the expansion of political opportunities that is necessary for pursuing democratizing reforms not only is driven “from above,” but also “from below.” Studying this process, social movement scholarship can learn a great deal from recent cases of social mobilization in Latin America. These experiences also call for more attention to the role of social movements in democratization studies.

In this paper, we examine a labor struggle between predominantly Latino service workers and the University of Southern California, the largest private employer in the City of Los Angeles. This struggle is part of a broader revival of the American labor movement, as some unions return to mass action and community-labor alliances. The re-emergence of labor as a social movement allows us to ask new questions about power and resistance. In particular, we maintain that a full understanding of the political potential of social movements requires recognition of their inherently spatial nature. Drawing on the recent spatial turn in social theory, we argue that social movement scholarship can benefit from attention to space as an active dimension of movement organizing. In an ethnography of the USC case, we show how a coalition of workers, students and community members used tactics of spatial transgression on, around, and beyond campus. At the same time, coalition members linked the labor conflict to social and spatial inequalities between the university and surrounding neighborhoods, and to citywide movements for living wages and job security. Through these actions, the coalition undermined a commonsense understanding of USC as a benevolent employer and good neighbor, and challenged the university's move to gain flexibility through sub-contracting. While we are constrained in our ability to generalize from the USC case, our analysis suggests that further attention to the spatiality of such struggles can enrich social movements scholarship.