Identity-based Social Movements Research Articles

Double Bind: Alejandro Lipschütz and the Failure of Transnational Indigenismo in Chile

AbstractThis article examines the life and career of Alejandro Lipschütz, Chile's most accomplished indigenista, to investigate his influence on the scientific and political discourse about the role of indigenous peoples in modern American states, known as indigenismo. Trained as an experimental biologist, Lipschütz criticized prevailing views of race in the Americas, arguing for a social interpretation and analysis of racial categories that defined indigeneity. Lipschütz then promoted the creation of an indigenous institute within the Chilean state and advocated on behalf of the Mapuche people. Because indigenous leaders themselves developed a strong political movement in the mid twentieth century, transnational indigenismo failed to produce meaningful or lasting progress in Chile. That failure convinced Lipschütz that indigenous peoples should preserve and strengthen traditional communities and seek political autonomy. This analysis joins a growing body of scholarship that challenges conventional views of indigenismo, which characterize it as a repressive ideology used by paternalistic states. This study of Alejandro Lipschütz prefigures the shift toward acknowledging the greater indigenous agency that accompanied identity-based social movements emerging in the 1980s.

A Brief History of Social Movements in North America


 
 
 The purpose of this analysis is to differentiate social movements. In this instance, we will be using the hippie/counterculture movements during the 1960s and 1970s in Canada, and those that are occurring in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In particular, this analysis distinguishes right-wing extremist movements in 2016 from groups like the Hippie Movement and the Black Panther Party Movement. Specific reference will be made to contrast the social movements of the twenty-first century that are non-political in nature but are identity-based, versus movements during the 60s and 70s that were political by design and intent. Due to the non-political nature of twenty-first century Violent Transnational Social Movements, they might be characterized as fifth generation warfare, which we identify as identity-based social movements in violent conflict with other identity based social movements, this violence may be soft or hard. ‘Soft violence damages the fabric of relationships between communities as entrenches or highlights the superiority of one group over another without kinetic impact. Soft violence is harmful activities to others which stops short of physical violence’. (Kelshall, 2019) Hard violence is then recognized as when soft violence tactics result in physical violence. Insurgencies are groups that challenge and/or resist the authority of the state. There are different levels of insurgencies; and on the extreme end, there is the resistance of systemic authority.
 
 

A solution to multiple problems: the origins of affirmative action in higher education around the world

ABSTRACT How and when does affirmative action emerge in different national contexts? This paper is the first to analyze the emergence of affirmative action in higher education across national contexts. We find that three distinct clusters of affirmative action policies developed historically: (1) early nation-building projects, (2) mechanisms to attenuate social inequality in response to identity-based social movements, and (3) twenty-first century ‘indirect’ affirmative action policies. These clusters differ not only in the goals of their affirmative action policies, but also in how those policies are implemented, and the circumstances under which they emerge, as we show. The findings suggest that once provisions for underrepresented groups becomes part of the repertoire of actions universities or countries can take to solve a variety of national and university problems, affirmative action develops as a means to further a variety of organizational and national goals.

Chico Mendes, the rubber tappers and the Indians: reimagining conservation and development in the Amazon

In the mid-1970’s rubber tapper leaders Chico Mendes and Wilson Pinheiro reformulated strategic objectives of the rubber tappers’ movement, from protesting and denouncing violent dispossession of families and deforestation to defending rubber tappers’ forest territories and diversified land use. This strategic turn laid the basis for the rubber tappers’ transformation from a solely class-based union movement to one that incorporates a specific cultural identity associated with land and resource uses defined as opposed to the government-sponsored socio-environmentally destructive development model. The rubber tappers’ conceptual transformation of “extractivism”, from an archaic, outdated and primitive economic activity into an alternative for a modern, sustainable development model, based in their distinct culture, mirrored and paralleled the emergence of identity-based social movements globally. It also mirrored the re-emergence of “submerged” indigenous ethnicities and subsequent “ethnogenesis” of allegedly extinct or forgotten indigenous peoples, in both cases contrary to the assumptions and predictions of both policy and some anthropological theory. The rubber tappers’ definition of extractive reserves as collective land rights – and access to technology, social services and markets on terms in some measure controlled by the communities – in exchange for environmental and forest protection enabled significant territorial gains (parallel to indigenous territories), as well as proliferation of extractive reserve analogues in both environmental and land reform policy. Alliances with indigenous peoples and environmentalists were central to the development of this vision. The model of collective rights, with access to technology, services and markets could have very broad applicability for poor populations globally, in light of climate change and other environmental crises, if at-scale incentives for climate change and other environmental mitigation can be created.

Deflective Whiteness: White Rhetoric and Racial Fabrication

This article focuses on the ways that minority identity politics are co-opted, decontextualized, and used by those invested in white supremacy and white identity politics to further their own racial project in seemingly benign, everyday cross-media discourse. This pattern of discourse, which the author terms “deflective whiteness,” deflects the fear, discomfort, and aggression that those invested in white supremacy feel when confronted with systemic racism and inequity. This fear and discomfort are transposed onto individuals linked with identity-based social movements, who are then faulted for causing a social disruption. The vantage point of deflective whiteness deliberately avoids recognizing the mission or goals of the social movement, and the resulting decontextualized chastisement is categorized as “common sense.” In the process, the original protest against white supremacy and its effects is ignored and overshadowed by a colorblind critique of those invested in identity politics as weak, unpatriotic, and naïve.

“Bring Your Whole Self to the Work”: Identity and Intersectional Politics in the Louisville LGBTQ Movement

This essay examines the interpretive use of intersectionality in oral history scholarship. The authors raise questions about how recent social movement participants grapple with multiple and overlapping social identities, as reflected in a body of interviews with LGBTQ activists connected to an organization called the Fairness Campaign in Louisville, Kentucky. The Fairness Campaign originated in 1991 as a mostly white-led but coalition-oriented LGBTQ rights organization, distinguishing itself for its racial and wider social justice focus. The authors ultimately suggest that intersectionality is a valuable theoretical framework for oral historians working on the LGBTQ and other identity-based social movements of the past half century

Feminist and Trans* movements at the crossroads: mutual learning and productive conflicts

The rights of transgender people in Spain are the result of complex negotiations that have taken place in our recent history, concerning democratic freedom, sexual and reproductive rights, as well as identity-based social movements that emerged during the democratic transition. In record time, those once considered to be socially dangerous slackers and delinquents became travestites, transsexuals and later on, activists and subjects of rights. Following this development of the intelligible political subject, we focus on the crossroads of the feminist and trans* movements, which facilitates a critical approach to the role of the State and legislation, as well as the medicine in order to guarantee rights for trans* people. In order to do so, we have interviewed relevant activists, reviewed social movements’ literature and posed some bold hypothesis, tested with our protagonists.

Latin American Identity Politics: Redefining Citizenship

AbstractIdentity‐based social movements and politics have played an important role in Latin America since the 1970s and continue to do so today. In this essay, I argue that this form of politics – as it has taken shape across Latin America – has been defined by its intersectionality. I trace the ways in which neoliberalism has facilitated a certain kind of identity politics while limiting more radical political claims. I argue that identity politics have contributed to the current “pink tide” sweeping across the continent and are in continual dialogue with these new leftist governments as they redefine what it means to be citizen and what the relationship between state and citizen should be.

CIES Bibliography 2011

CIES Bibliography 2011

Formal organizations and identity groups in social movements

Formal organizations advancing the goals of identity-based social movements and identity groups have become increasingly interdependent. The former often lacks legitimacy in the eyes of stakeholders and the latter typically possesses insufficient organizational capacity. In principle, the transfer of ideas and resources between formal organizations in social movements and social identity groups can result in organizational innovation that revives the formal organization while at the same time enhancing the status of the identity group. But in practice, collaborations between formal organizations and identity groups often result in identity groups being overpowered by formal organizations. This article compares outcomes for identity groups in two cases of trade unions adopting the causes of identity-based social movements to examine the role of organizational processes in explaining outcomes for identity group members. The findings from the comparative cases analyzed here suggest that identity group members must be able to influence organizational processes in order to impact how they are incorporated into the formal organization.

Multimodal Literacies, Pedagogy, and the Construction of Identity-Based Social Movements: The Case of Espina y Jugo in Mexico

This article looks closely at how the process of artmaking linked to social critique unfolds in one community-based educational setting in Latin America. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork with a community-based popular education organization in the northern desert of Mexico, the article examines the pedagogical uses of poetry, music, and other modalities to disrupt dominant discourses about what it means, in this case, to be “Mexican.” At the center of the paper is an analysis of the “espina y jugo” (thorn and juice) metaphor, which refers to the outside and inside of the desert cactus. I argue that the processes of meaning-making and signification underlying the enactment of this metaphor represent a pedagogy that is oriented toward collective identity-building and social action. The enactment of such collective identities, forged in and through acts of multiliterate and multimodal engagement, can be interpreted as a pedagogy of the “new social movements of grassroots orientation” (Escobar, 1992b, p. 421).

Indigenous Peoples' Politics in Latin America

Political science research on indigenous peoples' politics in Latin America is methodologically diverse and interdisciplinary. It has produced significant insights about citizenship, reform of the state, and the causes and consequences of the emergence and success of identity-based social movements and political parties. In order to expand and deepen our knowledge, future research should pursue three goals. First, scholars should explore a wider selection of cases, including countries where indigenous populations are small and where dramatic events have not occurred, in order to better explain more common types of indigenous political mobilization in the region. Second, they should better connect the study of indigenous politics to that of Afro-descendent movements and gender and, thus, expand our understanding of racial and gender politics. Third, they should be more critical of the democratic performance of indigenous organizations and politicians, especially when they hold public office.

Locating and Linking Sexuality in Development and Human Rights

This paper argues that there are two opposing tendencies in relation to sexuality in the health, development and rights fields. The first is to deny the role of sexuality in shaping the institutional and social fabric of society; the second is to explain all experience and subordination through the lens of sexual identity. This paper uses the concept of sexual citizenship to identify diverse ways in which sexuality shapes access to resources, recognition and representation. It illustrates how other sources of subordination such as race, ethnicity and class intersect with sexuality, creating potential for alliances between diverse issue-based and identity-based social movements for policy change.

Friendship, Friendliness, and Feminist Fieldwork

Dans cet article, l'A se penche sur les conditionnements des reponses d'interviewees dans les entretiens conduits par des chercheuses. L'A fait part de sa propre experience pour tenter de comprendre les raisons de la confidentialite et de confiance qui se tissent entre l'enqueteur et l'enquetee dans les etudes feministes. Il est egalement question des effets parfois pervers que ce genre de relation peut avoir sur les reponses mais aussi sur les participants a la recherche

The politics of plunder: The rhetorics of order and disorder in Southern Nigeria

This article looks at four cases of youth-led identity-based social movements in Benin City and in the Annang area of southern Nigeria. It shows how each of these movements — youth associations, ‘area boys’, vigilantes and campus cults — draws on different, older repertoires of discourse and organization, and enters into relations with state authority that combine elements of complicity, insurgency, monitoring and disengagement. It argues that their activities, mobilized around resource control and community security, can be understood as a response to the Nigerian ‘politics of plunder’, endemic since the beginning of the oil boom, but locally perceived as having intensified from the 1990s onwards.

Some Effects of Identity-Based Social Movements on Constitutional Law in the Twentieth Century

Some Effects of Identity-Based Social Movements on Constitutional Law in the Twentieth Century

Channeling: Identity-Based Social Movements and Public Law

Channeling: Identity-Based Social Movements and Public Law

Inside the black box: Recent studies of Latin American party organizations

L American party organizations have received remarkably little scholarly attention. Although this is hardly a new problem (see Blanksten 1960: 479; Martz 1964: 509; Kaufman 1977: 109), it is particularly surprising in the contemporary period. Not only has the demise of authoritarianism in the region increased the number and importance of parties, but the intellectual trend away from marxism to more political and institutional approaches has created a more favorable scholarly environment as well. Yet while a substantial amount of research has been done on non-party organizations such as neighborhood associations, NGOs, “issue networks,” and identity-based social movements,1 and while the recent “institutionalist” wave has generated important studies of Latin American electoral laws, legislatures, and executive-legislative relations,2 studies of party organizations remain conspicuously absent.3 One possible explanation for this paucity of research is that party organizations are simply less important in Latin America than in the advanced industrialized countries. Indeed, more than a generation ago, Douglas Chalmers (1972) suggested that due to long-established patterns of hierarchy, elitism, bureaucratic-corporatism, and patrimonialism, Latin American parties played a lesser role in shaping policy, aggregating interests, and fomenting participation than the class-based parties of Western Europe. More recently, scholars have pointed

Environmental Social Movements in Thailand: How Important is Class?

AbstractThis paper argues that current academic approaches to environmentalism in developing countries understate the role of class in either dominating political alliances, or in constructing underlying environmental discourse. The paper uses examples of various social movements in Thailand to illustrate the diverse ways in which environmental activism may represent or support different political objectives. It is proposed that analysts need to pay more attention to the origin of much environmental discourse from new, or identity-based social movements both within Thailand and elsewhere, and to seek ways to understand the 'co-production' of social activism and environmental knowledge.