Movement Leaders Research Articles

“Weak characters” easily shaped, or strong‐minded conscientious objectors impervious to change?

AbstractCommentaries on the World War I history of the International Bible Students Association in their USA homeland usually feature decisions made by the movement's leadership and their subsequent arrest and prosecution, supposedly for conspiring to violate the Espionage Act and attempting to cause refusal of duty in the armed forces of the United States. In so doing, these neglect to consider the enthusiastic support and voices of their adherents. In contrast, and in response to Zoe Knox's April 2019 Peace & Change article, this study unmutes the voices of their conscientious objectors and proposes that their experiences were profoundly significant in shaping the movement over the following century.

“The Aftermath of Historic Chaos”: Trumpism as a Totalist Worldview in the Testimonies of Participants in the January 6 Attacks

Abstract This article explores how the January 6th attack on the Capitol building is represented in the discourse of the participants in the insurrection. We analyze a self-compiled corpus of depositions and interviews with individuals involved in the January 6, 2021, assault, which we have named TruJan. The TruJan corpus was compiled from the GovInfo website. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC-22) was used for the analysis to extract the most frequent topics discussed by the interviewees during the hearings, along with sentences that showcase the attitudes of the speakers regarding the most salient issues. The second part of the article offers a close reading of the depositions and interviews with movement leaders or founders: Ali Alexander (Stop the Steal), Henry “Enrique” Tarrio (Proud Boys), and Stewart Rhodes (Oath Keepers). We argue that Trumpism’s latent totalist potential was made manifest in the January 6 attacks due to the political setbacks Trump faced when losing the 2020 elections, which was perceived as a state of crisis.

Rhizomatic Organizing, Collective Leadership, and Community-Centered Pedagogy in the Early Asian American Movement

Rhizomatic Organizing, Collective Leadership, and Community-Centered Pedagogy in the Early Asian American Movement

“Swoop and Grab Your Rights”

Abstract This article centers community archives as sources of history as well as sites of theory to map interconnected social and ecological struggles in the Niti Valley of the central Himalayas from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Tolchha and Marchha communities have integrated different ecological belts over centuries through lifeways of trade, pastoralism, and herb gathering. Colonial and postcolonial policies threatened to sever these lifeways through militarized borders, timber extraction, and the demarcation of the exclusive boundaries of the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve. Yet tribal communities have fought to maintain ancestral relations with land by infringing upon colonial restrictions and defying dichotomies of nature and culture through the postcolonial Chipko and Jhapto Cheeno movements. Juxtaposing official archives with community archives from Lata Village, this article argues that leaders of people's movements have sought to reclaim authority over Himalayan history and resituate rural struggles within the framework of Indigenous spatial knowledges.

‘Children should be raised like this’: A history of the neurodiversity movement in Italy and its implications for children's well‐being

AbstractChildhood Studies scholars have increasingly engaged with the concept of neurodiversity, particularly with respect to neurodivergent children's mental well‐being. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the history of the neurodiversity movement in Italy, and the consequences on children's mental health, drawing on eight in‐depth interviews with movement leaders, researchers and members of parent associations. We argue that Italian education and health services serve as promising sites within which a neurodiversity approach can foster neurodivergent children's self‐esteem and give them powerful tools to fight against oppressive practices.

Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-7

This absorbing account of relations between the Soviet Union and the leaders of anticolonial movements fighting to liberate Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau from Portuguese rule in the 1960s and 1970s is in part the fruit of Natalia Telepneva's doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Odd Arne Westad,1 whose own work looms large in the historiography of the Cold War. The book opens like a spy thriller with a Soviet military plane landing in Luanda on the day Agostinho Neto, leader of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), is set to be inaugurated as the first president of independent Angola. On board the An-12 is an intelligence officer by the name of Boris Putilin, 'whose job had been to coordinate arms transfers from the Soviet Union'2 to the MPLA. Putilin is almost shot at by an Angolan solider but is rescued in time to attend the inauguration by the chief of airport security.

Tactical choices of diaspora movements: comparing Hongkonger, Thai, Burmese, and Ukrainian mobilizations in Taiwan

ABSTRACT Diaspora movements are campaigns launched by migrant minorities who maintain allegiance to their homelands. This article investigates the recent mobilization of the Hongkonger, Thai, Burmese, and Ukrainian diasporas in Taiwan to understand the factors behind their tactical choices. While the existing literature pays more attention to the protester-government interaction to understand how movement leaders decide on their movement strategy, we contend that certain pre-existing characteristics of the diaspora communities matter more. The use of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) leads us to conclude: (1) ethnic discrimination, migrants’ class position, and the host government’s support do not affect the tactical choices; (2) a sufficiently large community with available mobilizing networks makes it possible to recruit and collect resources entirely from ethnic compatriots (reach-in); (3) linkages to local civil society enable it to speak to a broader audience and activate local responses (reach-out).

THE LEADERSHIP OF AN IDEOLOGICAL MOVEMENT: A STUDY OF ‘RASHTRIYA SWAYAMSEVAK SANGH MOVEMENT’IN BHARAT

A social movement without organization or leadership can hardly be thought of. The basic premise behind the analysis of leadership is that they are the chief architect of the phenomenon we call social movement and that social movement can never occur in a vacuum. Leadership in a social movement plays a major role in mobilizing the mass base. The individual who performs this task of mobilizing people for action is called the leader. Although we are accustomed to identifying a social movement with a single leader, it is more accurate to think in terms of a group of leaders often organized in a hierarchy.In the present paper, the question of leadership has been studied in the context of the ‘Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Movement’.The study tries to investigate the life history of the leaders in general and founder in particular which includes various aspects such as their family background, education level, and bringing up, extraordinary talents of the leaders. Further, an attempt has been made to depict the contributions which different leaders have made to this organization. Data were collected from the available literature and interviews of knowledgeable members who themselves have been involved in the activities of movement for more than five decades.

Sustaining a social movement through infrastructural followup: activist pedagogies and prefigurative politics in Narmada Bachao Andolan’s schools for life (jeevanshalas)

ABSTRACT This article is based on an exploratory study of jeevanshalas, a network of ‘schools for life’ run by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), an anti-dam movement in the Indian states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra that did not succeed in its mission of stopping the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. Based on participant observation and conversations with movement leaders, teachers, administrators, parents and community volunteers, and on participatory research with children living in the localities of Jeevan Nagar and Trishul, Maharashtra, this article illuminates how the NBA reinvented itself through education. It argues that the jeevanshalas offer a model of long-term sustainability for social movements whose aim is not necessarily to grow the movement’s membership but to catalyse wider societal change that might eliminate the need for the movement. The findings suggest that the NBA’s understanding of the social purpose of education reflects a view of young people as political agents whose voices shape the community’s collective future, in marked contrast with India’s state-run depoliticising education system. The jeevanshalas thus represent a previously under-researched model of social movement led education whose explicit aim is not to train movement agents but to leverage the transformative potential of education to address underlying patterns of oppression. The article theorises this rearticulation of the concept of ‘social movement schools’ through Spivak’s notion of ‘infrastructural followup’, which parallels recent debates about the nature of prefigurative politics.

Comparing the Costs and Benefits of Activism for Girls with Different Sexual Orientations and Racial and Ethnic Identities

In recent years, girls and young women have become particularly visible as leaders of activist campaigns and social movements. Drawing on data collected from an ACLU summer program for youth activists and advocates, this study explores the costs and benefits cisgender girls incur as a result of their activism. The findings reveal that although girls report more benefits than costs overall from their activism, the costs are correlated with the number of marginalized identities they hold. Queer Black girls report the greatest overall costs from their activism, and queer Multiracial girls report the highest rates of burnout. Queer White girls report significantly greater overall costs and problems as a result of their activism than heterosexual White girls, more burnout than heterosexual Black girls, and more empowerment than heterosexual Latinas. Informed by intersectionality and the PVEST framework, implications for supporting the sociopolitical action of girls with different social locations are discussed.

Framing Social Movements on Social Media

Social media enables activists to directly communicate with the public and provides a space for movement leaders, participants, bystanders, and opponents to collectively construct and contest narratives. Focusing on Twitter messages from social movements surrounding three issues in 2018-2019 (guns, immigration, and LGBTQ rights), we create a codebook, annotated dataset, and computational models to detect diagnostic (problem identification and attribution), prognostic (proposed solutions and tactics), and motivational (calls to action) framing strategies. We conduct an in-depth unsupervised linguistic analysis of each framing strategy, and uncover cross-movement similarities in associations between framing and linguistic features such as pronouns and deontic modal verbs. Finally, we compare framing strategies across issues and other social, cultural, and interactional contexts. For example, we show that diagnostic framing is more common in replies than original broadcast posts, and that social movement organizations focus much more on prognostic and motivational framing than journalists and ordinary citizens.

A declaration of commitments toward agroecology pluralities: A critical gaze on the U.S. Agroecology Summit 2023

First paragraphs: The U.S. Agroecology Summit was held May 22–25, 2023, at the Elms Hotel in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. One of the first agroecology convenings of its kind, the summit was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and organized by researchers across prominent U.S. universities. The gathering brought together scholars, researchers, farmers, activists, and movement leaders to create a “roadmap for agroecological research in the U.S.” This declaration, written, edited, and affirmed by us, the undersigned subgroup of summit participants, aims to archive and communicate the challenges we grappled with during and after this gathering while also advocating for an unwavering commitment toward agroecological pluralities. Like all lands commonly known as the United States, the location for the convening, the Elms Hotel, is on stolen Indigenous land. The rolling hills of Northwest Missouri where the convening took place are the historical hunting, foraging, and fishing grounds, and farming areas of the region’s original peoples, which include the Ioway, Missouria, Osage, Otoe, and Sac and Fox nations. Through a series of treaties in the 1800s, all tribes were forcibly and systematically removed from what became Missouri to make way for white European settlers. None of the aforementioned tribes currently have a land base in Missouri, nor are there any federally or state-recognized tribes remain­ing in the state. Approximately 50 miles to the west and across the Missouri River, the state of Kansas is now home to the nearest federally recognized Tribal Nations: the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, Kickapoo Tribe of Kansas, Prairie Band Potawatomie, and Sac and Fox Nation of Missouri in Kansas and Nebraska. There was no representation from these tribes or any other local or regional Black, Indigenous, or communities of color in the summit’s organizing committee. Subsequently, the summit’s conceptual framings, design, and decision-making lacked grounding in the histories, ethics, and practices of local Indigenous and other regionally based frontline communities. . . .

Towards effective women’s movements against violence: the role of organizational conditions in promoting leadership capital

ABSTRACT Over recent years, increasing violence in Latin American countries has led women’s movements against violence to face challenging circumstances while advancing their goals. Attention has recently turned to the internal structures of these movements, particularly the aspect of leadership. While prior research recognizes a preference for shared leadership among women’s movements, where responsibilities are commonly distributed among many members, it also points to its potential for conflict, which can impede collaborative action. However, there is still a limited understanding of the organizational conditions of movement leadership, especially within women’s movements facing adverse contexts that require enhancing their capacities for goal attainment. This study follows the concept of leadership capital, which posits that movement leaders use their skills and knowledge to undertake decision-making that is crucial for the movement’s goals. Conceptually, it explores potential relationships between organizational conditions that might foster elements to enhance leadership capital. Employing inductive research through a cross-case study of two Mexican women’s movements against violence, the Olimpia and the Anti-femicide movements, performed between 2017 and 2021, the study focuses on two main organizational conditions: the presence of a common agenda and effective communication. By comparing these movements, which had varying degrees of success in meeting their legislative objectives, the study reveals how differences in these organizational conditions can potentially relate to promoting leadership capital. This study thus advances the social movement literature by proposing a new framework to study movement leadership.

Leo Tolstoy’s Anti-Colonial Views and Their Influence on Liberation Movements in Africa

Leo Tolstoy is one of the few Russian thinkers of the pre-Soviet era whose views influenced leaders of liberation movements in Africa. Soviet researchers explored his anti-colonial views and their perception in the African continent. Although based on extensive source material, these publications are overly ideologized. The topic is reconsidered, using previously untapped archival data, as well as publications which appeared in Russia and internationally over the past thirty years. Tolstoy’s first attempts to speak out in the press about the colonial partition of Africa date to the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1895–1896. He denounced colonial expansion as an attempt by governments to distract their people from problems at home and force them to sacrifice themselves for business and political interests of others. Tolstoy advised people in metropoles not to take part in colonial schemes, and prompted colonised peoples to defend their rights through peaceful means so that the vicious circle of violence could be broken. His anticolonial rhetoric resonated in Africa, and from the beginning of the 20th century, his ideas were accepted as a guideline. M.K. Gandhi, a future leader of the struggle for Indian independence, who spearheaded a civil-rights movement of South African Indians in the 1900s, used Tolstoy’s ideas in developing his tactics of nonviolent resistance (satyagraha). Indirectly, these ideas continued to impact the South African liberation movement thanks to Gandhi’s influence. It was not until 1961 that the African National Congress (ANC) had to form a military organisation to fight against the apartheid regime. Yet the ANC managed to achieve a non-violent transition from apartheid to non-racial democracy. The success is associated with President N.R. Mandela, who shared Tolstoy’s views on the need to abandon armed confrontation.

MANIFESTATIONS OF MILITANT UNITY IN THE MAGHREB BETWEEN 1926/1958 (ALGERIA - TUNISIA AND THE MOROCCO AS A MODEL

The submission of the Maghreb countries (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco) to the french and spanish occupation, and its arbitrary practices and crimes committed against the peoples of the region made these peoples more cohesive and harmonious, this increased the feeling of loneliness and any event in one country would soon resonate in the rest. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the call for struggle began to grow among political and reformist elites and leaders of Maghreb national movements. Maghreb awareness associated with the idea of the unity of the Arab Maghreb in the interwar period increased to develop further after world war II, and these countries did not rely only on the countrie national struggle, however, it adopted the Maghreb dimension based on collective confrontation and the unity of the historical and civilized system, and this stability was embodied and crystallized in parties, associations and committees that had a major role in embodying the common Maghreb struggle, this steadfastness was embodied and crystallized in parties, associations and committees that played a major role in embodying the common Maghreb struggle. The idea of Maghreb unity represented an important endeavor in the activity of Maghreb national movements and the coordination of the joint struggle through its various stages in the three countries. Research Objectives : This research paper aims to shed light on the Maghreb struggle against occupation in the countries of the Arab Maghreb, including french and spanish, during the contemporary period, and the interaction of the parties of the national movement in resisting the aggressors, Then highlighting the development of the Maghreb struggle after the end of world war II in strengthening solidarity among the peoples of this arab region to gain arab and international support for liberation and unity

The Role of Charismatic Leaders in National and Liberation Movements: A Comparative Study of Mahatma Gandhi and Mullah Mustafa Barzani

This study investigates the essential roles played by charismatic leaders in national and liberation movements, specifically examining the contrasting leadership approaches of Mahatma Gandhi during India's independence struggle and Mullah Mustafa Barzani in the Kurdish liberation movement. Through a comprehensive comparative analysis utilizing historical literature, primary sources, speeches, and biographies, the research endeavors to illuminate both the similarities and disparities in their leadership styles, strategies, ideologies, and impacts on their respective movements. Essential areas of investigation encompass the genesis and evolution of their charismatic authority, methods employed for mobilization and resistance, dynamics of relationships with followers and adversaries, and the lasting legacies they left behind. By drawing upon theoretical frameworks from disciplines such as leadership studies, political science, and sociology, this study aspires to deepen our comprehension of the intricate dynamics of charismatic leadership within the context of national and liberation movements. It aims to offer valuable insights into historical trajectories and contemporary leadership contexts, with a particular emphasis on the ongoing struggle for social justice and human rights. Through meticulous examination and analysis, this research endeavors to contribute to the scholarly understanding of effective leadership strategies in navigating complex socio-political landscapes, ultimately aiming to enrich our knowledge of transformative leadership practices in the pursuit of societal change.

Leaders in Social Movements: Evidence from Unions in Myanmar

Leaders in Social Movements: Evidence from Unions in Myanmar

Moscow monarchist organizations

The article examines the creation and activities of monarchical organizations in Moscow, which has become one of the centers of the right-wing movement in Russia. The Moscow nobility played a key role in the creation of right-wing organizations. However, the events of the First Russian Revolution involved many representatives of other social groups and strata in the political process, some of whom found themselves on the side of the autocracy, usually adhering to extreme right-wing beliefs. This explains the creation in Moscow of many different monarchical organizations, most of which had a pronounced class, professional or estate character. Moscow monarchists laid claim to all-Russian leadership in the right-wing movement, taking a number of successful steps to consolidate it during 1906. But still, in this rivalry, Muscovites, having lost their recognized leader V.A. Gringmut in 1907, lost to the St. Petersburgers, who had more significant financial and administrative support from the government. Gringmut's successors were unable to continue even the unification of the Moscow monarchist organizations that he had begun, primarily due to the personal ambitions and selfish motives of their leaders. A certain role in this was also played by the impossibility of coordinating the interests of various social and professional groups represented in the monarchical organizations of Moscow.

African women’s trajectories and the Casa dos Estudantes do Império

ABSTRACT This article compares the trajectories of different women who crossed the Casa dos Estudantes do Império (CEI), a formal institution created in Lisbon by students from the colonies with the support of the Portuguese dictatorial regime in 1944, that became a platform for anti–colonialism. Due to the role played by the CEI in the political and social paths of the leaders of African national liberation movements, historiography has privileged masculine accounts. In contrast, the roles and lives of women linked to the CEI remain unexplored or approached from a vision of “methodological nationalism”, with few exceptions. Addressing these trajectories from a transnational and “Afro–Iberian” lens and through the scrutiny of several sources allows us to reflect on a diversity of gender, race, class, and political ideology. The final aim is to illuminate some aspects of the Afro–Iberian mosaic from a gendered and postcolonial perspective.

Social Equity, Intellectual History, Black Movement Leaders, and Marcus Garvey

This paper engages the U.S.-focused social equity literature and its ahistorical understanding of its pre-1968 intellectual histories. We use racial contract theory to highlight the epistemological necessity of a disciplinary reconsideration. We suggest that intellectual histories bound to an exclusively academic voice negate a fuller understanding of lived realities. By engaging the work of a Jamaican-born activist like Marcus Garvey and his significant inroads into 1910s and 1920s America, we create an updated historical understanding of social equity that challenges the disciplinary script.