Social Movements Research Articles

Cleavages and identities in the changing landscape of world politics

The article advocates updating the research concerning divided societies and complexly organized states. It addresses the genesis and advancement of complex identities of social actors and political agency. The discussion focuses on the correlation between the structuration and content saturation of identities. The use of operational interfaces from fundamental distinctions to various kinds of divides, demarcations and polarizations leaves still unresolved the problem of qualitative parameters of identities, and ways to represent and analyze them. Innovative approaches developed by Russian political scientists take into account the relationship between the processes of world development and the identity of its development drivers and agency from individual political actors to complex social movements. The article shows that the effective deployment of the respective research program requires not only external accounting of the temporal parameters, but full integration of modern evolutionary approaches into their methodology. It is necessary to overcome the usual interpretations of identity in the singular as an abstract universal idea. Equally it is necessary to move to the study of the complex interaction of the acting forces of development and the formation of a dynamic flow of individual and mutual identifications in the plural. To this end, it is suggested not only to update the Rokkanian paradigm of demarcations by expanding the set of distinctions and making the whole structure more dynamic, but also to use the possibilities of extended evolutionary synthesis.

Social movements and the 2030 Agenda: the correlation between the progressist agendas and the Sustainable Development Goals

Since World War II, as of the Declaration of Human Rights, several social movements have undergone restructuring, encompassing multiple agendas that have solidified as catalysts for broad social and political changes. The social movements also played an important role in defining the current global agendas, such as the 2030 Agenda. To highlight the protagonism of social movements in the current Sustainability Agenda, this research presents progressist movements that emerged from the late 1940s, establishing a correlation with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda. A narrative literature review was conducted, integrating definitions, concepts, and guidelines of the social movements. The results demonstrate the considerable role of social movements in reshaping the civilizational process that led to significant societal advancements across various fronts, including gender relations, racial, labor, and environmental issues.

Democratizing provisioning systems: a prerequisite for living well within limits

The core challenge of the 21st century, of achieving good living conditions for all, while bringing resource use and emissions down within planetary limits, is likely to be technically feasible. However, current political and economic trends perpetuate extractive practices and growth imperatives, where decisions that benefit vested interests at the expense of humanity and life on Earth are hidden behind capitalist market logics. To break this deadlock, we argue economic democratization is necessary, bringing crucial economic decision-making into the sphere of democratic deliberation. We review existing proposals and argue that economic democracy requires more fundamental rethinking of social, political, and economic relations. We then explore these in three thematic areas: the deepening of democracy, the importance of provisioning systems, and the provisioning logics within organizations. We conclude with a call to action for a revived coalition of environmental and social movements, focused on the crucial task of democratizing the economy through its provisioning systems and organizations.

Liberals and the «historical state power» at the dawn of the great upheavals

The article is devoted to the analysis of the first scientific edition of V.A. Maklakov's memoirs. The author examines the problems of the relationship between the autocracy and the social movement in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Autocracy and the Great Reforms in the memoirs of V. A. Maklakov

The article is devoted to the analysis of the first scientific edition of V.A. Maklakov's memoirs. The author examines the problems of the relationship between the autocracy and the social movement in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Centering the Most Marginalized: Black Women Movement Actors and Misogynoir in the Movement for Black Lives

This research evaluates the extent to which 30 Black women movement actors (e.g., leaders, organizers, and protestors) narrate their intersectional experiences in the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) in the District of Columbia and Maryland. Specifically, through the narratives and experiences of Black women movement actors (BWMAs) within contemporary social movements, this work uses sociological intersectionality as a theoretical conceptualization and analytical method to link misogynoir to movement literature. Misogynoir was a recurring, embedded concept that had a sustaining effect on movement goals. Also, the amount of time in movement acted as an important identifier of a structural analysis for BWMAs intersectional interpretations. Joya Misra, Celeste Vaughan Curinton, and Venus Mary Green proffer six tenets of sociological analysis that help to illuminate the tools BWMAs use to challenge local organizations to decenter male-centric goals and center women, queer, and differently abled needs for liberation, toward a more comprehensive movement. Implications for future research are discussed.

Energy democracy: Reclaiming a unique agenda in energy transitions research

The intersection of energy transitions and equity is a rapidly expanding area of research and concern. Within this literature, energy democracy and energy justice have arisen as two equity-related concepts sharing both overlap and distinctions, at times leading to conceptual confusion and diverging recommendations on how to address their overlap. Given the importance that research adequately wrestles with the intersection of energy transitions and equity, it is critical that scholars do not inadvertently obscure the complexities inherent in this field of research. With this in mind, our perspective paper illustrates the uniqueness of these concepts, with particular focus on energy democracy.While energy justice has arisen as a valuable academic framework for assessing critical energy issues, we differentiate energy democracy as both a critique of dominant approaches to energy transitions and the offering of an alternative vision involving the reconfiguration of social relations in energy systems. We argue that without understanding the broader struggles in which energy democracy is embedded, it may otherwise be difficult to understand why its distinctiveness matters. Our paper therefore situates energy democracy within broader struggles to prefigure a democratic economy. Further, we argue that critical engagement with these broader social movements and their associated literatures may position energy researchers to better wrestle with challenges facing energy democracy and energy transitions, including systemic power imbalances, Western biases in equity-related frameworks, and the structural barriers inherent in existing economic systems.

Under the Smokescreen of Horizontality: Gendered Leading Tasks within the Yellow Vest Movement

There is little scholarship on how gender impacts the construction of leadership in supposedly leaderless, horizontal social movements. In this study, I expand the concept of leading tasks, to get at the ways in which gender intersects with the critical organizing work of maintaining horizontal movements. Drawing on comparative data from 7 months of fieldwork conducted with two grassroots groups in the French Yellow Vest movement, I argue that horizontal organizing in the Yellow Vests (YVM) functions as a gendered structure which opens possibilities for women to take on important leading tasks: caring management, attentive listening, and superintendence. These analytically constructed, gendered leading tasks point to a tension inherent in horizontality: It creates leeway for women’s participation, while also functioning as a smokescreen for a process where group members reproduce traditional gendered expectations of women to do a “third shift” in organizing, characterized by nurturing and caring for participants and activist spaces. The study documents how women can be disadvantaged by this mode of organization. Thus, the concept of gendered leading tasks contributes to investigating how leadership is a gendered construct shaped by those who enact it, and the social structure that surrounds it.

State power and society of Late Imperial Russia in the assessments of V. A. Maklakov

The article describes the publication of part of the memoirs of a prominent political and public figure in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, one of the leaders of the Kadet Party, the famous lawyer Vasily Alekseevich Maklakov. The excellent style and content of the memoirs are noted, reflecting the development of the social movement in Russia, the relationship between government and society, the fate of the Kadet Party, and vivid portraits of contemporaries through a biographical context. This publication is very important for the study of the social movement and Russian liberalism of the early twentieth century.

From Kandahar to bride: Protesters’ critique of the media's portrayal of Tripoli during Lebanon's 2019 October Uprising

ABSTRACTDuring the Lebanese 2019 uprising, the country's second‐largest city, Tripoli, became portrayed as the “bride of the revolution.” This portrayal was seen to break with the city's former stigma as a hotbed of extremism. However, as this article shows, local protesters were not unambiguously happy with this portrayal. Based on interviews with 30 protesters and fieldwork observations, the article seeks to understand the critical views of this narrative. It shows that there was a widespread perception among Tripoli protesters that the narrative of their city as the “bride of the revolution,” as presented by the media, represented a distorted image that romanticized, depoliticized, and de‐contextualized the uprising. This narrative was believed to serve a political purpose. These findings provide two main contributions to scholarly debates concerning identity narratives and the role of media for social movements in societies like Lebanon, characterized by hybrid regimes and a complex media‐politics nexus. First, it points to the complexity of breaking stigma and changing geography‐based identities. Second, it shows how the political ownership of media fuels the understanding of media frames as being politically motivated, even when they seem sympathetic to protests.

Research on the history of Polish intelligentsia during the partition period

The presented text is an attempt to characterize research on the history of the Polish intelligentsia during the period of partitions, conducted since the 1960s within two directions treating the intelligentsia as a socio-professional stratum and as an opinion-forming stratum, exerting a multifaceted influence on the Polish society. This article does not claim to exhaust the extensive topic in either methodological or practical research postulates. First of all, it expresses the author’s position and is an invitation to discuss the future of research, also in the field of social history, on the history of the Polish intelligentsia during the period of partitions, especially in Galicia.

Human Initiative Movement: Enhancing Environmental Literacy and Awareness among Orphans in Bengkulu City

This paper examines the Human Initiative organization in Indonesia and its efforts to provide education for orphans in Bengkulu City. It analyzes the organization's resource mobilization using various data collection techniques. Establishing an education center called the Home of Learning is seen as a social movement that successfully achieved its goals. The research considers five aspects proposed by Oberscall: social movement organization, leaders and leadership, resources and resource mobilization, networks and participation, and community opportunities and capacity. The research findings show that (Home of Learning) HOME in Bengkulu is a social movement that effectively implements quality education programs. This success is due to a clear institutional structure, effective leadership, resource mobilization, community participation, and opportunities for child development. Overall, this research highlights the effectiveness of the Human Initiative in providing education for orphaned children.

Do Consumers Respond to Social Movements? Evidence from Gender-Stereotypical Purchases After #MeToo

This paper explores whether and how consumers respond to global social movements challenging systemic discrimination and stereotypes. We examine the impact of the #MeToo movement on the market for products with stereotypical markers of femininity. Our analysis of high-frequency stockout and price data from a leading global fashion retailer spans from January 2017 to December 2018 and covers 32 countries, or 89% of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) population. Using a triple-difference approach across time, countries, and products, we identify changes in product-level stockouts, corresponding to a drop in the purchase of stereotypically “feminine” items. Our findings suggest a sudden shift in demand, with no immediate adjustments in product assortments or pricing. We discuss potential driving mechanisms, as well as implications for product management and marketing in marketplaces where segmentation is gender based. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.02352 .

Legal Feminism: Wang Ruqi and the 1950 Marriage Law

Abstract This article analyses Wang Ruqi’s 王汝琪 (1912–1990) contribution to the drafting of the 1950 Marriage Law, the first codified law promulgated by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It argues that Wang–who had been a legal specialist and a female political activist dating back to the 1930s and 1940s–was the actual author of the law’s first draft. In rehabilitating Wang’s long-forgotten contribution to the making of the Marriage Law, this study highlights that, first of all, lawmaking in the early years of the PRC was characterized by legal “professionalism,” rather than the “vernacularism” that scholars in recent years have tended to ascribe to this period. Second, Wang was an exemplary figure of a new breed of “state feminists” in the PRC, which we term “state-legal feminists.” State-legal feminists, like state feminists in general, were brought into the PRC state apparatus and took advantage of their role in the state to advance sociopolitical agendas. However, they differed from their fellow state feminists because they firmly believed that the state’s will and intent could be best articulated and exercised through codified laws and legal institutions. The making of the Marriage Law thus exemplifies the state-legal feminist approach insofar as it resorted to a codified law to push for the political agendas of women’s emancipation and restructuring families in China. While recent scholarship highlights the politicization of the law in the 1953 campaign to promote the Marriage Law, this study inverts this by addressing the legalization of political and social movements.

Video, Feminism and Television: A Trajectory of the Brazilian Feminist Collective Lilith Video, 1983–1988

This article examines the television work made by Lilith Video (1983–1988), active in the city of São Paulo, and one of the first feminist video collectives in Brazil. Lilith was founded by Jacira Melo, Márcia Meireles, and Silvana Afram, producing documentaries and the unprecedented Feminino Plural, a series of five episodes, each one focused on an aspect of the everyday life of Brazilian women. In 1987, TV Cultura public television broadcast the series twice. Feminino Plural still remains perhaps the only feminist programme ever made by an independent collective to go on air. We start by situating the works of the group within Brazilian and international literature; we highlight the ways in which its history interweaves video art, television production, and feminist social movements in immediate Brazilian post-dictatorship. As we move to the analysis of the series, we discuss how the combination of testimony, dramatization, archive, and voice over allowed for a sensible approach to private issues in the virtual public space. By mapping Feminino Plural’s intersectional connections, this article suggests the ways in which the series helped to expand the scope of what was possible for women, understood as plural, opened to colour, class, age, and geographic regions.

Exploring the harmony between contemporary values and Islamic identity through the lens of the Gülen movement's teachings

There is a growing need for new Muslim identities that reflect global realities. Fethullah Gülen, a notable Turkish-Muslim cleric, is influential and persuasive. Gülen emphasizes spirituality, religious pluralism, discussion, and education to promote peaceful coexistence and integrate faith and reason in Western democracies. This study examines how Gülen's ideas and the global volunteer organization he created promote Muslim-non-Muslim harmony. We use text linguistics' seven principles—cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situation, and intertextuality—to assess Gülen's teachings and movement. In the social sciences, we also use textual language norms as a fresh theoretical and methodological approach to studying social movements and events. This study's focus on movement-text relationships and cognitive processes in information creation, reproduction, and dissemination makes it distinctive. This study investigates these issues in Muslim countries, multicultural cultures, and liberal democracies. This research is useful because it explains the Gülen movement's domestic and worldwide advancements. This article figuratively depicts Fethullah Gülen as the author, his movement as the text, and humanity as the readers.

The uphill battle for reinventing post-industrial regions: The case of Greater Manchester's ‘clean growth’ mission

In this paper we enrich the concept of place-based leadership. Building on social movement theory, our analysis of the clean growth mission development in Greater Manchester (UK) reveals the role of place-based leadership in mobilising and coordinating framing processes that linked the global climate change problem with local challenges, articulated local benefits of its resolution, and provided justification for local change efforts. We draw on theories of the policy process (i.e. Multiple Streams Framework) to shed light on how place-based leaders frame problems and solutions strategically to engender policy change. While framing processes had an impact on local policy agendas, we do not find evidence of accelerated implementation, pointing to the important distinctions between problem ownership and solution ownership in the context of wicked problems. Our findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the role of multi-level governance and localised agency in problem-based policymaking for sustainable regional development.

A Reformation in Progress: The Path toward the Reform of Johannes Oecolampadius

This article examines the life, theological career, exegetical development, and posthumous biographies of Johannes Oecolampadius as illustrative examples of the fact that the Swiss Reformation, with all its religious movements, was far from a uniform concept in terms of its origins, purposes, and methodologies. The article explains through Oecolampadius’s example an approach to reform that was ‘in progress’, traversing the nexuses of disparate methods and exegetical priorities. Oecolampadius’s experience occupied a position at the intersection between the authority of Patristics and the principle of sola scriptura, exemplifying a balance between the past and the present of Christian tradition. The path that led Oecolampadius to become a Protestant Reformer is characterised by a gradual transition, not abrupt, not radical. His example demonstrates the methodological and ideological diversity of the Reformation, which can be observed through the prism of a single life and its intellectual periods. His conversion offers insight into how these varied approaches shaped personal engagements with Scripture, and challenges the notion of an immediate or singular evangelical ‘calling’ or ‘conviction’. This article examines a specific phase within the broader and varied trajectory of the Swiss Reformation by analysing the transformation of Oecolampadius from a biblical scholar to a preacher, and eventually to a Reformer. This case study illustrates how disparate methodologies, whether rooted in humanism or Patristics, contributed to gradual and personal evolution, ultimately giving rise to distinctive individual stances on reform. This article presents a synthesis of three distinct perspectives on the question. The first part approaches the question through the lens of church history and intellectual history; the second one utilises the history of exegesis and New Testament scholarship; and the third draws upon the perspectives of Protestant historiography, from the standpoint of social history and the history of biographies in Early Modern times.

Fantasy and anti‐capitalist resistance: Some implications for psychoanalytic liberation psychology

AbstractDrawing from liberation psychology as well as progressive traditions within psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic liberation psychology represents a paradigmatic approach to practice, one that moves away from regressive disciplinary orthodoxies and toward the flows of desire and emotion that characterize emancipatory political spaces. For psychoanalytic liberation psychology, the manner by which fantasy is engaged within anti‐capitalist movements remains, somewhat curiously, under‐considered. In this article, I reflect on my work with a South African social movement to flesh out some of the progressive and regressive valances of fantasy in the context of social movement building. Specifically, I consider how psychoanalytic liberation psychology may and may not be of use to anti‐capitalist resistance movement actors whose political activity is undergirded by a bricolage of fantasies, breakdowns in fantasy, and holding reality accountable to liberatory fantasies. I conclude by speculating what fantasy might mean for future psychoanalytic liberation psychology work.

‘The Church is against us!’ Feminist collective apostasies and the struggle for gender equality in Argentina and Spain

ABSTRACT Feminist mobilisations risen across the globe in the last few years. This is especially the case in Latin America and Spain, where social movements to claim the legalisation of abortion and to end violence against women have become key political actors. Some of these movements have adopted collective apostasies as a tool within their mobilisation repertoires to denounce the role of the Catholic Church in maintaining the patriarchal system and interfering in the state and politics. By collectively and formally leaving the Church, members of these groups bring together the fights for gender equality and for the separation of church and state. In so doing, they make apostasy a highly politicised action, far from how previous scholarly conceptualisations of institutional disaffiliation considered it an individual process of religious disengagement. Feminist groups identify the Church as an enemy of women’s rights and while they acknowledge the restricted impact apostasies may have, they perceive them as useful tools to open up public debates around the contentious intersection of institutional religion and gender. This contribution draws on interviews, ethnographic observations, and document and visual analysis of feminist collective apostasies in Argentina and Spain to unpack the discourses generated in and around them.