Social Movement Literature Research Articles

Dualing discourse: Democracy, gender equity and discursive politics in rural Morocco

Feminist scholars have long been interested in the ability of grassroots organizations to meet both the practical and strategic gender needs of women in developing economies. One point of contention is the role of the neoliberalist framework, which prioritizes women's economic participation over the creation of political institutions that foster gender equality, in democratic projects. Drawing on feminist, development, and social movement literatures, we show that neoliberalism interacts with local socio-religious contexts to provide a complicated – and gendered – set of discursive opportunities for grassroots activists. Drawing on a three-month participant observation with “The Association of Women” in Ouarzazate, Morocco, we illustrated how gender constrains the discursive politics of a male and female organizational leader. The male leader regards neoliberalism as a legitimate challenge to gender inequity, and uses it to highlight the connections between economic opportunity, gender equity, and democracy. The female leader, in contrast, employs neoliberalism and traditional notions about women's roles in Ouarzazate to maintain her relationship with her male colleague, build bridges between her and women in the community, and to create a space where women can cultivate their gender consciousness. We conclude with a discussion of the promises and pitfalls of discursive politics and argue that scholars need to give the discursive politics within local organizations more empirical attention, particularly if they are concerned with the strategic gender needs of women.

To Resign or Not to Resign: Why Incumbents Ignore Peaceful Mass Protests

This article examines why incumbents facing non-violent demonstrations resign or remain in office. It presents a theoretical framework to analyse five major anti-government protests in Bulgaria (1990–2014) and select protests in Serbia, Romania and Macedonia. Incumbents remain in office if they perceive both the extra-institutional and electoral threats to them as low and unlikely to increase. They resign if either threat is high or increasing. To remove incumbents from power, peaceful protesters must employ an electoral strategy. This article builds on the social movement and colour revolution literatures, while underscoring the relationship between barricades and ballots.

Huddle Up! Exploring Domestic Coalition Formation Dynamics in the Differentiated Politicization of TTIP

The politicization of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has manifested itself to different extents across EU Member States. In some countries, conflicting interpretations about the deal were highly visible in public and political debates, while in others there was hardly any awareness. To further understand this phenomenon, trade scholars have to date not yet deepened nor leveraged the insights of the ‘differentiated politicization’ and social movement literature, which both point to coalition formation as an important trigger of politicization processes. This article contributes to our understanding of variation in politicization across EU Member States, by exploring coalition formation dynamics in differentiated politicization processes, in order to identify the factors facilitating successful domestic coalition formation. Through an exploratory case study design, I focus on three countries that exemplify high, middle, and low politicization cases: Germany, Belgium, and Ireland. By relying on the testimonies of campaigners active during the TTIP episode, I identify three elements that facilitated the formation of a diverse domestic coalition, which subsequently played an important role in pushing for a broad-based debate about the implications of TTIP: (i) an expert ‘mesomobilization’ link with a transnational advocacy network, (ii) the prior availability of domestic alliances, and (iii) an inclusive framing approach in order to establish a diverse coalition. The findings also underline the importance of timing in the unfolding of (successful) politicization processes.

Anti-corporate activism and market change: the role of contentious valuations

ABSTRACT The contentiousness of markets has recently been assessed by the social movements literature. Activists can use a broad range of tactics to compel corporations to change their practices. This paper examines the outcomes of this contentiousness. It draws on an empirical study of a disruptive tactic used by anti-corporate activists: the shame-on-you prize. I propose to adopt an economic sociological perspective to understand the mechanisms by which social movement organizations seek to undermine the values that underpin the economic order. Activists provide new categories for valuating economic activities that challenge the existing ones. Social movement organizations legitimate these valuations as coming from civil society and reflecting public expectations about what should count in valuations of economic activities. As such, they may encourage public decision-makers to undertake regulatory action.

BROKER AND BUFFER: WHY ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS PARTICIPATE IN POPULAR PROTESTS IN CHINA*

The social movement literature considers that institutional allies facilitate movement mobilization and favorable outcomes, but it has not sufficiently analyzed how such alliances emerge and endure. This gap becomes more significant in nondemocratic settings, where institutional support of protests is monitored, restricted, and suppressed. Drawing upon fifty in-depth interviews, this article examines the variations of environmental nongovernmental organizations' (NGO) participation in four popular protests in China. I find that environmental NGOs collaborated with grassroots protesters to varying degrees, ranging from minimal presence of information provision, policy advocacy, coalition building, to pervasive participation including protest mobilization. The degree of NGO participation cannot be explained by organizational resources, civic communities, or political environments; rather, it hinges on skillful agencies that broker otherwise disconnected resources and buffer political pressure for their partners. My research contributes to the relational approach to social movements and to studies on the interactions among social movements, NGOs, and the authoritarian state.

The evolving self-presentation of the Islamic State, from Dabiq to Rumiyah

ABSTRACT In 2016 the Islamic State (IS) dramatically altered the centerpiece of its Western outreach, shuttering Dabiq magazine and replacing it with Rumiyah. While Dabiq was marked by twin appeals to themes of chaos and civilization, the publication run of Rumiyah finds IS experiencing significant setbacks. Utilizing a quantitative content analysis of images in Rumiyah reveals IS adapting its framing to better reflect its present abilities and outlook. Drawing upon framing effects and social movement literatures, we argue the imagery in Rumiyah represents the group taking a step backward from would-be state to more typical jihadi organization.

A hit dog will holler: challenging Szetela’s claim of epistemological insiderism

ABSTRACTAdam Szetela defends critiques of the Black Lives Matter movement by claiming epistemological insiderism as an oppressive agent that dissuades democratic exchange and emancipatory scholarship. As an approach to understanding race-based social movements in the United States, Szetela fails to acknowledge the centrality of white logic guiding his analysis. Thus, I challenge Szetela in suggesting that to claim epistemological insiderism as a mechanism by Black scholars “attack” those who disagree is a claim to the historical domination of white supremacy in sociology. As this symposium demonstrates, the usage of epistemological insiderism is an investment in protecting and reifying whiteness in social movement literature, as well as a broader disciplinary trend invested in the retrenchment of critical race and gender scholarship.

Philanthropic Collaboration: A Conceptual Framework for Giving Circles

As the country faces challenges in response to the current political climate, societal tragedies, and environmental disasters, citizens are besieged by nonprofit organizations requesting donations. In response to these requests, individual citizens are seeking out innovative ways to engage in philanthropy. One recent innovation in grassroots philanthropy is giving circles where individuals pool their money, knowledge, and resources to make a social impact. The functions of giving circles can be likened to collaborations in that giving circles encompass the key characteristics of collaboration including communication, consensus decision-making, focusing on common goals, a shared vision and ethical approach, pooling of resources, depending on social capital, and trust. The proposed framework of philanthropic collaboration creates an intersection between the collaboration, philanthropy, and social movement literatures by proving an innovative lens through which to view giving circles. The conceptual framework provides a tool for scholars and practitioners to define and operationalize this new innovation in grassroots philanthropy.

Activating the socialist past for a nativist future: far-right intellectuals and the prefigurative power of multidirectional nostalgia in Dresden

ABSTRACT A widespread view on the success of populist far-right parties is that they mobilise economically left-behind voters via a backward-looking, nostalgic and thus illegitimate agenda. Yet, recent research has shown that it is often wealthy areas that vote for the German populist far-right AfD. Drawing on nationalism, memory-studies and social-movement literature, this article examines how nostalgia drives the activism of well-off local intellectual far-right groups. Based on ethnographic data gathered in Dresden, I argue that far-right intellectual activism in East Germany is facilitated by the convergence of two distinct but related forms of nostalgia. First, a positive nostalgia for a guilt-free past. Second, a negative nostalgia characterized not by a celebration of socialism, but the resistance to it. As multidirectional nostalgia this convergence makes the far right’s political memory resonate with local individual and social memories providing the cultural opportunity structure for electoral success. Infused with a forward-looking ‘anxious hope’, it prefigures an alternative far-right future.

The Role of Women's Movements in the Implementation of Gender-Based Violence Laws

AbstractThe question of whether social movements can catalyze change has preoccupied researchers but an understanding ofhowsuch change can be created is equally important. Specifically, there has been little investigation of how women's movements engage in the process ofimplementationof women's rights laws. We use a case study of Ghana's Domestic Violence Coalition to examine the challenges that movements face in the policy implementation process. The Domestic Violence Coalition, a collective of women's rights organizations, was instrumental to the passage of Ghana's Domestic Violence Act in 2007. Our study investigates the coalition's subsequent attempts to influence the act's implementation. Drawing from the social movement literature, we apply an analytical framework consisting of three internal factors (strategies, movement infrastructure, and framing) and two external factors (political context and support of allies) that have mediated the coalition's impact on implementation. We find that changes in movement infrastructure are most significant in explaining the coalition's relative ineffectiveness, as these changes adversely affect its ability to employ effective strategies and take advantage of a conducive political context and the presence of allies. This article advances the literature on rights advocacy by women's movements by analyzing the challenge of translating success in policy adoption to implementation and explaining why women's movements may have less impact on implementation processes.

How Sociology’s Three Identity Theory Traditions Clarify the Process of Entrepreneurial Identity Formation

The sociological literature on identity construction falls into three broad traditions. One, rooted in social psychology, underscores how individuals internalize identities that become stable self-structures. The second, rooted in dramaturgy, emphasizes how individuals contextually perform their identities through various scripts. The third, rooted in social movements literature, stresses how collective identity is nurtured and mobilized. Through 56 interviews with undergraduate entrepreneurs, I show that the three traditions are not contradictory, but rather highlight complementary processes and divergent layers of analysis. This synthesis is pedagogically and analytically useful, providing a heuristic for designing future empirical inquiry on entrepreneurial identity construction.

Reframing Gentrification: How Tenant Shopkeepers’ Activism in Seoul Radically Reframed Gentrification

Critical scholarship on gentrification has contributed significantly to bolstering the rights of working-class residents against the forces that price them out of the city. However, working-class residents are not the only ones who suffer from dispossession and displacement with rampant hyper-commodification of urban space. Based on the case of Seoul, I examine how new agents—tenant shopkeepers—emerged at the forefront of challenging gentrification and successfully reframed the problem of gentrification. Within the new frame, the shopkeepers who make their livelihoods by using urban spaces are pitted against the property owners who attempt to profit at the expense of their tenants. Through this case, I ask ‘How can radical shifts occur in the ways that the problem of gentrification is constructed?’ My answer draws upon the framing theory in the social movement literature which identifies conditions under which a radical departure from institutionalized ways and social norms can transpire even when the radical shift means challenging the entrenched power structure—in my case, the property-ownership-based rights regime. I highlight the importance of further developing a gentrification scholarship on social change that unravels the rise of new locations of resistance, particularly at a time when the advance of gentrification seems inevitable.

Analyzing frenemies: An Arctic repertoire of cooperation and rivalry

Intensive transnational cooperation and manifestations of the NATO-Russia security rivalry have endured for over 30 years in the post-Cold War Arctic. Drawing upon the concept of repertoires from the social movement literature, this article seeks to make a conceptual contribution as to how we might better analyse and articulate the simultaneity of these practices and narratives of cooperation and rivalry in the circumpolar region. Repertoires are typically defined as bundles of semi-structured/semi-improvisational practices making up a context-contingent performance (for example, by civil society towards the ‘state’). These repertoires are argued to be created and performed in ‘contentious episodes’, rather than structured by long-term trends or evidenced in single events. Translated to global politics, a repertoires-inspired approach holds promise for privileging an analysis of the tools and performance (and audience) of statecraft in ‘contentious episodes’ above considerations of how different forms of global order or geopolitical narratives structure options for state actors. The emphasis on the performance of statecraft in key episodes, in turn, allows us to consider whether the interplay between the practices of cooperation and rivalry is usefully understood as a collective repertoire of statecraft, as opposed to a messy output of disparate long-term trends ultimately directing actors in the region towards a more cooperative or more competitive form of Arctic regional order. The article opens with two key moments in Arctic politics – the breakup of the Soviet Union and the 2007 Arctic sea ice low. The strong scholarly baseline that these complex moments have garnered illustrates how scholars of Arctic regional politics are already employing an episodic perspective that can be usefully expanded upon and anchored with insights and methods loaned from social movement literature on repertoires. The 18-month period following Russia's annexation of Crimea is then examined in detail as a ‘contentious episode’ with an attending effort to operationalize a repertoires-inspired approach to global politics. The article concludes that a repertoire-inspired approach facilitates systematic consideration of the mixed practices of amity and enmity in circumpolar statecraft over time and comparison to other regions, as well as offers one promising answer to the growing interest in translating the insights of constructivist scholarship into foreign policy strategy.

In the name of immigrant mothers: Gendered mobilization of Korean-Chinese women in South Korea

ABSTRACTDrawing on ethnographic data from the anti-deportation protest of the Seoul Korean-Chinese Church (SKCC) in 2013, I examine the impact of gender on the mobilization of Korean-Chinese immigrant women in South Korea. Despite legal, economic, and religious differences, these protesters have bonded greatly among themselves, largely because of their immigrant mother identity. As the leaders of their family migration projects, both Christians and non-believers have grown to feel a strong sense of kinship and acknowledge the efficacy of collective action. Emotional protest rituals and the political impact of the activist-clergy have prompted the mobilization and consequent politicization of these largely women demonstrators. Early social movement literature has overlooked the impact of gender identity on women’s collective action, while my study shows how gender intersects with diasporic identities, to enable the mobilization of immigrant women for the collective goal of justice.

Diversity, Leadership, and Authenticity in the Undocumented Youth Movement

AbstractThe undocumented youth movement is diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, and immigration status. I argue that racial and immigration status diversity has a direct impact on the movement's ability to “expand the scope of conflict,” that is to say recruiting new members, reaching out to elected officials, and establishing representative leadership—elements that are critical to the sustainability and effectiveness of a movement. Findings also indicate that immigration status diversity plays a complex role. The presence of citizen allies brings both risks and benefits to the movement, as they reinforce the electoral connection sought by elected officials while at the same time jeopardizing the authenticity of the movement. Results are based on field research conducted between 2012 and 2015 in NJ and NY, including participant observation in state-level campaigns and interviews with over 130 immigrant youths, allies, and elected officials. This article contributes to the social movement literature by providing empirical evidence of the challenges present within diverse coalitions. It addresses the question of immigration status diversity, an issue that affects the immigration movement but speaks more broadly to the role of allies in social movements.

Urban activism in confined civil spaces: Networked organizations of housing activists in urban China

ABSTRACTIn the social movement literature, networked organizations are presented as being pivotal to the development of a movement. Yet in authoritarian states, such organizations are perceived as challenging the redline of the state. Hence, the establishment of networked organizations of homeowner activists in urban China and their proliferation to inland cities signifies a changing state-society interaction. This paper attempts to trace the development of homeowner networked organizations using data from in-depth interviews with homeowner activists as well as information collected from the networked organizations. This paper attempts to trace the development of cross-neighborhood networked organizations of homeowners in urban China against the conceptual backcloth of social movement networks and examines the recent development of such networks within the context of the tight social control of the authoritarian regime. This paper helps to shed light on the process by which seemingly neutral, mundane, and isolated small-scale actions involving everyday issues in residential neighborhoods are able to create networked organizations which may have the potential to orchestrate social movement mobilization.

Legitimating Extremism: A Taxonomy of Justifications for Political Violence

ABSTRACT Terrorism is an inherently communicative enterprise in that it attempts to convey messages using violent means. Furthermore, the effective use of rhetoric is fundamental to the sustainment of militant campaigns. Nevertheless, the literature on terrorism currently lacks a comprehensive blueprint for analyzing terrorist discourse. This paper proposes a framework for classifying narrative frames that serve to justify acts of political violence. Drawing on the social movements literature, it utilizes the jihadist organizations Al Qaeda and the self-proclaimed Islamic State as primary examples to show how militants utilize defensive, moralistic, legalistic, imperialistic, and apocalyptic framing to legitimate acts of terrorism. It also demonstrates how these same categories can be applied to extremists animated by ideologies other than jihadism.

Framing and counter-framing a Peace March in Russia: the use of Twitter during a hybrid war

ABSTRACTFraming is vital to the capacity of social movements to enlist popular support and sustain contentious collective action. Using the case of a Peace March held in Moscow on 21 September 2014, the article examines how antiwar activists and their opponents framed a protest against Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. The study argues that different interpretations of patriotism underpinned divergent evaluations of the conflict and the construction of opposing identities. An analysis of Twitter posts on the eve of the march shows that peace activists positioned themselves as citizens with high moral standards and a healthy dose of patriotism, criticized the Russian government for military intervention in Ukraine, and called for a peaceful conflict resolution. In turn, opponents of the march considered themselves as real patriots and their adversaries as national traitors, denied Russia’s military presence in Ukraine, and fomented an attack on critics of Russian foreign policy. The study contributes to social movement literature by analyzing the framing of antiwar activism on a social media platform in the midst of a hybrid war, marked by a great deal of ambiguity and deception about causes, dynamics, and consequences of military operations by state and non-state actors.

From national identity to state legitimacy: Mobilizing digitally networked publics in eastern Ukraine

Social media enable broad and diverse publics to mobilize around a shared collective identity. In this article, the authors use social movement literature and studies of peace and conflict to foreground the role of platform-mediated communication in creating a national identity in a fragile state. We argue that, by affording activists with a possibility of public, yet anonymous interactions, social media may play a crucial role in conferring state legitimacy during a violent conflict. Investigating the case of Mariupol, Ukraine, where a small group of citizens employed social media to support and legitimize the Ukrainian state among the city population, the authors illuminate the use of new media affordances to construct a national identity among digitally networked publics, mobilizing support for a threatened state.

Organisational leadership and/for sustainability: Future directions from John Dewey and social movements

In this paper, we suggest that organisational leadership that is based (generally) on a neoliberal paradigm has contributed to an ‘intolerable situation’ that was recognised at the United Nations (2015a) Paris Agreement on Climate Change. We, therefore, attempt to re-frame organisational leadership based on a sustainability paradigm. In doing so, we draw on John Dewey’s thinking on publics: due to the need for greater stakeholder involvement in identifying how sustainability could be achieved and increasing pressure from governments, campaigning groups and public opinion for organisations to expand their boundaries further to interact with, and take seriously, the needs of the communities that they affect. Then―and for the implementation of this re-frame and cognizant of the community requirement―we will offer that guidance may be drawn from the emerging social movements literature, specifically the importance of narration, mobilisation and organisation. Finally, we present a revised framework for organisational leadership that is based on this sustainability paradigm.