Search

Understanding disabled youth activism is key for improving young disabled people's participation in politics and social change. Young disabled people require opportunities to situate historical and biographical experiences within broader socio-economic contexts. This will lead to a politicised consciousness surrounding disability, emancipation and social justice. This article presents empirical data from the first study on young disabled people's contemporary position within the UK Disabled People's Movement. It critically assesses three areas pertinent to youth activism: activist membership, social movement organisation and future considerations for activism. This allows for an exploration of how young disabled activists navigate collective action, influence activist claims and demands and understand the issues for sustaining a disabled people's social movement. The article illustrates young disabled activists' desire to disrupt their current position within the UK Disabled People's Movement and bring into focus a future where young disabled people's contributions to activism and social movements are accessible, valued and influential. The article argues that a failure to support young disabled people's participation within social movements will have an adverse impact on their political identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conspiracy theory known as 'Pizzagate' gained a cult following on alt-right forums, ultimately prompting one believer to conduct a shooting on the pizzeria identified by online conspiracists. A thematic analysis of 767 tweets referencing Pizzagate selected from five key intervention points in this timeframe reveals several factors influencing Pizzagate's continued appeal over a four-year period. The article examines how an online alt-right conspiracy collective, QAnon, weaponized Pizzagate as part of its overarching campaign to attract support for President Donald Trump and worked to establish the theory as a popular (albeit false) narrative within the contemporary political zeitgeist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sheds light on LGBT activists' recourse to the rights frame as a means to overcome social and political restrictions and develop an effective advocacy in an authoritarian context. While the literature has de-emphasized social movements' recourse to cultural resources in authoritarian contexts, this study presents cause framing and its interactionist approach, cultural opportunity structure, as a means of adaptation to repression. Thanks to the rights frame, activists used cultural resources in the formulation of their cause based on feelings of common injustice and the development of a flexible transnational cyber-advocacy calling for the end to the state's violation of individual rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty-eight years after the Taylor Report into the Hillsborough disaster recommended that all football grounds in the top two divisions in England and Wales should become all-seated, the UK government, in 2018, announced a review into the safety of modern standing areas and whether developments in stadium safety might justify changing the all-seating legislation to permit Safe Standing. These events are the outcome of a 30-year social movement in which a critical mass of supporters, through the relational networks they formed, have built collective action. Drawing upon both archival and fieldwork research to analyse the longer-term impact which all-seated stadia have had on football supporters' consumption of the game in England, the article uses relational sociology to tell the story of the movement, and studies the working tactics and structure of a small network mobilizing across the political and discursive fields of contention post-Hillsborough. It argues that whilst now a more effective movement with technological and political capital, Safe Standing continues to raise important questions around the historical views on football fans as somehow deviant and reinforces the long-term impact and legacy of Hillsborough on supporters' modern cultural consumption of the game by moving within the parameters of the all-seating legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the mobilization carried out by tenants living in a rent-stabilized building in NYC's Lower East Side. Their action was a central part of a large and successful struggle against the landlord, blocking his continuous attempts at eviction. The main research question is: what are the reasons of the success of this action? In other words: what has tipped the balance in favor of the tenants in a conflict in which the landlord clearly had stronger economic, political and power resources? The article argues that this success was highly based on the intersection of three main elements: the specific resources of the tenants, the organizational resources of the territory and the institutional and legal configurations. Moreover, the study considers these three levels closely interconnected and mutually influencing each other. Based on the direct observation of the mobilization, on semi-structured interviews and on biographical sources, the article aims to contribute to the understanding of the multifaceted dimensions of the fight against evictions. The article also aims to contribute, theoretically and methodologically, to a relational and interactionist approach both for the study of social movements and of gentrification and to strength the dialogue between the two fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on journalists' professional behaviors during the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey, this article offers a theoretical framework for understanding the transformation of inertia into contentious action. Accordingly, the emotion of shame triggers contention when it is experienced with a contingent event that generates hope for change. In Turkey, journalists working in the mainstream media extensively practiced self-censorship before the 2013 Gezi Protests and felt ashamed of themselves. This feeling became a trigger for joining public protests, resigning and/or producing non-compliant news stories when Gezi offered them an opportunity for social change. This argument builds on the sociology of emotions and events, and is inductively derived from 20 in-depth interviews conducted with journalists. The article presents the social context in which shame arises and the place of this emotion in generating contention. Through this research, the Gezi Protests assert their continuing relevance for understanding the relationship between repression and contention, especially in countries hit by the current wave of authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than a decade, widespread protests have erupted within South Africa's impoverished black townships and informal settlements. The mobilizations resembled what Sidney Tarrow refers to as a 'cycle of contention' or 'protest cycle,' as they represented a diffusion of heightened conflict across society. In contrast to Tarrow's protest cycle, however, resistance failed to converge around 'objective coalitions' and a generalized challenge, and it persisted rather than reaching exhaustion. Drawing on a case study of protest and organizing in Bekkersdal, this article argues that the fragmentation and localization of resistance reinforced this peculiar combination. Bekkersdal activists responded to democratization by seeking administrative fixes to local government. Political parties also pulled activists in different directions, yet without facilitating bridges to activism in other areas. While providing a highly visible example for activists in other areas to replicate, the Bekkersdal resistance thus failed to produce broader concessions that might have discouraged protests elsewhere. The case study shows how local containment of political incorporation processes may enable the persistence of protest cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last decade, processes of constitutional change in different parts of the world have taken place in response to massive mobilizations, in contexts of social and political crises. What do social movements do when they participate in a body created to formulate a new constitution? The constitutional change process of 2021–2022 in Chile provides a unique opportunity to analyze how social movements act when they actively intervene in the constitutional arena. For the first time, activists from independent social movements participated as representatives in a constitutional body and significantly influenced the content of the new proposal. The movements analyzed in this article succeeded in incorporating most demands that have been collectively developed over the past 10 years in the context of a new cycle of mobilizations in Chile into the final proposal. Yet, the proposed constitutional draft was rejected. How did they attempt to influence the constitutional debate within the convention? What were the consequences of these strategies? Based on qualitative research, which included interviews, observations during the constitutional debate in the Constitutional Convention, and document analysis, this article examines the strategies and consequences of the constitutional mobilization carried out by these movements. We argue that some of the conditions for the success of these social movements within the Convention partially explain the failure of the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Hate stereotyping' occurs when researchers foreground negative emotions, especially hate, as motivating right-wing social movements, epitomized by labels like 'hate group'. This convention contradicts empirical evidence showing that hateful feelings and ideological prejudices are mostly insignificant for attracting and retaining members in such movements. Using contemporary theories of hate, this article demonstrates the concept's limits and misuse in studying and theorizing the political Right. For instance, hate's theoretical and methodological ambiguity sometimes leads scholars to confuse hatred with right-wing ideology and prejudice, which can obfuscate findings and spur dubious generalizations across political groups. Moreover, some researchers accept post-structuralist theories of hate as a substitute for vital data on emotions, motivations and meaning-making among right-wing actors. Hate explanations persist because they appeal to 'common sense' about intolerance, not because of their methodological integrity for studying right-wing movements. By foregrounding intolerance, hate stereotyping risks sustaining the dominant narrative that prejudices such as racism are deviant, and that racism is a problem of bad attitudes and fringe ideologies, rather than larger issues of systemic and structural inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay represents an effort to rethink the relationship between political emergence and migrant agency. This undertaking has a theoretical motivation. Mainstream human and social sciences seem to be at an impasse because of their structural inability to interpret and explain systemic crises and contradictions. While this is a topic far too complex to be dealt with in a brief essay, the following pages will explore three expressions of this impasse. First, the social sciences often analyse migration without acknowledging its profound political implications. Second, European history and sociology rarely recognize histories of imperial dominance and anticolonial resistance as intrinsic to European history and society. Third, mainstream social and political theories often ignore the structural significance of collective protests and resistance movements for the realization of democracy. The article frames the analysis of these problems via two different theoretical contexts in which we can observe ongoing conceptual or methodological shifts or 'turns' that respond to the said impasse. In studies of democracy and citizenship there has thus been a clear turn toward 'borders'. In migration studies, there is a corresponding turn toward 'agency'. By analysing the interconnections between these theoretical contexts the article suggests ways of resolving the three problems at hand. It starts by examining the first one, or the inability to acknowledge the profound political implications of migration. This discussion will then offer an approach to the other two, concerning the legacies of colonialism and the significance of political agency and protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UK students' desire to create disruptive, media-friendly 'events' during the 2010–11 protests against fees and cuts is reflective of wider cycles and processes in student activism history. First, constant cohort turnover restricts students' ability to convert campaigns into durable movements, necessitating that they must periodically 'start from scratch'. This informs a second process, namely the need to gain the attention of mainstream media, as this can potentially amplify students' grievances far beyond their own organizational capacities. Both have shaped student activism over the past 50 years, compelling contemporary students to create protest events that live up to their radical history. These processes were evident in autumn 2010, when an NUS demonstration saw students attack and briefly occupy Conservative Party headquarters at 30 Millbank. The protest's mass mediation was central to activists' 'eventing' processes, and provided the spark for the radical UK-wide campaign that followed. Yet once the fees bill was passed by Parliament, students' dependency on mainstream media cycles was quickly exposed. With 'mediatization' tendencies having dogged student activism since the 1960s, this article argues that creating 'events' epitomizes students' longstanding strengths and limitations as society's 'incipient intelligentsia'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of economic injustice protests during the Great Recession era – i.e. against economic inequality, flawed democracy, and austerity – begs the question whether the social and political divisions underlying protest behavior have changed. Iceland offers a microcosm for studying such changes. Since the crisis struck, huge protests against economic injustice have emerged repeatedly, providing an opportunity to study how protest behavior has changed during the cascading crisis, that is, a crisis that started in finance but then led to recession, austerity, and political crisis. This article uses survey data obtained in Iceland before the crisis, and during two protest waves emerging at different stages of the crisis, that is, during the 2008–2009 financial crisis, and during the 2016 'Panama Papers leak'. The author finds that economic vulnerability, perceptions of flawed democracy, and political centrism emerged as predictors of protest behavior during the crisis. But the role of 'new social movements' allegiance seems to diminish in the later stage of the crisis. The study supports broad theses about changes in popular protest, yet it illustrates the need to embed the work in a given (evolving) social context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times, the region of Salento in South-Eastern Italy has become one of the most popular gay-friendly tourist spots in the country and several LGBT organisations have operated in this territory over the last few years. This article seeks to map the creation, development and challenges of the LGBT movement in this Italian sub-region by looking at forms of negotiation between 'local' and 'queer' identities and beyond narratives of 'metronormativity' of LGBT identities and from the perspective of 'critical regionality' and 'meridian thought'. Through semi-structured interviews conducted with five local LGBT activists in 2016 and ethnographic observations carried out at Pride events in 2016 and 2017, the article looks at conflicting social processes whereby local activism is rooted in situated allegiances and interactions with the territory and its population, whilst being permeated by the globalising dynamics of LGBT identity politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on art and social movements focuses on the representational aspect of art, leaving untouched how artwork informs audiences and actors on the mobilization dynamics permeating the field of action. In this article the authors contend that the analysis of art in social movements should pursue the ways in which collective actors place art as part of their interpretative lens to act upon changing social conditions. The article's analysis of art around the DREAMers Movement suggests that artwork allows for movement actors to change the limits of their cultural context and affect the repertoires of articulations conceived within that context. This analysis moves beyond the notions of art as representation and presents art as a field to challenge the forms and dynamics of mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies found a tendency for negative representations of social movements in the media in the so-called ‘protest paradigm’. This work proposes a methodology using the paradigm as a framework and operationalizing its characteristics into neutral variables: emphasis, prominence, legitimacy, and tone. In addition, the political elite-media relationship is included as an analytical dimension to better understand the factors that produce media representations of social movements. The empirical focus is the representation of the movement against femicide in three Mexican national news outlets with different political leanings, from 2014 to 2017, gathering N = 865 news articles. The articles were coded using the qualitative content analysis technique. Each variable was coded to measure the representation of the movement and the authorities. The results show that the detriment to one actor’s legitimacy can benefit the other’s representation, suggesting an interdependent system formed by the political elite, the media, and the social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long been interested in explaining the effect of state repression on political participation. Recent reviews of research on state repression highlighted contradictory findings about this effect, yet the core question is still debated: what accounts for the variation in the effects of repression? This article posits that, to make sense of the variation in repression’s effect on political participation, theorization needs to move toward predictions about individuals’ responses to repression. The article, thus, attempts to lay the foundations for such theorization by reviewing the scholarship on the relationship between repression and political participation through the lens of the strategic choices individuals can make. Seeing individuals as having agency and shifting focus to their responses to repression (1) offers a broader picture of the activities available to discontented people under repression and (2) provides a better account of the contentious politics occurring under repression. A number of strategies in response to repression are identified. The notion of ‘choice points’ is applied to formulate hypotheses about why or under what conditions people choose a particular strategy in response to repression. In doing so, this article outlines new avenues for empirical research on repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research extends existing scholarship on the environmental movement by examining different groups of participants, building on the distinctions between public and private modes of engagement. The article uses data from the 2010 United States General Social Survey and the International Social Survey Programme to first conduct a latent class analysis to explore the existence of different classes of participants, and then presents a multinomial logit model to examine factors that affect class membership. The study finds there are four classes in the analysis of the environmental movement: a group of non-participators, a group that engages primarily in more organizationally-based environmental movement activities, a group that engages in green lifestyle activities, and a group that engages in both types of activities, but only at a high-intensity level. The study also finds that there are distinct differences in the composition of each group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews three strands in the scholarship on the populist radical right (PRR). It covers both political parties and extra-parliamentary mobilization in contemporary European democracies. After definitional issues and case selection, the authors first discuss demand-side approaches to the fortunes of the PRR. Subsequently, supply-side approaches are assessed, namely political opportunity explanations and internal supply-side factors, referring to leadership, organization and ideological positioning. Third, research on the consequences of the emergence and rise of these parties and movements is examined: do they constitute a corrective or a threat to democracy? The authors discuss the growing literature on the impact on established parties’ policies, the policies themselves, and citizens’ behaviour. The review concludes with future directions for theorizing and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a strategy of peace activism that gained visibility in the last decades: memory activism. Memory activists manifest a temporal shift in transnational politics: first the past, then the future. Affiliated with the globally-circulating paradigm of historical justice, memory activist groups assume that a new understanding of the past could lead to a new perception of present problems and project alternative solutions for the future. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis among memory activists of the 1948 war in Israel since 2001, the article examines the activist production of counter-memory during active conflict. Using Coy et al.’s typology of oppositional knowledge-production, the article shows how the largest group of memory activism in Israel produced ‘new’ information on the war, critically assessed the dominant historical narrative, offered an alternative shared narrative, and began to envision practical solutions for Palestinian refugees. However, the analysis raises additional concerns that reach beyond the scope of the typology, primarily regarding the unequal power relations that exist not only between the dominant and activist production of oppositional knowledge, but also among activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the discussions on Internet mobilization and on international social movements’ ability to influence national policy. The event studied is the ‘first Internet strike’ of 18 January 2012 aimed against the SOPA legislation proposed in the USA. Wikipedia’s volunteer editors from all around the world took part in the vote concerning whether Wikipedia should undertake a protest action aimed at influencing American policymakers. Wikipedia editors are shown to share values of the international free culture movement, though experienced editors were also likely to be conflicted about whether taking part in a protest action was not violating the site’s principle of encyclopedic neutrality. Further, Wikipedia’s participation in this protest action allowed non-US citizens to have a visible impact on the US national legislation. As such, Wikipedia can be seen as an international social movement organization, whose 24 hour-long blackout of its popular website was a major factor in the success of the anti-SOPA protests. Wikipedia’s blackout was an expression of an international political opportunity structure in the form of worldwide awareness and protests, which in turn enabled a national political opportunity structure by informing and mobilizing American citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent mobilizations in the Middle East, Southern Europe, and United States were both inevitable given the implosion of global capital, and at the same time unexpected and unpredictable. How are we to understand these mobilizations? This article suggests that NSM, New Social Movement theory, with its concerns for identity, culture, and meaning, in which the transformation of identity becomes the basis of subsequent social transformation remains a useful starting point. But given the contradictions of global capital, as well as developments in social movement theory, there is a need to further consider the importance of the legitimation crises of the political economy migrating to the subjective realms of identity and emotion that impel mobilizations that are informed by morality and visions that may be utopian. The Occupy movements illustrate these relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the spontaneous popular movement J14 that erupted into the Israeli public sphere during the summer of 2011. Inspired by the Egyptian and Spanish movements, J14 was ignited by opposition to housing prices, later expanded into protests against neoliberal economic policies and socioeconomic inequalities. The concept of resistance mo(ve)ment is used to comprehend the peculiar intersection between the movement and moment of mass mobilization. The article explores the mo(ve)ment focusing on the political and economic background and context, and analyzing the role of a new generational class who were suffering the effects of a neoliberal political economy. The B Generation in Israel is the product of a double crisis, global and local. The local crisis involves the disintegration of Israeli society after Rabin’s assassination in 1995, and the repression of socioeconomic agendas by fanning hostility to external ‘enemies’. The global crisis is the outcome of a neoliberal economy that weakens middle and lower classes, especially young people living under precarious conditions. The argument is that socioeconomic protests in Israel take place when the external ‘conflict’ is quiet. The calm summer of 2011 was framed in-between Netanyahu’s US campaign against UN recognition of a Palestinian state in May and the scheduled UN discussions in September. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to analyze the mobilizations that are currently taking place in Spain as a result of the multidimensional crisis unleashed in 2008. The authors study the ‘15M movement,’ or that of the Spanish indignados, by focusing on three analytical axes: the cognitive, emotional, and relational processes feeding the construction of a social movement identity. First, the article refers to the diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing tasks performed by 15M participants to define the problematic situation and attribute blame, articulate a solution to the problem and devise strategies to achieve that end, and motivate participants to sustain their engagement and remedy the situation. Second, the article concentrates on the emotions that were ‘mobilized’ by social movement organizations linked to the 15M (e.g. outrage or indignation), and those emotions that emerged spontaneously during the ‘encounters’ that took place in the public space: joy, efficacy, and empowerment. Finally, the article addresses the relational aspects entailed in the process of identity construction, that is, the activation and de-activation of both ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ ties between 15M members and previous and/or current political and social collectives within the ‘progressive field.’ In following this triple objective, the article describes the process of identity-synchronization that has allowed people with no previous political participation and with different and oftentimes opposing politico-ideological trajectories to feel part of the movement. The data come from 17 in-depth interviews and eight focus groups with key activists, ethnographic observations in camps and assemblies in both Bilbao and Madrid during the summer of 2011, and visual materials displayed in web pages and Facebook accounts associated to the 15M. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author claims that there is an emergent ethic of reconciliation which influences social and political action in the recent period. This ethic of reconciliation has four sources: neo-Gandhian dispositions in the global South that provide a critique of arms and of military solutions; post-racist and pro-peace and feminist discourses in the West that emerged through significant social movements of reflexive modernization; and post-Stalinist socialist ideas and practices that have renovated Marxism and the work of the arts, literature and performance. The article goes on to point to some serious sociological reasons why this ethic of reconciliation has consolidated its presence and how the experience of war, violence and instrumental reason have been and are seriously challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political movements seek influence in policy-making, but are typically marked by intra-movement conflict, which, analysts argue, reduces the achievement of social change. This article examines the effects of conflict within the Gulf War illness movement on its influencing government policy-making. Using in-depth interviews, participant observation and document analyses, the article assesses the movement's policy outcome, examines the substance of the conflict and analyzes the ways in which it hampered the movement's execution of policy-relevant tasks. It is found that intra-movement conflict over activists' divergent views of the government's intentionality with regard to veterans' hazardous exposure impaired the movement's execution of tasks that would have had a critical influence on policy-making. As a consequence, public pressure was insufficient to precipitate a legitimation crisis for the state, permitting government officials to evade the movement's demands and liability while imparting the image of responsiveness through weak policy formulations and implementation. The outcome was one of policy palliatives rather than curatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the environmental activism of the Aukuras and Romuva movements in Lithuania, and of several organizations opposed to a dam project in the Tunceli region of Turkey. Since the late 1980s, these movements have combined celebration of cultural traditions and identities with environmental protests, lobbying and education projects. Implicit in thesemovements is a response to criticisms that environmentalism has become overly bureaucratized and perhaps hegemonic, and a challenge to theories that view global environmentalism as a homogeneous movement. The author argues that although these movements are similarly shaped by globalizing forces - including economic liberalization, migration and international institutions - globalization has, paradoxically perhaps, given rise to social movements blending traditional, local identities with global concerns such as the environment. These movements suggest that environmental activism in developing nations subject to forces of globalization may bear little resemblance to past movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the anti-apartheid movement, perhaps the most highly transnationally integrated social movement during the post-war era, and compares it with the contemporary movement for global justice. The article specifically analyses strategies of public communication; the formation of ‘alternative media’ and a movement ‘counterpublic’ with global reach. The major questions addressed in the article are: What were the main strategies of public communication of the anti-apartheid movement — and what was their impact? How did the counter-public(s) of anti-apartheid relate to the established media dominating the global public sphere? What are the implications of the case of anti-apartheid for contemporary research and theorising on transnational/global public spheres and counterpublics? What are the similarities and differences between the anti-apartheid movement and the global justice movement regarding strategies of public communication? Theoretically, it raises the question about the concept of ‘society’ and its empirical referent in the context of increasing globalization. It is argued that in the context of social movement studies, there is a need to develop a conceptual framework around the concept of ‘global civil society’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delineates trajectories of the glocalization of law and maps the changing contours of legal pluralism using empirical material on World Bank financed infrastructure and biodiversity projects in India. The role of international institutions, social movements and NGOs, which challenge the monopoly of the state over the production of law and the definition of the common good, is analysed with reference to conflicts over privatization of natural resources, struggles against forced displacement and loss of livelihood as well as the complaints on behalf of indigenous communities before the World Bank Inspection Panel. It is argued that despite scattered sovereignties in the new architecture of global governance, the state remains a central albeit contested terrain. Its pivotal role in selectively transposing conditionalities, law and policies into the national arena as well as its strategies to avoid accountability are foregrounded against the attempts by civil society actors to use national and international legal platforms to enforce compliance with environmental and human rights standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]