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Nine articles exploring the impact on democracy of Spain's 15-M or "Indignados" social movement of 2011.

Social movement impact on democracy has primarily been treated in two ways in the literature: the role of social movements in promoting democratization in the form of regime change; and a more recent literature on the ways social movements initiate democratic innovation in governing institutions and norm diffusion in already existing democracy. In this article, we argue that to fully understand social movement impact on democracy, we need to look beyond these two main approaches, as important as they are. Using the emblematic case of Spain’s 15-M pro-democracy movement to illustrate our conceptual proposal, we draw on existing literature to argue that social movements can impact democracy in several key arenas currently not sufficiently considered in the literature. We provide examples of democratic impact emerging from the experimentation around the central problematic of ‘real democracy’ in the ‘occupied squares’ to highlight several ways social movements’ democratic impact might be explored. We develop the concepts of hybridity and democratic laboratory to analyze these impacts and discuss their relation to contemporary theorizing about democracy and movement outcomes. We argue that adopting this broader approach to the democratic impact of social movements leads to a more nuanced understanding of movement outcomes and ‘success’.

Political scholars express concern for the continued resilience of democracy in the face of multiple crises. In times of crisis, social movements articulate grievances and make demands of political leaders and policymakers. In contrast to the wave of pro-democracy movements following the 2008 global financial crash where protesters demanded accountability from elites, mobilization during the COVID-19 pandemic has defied expectations in several key ways. First, the expectation for protesters to mobilize primarily online in the face of the restrictions and risk associated with large gatherings has not been upheld. Instead, we have witnessed widespread “offline” mass protests. Second, despite high mortality rates and significant disparities in the effectiveness of national public health responses, we have not witnessed widespread mobilizations demanding governments do better to protect citizens from the virus. Instead, we have seen two radically different responses: At one extreme, veterans of “pro-democracy” movements have “pivoted”, using their skills and experience to either make-up for weak government responses to COVID-19 (Hong Kong) or to reinforce government efforts to contain it (Taiwan). At the other extreme, "anti-democratic" and predominantly far right-wing movements have mobilized against public health measures, circulating COVID negationist and conspiracy messages. Indeed, the political weaponization of disinformation has been a notable feature of pandemic mobilization. I analyze these contrasting trends, highlighting the challenges they pose for the effective handling of the pandemic, and their broader implications for democratic legitimacy and resilience. In so doing, I call attention to the ways that mobilization during the pandemic challenges scholars to revisit some of our assumptions about the dynamics of social movements in times of crisis, and how they can foster or erode democracy. The analysis also suggests that scholars analyzing the impact of information disorders on democracy need to pay careful attention to offline protest as well as online transmission.

Transnational coordination is a key aspiration of activists seeking to mobilize globally, yet the literature pays insufficient attention to the impact of cultural differences on transnational networking. In this article I draw on ethnographic data from three European autonomous social movement encounters in the Global Justice Movement (2002-2004) to demonstrate the impact of culture clashes between activists on transnational networking. I use the concept of habitus to explore how routinized, taken for granted, symbolic systems of meaning that individuals from shared locations have in common shape their interactions in transnational encounters. This conception of culture is underutilized in social movement analysis yet offers important insights into internal movement dynamics. I argue that despite the autonomous commitment to radical openness and plurality, a lack of attention to the empirical reality of place-based activist subcultures and habitus actually works against the "cosmopolitanism" that many activists and scholars aspire to.

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On June 28, the Transnational Institute Amsterdam hosted a symposium with activists from a range of movements and researchers from the three main European networks of social movement research (Council for European Studies, European Sociological Association, European Consortium for Political Research). The goal was to share experiences from participants’ different standpoints, map out the current situation of movement organising in Europe, and identify strategic implications in a way that can be usefully shared with activists across Europe.

As we celebrate our fifth year anniversary, we make a departure from our existing practice to publish our first ever non-themed journal. Interestingly, despite every CFP stating that we always are open to non-themed contributions, we frequently receive questions about this so we thought a general issue might help highlight the issue once and for all: we are always open to contributions on any social movement related subject even if we issue themed calls for papers. Normally, our editorials are jointly written by the editors who have taken the lead on designing the theme of the issue and writing the original call for papers. They are somewhat unusual for journal editorials in that they attempt to be a sort of state of the art on the theme under discussion in the issue, from the perspectives of the editors coordinating the issue. They often involve intense debate, dialogues and compromises between a diverse range of positions before finally coalescing in what we hope are more or less coherent position papers. They take a lot of work and we hope they are in themselves important contributions (the fact that they do get cited and reprinted gives us some basis for this hope). This issue, however, we are doing something completely different in that we are simply individually reflecting on our experience with the journal since its inception, and offering those reflections in a very loosely edited fashion for any of our readers who might be interested in knowing more about how the Interface project began and where we would like it to go from here. For those of you who simply want to get on to what is in store for you in this issue, you can skip the trip down memory lane, and jump straight to the section titled “In this issue”. And now for something completely different.....

En este capítulo queremos aportar algunas reflexiones sobre la génesis y el desarrollo del proyecto Interface, una revista multilingüe, gratuita y disponible en la red, con pretensiones globales, que pretende crear un puente entre los movimientos sociales y la academia, y que parte de una reflexión sobre la producción del conocimiento sobre, por y para los movimientos sociales. El proyecto nace a raíz de una propuesta de Laurence Cox en el marco de una conferencia anual en Manchester que reúne a académicos y activistas (Alternative Futures and Popular Protest). Está curiosa confluencia de activistas y académicos (con una importante medida de activistas/académicos) organizado desde hace años por Colin Barker y Mike Tyldesley había producido a través de los años un ámbito donde los textos académicos presentados estaban sujetos a las críticas de los activistas y donde las ponencias de los activistas se sometían a las críticas teóricas y analíticas de los académicos. En el tira y afloja resultante se generaba un intercambio importante de ideas y perspectivas y la producción de conocimiento que de alguna manera salía de los límites intelectuales de los grupos integrantes. La propuesta de crear una revista que intentaba de alguna manera plasmar este proceso de generación de conocimiento en un proyecto que integrara a más personas y que pudiera llegar a cualquier rincón del mundo nació precisamente de la experiencia tan positiva que habíamos tenido los fundadores a través de los años en este congreso. Teníamos la sensación de que muchas de las revistas sobre movimientos sociales académicos no siempre ofrecían mucha información de utilidad o valor para los mismos practicantes de los movimientos que pretendían analizar. En algunos casos las revistas podrían estar controladas por un núcleo de académicos con una línea teórica y quizá no estén suficientemente abiertas a nuevas ideas que surjan de académicos jóvenes que sean también activistas dentro de los movimientos que estudian. Por otro lado, reconocíamos que los movimientos mismos producen mucho conocimiento pero que muchas veces éste es auto referencial y no logra entrar en diálogo con otros movimientos y grupos ni tampoco de manera sistemática con la producción académica y teórica. En un contexto global del movimiento de movimientos en que muchos activistas tienen un pie en la academia y viceversa, el proyecto Interface se puede entender como una pequeña parte de un proceso más amplio que incorpora una serie de intentos de realizar investigación participativa de activistas y académicos.i Antes de pasar a explicar el proyecto en más detalle, conviene hacer un repaso histórico breve a la producción de conocimiento desde los movimientos, desde la academia, y los intentos de combinar ambas perspectivas.

Editorial

This issue engages with the increasingly important, separate yet interrelated themes of feminism, women’s movements and women in movement in the context of global neoliberalism.