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Contemporary social movements and organizations have increasingly embraced the notion of 'leaderfulness'. This development has the possibility of affecting the current struggles these movements face as well as the activist landscapes of the future. Due to its distinct contribution to developing an analysis of leadership, this article seeks to position Gramsci's intellectual work at the heart of understanding the ways in which these contemporary movement organizations are using organizational structures to address social objectives and the implications this has on the movement. Specifically, this article examines the Black Lives Matter Global Network, which openly advocates for leaderfulness, through documentary content analysis and 22 interviews of activists across 18 local chapters. We find that the structures for promoting leaderfulness which Gramsci had advocated for were lacking and, we argue, this was the reason why the development of leaderfulness was limited. This article helps to shed light on the difficulties of social movement momentum and proposes a solution drawn from Gramsci's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using in-depth interview data of young adults who participated in the University of Kent student occupation, this paper (1) explores the process by which young people enter into and engage in high-intensity mobilisation and (2) seeks to understand how this mobilisation (and prior engagement) impacts future political trajectories of these youth activists as they grow into adulthood. Recruitment and initial engagement in high-intensity mobilisation correspond to concepts used to explain civic engagement in Verba, Schlozman and Brady's ([1995]. Voice and equality: Civic voluntarism in American politics. Cambridge: Mass: Harvard University Press) civic voluntarism model. Political trajectories following high-intensity engagement appeared to correspond with engagement prior to participation in the occupation, with those who had lower levels of prior engagement able to sustain their activism well beyond the initial high-intensity engagement. Those with greater activist experiences prior to the occupation and earlier in their youth reduced their engagement following the high-intensity mobilisation. While patterns of trajectories from young adulthood to adulthood appeared, the causal mechanisms varied significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social movement literature in Western Europe and North America has oriented much of its theoretical work towards micro-, meso-, and macro-level examinations of its subject of study but has rarely integrated these levels of analysis. This review article broadly documents the leading theoretical perspectives on social movements, while highlighting the contributions made in recent years with regard to the wave of protests across the globe – typified by the Occupy Movement and the ‘Arab Spring’ – and grievances that are relatively novel in qualitative or quantitative form such as austerity, precarity, and a sense of democratic deficiency. While these novel social processes have invigorated the specialized arena of ‘social movement studies’ and generated a resurgence of work on social movements beyond the field, this article argues for the need to interconnect levels of analysis in order to develop a more insightful account of contemporary contentious politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While neo-imperialism is becoming increasingly discussed within academia and by public intellectuals, this paper hypothesises that, due to resource needs of social movement organisations, neo-imperialism is not a major diagnostic frame used by international solidarity organisations in the Global North. We tested this hypothesis by examining diagnostic collective action frames used online by 30 organisations across three solidarity movement issues: climate justice, refugee solidarity and debt relief. While the frame was infrequently used across the organisations, results reveal that those organisations that did utilise the frame with some regularity had constituencies that have suffered from historical forms of imperialism. A qualitative analysis was used to locate the contexts in which the frame was used and the prominence these uses had within the organisations’ public broadcasting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social Movements often incorporate masculinity into protest events as a means of achieving media attention. This attention is then used to mobilize, increase membership, and generate social and political outcomes. This article explores the media attention potential of novel social movement actions that deal with ‘domestically feminine’ elements of protest. This article examines the case of the Great Railway Adventure, a series of protests in England organized by the Craftivist Collective and Climate Rush incorporating feminine dress, craftwork, and food. It analyzes the success of these elements in generating media attention and the role the elements play in news media’s framing of the protests. By employing a qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles, I found that the elements were able to achieve limited levels of media attention through novelty and situational irony when combined with more standard elements of direct action campaigning. These elements also shaped the content of many but not all of the news articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the literature on dynamics of contention has proliferated, its focus on movement onset, mobilisation, and outcomes could be used to understand interactions between actors during episodes of contention. While the authors of Dynamics of Contention acknowledge the importance of these interactions, more insight is needed into what shapes these relations and how they change over time. Here, an attempt is made to test the dynamic model as it pertains to interactions, utilising the case of the proposed third runway at Heathrow airport, which included a variety of environmental campaigners, powerful corporations, political actors and parties, and a countermovement. The campaign is broken down into phases that represent the predominant interactions between actors, and the process of phase changes is explained using a process-tracing approach. The findings highlight the importance of cognitive mechanisms over objective factors. However, explanations offered by more static models retain some explanatory power and therefore should not be discarded altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]