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Though most social movements form in order to press for significant social change, unequivocal policy success is rare and difficult to achieve. Instead, movements may win incremental victories--increased public attention or media coverage, Congressional hearings, judicial rulings in lower courts--that stop short of the movement's ultimate goals. Drawing on data collected from different anti-death penalty organizations around the United States, this paper investigates how such partial success affects the subsequent level of support and resource endowments of movement organizations. In so doing, this paper contributes to a larger body of work that studies movement outcomes, while reorienting the focus to how movements react to lesser gains. Ultimately, I argue, the impact of small victories is curvilinear: movements initially benefit from incremental advances both in terms of support and income levels. However, continued success produces an eventual tipping point where gains actually contribute to sharp declines in support and resources. Overall, small gains or setbacks in formal institutional arenas--legislatures and courts--have more of an impact than more informal changes in behavior, attitudes, and practices. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though the emergence and development of transnational feminist networks have been well documented by feminist scholars (Friedman 1995, Keck and Sikkink 1998, Moghadam 2005), these phenomena have received surprisingly little attention from scholars of social movements. In particular, systematic explanations of feminist political strategies and the outcomes of their efforts are sorely lacking. This paper represents part of a larger project seeking to address this gap by examining the efficacy of various discursive strategies of transnational feminist networks in the post-Beijing era.Drawing on the framing perspective in social movements, I consider 1) the degree to which two very different master frames (Snow and Benford 1992), anti-fundamentalism and women's human rights, promote cross-cultural, cross-issue collaboration among feminist and women's activists, and 2) the political and organizational circumstances under which they do so. In comparing these discursive strategies, I rely largely on a content analysis of organizational materials such as newsletters, position papers, press releases, action alerts, meeting minutes, and scholarly articles from 1995-2005. I conclude with remarks on how such an analysis might inform both the strategic discursive choices of transnational feminists and the developing theories of framing processes in social movements. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global anti-globalization (or social justice) movement presents an extraordinary challenge for mobilization. First is the problem of discovering (or constructing) a common interest among highly disparate groups of opposition to "globalization," by no means an obvious matter. Second is the problem of cooperating in pursuit of that interest when there is an overwhelming temptation to free ride on the efforts of others. And third, is the problem of coordinating a coherent collective action. This paper argues for a central role for narrative in the formation of the movement. It argues, first, that theories of social movements based on rational choice and institutional behavior, while helpful, are insufficient for solving the puzzle posed by the anti-globalization movement and, that understanding the movement requires recognizing the way in which a globalization narrative served to construct a common interest in opposing it and engage individuals in a social drama of opposition. The theory of social movement developed in the paper draws on literatures in social movement theory, theories of collective action, cognitive psychology, narrative theory, and others. Empirical evidence is drawn from primary documents of the movement. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the literature on global civil society assume that progressive movement(s) need(s) to be fixed into commonly agreed upon interests and strategies that make up a stable identity of the movement as a whole. Often, these movements rely upon taken-for-granted speech acts whereby interests and desires are articulated through language, vocal language. By reducing our senses to rational speech acts, we undermine the progressive potential of other forms of sensory language. For this reason, I attempt to provide a polemical reading on the potential of silence(s) as moments and sites of agency. Thus, this paper goes beyond mainstream literature on social movements, and attempts to (re)locate potential for agency within the silent word. The written word becomes that "knowledge [which] is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting,"a space for one own, on paper, on walls, where none existed before. Included in the paper will be a brief analytical section on the problematics of social movements in relying on vocal speech acts as sites of agency. Thereafter, I begin from the premise that useful theoretical frameworks can be drawn from literary works themselves, particularly the ways in which silence manifests itself as a mode of political resistance. This paper will look at how two strangers in two separate novels create spaces of their own by narrating a reading of resistance that resist dominant structures of speech acts. Moments of silence are indeed vague, but they come with potential for something surprising and unexpected by offering possibilities for agency, even within global movements. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The policy puzzle for this project focuses on the rhetorical basis for the engagement policy toward China and the strategies employed by recent administrations to maintain their policy against political opposition. Since Tiananmen Square and the end of the Cold War, the engagement policy debate has become more polarized and the dominant engagement frame has been challenged by more negative interpretations of Chinese intentions. This policy situation raises three important conceptual questions. Why do particular policy frames (like engagement) become dominant and how are they maintained over time? Under what conditions do dominant policy frames become vulnerable to new arguments that require a reframing of the policy issue? What effect does the either-or dichotomy that dominates discussion over Sino-American relations have on an administration’s ability to pursue a pragmatic foreign policy? This paper draws on literature in issue framing from studies in social psychology, public opinion, the media, social movements, and foreign policy to address these questions. The premise underlying this study is that policy framing entails a three-level game, rather than just a two-level game. First there is a game among advisors who work to influence the president’s policy agenda and policy decisions. Second, administrations work to balance international policymaking to domestic political realities. This paper is part of a larger project focusing on the impact strategic framing has on foreign policymaking context in the Nixon/Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II administrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist scholars have usefully offered explanations for why women?s social movements emerge, but rarely have they explored why the goals of these movements often remain out of reach. Building on a detailed analysis of Malaysia?s anti-gender violence movement, I pose the question why, in spite of decades of activism against gender violence, has gender violence not abated? The typical response of feminists is to focus on the embeddedness of masculinism ? where masculinist attitudes and behaviors that sanction and sustain gender-based violations such as rape and domestic violence are approached as intractable and potentially unchangeable. In the present study, I instead raise the possibility that feminist practices may have unintentionally contributed to the undermining of transformative change.Feminist analyses that explore a politics of inclusion and exclusion associated with women?s movements have had a tendency to center on criticizing the essentialization of ?women? and ?women?s interests? that often forms the basis of these movements, which has served to obscure attention to how gender intersects with other identity signifiers, such as ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and geographic location. In the course of two cycles of field research in Malaysia in 1997 and 2002, I confirmed that identity-based divisions among women in Malaysia persist, undermining the cohesiveness of activists within the anti-gender violence movement while also limiting how representative the movement is with respect to women within Malaysian society. But I also identified other lines of fracture that are associated with the movement that haven?t been adequately problematized to date ? including issue-based, resource-based, and gender-based divisions.In my proposed paper, while approaching these lines of fracture as inter-related, my analysis of Malaysia?s anti-gender violence movement will concentrate on problematizing gender-based divisions, in light of my contention that the most far reaching fault-line across feminist theories and feminist-inspired practices is that between ?women? and ?men.? Building on extensive interviews with Malaysian activists, I explore why the exclusion of men from the practices of women?s activists persists and the implications this exclusion has had for the (in)ability of activists to achieve their broad objective of ending men?s violence against women. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]