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Since the early 2000s, governments in many Western democracies have introduced policies and practices to prevent radicalization and violent extremism (PRVE). This has led to the formation of a new policy arena in which an increased number of actors are tasked with PRVE work. The diverse set of actors and methods involved affect social movements in new and complex ways, but also challenges the established knowledge and analytical focus of research on the repression of social movements. In this article, we propose a conceptual framework that attends to the causes, content and consequences of protest control. We use it to examine interaction between actors in the PRVE arena and to highlight issues that are underexplored in repression research. To elucidate these issues, we use empirical examples from our own research on measures to counter extremist milieus in the Nordic countries and the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the literature of social movements and emotions, this article analyses a case of the union-led movement against outsourcing in the UK. Our focus is on the emotional processes of collective identity formation and the movement culture of new grassroot unions, addressing the themes of movement culture, collective identity and political solidarity. Data consists of participant observations, interviews, and additional website and media material. The results show that the movement culture of the new grassroot unions is characterised by direct action and a collective identity based on a proud re-centring of BAME workers as subjects of labour struggles. Key emotional processes consist of sharing emotions of humiliation, anger, and exclusion, but also joy and feelings of solidarity. A crucial part of the movement's expansion is due to the construction of political solidarity and coalition-building. The results demonstrate the importance of heeding the crucial mobilising power of shared emotions in the analysis of new labour unions. The article contributes to labour movement research with an enhanced understanding of immaterial claims on dignity, respect and care, alongside the cognitivist focus on material work conditions and labour rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines collective action and the alliances between social movement organizations engaged in the work of solidarity with disabled people within and across borders during austerity. Building upon social movement theory, specifically political opportunities and resource mobilisation, we focus our analysis on data from in-depth interviews with thirty-five organizations at the UK and European levels, where we examine both how solidarity is operationalized by such organizations and the everyday cooperation and alliances they build with others in a UK policy context that has been hostile to disabled people and a European context which disabled people's solidarity organizations have sought to seize as political opportunities. Our study therefore adopts a multi-level approach by analysing the building of alliances between organizations at the local, national and transnational levels and it reveals the impact of the political context and organisational pressures which can diminish resources and generate competition, thus placing strains on solidarity between disabled people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses qualitative content analysis to investigate the role of the communicative tactics used by the UK campaign group, The People's Assembly Against Austerity, to reach voters in the 2015 and the 2017 general elections. It focuses on the heuristic of trust and analyses the language of the tactics used by the group as they campaigned against the policies of the governments at the time. Analysis reveals that in both elections The People's Assembly employed existing electoral campaigning strategies, such as negative campaigning and political advertising, alongside novel tactics such as a protest song, that were all aimed at the voter and sought to shine a light on the pro-austerity policies of the incumbent Conservative government. This pattern shows that a group within the broader UK anti-austerity social movement was actively engaging in the parliamentary political process in an attempt to communicate with voters. What this insight does is emphasise the role of social movement communication in electoral campaigning and posits the dimension of 'social movement–voter interaction', which largely remains absent in both the fields of social movement research and political communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responses to the Great Recession are varied across welfare states and gendered in their consequences. Combining gender, social policy and social movement scholarship, this paper investigates how the differential policy responses to the Financial Crisis in three European countries shaped gender-differences in anti-austerity demonstrations. We compare the involvement and characteristics of women and men in anti-austerity protests using data collected at street demonstrations (2010–2012). We conduct cross-national multi-level analysis of demonstrators from countries representing different gender regimes (Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom). Our results show that gender regimes have a significant impact on women's and men's involvement in anti-austerity protests. We thus make an important contribution to research on gender differences in participation in anti-austerity demonstrations post-Great Recession. Our comparison of women's and men's participation in anti-austerity street demonstrations suggests that at the country or regime level resources matter more than grievances, but that grievances matter at the individual level. This innovative paper links scholarship on gender regimes with research on protest participation. Resources and experiences of grievances are shaped by gender regimes which provide access to decision-making and social support. We reveal novel insights into the connection between gender regimes and demonstration participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the production of knowledge by Muslim environmental activists in the United States and Great Britain, applying Eyerman and Jamison's theory of cognitive praxis to demonstrate how religious and political knowledge and practices are synthesised by the activists. The paper emerges from research conducted with Islamic environmental organizations in the United States and Great Britain in 2012–2013 and utilises data gathered from interviews conducted with Muslim environmental activists working in those organizations and from the publicly available newsletters, websites, and articles produced by the activists and organizations. I argue that through the integration of environmental and religious knowledge, Muslim environmentalists construct a 'critical community' within Islam that seeks to transform orthodox Islamic knowledge and practice. In the process, Muslim environmentalists demonstrate that religiously-grounded social movements may simultaneously pursue religious and political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement organizations use consumer activism to mobilize public pressure and cause economic or reputational damage to their target. However, current frameworks fail to explain why organizations would use indirect consumer activism: targeting one firm to elicit change from a third party. This paper aims to explain this choice, drawing upon theories of opportunity structures to explain why groups choose to use indirect strategies. I examine three campaigns using indirect strategies: US-based Grab Your Wallet and Sleeping Giants, and UK-based Stop Funding Hate. Groups use indirect strategies to reach inaccessible targets and to mobilize the public; these strategies help social movement organizations to raise public awareness at the beginning of a campaign. I conclude with some expectations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All non–governmental organizations (NGOs) rely on funding to support their work. But how does the source of funding shape the types of advocacy groups engage in? Using novel panel data collected by the Environmental Funders Network, this research examines how funding from government, foundations, business, and members shape the advocacy work of environmental NGOs (ENGOs) in the UK. Past research suggests that elite funding sources channel groups into institutional advocacy, such as lobbying or litigation, and away from public advocacy, such as protesting. This paper confirms previous research while also showing that all types of funding channel group actions. Foundation and business funding is associated with more institutional advocacy, government funding is associated with non–political advocacy such as species conservation, and member funding is associated with public advocacy. By comparing across funding types, this study demonstrates the ways in which groups are both helped and hindered by funding from different sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International tax justice issues, such as corporate tax avoidance, have gained particular salience over the past decade in an environment of financial instability and government austerity. Civil society involvement has ranged from trade unions and NGOs calling for parliamentary inquiries to civil disobedience by less established actors. Since the international financial crisis, how have levels of contentious collective action around these issues waxed and waned? Is contentiousness associated most with domestic politics or global media events like the Panama Papers? This paper uses an original hand-coded dataset from five national newspapers in the United Kingdom and Australia between 2008 and 2016. Political claims analysis (PCA) was used to collect all instances of claims around international tax justice and compare the types of actions and the different frames used by civil society actors. In both countries, mobilising grievances are generated most strongly in the period after domestic austerity policies are introduced. The qualitative coding provides evidence of accompanying frame alignment in these periods, as international taxation is problematized in terms of national revenue, demonstrating scale shift from the global to the national political stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to 2017's terror attacks in Britain, the Football Lads Alliance (FLA) and latterly, the Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA) were formed. Self-described as street-protest movements that encourage rival 'football firms' to reject acrimonious hostilities to unite against the Islamist extremism and extremists it believes are threatening Britain, its culture, values and way of life. As new incarnations of the British counter-jihad movement, this article affords new insights into how the movement and constituent parts are dynamically identifying and mobilising behind an increasingly diverse range of identities and socio-political issues. Contributing new knowledge about the FLA and DFLA, neither of which have been subjected to scholarly inquiry, this article makes a timely contribution to an embryonic scholarly canon. Contextualising the counter-jihad movement, this article explores how 'football' afforded the FLA and DFLA with a shared identity around which to mobilise. Highlighting how this is different to other far-right and counter-jihadi groups, their ideologies and activities are explored in relation to their establishment, support base and function. In conclusion, this article positions both groups within an 'identity-oriented' paradigm of new social movements as a means of offering new understanding and explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written in recent years about the growing impact of social media on social movements. While authors have extolled the virtues of Facebook and Twitter as organisational and informational tools for a range of movements from the Arab Spring to Occupy, evidence remains patchy as to under what conditions social media is most effective at engaging and mobilising the wider public. Drawing on the work of Tarrow, this article considers the impact of cycle effects on the effectiveness of social media as a mobilising and organising tool for the 2010/11 U.K. student protests. Although preceding the broader ‘movement of the squares’ contention cycle, the protests made similar use of social media for generating mass participation. Yet, its mobilising power was dependent on a number of temporal factors, including amplification through mainstream media and the urgency of its initial campaign goal. Moreover, towards the end of the cycle, activists were found to be using social media – via ‘secret’ Facebook groups – in ways that reinforced emerging group hierarchies, arguably contradicting their initial commitment to open-access networks and participatory democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we address the question of ethics in the study of social movements from the perspective of ‘Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project’, which will record life history interviews of 50 key activists in the UK for the British Library Sound Archive. Our research is inspired by the democratic ideals of oral historical methods and of feminism itself, yet we have discovered tensions concerning the status of individual experience and the practicalities of selection and method. Turning to other feminist scholars of women's movements we identify four broad justifications for focusing on the individual: a political understanding of the personal; situated knowledge; an investment in interview relationships and a psycho-social framework of analysis. Testing these justifications against some of the oral histories we have gathered, we conclude that they go a long way to answering the paradox of studying a movement through a few individuals' stories. But we are frank about the ethical and intellectual limits that a life history method imposes on capturing social movements. Examples from interviews with Mia Morris, Beatrix Campbell, Lesley Abdela, Ellen Malos and Juliet Mitchell will illuminate the history at stake. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on extensive data gained from activist interviews, questionnaires and ‘sociological interventions’, this article sets out the conflicting dimensions of the alterglobal (global justice) movement in three countries (France, Italy and Great Britain). Proceeding from the various interpretations given by movement actors to the relationships of domination engendered by contemporary globalisation processes, we aim to construct an interpretative framework of the alterglobal movement and its different components. We argue that the internal identity of the movement can be plotted within a series of contrasting ideological, symbolic, and organisational relationships, and – despite the considerable diversity of the movement – movement actors share a common construction of their own alterglobal subjectivity across three specific dimensions: a resistance to domination, the importance of the elaboration of alternative worldviews and the practical steps taken in the pursuit of these alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Habermas's idea of a conflict shift from 'old' to 'new' social movements has been a point of ongoing contention in the field of sociology. The criticisms aimed at his idea of 'newness' are numerous and persuasive. Rather than reiterating these debates, this paper argues that the next logical step is to apply Habermas to an analysis of the contemporary labour movement. In order to do this, I develop the notion of the 'colonization of the lifeworld at work', and explore the relationship between colonization and union activism in two cases drawn from the current UK context: the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) and the National Union of Teachers (NUT). In exploring colonization empirically, I suggest that it is met by a range of responses, from activism to acquiescence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological sabotage (ecotage) has been a feature of the more radical parts of the environmental movement in the Western world for several decades. While it may be perceived as being the preserve of underground cells of 'eco-terrorists', in the UK those who carry out small-scale acts of sabotage are also often engaged in relatively conventional political activity; view sabotage as a complement to other action, not as an end in itself; and are committed to avoiding physical harm to people. Drawing on ethnographic data from research with British activists, this article seeks to define ecotage and to explain its place in the repertoires of the environmental direct action movement in the UK. It is argued that the self-limiting form of ecotage in the UK has its roots in cross-movement debates that have developed over several decades and that national traditions remain important in understanding the development of social movement repertoires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the issue of social movement abeyance in relation to contemporary British feminism. It argues that currently British feminism is a social movement in abeyance that is not actively confronting the social system, and is largely preoccupied with maintaining itself through service providing voluntary organizations, educational and intellectual activities and incorporation into elite politics. The analysis of abeyance is also developed at the conceptual level by adding further detail to how we might theorize abeyance by contrasting it with the insurgent phase of social movement activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to advance our understanding of the processes whereby particular techniques of protest are selected from societal 'repertoires of contention'. Empirically, it focuses upon data which have been gathered on activists within mental health movements in the UK. Theoretically, it seeks to make a case for use of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, specifically his concepts of 'habitus', 'capital' and 'field'. The paper is exploratory, and acknowledged to be such. It is argued, however, that the evidence from the mental health movements is sufficiently persuasive to merit further investigation of the usefulness of Bourdieu's approach for analysing processes of repertoire selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]