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This article explores the influence that the educommunicative dimension of the 15M Movement has had on the creation and consolidation of a new ecosystem of independent media. To this end, we rely on a document analysis of the movement's minutes and manifestos and on the review of the editorial principles and educational activities of a sample of independent media. We also draw on ten in-depth interviews with key journalists and activists who actively participated in the 15M. We argue that the movement's media activism had a clear educommunicative orientation that strengthened pre-existing media activism, opening windows of opportunity for media innovation. This contributed to the rise of a new media ecosystem of independent media characterised by three key elements: (1) synergies and mutual support; (2) the key role of the community of subscribers and users; and (3) an educational agency with a public service orientation. Finally, we illustrate that this new media ecosystem displays a clear educommunicative orientation. This orientation is rooted in the imaginary and practices of the 15M and is based on the revitalised civic role of journalism and on the value of information for radical democracy. This article advances social movement studies by engaging a dialogue between an educommunicative perspective and a media ecology lens. It articulates the relevance of media as educational agents and explores the impact of a social movement in the creation and shaping of a new media ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 15-M movement, which emerged in 2011 amidst the Great Recession in Spain, has achieved the status of transformative protest event. Social movement research using this concept has mostly focused on meso-level legacies: event memories shape later organisational dynamics within social movements and among activists. Collective memories can, however, transcend the activists' milieu, acting as a sediment in the political culture of broader social sectors. Along this line of inquiry, this article examines the memory of the 15-M movement among ordinary demonstrators in two recent mobilisations (International Women's Day and the pensioners' protests). Based on forty-four in-depth interviews, we show not only a widespread recollection of 15-M eight years later, but also that memories include mobilising components, influencing the perceptions of protest as an efficacious political tool, or extending protest repertoires that are now considered familiar and legitimate. Recollections of 15-M are also associated with changes in the critical understanding of the political system and the advancement of a new political subject, which envisages an active role in politics for ordinary citizens. Significantly, these mobilising memories are discernible even among those who did not participate at the time, showing that cultural legacies may have transcended the first-instance protagonists. In short, protest action, subjects, critical mentalities and repertoires gained an enduring legitimacy, which is consistent with the extension of alternative horizontal logics of politics and more active understandings of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 15-M mobilizations shook Spanish society and placed the demand for 'real democracy' at the center of political debate. In order to better understand the scope and impact of the Indignados' democratizing endeavors, this article aims to address an issue that has not received much attention: the connection of this protest cycle with the political economy. To this end, both the opportunity structure generated by the economic crisis and the class and generational conflicts shaping the mobilizations are analyzed. The article proposes that the symbolic and short-term success of 15-M in re-politicizing distributive conflicts contrasts with its medium-term inability to materially democratize the political economy. This relative failure can be explained by the confluence of several factors: on the one hand, 15-M's organizational weakness and its disconnection from a somewhat declining labor movement; on the other, the lack of responsiveness of Spain's political institutions to street politics and the powerful structural inertia of economic dynamics created by decades of neoliberalism. The findings of this case study aim to contribute to scholarly debates on the impacts of social movements and their connection to political economy and social classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2011 the Indignados traced a line of flight from austerity policies. They invented unprecedented spaces for participation, re-imagined Spanish democracy and turned their attention to forms of life as spaces for political transformation. Their practices enacted a collective sensitivity that challenged the regime of impotence blocking their lives. The global financial crisis was denying them a future, and their ability to think and act together. Ten years later, while the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the world's normal course, self-organizing neighbours updated the Indignados' sensibility and methods. This article analyses the neighborhood support networks created by the Mutual Aid Groups (GAM) in A Coruña, Spain, during the lockdown in March 2020. As the government urged people to stay at home and obey the public health directives, the GAM took care of vulnerable life and democracy, threatened today by new authoritarian drives. From the standpoint of the ethics of care and an interest in experimental social movements, we discuss the power of a caring democracy, which sustains life and renews the democratic turn of the 15-M. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 2015 and 2019, the Spanish capital, Madrid, was governed by the movement party Ahora Madrid, a novel political actor strongly connected to anti-austerity and pro-democracy movements gathered under the umbrella of the Indignados, or '15 M', movement. Against the background of the party's abundant hopes for regenerating urban democracy at the beginning of its term, our research asks how and to what extent Ahora Madrid translated the movement's democratizing practices and expectations into concrete policies. Based on our own qualitative research involving government actors and social movements, our empirical findings demonstrate that the democratic innovations implemented responded to diverging visions of how to achieve 'real democracy', defined by different imaginaries and traditions of collective action within 15 M. While demonstrating the steady interaction between Ahora Madrid policy makers and the social movements they came from, the findings also reveal the policy agenda divisions that posed a challenge for the broadening and deepening of urban democracy. These divisions concerned vertical versus horizontal political logics, the individual versus collective nature of political subjects, and digital versus on-site political participation and deliberation. In addition to the tensions emerging among the various ideational frameworks for collective action (i.e. the autonomous tradition, technopolitics, and the institutional left), this study identifies an apparent divorce between the two intertwined goals of the 15 M: to fight neoliberal austerity and to seek participatory democracy. The empirical findings lead to highlight the internal accounts of the consequences of social movements, especially concerning the conditions for institutionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the biographical consequences of participation in 15 M by following the trajectories, from May 2011 to November 2019, of individuals who took part in the movement in Madrid. Based on a field study combining observations and repeat interviews, this follow-up of the trajectories of forty Indignados (22 in the period 2013–15 and 18 to 2019) reveals considerable biographical impacts on both representations and individual practices in the political, personal and professional spheres. These impacts were particularly salient among those who had experienced biographical disruptions, whether in relation to political socialization or a drop in social status, and those who had mobilized in an intense and lasting way. However, 15 M had also had a profound influence on the biographies of those with an activist background and those who had been less involved in the movement. This microsociological approach gives us a better understanding of the biographical trajectories of the Indignados and provides an account of the transformations in collective action in Madrid over the past ten years. The main legacy of 15 M is therefore that it created a new generation of activists who are now involved in a multitude of activist microspheres and institutional settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and the social distancing measures introduced created a series of social problems and needs that were partially addressed in Italy as well as in other countries by grassroots mutual aid initiatives. This article analyses these initiatives as direct social actions: actions that do not primarily focus on claiming something from the state or other power holders, but instead on directly transforming some specific aspects of society by means of the very action itself. The article addresses the impact of the temporality of emergency on solidarity politics by employing a series of qualitative interviews and choosing to place the analysis of mutual aid initiatives that developed in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in longer pathways of engagement in direct social action. While many of these initiatives were strongly rooted in the Italian social movement and civil society landscape and the choice to engage in mutual aid activities was the result of long years of reflection and planning, the article shows how strongly the temporality of emergency affected the nature of these initiatives, their development and their outcomes, in particular with regard to the extraordinary number of people who volunteered and their relationship with politicisation processes. Through this analysis, the article aims to contribute to the understanding of a crucial form of action and the influence of exceptional contexts on collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One distinctive feature of the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong is the 'international front' on which both Hong-Kong-based activists and members of diaspora communities engaged in public diplomacy and foreign government lobbying. While the emergence of the international front can partly be explained by perceived political opportunities and protesters' identity change, this article focuses on the evolution of mobilizing structures. Of particular interest is how the mobilizing structures were activated, expanded, and transformed in a protest campaign marked by certain core features of networked social movements. Based on in-depth interviews with twenty activists, the analysis illustrates the co-presence of and complementarity between digitally enabled, citizen self-initiated actions and organization-based mobilization. The analysis also shows how tactical shifts, negotiation of differences among activists, and state response drove the transformation of activist network. General theoretical implications on understanding of diaspora mobilization and networked social movements are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to advance environmental justice are often halting and uneven. How can we identify the longer-term significance of protests that seem to have failed? In this article, we turn to work on environmental injustice to examine the consequences of environmental justice movements over time and across space. We draw on the scholarship of Rob Nixon on 'slow violence': rather than the spectacular, visceral, and immediate violence of war, he argues that environmental degradation is a violence that operates in cumulative, slow-moving, accretive, and multi-causal ways. Borrowing – and flipping – Nixon's conceptualization, we suggest that a parallel process of 'slow justice' is taking place. As with environmental damage, mobilization for environmental justice can have consequences that are dispersed in time and place, occur in non-linear forms, and operate at multiple scales. To track the pathways through which slow justice emerges, we develop a three-part typology of social movement connectivity. Using the categories of people, projects, and processes, we identify the geographically and temporally distanced social, material, and governance legacies of moments of resistance. Through a case study of mobilization against fossil fuel infrastructure in the Mackenzie Valley in northern Canada in the 1970s, we use the typology to trace how this moment of mobilization shaped other efforts of environmental justice organizing, including for campaigns in different regions and on different issue-areas. We argue that slow justice can reframe how we understand the outcomes of social mobilization projects, making visible the often obscure, indirect, and long-term accrued benefits of environmental justice work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While activists have effectively used the #blacklivesmatter hashtag to organize protests against police brutality and racism, this success has also drawn out many who use the hashtag to express their opposition. How do supporters of the Movement for Black Lives and their opponents coordinate on Twitter? Drawing on a corpus of 18.5 million tweets, this paper compares coordination among supporters and opponents of #blacklivesmatter in terms of relations and spatialities. We elaborate two different models of coordination: the swarm and the grassroots. Compared to their adversaries, supporters of #blacklivesmatter are more strongly rooted in places and embedded in local relations, suggesting that their online activism builds on grassroots communities. Opponents can be differentiated into two categories. One group consists of conservatives that are rooted in places but in a markedly different geography than supporters; they are more often located outside of major cities and outside of the coastal states. A second group of digitally networked extreme right opponents coordinates more in the fashion of a swarm: they synchronize without being rooted in places or embedded in local relations. These findings demonstrate that movements and countermovements benefit from the affordances of social media in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement studies and labour scholarship have been developed as separate research fields, the former exploring the mobilizations of the so-called 'new' social movements, the latter the 'old' labour movements. However, such a sharp disciplinary distinction does not do justice to the interwoven character that social mobilizations may often take on in their formation processes and outcomes. This distinction seems especially untenable today given the return and proliferation of struggles on labour issues, where bottom-up forms of worker organizing and social movement types of action have been mixed, giving rise to a new array of labour actors and mobilizations. In short, the time seems ripe to spur on a scholarly prolific discussion between scholars of social movement and labour studies. In this profile, I start to do so by accounting for the case of the ongoing worker struggle at the GKN plant in the outskirts of Florence (Italy), where workers have been carrying out a bottom-up mobilization, consisting of the factory occupation and other radical forms of action. Both labour and social movement scholars can learn from this struggle, as it encompasses features whose interpretation cannot be confined to only one of the two disciplines, but it necessitates their integration. 'Remobilizing labour' entails, therefore, to stimulate a prolific conversation between these two communities of scholars on the topic of workers' collective organizing. With this contribution, I hope to be opening up the way for such kinds of studies to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since it first originated in the United States, #MeToo has spread around the world, giving rise to the most powerful and widespread global campaign against sexual violence in history. In March 2019, Mexican women created Twitter accounts and hashtags to share their experiences of sexual assault at workplaces and schools, in a country where nearly eleven women are murdered every day. The #MeToo campaign was intense and brief. It was trending at the end of March 2019, but by mid-April interest in it had plummeted. This article examines how the hashtag depended on activists' efforts in order to build an affective community for disclosure of sexual harassment. Based on the voices of participants, this study argues that although activists were able to handle affective labor to solve collectively urgent problems arising within the campaign, they failed to withstand the backlash which followed the suicide of Armando Verga Gil, a famous rock musician, after being accused of sexual abuse online. From the perspective of social movements theory, #MeToo is characterized as digital direct action forming part of the repertoire of contention of feminist crowds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engagement with science is a prominent feature for many social movements, yet the dimensions of that scientific engagement and bidirectional relationships between science and advocacy are incompletely theorized in social movement scholarship. While social movement scholarship has previously demonstrated the importance of external political and economic factors for social movement processes and efficacy, we show that the emergence and success of environmental health activism is also dependent on dynamic relationships between scientific evidence and lay demands for particular types of knowledge production and application. Despite decades of industrial production and widespread contamination, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) were a politically obscure class of chemicals until a recent spike in attention from activist, regulatory, and scientific circles. Drawing from in-depth interviews with activists of PFAS-impacted communities, we develop the scientific opportunity concept to examine how activists create and mobilize scientific factors to support their goals, and how scientific factors, in turn, support the emergence of further activism. Dimensions of scientific opportunity include availability of funding streams, openness and receptivity of institutionalized scientific spaces, presence of collaborative or community-led research, methodological and technological advancements aligned with activist demands, availability of relevant scientific findings and datasets, and presence of prominent scientific allies. We conclude by discussing the relevance of our concept to a wide range of social movements addressing science and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the citizen movements initiated in Hong Kong and Chile in 2019. Based on discourse analysis and interviews, the study argues that adapting the repertoires of protest to the mobility restrictions and the evolution of the political systems reinforced the populist dimension of the Anti-ELAB (anti-extradition law amendment bill) and the Chilean Spring movements. In Hong Kong, the restrictions of freedoms facilitated the constitution of a broad international network opposed to the Chinese Communist Party that comprises overseas organisations and public figures in exile dedicated to lobbying before western governments and providing a discourse frame to the diasporic communities. In Chile, the successive election campaigns that accompanied the constitutional process allowed new political actors with refoundation aspirations to access the institutions. This study found, in both cases, that rhetoric based on the antagonistic exaltation of the people’s signifier has become central to the movements’ discourses: a transformation accompanied by the consolidation of political leaders pretending to represent the movements’ demands. This study analyses the discourses and demands of the citizen movements in light of the institutional framework in which they appear and evolve to contribute to the growing literature where the study of contemporary social movements intersects with the studies of populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current literature finds that democratization is most likely when opposition social movements have initiated a political transition. Yet little work has disaggregated bottom-up transitions to suggest when this effect obtains. This article examines a case not widely known in the social movements' literature: the 1991 political transition in Zambia. It proposes a novel theoretical avenue to help explain this case's incomplete democratic transition. The piece re-conceptualizes the opposition movement as a multi-organizational actor network. I argue that opposition movements face strong incentives to unify through either centralizing around a single organization or creating a dense network of multiple, overlapping connections. The strategy they pursue affects the transitional political landscape. Highly centralized opposition networks are likely to lead to less democratic outcomes while dense decentralized networks will have more democratic outcomes. I find that high centralization by the opposition in Zambia undermined political accountability during the transition and limited Zambia's democratic progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 2015 local elections, political formations with their roots in social movements took control of several Spanish city councils, including Madrid and Barcelona. The wave of protests that began with the 15-M movement in 2011 gave way to an electoral model that aspired to promote transformative politics and new ways of 'doing politics'. The aim of the present study is to examine the scope and the limits of this move into the institutions in Madrid and Barcelona (2015–2019). The case studies involved in-depth interviews and a documentary review. Results reveal significant differences between the two cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last weekend of February 2003, between six and ten million people in 60 different countries protested against the imminent Iraq War. Commentators quickly described the worldwide protests as a manifestation of a new form of transnational contention, which would lead to new forms of transnational memory and identity. Building on efforts to connect social movement and memory studies, this article examines if the massive size and transnational nature of the February 2003 anti-war protests resulted in an equally widely shared and transnational form of memory. Following research that describes the crucial role of visual communication for social movements and memory, it approaches this question by studying the size and shape of the online visual memory of the 2003 anti-war protests. Applying the Google Cloud Vision API to retrieve and analyse 1746 online circulations of twenty-five photographs of the 2003 anti-war protests in the period 2003–2019, we find that, compared to other famous images of protest, the online circulation of images of the protests remains limited. This suggests that the massive protests of 2003 did not result in a widely shared and transnational form of memory. Rather than focusing on individual images, this article argues that studying patterns in their online circulation can explain why some movements remain in the public eye, while others quickly disappear from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need by Sasha Costanza-Chock and Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein address ways to help navigate dominations people experience in society. Constanza-Chock's book is an essential resource for scholars of social movements and activists because the concept of 'design justice' represents a new form of activism that could build communities of activists, scientists, scholars, architects, and researchers to combat oppressive designs in society. In a similar vein, D'Ignazio and Klein offer ideas of concrete actions for data scientists as they seek help from feminism to build a more equitable society. The uniqueness of data feminism as a tool of activism lies in the fact that it encourages looking beyond quantifiable data to elevate emotions and embodiment that are crucial resources for social movements. Both books are grounded in the theory of intersectional feminism as they question stereotypical masculine values like objectivity and logic. Social movements, scholars who study them, and activists can use the ethical framework of 'design justice' and the principles of 'data feminism' to build more inclusive spaces for individual communities by honoring existing knowledge and practices, and by creating new and data-driven ways of to push back against the oppressive system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how volunteer and staff participants influence coalition functioning and outcomes. We compare two environmental coalitions in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: the Clean Rivers Campaign (CRC), which was supported by a general progressive movement community and led by organizational staff members, and Protect Our Parks (POP), an all-volunteer alliance that was part of a more specific anti-fracking movement community. While much research on social movement coalitions focuses on their formation, we show how coalition structure and types of participants affect the mobilization, longevity and goal achievement of our two cases. Both coalitions succeeded in mobilizing supporters for their campaigns, but the CRC enjoyed greater longevity and had a clearer impact on public policy. Paid staff and organizational members were better able to recruit new activists, maintain commitment and transform coalition goals, affecting longevity and goal achievement. This finding contributes to our understanding of the impacts of different types of structures and activists on coalition outcomes, suggesting that paid organizers do not necessarily limit the range of coalition tactics and goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Animal Welfare Movement, among other things, aims to change animal welfare policies. Why certain animal welfare campaigns have been more successful than others remains unclear. This article examines the course of such policy changes in animal welfare based on the 1986 ban on dog slaughter in Germany. It answers the research question: 'How can we explain the influence of the animal welfare movement on policy change regarding the ban on dog slaughter?' This article analyses the case of a long-delayed policy change, although the demand had received broad public and political support. Drawing on social movement studies, this article proposes that the delay is due to framing errors on the part of the animal welfare movement and argues that policy change could only take place through the help of allies in the field of politics. Using the process-tracing method, over 1,000 pages of policy documents and other relevant documents were analysed. The results show that the dog slaughter ban was delayed because policy makers feared that a morally motivated ban could be extended to other animal species. Only frame bridging with public health discourse by actors from the field of politics was able to overcome this barrier. This article contributes to social movement studies by analysing a case of frame bridging triggered by movement allies, thereby deepening our understanding of the relevance of the wider cultural environment of a contested policy and of interactions between movements and allies in policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades the importance of emotion for social mobilization has been recognized. Likewise, there has been a recent upsurge of descriptive and theoretical work done on creative forms of activism that mobilize affect. What is missing is an evidence-based, empirical study of the variable impact of creative vs. conventional forms of activism on a public audience. To address this knowledge gap, the authors designed and staged a public experiment on the comparative effect and affect of creative vs. more conventional forms of activism over three days on a busy bridge in Copenhagen, Denmark. Our experiment design allowed us to analyse differences and similarities on several levels: attention, thought, feeling, memory, and action. We found that a creative approach was more effective at delivering upon traditional advocacy objectives like awareness, engagement, and receptiveness than conventional means. In addition, the affective responses of most people we interviewed and observed were decidedly more positive towards the creative interventions than for more conventional ones. Follow-up surveys also revealed that creative activism proved to be more memorable and result in more ensuing action on the issues. A 'double edge' to creative activism, however, was also observed. The novelty, humor, and surprise of creative forms of activism that generated interest and mobilized affect, could also result in 'non-productive confusion,' scepticism regarding the issue, and undermining the seriousness of the activists and their cause. Qualifications aside, the data gathered from the "Copenhagen Experiment" strongly suggest that creative activism is more effective, in part because it is more affective, than conventional forms of activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the promise to address socioeconomic injustices and unemployment, these issues remain in political and public debates in 'democratizing' Tunisia without having no radical and systematic approach to resolving them in place. The existing literature notes that Tunisia's 'transition to democracy' has been largely shaped by the old neoliberal approach, leading many youths to take to the street again. This article contributes to the literature and more broadly to the study of resistance in neoliberal times by exploring the relationship between the post-2011 transitional justice regime's governing through rights and justice and the Mafrouzeen Amniya Movement, which consists of a group of unemployed protesters who claim that their right to work was violated by the state as a result of their protests against the authoritarian regime. Drawing on critical approaches to neoliberalism, human rights and social movements, I argue that transitional justice in Tunisia partly served neoliberal governing by marginalizing revolutionary demands for structural changes and social justice and promoting individualized forms of human rights. Crucially, the neoliberal function of transitional justice was not a top-down process but was constituted through a form of social movement whose dominant liberal human rights discourse was (re)produced by the state as well as by grass-roots movements including the Mafrouzeen Amniya group. In arguing this, rather than present unemployed protesters as being co-opted and subordinated to the state, this article offers a nuanced understanding of how they can reproduce and at the same time challenge the neoliberal transitional justice movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2011 the 15 M movement occupied squares across Spain demanding true democracy. Four years later, bottom-up municipalist initiatives won the 2015 local elections in seven medium-size and large cities. In coalition with traditional parties, these initiatives formed new left-wing governments that incorporated former activists as mayors and councilors. This history has sparked debates about the consequences of co-optation, institutional alliances, and state openness to social movements. In this article we aim to contribute to that debate with a discussion of the outcomes of municipalist governments in four cities (Madrid, Barcelona, A Coruña, and Cádiz) during the 2015–2019 mandate. Theoretically, we argue for the necessity to interpret these outcomes against the background of the political and economic contexts that constrain (and enable) a progressive urban agenda. Empirically, our results reveal that municipalist governments only to a certain extent performed as instruments of grassroots movements. Despite favorable alliances and partial achievements, we identify various constraints to the responsiveness of municipalist governments to activist demands. Especially, we conclude that supra-local neoliberal policies, various concerned capitalist interests, and the relative waning of the 15 M protest movement limited the potential benefits of those alliances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Movements attempt to change beliefs and behavior. Yet we know little about what happens following one of the most dramatic forms of change: movement from one side of a contentious issue to the opposition. I examine four cases of movement conversion, focusing on how actors present conversion stories. I find converts, journalists, and sympathetic activists present converts as credible experts on the opposition and use their stories to graphically demonize the opposition. It's not surprising that converts and like-minded activists accept and publicize converts' stories for their gain. It is notable that the media frequently presents conversion stories in an uncritical manner, emphasizing the most sensational elements of converts' tales without questioning the truth of their claims. As a result, converts' former insider status is primarily presented as an unproblematic source of credibility across mediums. This suggests converts can be valuable assets to social movement organizations, capturing media attention and demonizing the opposition in a persuasive and compelling manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), activists and scholars debate their effect on social movement inclusivity. Those in favor argue ICTs improve access to and voice within movements. Those against argue that the digital divide exacerbates existing inequalities. Yet, these debates often hinge on basic access to ICTs and do not consider the usefulness of their application. Drawing on over three years of fieldwork and 24 in-depth interviews among activists within the women's movement of Ghana, West Africa, our findings complicate a binary notion of access. We highlight how a more effective, as opposed to formal, access to ICTs is needed for inclusion within social movements. We further demonstrate how organizations facing ICT restrictions often choose not to use them. This is not because activists lack motivation or understanding of ICT potential, but because they make pragmatic decisions to advance their priorities using more reliable means. This study demonstrates the enduring relevance of the digital divide, the importance of access quality for ICTs to increase social movement inclusion, and how movement culture can compound or challenge the exclusionary effects of ICTs. We conclude with suggestions to reduce inequalities within social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement studies often focus on how the general public is mobilized to join collective contentious actions rather than on state-movement relations. Yet, institutional actors who occupy positions within the administration can employ institutional means to support a social movement. We examine how social-psychological factors and communication patterns influence institutional actors' participation, based on a survey of civil servants during the anti-extradition law amendment bill movement in Hong Kong (N = 277). The results show that both the perceived damage to reputation and collective efficacy relate positively to participation intent. Through structural equation modeling, we elaborate how news consumption on different media platforms and interpersonal discussions influence civil servants' political participation indirectly through affecting the perception of their reputation and collective efficacy. These findings suggest institutional actors are motivated to act when a social movement threatens institutional legitimacy and engenders collective efficacy through mass/interpersonal communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the linkages between the online activism and offline protests against the anti-Muslim, Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed in India in 2019. Muslim women initiated a 101-day sit-in protest at Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, India to challenge both the anti-Muslim rationality of CAA and the ruling party in India. I analyze how the experiences of Muslim women in physical sites of protests are tied with the presence of digital feminist networks which foster translocal connections and sustain the movement through online activism. I study both the corporeal street protests where the female body is physically deployed as an instrument of dissent and the virtual presence of cyberfeminists who use digital platforms to create and circulate discursive and everyday experiences challenging the surveillance of the precarious female body. In unpacking the connections between body-offline-online, I bring to the surface discussions on the pervasiveness of violence against Muslims, especially women, in India and how they are subjected to instances of discrimination manifest in the form of corporeal punishment as well as discursive vitriol and ridicule. I argue that a protest led by Muslim women in India challenges the majoritarian masculinist assumptions about public spaces, politics, and processes of meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following increased flexibilization of labour market and related decline of traditional labour unionism over the last few decades, studying mobilization processes of precarious workers has become particularly timely. While localized forms of organization and unionization are gradually emerging, little is known about why workers intend to join these coordinated forms of collective action. Integrating social movement studies with social psychological literature on collective action, this study fills this gap by exploring collective action intentions in the current context of non-standard labour. To do so, we surveyed precarious workers enrolled by temporary hiring agencies in Italy (N = 379) and found two parallel psychological pathways explaining their collective action intentions. On the one hand, participants exhibited high collective action intentions when they were able to collectively identify with other precarious workers as part of the same social group. Collective identification with precarious workers increased group-based injustice that in turn predicted collective action intentions. On the other hand, participants also exhibited high collective action intentions when they were able to politically identify with unionized workers. Politicized identification with unionized workers increased collective efficacy that in turn predicted collective action intentions. By singling out the complementary role played by these two parallel pathways of collective action intentions among precarious workers, this study shed light on the socio-psychological determinants underlying the mobilization propensity of individuals still lacking any organizational affiliation, a topic that has been relatively ignored in scholarly literature. In doing so, we combine social movement studies and social psychological literature in innovative ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I Gendered Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges i offers invaluable reading for movement activists as well as students and scholars of intersectionality, social movements, gender and politics, and comparative politics. The rise of populist far-right parties and anti-gender movements across the globe have challenged diverse equality and social justice projects. ISBN 978-1-78552-290-1, $44.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-78552-289-5, $41.50 (eBook), ISBN 978-1-78552-291-8. [Extracted from the article]

Connective action, or individuals networking with each other online to form social movements, rarely leads to lasting change. In this study, we argue that such movements are ultimately ineffective because they struggle to sustain themselves over time and identify the reasons behind their transience. Our analysis focuses on Twitter conversations about Aadhaar, a biometric ID project that has raised concerns about data privacy and civil liberty in India, the world's largest democracy. A computational mixed-methods approach incorporating social network analysis, sentiment analysis, and structural topic modeling demonstrates that connective action against Aadhaar failed to produce a sustained discourse of resistance, with people's feelings toward and beliefs about Aadhaar vacillating sharply. The analysis draws attention to the power of brick-and-mortar social institutions, including the state and its agencies, political parties, courts, technology companies, and 'legacy' news media, in shaping and reshaping seemingly bottom-up discourses on digital platforms. It also identifies three interlinked weaknesses of connective action – the individualized nature of mobilization, excessive flexibility of social networks, and a negative emotional culture. We contend that in order to be effective, contemporary social movements need to utilize digital technologies for 'collective' action by forging collective identities that bind participants affectively and cognitively, empower them against structures of social control, and enable them to commit to non-personal and long-term objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between March and June 2020, residents in north London faced the Covid-19 pandemic by creating neighbourhood Mutual Aid groups on WhatsApp and Facebook. These groups not only addressed basic survival needs such as bringing groceries and medicines to infected people, the elderly, and other vulnerable populations in quarantine; they also offered opportunities for social interactions between strangers living in the same neighbourhood during lockdown. Their success was linked to their rapid mobilization, adaptability and local knowledge. A study of their meso-level organization on Facebook shows that we should pay attention to the potential for mobilization of these grassroots structures. Their bottom-up organization, based on the principle 'Solidarity not Charity', showed a singular way to express dissent with policy response to the pandemic, and brought them closer to the horizontal social movements of the 2010s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive research shows that emotions influence social movement participation. Scholars argue that emotions like anger and pride generally activate – i.e. increase movement participation – whereas emotions like hopelessness and sadness generally deactivate. Organizational theory complicates this research by showing that the same emotions can produce varied outcomes, although the causes of variation remain undertheorized. This article brings together these disparate literatures to ask how boredom, an emotion underexplored in the social movement literature, shapes political participation in a rape crisis center. Drawing on three years of participant observation and forty in-depth interviews, the author shows that, while most volunteer victim advocates experience boredom while answering less 'legit' hotline calls and passing time during shifts, their boredom does not necessarily deactivate. Instead, the meaning volunteers attach to their boredom – specifically through a process this article terms 'emotional attribution' – shapes activation. Volunteers who blame their boredom on organizational conditions and service provision models often decrease their participation, whereas volunteers who understand boredom individualistically remain engaged. These findings advance social movement and organization theory by disrupting assumptions about the essential 'good'-ness or 'bad'-ness of emotions, and by theorizing emotional attribution as an interactional process predictive of variation in the consequences of emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long seen as divergent in nature, the fields of populist studies and social movement analysis have rarely been the focus of cross-disciplinary research. This paper, by encouraging such convergence makes two significant contributions to both the study of populism and social movements. First, by combining a discourse theoretical approach to populism with social movement theories of abeyance and 'cultural repertoires', it examines populist discourse as a form of contentious politics. Second, using primary and secondary sources of both a textual and visual nature, it applies this framework to a case study of North Italian populist regionalism and in doing so takes a diachronic approach to populism. This allows for a clearer understanding of not only of the decline of certain populist movements, but also how these movements' repertoires are transmitted between separate waves of activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tailoring messages and calls-to-action to demographic subgroups could give social movement organizations an edge in recruitment and mobilization efforts. But do they engage in this strategy? We analyze the content of 70 social movement organizations' websites, across seven different issue sectors, to determine the presence and form of customized, age-tailored material across the youth spectrum: children, teens, and young adults. We find that many organizations disseminate youth-targeted website content, and they are creative in the ways they do so. Analysis indicates organizations use customized frame packaging, defined as the act of tailoring the presentation of the frame for a specific audience, as well as tactic customization, defined as action opportunities designed for a specific demographic subgroup. Frame packaging strategies include fun, easy-to-read material for youth and reaching youth through education materials. Customized tactics include attempts to empower youth to be the drivers of action and to gain access to arenas that otherwise may be hard to breach (i.e., schools). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement scholars have long been interested in how violence impacts movements. A primary route to that impact is through public opinion. We examine changes in public opinion – in aggregate and within population subgroups – following dramatic sequences of movement-related violence. Using survey data collected in four US cities before and after the 'long hot summer' of urban unrest in 1967, we examine changes in public opinion about whether rioters reacted to legitimate grievances and whether the unrest would be effective in helping the plight of Black Americans. We find that violence expanded the opinion gap between the dominant white 'public' and Black 'counterpublic.' We also find unique opinion patterns among within-race subgroups based on gender and education (Black women and college-educated whites). In effect, violence realigned the structure of public opinion allies for the Civil Rights Movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement scholarship has increasingly shown how continuous mobilization depends on collective memory construction. This article sets out to study this formative activity in a changing media landscape. It asks how activists navigate the temporal nexus of collective memory mediation. The empirical focus is on Brazil's Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST), a well-established organization that since the early 1980s has communicated its collective memories on several media platforms. This article also demonstrates, through a corpus analysis of MST's internal newspaper, Jornal Sem Terra (1984–2014), and its Facebook page (2014–2019), how collective memories of rural violence serve various functions in these different media. The empirical study verifies the formative implication of rural violence for Brazil's landless movement, but also unveils notable differences between the newspaper and Facebook in this regard. Whereas Jornal Sem Terra employed a horizontal collective memory construction through contemporary documentation of ongoing and upcoming events, the Facebook posts primarily engaged in the vertical extraction of already established memories. In other words, the print media produced a narrative around collective memories of rural violence, and these memories were re-produced through digital media platforms. These empirical findings implicate that renewed methodologies are needed in future studies of social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an overview of the Istanbul park forums that emerged in parallel with the Gezi events – social protest movements that took place in summer 2013. Despite the criticism that Gezi events were short-lived, impulsive, and ineffectual I argue that they have a long-lasting influence on democratic consciousness and new forms of political action. Istanbul park forums, the street and urban squares have become an important link between those who wish to transform the qualities of both democracy and the regime at large with efforts to create influence over local and national policy-making processes through engagement in political action. Drawing from the political theory of Hannah Arendt, this study assigns the capacities of 'deed and speech' to redefine 'politics'. Analyzing the politics of the park forum process through the lens and concepts of Arendt's political theory suggests an alternative way of evaluating the eventual dissolution of the Gezi events: rather than suffering from the inability to organize themselves within the conventional format of party politics, I show that the Gezi community deliberately created a new manner of engagement through political action, and thereby cast its influence as a historic landmark in the future of Turkish politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2013 Gezi protests still remain the largest to have arisen in the AKP era of governance in Turkey. In light of substantial interdisciplinary attention attributed to this case, this study analyses a previously neglected, yet salient activist strategy known as fraternization that arose during protester-police interactions. We argue that when entrapped in situations marked by confrontational tension with police, protesters strategically attempt to overcome outgroup divisions by getting state forces to sympathize with opposition through fraternization. Utilizing video data analysis (VDA), we assess a sample of 147 publicly available videos featuring protester-police interactions and complement our assessment with semi-structured interviews with protesters. Results reveal that significant levels of fraternization occurred between heterogeneous groups of activists (age, gender, identity) and police. In some cases fraternization attempts contributed to a positive dialogue being established with police, while other attempts had no effect in reducing repression. Although activists were ultimately unsuccessful in convincing police to defect, this inquiry presents new implications for our understanding of the situational dynamics underlying fraternization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of social movements have often focused on mobilisation and campaigning; by comparison, demobilisation has received little attention. This article adds to the body of literature on demobilisation by examining one case of demonstration campaign demobilisation. The 'Hess Gedenkmarsch' campaign in Germany, initiated in the late 1980s and demobilised by the mid-1990s, is not only a case of a causal mechanism of demobilisation, but also particularly important within far-right social movement activity: it was the vanguard campaign in a emergent pattern of 'demonstration politics' by far-right groups in Germany. The case exhibits a process whereby anti-far-right activists effectively engaged in a sort of kamikaze counter-mobilisation, seeking to shut down far-right events; this, in turn, spurred state authorities to act, imposing coercive measures that demobilised the far-right campaign. This case illustrates a causal mechanism of negative demobilisation that can be observed in other demonstration campaigns, and is particularly relevant to other cases of far-right activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent do perceptions of public opinion effect individual support and political participation in political action? To what extent might media use moderate the role of public opinion in predicting political participation in the digital age? This study investigates these questions by analysing unique data from an experiment and a representative survey designed and conducted at the height of the summer 2011 protests in Israel. This study offers a new analytical model for studying activism by independently and simultaneously examining the direct and indirect effects of perceptions of majority support, individual support and media use on political behaviour. The experimental results suggest that perceptions of public opinion and media use did affect participation in the 2011 social movement. Specifically, increased perception of majority support for the movement led to increased rates of participation. Moreover, media use was inconsequential among those respondents who perceived that a majority of the public supported the protest. Digital media had a moderate effect on the association between perceptions and support for the protest movement, but there was no such effect with respect to mainstream media use. The findings provide new empirical insight into the effects of perceptions of public opinion and media use on political behaviour. In doing so, they help to explain the development of mass protest movements in the digital age and especially the potential effect of perceptions and media use in promoting the evolution of social movements as well as involvement in collective action in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on social movement schools shows that movements often facilitate the schooling of their participants, while scholarship on the biographical consequences of social movements demonstrates that movements influence their participants' subsequent careers. To date, however, few studies consider whether and how the schooling functions of social movements shape participants' later careers. In this article, through a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of the careers of 23 student participants in the Nashville civil rights movement of 1958–1961, we show that participants who enrolled in James Lawson's workshops in nonviolence and who served in the core cadre of the movement's Student Central Committee – two important forms of social movement schooling – pursued careers in organizing and electoral politics. In contrast, participants who did not enroll in Lawson's workshops and who were not part of the core cadre of the Student Central Committee tended to pursue careers as social service workers or businesspeople. The article extends our knowledge of the impacts of social movement schools and suggests directions for future research on the biographical consequences of social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a conceptual framework and introduction to the special section 'Mobilising around Europe: pro and anti-EU politics in an era of populism and nationalism'. By means of its four articles, the special section seeks to address the 'politicisation of Europe' outside of the conventional party-political arena. Whilst the future of European integration has become increasingly contested, not least due to the rise of Eurosceptic political parties of the populist radical right, we observe that politicisation has also occurred in the protest arena through grassroots activism. The contributions in this special section analyse these mobilisations, which have thus far received limited scholarly attention, and the positions and frames activists and various social movement organisations (SMOs) adopt concerning the future of European integration. By doing this, these articles reveal the often complex and context-dependent stances towards 'Europe' amongst actors across the ideological spectrum, which extend beyond dichotomous pro-/anti-EU positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many left-wing and liberal social movement activists, support for 'Europe' and opposition to a 'nationalist' turn has become a key motivation for their activism. Paradoxically, however, their opponents at the other end of the political spectrum, far-right activists, also positively identify as European. This article analyses one of the key developments in the contemporary European protest arena, i.e. the dominance of European identities, even when activists strongly criticize real-existing European integration. First, we propose a novel conceptual framework that captures these dominant European identities. We distinguish between 'anti-nationalist Europeans' and 'pro-European nativists', underlining the existence of strong European identities across the political spectrum, deeply embedded in the mindset of activists even when they sharply criticize European integration in its current form. At the same time, these pro-European stances strongly differ in whether they are culturally inclusive or exclusive and how they relate to the question of nationalism or the nation state. Second, we apply these concepts to six key cases of movement mobilization in western Europe after the anti-austerity protests, shedding light on the anti-TTIP protests, Yanis Varoufakis' DiEM25, the anti-Brexit movement in the UK, the Sardines in Italy (including their offshoot, the Herrings in Finland), the Identitarians and PEGIDA. Third, we further contextualize the 'anti-nationalist Europeanism' and 'pro-European nativism' of these six cases, emphasizing historical roots, the facilitation of coalition building, implications for transnational practices, and the meaning of silence. Methodologically, the article draws on online and offline publications, semi-structured interviews, and survey data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue will focus on processes and mechanisms of the making and unmaking of alliances among different grassroots, civil society, and social movement organizations. The formation of alliances is a key principle and basic mechanism of mobilization and the emergence of social movements. When focusing on why and how alliances emerge, social movement scholars tend to neglect that the making and breaking of coalitions is embedded in and interacting with broader social dynamics of societal fragmentation and convergence. We understand the politics of alliances as a process in which decisions about friends and foes are made and where increased attachment toward one's group helps to consolidate the constituency and create a feeling of belonging, but by doing so also accentuates antagonism and conflict structures in society, crystallizing interests into opposing fractions. Such dynamics often happen at the same time. Social movements may foster ideological alignment and belonging with some actors while creating more ideological distance towards others – thereby shaping the overall structure of societal relations. The contributions in the special issue build upon existing research on alliances and expands it – focusing on different friends and foes dynamics – in three important aspects: First, they look at how alliance formation interacts with the (re-)making of social boundaries and identities. Second, they address the consequences alliance formation can have across levels and contexts. Third, they explicitly look into cases where alliances fail or dissolve, and thus address the consequences of (un)making alliances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent, among progressive social movements, has critical Europeanism ceded terrain to Euroscepticism, including within this alter-European vision, is a central question this article seeks to address. After summarizing the theoretical debate on Europeanization and social movements (part 2), the article looks at three main sets of frames. As far as the diagnostic framing is concerned, in comparison with the period of the ESF, the critiques of the existing European politics and policies became even more acute (part 3). Looking at the prognostic framing, part 4 of this article points however to the lack of a generalized request for a return to the nation states, with rather the search for an alternative formula. Even if the closing down of political opportunities is reflected in the diagnostic frames, the prognostic frames single out the solutions in the transformation of European institutions, rather than in their demise. At the motivational level, addressed in part 5 of this article, the progressive social movements still see themselves as main engine of these transformations, even if acknowledging the difficulties in transnational mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines public contestation of Europe by the far right in France. It investigates whether far-right mobilization on the EU has changed over time, and how it diverges in the party and non-party sectors. Specifically, we follow a politicization approach and address mobilization in terms of three interrelated dimensions: intensity, issue focus, and action repertoire. This allows comparing collective action in the electoral and protest arenas, thus assessing how the far right politicizes Europe in public debates. The study relies on a mixed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the content of the press releases posted by far-right parties and movements on their official websites, scraped automatically from 2012 to 2019. The results show that European integration is increasingly at the core of far-right politics in France, but its politicization unfolds in different ways in the protest and electoral arenas. As political conflict over the EU expands, far-right parties and non-party actors are challenged to differentiate their respective profiles. These findings complement existing research on the linkages between protest and elections, and suggest that the rooting of the far right in society is reconfiguring the structure of political conflict in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on social movement analytics of coalition formation, we have established a dialogue with social theory on social inequalities and feminist scholarship on solidarity, bringing together the analytical sharpness of social movement studies with political and normative debates on solidarity building. We suggest that the processes of building solidarities that are key to coalition formation are best understood when taking into account four explanatory dimensions: context (structural conditions that might include political, economic, social and cultural institutional and various scales: from global events to national politics and organizational politics); discursive processes of framing that bridge across different social inequalities; the building of a coalitional identity and resources. We use this analytical framework to inquire into an instance of feminist coalitional politics, namely the Brazilian Marcha das Margaridas. This coalition emerged in the year 2000 and has had six editions since then, mobilizing between 20,000 to 100,000 women to Brasília. While the rural union movement forms the core of its leadership, several other partners co-organize the Marcha, including women's movements, trade union and agrarian social movements. The prominence of a union movement denotes the centrality of working class demands and redistributive issues together with demands for the recognition of gender difference and gender equality. We query the process of emergence and alliance building in the Marcha das Margaridas in 2000 by drawing on different types of data: documental analysis of archival material produced by the coalition, ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with activists that represent different social movements in the coalition [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]

When former president Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal tried to bypass constitutional limitations on renewing his candidature, tens of thousands took to the streets. The success of this mobilisation has been largely attributed to the newly created youth movement, Y'en a marre. Burkina Faso witnessed similar events, when the country saw hundreds of thousands protest against the potential continuation of former president Blaise Compaoré – the action being led by the social movement Balai Citoyen, whose public image also heavily featured music artists. Examining these large-scale mobilisations against term extensions by heads of state from a contentious politics perspective, however, reveals that a large number of actors from civil society and politics were involved in the protests. In both cases, we find cross-movement mobilisations, with none of them forming stable or enduring alliances. I will argue that the reasons for this go back to competitive relations among Senegalese actors, and ideological polarisation in the case of Burkina Faso. My concluding remarks outline the role and relative importance of these social movements within their broader societal contexts, and point at future pathways for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 (3/11), Japan has witnessed a nationwide upsurge of antinuclear demonstrations as well as protests against diverse concerns. Why did this upsurge of protests occur beyond the antinuclear concerns? The exact mechanism that caused this general upsurge of protests has not been explored in detail. Given the limited number of first-time participants, this phenomenon can be fully explained only through an analysis of network-building processes among social movement organizations (SMOs). Based on the first nationwide survey of SMOs conducted in Japan by our team in February 2018, covering 308 groups, we analyzed the constellation of the SMOs' networks after 3/11, their logic of coalition building, and their network effects on mobilization. We observed that the new characteristics of the constellation of the SMOs' networks are twofold. The first feature is that the networks of various SMOs were bridged by antinuclear groups. Antinuclear organizations served as the hub of SMOs' networks, enabling the mobilization to cross different concerns. The second feature is the connections between the citizen groups and labor unions. Labor unions increase the participation during events by mobilizing their partner unions. Both new connections contributed to the general upsurge in large-scale demonstrations for various concerns after 3/11. Our paper contributes to the general discussion on the relation between coalition of SMOs and mobilization by focusing on the dyadic level of networks, and analyzing its effect for mobilization through egocentric network analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]