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In 2011, one of the most important social movements since the end of the dictatorship proposed a change in higher education in Chile. More than two hundred thousand people participated in public demonstrations. Facing the failure of the negotiations with the government, the student movement focused on proposing changes to the 2012 Budget Law. What coalitions did the leaders of this student movement form to influence the Budget Law? The aim of this paper was to analyse the factors that explain coalition formation to impact the 2012 Budget Law. In doing so, an analysis has been carried out, focusing on the leaders of the student movement (CONFECH). This paper emphasizes their coalition with the rectors of public universities and their relationship with other educational actors and the opposition parties. The analysis includes the review of documents and national newspapers and interviews with the leaders of the CONFECH. The results of the analysis show that the traditional factors explaining coalition formation are useful but not sufficient to explain the student movement alliances. This paper argues that the factor that explains the student movement coalitions is the 'strategic sense' that the movement is focused on an outcome-based strategy. The leaders consider a coalition with the rectors of public universities as outcome-tactics. However, the relationship with opposition parties was much more difficult because of their distrust resulting from what happened in 2006. This study thus has significant implications for the coalition formation theories and its relationship with social movements' impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement research has shed light on the relationship between processes of alliance building and multiple factors related to political opportunities, framing, identities, networks and resource mobilization. However, less is known about the impact of eventful protests on coalition building dynamics. Drawing on a paired comparison between the Portuguese and Spanish cycles of protest under the Great Recession, we aim at accounting for social movement alliances over time. While these countries present parallel protest dynamics until 2011, after that point two eventful protests lead each country into different trajectories. While the cycle in Portugal was marked by intermittent large protest events dominated by institutional actors, in Spain the peak of mobilization was consistently high between 2011 and 2013. When comparing these cases two factors stand out: the mobilization capacity and the autonomy of new emerging actors vis-à-vis institutional ones. Eventful protests were a key factor in articulating these elements. In Spain, the strength and autonomy of 15M assemblies and anti-austerity actors facilitated the formation of strategic alliances with trade unions. In Portugal, transversal initiatives and sustained alliances did not follow after the Geração à Rasca events. These emerged only later in the cycle, however were nonetheless hampered by overlapping membership and a lack of autonomy from institutional actors. Two original protest event analysis datasets are used to illustrate these arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While social movement studies have long focused on the formation and dynamics of social movement coalitions and "boundary spanning', much less attention has been paid to why and how social movement alliances break down and dissolve. Expanding theoretical reflections on the 'dark side of digital politics', the current paper bridges critical Internet research and research on movement coalitions and explores how subversive digital media practices deepened existing conflicts within the Indignados movement. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of activists' texts, I outline the specific digital practices that fuelled the unmaking of the movement: trolling discussions, creating fake profiles in order to infiltrate closed groups, hijacking social media accounts, and manipulating voting systems. On a more general level, the paper analyses also how conflicts between activists have been affected by the possibility to capture and 'save' internal discussions and to disseminate snippets of them with the help of screenshots. The use of screenshots as instruments of proof, persuasion and manipulation has become a crucial and often underestimated subversive digital practice in contemporary activism. At the same time, I find that activists have developed strategies to cope with digital subversion and to fix broken connections in the name of new political projects, such as Podemos. Thus, the paper argues first, that technology is political and can be used to dissolve alliances and construct boundaries, and second, that the very notion of the 'political' should be enriched to go beyond the friend-enemy distinction and take into account forgiveness and compromise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in social movement coalitions has been increasing significantly in recent years. While this growing body of research has paid much attention to conditions and processes of coalition building, the consequences of coalitions remain understudied. This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of coalitions' internal impact by exploring how different types of coalitions affect each other. In particular, we analyse how coalitions across countries influence coalitions across movement sectors. The article explores the diverse coalitions in the Global Justice Movement (GJM) in Europe and Southeast Asia, a movement characterized by its strong transnational as well as cross-sectoral ties. Our analysis includes four case studies from different transnational coalitions within the GJM: the peasant network La Vía Campesina, the debt-relief campaign Jubilee 2000, the network of women's movements World March of Women, and the grassroots network Peoples' Global Action. The case studies in Indonesia, the Philippines, the UK and Italy show how coalition building across countries can both enhance as well as hinder coalitions across sectors. We demonstrate how transnational coalitions in some cases deepen divides between local movement sectors and hamper domestic coalition building, while they help bridging divisions within local movement coalitions in others. Our findings point to the relevance of conflicts, power inequalities and trade-offs in coalition building as well as to the importance of negative effects of coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past ten years the concept of intersectionality has become increasingly popular in feminist activism. Yet, how intersectionality is used within grassroots movements remains understudied. This article explores intersectionality in feminism within the radical left using a case study of the 2014 Scottish independence movement. The article draws on analysis of 37 semi-structured interviews carried out during the referendum campaign of 2014. Building on black feminist critiques, I highlight that intersectionality is taken up in ways that reproduce rather than tackle hegemonic norms of gender identity, race, class and age. I trace a disjuncture between interviewee claims to be intersectional and simultaneous perceptions of multi-dimensional marginalisations. I explore interviewee discussion of trans-inclusion as illustrative of how axes of intersectionality can be mobilised in ways that sustain hegemonic norms. Interviewees tended to legitimise their claims to intersectionality through invoking the trope of the 'TERF' – trans-exclusionary radical feminist – as a symbol of a selectively defined second-wave feminism elided with radical feminism. This invocation paradoxically reproduced marginalisations of race, class and even gender identity itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To unlock the explanatory potential of grievance, I conceptualise it through a multidimensional and multilevel theoretical model and test it on cross-national data from European Social Survey Round 8 Data (2016). I define three forms of grievance: economic, political, and social. Such a typology assumes that inequalities are reproduced not only within the field of the economy but also structured by political and social mechanisms. I also argue that grievances have multiple dimensions of complexity. I define two dimensions of grievance, that can be captured by indicators used in cross-national survey data: conditions and cognitive perceptions. Conditions are structural components that reflect existing inequalities when cognitive perceptions indicate an individual feeling of dissatisfaction about economic, political or social issues. Furthermore, grievances may interact differently with specific forms of contentious political action. I examine three forms of protest behaviour: signing petitions, attending demonstrations, and boycotting products. While the results are consistent with the PPT showing that grievances highly intersected with the lack of income and political opportunities create constraints for protest participation, they also show that factors related to dissatisfaction with external institutions and association with a discriminated group of people could increase the chances of protest for deprived individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protests offline, under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic and regulations such as a stay-at-home, require the adaptation of existing tactics and/or the use of innovative tools in the contention repertoire. This adaptation concerns restrictions related to pandemic measures, the lockdown of businesses/institutions, and social distancing along with access to resources, protesters' security, and the no-harm principle. This paper provides examples of protests which have occurred since March 2020, under four categories: (1) tactics adjusted to pandemic-related limitations, (2) tactics that are an essence of such limitations, (3) tactics related to opposition to the lockdown, and (4) protest tactics use framed as 'pandemic'. In the first section, I show how street protest (if permitted at all) is strengthened by symbolic action and how inability to refer to the 'logic of numbers' subjects the tactics to the 'logic of bearing witness.' However, the challenges and tactical limitations do not apply to the opponents of lockdown, breaking the rules of the sanitary regime. The demonstrations against the lockdown preserve the positive effects of street protests and even strengthen them. Discussion concerning high-risk protest actions under threat of infection results, however, in medicalization of political contention. [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]

Anti-consumerism is a rich and diverse field of advocacy and activism and has historically been studied in terms of its tactics, representations and ideologies. This paper presents an original contribution to this field through, first, its presentation of primary research conducted among subvertising practitioners in an international context. Subvertising (aka culture jamming) can be both a movement and a set of tactics used by movements. As an emergent anti-consumerist social movement, it has been connecting individuals and collectives in transnational actions against advertising. Drawing on twenty-four interviews with subvertisers in seven countries, I illustrate their perspectives of advertising as a problem, as well as their practices as responses to that. I argue that their theory and practice of anti-consumerism goes beyond a for/against binary which regards advertising as an ideological enemy. Instead, they protest the deleterious effects of contemporary Habermasian 'publicity'. Thus, the second contribution of this paper is in its application of a grounded theory approach complemented by framing theory to gain insights with respect to those, specifically in terms of public wellbeing, damage to democracy, and damage to the environment. To this set of problems, they offer solutions oriented towards critical pedagogy or policy change. Mobilising all tools at their disposal, from media production to media disruption, subvertisers are involved in the struggle against consumer capitalism, in both cultural and material terms. In their articulation of resistance narratives, and through their variant and often coordinated practices, subvertisers are united in a transnational anti-consumerist social movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why have Québec student organizations resisted oligarchization, conservativism, complacency and demobilization since the late 1960's? The Québec student movement has remained both radical and highly mobilized for over five decades, going on 10 unlimited student strikes and numerous other large-scale mobilizations since 1968, while the organizations which make up the movement have remained radical and non-oligarchical, maintaining similar organizational structures, beliefs and tactics since then. What explains the continuance of their radicalism and mobilization throughout this 50 plus year period? This paper explores the Québec student movements ability to circumvent the processes of oligarchization, conservativism and de-mobilization typically believed to affect social movement organizations as they age, grow and interact with government institutions. It will be argued that three major factors can explain this divergence. Firstly, the Québec student movements organization into large, highly funded, and ideologically radical student federations. Secondly, a unique legal context which protects and empowers student unions and thirdly their ideological subscription to 'combative syndicalism' and its embodiment through unique organizational structures: a weak executive system, holding general assemblies and the propensity to use the strike as a social movement tactic. All of this mitigates against the emergence of oligarchy, conservativism and demobilization while acting as abeyance structures helping the movement maintain its radicalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broad social identities like ethnicity and class are not only resources mobilized by social movements. Relational analysis reveals they can also be barriers constraining movement growth, as symbolic affinities with particular social identities may construct movement membership and support as incompatible with other identities. This mechanism may reproduce the particular demographics of social movements regardless of their universal messages and aspirations. Strategic deidentification may be crucial in struggles for social change. A study of the Israeli vegan animal advocacy movement during a time of diversification and growth is used to explore strategies movements use to dissociate themselves from particular social identities, both at the movement strategy level and the individual identity work level. Several 'deidentification strategies' are identified, including celebrating untypical identities, redefining the boundaries of the political, revising tactics and collective action frames, and becoming a field to mirror social space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements provide participants a chance to establish collaborative foundations and develop enduring friendships from which subsequent movements can arise. This happens as they find different ways to capitalize on a particular movement's momentum. However there can also be friction within the same movement. Unreconciled friction can lead to withdrawal and avoidance of working together. Movements may consequently disband and fail to achieve their immediate goals. This study investigates the sources of friction within one such movement. Based on interviews with 54 Kopi Badati movement participants in Ambon, Indonesia, we found that friction emerging from dissent on strategies, incompatible views, and feeling unacknowledged led to the disbandment of the Badati movement. When participants' relationships with others deteriorate, it becomes difficult for them to identify themselves with the movement. Conversely, participants' ability to reconcile internal friction may be one factor for the movement's success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the challenges undocumented youths face when joining and leading social movement coalitions. It relies on a case study of New York and New Jersey to bridge the gap between the literatures on social movement coalitions and undocumented migration. I argue that the success of undocumented youths within a coalition depends on establishing and maintaining leadership over the movement. I show that leadership has implications on youths' ability to manage movement structure and the diversity of goals across partner organizations. Not without difficulties, the New Jersey coalition assembled behind a single 'face' of the movement, streamlined its decision-making process and all members agreed to keep undocumented youths as the leaders of the movement. On the other hand, undocumented youths in New York joined a pre-existing coalition made up of 'heavy weights' with vast resources. They struggled to establish clear leadership over a vast coalition of groups with diverse objectives, not all of whom agreed to sacrifice some of their goals for the sake of undocumented youths. Ultimately, the diversity of goals within the New York coalition proved to be too great of an obstacle for the movement to be successful. The article is based on 72 interviews conducted in 2015 with young immigrant activists (documented and undocumented), community organizers, union members and elected officials involved in the campaigns for in-state tuition and state financial aid in New York and New Jersey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the concept of prefigurative politics by sharpening the conceptual distinction between future-oriented prefiguration and projectivity. My research suggests that a social movement group's orientation to the future is an important dynamic in how prefigurative action unfolds. Based on a case study of the Swedish autonomous collective Kulturkampanjen and the social center they built, Cyklopen, I analyze three dimensions of projectivity: reach (temporal extension into the short- or long-term future), contingency (perception of the future as fixed or flexible), and volition (a group moves toward the future or the future moves toward the group). This article is also an experiment in understanding how language can provide insight into the dynamics of prefiguration. I used a 'projective grammars' framework for qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews, ethnographic fieldnotes, newspaper articles, activist produced media (flyers, blog posts, zines, etc.), websites, and ephemera. I suggest that this analytic tool may help social movement scholars investigate projectivity and prefiguration more thoroughly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines the influence of key social movement theories – rational choice (as measured by interests), resource mobilization (RM), and political opportunity structures (POS) – in mobilization by local communities responding to mining in southern Perú. The selected cases are similar in many respects, but reveal divergent mobilizations, with a high level of protest against the Tía María mine, and low mobilization (with negotiation) in response to the Quellaveco mine. Extensive interviews and process tracing reveal that all of the social movement theories play a role in affecting the level of mobilization (the 'synthetic model'), but that RM and POS are largely a function of rational choice (interests). These interests are represented by communities' judgment of the socioeconomic costs and benefit of mining, as well as their perceptions of risk. The paper's main theoretical takeaway is an argument for reemphasizing rational choice in evaluations of social movement theories, particularly in the context of mining in Perú. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rojava is a semi-autonomous confederacy of mostly Kurds as well as less known ethnicities such as Assyrians, Armenians, and Yazidis. The focus of Thomas Schmidinger's book I The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds i is the Mountain region, otherwise known as Rojava in north Syria. Even when Rojava's leaders do not explicitly reject money as a means of exchange, the US could not tolerate their experiment because it knows that the social movement, once free and given the radical component of the activists' socialism, will spontaneously evolve for a moneyless and stateless order. [Extracted from the article]

Flash mobs are commonly portrayed in the media as light-hearted events intended to surprise bystanders. Meanwhile, academic literature features a number of explicitly political interpretations of flash mobs. However, to date, no empirical study has addressed why individuals organize and take part in the internationally spread mass events organized by the most popular contemporary flash mob incarnation, the Urban Playground Movement (UPM). In this paper, we place Budapest's UPM on an entertainment practice versus social movement mobilization spectrum. Our interviews with the leaders of the largest Hungarian UPM organization show that the functioning of the UPM in Budapest heavily relies on social movement continuity, where organizers see their events as ways to reclaim public spaces and to prefigure more social cities. However, among participants surveyed at the most notable yearly UPM event, the International Pillow Fight Day, we found fun as the primary motivation for participation, thus showing movement discontinuity. We conclude that the UPM in Budapest is a collective action, but not a social movement. Secondly, we find that the UPM exhibits 'thin' diffusion both in its reliance on individual activists over coalitions and in its usage of commercial social media as its diffusion infrastructure. Lastly, our results show that UPM collectives can act as 'containers' of social movement frames, implying that these playful groups could function as vehicles in the spread of protest in movement milieus. Our key finding that UPM is not a social movement contradicts the numerous academic interpretations of flash mobs as outright political events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse the Chilean Spring of 2019-2020 – the fiercest social outburst in Chile during the last three decades. After discussing the combined role of long-standing grievances, political attitudes, and cultural change in triggering the outburst, we study the interplay among peaceful and violent protests and criminal activity. We argue that brutal police repression and governmental mismanagement contributed to deepening the crisis once it exploded. We conclude by describing the attempts of the political class to cope with the crisis and speculate about its potential political consequences, especially for the Chilean party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frame alignment theory has become a dominant perspective on how people get mobilized into social movement activities. Most theoretical accounts on micromobilization take individuals' congruence with social movement organizations' frames as a starting point. However, the positive effect of frame alignment on protest participation has mostly been approached as an assumption rather than as an empirical question. Additionally, measuring frame alignment and testing its effect on participation is methodologically challenging. As a result, it has remained unclear to what extent an individual's degree of frame alignment increases the chance that he or she will participate in protest. Using panel survey data on a street demonstration organized in Belgium in 2016 (N = 2,646), we compare the frame components broadcasted by the organizers with the specific diagnostic and prognostic frame components held by both sympathizing participants and sympathizing non-participants. We test the effect of frame alignment on people's intention to join a protest and on participation as such, while accounting for multiple alternative determinants of protest participation. Our results suggest that frame alignment affects the likelihood that a sympathizer will intend to participate, which in turn affects participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contentiousness of markets has recently been assessed by the social movements literature. Activists can use a broad range of tactics to compel corporations to change their practices. This paper examines the outcomes of this contentiousness. It draws on an empirical study of a disruptive tactic used by anti-corporate activists: the shame-on-you prize. I propose to adopt an economic sociological perspective to understand the mechanisms by which social movement organizations seek to undermine the values that underpin the economic order. Activists provide new categories for valuating economic activities that challenge the existing ones. Social movement organizations legitimate these valuations as coming from civil society and reflecting public expectations about what should count in valuations of economic activities. As such, they may encourage public decision-makers to undertake regulatory action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008/9 social movements reminiscent of eco-emancipatory movements of the 1980s powerfully repoliticised the post-political order of neoliberalism. Additionally, and more recently, right-wing populist movements, Fridays for Future or political mobilisations related to the COVID-19 pandemic have substantially refashioned both the understanding of post-politics and the patterns of its repoliticisation. This article introduces a special issue on Movements and Activism beyond Post-politics. In light of these recent shifts we revisit the notion of post-politics, identify key characteristics of contemporary forms of repoliticisation, zoom in on academic debates about prefigurative and transformative politics and – following a preview of the contributions collated in the special issue – explore what the ongoing reconfiguration of public discourse may imply for further research into social movement activism beyond post-politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective alternative everyday practices (CAEPs), such as community gardens, clothing swaps or repair cafés, have become a prominent sight in the critical-creative milieus. So far, CAEPs have been mostly conceptualized in terms of prefigurative politics, i.e. as the strategy to change society through an everyday conduct that fully reflects idealized notions of the Self and society. However, there is increasing evidence of practitioners who engage in rather irregular, spontaneous ways and remain bound to an unsustainable consumer lifestyle. Scholars have identified such volatile participation as a problem for mobilization, but have not answered a) how the lack of continuous embodiment can be understood from a social movement perspective, and b) what the political quality of this behaviour might be. In this article, I address these research questions by drawing on theories of the late-modern subject and existing qualitative studies. Late-Modern Subject Theory assumes that individuals increasingly construct themselves through the market and in a multi-faceted way, due to processes such as commercialization, flexibilization and acceleration. From that perspective, volatile participants attempt to mobilize an idealized Self but are unable to do so persistently, due to the structural constraints (such as lack of time resources) and personal liberties (such as excess of consumer options) that define everyday life in late-modern society. The result are figurations of utopia that are bound to fail, but repeated ever again. These 'refigurations' maintain a political element through conveying a critique of and an alternative to the status quo, if only for a moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the evolvement of the 'movement of the squares' following the end of the more visible cycles of mobilization of the squares´ occupations. We argue that a crucial aspect of this evolution lies in the creation of a social infrastructure of alternative (re)productive projects in the form of commons. We call this type of outcomes 'social' in order to distinguish them from the cultural, political and biographical outcomes underlined in typologies on the consequences of social movements. Bridging social movement studies with the literature on the commons, we build a conceptual framework of their relationship. Through a comparative analysis of the movements in Athens and Barcelona, we show how the commoning practices of the square encampments gave rise to more endurable commons disseminated across cities´ social fabrics. We identify both direct and indirect mechanisms of movements´ transmutation into commons, and distinguish the former into transplantation, ideation, and breeding processes. Our second aim is to scrutinize the political dimension of these commons in relation to what has been framed as the 'post-political condition'. We maintain that the post-square commons constitute political and politicizing actions for activists and users for their effects on everyday life, for their capacity to link their practices with broader, structural dynamics of injustice, inequality and exclusion, and for their selective engagement with counter-austerity politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative research has been rare in social movement studies and scholars who embark on this path are confronted with several analytical and methodological challenges. This paper offers an avenue for developing comparative analytics using 'local spaces of protest' as path for comparison. We first situate this concept vis-à-vis other models available (field, space, arena, networks). We then define the three dimensions of 'spaces of protest': specific aim prompting collective action; particular distribution of political actions along different poles (electoral, protest, concerted and participation) and specific scales of protest (local, societal or/and global/glocal). By invoking critical geography to enhance the definition of place and scales of actions, we propose a systematic set-up for comparison. The last part of the paper shows how this notion allows for the comparison of local social forums (gatherings of activists fighting against neoliberal globalization) in two societies, France and Québec. The data presented have been gathered during extensive fieldwork and semi-structured interviews conducted between 2010 and 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the concept of women's cause field, which refers to the relational structure of groups mostly devoted to the advancement of women in a variety of social settings, cutting across the line between civil society and political institutions. Unlike the women's movement, the women's cause field encompasses a set of both extra-institutional and intra-institutional mobilizing structures. This concept expands on scholarship on institutional activism, and on field and network theory. Beyond the case of the women's movement, it provides a new framework – the notion of cause field – to capture the architecture of specialized collective protest in the era of movement institutionalization, distinct from, and complementary to, the concept of social movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article defines the concept of 'space of social movements', that describes the relatively autonomous microcosm of practice and meaning in which contentious mobilizations are linked by various relations of interdependence (e.g. inspiration, alliance, competition and conflict). By socially locating protest activities, the concept helps to understand the internal dynamics of the relationships between multiple movements and the relations the space of social movements maintains with other microcosms, such as the political and trade union fields. It also helps to analyze the practical aspects of contentious activities, as acting in the space of social movements requires from its members the control of some knowledge and skills that are acquired during a specific socialization process. The presentation of the concept is based on the analysis of French social movements from 1968 to 2010, and introduces a discussion of some of the main concepts of sociology of collective protest and of social differentiation, and especially Bourdieu's field theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of the dialogue with and use of dialectics in Bourdieu's foundational work on fields, recent work in social movements that employ fields and kindred concepts have generally abjured dialectics and, especially, Marxism. A renewed dialogue with Marxism is important to overcome some of the key limits of these meso-level analytic concepts. Several areas of extension are discussed, including the process of abstraction; the centrality of contradiction in driving change; the question of real potentials for change; and the problem of cohesion, including of consciousness. It is argued that Marxism pushes a sociology of movement fields back toward reflexivity, and from there to critical questions of intellectual practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing attention paid to the relational spaces of collective action is good news. It owes a lot to the legacy of interactionism and allows us to more accurately grasp the relevant contexts of protest that cannot be subsumed solely under big contexts such as political opportunity structure, economy, and so on. One can however worry about the never-ending succession of paradigms – more often acronyms – in the subfield of social movement studies. 'Context' issues are in fact linked to the very status of explanation in social sciences, and to the unequal nomological (or conversely more historical) ambitions of social sciences – a debate that is far from being settled. This article insists on this underlying epistemological debate, before highlighting different aspects of what is at stake in the way relational contexts of collective action should be considered: relational understanding of strategies, the link between mobilizations and transformations in and between social spaces, and the role and types of differentiation of society. Here, the classical (but barely translated) work of Michel Dobry appears as particularly useful in order to better understand contexts, if we consider them at the same time through interactions and the differentiation of society. But far from pleading for a new magic bullet, the article intends to support a more historically contextualized approach of social movements that is less interested in the establishment of laws than the understanding of the consequences of specific forms of social differentiations. This understanding could ultimately lead to a good definition of what relevant context of collective action might be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen a series of anniversaries of iconic protests. This draws attention to social movements' long-term legacies both in terms of their impact on society at large as well as their influence on subsequent cycles of mobilization. The growing literature on the interconnections between memories and movements provides crucial insights into such legacies as it explores how movements are remembered or forgotten. The paper aims to contribute to this literature and our understanding of continuities and discontinuities between different cycles of mobilization. For this purpose, we explore how activists of a central strand of the German anti-austerity movement, Blockupy, remember the '68 movement. Based on interviews with Blockupy activists and a media analysis, the paper shows how Blockupy activists largely share a joint memory of '68 despite ideological and generational differences. This shared memory is characterized by recurrent patterns of mnemonic adoptions of some '68 traits and rejection of others. At the same time, we reveal that this memory is only partly movement-specific as it overlaps with public memories in several respects. Activists however clearly reject public memories with respect to '68's central goals. The paper's findings show how impacts of past movements on later activism are shaped by activists' memories of that past and in particular by two levels of mnemonic rejection and adoption: how activists reject or adopt characteristics of a past movement and, in doing so, how they reject or adopt public memories of that movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Indignado protesters in the city of Valladolid (Spain) as a case study, drawing on retrospective qualitative interview research six years after the 'hype'. Our analysis explores how forms of interaction and participation during the events could have had an important influence not only on the motives of the participants' political engagement, but also the long-term durability of such engagement. The findings offer insights on the different forms of sociality present in the various types of activism and how these contribute to forming diverse understandings of collective action. Consequently, activists show tendencies for diverse forms of long-term engagement that appear to follow patterns that align with their experienced type of sociality and how it is remembered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the mobilizational plane of Spain's Podemos party's populist proposal to transform popular outrage into political power. Drawing on thirty-four semi-structured interviews with current and former party members, it sheds light on how and why a group of formerly horizontalist activists decided to rely on a charismatic figure as both a symbol and a strong leader. This decision is explained in relation to the Laclau-inspired theoretical reflections on leadership and representation of Íñigo Errejón, Podemos' chief theorist in the early stages and intellectual author of the party's first organizational model. This paper also follows the evolution of Errejón and his circle as they move from advocating the need for strong leadership to blaming themselves for 'failing' to erect effective counterweights to centralized and personalized power. We see that they attribute this failure to their lack of a proper theory of organization, which, in turn, is tied to their belief that a charismatic leader could make up for the lack of well-developed organizational structures and lead Podemos to power before the 'populist moment' passed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The next section concerns circulation (chapters 5-7) and how 'digital media provide social movements with new scopes of mnemonic diffusion' (p. 19). Anyone interested in social movements over the last ten years has most likely looked into research on social media platforms and Web 2.0 capabilities - Facebook and Twitter being the prominent examples. Mobilising mediated remembrance: (Palgrave Macmillan memory studies series), edited by Samuel Merrill, Emily Keightley and Priska Daphi, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xx + 298 pp., indices., £89.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-3-030-32826-9; £59.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-3-030-32829- 0; £71.50 (ebook), ISBN 978-3-030-32827-6. [Extracted from the article]

In this welcome addition to the social movement outcomes literature, Donatella della Porta describes how in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, movements against austerity have introduced democratic innovations which have contributed to the 'acceleration of constitutional processes, the multiplication of referendums, and the emergence of new parties' (p. 161). Through an examination of Podemos in Spain and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia, della Porta demonstrates how to mistrust of existing center-left parties created an opening for new movement party formations. [Extracted from the article]

The question of identity narrative is at the core of the interaction between social movements and temporalities. In this paper, we draw on long-term qualitative research amongst activists engaged in Italian social movements and argue that identity narratives are often the result of a complex mnemonic, contradictory and open-ended process that spans through a life-time of engagement with multiple collectives. We then question whether the use of social media reshape these dynamics. The analysis shows that the construction of identity narratives on social media tends to take place with knowledge of the complexity and overlaps that characterise these processes online. Nevertheless, the temporality of social media, based on immediacy, archival and predictive time, challenges the unpredictable, contradictory, and open-ended nature of political identity construction offline. The need to escape the hegemonic temporalities of social media poses new challenges to activists in their creative agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although rarely considered within the existing scholarship on social movements, even a cursory analysis of protest activity suggests that movements regularly invoke historical citations (whether consciously or not) while working to clarify aims and mobilize constituencies. In order to make sense of this process, and to account for the variations that arise among the different citation modalities favored by movements on opposite ends of the political spectrum, I draw upon the theoretical contributions of Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin and, in particular, on his exploration of 'wish images' and 'dialectical images,' their attributes, and their interrelationship. According to Benjamin, such images summoned the past either to project visions of future happiness (as with the wish image) or to deposit the witness before a moment of decisive, present-tense reckoning. After outlining the role of historical citation in social movements and in the broader cultural field through which these movements find expression, I analyze two recent protest events – the 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, VA, in which wish images were actively deployed, and the 2017 Women's Strike in New York City, where a dialectical image arose from the constellated nodes of the march's route – to consider the relationship between citation modality and protest outcome. Following from this analysis, and in keeping with the unapologetically partisan nature of my investigation, I conclude by advancing some strategic recommendations for movements seeking – as Benjamin once enjoined – to 'improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory article sets out the core concerns of this special issue on time and temporality in relation to social movements. It examines three areas: historical times, events, and sequences. In each area, we examine the ways that time and temporality are (often implicitly) embedded in existing social movement scholarship. We then introduce some of the problems raised by our contributors, and the ways in which they utilise greater sensitivity to time and temporality in furthering our understanding of the dynamics of the mobilisation, functions and fortunes of social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is now a substantial literature on the diffusion of protest events, tactics, identities, and frames between locations and among movements. This paper asks how the patterns identified in this literature may change as the time scale of diffusion extends across single cycles of protest and beyond the life spans of individual activists. I focus especially on two types of differences: the changing weight of relational and non-relational channels of diffusion; and ways in which, over longer stretches of time, the mediation of diffusion by formal organizations, institutions, and public history works to filter the influence of past activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shared memories shape relations among social movement participants and their organizations. However, scholars often ignore how experience operates as a means of solidifying attachment in group contexts. In contrast, I argue that activism depends on how participants publicly recall events. In this, I integrate a social memory perspective with the examination of activist movements. Through narrative, participants build engagement by presenting the self-in-history as a model for collective action. I refer to this as eventful experience, utilizing memorable moments as a resource for generating commitment. Movements depend upon members communicating the critical moments of their lives, embedding personal timelines in group culture. The linkage of personal experience and public events is a strategy by which individuals motivate collective action. Drawing on a thirty-month ethnography of a progressive senior citizen activist group in Chicago, I examine how members use an awareness of temporality to build a culture of action. Each movement group uses the past experiences of participants to build their culture – what Jasper refers to as taste in tactics, incorporating past successes, present plans, and imagined futures into a call for direct action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studying the nexus of media and social movements is a growing subfield in both media and social movement studies. Although there is an increasing number of studies that criticize the overemphasis of the importance of media technologies for social movements, questions of non-use, technology push-back and media refusal as explicit political practice have received comparatively little attention. The article charts a typology of digital disconnection as political practice and site of struggle bringing emerging literatures on disconnection, i.e. forms of media technology non-use to the field of social movement studies and studies of civic engagement. Based on a theoretical matrix combining questions of power, collectivity and temporality, we distinguish between digital disconnection as repression, digital disconnection as resistance and digital disconnection as performance and life-style politics. The article discusses the three types of digital disconnection using current examples of protest and social movements that engage with practices of disconnection. Abbreviations: AFA: Anti-Fascist Action; CHRI: Center for Human Rights in Iran; DDoS: Distributed Denial of Service [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent times have been defined as momentous: great transformation, great recession as well as great regression have been frequently used short-cut terms to characterize the period following the financial breakdown of 2008. As for contentious politics in these times, we frequently hear references to crisis as well as eventful protests, as calls for what was expected to be routine protest triggered portentous waves of contentious politics. Reference to moments of change can be found in different approaches addressing social movements from the macro, meso, and micro levels. While neoinstitutional approaches have looked at extraordinary times from a macro perspective, the Chicago School adopted a micro perspective, looking at the sudden breaking of established paths, the reproduction of ruptures, and their stabilization. An emerging concern in social movement studies with 'great transformations' that triggered big mobilizations can also be seen at the meso level Drawing on these perspectives, I argue that some eventful protests trigger critical junctures, producing abrupt changes which develop contingently and become path dependent. While routinized protests proliferate in normal times, under some political opportunities, some protests – or moments of protest – act as exogenous shocks, catalyzing intense and massive waves of contention. Referring to the debate on critical junctures, and bridging it with social movement studies, I thematize a sequence of processes of cracking, as the production of sudden ruptures; vibrating, as contingently reproducing those ruptures; and sedimenting, as the stabilization of the legacy of the rupture. With the aim of mapping some relevant questions, rather than providing answers, I refer for illustration to research I carried out on movements in democratic transitions during economic, political, and social crises, as well as their legacy and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing theories of social movements have a weak conception of temporality, which is generally tied to truncated protest waves or else to micro-scale sequences of interaction. Neither approach enables an understanding of continuity and change in the content and form of social movements over longer periods. This article develops a new conceptual terminology intended to bring temporal sensitivity to our understanding of the interplay between movements and their socio-political environments. Vectors highlight evolving patterns of interaction that carry ideas and action orientations into a range of social settings over a period of decades. Examining the interplay of different vectors, and accounting also for the unfolding character of historic events, enables the apprehension of an overarching timescape within which movements move. This theoretical approach is illustrated with an examination of three significant periods of transnational contention associated with the Alter-Globalization, Anti-War, and Occupy movements. Analysis of vectors that shape discourses of conflict, organizational preferences, and practices of individual autonomy explain dynamics of continuity and change across different movements, each of which is shaped by a dynamic neoliberal timescape. Abbreviation CBDM: Consensus-based Decision Making; ICT: Information and Communication Technology; IFI: International Financial Institution; IMF: International Monetary Fund; WTO: World Trade Organisation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interactive approach to social movements highlights time dynamics in ways more correlational approaches do not, in that interaction and outcomes unfold in sequences as players react to one another. Some aspects of these engagements are shaped by institutional schedules, while others leave discretion to the players. Some institutional schedules, meanwhile, may be reshaped by strategic interactions. By examining the implicit trade-offs and explicit dilemmas that pervade strategic interaction, we see how some are tightly linked to time whereas others more closely reflect ongoing structural situations. Analyzing the case of participatory budgeting in New York City, we focus on two trade-offs, 'being there' and 'powerful allies', that appear when social movements attempt to institutionalize new policies and processes. These time-based strategic trade-offs complicate activists' efforts to secure lasting gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the disjunctive temporalities of Occupy Philadelphia's political constituencies. Drawing on both an ethnographic participant observation study of the Occupy Philadelphia movement and Philadelphia's neoanarchist political communities, and on recent social scientific theorization of events, the paper argues that contradictory ideas about temporal timescales, momentum, duration, sequences, and rhythms of tactical and strategic action problematized interaction and coordination among movement participants. These points of coordinative disjuncture can be traced back to differences in participants' ideas about prefigurative politics and strategic temporalities. Limning the temporal expectations and experiences of social movement participants, this paper contributes to the examination of both linkages and disjunctures between eventful temporalities experienced in moments of protest and in social movements with diverse timescales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will discuss the existence of and reasons for a pattern of cross-mobilisation between Italian feminist and LGBT movements in relation to the controversial issue of gestational surrogacy. Gestational surrogacy usually involves a woman who offers to carry out a pregnancy (either on a voluntary basis or through monetary compensation) on behalf of couples (be them heterosexual or homosexual) who are infertile or cannot have children. In Italy gestational surrogacy has acquired prominence in the political debate following the approval of the law same-sex unions in 2016. Immediately within this context important fractures on this issue emerged between and within the feminist and LGBT movements. This article will consider the motivations behind those rifts and map the different proposed solutions to the regulation of gestational surrogacy in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement scholars have not satisfactorily engaged with the concept and reality of neoliberalism. The growing academic consensus is that neoliberalism is a waning analytical category devoid of conceptual rigor, and therefore, inadequate for academic use. At the same time, research on neoliberalism repeatedly confirms the centrality of organized collective action in its ascent to global hegemony. Blurring the artificially constructed boundaries between politics and the academy, I propose an actor-centered approach to neoliberalism, shedding light on the mechanisms driving the term's conceptual stretching and its exclusive usages by its political and intellectual foes. But I also probe social movement theory with the case of neoliberalism, understood as a peculiar type of movement: a transnational movement of market-fundamentalist intellectuals that, interestingly, relentlessly refrained from collectively asserting an 'identity'. This makes neoliberalism a case ill-suited to canonical ways of describing social movements. Hence, my aim is to rethink not only neoliberalism but also to stretch a bit what we think movements are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies of protest outcomes have focused on the effects of organizational characteristics, disruptive tactics, and political opportunity structures. However, most studies, especially those situated in Western democracies, fail to adequately account for the paths to successful protests in authoritarian regimes like China because of the structural differences between the two types of regimes. By incorporating insights from studies of protests in China and communication studies, this article extends the political mediation model and argues that the success of protests is shaped by the tripartite relations among protest forcefulness, favorable political contexts, and media exposure. In face of joint occurrence of elite support and media exposure, large size of protest is sufficient, whilst large size and disruptive actions are required when media exposure is present but elite support is absent. This result shows that the effectiveness of protest characteristics is dually mediated by political and media conditions. This study not only enhances our understandings of protest outcomes in China but also brings scholarly dialogue between social movement studies and communication studies so as to enrich the literature of protest outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study advances the protest paradigm as a transnational theory by examining how ideological affiliations within and across national borders influence the framing of a protest movement. Our empirical focus is the coverage of the 2016–17 South Korean 'candlelight' protests to oust conservative President Park Gyun-hye in Korean and US newspapers. Content analysis of 6 months of coverage suggests that liberal publications in both nations (Kyunghyang Shinmun and New York Times) were supportive of the movement, framing the protests as large yet peaceful and relying on protesters for information. In contrast, the conservative press in the US (Wall Street Journal) was closer in its coverage to Korea's conservative publication (Chosun Ilbo), which was defensive of Park and her supporters. We argue that ideological affinities can operate beyond national boundaries – what we term 'ideological parallelism' – to make news organizations sympathetic or hostile toward a social movement. But nationalist sentiments also remain significant to the extent that a foreign (Korean) social movement affects a nation's (US) foreign policy. We identify a novel framing device – Gaze – under which the coverage of both US newspapers converged and considered the adverse implications of candlelight protests for America's relations with South Korea and its containment of North Korea and China. We also show how the US media's Gaze recursively shapes South Korean press coverage, indicating that transnational protest frames impact local perceptions of social movements and can potentially influence their legitimacy and outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on Tea Party activity is a debate between structuralist and culturalist interpretations of the movement's macro-processes – its origin and meanings – that neglects the micro-processes of organizing Tea Party activity (meetings, rallies, and so on). To address that gap, this article presents the results of a six-year ethnographic comparison of Tea Party chapters in Western North Carolina, focusing on the role of chapter leaders. It finds that these leaders are best understood through micro-process theories that locate them on the border between two different arenas: a national context in which elite-driven advocacy groups seek policy change, and their local context of citizen activism. Chapter leaders' ability to control the flow of messaging from national organizations to members, and the reverse flow of member activity to different causes, affords them space for agency to pursue idiosyncratic agendas. Like other social movements, the Tea Party is not solely determined by larger social forces, but instead created by interaction between a variety of inter-connected actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As organizers often remind us, we need to work across movements if we are to make substantive social change. Such talk is central to how we understand what social movements are and how we can work together. But how is that talk structured, and how might we theorize structural change over time as movements emerge and subside? This paper outlines several key considerations in the social construction of cross-movement relations between 2003 and 2013 on a daily independent broadcast news magazine program in the United States. Drawing on relational sociology and network studies, I offer a framework for understanding the changing structure of cross-movement talk as an interplay of a) the narrative clustering of movement labels, and b) the bridging of cross-cluster narrative divisions. Using positional network analysis, I first chart the movement canon – those movement labels that were used year after year for structuring the cross-movement field – and trace how key labels were used as bridging leaders during two periods of mass-mobilization. I then compare the narrative environment over time as it moved between more segmented and pluralistic structural characteristics, culminated in periods of narrative convergence in 2008 and 2011 around the Obama presidential election and the Occupy movement. By examining the overall structure of cross-movement talk in broadcast news programming, I illustrate how movement labels themselves are used by hosts and guests to facilitate the social construction of emergent movement clusters, and point to strategies for future application and analysis in cross-movement organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement scholars have long been aware of leadership competition or 'factionalism' as one of the mechanisms within the longer process of polarization. As such, competition is often discussed as a harbinger of demobilization, and rarely in the context of movement emergence or growth. In turn, education scholars have examined social movement learning primarily as a cognitive process of identity formation, with rare and oblique references to the literature on movement dynamics. The first phase of the 2010–2011 student strike at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) is a useful counterintuitive case for re-examining these conventional wisdoms, as existing studies and first-hand accounts suggest a pattern of intimate connections between factional competition and movement learning. In this article, I propose Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as an alternative framework for analyzing that sequence. By recasting competition and other movement dynamics as aspects of the internal contradictions of nested activity systems, themselves crucial to the emergent process of expansive learning, CHAT may help bridge the gap between fields and approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]