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There have been abolitionist movements against slavery, torture, prostitution, capital punishment, and prison. This entry focuses on the latter alone. When the term “abolitionism” is used in relation to criminological issues, it generally dismisses penal definitions and punitive responses to criminalized problems, and proposes their replacement by dispute settlement, redress, and social justice. More generally, it refers to the abolition of state (supported) institutions that are no longer felt to be legitimate. The word “abolitionism” as currently understood in criminology is adopted from the North American anti-prison movement of the early 1970s. Here Quakers, most notably, take up their historical mission from the anti-slavery movement. They see prison as an institution that today fulfills the same social functions as slavery did until the late nineteenth century: disciplining the (mostly black) underclass. This American penal abolitionism is mainly grounded in religious inspiration, and less in considerations of the countereffectiveness of criminal justice, as is the case in Europe. The European abolitionist social movements of that era were prisoners' unions and more intellectual radical penal reform movements. This more academic abolitionism has its roots in symbolic interactionism and social constructionism, with a strongly Foucauldian focus on discipline in a carceral society.

In response to the influx of millions of refugees during the summer and fall of 2015, refugee solidarity movements mobilized across Europe, offering relief aid to the refugees as well as protesting what were perceived as unjust policies and practices by states. While nonpoliticized solidarity and compassion for the refugees was a central driver of the mobilization, the issue was entangled with the highly contested political issues of deservingness of refugees, integration, and immigration politics, thus adding a contentious element.

When a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic strikes, society is simultaneously disorganized and reintegrated. Disorganized because crises upset the usual order of things and reintegrated because actors take on new tasks and abandon old tasks that have lost their importance in the crisis situation, and new actors emerge while others disappear, all in order to ensure functionality in the new circumstances. The COVID-19 pandemic did not diverge from this pattern. Here civil society took center stage in the task of containing the spread of the disease and softening the consequences for those affected. While the importance of the solidarity, cooperation, and coordination of civil society in stopping the spread of the disease cannot be underestimated, this entry focuses on the role of voluntary civil society in providing the social support and help that was demanded because new needs related to COVID-19 emerged and because formal welfare provisions were shut down in order to contain COVID-19.

Social movement activism typically denotes conflict, anger, and protest against those in power under the heading of contentious politics. Due to political conflict's obvious centrality to social and historical change, which is the principal reason for studying movements in the first place, social movement scholars have almost exclusively focused on the contentious dynamics and not paid much attention to humanitarian support and voluntary social work in the movements. Humanitarian support and voluntary action – denoting neutral altruism, sympathy, and direct action to relieve others of their suffering – have instead been allocated to the neighboring research field of voluntary studies. This implies that the studies of, on the one hand, social movements and, on the other hand, volunteering have, to a large extent, developed independently and have paid little attention to one another. Recently, however, several scholars have argued for an integration. For instance, Donatella della Porta argues that both social movement studies and the field of volunteering are interested in (i) voluntary participation in collective action, involving (ii) cooperative and conflictual relations, for (iii) causes defined, implicitly or explicitly, as the public good. Therefore, both fields stand to gain from greater integration.

Collective action is organized in grassroots groups, social movement organizations (SMOs), and social networks, pointing to the centrality of meso-level groups for coordination of action, formation of identity, solidarity, and development of politics and ideology in social movements. In addition to the strong tradition for studies of collective identity formation and strategic action planning and framing in groups, recently the question of group culture has gained traction among movement scholars.

Digital methods have the potential to strengthen social movement studies because digital trace data have the affordances necessary to record aspects of social life related to several problems of particular prominence in social movement research, namely: (i) group formation, (ii) unexpected and consequential events, (iii) mobilization cycles, (iv) persistence of activism, and (v) within-movement interaction and negotiation. Yet, suitable data for studying these phenomena have been rare. The reason is the informal nature of most social movements, making movement populations hard to delimit and reach, as well as the difficulty of predicting mobilization so that data can be collected before, during, and after a protest event making movements' populations hard to predict: in sum, the problem of ephemeral populations. Furthermore, because many movements do not keep systematically organized records of meeting minutes and the like, the level of micro-negotiations and internal cultures are difficult to measure. In these regards, digital trace data and methods offer promising new empirical tools.