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Contributing to the growing literature on the memory-activism nexus, this article analyses how activists remember past activism. For social movements and activists, memories of past mobilisations represent both an asset and a burden. This article seeks to contribute to existing research on memory in activism by identifying recurrent patterns of how activists remember and forget previous mobilisations across different movements. Based on interviews with activists of the Global Justice Movement (1998–2007) and the Blockupy movement (2012–2015), four mnemonic modes are identified. These entail two types of mnemonic adoption, which highlight continuity with a positive or negative valence attached, and two types of mnemonic rejection, which highlight discontinuity with a positive or negative valence attached. I show how similar patterns of these mnemonic modes can be found across the two movements and their diverse subgroups. At the same time, however, these mnemonic patterns differ depending on the degree of activists' identification with the overall movement; while activists who strongly identify with the movement in question remember failures of past mobilisations and their differences to current ones more clearly than similarities and successes, the opposite is the case for activists with low identification attachments. [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]

Starting in the 1990s, international organizations (IOs) have created various opportunities of access for civil society to voice criticism. While international relations (IR) scholarship has increasingly addressed the resulting interaction between IOs and civil society with a focus on NGOs, we know little about the particular reactions to IOs' opening up by social movements. This paper analyzes reactions to opening up by a transnational social movement centrally addressing IOs: the Global Justice Movement (GJM). Examining reactions by different groups of the GJM in Europe and Southeast Asia to IOs' opening up, we demonstrate that reactions differ considerably depending on activists' assessments of the nature of opening up. In particular, we identify four pathways of reactions on a continuum from (1) strong cooperation with IOs as a reaction to opening up, (2) temporally limited cooperation with different IOs, (3) a hybrid reaction that combines cooperation with specific IOs with a strong opposition to other IOs in reaction to their opening up, to (4) a continuous rejection of all cooperation with IOs. We show how these different reactions are shaped by activists' perceptions of the quality of the international opening up in conjunction with national and local context factors. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that such perceptions can significantly change over time depending on experiences of interactions. Reactions to opening up are therefore not predictable on the basis of a movement's shape and resources only, but rather depend on a variety of factors such as the movement's perception of the IO's sincerity in a strategic and consequential interaction, as well as the movement's ideological framework and its history of interaction with institutions at other levels, especially in the domestic realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Der Artikel bietet einen Überblick über den noch jungen, internationalen Forschungsstand zum Umgang Sozialer Bewegungen mit der Covid-19 Pandemie. Bewegungen haben digitale Aktionsformen stärker aufgenommen und zum Teil mit analogen Formen verbunden. Der Straßenprotest ist aber nicht verschwunden, sondern hat sich den Pandemie-Bedingungen angepasst. Thematisch hat die Pandemie Probleme neu aufgeworfen oder verstärkt. Insbesondere Gewalt gegen Frauen und soziale Ungleichheit erhielten neue Aufmerksamkeit, aber auch rechte Akteur*innen konnten mobilisieren. Die vor der Pandemie prominenten Klimaproteste wiederum mussten ihre Proteste an die nun fehlende öffentliche Aufmerksamkeit anpassen. Wir zeigen die Änderungen, aber auch die Kontinuitäten innerhalb Sozialer Bewegungen in der Pandemie auf. This article offers an overview of the still young, international state of research on how social movements have dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic. Movements have made greater use of digital forms of action and combined them in in part with analog ones. However, street protest has not disappeared but has adapted to pandemic conditions. Thematically, the pandemic has raised new or intensified problems. In particular, violence against women and social inequality received new attention, but right-wing actors were also able to mobilize. Climate protests, on the other hand, which gained prominence before the pandemic, now had to adapt to a lack of public attention. We show the changes, but also the continuities within social movements in the pandemic. [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]

In recent years, scholarly interest in the interconnections between social movements and memory has been growing significantly. In this article, we outline and discuss this emerging focus of research on the movement-memory nexus with the goal of systematizing it and pointing to ways forward. We begin by delineating the interdisciplinary nature of the field, its central characteristics, and its disciplinary and conceptual foundations. We then identify and discuss three major areas of research, namely, research on memories of movements, memory in movements, and movements about memory. We close by outlining the debates, insights and pose several questions with the aim of bringing the different strands of research on the movement-memory nexus into a closer dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent wave of occupations highlighted how closely space and social movements are related. While this revived scholarly interest in the role of space during protests, little attention so far has been paid to the role of space in protests' long-term internal effects. Bringing together the literatures on transformative effects and space in social movements, the paper examines the role of protests' spatiality in their transformative effects, drawing on a narrow approach to space. The analysis focuses in particular on effects on collective identity building in social movements. Based on interviews and focus groups with activists in 2011, the paper examines the long-term effects of an incisive protest event of the Global Justice Movement (GJM) in Europe, the protests against the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001. The paper shows that this event's spatiality plays a crucial role in building movement identity several years later: it provides activists with interpretational devices to delineate the GJM's internal and external boundaries. The paper thus underlines that research on transformative effects can considerably profit from considering spatiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines how relationships of international solidarity cope with sectoral and national affinities in the case of the Global Justice Movement (GJM). Drawing on interviews with activists in Italy, Germany, and Poland the paper shows that national, sectoral, and international solidarities are entwined in several ways - and in some respects depend on each other. While activists identify a variety of national and sectoral differences within the GJM, these differences are not seen to impede international solidarity building. However, national and sectoral affinities are considered to play somewhat different roles in building international solidarity. On the one hand, activists prioritise solidarity building across different sectors - identifying it both as the largest challenge and success of the GJM. On the other hand, solidarity building across countries is perceived as less problematic and believed to be a precondition for cross-sectoral solidarity building. The paper contributes to our understanding of transnational activism and considers ways in which to deal with national and sectoral affinities in transnational activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]