Search results

Reactive groups adopt a variety of repertoires ranging from institutional resistance to violence to counter mobilizing efforts of movements. Countermovement studies provide useful insights into how violence by non-state actors can constrain social movements’ success. Few studies however considered the possibility that violence may, on the contrary, facilitate the outcomes sought by the movement. Under what conditions do political killings of movement members affect support for the movement? To answer this question, we follow the evolution of the Kurdish ethnic movement in Turkey as a movement party and track changes in the movement’s constituency in response to countermovement violence (1991–2002). The study uses an original dataset of countermovement killings by the ethnic movement’s Islamist rival, Hizbullah, across 113 districts in 13 southeastern provinces. We demonstrate that countermovement violence has non-uniform effects on electoral support for the movement party. These effects are conditional on initial movement strength: in localities with prior loyalties to the ethnic movement, Hizbullah-inflicted harm consolidates the movement party’s constituency. By contrast, countermovement violence is met with reduced support where the movement is weak and is struggling to make inroads to the community. Our findings suggest that initial preferences might play important roles in understanding movement outcomes.

Colleges and universities in the United States are common sites of social movement activism, yet we know little about the conditions under which campus-based movements are likely to meet with success or failure. In this study, I develop the concept of educational opportunity structures, and I highlight several dimensions of colleges and universities' educational opportunity structures – specifically, schools' statuses as public or private, secular or religious, highly or lowly ranked, and more or less wealthy – that can affect the outcomes of campus-based movements. Analyzing a religious freedom movement at Vanderbilt University, which mobilized from 2010 to 2012 to demand the ability of religious student organizations to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and religious belief, I argue that Vanderbilt's status as a private, secular, elite, and wealthy university ensured that conservative Christian activism at that school was highly unlikely to succeed. The findings hold important theoretical implications for the burgeoning literature on student activism.

This study explores citizen activism in the articulation of a politicised counter-account of Aboriginal rights. It aims to uncover the enabling factors for a successful challenge to established political norms and the obstacles to the fullest expression of a radical imagining.

Laclau and Mouffe's theory of hegemony and discourse is used to frame the movement's success in challenging the prevailing system of urbanised healthcare delivery. Empirical materials were collected through extensive ethnographic fieldwork.

The findings from this longitudinal study identify the factors that predominantly influence the transformational success of an Yaṉangu social movement, such as the institutionalisation of group identity, articulation of a discourse connected to Aboriginal rights to self-determination, demonstration of an alternative imaginary and creation of strong external alliances.

This study offers a rich empirical analysis of counter-accounting in action, drawing on Aboriginal governance traditions of non-confrontational discourse and collective accountability to conceptualise agonistic engagement. These findings contribute to the practical and theoretical construction of democratic accounting and successful citizen activism.

Those interested in studying the relationship between law and social movements have a wide variety of theoretical and empirical research to draw on, from both social movement theory and legal studies. Yet these disparate studies of law and social movements rarely engage with each other. In this chapter, we review current developments in research on law and social movements and summarize the chapters in this special issue. These chapters offer insight into the multivalent nature of law for social movements, the factors shaping movements’ strategic engagements with the legal system, the relationship between law and identity for social movement activists, and the complex role that cause lawyers play in social movement processes and dynamics.

Prior research has documented the importance of the state and social movements for the emergence and proliferation of alternative organizational forms. Yet, we lack a comprehensive and interactive understanding of the larger environment that sustains cooperatives and other collectivist-democratic organizations. Using the example of Brazil’s Solidarity Economy Movement, a longstanding social movement to address poverty and inequality, we describe how a multilevel ecosystem of organizations and institutions creates conditions favorable for the growth of alternative organizational forms – in this context, democratic cooperatives that the Movement calls solidarity economy enterprises (SEEs). Drawing from archival data, interviews, and a government survey of over 19,000 SEEs between 2005 and 2012, we map out the key actors at each level of the ecosystem, identifying three primary mechanisms by which these actors collectively enabled the creation and development of SEEs: (1) providing glue for action; (2) organizing for action; and (3) engaging in action. These mechanisms, in turn, allowed for greater communication and cohesion and the exchange of information and experiences among the Movement’s participants, thereby enhancing their interconnectedness and the institutionalization of their practices.

Purpose – This research is an analysis of expressions of masculinity among members of two social movements. The focus of the study is how racialized constructions of masculinity shape similar discourses of victimization in the mythopoetic men's movement and the Militia of Montana.

Method – Content analysis of the movement members’ written work available to the general public is analyzed. A theoretical overview of masculinity and victimization is also utilized to illustrate essentialist narratives in masculinity.

Findings – This research raises questions about the lived experience of the racialization of masculinity in movements, the complexity of identity formation of movement members, and challenges assumptions about the limitations of essentialism in these types of social movements. Both movements employ language that explicitly and implicitly illustrate a perception of white male victimization. Attention to essentialism in each movement shows the contradictions of each movement, with attention to how movement members choose to construct their own identities.

Research limitations – This research is limited to the written words of some movement members from material generated by each movement, and therefore, this research does not contain interview narratives of the movement members.

Originality/value of chapter – Previous research has faulted each movement for essentialist notions of self and group. This work argues that group cohesion and success of these types of movements depends on the ability of members to create essentialist categories of masculinity to support their claims and interests.

This paper examines whether affiliation strategies used by social movement organizations to establish institutional linkages assure survival. Several streams within both social movement and organization theories suggest contrasting expectations. Two core research questions are proposed: how does strategic affiliation, as well as increasing legitimation, alter social movement organizations’ longevity, and how does the evolution of the movement condition these dynamics? Our answer focuses on the self-help/mutual-aid movement and the institutionalization of national self-help/mutual-aid organizations. Analyses comparing economic, political and symbolic means of survival at the population-of-organizations level and organizational level, and across the history of the movement, show that professional and political alliances and legitimation impact the longevity of self-help/mutual-aid organizations in unexpected ways. For instance, as the number of political alliances at the population level increases, the likelihood of organizational survival declines, although political alliances at the individual organizational level are beneficial for an organization. These relationships change dramatically as the movement matures. Implications for integrating social movement and organizations theories are discussed.

This chapter seeks to address questions related to the convergence among alternative agrifood movements as well as the convergence between alternative and conventional practices with a focus on local movements. We reconstruct the common conflation of the alternative/conventional binary into a multidimensional measure that recognizes the complex interactions of economic, political, social, and cultural elements in the construction of convention, alterity, and opposition. We also consider several forms of possible convergence: multi-organizational, multi-sectoral (among elements of the agrifood system), multidimensional (among political, economic, cultural, and social practices), and multilevel or scale (hierarchy of spatially embedded governance units). These matters are empirically examined by focusing on the rapidly growing Food Policy Council (FPC) movement in North America. We address the question of this movement’s diffusion, consider its variable linkages between state and civil society, and examine the substantive practices and framings in which the movement has been engaged. While we find that most FPC practices are probably vulnerable to conventionalization, the movement’s most valuable function may be its modular form. That form functions as an incubator of multi-organizational and multi-sectoral experimental practices in a multiplicity of local environments. Further, ties between FPCs provide a networking mechanism for transmitting information about the successes and failures of those experiments among hundreds of locales and regions. Finally, the discourse among the FPC leadership amplifies values favoring the democratization of food, and articulates beliefs in the right to food as well as notions of food citizenship and sovereignty.

Social Movements can play an important role in societal change, and Social Movement Organizations (SMOs) are often carriers of those efforts. SMOs differ from traditional organizations in the goals they seek to accomplish and how they operate. Typically, within Social Movement literature, the unique internal organization forms have been understudied and usually do not attend to the socio-structural aspects of those processes. Using a Critical Race Theory/Intersectionality (CRT/I) lens and organizational theories, this study analyzes an ideologically driven SMO case dedicated to transformative change and the leadership of structurally marginalized people and communities, particularly women and people of color. Analysis of this case reveals unique organizational dynamics and particular ways that socio-structural patterns influenced every level of social movement-building and organizational practices.