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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Social movements play a vital and increasingly visible role in modern politics. Headline-grabbing demonstrations against authoritarian governments, police brutality, economic inequality, and other grievances suggest that, around the world, social movements are seen as powerful catalysts of change. In democracies as well as autocracies, rich countries as well as poor, citizens turn repeatedly to protest as a way of addressing a range of perceived social ills. In this engaging and accessible book, Devashree Gupta offers a thorough introduction to the study of social movements in these diverse settings, examining their structures and operations to identify the ways in which political and social contexts shape how movements behave and what impacts they have. Drawing on multiple theoretical approaches and contemporary case studies, Gupta explores how movements think and act strategically, learning from past interactions with authorities and the experiences of other movements, to find innovative ways to challenge the status quo. With suggestions for further reading and questions for class discussion throughout, Protest Politics Today will be essential reading for students of social movements and contentious politics across the world.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Contents
Cover
Front Matter
1 The Politics of Protest
Introduction
What are Social Movements?
The Rise of Modern Social Movements
Protest Then, Protest Now
Mechanisms of Change
Studying Social Movements
Concluding Summary
Questions for Discussion
Additional Readings
2 The Activist
Introduction
Historical Perspectives on Protestors
Activist Traits, Activist Motives
Mobilization Processes
Obstacles and Enablers on the Path to Mobilization
Retention and Demobilization
Concluding Summary
Question for Discussion
Additional Readings
3 The Organization
Introduction
From Organizations to Networks
Intra-Movement Relations
Movement Life Cycles
Concluding Summary
Questions for Discussion
Additional Readings
4 The Target
Introduction
Targeting Considerations
Movement Targets
From Targeting to Target: Countermovements
Concluding Summary
Questions for Discussion
Additional Readings
5 The Message
Introduction
Framing and Social Movements
Types of Frames
Framing Processes
Framing Dilemmas
Mediating Frames: The Role of Media
Concluding Summary
Questions for Discussion
Additional Readings
Notes
6 The Tactic
Introduction
A Typology of Tactics
Choosing Tactics
Tactical Evolution and Diffusion
Prefigurative Politics
New Frontiers: Digital Activism
Concluding Summary
Questions for Discussion
Additional Readings
Notes
7 The Response
Introduction
Situational and Institutional Responses
Situational Responses: Public Order and Policing
Institutional Responses: Repression, Co-optation, Deflection, and Concession
The Consequences of Government Choices
Concluding Summary
Questions for Discussion
Additional Readings
8 The Aftermath
Introduction
Defining Movement Outcomes
Assessing Causality and Explanatory Variables
Looking Beyond the Movement
Concluding Summary
Questions for Discussion
Additional Readings
9 The Future
Introduction
Protest Continuities?
Protest Innovations?
Conclusions: The Future of Protest?
Questions for Discussion
Additional Readings
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
Research methods and type of knowledge generated
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Variation in engagement
Figure 2.2
Steps to mobilizing movement participants
Figure 2.3
Protest events around the world on April 10, 2015
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
Social movement actors
Figure 3.2
Comparing network densities
Figure 3.3
Network centrality and network brokerage examples
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Common protest targets, 1960–1995
Figure 4.2
Boomerang model of transnational targeting
Figure 4.3
Scenes from Greenpeace’s campaign against LEGO
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Marriage equality movement framing, Minnesota
Figure 5.2
Factors affecting frame resonance
Figure 5.3
Black Lives Matter slogan in Northern Ireland
Figure 5.4
Social media and Egyptian protest signs
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
Selected protest tactics worldwide, 2006–2013
Figure 6.2
Protests by region, 2006–2013
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
Variable dimensions in policing practices
Figure 7.2
Possible relationships between repression and mobilization
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1
Typology of movement outcomes
Figure 8.2
Population living under democratic regimes, 1816–2015
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1
Protestors at the Women’s March on Washington, DC
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1
Comparative participation rates (percentages) for different protest forms
Chapter 4
Table 4.1
Percentage growth in Indian crop yields, 1980s–2000s
Chapter 5
Table 5.1
States with constitutional amendments barring same-sex marriage
Table 5.2
Comparing audience reach of different media platforms
Chapter 8
Table 8.1
Historical attitudes toward capital punishment in the United States
Guide
Cover
Contents
Begin Reading
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Protest Politics Today
DEVASHREE GUPTA
polity
Copyright © Devashree Gupta 2017
The right of Devashree Gupta to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press,101 Station Landing, Suite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4592-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gupta, Devashree, author.Title: Protest politics today / Devashree Gupta.Description: Cambridge, UK : Malden, MA, USA : Polity Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017006634| ISBN 9780745671147 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745671154 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Protest movements. | Social action. | Social change–Political aspects.Classification: LCC HM883 .G86 2017 | DDC 303.48/4–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006634
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Dedication
To Bob, for his constant love and support and Archie, for never leaving my side
CHAPTER 1The Politics of Protest
Objectives
To establish how social movements differ from other types of political activity, including institutional and non-institutional forms.
To examine how modern social movements developed and the political, economic, and social changes that led to their creation.
To identify how main theoretical approaches used by scholars to study social movement differ in the questions they privilege and the variables they use to explain patterns of protest.
To determine how scholars use different methodological approaches to answer questions about social movements.
Introduction
One week after the controversial shooting death of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, by a white police officer in South Carolina, several dozen people gathered in front of North Charleston’s city hall on a mild April evening in 2015 to hold a candlelight protest vigil. Carrying signs that said “The World is Watching” and “Black Lives Matter,” the protestors demanded accountability for Scott’s death, which had been captured on video by a bystander and whose details had intensified an already agonized national conversation about police brutality and institutional racism. It had been almost two years since a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman of murder for shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teen who was walking home from a convenience store and who, Zimmerman claimed, had attacked him. The acquittal touched off a wave of protests, while the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter began to circulate on social media sites. Starting out as an online campaign, it made the jump to physical demonstrations one year later to protest the death of Michael Brown at the hands of a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. In the months following, Black Lives Matter (BLM) became a national movement, with a network of local chapters and a forceful online presence.
The demonstrations in North Charleston were part of a long list of protests that had taken place all around the United States since Ferguson – in New York, Oakland, Cleveland, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and other cities both large and small. In each case, protestors called attention to issues of institutional racism, police brutality, and unequal treatment meted out by the justice system to communities of color. For several hours, the protestors in North Charleston sang songs, shared personal stories of their own brushes with law enforcement, and observed a moment of silence to honor Scott. They also made demands, including the creation of a citizens’ advisory committee with extensive powers to investigate and review police actions. They gave the mayor of North Charleston until 7 p.m. that evening to announce his response. To the protestors’ disappointment, the mayor rejected their demands. To those gathered at the vigil, however, this reply was neither satisfactory nor the end of the matter, and organizers promised to step up their campaign of resistance following Scott’s funeral the next day to pressure city officials to address their concerns.
On the same day, over 7,000 miles away in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a, a political sect of Zaidi Shia Muslims known as the Houthi took to the streets to protest airstrikes by a coalition of nine Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan. Several thousand protestors carried Yemeni flags and banners demanding an end to foreign intervention by the Saudi-led coalition in what they argued was a purely domestic conflict between supporters of the ousted President, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and rebel groups (including the Houthi) who supported his predecessor, Ali Abdullah Saleh. These protests were matched by parallel demonstrations in other Houthi-controlled parts of the country and some even further afield, including an anti-war protest in front of Saudi Arabia’s London embassy planned for later that weekend. But the Houthi were not the only ones voicing their discontent in the streets. Even as they marched against coalition airstrikes, in parts of the country controlled by their opponents people marched in support of the coalition and President Hadi, who they claimed had been illegally ousted by rebel forces.
As the Houthi and their opponents were demonstrating in Yemen, activists in Madrid, Spain were carrying out a very different kind of demonstration in front of the Spanish parliament building that same evening: a holographic protest march. The object of their grievance was a controversial Spanish law that sharply restricted when and where people could protest and attached stiff financial penalties – up to €600,000 – for violations. Criticizing the law for severely limiting free speech and assembly rights, activists staged the world’s first-ever hologram protest, in which thousands of holographic images of people were projected marching past the parliament building during an hour-long demonstration. Because the parliament was one of several sites subject to the draconian new restrictions, the organizers of the protest wanted to juxtapose the relative freedoms enjoyed by the holograms, which were not limited by the new law, and flesh-and-blood individuals, who were.
While the holograms were marching in Madrid, students at the University of Cape Town were protesting by staying still – in their case, by continuing to occupy an administrative building as part of the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) movement. The RMF movement started out as a campaign to remove a large statue of Cecil Rhodes, the business magnate and South African politician, who was seen by protestors as a disgraced champion of imperialism and racial subjugation. For nearly three weeks, dozens of students had staged a round-the-clock sit-in to put pressure on the university by disrupting normal administrative operations. As they lived and slept in the building, protestors engaged in discussions about how removing the statue could lead to more extensive reform on campus. Eventually, the University Council yielded to the RMF demands and removed the statue on April 9, 2015. Yet the sit-in continued the next day – despite university orders to vacate the premises – as protestors sought to build on their success to address lingering problems of institutional racism and injustice. For RMF activists, the removal of the statue was not the end, but merely the opening salvo of a longer struggle to “decolonize” the university.
All four of these protests took place on the same day in April, but apart from sharing a moment in time, they seem to have little else in common. The contexts which made it possible for people to protest ranged from the United States’ long-established democracy, to Spain’s and South Africa’s relatively young democracies, to Yemen, which is not, and has never been, fully democratic. Protests happened in rich societies like the United States, where the GDP per capita was over $53,000 in 2013, as well as in the considerably poorer country of Yemen, with a GDP per capita of just $1,473. In addition to sharing the diversity of settings, the protest events themselves differed in focus, target, and tactic. The grievances that motivated protestors to leave the comfort of their everyday routines ranged from police brutality to university culture, and from protests against domestic law to the actions of a neighboring government. The targets included local political elites, the national parliament, a foreign state, and even a university. The protestors sometimes numbered a few dozen, while the demonstrators in Sana’a numbered several thousand, and the Spanish hologram march past parliament – technically speaking – involved no people at all!
The differences among these four examples continue when we consider the outcomes of these various protest events. Over a year after the Sana’a protests, for example, the Saudi coalition continues to bomb Houthi-held areas, while thousands of Houthi continue to protest coalition involvement in the Yemeni civil war. Despite the hologram protest (and others featuring actual people), the Spanish government has yet to repeal its harsh law, and has already levied fines against people in violation of its provisions. Meanwhile, protestors at the University of Cape Town not only succeeded in removing the hated statue of Cecil Rhodes, they also triggered a larger curriculum review and the addition of Black Studies as part of an effort to transform the institution and rid it of institutional vestiges of its colonial past. And back in North Charleston, the protestors eventually did get their citizens’ advisory committee after all, though with limited powers and other compromises that left some leaders of the movement doubtful whether it would be of any real use in combating police violence.
Despite these differences in context, characteristics, and outcomes, there are several key commonalities that these four protest events share. In all of the examples, protests were carried out by people who felt deeply about an issue – so much so that they chose to invest their personal time and energies to bring attention to a problem and work for a solution. But participation required more than simple time and energy; it also was costly, as participants had to take time off from work or school, arrange transportation, and perhaps even risk injury or arrest. Yet despite these potential costs, deeply invested individuals in all four cases chose to act in concert with other, like-minded individuals to coordinate their actions and present a united front to their targets. This unity was often expressed through singing songs, telling stories, and sharing experiences – activities that bonded protestors and transformed them from atomistic individuals to a collective working together for a mutually desirable goal. Protests also involved strategies like sit-ins, vigils, and marches – tactics that were public and that demanded attention – in order to achieve their demands.
In addition, the protests themselves were not isolated incidents destined never to be repeated. Rather, in all four cases, protests were part of a larger, sustained effort to bring about social change. The North Charleston protestors planned to carry out their campaign in the days following Walter Scott’s funeral, and their association with the national Black Lives Matter movement connected their protests to larger efforts to address issues of systemic racism. Similarly, the April 10 protest against Saudi airstrikes was one of several happening that day in the country, but was also connected to subsequent protests against the coalition’s military offensive, in Yemen as well as in London, Toronto, Lebanon, and Iran. The hologram protest may have been the first and only one of its kind, but the organizations that helped to coordinate the demonstration had worked actively to oppose the law since the moment it was passed by the legislature. And RMF protestors continue to challenge the University of Cape Town – and other South African universities – in matters of racial discrimination and injustice. The movement even spread to universities in the United Kingdom and United States, where local students took up the challenge to “decolonize” their institutions and spawned a successor movement – Fees Must Fall – that agitates on the issue of lowering university tuition rates. These similarities – deeply invested participants who shared a sense of purpose and came together as a community, public displays of strength and fortitude, a commitment to ongoing action – suggest that these four protest events are all the handiwork of social movements.
What are Social Movements?
If you were to brainstorm a list of ways in which people could participate in political life, you might name activities like voting in an election, writing a letter to an elected official, donating money to a political party, or answering a pollster’s questions about the most pressing issues facing your country today. Perhaps if you had more time to think, you would start to add some activities to your list that are a little less common, like participating in a strike, or taking part in a protest march. You might even think about disruptive activities – such as hunger strikes, sabotage, or riots – that occur far less frequently, but, when they do, have the potential to shake the existing political order. The universe of political activity, in other words, includes a range of actions, some of which might strike you as innocuous, even commonplace, while others might be surprising, threatening, or shocking.
Where do social movements fit into this smorgasbord of political activity? Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow suggest that they are examples of contentious politics, or politics “in which actors make claims bearing on someone else’s interests, leading to coordinated efforts on behalf of shared interests or programs, in which governments are involved as targets, initiators of claims, or third parties” (Tilly and Tarrow 2015: 7). At first, this definition might not seem to be all that helpful since so much of the political world these days seems to involve people acting in combative and antagonistic ways. But what Tilly and Tarrow argue is that contentious politics involve people making demands, such as a shift in policy, or increased funding for an organization, or a change in the way political elites behave. There are many political activities that do not involve demands. Registering to vote, for example, does not involve making demands but following established rules in order to legally fill out a ballot during elections. Likewise, donating money to an interest group like the American Association of Retired Persons or the National Rifle Association does not, by itself, entail making demands on others, though what such groups do with those donations – lobbying for legislative changes, for example – might indeed involve contentious claims.
Not only do contentious actors like social movements make demands, their claims directly affect the interests of other actors in society who may, in turn, resist giving in to those claims. These interests could include holding on to political power, for example, which motivated the autocratic leaders of various Arab states to resist the demands for democratic reforms emerging from the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. Social movement demands can also affect financial interests, as in the case of protests by North Dakota’s Standing Rock Sioux tribe, which objects to a planned oil pipeline that would cross their main source of drinking water and sacred tribal lands. Preventing the pipeline from being built would cost Dakota Access, the company building it, millions of dollars in lost revenue. Contentious demands can also affect other actors’ identities and values, as in the case of the 2015 clashes over displaying the Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina capitol building. On one side were protestors who argued for the flag’s removal, citing its connection to slavery and racial hatred. On the other side were those who defended the flag, arguing that it was a cherished symbol of Southern heritage and also honored those who lost their lives fighting in the Civil War. As these examples also suggest, the contentious claims that propel social movements can come from all sides of an ideological spectrum; some movements, such as anti-immigration or far-right nationalist movements, are rooted in conservative or even reactionary ideological philosophies, whereas groups like Occupy Wall Street (OWS) or the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) movement come from a left or progressive stance. Some movements may even contain groups with ideologically conflicting stances. The anti-globalization movement, for example, includes groups that critique neoliberal economic policies from Marxist perspectives as well as groups that oppose globalization as a threat to nationalist identities and conservative values. Regardless, whether it impacts power, money, identity, or some combination of these things, fulfilling social movement demands is rarely a straightforward task.
Defining Social Movements
Contentious politics include a range of phenomena besides social movements, so what are the distinguishing characteristics that set this category apart from other forms of political participation? Sidney Tarrow offers one succinct definition when he argues that movements are “collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in a sustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities” (Tarrow 2011: 9). While other scholars might define movements slightly differently or emphasize other aspects, Tarrow’s formulation is a good place to start because it captures many of the components that reappear in these other definitions.
First, social movements are collective, in that they consist of multiple people working in concert toward a common end. They are, ultimately, social spheres that promote interaction among their supporters. These interactions can occur in multiple ways and in multiple locations, ranging from relatively formal movement organizations to less structured and more free-wheeling social media platforms, but still have some kind of organizational structure that can facilitate cooperation across the movement. Participants in the movement are connected to each other via dynamic and flexible networks that facilitate the flow of ideas and information from one part of the movement to another, as well as help to build a sense of collective identity.
Collective identity, in turn, is important because social movements are about bringing together not just people with common goals, but people who share a sense of solidarity with each other and who identify with others in the movement (Melucci 1995). In turn, people who closely identify with and are invested in the movement will be more likely to be concerned for its well-being and survival and, in turn, to help to sustain movement participation over time (Hunt and Benford 2004). This collective identity may precede a movement’s formation, be created as part of social movement activism, or a combination of the two; regardless, this collective sense of belonging and emotional investment that a social movement encourages can be a pleasurable end in itself for activists, whether the movement achieves its demands or not (Jasper 1997: 8).
Duration is also important: one protest event does not a social movement make. It can take time to alter the status quo, and social movements must persist in their demands and work toward them, whether it takes days, weeks, or years. It took the abolitionist movement in the United Kingdom 51 years of work to end slavery in the British empire, from the founding of the first anti-slavery group in 1783 to the final passage of the parliamentary bill. While some movements have shorter life spans than this (and some may last even longer), this capacity to sustain contention is a core feature of social movements and one that differentiates them from riots, which are explosive but short-lived.
Protest Forms and Signaling Credibility
In addition to the above criteria, Charles Tilly and Lesley Wood also argue that social movements use particular types of protest, employing “combinations from among the following forms of political action: creation of special-purpose associations and coalitions, public meetings, solemn processions, vigils, rallies, demonstrations, petition drives, statements to and in public media, and pamphleteering” (Tilly and Wood 2004: 3). Although this seems like a definitive list, social movements are not necessarily bound to just these forms and some can be quite creative in how they articulate their demands. The movement to close down the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, for example, included a group that staged political puppet shows as part of its protest. Students protesting the Chilean government’s education policies staged protest kiss-ins and a flash mob with participants dressed in costumes inspired by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. And Mexico’s Manifesto MX, a street-art collective, organizes graffiti artists to tag buildings with protest murals on topics ranging from neoliberal economic policies to the drug war.
What is noteworthy about these examples is that they are non-institutional. That is, they are activities that occur largely outside formal institutions like courts and legislatures. Social movements do not always use non-institutional forms of protest; they also sometimes lobby political parties, testify before Congress, and make use of the courts to advance their causes, as in the case of the LGBT movement, which used the 2015 US Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges to strike down state-level bans on same-sex marriage. And sometimes institutional actors make use of non-institutional forms of action to make a point or capture the public’s attention. For example, following a deadly mass shooting in Florida, 170 members of the Democratic Party staged a one-day sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives to protest the lack of meaningful gun-control legislation. The tactic infuriated the Republican members of Congress, who argued that it violated the institution’s rules and procedures and called it a political stunt.
Via these non-institutional protests, movements must communicate their worthiness (W), unity (U), numbers (N), and commitment (C) in their actions (Tilly and Wood 2004: 4). Combined into the rather inelegant acronym WUNC, such displays are important because they confer credibility and legitimacy on actors who could be seen as threatening or politically marginal, and whose demands could otherwise be easily dismissed. Outsiders who are seen as deserving, moral, upstanding, and respectable might have an easier time than those who display moral licentiousness or reckless behavior. Movements can demonstrate their WUNC-ness in many ways. For example, by featuring respected members of society participating in rallies, they can demonstrate worthiness; by having everyone wear matching shirts or singing common songs, they can signal unity; by having as many people as possible turn out to a rally, they show numbers; and by protesting, despite the ominous presence of riot police nearby, they display commitment to a cause.
Differentiating Movements
The above criteria provide a working definition of social movements and also help us to separate them from other political groups that might seem similar in certain respects. The requirement that movements operate largely outside formal institutions, for example, sets them apart from other collective, goal-oriented, and sustained groups like political parties and interest groups, which operate largely within institutional settings and use much more conventional tactics to get what they want (Johnston 2014: 9–10). This distinction between institutional and non-institutional channels derives from the notion that political parties and interest groups are largely made up of political “insiders” who have privileged access to the levers of power, compared to political “outsiders” like members of social movements (Kornhauser 1959; Tilly 1978; McAdam 1982; Gamson 1990).
While outsiders can still influence politics, it requires more effort than for insiders who have the standing, resources, access, or know-how to wield political influence more easily (Schattschneider 1963; Merton 1972: 11; Lindbeck and Snower 2001). Political parties, for example, can actually pass (or block) legislation, and have a chance to govern the country if they win enough votes (in democracies) or have enough coercive power (in autocracies). Interest groups can also achieve insider status via the resources they have to lobby lawmakers and the possible technical expertise they can offer when bills are being drafted (Maloney et al. 1994). When drafting the 2013 Affordable Care Act (commonly called Obamacare), for example, lawmakers met with a range of interest groups, including those representing hospitals, medical professionals, and the insurance industry, all of which offered technical advice and recommendations to those in charge of writing the bill.
Social movements, by contrast, are relatively disadvantaged when it comes to wielding political power. They lack the deep pockets of powerful interest groups and the institutional standing of political parties. To use Charles Tilly’s (1978) terminology, social movements are challengers who seek entry into the privileged political sphere inhabited by insiders. But because insiders have a vested interest in limiting the number of people who influence politics, they may not be willing to permit entry or listen to the demands of outsiders. Being excluded from power, in turn, requires outsiders to work a little harder, bang a little louder, be a little more insistent in their efforts to affect change.
While this distinction between insider and outsider is conceptually helpful, in practice the lines are much blurrier. In Sidney Tarrow’s words, social movements are “neither as independent of the polity as they like to portray themselves, nor as ensnared in institutional politics as many later become. They are ‘strangers at the gates’ who operate on the boundaries of the polity, in an uneasy position that explains much of the ambiguities and contradictions in their strategies, composition and dynamics” (Tarrow 2012: 3). Not all political parties and interest groups, for example, have equivalent access to the levers of power. Marginal political parties usually have little hope of winning seats or having any real influence in policymaking. And not all interest groups and lobbies have equally deep pockets or clout. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, interest groups representing the pharmaceutical industry spent $240 million on lobbying politicians in 2015 – the most of any industry – but the alternative energy sector (wind and solar power companies) spent just 9.6 percent of that amount in the same period. And, as Jack Goldstone (2003) observes, there is no sharp dividing line between movements and institutional actors, as movements can develop deep ties with institutional actors, partner with them strategically, and even turn into them over time, as the African National Congress did when apartheid was abolished in South Africa: as a social movement group, it was banned by the country’s government for over three decades, but as a political party, it has won every general election since 1994.
The Rise of Modern Social Movements
Having defined what social movements are, let us now ask: what are their origins? In one sense, protest is old news. The first recorded strike in history, for example, took place over 3,000 years ago in Egypt, near the Valley of the Kings where the ancient pharaohs were entombed. Details of the strike were preserved on papyrus and inform us that it involved the workers who lived in Deir el-Medina, an Egyptian village that supplied the artisans who worked on the royal tombs. Roughly around 1170 BCE, food rations were slow to arrive and, after several lengthy delays, the workers decided to take action. They laid down their tools and left their worksite, demanding their food rations. Government officials gave in to their demands, making this ancient strike a resounding success. In fact, it was so successful that the artisans went on strike several more times in the future when food rations were again delayed (Edgerton 1961).
Though this early strike seems familiar to us in many ways, social movement scholars argue that it does not really constitute a social movement – at least, not in the way we understand it today. In fact, none of the protests that occurred prior to the eighteenth century really had the characteristics that we ascribe to social movements – collective, shared solidarity, with some kind of organizational backing, sustained over time, with displays emphasizing WUNC. As a result, scholars argue that social movements are a relatively modern invention. We can actually date their emergence to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and pinpoint their places of origin as Western Europe and North America. But why then, and why there? The answer has to do with the significant social, political, and economic changes that were unfolding at this time – the rise of the national state, the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of democratic principles – that in combination created the social movement that we know today (Tilly and Wood 2004; Jasper 2014).
Protest Then, Protest Now
What were the hallmarks of protest before the rise of the modern social movement? John Archer’s detailed historical analysis of protest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain gives us some inkling. Consider, as an example, protests that developed around the country in response to the criminalization of gathering wood. For many years, rural communities would collect fallen tree limbs, as well as smaller twigs and branches that could be snapped off by hand from woodlands and the Royal Forests, and use this wood for fuel. This custom, however, started to come under attack, and by 1766 was banned outright. Because alternate fuel sources were scarce, wood theft became the most common crime in the UK by the beginning of the nineteenth century (Archer 2000; Briggs et al. 1996).
This conflict generated protests around the country. The details are instructive. In Otmoor, located less than 10 miles from Oxford, “under the guise of pursuing the traditional ritual of beating the bounds, 1,000 locals marched several miles, destroying fences and hedges in the process. In this incident men reportedly dressed as women took a leading part in the destruction … [even though] cross dressing in English rural protest was, by this time, unusual” (Archer 2000: 13). In Sussex, 100 miles to the south, the protest took a different form: on St. Andring’s Day, people traditionally went squirrel hunting, so, to protest, locals went out on the pretext of hunting squirrels, but “anything that moved was shot and hedges were destroyed and carried home for fuel” (Archer 2000: 13). What makes protests like these different from the strategies and tactics of a modern social movement?
First, these protests tended to be highly localized affairs in which participants were concerned primarily with their immediate surroundings and the targets directly in front of them. They lacked a sense of sharing a common grievance with people from elsewhere, and they did not direct their anger at the government that had passed the despised legislation. Even though protests were widespread, they were remarkably local in focus (Archer 2000: 19). There is no sense from the accounts of these protests that the villagers in Otmoor knew about or felt common cause with the crowd in Sussex. Moreover, protests were largely aimed at what Sidney Tarrow (2011: 38) calls “the immediate sites of wrongdoing” and the perpetrators associated with them: the tax collector or the grain merchant, and not, for example, the government elites who made the tax laws or set grain prices but who were located many hundreds of miles away in a city that most people would never see.
A second, related point is that these separate protests drew on highly localized cultural forms and practices to shape their protests. The Otmoor protests made use of a locally relevant tradition – beating the bounds – and employed cross dressing, which clearly had some local meaning but was not at all a common practice elsewhere. It seems not to have had sufficient resonance to be employed in the Sussex protest where, again, the local celebration of St. Andring’s Day and its custom of squirrel hunting were used to mask the protests that ensued. In Sidney Tarrow’s words, the highly localized scale made protest both parochial, insofar as “most often the interests and interactions involved were concentrated in a single community,” and segmented, “because when ordinary people addressed local issues and nearby objects, they took impressively direct action to achieve their ends, but when it came to national issues and objects, they recurrently addressed their demands to a local patron or authority” (2011: 40).
A third feature in these examples is the relatively short-lived nature of these protests; none of them is sustained over time – rather, they come across as impulsive and brief. This is not particularly surprising given our previous discussion: there was no organization, no collective identity, no emotional attachment in evidence – nothing that would help sustain a protest over multiple days or weeks.
Fourth, protests before the late eighteenth century tended to be defensive and reactive moves rather than campaigns to proactively influence political decisions. Take the case of the wood protests: a law passed by Parliament made the long-held custom of gathering wood illegal, but neither protest demanded that Parliament repeal this law. Instead, they were exercises in venting anger and seeking immediate relief for the problem, not long-term political change.
All of these characteristics, however, were about to change. Rather than being “parochial, segmented, and particular” like earlier protests, the modern social movement would be “cosmopolitan, modular, and autonomous” (Tilly 1996; Tarrow 2011: 40–1). The cosmopolitan nature of modern social movements refers to their increased scale and scope; no longer highly localized, the modern social movement connects local, regional, national, and even international action as part of a unified social movement community. The examples that opened this chapter illustrate this point nicely. The North Charleston protest was, in some ways, very localized, insofar as some of its grievances and demands were narrowly focused on policing practices and oversight in a city of under 100,000 residents. At the same time, the protest was selfconsciously connected to a much larger national movement – the Black Lives Matter movement – and the tragic death of Walter Scott was given national context when connected with the names of other black victims of police violence. Similarly, although the RMF movement started out highly localized, its focus on confronting racial inequities and discriminatory legacies in education spread to other universities in South Africa and even overseas, to Oxford University, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of California, Berkeley. All of these institutions took inspiration from and identified with the RMF movement. The Spanish protests and the Yemeni protests, too, linked multiple sites of protest in ways that earlier forms of protest simply did not do.
The modularity of protest is also a key feature of modern movements. Modularity, according to Sidney Tarrow, involves easy transferability across settings or contexts (Tarrow 2011: 41). In contrast to earlier forms of protest, which were tied to highly local practices, customs, and understandings, modern movements employ tactics that travel across issue and across space: a sit-in can be used in Toronto by taxi workers protesting the entry of ride-sharing companies like Uber into the city, as well as by Chinese students in Tiananmen Square demanding democratic reforms, as well as by disabled Bolivians protesting the level of benefits they receive from the government. This modular form of protest serves “a variety of sites, on behalf of a variety of goals, and against a variety of targets” (Tarrow 2011: 38). Contrast this with the destruction of hedges while cross dressing in Otmoor or shooting anything that moves on the pretext of squirrel hunting, as in Sussex: not only do these forms of protest travel poorly outside their particular locales, but to use them to protest other issues – bread shortages or increasing mechanization – would seem nonsensical.
Social movements also become autonomous as they increasingly moved from defensive, reactive activity to more proactive, strategic approaches. Whereas Lynne Taylor describes bread rioters as spontaneous and impulsive, apolitical and defensive (Taylor 1996: 483), modern social movements have more control over when, where, and how they make their demands (Tilly 2002: 65). The new autonomous social movements not only initiate protest proactively, but also connect protestors to national centers of power rather than the local faces of their grievances, making it possible to aim for long-term changes addressing root causes rather than seeking temporary relief for the immediate symptoms.
Mechanisms of Change
How and why did the modern social movement emerge? And why did it take on the particular form that it has? Three important transformations lie at the heart of this evolution: the rise of the modern national state, the emergence of industrial capitalism, and the spread of democratic ideals. Each of them shook up the existing political, economic, and social order in ways that had long-lasting effects on popular protest.
The Modern State
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European countries were undergoing monumental changes in political structure. In places like Britain and France, feudal structures were being dismantled and, in their place, monarchs were setting up bureaucratic institutions that would make it easier to rule their populations directly rather than relying on intermediaries such as members of the nobility. As they dismantled these feudal structures, they needed a way to carry out the administrative functions that nobles, knights, and their vassals had previously performed. Under a feudal system, for example, the monarch might delegate tax collection to his nobles, who, in turn, would auction off the right to the highest bidder. The winning bidder would then collect taxes from the peasantry, hand it over to the nobleman (keeping some for himself, of course), and the nobleman would, in turn, hand it over to the king (also keeping some for himself, of course). The end result was an inefficient and easily corruptible system of laws and administration that not only diluted the power of the king, but led to discrepancies in enforcement across the country. Under this feudal “tax farming” system, for example, it would not be unusual for two people making the same amount of money to owe completely different amounts in tax, depending on how greedy their respective tax collectors and feudal lords might be. While this system was clearly problematic, monarchs could not simply abolish it without having something to put in its place. Without feudal hierarchies to play that role, state rulers set about developing centralized bureaucracies to carry out these tasks (Tilly 1992).
These bureaucracies were not only centralized, but accountable directly to state leaders. They were also increasingly staffed by people with more specialized knowledge in particular areas. Tax collectors, for example, would no longer be the people who bid the most for that perk, but trained officials who knew the tax code and could administer it fairly and even-handedly. For ordinary people, this shift was significant: the entire population was subject to the same laws, administered in the same way. Moreover, the face of those laws was not the local nobleman or knight, but a representative of the national government itself. These changes fostered not only a sense of horizontal equality and sameness across the population, but also direct connections between individuals and the central government. Now, if there were grievances, it would be more likely that those grievances would be turned toward the national government rather than the purely local, and that individuals would find common cause with others across the country, given that their experiences under the law were far more equal than before.
Industrial Capitalism
In addition to the construction of modern states with their centralized, professional bureaucracies, economic changes also played a role in the evolution of social movements. The first stirrings of industrial capitalism in Britain soon spread throughout Europe, bringing profound social and economic upheavals with them. Industrialization encouraged intensive urbanization as rural populations left their traditional homesteads and moved to cities to work in factories. As a result, by 1850, London had become the largest city in the world – the first European city to achieve this milestone in over 1,000 years (United Nations 1980: 5). It also encouraged greater connectivity to outlying regions of the country, as industries needed reliable and cheap ways to convey raw materials and laborers to manufacturing centers and ship finished goods to consumers. As a result, roads, railways, and canals proliferated across the landscape making it easier to transport goods, but also people and ideas.
Adding to this spread of information were technological innovations in publishing, which made it possible to print cheap books and pamphlets for popular consumption (Anderson 2016). Whereas only the wealthy could afford books before mass printing techniques were perfected, by the middle of the nineteenth century ordinary people could buy books and discover new ideas from far-away places. Together, these forces made it easier for people in one part of a society to learn about, identify with, and potentially support protests happening in other places. Easier travel made it possible to get news about protest tactics and spread those ideas widely. When protest occurred in one place, those towns and villages connected to it by main roads were more susceptible to subsequent outbreaks of protest as the highways served as conduits of information and practice (Archer 2000: 20).
Industrialization also encouraged the development of labor associations, formed to represent the interests of the rapidly growing – and politically marginalized – working classes. These labor associations, in turn, provided an organizational nexus for protests, helping to recruit and mobilize individuals, coordinating activity, and making it possible for episodic bouts of protest to transform into something more sustained and proactive. The collective action that flowed from such organizations became more complex and ambitious, containing explicit programmatic demands and more coherent ideological foundations. Bread rioters did not make sophisticated claims; they just demanded access to bread when it was in short supply. Labor organizations – and the other organized interests that emerged – could make more substantive and systemic policy demands, and frame them as part of a larger ideological agenda. In addition, the organizational structures of such associations made it easier to plan ahead, take advantage of opportunities that presented themselves, and orchestrate protest for the times, places, and targets where it might have the greatest impact.
Spread of Democracy
The final major social change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that affected the evolution of social movements was the spread of democratic ideals and notions of popular sovereignty. Although there were relatively few democracies in the world by the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of democracy was much more widespread. The print revolution had made it easier to circulate the writings of key thinkers like John Locke, and to inform the reading public of developments happening in democracies like Britain, France, and the United States. In a world still dominated by autocratic rulers, the ideals championed by democratic rule – popular sovereignty, freedom, equality, and a government accountable to its own citizens – were enormously appealing to ordinary people.
In addition, the spread of democratic ideas, combined with the development of the national state, also triggered a change in what people believed was the proper relationship between government and those it governs. Whereas earlier monarchical systems justified their authority based on principles like divine right, democracies derived their legitimacy from those they ruled. As a result, government was not seen as separate from and superior to the people; it was the people, and subject to their demands. The idea that people were subjects to be ruled over by a remote authority started to give way to the notion that people were citizens, equal members in the polity. This shift in how people thought about the relationship between people and the government, citizens and the state, also affected social movements. Whereas subjects had no right to make demands on a divinely appointed monarch, citizens had every right to make demands of a government that could not be legitimate without their support.
Together, these social transformations also changed social protest in fundamental ways. As state building, industrial capitalism, and democratic ideas spread and affected the social movements that emerged in Europe and the United States, this new idea of what social movements were and what they could do started to spread beyond its point of origin. While not all protest may fit into the cosmopolitan, modular, and autonomous framework, much of it does, regardless of where in the world we look.
It is important, however, not to take this idea too far; protest may generally share certain key features regardless of whether it occurs in Copenhagen or Caracas, but that is not to say that protest is identical in different locations. Instead, in this book I argue that social movements are also conditioned by the political and social environments in which they are located, and the nature of their opponents, as well as their past histories and decisions; this makes social movements anything but cookie-cutter versions of each other. Accordingly, in the following chapters, I highlight the similarities among social movements that come from general evolutionary patterns that apply broadly to all social movements, as well as ways that social movements reflect the specific locations in which they operate and histories out of which they emerge.
Studying Social Movements
The last remaining task of this first chapter is to provide a brief overview of some of the main theories and methods that scholars use to study social movements. Each of these approaches contains certain foundational assumptions about human nature, what motivates people to act, and what kinds of variables are particularly important to consider when answering questions about social protest. While people certainly disagree on some of these assumptions or about which variables are particularly important for explaining protest, the study of social movements is, ironically, not nearly as contentious as other fields (Tarrow 2004; Edwards 2014: 3). In part, this stems from a reluctance of scholars to claim any sort of sweeping universal law about social movements; there is recognition that the various theoretical approaches might explain part, but not all, of a particular puzzle, and that theories that emphasize different variables can shed light on distinct aspects of social protest. In the subsequent chapters, I will highlight some of these disagreements and areas of agreement or possible synthesis as they pertain to specific questions about social movements.
Collective Behavior Theories
Collective behavior (CB) theories are the earliest attempts to think systematically about why and under what conditions people turn to social protest. It is a heterogeneous collection of approaches, much of which predates the 1970s. While there are critical differences among different scholars working within the CB tradition, they share certain foundational assumptions about social movements.
First, they argue that social protest is not a part of “normal” society; rather, protest occurs when there is some strain on, or disruption to, existing social structures. When such cracks in the social fabric appear – caused, for example by shocks, tragedies, upheavals, or disasters – people are unable to work out their grievances through conventional political institutions or channels. Protest, in other words, is a symptom of social breakdown and turmoil (Edwards 2014: 10). There are different ideas of where these strains come from. Herbert Blumer argues, for example, that strains are not objective conditions in society, but constructed by individuals when they are unable to cope with change or deal with their grievances (Blumer 1971). Social change can aggravate this sense of grievance, and increases the distance between how good people think their lives are and how good they think they ought to be (Gurr 1970). William Kornhauser (1959) builds on this idea by arguing that such breakdowns cause people to feel anxious and alienated from others in society, and that social movements can use this vulnerability to recruit people and offer them a sense of belonging and community. Neil Smelser (1962) argues, by contrast, that it is not individual perceptions of strain but actual, structural strains that generate social breakdowns.
Second, since protest is a manifestation of breakdown when normal institutions are unable to cope, it stands to reason that protest occurs largely outside of institutional structures. Finally, CB theorists emphasize the importance of shared identities and values among movement participants; for them, they are important variables when considering questions about who participates in social movements and why. Individuals who feel adrift in a social order that seems to be breaking down can find a sense of community, purpose, and comfort in a social movement of like-minded individuals (Staggenborg 2011: 12–13).
Resource Mobilization and Political Process Theories
In the 1970s, social movement scholarship took a big step forward with the development of the resource mobilization (RM) school. Dissatisfied with the inability of CB theories to adequately account for empirical patterns of protest and mobilization, early RM theorists like John McCarthy and Mayer Zald proposed an approach based on some different underlying assumptions. RM theory starts from a premise that there is no sharp distinction between social movements and routine political behavior; social movements are not clear-cut outsiders, nor do they employ exclusively non-institutional forms of action. Moreover, participants in social movements are not suffering from any psychological strain but are rational actors capable of making sophisticated cost–benefit calculations about when and how to participate in social movement activities.
RM theorists observe that, if grievances are the key catalyst for social protest, we should have far more protest than we actually do. Everyone is aggrieved about something, but most people do not join protest movements to deal with their grievances. CB theories, in effect, overpredict the amount of protest we would expect to see. Instead of grievances, therefore, RM theorists focus on the variables that facilitate organizing and protest. Their variable of choice is right in the name: resources, both tangible, such as money or physical assets, and intangible, such as reputation and experience (Freeman 1979). Organizations are the main repository for these resources, and, accordingly, have pride of place in RM theories, which point to social movement groups – particularly formal ones – as crucial for initiating and sustaining mobilization (McCarthy and Zald 1977).
Political process theories (PPTs) have similar foundational assumptions to RM theories, but place more emphasis on the interactions between states, social movements, and the larger political context. In trying to account for movement emergence and mobilization, the PPT approach tends to refer back to three core ideas: mobilizing structures (that is, the organizational bases that help to initiate protest), the structure of political opportunity, and framing processes. This approach – and these three ideas – has dominated much of the research on social movements since the 1980s, and there is a great deal of consensus as to their importance (McAdam 2004), though by no means universal acceptance.
One of PPT’s central claims is that movements operate within a particular political opportunity structure, loosely understood as dimensions of the political environment that exist within the structures of a given state. Sidney Tarrow further defines political opportunity structures as “consistent – but not necessarily formal or permanent – dimensions of the political environment or of change in that environment that provide incentives for collective action by affecting expectations for success or failure” (Tarrow 2011: 163). A movement that wants to push for stricter gun-control laws might have an easier time achieving its goal when it operates in a place with legislators sympathetic to their aims, but a much harder time if political elites do not support gun control in any way. Partisan control of the executive and legislative branch could, therefore, be an important part of the movement’s political opportunity structure. While political opportunity structures are conventionally applied to domestic political arrangements, some scholars also argue that aspects of international politics might constitute transnational opportunity structures that can facilitate (or limit) transnational social movements (Passy 1999).
Some scholars argue, however, that without a precise list of what does or does not constitute a political opportunity, nearly anything could be construed as a political opportunity structure, making it “a sponge that soaks up every aspect of a social movement’s environment” (Gamson and Meyer 1996: 275). For critics of PPT, this presents a big problem (Goodwin and Jasper 1999). Defenders of PPT, however, believe the concept can be salvaged and, with more precise description of the causal mechanisms that connect features of the environment with movement strategies, or more exacting definitions, some of the chief concerns about this approach could be mitigated (Meyer and Minkoff 2004).
While PPT was initially seen as highly structural, given its focus on the role that formal organizations play in mobilizing individuals into action (a carry-over from the RM school) and political opportunity structures, it has evolved over time to include certain cultural and ideational factors that contribute to mobilization as well. In particular, PPT focuses on how movements interpret and frame their message in order to appeal to supporters, cultivate allies, and influence their targets. Framing is one of the most important things that social movements do; frames convey
