Figure 29.1 Evolution of dissertations related to global social movements, 1989–2017
Source: ProQuest Theses and Dissertation Database, https://www.proquest.com/libraries/academic/dissertations-theses/
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT
History, Content, and Form
Breno Bringel and Elizabeth McKenna
ON DECEMBER 17, 2010, A TWENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD fruit seller named Mohamed Bouazizi poured paint thinner over his body and struck a match. Bouazizi’s public self-immolation set off street protests that toppled an autocratic regime in Tunisia and catalyzed a wave of protests known as the Arab Spring. During this same period, anti-austerity demonstrations swept Portugal, Spain, and Greece. Across the Atlantic Ocean, protesters inspired by Madrid’s indignados pitched tents in lower Manhattan, a symbolic occupation of Wall Street that spread to more than two hundred cities throughout the United States (Adams 2015). Other countries in both the Global North and the Global South experienced protests with similar characteristics during the same period. Fueled by indignation and rapid-fire communication technology, this cycle of protest seemed to signal a sea change in the scope, scale, and dynamics of social struggle around the world (Castells 2013; Howard and Hussain 2011; Piven and Shefner 2014; Tufekci 2017).
It is tempting to interpret the sudden succession of protests on the streets of Cairo, Lisbon, New York, São Paulo, Hong Kong, and elsewhere as absolutely new or as a unique set of events linked to the political and economic conditions of the late-aughts. Remarkable as this wave of unrest was, the phenomenon of global protest diffusion long predates the rise and spread of digital networks. Its history stretches from religious uprisings to abolitionism, from anti-colonial independence movements to the anti-globalization protests that marked the turn of the twenty-first century.
Guided by this historical view, this chapter has two main aims. In the first section, our goal is to situate global social movements in a longue-durée perspective, outlining what we see as three patterns in how transnational collective action has both taken shape in the real world and been studied by social scientists. Following the proposal and scope of a handbook, we offer a select review of research that speaks to the multiple levels and scales at which social movements operate. Within the vast literature on transnational activism, we identify three genres of scholarship: (1) labor internationalism (and the anti-racist and anti-colonial movement studies that similarly address how activists confront global capitalism); (2) polity studies, which takes the nation-state as the primary movement target; and finally (3) a postmodern and postcolonial turn to the universal dynamics of social contestation. In our survey of this literature, we aim to identify what was gained and what was lost in the transition from one paradigm to the next. In the second half of the chapter, we outline a research agenda that takes these lessons into account by considering the content, form, and temporality of global social movements.
The terms transnational activism and global social movements are often used interchangeably (e.g., Bennett 2005; Fisher et al. 2005). We consider them to be both theoretically and practically distinct and use them to mean different things throughout this chapter. Activism refers to the use of direct action methods to bring about desired social and political change. It can involve disruptive tactics (or contentious politics in the social movement nomenclature), such as protesting, rioting, or bird-dogging a decision maker. Activism can also entail less confrontational activity, like circulating a petition, launching a social media campaign, or attending a committee hearing.1 In repressive contexts, activism is often necessarily more subtle (Chen and Moss 2018); some forms it can assume include dissident writings (Glasius 2013), subversive faith-based displays (Levine 1988), or neighborhood-level associational activity (Lin 2020). Diaspora communities that raise money for humanitarian assistance—as, for example, Myanmar’s exiled populations did for borderland refugees (Simpson 2013)—or a mobilization in which thousands of people around the globe simultaneously post social media messages in support of climate justice (Padawangi 2013) are examples of transborder activism.
By contrast, a transnational social movement involves “mobilized groups with constituents in at least two states, engaged in sustained contentious interaction with power-holders in at least one state other than their own, or against an international institution, or a multinational economic actor” (Tarrow 2001:11, emphasis added).2 One such movement is La Vía Campesina, an international peasant movement founded in 1993 and made up of 182 organizations in 81 countries, and which makes claims on states for sustainable agriculture, food sovereignty, and gender equity. Examples of the kinds of transnational actors that are often the subject of research in the subfield include international government institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, international NGOs, global human rights organizations, and international ethnic, social, or religious movements.3
Trends in Contemporary Global Movements: Research and Social Practice
Although any attempt to classify and periodize a body of work as large and diverse as global social movement studies is a reductive endeavor, our goal is to sketch the outlines of the field’s intellectual history in relationship to the best available evidence of how this sort of activism unfolded. Thus this section will not be an exhaustive inventory of all global movements ever recorded; instead, we use this selective literature review to demonstrate why more historical grounding is needed as scholars turn their attention to the global dynamics of contentious politics. And scholarly interest in the topic does appear to be on the rise: the number of dissertations archived in ProQuest that relate to transnational activism or global social movements increased from just 4 dissertations in 1989 to 106 in 2016.4 As reflected in Figure 29.1, as a percentage of all dissertations archived in the database that include social movements or activism in the abstract or keywords (N = 7,733), those incorporating a global dimension of analysis increased from less than 5 percent in 1989 to a peak of 29 percent in 2007.
Figure 29.1 Evolution of dissertations related to global social movements, 1989–2017
Source: ProQuest Theses and Dissertation Database, https://www.proquest.com/libraries/academic/dissertations-theses/
Did this upswing in transnational social movement scholarship mirror patterns of contention in real world, as many scholars predicted it would? Shortly after the Iraq War protests of 2003—thought to be the largest international demonstrations in history—Sidney Tarrow wrote, “We are witnessing, if not a full-blown global civil society or an integrated transnational polity, at least a trend toward new forms and new levels of transnational contention” (2005:xii). One way to assess the hypothesis that globally oriented activism has increased as the world “flattens” (Friedman 2005) or “shrinks” (Herod 2003) is by testing this proposition against data from one of the increasingly comprehensive large-N databases of contentious political events.
Two such databases, the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) and the Worldwide Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS), monitor the world’s news in print, web, and broadcast media in over 100 languages. The power of these databases derives from their ability to aggregate large amounts of events through automated coding procedures. As social researchers gain access to vast quantities of textual data, machine learning techniques are now being used to detect patterns in large corpora, including newspaper articles (DiMaggio, Nag, and Blei 2013; Newman and Block 2006), meeting transcripts (Fligstein, Brundage, and Schultz 2017), and patents (Kaplan and Vakili 2015).
At the time of this writing, coded output of the ICEWS database is publicly available via the Harvard Dataverse, and includes more than seventy million rows of text-based data spanning the years 1995 to 2016.5 Events are automatically identified from international, regional, national, and local sources, partially mitigating one of the common critiques of newspaper data: namely, that not all contentious political events are covered in canonical media sources like the New York Times, much less earn international coverage (Ortiz et al. 2005). ICEWS events are coded as triplets. Each consists of an initiating actor, an event type, and a target actor. Purely U.S. domestic events are excluded and geographical-temporal metadata are extracted and associated with the events reported in the news article (Boschee et al. 2018).
Filtering for sociopolitical interactions that are both collective and contentious, and which involve one or more transnational actor, allows us to track changes in real-world instances of transnational activism over time.
The map points shown in Figures 29.2 and 29.3 indicate the location of a contentious political event as reported in more than 170 media sources that were coded as involving a transnational actor as either a target or initiator of the action. As a percentage of all contentious political events detected in the database, there were 62 percent fewer protest events involving one or more global actors in 2016 as compared to 1995. The percentage was similar for 2011, the year of the Arab Spring and the major anti-austerity protests in southern Europe, with 60 percent fewer such events as compared to 1995.
In a purely quantitative sense, this finding runs counter to the assumption that the “rooted cosmopolitans” (Tarrow 2002), “transnational advocacy networks” (Keck and Sikkink 1998), and “global non-state” actors (Sassen 2002) that emerged in the 1990s inexorably increased (or at least intensified) their contentious political activity. After the emergence of anti-globalization activism in the late 1990s, the growing capacity of nonstate actors to organize across borders while agitating both state and international institutions showed no signs of abating (Boli and Thomas 1999; Sikkink and Smith 2002).6 In her study of the Battle of Seattle, Jackie Smith demonstrated how that “protest of the century” adapted local repertoires of action to the international stage (2001). Smith and her colleagues later extended this line of research to examine how transnational coalitions of citizen groups responded to the deleterious effects of globalization (2008), with a focus on one particular form of transnational activism: the World Social Forum. Smith and her colleagues argue that the forums, which began in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, were an important precursor to the mass protests that swept the globe in the early 2010s (Smith et al. 2014). Curiously, however, the ICEWS data suggest that globalization did not ipso facto trigger more instances of transnational activism so defined. Nevertheless, the possibility should be considered that global social movements have become so powerful as to “restructure world politics” (Khagram, Riker, and Sikkink 2002) in ways that are simply not detected in these large-N event databases. This includes their importance in everyday spaces and submerged networks related more to experiences than to protest events (Bringel and Pleyers 2017).
Moreover, event-based protest research does what much social movement scholarship tends to do: privilege disruptive tactics at the expense of the more prosaic kinds of action on which successful social struggle inevitably depends. The phrase “the long march through the institutions,” popularized by German New Leftist Rudi Dutschke (and often attributed to Antonio Gramsci) signified “working against the established institutions while working in them” (Marcuse 1972:55). According to this strategy, it is by way of “insinuation and infiltration rather than confrontation” that radicalism succeeds (Kimball 2000). In addition, the automated coding of political data is far from flawless (Schrodt and Van Brackle 2013). The systems are still vulnerable to missing, duplicative, or misclassified events.7 “If something doesn’t get reported in a newspaper or a similar outlet,” notes political and computer scientist David Lazer, “it will not appear in any of these databases, no matter how important it really is” (Singer 2016).
Faced with this confluence of increased scholarly attention (Figure 29.1) in transnational activism and an apparent stasis in its contentious manifestations (Figures 29.2 and 29.3), we propose three paths that would enrich research on contemporary social movements. First, we think that the subfield would benefit from a historical orientation that recovers the political content of activism, the analytical concern that dominated studies of the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist movements of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Second, it should retain but complicate the polity model’s focus on the institutional dynamics of movement activism. Finally, we suggest that research should integrate these perspectives with the field’s relatively recent fascination with the new organizational forms of activism observed in the early years of the twenty-first century. In the following sections, we review some of the lessons bequeathed by these prior literatures.
Placing Cross-Border Collective Action in Historical Context
Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Colonial, and Anti-Racist Global Movements
We start from the same point as early scholars of social movements: with self-consciously global social movements that resisted three interrelated systems of worldwide exploitation: capitalism, colonialism, and slavery. We classify the first of these bodies of research, a “resolutely pro-Marxian” strand (Tilly 1978:48), as labor internationalism. Classic works in this vein placed the international struggle of the proletariat at the center of the theory of history. Marx and Engels’s famous 1848 injunction—“Workers of the world, unite!” ([1848] 1978)—became the rallying cry of radical labor movements for the next 150 years (Löwy 1998). According to Marx, industrial society is not the design of any one nation-state; rather, it is the product of the dynamics of capitalism. Therefore, the grievances inherent in different class situations transcend borders. Social movement research in the Marxist tradition insists on the primacy of shared positions in the organization of production. Key works of scholarship investigated peasant revolutions in Algeria, Angola, China, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Russia, and Vietnam (Paige 1975; Wolf 1969); as well as the historically specific relationships among agrarian classes, landlords, and bureaucrats in Britain, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, and Russia (Moore 1966). There was also Charles Tilly’s analysis of the history of collective action in Western Europe and North America (Tilly 1978:48).
A launch point for much of this work was the rise and fall of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA), also known as the First International: a political organization founded amid the labor union revival of the 1860s to resist capitalism on a global scale. It illustrates some of the contradictions that would plague Marx’s elusive worldwide proletarian revolution and the scholarship that attended to it. In his inaugural address to the IWMA at St. Martin’s Hall in central London, Marx described the dire conditions of the British laboring classes. “With local colors changed,” he said, “the English facts [of poverty and increasingly obscene wealth concentration] . . . reproduce themselves in all the industrious and progressive countries of the Continent” (Marx [1864] 2000). The only antidote, he proclaimed, was for workers of different countries to link arms in universal, emancipatory struggle. As is well known, Marx predicted that as the rate of profit declined to zero, widespread worker rebellions would beget the dissolution of the capitalist world system. Even though, as Giovanni Arrighi showed in his analysis of evolutionary patterns of world capitalism (2009), systemic cycles of accumulation are progressively shortening, the mass uprisings predicted by Marx did not come to fruition. Asked whether a second proletariat revolution would be possible, labor scholar Peter Waterman dismissed it as an impossibility, given that “there was no first coming of this mythical creature” (1998:349).
Paul DiMaggio (2001) offers an account of the reasons why Marx’s predictions of imminent worldwide revolution did not materialize. The six explanations he reviews can be reduced to two broader ones. First, advanced capitalist nations and firms used offensive practices that forestalled the declining rate of profit, such as outsourcing exploitation to peripheral countries and exploiting ever more vulnerable populations, including immigrants and ethnic minorities (Sassen 1983; Schoenberger 1988). Second, monopolists and oligopolists employed defensive (or class conciliatory) tactics. These included distributing profits among professional salaried managers (Galbraith [1967] 2007), bureaucratizing the enemy (Edwards 1979), and using the spoils of monopoly pricing to pacify the workforce (Baran and Sweezy 1966). Most political economists agree that these two sets of practices had anesthetizing effects on the trade unions and undercut the potentially revolutionary ambitions of the underclasses.
Historians identified other explanations for the First International’s inability to forge a global solidarity movement. Drawing on primary documents, Henry Collins showed that the varied development of national labor movements across Europe meant that British trade unionists, by far the most well established, saw no point in collaborating with the “technically and organizationally backward” workers on the continent (1962:412). Collins observed that whereas “in Switzerland, strikes were treated as abnormalities; in Belgium as acts of war,” England’s trade unions were “within their accepted limits, powerful” (1962:412). Contrary to Marx’s proclamation, some laborers felt that the workers of the world needn’t unite after all—at least if they wanted to secure incremental gains—so long as their bargaining partner was a reform-oriented government. Corroborating this research, Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly later showed that workers have historically secured rights by making claims on the nation-state rather appealing to a supranational body (1974).8 Meanwhile, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Hermes Augusto Costa note, capital—and not the laboring underclass or minority movements—managed to internationalize with far more success (2005:18).
In contrast to the relatively bloodless domestic labor reforms covered in this research, a parallel body of work examines contemporaneous—and more militant—global uprisings, including indigenous struggles, slave revolts, anti-colonial wars of independence, and attempts at Pan-African revolutions (Aptheker 1937; Du Bois 2007; Tarrow 2007). In his foreword to Cedric Robinson’s influential book Black Marxism ([1983] 2000), Robin Kelley explains this coincidence: “At the very same moment European labor was being thrown off the land and herded into a newly formed industrial order, [A]frican labor was being drawn into the orbit of the world system through the transatlantic slave trade” (xiv). According to Robinson, many slave-led rebellions took inspiration not from Western Marxism’s formulation of the transnational and transhistorical proletariat but from West and Central African culture, merging different influences. The same holds true for Latin America, where the political language of social movements is the result of situational changes and an available “political and conceptual repertoire” that is reinvented and redefined over time, assigning new meanings to classic themes and transformative political action in the region, as evidenced by, for example, the anti-imperial and decolonization movements (Bringel 2019).
The relationship between abolitionism and anticapitalism remains the subject of much scholarly debate (e.g., Ashworth [1995] 2007; Bender et al. 1992). Undeniable, however, is that Marxist thinking—if not Marx himself—was present in many of these revolutionary movements (Cabral [1964] 2010; Fanon [1963] 2004).9 The abolitionist movement itself, which peaked in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was a significant early instance of cross-border struggle (Drescher [1977] 2010). Scholars have examined the networks that structured the slave trade and the abolition movement (Ingram and Silverman 2016), the overlooked role of female antislavery activists (Jeffrey 1998), and the strategic use of pressure tactics like the “carrot of British financial aid” and the “stick of the possible boycott of colonial produces” (Murray 1980:53).10 Richard Blackett’s work (1983, 2000, 2013) draws attention to the ways in which black Americans’ role in the struggle for emancipation is often excised from popular and scholarly discourse, as well as how transatlantic connections strengthened the movement. Instead, it is the changing normative regime—found in the work of Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke and Montesquieu—that emphasized constructs like “moral capital” (Brown 2006) and the “rhetoric of sensibility” (Carey 2005) that received the most attention among scholars of abolitionism in the Global North. Black radical scholarship provided a trenchant critique of this discourse and literature (e.g., Robinson [1983] 2000).11
Distinct from many movement studies that came later, what the literature on the anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-racist global movements briefly outlined earlier have in common is their concern with the dynamics of politics, power, and structural oppressions (Hetland and Goodwin 2013; Walder 2009). This scholarly preoccupation with movement claims and content, however, receded as critiques of orthodox Marxism’s failure to explain country-by-country patterns of social struggle gained prominence. As Jeff Goodwin and Theda Skocpol observed the year the Berlin Wall fell, the Marxist hypothesis that “misery breeds revolt” could not explain why and where protests and revolutions occur (1989:490). Critics note that even at their peak popularity, materialist analyses could not explain, for example, the strike waves of the 1930s. The French sit-down strikes, the United States’ mass automobile and steelworkers’ strikes, and the Arab revolt in Palestine all suggest that rebellions do not depend on some threshold level of hunger, oppression, or immiseration. Instead, scholars have shown that global levels of protest sometimes increase, sometimes decrease, and sometimes stay the same when material well-being improves (Gould 2005:239).
The Polity Model
Acknowledging these limitations, a second school of social movement research placed collective action struggles squarely within the bounds of the territorial nation-state. This shift coincided with the academic institutionalization of social movement studies in the 1960s and 1970s, after which political process and resource mobilization theories emerged as the dominant theoretical paradigms. Most work in this intellectual lineage used what Elizabeth Armstrong and Mary Bernstein called the polity model, a “state-centered view of power” (2008:77), which generally ignored the nonstate and suprastate institutions in which power also inheres.12 What is more, for much movement scholarship originating in the Global North, analysis of the world beyond the United States or Western Europe is the exception rather than the rule (Bringel 2011; Mariátegui 2005).13
Instead, many seminal works in the polity tradition were written in the long afterglow of the American civil rights movement, whose successes justified its usage as the primary case from which new theoretical insights emerged (e.g., Andrews 2004; McAdam [1982] 1999; Morris 1984). Among these scholars’ interventions was the call to reenter human agency in social movement studies, rejecting both the mass society theorists’ model of collective action as extreme and irrational crowd behavior, as well as collective behavior theorists’ analysis that “system strain” results in the normative ambiguity and alienation that in turn produces social movements (Buechler 2000). Although political process theory is sometimes criticized for its structural bias (Goodwin and Jasper 2004), many polity model researchers call attention to the fundamental sources of human agency of social movement leaders, the institutional forms they create, and the tactical repertoires they creatively employ to mobilize their constituents.
At the same time, the polity model’s tendency toward methodological nationalism has been thoroughly critiqued (e.g., Oommen 2012)—and, in some cases, partially corrected. In Doug McAdam’s introduction to the second edition of Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, for example, he notes that “scholars in the political process tradition have generally failed to fully appreciate the multiple embeddings that shape the interpenetrations and actions of political actors” ([1982] 1999:xxxi). Civil rights leaders, McAdam argued, recognized that they could strategically leverage the geopolitical context of the Cold War when making their demands. So long as black citizens at home were denied the right to vote, the national political establishment lost the veneer of moral superiority that it relied on while fighting communist regimes abroad. Tarrow, another originator of the political process model, later made it his project to examine the processes and mechanisms that explain transnational activism, the fusion of international and domestic contentious politics, and whether “new” forms of movement organization are “simply producing old local wine in new global bottles” (2005:214). Michael Mann (1984, 1997), among others, offers a skeptical answer to Tarrow’s line of inquiry, qualifying the effects of globalization. Mann argues against declaring the death of the nation-state, noting the uneven effects of transnational interactions on domestic sources of power, in the realm of both the material (“hard geopolitics”) and the ideological or normative (“soft geopolitics”).
The Third Phase of Modernity
Finally, in what sociologist José Maurício Domingues (2012) named the “third phase of modernity” (and several others called “flexible modernity” or “postmodernity”), scholars and activists interrogated the taken-for-grantedness of the Westphalian political order in movement studies. Research on transnational movements proliferated after the fall of the Berlin Wall. These included studies of indigenous movements like the Zapatistas (Inclán 2008; Stavenhagen 2003), land reform struggles connected to La Vía Campesina (Martínez-Torres and Rosset 2010), feminist movements (Dufour, Masson, and Caouette 2011), anti-globalization mobilizations culminating in the 1999 Seattle protests (Levi and Murphy 2006; Smith 2001), the international environmental movement (Longhofer and Schofer 2010), and global human rights campaigns (Gohn 2011; Sikkink 1993), among others.
This marked scale-shift away from the framework of the polity model reflected a “decentering of the nation-state as a hegemonic reference for protests” (Bringel 2015:123). But many of these studies still hewed to the theoretical and methodological assumptions of earlier decades. For example, even as Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink acknowledge the increasingly blurred boundary between the international and national realms (1998:4), the boomerang pattern they propose—a metaphor used to refer to the risks nation-states face from increasingly powerful transnational alliances—has been criticized for reifying the global–local dualism of the earlier scholarly order.
Recent work, such as Tianna Paschel’s comparative investigation of black movements in Brazil and Colombia, shows that the improbable gains of ethnoracial justice struggles were not the result of the boomerang of international pressure “echo[ing] back” against a domestic setting in which decision makers were “deaf” to movements “too weak to advance their own claims” (Tarrow 2005:200). Instead, these victories emerged from the alignment of global and local openings (Paschel 2016:227). Similar to McAdam’s analysis of civil rights leaders’ strategic use of the Cold War geopolitical rhetoric, Paschel showed that the “Afro-Brazilian movement was able to leverage [unprecedented international openings] effectively because the Brazilian state had invested decades in projecting its image as a racial paradise abroad” (2016:236) at the same time as the domestic Afro-Brazilian movement strengthened its internal capacities. Adding still more complexity to the boomerang model is Yan Long’s research on international AIDS activism in China, which showed that transnational interventions can birth new forms of domestic or “diplomatic repression” rather than new human rights advances. Long’s longitudinal case study showed that transnational interventions mainstreamed AIDS and, in the process, created “new repressive actors” (with new repressive repertoires) out of social health organizations (2018).
The body of scholarship that emerged in this third phase of modernity sparked original and much-needed discussions about the cross-national dimensions of social contestation, articulating territories, networks, and scales in a more flexible and dynamic way. As Paschel’s and Long’s research makes clear, there is no absolute contradiction between the local and the global, as the widely used boomerang metaphor tends to suggest. International dynamics interpenetrate domestic politics in vital ways—the two are not completely separate spheres of political action. Moreover, although a wide literature has demonstrated the efficacy of legalistic international pressure on human rights concerns, the extent to which such interventions are similarly effective on questions related to global capitalism and the political economy of extractivism—where we first began with Marx—is less clear (Caren, Gaby, and Herrold 2017; Thomas and Mitra 2017).
Critical Reflections and New Research Directions
Such an oversight is not uncommon. Many accounts of global activism examine the variety of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs), but don’t address their political content, much less the material forces that so preoccupied the labor internationalists, decolonial thinkers, and anti-racist scholars referenced earlier. This omission may be due, in part, to the longstanding and growing specialization of fields of study with close proximity, such as labor studies and social movement research (Ferguson, Dudley, and Soule 2017). The split is reflected in the semantic emptying of terms like activist. As Jonathan Smucker observes, social movement adherents were historically classified as “abolitionists, populists, suffragettes, unionists, or socialists” (2017:18), all terms that referenced specific political context and content. The more modern term “activist, on the other hand, is an apparently ‘contentless’ label that now traverses political issues and social movements,” he notes (Smucker 2017:18). Part of what makes sociology distinctive is its attention to the social and material bases of politics as reflected in the terms Smucker enumerates.
Rethinking Power and Capitalism
Careful analysis of the ways in which economic power translates into other kinds of power is one of the central contributions of the discipline of sociology (Bourdieu [1979] 1984; Weber [1922] 1946). And yet scholars have noted that class has receded to the background in much research (Manza and McCarthy 2011), despite renewed interest in the issue after the 2008 crisis (Barker et al. 2013). Mainstream studies of social movements have often been criticized for bracketing out the distribution of power (and its oft-utilized proxies, like wealth, income, ideology, and education) in attempts to identify the microprocesses of mobilization. For much of this line of inquiry, whether protesters seek to topple a dictator or torch a McDonald’s—and whether the protagonists of protests are elites or marginalized members of an aggrieved population—is of secondary concern. Instead, the emphasis is on discerning which collective-action frames are operative; how well attended protests are and how often they occurred; and the causal effects of communication, recruitment, and tactical diffusion (e.g., Baldassarri and Bearman 2007; Bearman and Everett 1993; Ketelaars 2016; Wang and Soule 2012).
Andrew Walder (2009:398) in particular has argued against this turn, claiming that the field’s focus on framing processes and the ways in which networks catalyze collective action while eschewing political economy “radically narrows the intellectual horizons of the field” (398). In a similar critique of this trend, Gabe Hetland and Jeff Goodwin (2013) observe that social movement scholars have increasingly—and inexplicably—ignored how inequality and capitalism affect protest and political contestation. They write:
The more recent scholarship tends to ignore not only the direct and proximate effects of capitalist institutions on collective action, but also the ways in which capitalist dynamics indirectly shape the possibilities for protest, sometimes over many years or even decades, by, for example, influencing political institutions, political alliances, social ties, and cultural idioms. Instead, recent scholarship tends to focus on short-term shifts in “cultural framings,” social networks, and especially “political opportunities,” rarely examining the deeper causes of such shifts (Hetland and Goodwin 2013:86)
The political content of social movements—if addressed at all—is often reduced to either material claims (such as wage disputes, welfare reform, or other redistributive issues) on the one hand, or identity-based recognition claims on the other (Fraser 2009). The artificial separation between capitalist dynamics and what the new social movements literature called “post-material” claims (referring to the women’s, ecology, LGBT, and peace movements, among others) was never wholeheartedly accepted in Latin America and in other peripheral regions of the world.14 For example, Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, widely known as the Landless Movement, or MST, combines the struggle for land and agrarian reform (a traditional material and structural claim) with more “identity-based” or transversal claims regarding race, gender, and environmental politics (Bringel 2013). In this and many other cases, the intrinsic relation between culture, nature, and territory makes it impossible to separate the “cultural” from the “material,” since both are interwoven in the defense of movement participants’ lives and livelihoods.
Some research on the protests that erupted in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis—with which we began this chapter—emphasizes this intersection of structure and culture. Examining the anti-austerity protests in Portugal, borne of “contagion” and “communication,” Elísio Estanque, Hermes Augusto Costa, and José Soeiro argue that, in contrast to other cycles marked by postmaterialist values, economic issues have gained a new centrality in both global protests and the research that studies them (2013). Donatella della Porta’s Social Movements in Times of Austerity praises this new trend, arguing that “there is much to gain from bringing reflection on [social class] cleavages back into social movement studies” (2015:12). We are encouraged by both the epistemological and political learnings that are emerging from movement experiences rooted in the Global South—and by increased attention by scholars in the Global North to the constraining and enabling conditions of capitalism—and expect it to continue.
Another Kind of Right Censoring
Another consideration is that much of the research in the three epistemological traditions surveyed earlier examines movements from the perspective of minority challenger groups and progressive left-wing movements. Characteristic of this tendency is Charles Tilly’s definition of a social movement: “the sustained, organized challenge to existing authority in the name of [a] deprived, excluded, or wronged population” (1995:37). Scholars rarely subject reactionary countercurrents or elite-led contentious politics to the same level of scrutiny. Similarly, a great deal of the research on global social movements that took place in the third phase of modernity referred exclusively to the action of advocacy groups acting in the name of “principled issues” (Sikkink 1993; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). What of groups rallying around unprincipled causes? Few scholars take Al Qaeda, the right-wing Atlas Network, the spread of neo-Pentecostalism, or even contemporary fringe right-wing groups as research objects, even though they arguably meet the empirical and analytic criteria for social movements outlined in the literature.
Across these three paradigms, we observe a tendency for scholars to study movements with left-leaning political content, making them overrepresented in the canon. Returning to the ProQuest dissertation database, we used a random-number generator to select a 10 percent subsample (N = 313) of dissertations on transnational activism archived between 1989 and 2016, which we then read and coded for a specific claim, a meta claim, and an ideology claim (left, right, mixed, or unknown).15
The coded output, depicted in Figure 29.4, reveals a new meaning for the phrase “right censoring.” Most dissertations focused on topics closely associated with progressive causes. For every dissertation related to a conservative, reactionary, or regressive global movement, five are written on causes more closely associated with left politics. Although there always tends to be a lag and overcorrection in the study of world events, we suggest that our tendency to study emancipatory movements helps explain the inadequacy of existing frameworks to explain the revival of anti-democratic, nativist, anti-globalist, and white supremacist movements in Europe and the United States, the rise of religious fundamentalism in parts of the Middle East, and the ebbing of the so-called Pink Tide in Latin America.
Figure 29.4 Political content of dissertations on global social movements, 1989–2017
Source: ProQuest Theses and Dissertation Database, https://www.proquest.com/libraries/academic/dissertations-theses/
Kathleen Blee and Kimberly Creasap (2010) note that there is indeed a growing literature related to rightist causes, and right populism in Europe in particular (see Toscano 2019). They point to a robust body of research on the role of women, websites, and white supremacists in scholarship on conservative activism; however, they note that scholarship on the global connections among right-wing movements and their relationships to institutional politics is limited. With this in mind, one avenue for future research might examine whether and how the mechanism of diffusion (or contagion), widely studied in the literature on leftist transnational activism, might be operative for right-wing movements as well.
An especially fruitful research direction might examine these rightist movements in a Polanyian sense by attempting to understand the sort of double movements of which they are a part.16 The emerging right-wing social movements in the world in recent years cannot be understood in isolation. On the contrary, we need relational interpretations that analyze the history, emergence, and dynamics of these movements, taking into account a broader field of contention that includes diverse actors, targets, and spaces. Yet studies that analyze movement-countermovement interactions are still scarce (Meyer and Staggenborg 1996). Examining these dynamics may help us understand how, for example, the unprecedented successes of the civil rights, women’s, and environmental movements of the 1960s relate to the anti-government, right-wing movement that wrested control of the Republican Party (Ganz 2018). We would do well to be less left “movement-centric” (McAdam and Tarrow 2010), pay more attention to activists’ enemies and targets (Luders 2010), and sharpen our analysis of how conservative and reactionary activists make the long march through institutions as well (Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez 2016).
Organizational Forms and Temporality of Global Social Movements
Another less trodden path in global social movement studies rescues some of the polity literature’s concern with organizational forms and repertoires. In the previous edition of this volume, Elisabeth Clemens analyzed how organizational structures and practices shape political socialization (2006). If this is the case, than scholars of transnational activism cannot stop at examining the political content of social movements. They must also turn a critical eye toward the organizational forms, practices, and routines of which they are composed, as well as how they change over time.
One of the most incisive reminders of the link between the content and form of associational activity comes from Sheri Berman’s (1997) study of the Weimar Republic, in which she showed that civil society activity based on bonding rather than bridging ties can aid the rise of fascism. This led her to observe that “political institutionalization may be less chic a topic these days than civil society, but it is logically prior and historically more important” (1997:401). Her account shows that activism is not an unalloyed good. Nor is charity. Clifford Bob’s research (2002, 2009, 2010), for example, shows how many INGO funding practices can be characterized as Darwinian: groups engage in fierce competition with each other to appeal to international donors for scarce resources—sometimes to the detriment of the needs and interests of their own constituencies. In the United States, this culprit for this dynamic was named “the nonprofit industrial complex” (Rodríguez 2007), a reference to the ways in which funders sometimes reinforce the power dynamics they purport to fix. This research suggests that the politics of social movement funding practices merit investigation as well.
Building from this body of research, we propose two further research topics that bear on the organizational dimensions of global social movements: the time horizons of protest cycles and the formal structures and diffuse platforms that link them together (or not). With regard to the first dimension, our effort to distinguish activism from movements at the outset of this chapter is also a comment on the temporal lenses through which scholars analyze social movements. The medium-term political consequences of many of the post-2008 protest movements demonstrate that large numbers of people in the streets are perhaps neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for movement success.
In some cases, amorphous masses can inspire powerful countermovements. In 2011 in Egypt, for example, the 10-million-person mobilizations that toppled a feckless Mubarak ultimately led to a military-judicial seizure of power (Tuğal 2014). That same month, in Brazil, diverse individuals from across the ideological spectrum took part in mass mobilizations in more than 350 cities across the country. After the initial outpouring, however, the democratizing demand that had sparked the protests—a call for free public transportation—receded. The protests’ progressive elements were outmatched by a subsequent wave of reactionary demonstrations that grew into a full-blown authoritarian movement. With help from the traditional purveyors of power like the media, the judiciary, and economic power elite, Brazil’s authoritarian movement overtook all levels of government in both the 2016 and 2018 elections (Bringel 2016; Bringel and Pleyers 2019; McKenna 2019). In Turkey, the Gezi protests that relied on a digital infrastructure, but no internally legitimated leadership, were easily and forcibly dispersed (Tufekci 2014:14). Almost ten years after the beginning of this global cycle of protests, the world appears to have moved from indignation to polarization and, in simple terms, from democratization to authoritarianism. We can draw some lessons from these cases about the tension inherent in the temporal choices scholars must make in the study of social movements.
Doug McAdam and William Sewell note that much social movement research avoids this choice, “betray[ing] no temporality whatsoever” (2001:90). The framing literature and cross-sectional surveys of movement activists in particular seems to have “no particular conception of time” (2001: 90). McAdam and Sewell identify two temporal rhythms that have dominated in the study of social movements and revolutions: long-term processual change and the protest cycle. By contrast, they lament the lack of focus on “the precise sequencing of actions over the course of a few hours or days . . . [which] may have structuring effects over a very long run” (2001:102). Sewell’s analysis of the storming of the Bastille—which, he argued, catalyzed the French Revolution and invented the very category of revolution itself—exemplifies what the authors term event-based sociology (1996a, 1996b). Since this intervention, some studies have focused on the momentary and contingent choices that actors make in high-stakes moments and their short and long-term effects (Seguin 2016). One noteworthy example is David Snow and Dana Moss’s (2014) retheorization of spontaneity. Snow and Moss argue that the importance of unplanned actions that take place as protests unfold militates against what they call the “overly-organized” conception of how movements operate.17
At the same time, as Max Weber famously observed, “Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” Street protests, strikes, boycotts, and critical elections represent only the most visible forms of struggle over the distribution of power, as Alberto Melucci insisted in all his work. Although event-based sociology can be key to understanding conjunctural dynamics, a focus on open political conflict alone obscures how power relations also operate through nondecisions, agenda control, and other structures that allocate authority over what issues are even up for debate (Lukes [1974] 2005; Pierson 2015). Analyses restricted to the first face of power, typical of the kinds of studies that use newspaper data (as we did in Figures 29.2 and 29.3), often fail to examine what Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez call the “organizational universes” that structure long-term political shifts (2016:681).
This limitation opens new possibilities for future research. The first is related to the continuities and ruptures that take place between protest cycles. Excessive focus on protest waves—and on the sensational newspaper coverage they often generate—often makes us overlook what happens in between cycles. The intercycle lens can be provide a useful analytical approach with which to examine the continuities, ruptures, and innovations that take place over time. The cadence of protest cycles and the mechanisms that link the peaks to the troughs mean that what happens after and between the “moments of madness—when all is possible” (Tarrow 1993) may be as important as the collective-action events themselves.
A second possibility relates to the temporalities of protest cycle analyses. There is a kind of division of intellectual labor in the social sciences among the analysts of these cycles. Those linked to political economy and historical sociology tend to approach them from a longue-durée perspective, focusing mainly on the dynamics of capitalism (e.g., Arrighi 2009; Braudel 1977; Wallerstein 1974). These authors have developed sophisticated elaborations of economic cycles but maintain a problematic relationship with what they call “anti-systemic movements” because of their sometimes deterministic emphasis on immutable structural and historical forces. A second way of interpreting protest cycles is associated primarily with political sociology and historical institutionalism, schools of thought that have helped us understand political cycles in the medium term, such as the periods that scholars sometimes refer to as “waves of democratization” (Huntington 1991). In this case, social movements are also often considered a consequence—but not a creator—of suprapolitical and institutional dynamics. Finally, within this division of intellectual labor in the social sciences, social movement scholars tend to study protest cycles in the short term, which often narrows the scope of the scholarly contribution. The length of a given cycle of protest is often just a few weeks or, at best, a few months. Far too few studies integrate these different temporalities (short, medium, and long-term) into coherent analytical frameworks.
Given this challenge, how might future scholars of transnational activism and social movements theorize the relationship between protest events, their cultural and material content, and the broader political cycles of which they are a part? How can a more complex, dynamic, and contingent understanding of the impacts of global protest help us understand the current moment characterized by democratic setbacks? To what extent can an analysis of the temporalities of social movements contribute to our understanding of changes in organizational forms? Time-based analyses are fundamental to any assessment of social movements and their myriad organizational forms. The answer to these questions, we argue, would significantly advance the state of the art of social movement research and praxis.
Final Words
In 1897, Albion Small wrote a short essay in one of the American Journal of Sociology’s earliest issues. He argued that the term social movement “once had dignity,” which it had lost, because of the confusion surrounding what, exactly, it means. “Let us try to represent the social movement candidly,” he wrote:
So long as men have lived they have at times showed two opposite dispositions; first, to calmly take life as they found it; second, to try to better themselves. It would be altogether distorted to represent past times as controlled by the former impulse, and to assert that the latter is peculiar to our day. The migrations of Semites and Mongols and Teutons would disprove that. The history of industry and commerce and war and science would disprove it. The study of every great nation would disprove it. Men have always tried to improve their condition. (Small 1897:340–341)
We have attempted to make three interventions that could strengthen future research on the perennial phenomenon that is the social movement. First, as Small observed more than a century ago, transnational activism and global social movements are hardly “peculiar to our day.” In much of the research we surveyed, the overwhelming tendency is for social movement scholars to study transnational activism and movements as though they were historically novel phenomena. Second, theoretical and empirical research that bridges the content (political and cultural) and form (organizational, tactical, and temporal) of transnational movements would represent a welcome intellectual contribution to the field. Finally, scholarship that rescues capitalism and power and moves beyond the tendency to study single temporalities and movements that are left-leaning in their politics (and that operate primarily within the bounds of the nation-state) would help address systematic biases in the dominant theoretical frameworks of the subfield.
Despite our focus on history throughout this chapter, we would be remiss to ignore the deep transformations taking place in contemporary activism today. Around the world, there is something of a consensus that we are living through the change of an era. The actors and their respective practices and grammars of action have changed considerably vis-à-vis the broader shifts in societies. Deciphering these transformations requires transcending rigid frameworks, short-termism, and even the fierce urgency of the present. It also requires thinking globally and in an open and dynamic way, learning from the participants of social movements and synthesizing accumulated knowledge. This chapter was an attempt to map a few possible steps in that direction. Many more must also be taken.
