No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Habitus and social movements: how militarism affects organizational repertoires
Social Movement Studies
Abstract
2010–2012 were years of global protests. This wave of mobilization has been celebrated for its horizontal, leaderless, and participatory character. But this was not the case in all countries. In Israel, which saw the largest social contention in its history, the protest was marked by a dominant and centralized leadership and by cooperation with institutional actors and corporate media. Based on the study of the Israeli case, this research seeks to contribute to explanations of how movements’ organizational forms develop. Social movement scholars have shown that activists’ forms of organization are limited to a familiar repertoire of action. Building on previous scholarship, I argue that activists’ organizational repertoires are shaped by a habitus that familiarizes and routinizes certain practices. But while existing scholarship focuses on how organizational habitus develops within the field of activism, I expand the applicability of habitus and show how movement repertoires are also influenced by habit in fields unrelated and even antagonistic to activism. Based on participant observations and interviews, I show how in the Israeli case, militarism formed part of activists’ organizational habitus and contributed to the 2011 protests’ centralized and hierarchical character.
... An important line of research on the participation-representation connection entails case studies in the social movement literature that use process-tracing and historical institutional methods (e.g., Ganz 2000Ganz , 2009McAdam 2017;Shoshan 2018;Tarrow 1994;Tilly and Tarrow 2007). While this body of research has identi ed a number of cases in which speci c forms of participation seem to be e ective at achieving the goals of participants, a common critique of this work is that researchers often investigate salient and Combining data on political participation with these two measures of representational outcomes allows researchers to empirically investigate whether and how di erent forms of participation are associated with congruence (i.e., preference similarity) between citizens and representatives, and to assess the responsiveness p. 820 ...
The Oxford Handbook of Political Participation provides the first comprehensive, up-to-date treatment of political participation in all of its varied expressions. It covers a wide range of topics relating to the study of political participation from different disciplinary and methodological angles, such as the modes of participation, the role of the context as well as the determinants, processes, and outcomes of participation. The volume brings together the political science and political sociology tradition, on the one hand, and the social movement sociological tradition, on the other, is sensitive to theoretical and methodological pluralism as well as the most recent developments in the field, and includes discussions combining perspectives that have traditionally been treated separately in the literature as well as discussions of current trends and future directions for research in this field.
... An important line of research on the participation-representation connection entails case studies in the social movement literature that use process-tracing and historical institutional methods (e.g., Ganz 2000Ganz , 2009McAdam 2017;Shoshan 2018;Tarrow 1994;Tilly and Tarrow 2007). While this body of research has identi ed a number of cases in which speci c forms of participation seem to be e ective at achieving the goals of participants, a common critique of this work is that researchers often investigate salient and Combining data on political participation with these two measures of representational outcomes allows researchers to empirically investigate whether and how di erent forms of participation are associated with congruence (i.e., preference similarity) between citizens and representatives, and to assess the responsiveness p. 820 ...
In an era marked by concerns about democratic legitimacy, the question of whether citizens’ political actions are effective in achieving intended outcomes is of utmost importance. Although a core idea in democratic theory is that democratic governance should be responsive to the will of the people, most empirical research on this topic has focused on the opinion–representation connection, with less focus on the participation–representation connection. This chapter reviews three key areas of research that inform this topic, namely the categorizations used to distinguish between different forms of participation, including institutionalized and non-institutionalized participation; recent empirical studies that investigate the participation–representation connection; and the main attitudinal measure related to effectiveness of political efficacy. The concluding section includes a brief analysis of cross-national data on these topics from the European Social Survey, with a focus on providing insights into the challenges and opportunities for advancing future research.
... Yet, social movement studies reveal that getting involved is often mediated by informal social networks. Apart from this, also the complexity of reconciling individual selves with collective concerns, of negotiating different degrees of activism and of identifying with a more or less institutionalised collective habitus has been analysed; difficulties that reflect social divisions according to gender, ethnicity or education (Bobel 2007;Rogstad and Vestel 2011;Shoshan 2017;Barassi and Zamponi 2020). The findings of Haenfler, Johnson, and Jones (2012) regarding the blurring boundaries between lifestyle movements and social movements are thus helpful to understand the relation between youth culture and participation. ...
Youth councils, youth parliaments or youth organisations are often referred to as the king’s road to young people’s participation, at least from the point of view of policymakers. At the same time, there is evidence that many young people are either uninformed about or sceptical of institutionalised forms of youth participation as they distrust institutions in general. This article is interested in understanding why some young people actually engage in those institutionalised forms of youth participation that most of their peers assess as being ineffective and irrelevant for their needs and interests. Based on qualitative interviews with young people involved in different forms of participation in the context of a European research project, we take a biographical approach aimed at reconstructing what makes young people interested in getting and staying involved with youth councils, youth parliaments and/or youth organisations. The aim is, on the one hand, to analyse the different biographical pathways that lead young people into formal engagement as youth representatives. On the other hand, this article draws on a reconstructive analysis of the life stories of young people who engage in formal participation to elaborate the key dimensions and constellations that can be reconstructed from their participation biographies.
... Like Tillian repertoires, then, the concept of practices recognizes that action forms may be performed because they are habitual or routine, and this helps to explain why expressive action is patterned. The habitual features of practices may also help to explained patterned variance in action forms across different socio-political environments, as recent applications of Bourdieu's notion of habitus reveal (Ivanou and Flores 2018;Shoshan 2018). But Tilly's repertoire shifts are epochal and encourage a focus on sets of markedly different action forms on the basis of their characteristics in interaction. ...
This chapter addresses the issue of definition of “social movement,” which reveals how different theoretical traditions conceptualize the authors' object of study. It then moves from actor to action: what do movements do? The chapter sets out the movement activity that constitutes the movement as such. Developing interpretative frames, collective identities, and coordination mechanisms are key ways in which movements bootstrap themselves into existence. The chapter considers the ways in which movements attempt to generate social change. The classic forms of protest are collective actions and thus dovetail neatly with the conception of a social movement as a collective actor. But more individualized forms of change‐oriented have also become frequent subjects of research. The chapter explains a variety of more individualized strategies for social change: from “lifestyle movements” to Bayat's “quiet encroachment of the ordinary”.
... In particular, the term identifies the repertoires used by squat inhabitants to deal with the squat space. These repertoires depend on practical knowledge and experiences (Shoshan 2017). Therefore, "configurations of strategies" are to be understood as internalised common sense strategies that Housing Squats as "Educational Sites of Resistance" shape the attitude and behaviour of social movement participants (Flesher Fominaya 2014). ...
This paper aims to contribute to the scholarly work on the internal dynamics of contemporary housing movements. In particular, it explores the spatial strategies through which squat inhabitants change the configuration of the squat to turn an abandoned building into a house for multiple families. The main argument is that these strategies, requiring horizontal participation and solidarity, catalyse the transformation of a sum of people dispossessed of the house into a collective, political subject. Therefore, the author proposes to analyse housing squats as “educational sites of resistance”. The findings come from the author's participant observation of Rome's housing movement organisation Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la casa. In addition to providing empirical knowledge, the paper aims to offer inputs for investigating to what extent the process of politicisation is shaped by the space and what constitute the peculiarities of a so‐recomposed collective subject.
Since the end of the Cold War, political and social trajectories of new nominal democracies, including some new states, have played out very differently. Here, reviewing the other chapters, I note contingencies in historical development since. I argue that the diverse case histories can be helpfully explained with reference to political opportunity theory, and that the collection as a whole offers help in sharpening existing theory on social movements. Particularly, I urge attention to state capacity and international institutions as important variables that shape contentious politics.
This paper proposes the novel concept of ‘temporal activist repertoires’ (TAR) defined as the intentional and meaningful selection and use of temporal elements, such as time frame, timing, tempo, duration, and temporality in collective action’s tactics and frames. Collectives thereby draw on culturally resonant temporal references to interweave the symbolic and strategic choices in making their demands, organising political action and/or sustaining commitment to the political cause. To answer the question of how social movements use TAR and how these are positioned alongside other repertoires of contention, the paper analyses: the global Fridays for the Future and 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, and the Austrian ‘It’s Thursday Again!’. The paper shows that the innovative potential of TAR is linked to the use of technologically advanced media tools for the purposes of coordination, pressure, recruitment, mobilisation and visibility, as well as for the adaptations that these movements require, which include strategies to build on past traditions and/or to connect with currently existing allied movements.
This chapter illustrates the analytical framework through which the phenomenon of housing mobilization is explained. The first part of the chapter reviews how sociologists and geographers have dealt with the topic so far and their main theoretical approaches. The author puts forward a critical reading of the notions of urban movements and the right to the city. In the second part, the spatial and strategic approach at the base of the research is constructed by disentangling the dimensions that compose the concepts of space and strategy. Three main notions are introduced: “configurations of strategies”, “spatial opportunities structures” and “educational sites of resistance”. The last part of the chapter addresses the epistemological novelties that emerge from the previously explored analytical instruments, which are renewed conceptualization of class and resistance.
In an era marked by concerns about democratic legitimacy, the question of whether citizens' political actions are effective in achieving intended outcomes is of utmost importance. Although a core idea in democratic theory is that democratic governance should be responsive to the will of the people, most empirical research on this topic has focused on the opinion-representation connection, with less focus on the participation-representation connection. This chapter reviews three key areas of research that inform this topic, namely the categorizations used to distinguish between different forms of participation; recent empirical studies that investigate the participation-representation connection; and the main attitudinal measure related to effectiveness of political efficacy. The concluding section includes a brief analysis of cross-national data on these topics from the European Social Survey with a focus on providing insights into the challenges and opportunities for advancing future research.
How can we account for the emergence and the dynamics of contentious mobilization? In order to answer this question, this article draws upon Bourdieu’s sociology to reformulate the political process model. Building on the claim that many social spaces organized around different logics coexist within each society, I propose to replace the concept of political opportunity structure, which lies at the core of the political process model, with that of field opportunity structure (FOS). There are thus as many FOS as there are fields and the structure of political opportunities is just one type of opportunity structure among others. After briefly reviewing the political process model and Bourdieu’s field theory, this article explains how shifts in the FOS can contribute to the emergence, growth, and decline of mobilization and contention. It then discusses how Bourdieu’s concept of habitus can account for actors not taking advantage of such shifts in situations of crisis,
when fields relax their hold over the practices and goals of actors.
This paper develops Bourdieusian notions of habitus, capital and field, along with the allied concepts of hysteresis and homology, to examine routes into public activism in post-Soviet Russia. Focusing on a neighbourhood campaign against construction projects in the Moscow district of Izmailovo, we argue that mobilization was driven by activists whose formative years took place during the Soviet period, and this resultant Soviet habitus enabled them to sustain their mobilization, despite the unpropitious circumstances. Our data shows that activists’ engagement was first triggered by perceived discrepancies between Soviet ideals and post-Soviet realities (hysteresis), and then supported by the mutual recognition of actors whose grievances echoed similarities in their structural positions (homologies). However, although mobilization gained momentum, it was unable to achieve definitive success in the face of negative social capital, or what Russians call administrativniy resurs: the arbitrary use of public office power that characterizes a number of social fields in post-Soviet Russia. We argue that understanding post-Soviet mobilization requires an understanding of the continued significance of Soviet ideals, as well of the role of the intergenerational transfer of civic ideals amid Bourdieusian ‘class struggle’.
European social movements have been central to European history, politics, society and culture, and have had a global reach and impact. Yet they have rarely been taken on their own terms in the English-language literature, considered rather as counterpoints to the US experience. This has been exacerbated by the failure of Anglophone social movement theorists to pay attention to the substantial literatures in languages such as French, German, Spanish or Italian – and by the increasing global dominance of English in the production of news and other forms of media.
This book sets out to take the European social movement experience seriously on its own terms, including:
* the European tradition of social movement theorising – particularly in its attempt to understand movement development from the 1960s onwards
* the extent to which European movements between 1968 and 1999 became precursors for the contemporary anti-globalisation movement
* the construction of the anti-capitalist "movement of movements" within the European setting
* the new anti-austerity protests in Iceland, Greece, Spain (15- M/Indignados), and elsewhere.
This book offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary perspective on the key European social movements in the past forty years. It will be of interest for students and scholars of politics and international relations, sociology, history, European studies and social theory.
Published in the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. The Occupy movement owes its strategies to many predecessors, although none more than the Zapatistas. It is thus surprising that, so far, no one has traced the wave of theoretical and practical influence that runs from the Zapatistas to the Occupy movement. Accordingly, the aim of this article is to do precisely that. In order to accomplish this task, this essay is divided into three sections — each of which argues for the theoretical consistency and practical resonance of one of the defining political strategies of the Occupy movement:(1) horizontalism, (2) consensus decision-making, and (3) the political use of masks. The thesis of this paper is that these three defining political strategies can all be traced back to the influence of the Zapatistas.
The Social Justice Protest movement in 2011 was the largest social movement in Israel’s history. The movement received media coverage for almost two months and in all news outlets, despite the protest’s broad demands and its overall radical indictment against the economic system and the status quo. This study explores the causes for this extraordinary media coverage. We find that movement characteristics of the leadership’s professional background, the media strategies they employed, and the effects of mainstream channels on media tactics were important. We also find that journalists’ personal identification with the movement is a key factor leading to the wide and favorable media coverage. Personal identification led many journalists to report favorably on the movement and write supportive opinion columns, to ignore stories that could damage it, to participate and volunteer in movement activities, and to offer their professional skills to help the movement leadership. We propose a tentative model consisting of factors and mechanisms that may explain when personal identification and journalistic activism are more likely to occur.
From the beginning of time, humans have yearned to know what lies ahead. Throughout history our forebears tried to influence and anticipate the future, by sacrifices to the gods, imploring oracles for advice, reading the stars, and more recently through scientific prediction.
In this book Jennifer M. Gidley explains how our traditional belief in a single predetermined future has been challenged by quantum physics, and argues that we’ve always had multiple possible futures over which we have infinite control. Considering some of our most burning questions about the nature of the future, Gidley shows how we have learned to study, understand, imagine and create alternative futures.
In this chapter, we argue that the transnational struggles for real democracy – which we refer to here as the Real Democracy Movement (RDM) – spread around the globe through a pattern of resonance. In drawing on this concept, we move beyond the traditional literature in social movement studies, which has hitherto identified diffusion as the mechanism by which movements spread from one place to another. As we aim to demonstrate, the concept of diffusion rests upon a number of assumptions that do not appear to hold up in the case of the RDM. Building on extensive participatory observation as well as follow-up interviews with key activists in Greece, Spain, and the United States, we argue that two conditions must be in place for an autonomous social movement to resonate and spread across borders: first, different countries must share similar structural conditions; and second they must have pre-existing horizontal movement experience and autonomous activist networks in place to trigger a broader pattern of resonance within their own country. Movements ultimately spread not as a result of ‘contagion’, or mindless imitation, but rather because latent potentialities for mobilisation are activated through the inspiration provided by movements elsewhere.
This article gives an overview of the trajectory, components and repertory of the Chilean students' movement, which staged a series of protests during 2011. Although it started by contesting inequalities in the education system, the movement soon evolved into a challenge to the authoritarian character of political institutions, sharing similar goals with protests elsewhere around the world-including radical economical and political democratization. Should we therefore see the Chile students' protests as an Occupy-type protest? By analyzing the main interpretations over the movement, this article argues that the Occupy label is insufficient to understand the specificity of the conflict. In Chile, protests did not occur through small groups coordinated by loose networks; instead, they were spurred by traditional student organizations. This created a scenario of social unrest that resembles classical forms of contention, and in that respect differs from Occupy Wall Street, the indignados or the Arab Spring. This case shows that despite the crisis of neoliberal governance forming a common historical backdrop, the modularity (how?) and the composition (who?) of the movement are better explained by the historical configuration of national political systems.
This article aims to articulate a new agenda in the scholarship of social movements. Specifically, it seeks to turn attention to the assumptions that undergird activism. Rather than studying movements themselves, we can study them as the embodiment of collective expectation in a particular public. We can learn more about the broader society in which movements are embedded by asking how activists and the public they seek to engage determine what is within the realm of possibility. I refer to the imagined horizon of possibility as the activist prospectus. To illustrate the importance of prospectus, I draw upon a case study of environmental activism in Samara, Russia. Ethnographic observation and analysis yield insights into subjective perceptions that help explain the weakness of civil society within Russia.
The term “prefigurative politics” refers to a political orientation based on the premise that the ends a social movement achieves are fundamentally shaped by the means it employs, and that movements should therefore do their best to choose means that embody or “prefigure” the kind of society they want to bring about. On one level, this commitment to means–ends consistency reflects what Weber called a “value‐rational” logic of action, in which action is guided by values rather than instrumental efficiency. But a prefigurative orientation is motivated by more than a commitment to moral action in its own right; it has been pursued as an alternative to both vanguardist and structural‐reformist strategies for social change. Rather than looking to a revolutionary vanguard to seize existing power structures and implement revolutionary change on behalf of the masses or to trade unions or political parties to leverage reforms within the existing system, a prefigurative approach seeks to create the new society “in the shell of the old” by developing counterhegemonic institutions and modes of interaction that embody the desired transformation. In this sense, a prefigurative strategy is based on the principle of direct action, of directly implementing the changes one seeks, rather than asking others to make the changes on one's behalf.
This article analyses the role played by Spanish immigrants in the diffusion of the indignados movement in Occupy Wall Street (OWS). I argue that Spanish residents in New York City acted as brokers between the two movements, and that their behaviour had a significant impact on OWS’s understanding of itself as an expansive, inclusive and empathic phenomenon. Building on recent theoretical developments, which stress the importance of dialogue and collective learning in the transnational diffusion of historical social movements, this research produces results at different levels. At the empirical level, the problems faced by the immigrants reveal the cultural complexity of transnational diffusion within the recent wave of contention. At the analytical level, the personal contact and intergroup dialogue established between immigrants and local activists challenge accounts stressing the role of social media and the internet within the transnational diffusion of this protest. At the theoretical level, the article develops a process-oriented perspective on brokerage, improving our understanding of its implications concerning diffusion. I argue that a longitudinal analysis of brokerage shows how interaction can modify role identity and movement diffusion: diffusion develops where brokers maintain a coordinating role in the movement, and ceases to do so where brokers are displaced from this central position.
The Occupy Wall Street movement arose to protest extreme economic inequality, corporate control of economic and political life, and government policies which exacerbated them. Many activists held anarchist principles, though not primarily directed at the abolition of the state but rather at the organization of the movement itself: horizontalism (no formal leadership), prefiguration (attempting to model the desired future society in the movement's own practice), autonomy from the state and other political organizations, mutual aid, and defiance of government authority. The mainly young occupiers were attracted to anarchism because neither employment in large institutions nor a government safety net appeared to offer them any prospect of security, so they invested their faith in autonomous solidary organizations governed by consensus. Though Occupy Wall Street deliberately abstained from conventional political activism, it nevertheless influenced that process by focusing political discourse on inequality, opening up political space for other actors to press for reforms.
The term prefigurative politics refers to a political orientation based on the premise that the ends a social movement achieves are fundamentally shaped by the means it employs, and that movements should therefore do their best to choose means that embody or “prefigure” the kind of society they want to bring about. On one level, this commitment to means–ends consistency reflects what Weber called a “value-rational” logic of action, in which action is guided by values rather than instrumental efficiency. But a prefigurative orientation is motivated by more than a commitment to moral action in its own right; it has been pursued as an alternative to both vanguardist and structural-reformist strategies for social change. Rather than looking to a revolutionary vanguard to seize existing power structures and implement revolutionary change on behalf of the masses or to trade unions or political parties to leverage reforms within the existing system, a prefigurative approach seeks to create the new society “in the shell of the old” by developing counterhegemonic institutions and modes of interaction that embody the desired transformation. In this sense, a prefigurative strategy is based on the principle of direct action, of directly implementing the changes one seeks, rather than asking others to make the changes on one's behalf.Keywords:anarchism;democracy;egalitarianism;feminism;social change
This paper analyses the 2011 Chilean student movement, the most relevant social mobilisation in Chile since the restoration of democracy in 1990. Based on available material and secondary sources, it describes the main features of this student movement, analyses the key components of the students' discourse and its relationship with the Chilean market-oriented educational system, and identifies its impact on the field of higher education. The paper argues that this student movement was a process of expressing accumulated grievances against some neoliberal features of Chilean education. Since this movement is also linked to the emergence of a new generation of higher education students, it identifies relevant characteristics of current students' organisations and protests. Finally, the paper discusses hypotheses for interpreting the recent student movements. This case is informative not only for those concerned with student participation, but also with the potential downsides of market-oriented educational policies.
The 15M demonstration (the origin of the indignados movement in Spain and the seed of the occupy mobilizations) presents some outstanding characteristics that defy the established principles of the collective action paradigm. This article develops some observable implications of the concept of connective action and tests them against the case of the 15M demonstration. Cases of self-organized connective action networks are expected to be different from traditional collective action cases with regard to the characteristics of the organizations involved, the prevalent mobilization channels and the characteristics of participants. Based on a comparative analysis of data gathered from participants and organizations in nine demonstrations held in Spain between 2010 and 2011, relevant and significant differences were found in the characteristics of the 15M staging organizations (recently created, without formal membership and mainly online presence), the main mobilization channels (personal contact and online social networks rather than co-members or broadcast media), and participants (younger, more educated and less politically involved). These findings help to understand the large turnout figures of this movement and have important implications for the mobilization potential of social networks, particularly as it can affect the political participation of the less-involved citizens.
In the summer of 2011, similar to and partly inspired by Spain's 15M (indignados) movement, Israel experienced an unprecedented wave of socio-economic protest featuring tent encampments and mass rallies. Headlined ‘the people demand social justice’, the protest was surprising since distributive conflicts and social policy issues are peripheral to Israeli politics, and Israel was not in the throes of an economic crisis. These were not anti-austerity protests, but reflected the eroding life chances of young adults. Specifically, liberalisation of Israel's political economy – which contributed to a substantial rise in the living standards of the parental generation of the middle class and improved their life chances in the 1990s – is now impeding inter-generational class reproduction for their children. We document significant changes in home ownership, relative incomes, and the value of higher education and other assets that were previously the key to middle class incomes and lifestyles. The impact of neo-liberal policies is evident, for instance, in the declining scope and generosity of the public sector's role in employment and housing. At the subjective level, on the eve of the protests young adults with higher education were less optimistic about their economic prospects than other groups. Finally, even though the protests appeared to be broadly consensual and inclusive, a closer look reveals that its core supporters and activists were drawn from social and political sectors closely associated with the middle class.
In summer 2011, Israel was swept by unprecedented political protest as multiple encampments occupied streets and mass rallies were held weekly in Tel Aviv and other cities. The article focuses on the spatial politics of this protest, analysing the particular strategies it used to activise urban public space. The protest initially reflected a specific urban context and limited agenda—namely, the lack of affordable housing in Tel Aviv. However, as it materialised and expanded in public space, it also became more inclusive, incorporating more marginalised publics and places, addressing long-standing socio-spatial inequalities between Israel’s ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, and advancing a message of ‘social justice’—with the noted exception of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The analysis of the Israeli protest foregrounds some dynamics that it shares with other ‘global’ protests in 2011, from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street, pointing to the spatial politics of centrality, multiplicity and ‘media-space’, a mutually enforcing relationship between physical public space and mainstream and social media.
The article discusses the spontaneous popular movement J14 that erupted into the Israeli public sphere during the summer of 2011. Inspired by the Egyptian and Spanish movements, J14 was ignited by opposition to housing prices, later expanded into protests against neoliberal economic policies and socioeconomic inequalities. The concept of resistance mo(ve)ment is used to comprehend the peculiar intersection between the movement and moment of mass mobilization. The article explores the mo(ve)ment focusing on the political and economic background and context, and analyzing the role of a new generational class who were suffering the effects of a neoliberal political economy. The B Generation in Israel is the product of a double crisis, global and local. The local crisis involves the disintegration of Israeli society after Rabin’s assassination in 1995, and the repression of socioeconomic agendas by fanning hostility to external ‘enemies’. The global crisis is the outcome of a neoliberal economy that weakens middle and lower classes, especially young people living under precarious conditions. The argument is that socioeconomic protests in Israel take place when the external ‘conflict’ is quiet. The calm summer of 2011 was framed in-between Netanyahu’s US campaign against UN recognition of a Palestinian state in May and the scheduled UN discussions in September.
This article will explore the effect of social media and Internet-based communication on social movements. It will do this by looking at two major processes of social movements—framing and organizing—in two case studies: the protests in Egypt from December 2010 to February 2011 (during the Arab Spring), and the post-election protests in Iran in 2009 that became known as the beginning of the Green Movement. The article will use this comparison and examination to determine how computer-mediated communication (CMC) was used in Iran in 2009 and in Egypt during the Arab Spring. These examples will also reveal whether CMC is most effective in framing a protest movement or organizing it; and to what extent this usage explains the success or failure of these protest movements.
Ideology: A Very Brief Introduction is an examination of the major theories of ideology and the ways they have enriched our comprehension of ideology. Ideology is one of the most controversial terms in the political vocabulary. It creates both revulsion and inspiration. This VSI examines the reasons for this reaction and explains why ideologies deserve respect as a major form of political thinking. It explores the changing understandings of ideology as a concept and the arguments of the main ideologies. It draws on a range of disciplines in order to show the potency of ideology as a resource at the disposal of societies.
This chapter offers an insider’s account and analysis of the failed efforts to democratise the Israeli Tent Protest movement and impose accountability on its founders. Following an account of the movement’s development and early tensions around leadership, the democratization efforts are recounted from a first-person perspective. The analysis critically relates the process to the proposals made by Jo Freeman in her well-known article “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”, albeit concluding that its framework is inadequate for explaining the dynamics involved. Instead, it is argued that the democratisation process failed because of the founders’ media-oriented mentality and their reliance on professional campaign advisors who were openly contemptuous towards horizontalism. This highlights the explanatory significance of personal, agency-based analyses in discussions of power within movement networks.
Most of social sciences’ research on Israel emphasizes ethnicity, status, nationality, identity, gender or coloniality as the central explanatory concepts. This article argues that in order to understand the emergence (as well as the limitations) of phenomena such as the 2011 social protest, the analysis must incorporate a class perspective. In answering questions such as which social groups initiated and supported the protest, what the socio-economic causes of the protest were and what explains the characteristic political patterns of the protest, the article proposes the following theses: (1) The protest was launched and led by the ‘bohemian-bourgeois’ sector of the middle class, but was joined by other groups; (2) The protest was the first large-scale display of class resistance to the post-Fordist, neoliberal socio-economic system; and (3) The protest manifested the emergence of a new kind of ‘post-postmodern’ politics, in response to both the representation crisis of the political system and to the failure of postmodern politics to address socio-economic concerns.
In this chapter I want to draw on the theoretical understanding of culture as implicit, routinized, taken-for-granted symbolic systems of meanings that individuals from shared locations (e.g. local, national, class, and social) have in common and that shape their interactions. This understanding of culture has a rich and diverse theoretical trajectory that is under-utilized in analysis of social movements,1 yet yields significant insight into the internal dynamics of social movement interaction. As such it provides a very fruitful conceptual tool for research into culture and movement, as I hope to illustrate. My aim here is not prescriptive - other understandings of culture capture important aspects of social movement dynamics. Rather, I want to show how this conception of culture, broadly defined, can illuminate internal movement dynamics, using the specific example of how it can hinder a sense of collective belonging or cohesion in movement groups, within the context of deliberative and coordinating practices. This forms part of a larger agenda to show how social theory, broadly defined, rather than social movement theory, narrowly conceived as a self-contained and self- referential subfield, can serve as a rich source of insights into social movement dynamics (Flesher Fominaya 2014). At the same time, I hope to show that the study of collective action provides fertile terrain for the advancement of social theory.
Under the legitimacy of the wave of social protest initiated by middle-class Israeli students in July 2011, a much broader movement developed as thousands of marginalized poor hoping to obtain housing solutions began encamping in public spaces. These Israeli poor, mainly of Mizrahi origin, did not fit the model of “the salt of the earth,” the “good citizens” who by virtue of their contribution to the colonization project are supposed to enjoy preferred treatment by the state. Based on a reflexive analysis of my political intervention, in this paper I describe the dynamics of the HaTikva encampment of the poor in south Tel Aviv. Making use of the contradictions between the state’s colonialist logic and its neoliberal reforms, a marginalized and poor segment of Mizrahi Jews was able, for a short while, to act as an autonomous political agent and shed the control and patronage of political bosses. The very same marginality that allowed them to develop significant agency and even to experiment with alliances ...
European social movements have been central to European history, politics, society and culture, and have had a global reach and impact. Yet they have rarely been taken on their own terms in the English-language literature, considered rather as counterpoints to the US experience. This has been exacerbated by the failure of Anglophone social movement theorists to pay attention to the substantial literatures in languages such as French, German, Spanish or Italian - and by the increasing global dominance of English in the production of news and other forms of media. This book sets out to take the European social movement experience seriously on its own terms, including: the European tradition of social movement theorising - particularly in its attempt to understand movement development from the 1960s onwards the extent to which European movements between 1968 and 1999 became precursors for the contemporary anti-globalisation movement the construction of the anti-capitalist "movement of movements" within the European setting the new anti-austerity protests in Iceland, Greece, Spain (15-M/Indignados), and elsewhere. This book offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary perspective on the key European social movements in the past forty years. It will be of interest for students and scholars of politics and international relations, sociology, history, European studies and social theory.
Transnational coordination is a key aspiration of activists seeking to mobilize globally, yet the literature pays insufficient attention to the impact of cultural differences on transnational networking. In this article I draw on ethnographic data from three European autonomous social movement encounters in the Global Justice Movement (2002–2004) to demonstrate the impact of culture clashes between activists on transnational networking. I use the concept of habitus to explore how routinized, taken for granted, symbolic systems of meaning that individuals from shared locations have in common shape their interactions in transnational encounters. This conception of culture is underutilized in social movement analysis yet offers important insights into internal movement dynamics. I argue that despite the autonomous commitment to radical openness and plurality, a lack of attention to the empirical reality of place-based activist subcultures and habitus actually works against the “cosmopolitanism” that many activists and scholars aspire to.
This article examines journalists' narratives of the constellations of factors that shaped the coverage of the 2011-2012 social protest in Israel, and how journalists used the protest to negotiate their roles, practices, and values against the backdrop of their own professional and economic struggles. Based on in-depth interviews with reporters and editors who were involved in the coverage of the protest movement, this article analyzes journalists' interpretations and negotiations of the various influences on their work during the two major waves of the protest. An analysis of patterns of collision and concurrence between individual, organizational, and professional domains of influence in journalists' narratives shows that while the norm of objectivity remains a key site of tension in relation to other factors, considerations of newsworthiness are constructed as complementing and justifying all other types of influence. An examination of diachronic patterns suggests that journalists' individual conditions and positions play a greater role in journalists' narratives in the first stage of the protest, giving way to professional values and organizational economic considerations in later stages. Although these findings further complicate the protest paradigm, they also show a dominant pattern of "paradigm repair" at the level of both journalists' professional ideology and protest coverage.
A quick comparison of characteristic British struggles in 1758 and 1833 will show how greatly the predominant forms of popular collective action changed during the intervening 75 years. That change sets a research problem that I have been pursuing for many years: documenting, and trying to explain, changes in the ways that people act together in pursuit of shared interests—changes in repertoires of collective action. This interim report has two complementary objectives: first, to situate the evolving concept of repertoire in my own work and in recent studies of collective action; second, to illustrate its applications to the experience of Great Britain from the 1750s to the 1830s. It will do no more than hint, however, at explanations of the changes it documents.
The Spanish 15-M/Indignados have drawn global attention for the strength and longevity of their anti-austerity mobilizations. Two features have been highlighted as particularly noteworthy: (1) Their refusal to allow institutional left actors to participate in or represent the movement, framed as a movement of ‘ordinary citizens’ and (2) their insistence on the use of deliberative democratic practices in large public assemblies as a central organizing principle. As with many emergent cycles of protest, many scholars, observers and participants attribute the mobilizations with spontaneity and ‘newness’. I argue that the ability of the 15-M/Indignados to sustain mobilization based on deliberative democratic practices is not spontaneous, but the result of the evolution of an autonomous collective identity predicated on deliberative movement culture in Spain since the early 1980s. My discussion contributes to the literature on social movement continuity and highlights the need for historically grounded analyses that pay close attention to the maintenance and evolution of collective identities and movement cultures in periods of latency or abeyance in order to better understand the rapid mobilization of networks in new episodes of contention.
This article explores the links between social media and public space within the #Occupy Everywhere movements. Whereas listservs and websites helped give rise to a widespread logic of networking within the movements for global justice of the 1990s–2000s, I argue that social media have contributed to an emerging logic of aggregation in the more recent #Occupy movements—one that involves the assembling of masses of individuals from diverse backgrounds within physical spaces. However, the recent shift toward more decentralized forms of organizing and networking may help to ensure the sustainability of the #Occupy movements in a posteviction phase. [social movements, globalization, political protest, public space, social media, new technologies, inequality]
The Internet is causing major changes in the field of political activism. One particularly significant case is the 15M movement, which emerged from a popular initiative organized in several Spanish cities in 2011. Based on the analysis of these protests as a case study, this paper has two aims: first, to examine the role of digital technology – websites and social networks – in the online organization of political activism; second, to analyse the relationships established between the conventional media on the one hand and activists on the other. The methodology combines the technique of in-depth interviews and qualitative analysis of reports, working papers and file data about 15M. The findings show an intensive use of digital technology by activists, both of their own social networks (for example, N-1) and commercial ones (Facebook or Twitter). These digital tools enabled them to disseminate their own information and optimize their internal organization. The indignados established an interplay between online activism and offline actions. Digital technology facilitated the organization of the mass gatherings in the streets. The possession of communicative and technical skills played an important part in organizing 15M. On the other hand, the relationship between journalists and activists was a difficult one. The indignados did not follow the established patterns of the journalists’ work routines. The latter had to resort to the demonstrators’ websites and social networks to obtain information. The activists recognize that the conventional media were crucial to the protests achieving a widespread impact in the news.
Amid a dizzying array of social media, the ground of activism has fractured into decentered knots creating a cacophony of panmediated worlds. Our analysis of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) offers a preliminary charting of the fragmenting of the old media world into a proliferation of social media worlds. On old media, OWS was stillborn, first neglected, and then frivolously framed. On social media, OWS's emergence was vibrant, its manifestations much discussed, celebrated, and attacked. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube create new contexts for activism that do not exist in old media. Plus, social media foster an ethic of individual and collective participation, thus creating a norm of perpetual participation. In OWS, that norm creates new expectations of being in the world.
This article argues that Bourdieu’s theory of practice provides a useful and dynamic framework which may be used to examine the reproduction of political practice. I use the Bourdieusian theoretical model to analyse and interpret data collected from 30 semi-structured interviews with British anti-capitalist activists from a range of anarchist and socialist political organizations and networks. The interviews reveal a clear case of political distinction between anarchists and socialists. The political history, political methods, and ideology of the activists become embodied and routinized over time. This explains why and how there is a durable ideological division which is consistently reproduced over and over again within sections of the British anti-capitalist movement.
Only one year after the global wave of protest movements and revolts—starting with the ‘Arab Spring’, then, subsequently, the Indignados movement and Occupy- our appreciation of such movements turned sour. The aim of this contribution is to question the predominantly sceptical and defeatist discourse on these movements. One element central to many defeatist discourses on the 2011 movements, is the way in which a lack of demonstrable ‘outcomes’ or ‘successes’ is retrospectively ascribed to them. Therefore, an alternative approach should be formulated, which would allow us to recognise the significant or valuable aspects of these movements and their practices, without downplaying them as ‘unsuccessful’ or ‘failures’ altogether. Pierre Rosanvallon’s concept of ‘counter-democracy’ and Hardt and Negri’s perspective of a ‘Multitude’ will be evaluated as alternative approaches to current political movements. Although they are meritorious, both perspectives do not go far enough and need further articulation. The notion of ‘prefiguration’, originally derived from contemporary anarchist discourse, could be beneficial to this endeavour. After defining and deepening this concept from an anarchist perspective, it will be applied to one particular context: the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, during the 2011 revolution in Egypt. As will be concluded, in its application this concept of ‘prefiguration’ could teach us more about the recent wave of protest movements in general, and could help us to formulate a different approach to such movements.