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CHAPTER 1

Social Movements

The Structure of Collective Action

The voluntary coming together of people in joint action has served as a major engine of social transformation throughout human history. From the spread of major world religions to community-led public health campaigns for reducing debilitating vector-borne diseases at the village level, collective mobilization may lead to profound changes in a wide variety of contexts and societies. At key historical moments, groups have unified in struggle in attempts to overthrow and dismantle systems of oppression and subordination, as observed in indigenous peoples' resistance to colonialism and in rebellions launched by enslaved populations. In the twenty-first century, collective action by ordinary citizens around the world could prove decisive in slowing down global warming and in supporting planetary survival. In short, the collective mobilization of people creates a powerful human resource that can be used for a range of purposes. In this volume we explore a particular type of collective action — social movements.

The study of social movements has increased markedly over the past two decades. This is largely the result of theoretical and empirical advances in sociology and related fields as well as an upsurge in collective action in the United States and around the world. The variety of mobilizations examined by students of social movements ranges from the anti-Trump resistance to anti-neoliberal and austerity protests in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Already by 2011, global protests reached such a crescendo that Time magazine crowned the "Protester" as the "Person of the Year" (Andersen 2011). Then, in stunning fashion, citizens broke the record for the largest simultaneous demonstrations in the history of the United States, with the women's marches in 2017 and 2018. With so much social movement activity occurring in the twenty-first century, some experts predict we are moving into a "social movement society" (Meyer 2014) or a "social movement world" (Goldstone 2004).

On the basis of the best systematic evidence available from global surveys and "big data" collections of protest events over time (Ward 2016), social movement activity continues to be sustained around the world at heightened levels in the contemporary era (Dodson 2011; Karatasli, Kumral and Silver 2018). Indeed, over the past two decades groups engaging in social movement activities have not just proven to be impressive by their scale and intensity of mobilization, but have also transformed the social and political landscapes in the United States and across the globe. A brief sketch of some of the largest movements, including the anti-Trump resistance, immigrant rights, and movements for economic and climate justice, exemplifies these claims.

Women's March and Anti-Trump Resistance

The Women's March against the newly inaugurated Trump administration in early 2017 represented the largest simultaneous mass mobilization in US history, with the organizers, in the opening of their mission statement, explicitly stating a threat to the protection of rights, health, and safety as the primary motive for the unprecedented demonstrations. Activists repeated the marches again in January 2018 with equally impressive levels of mobilization. The initiators of the mass actions strived for an intersectional strategy to unite women and others against structural exclusions along the lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The Women's Marches were held in hundreds of US cities and drew between four and five million participants (see figures 1 and 2), including people in dozens of countries outside the United States. The movement immediately evolved into the "Resistance" and has sustained mobilizations against subsequent exclusionary policies and public gestures by the Trump administration against immigrants, women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and LGBTQ communities (Meyer and Tarrow 2018).

Immigrant Rights

Between February and May 2006, the immigrant rights' movement burst on to the public scene in dramatic style with massive demonstrations and rallies in large and small cities in dozens of US states (Bloemraad, Voss, and Lee 2011; Zepeda-Millán 2017). The participants found motivation to take to the streets from new legislation (House Bill 4437) passed in the Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives that would make living in the United States without proper documentation a serious criminal offense for the undocumented, as well as for those aiding them. The impending negative consequences associated with this legislation mobilized communities throughout the national territory, with several cities breaking records for protest attendance. The resources used to mobilize the movement included organizations of churches, radio stations, public schools, and an emerging pan-Latino identity (Mora et al. 2018). With some of the demonstrations drawing up to a million participants, Congress backed down and shelved the legislation in a stalemate between the House and the Senate. The power of mass collective action had prevented the implementation of a punitive law that potentially would have led to widespread disruption of working-class immigrant communities in the United States. A similar campaign emerged in the summer of 2018 against the Trump administration's policy of family separation of immigrants seeking asylum at the US-Mexican border, with protest events reported in over seven hundred cities.

Movements around the Globe for Economic Justice

Between 2000 and 2018, from the advanced capitalist nations of Europe and North America to large swathes of the developing world, citizens launched major campaigns against government economic cutbacks and privatization of social services and the state infrastructure — or what economists and sociologists call the economic policies of neoliberalism. Labor flexibility in France, austerity in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, and economic reforms in Argentina, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, and India all drew hundreds of thousands of people to public plazas and mass demonstrations demanding protection of their social citizenship rights — the basic right to a modicum of economic welfare provisioned by the state (Somers 2008).

The global movement for economic justice took off in the wealthy capitalist nations in the late 1990s and early 2000s with major protest events outside of elite financial summits in Seattle, Prague, Davos, Doha, Cancun, Quebec City, and Genoa. The mobilizations kept up steam by aligning with movements in the global South via the World Social Forum network. In July 2017 the global economic justice movement mobilized over one hundred thousand people to demonstrate against the G20 economic summit in Hamburg, Germany. Similar types of street demonstrations occurred in the United States over economic inequality between late 2011 and early 2012 with the occupation of public squares in the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. Privatizations of water administration, public health, telecommunications, and energy catalyzed some of the largest mobilizations in South America, Asia, and Africa over the past two decades. Taken together, there has been a recent upsurge of movements around the world struggling for more equitable forms of economic globalization (Almeida 2010a; Castells 2015; Almeida and Chase-Dunn 2018). On the dark side of politics, we also find that extremists and populist demagogues use the heightened inequities associated with economic globalization and free trade to mobilize right-wing and racist movements in the United States, South America, and Europe (Berezin 2009; Robinson 2014).

Transnational Movement for Climate Justice

Since 2000 a worldwide movement has gained momentum in an attempt to slow down global warming. The "climate justice movement" seeks a global accord among the world's nations for an immediate and drastic reduction in carbon emissions. By 2006 the climate mobilizations had reached multiple countries on every continent. Climate justice activists use cyber networks and social media to coordinate with hundreds of nongovernmental organizations, concerned citizens, scientists, and environmental groups around the planet to hold public gatherings and demonstrations demanding governmental and industry action to reduce greenhouse gases. The global mobilizations usually take place in conjunction with annual United Nations-sponsored climate summits in order to place pressure on national leaders to act (including an enormous street march of four hundred thousand persons in New York City in 2014). Between 2014 and 2018 alone, the climate justice movement successfully mobilized thousands of protest events in 175 countries on multiple occasions — the most extensive transnational movement in history.

These four movements demonstrate the multiple facets of social movements discussed in the pages that follow. They all involve sustained challenges seeking social change using resources to maintain mobilization. All four movements first mobilized in reaction to real and perceived threats to their interests. Finally, and perhaps most germane here, the movements resulted in deep changes within the societies they operated in. The Women's Marches sent a powerful message that all attempts to deepen social exclusion by the newly elected Trump administration would be met with massive resistance. The immigrant rights movement forced anti-immigrant politicians to backpedal from their legislation as the mobilizations spilled over into a movement that fights for other immigrant rights issues, such as the right to education and employment for immigrant youth — the "DREAMers' Movement" (Nicholls 2014) — a comprehensive immigration reform act that provides a path to citizenship, and an end to the policy of family separation of asylum seekers. Economic austerity protests have swept several new left-wing political parties into executive power and parliaments in South America and southern Europe. The climate justice movement forced a long-awaited global treaty on carbon emissions at the end of the 2015 Paris Climate Summit.

DEFINING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

The four movements portrayed above clearly exhibit properties of social movement activity. Throughout this text, we will work with the following definition: A social movement is an excluded collectivity in sustained interaction with economic and political elites seeking social change (Tarrow 2011). In such situations, ordinary people come together to pursue a common goal. Social movements are usually composed of groups outside of institutionalized power that use unconventional strategies (e.g., street marches, sit-ins, dramatic media events) along with more conventional ones (petitions, letter-writing campaigns) to achieve their aims (Snow and Soule 2009). The outsider status and unconventional tactics of social movements distinguish them from other political entities, such as lobbying associations, nonprofit organizations, and political parties (though these more formal organizations may originate from social movements). Most people participate in movements as volunteers and offer their time, skills, and other human resources to maintaining movement survival and accomplishing goals. Throughout this book, I will emphasize the exclusion of social groups from institutional, economic, and political power as a primary motive for engaging in social movement actions.

Social movements range from community-based environmental movements battling local pollution, to women's movements organized on a transnational scale attempting to place pressure on national governments and international institutions to protect and expand the rights of girls and women (Viterna and Fallon 2008). We will explore these different levels of social movement activity in the next chapter. The modern social movement form arose with the spread of parliamentary political systems and nationally integrated capitalist economies in the nineteenth century (Tilly and Wood 2012). Before the nineteenth century, collective action was largely based on local grievances at the village level and mobilization was sustained for shorter periods of time (Tilly 1978). Nonetheless, we observe important forms of collective mobilization throughout human history (Chase-Dunn 2016). The core movement elements of sustained collective challenges by excluded social groups attempting to protect themselves from social, political, economic, and environmental harms form the basis of our definition of social movements and drive the largest campaigns of collective action in the twenty-first century.

The Core Movement Elements

Sustained Collective Mobilization Social movements are collective and sustained over a period of time. How and why individuals come together to pursue common goals provides much of the content of this book. The larger the scale of collective action, the longer the mobilization should endure to be considered a "movement." Local neighborhood and community movements may last for only a few months or a year as they tend to have short-term and specific goals, such as preventing pollution from a nearby facility or demanding street lights for nighttime safety. Larger national-level mobilizations likely need to sustain themselves for at least a year to be considered a social movement. In contrast, a single demonstration or protest does not constitute a social movement. At the same time, collective actors must find ways to maintain momentum and unity. Preexisting organizations, social relationships of friends, neighbors, the workplace, schools, ethnic ties, collective identities, and a variety of resources assist in prolonging the mobilization process (see chapter 4 on movement emergence).

Excluded Social Groups Social movements are largely constituted by groups with relatively less political and economic power. Their exclusionary status provides the rationale for taking the social movement form (Burawoy 2017; Mora et al. 2017). Non-excluded groups benefit from more routine access to government and economic elites in terms of having their voices heard, and are relatively more likely to receive favorable resolutions for their grievances via petitions, elections, lobbying, and meetings with officials. Excluded groups (along racial, economic, citizenship, and gender lines, among many others) lack this routine access and may at times resort to less conventional forms of seeking influence to gain the attention of authorities and power brokers.

Social, Economic, and Environmental Harms A central motivation for social movement mobilization involves real and perceived harms. A critical mass of individuals must come under the threat of a particular harm, such as discrimination, job loss, or environmental health, that motivates them to unify and launch a social movement campaign, especially when institutional channels fail to resolve the issue at hand. Opportunities may also arrive to reduce long-standing harms, such as decades of discrimination or economic exploitation (Tarrow 2011). Social movement mobilization is much more likely to materialize when large numbers of people mutually sense they are experiencing or suffering from similar circumstances. This was precisely the case for the 2006 immigrants' rights protests discussed above. Millions of citizens and noncitizens came under a suddenly imposed threat of criminal prosecution for their undocumented status or for aiding nonlegalized immigrants. This led to mutual awareness among immigrant communities and to rapid mobilization (Zepeda-Millán 2017).

Throughout the text, I will emphasize these three core movement elements of (1) collective and sustained mobilization, (2) social exclusion, and (3) threats as key dimensions in characterizing social movement activity.

BASIC SOCIAL MOVEMENT CONCEPTS

As in most subfields of sociology and the social sciences there is a vernacular or jargon for discussing key social processes and terms. The field of social movements is no exception. As we progress deeper into the study of social movements in this book, new terms will be introduced and defined. To begin, some of the principal concepts used to discuss social movements are presented below.

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