Peoples' movements and protests


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Category
Attitude
Identity
Interest
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Organization
Mobilization
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Conflict action
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The conflict category develops relations to the surrounding world

 

 

 

A social movement has to consider, when mobilizing in a conflict, the present ”political field” or ”opportunity structure”. A political field or opportunity structure consists of everything that a movement has to relate to: opposite party, other parties, power distribution, and not least the political culture or climate, that is, what people in general think is legitimate and acceptable ways of doing things.

The opposite party is considered under the heading ”Action”.

Among third parties the state is perhaps most important. It is the particular function of the state to maintain the stability of the system, which implies among other things that it will engage in every bigger conflict, not only in those itself is a protagonist in. It can do that either in trying to obstruct the movement or support it, thereby trying to influence it. There is a strong motive for social movements to influence the state, if for no other reason to prevent the opposite party from influencing it too much.

Methods are playing different authorities against eachother, playing different elites against eachother, goading the state into unpopular actions and depriving it of means through tax strikes and boycotts. A historically important method has been to infiltrate or invade the state through political parties – an ambiguous method as we shall see.

But any organized body may be a party in the conflict – businesses, schools, churches. One can even figure the built environment as a party in a conflict since certain kinds of such are easier to handle than others in for example manifestations.
There are also the conventional mechanisms of mediation, highly autonomous, privileged institutions whose aim it is to articulate interests and formulate the agenda of society: political parties and the media.

Political parties are problematic for peoples’ movements. Even when they in some sense ”represent” peoples’ movements, their articulation is from the outset gauged at compromises. In the first place, because parties are potential governments, a compromise with the state, but also with other interests they regard as potential voters. Moreover, they can thanks to their privileged position maintain that their version of the interest is the correct one. For that reason, peoples’ movements have to struggle against them to get the space to formulate autonomously.

Media are perhaps less problematic because there are other institutions that may play partly the same role for the movement, for example mass organisations and local communities. The problem is related to the fact that media influence the language or program; this is perverted by the language and program of media, which in its turn is influenced by owners’ and journalists’ interests and by socalled journalistic evaluation of facts, which are certainly not the same as the movement’s own.

"Shadow movements" and opportunities

Even ”friendly” political parties and media, and perhaps also other established organizations and people, may cause trouble by virtue of their status. They may easily come to dominate the discourse of the movement, kill what is demotic and anti-systemic, and thereby kill the movement’s ability to renew itself. However, the more successful a movement is, the more such ”shadow movements” will try to ally with the movement in order to influence them. The strength of the movement in that case is that they don’t really need these people, and don't lose much if they keep them in reins.

Finally, the situation plays a great role for peoples’ movement’s mobilizations. Politologists have particularly focused on the importance of other political actors’ acts for movements. Politics is always a matter of take advantage of the opportunity, and use them, and other people’s actions to their profit. The opportunity may consist of disunity within the elite, emergence of a new actor, or change in the political culture.

Emergence of new opportunities are important for upswings of peoples’ movements. Upswings are usually set apace by strategic quarrels within the elite, which induce some privileged categories to mobilize for their interests. Successes for them trigger others to mobilize; many contemporaneous mobilizations against the same adversaries enfeeble the latter and make them incapable to withstand in new conflicts. This rises expectations and entices new social movements. All mobilizations together create a strong social movement culture where it is easy to formulate identities, themes, ideologies, strategies and programs; this make things easier for new social movement mobilizations, etc. In the end, the boom is broken through countermobilizations from the elites, according to new strategic principles, linked to rash errors by the popular movements, and not least disagreements about strategic principles. Usually you can see clearly when the reverse is set in: it is when movements begin to quarrel about ”further advance” or ”consolidation”.

 

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