The result refers both to the movements themselves and their environment

Confrontations between social movements and their adversaries change both themselves and society at large. The most obvious result is the concessions they can force upon the adversaries, but other results are rather more interesting.

Result for the movement itself

The conflict affects the peoples’ movement itself, positively and negatively. It is only in the extremely rare cases when it is completely annihilated or wins a complete victory that the movement ceases to exist. When the conflict ends in a compromise, which is almost always, the movement wins a developed collective identity, increased experience, developed solidarity and often a widened array of themes that strengthens the movement in subsequent conflicts.

But the movement is often forced, as a part of the compromise, to accept a certain degree of conflict insitutionalization. Such things imply certain advantages insofar as the routines the category lives under and the conflict has dealt with are made somewhat less repressing. But it also carries with it some questionable secondary effects.
- The managing of the conflict is formalized in laws, government agencies and more marked by mediators like political parties and media instead of the social movements themselves.
- The peoples’ movements’ organisations are forced to manage the evermore intricate institutionalized conflict management through formalizing and labour-divisioning themselves; this formalization and labour division will with the time kill what makes the movement organisations to social movements.

A popular movement has to accept this, and relate to it. In practice this means that a movement continuously creates new organisations as a replacement for those that have been institutionalized and forced the popular movement to work under awkward conditions. This tension between institutionalization and new initiatives is what characterizes the life of popular movements.

Result for society

The result for society in general depends on the way the movement and its adversaries have acted and can never be figured beforehand. One can, in every decision moment of a struggle, make the ”right” choice or the ”wrong” choice.
- The first choice is when one decide about the collective identity: who are ”we”? A bigger ”we” will have greater impact, but may also increase disunion – for which however there are tested remedies.
- Next choice appears when articulating interest and alternative. Here, the possibilities are still more extensive, and what one chooses affects the enthusiasm and spirit of self-sacrifice, the adversary’s inclination to compromise, and the opportunity of alliances with third parties.
- The organisational form is also a result of choices. And different forms of organisation may be more or less effective in the given situation.
- So are different mobilizations, conflict actions, and alternative society constructions. These choices are called strategies, and here there is more understanding that there is really a matter of choices. Nevertheless, an unusual creativity is usually demanded to stretch the limits of time-honoured strategies or create new ones, more adapted to the present situation

The rule is, however, that it will always be better if one struggles than if one does not. Any outcome is a result of many forces, of which the force of the movement is one.
Even if one ”lose” a struggle, the struggle itself has been awkward for one’s adversary, and it is likely that he thinks carefully next time, before he tries new tricks. And if the movement has struggled well, without any apparent stupidities, its participants have learnt a lot about how to do it better next time.