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Peoples' movements and protests |
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CategoryAttitudeIdentityInterestArticulationOrganizationMobilizationRelationsConflict actionResultBack to Popular movement theoryBack to main page
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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. 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 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.
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