Piety over Protest: Cognitive Liberation and Deflected Collective Action in Central India

Cognitive liberation is often treated in the social movements literature as a mediating factor through which political opportunities and mobilizing structures generate protest. This paper unpacks multiple dimensions of cognitive liberation and finds that they may operate in tension with one another. Building on scholarship that focuses on subjective factors in social movements, the paper examines the case of the Korku, an oppressed indigenous community in central India, who choose not to protest despite the presence of several dimensions of cognitive liberation. Rather than engage in collective political action, the Korku’s grievances are deflected toward depoliticized religious goals. The Korku seek communal improvement through Hindu piety in a context of the Hindutva cultural-nationalist ideology, rather than protest against the encroachment of this ideology on their community.     

MASTER FRAMES, POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIES, AND SELF-DETERMINATION:c The Åland Islands in the Post-WWI Period

While the literature on master frames has drawn attention to the crucial role of ideas in cycles of protest, reliance on the creation of frame resonance to account for the success or failure of a social movement within a cycle can be problematic. Applying propositions adapted from McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald (1996), this article traces how political opportunities interacted with framing processes during the emergence and development of the Åland Islands secessionist movement of the post-WWI period. The Ålanders aligned their claims with early representations of the "selfdetermination master frame" that underlay the cycle of protest that emerged after the war in a way that resonated with the Allied leaders adjudicating their case. Shifts in political conditions, however, helped to foster an intense "framing contest" among contenders that in the end undermined the Ålanders' representation of the master frame and their ability to achieve desired ends. Although the case reveals certain shortcomings in the propositions, they nevertheless provide a useful starting point when documenting the complex interplay of political conditions and framing processes in an instance of collective action.     

Multiple routes to immigration scepticism: The association between individual grievances and anti-immigrant attitudes in Canada,Germany and the USA

This article theorizes and tests the association between the ego-tropic and socio-tropic dimensions of three sets of grievances, that is, economic, value-based and security-related, and anti-immigrant attitudes using data from an original survey fielded in Canada, Germany and the USA. Our analysis confirms the presence of multiple paths towards anti-immigration attitudes. Our contribution is threefold. First, we offer a nuanced understanding of the complexity of immigration scepticism and shed light on its different dimensions, including the under-researched personal value-based and collective security-related. Second, we make an empirical contribution by confirming the multi-faceted nature of anti-immigrant attitudes using data from an original survey tailored specifically to our research questions. This allows us to examine each set of grievances independently of each other and independently of anti-immigrant attitudes. Third, our survey enables us to identify country-specific dynamics by testing the relationship between individual grievances and anti-immigrant attitudes in diverse political settings.     

Institutional Activism: Reconsidering the Insider/Outsider Dichotomy

Social movements are conventionally understood as a means by which groups seek to resolve collective grievances outside of the regular political process. With this in mind, I explore the important role of “institutional activists”– insiders with access to resources and power – who proactively take up causes that overlap with those of grassroots challengers. This article focuses on the history of, and recent developments in, the study of institutional activism, situating the concept within existing social movement theory and providing examples of the varying roles of institutional activists in mobilization.     

Quality Controlled: An Ethnographic Account of Tea Party Messaging and Action

What strategies do Tea Party movement organizers use to achieve frame alignment, that is, uniformity of grievance, purpose, and action, with their participants? Evidence to answer this question is gathered from a year‐length participant‐observation case study of one city‐based Tea Party organization, primarily through the meetings of its localized grassroots chapters. Principal findings are that Tea Party organizers employ quality control of off‐message grievances, for example, abortion, as well as any action or communication that would or could be perceived as racially prejudicial, or otherwise inflammatory. Formally, these findings demonstrate the influence of organizational hierarchy on grassroots practice. Substantively, they demonstrate the complex relationship between a broader conservative ideological repertoire as empirically deployed by participants, and the more focused frame alignment attempts of a particular social movement organization. In short, the findings elucidate the importance of interaction and organizational structure as they influence social movement messaging and action.     

Indigenous resurgence,decolonial praxis,alternative futures: the Maya Leaders Alliance of Southern Belize

ABSTRACT

While most scholars working on resistance and decolonisation in Latin America and the Caribbean are familiar with the Zapatistas, far fewer have afforded committed attention to the parallel Maya land rights struggle and autonomous social movement in the region. Notably, a movement that is currently advancing in both Central America and the Caribbean, namely, Belize—a former colony of the British Crown. Accordingly, this piece offers a summary of the struggle of the Q?eqchi? and Mopan Maya communities of Toledo District, Southern Belize. More specifically, it introduces readers to the Maya Leaders Alliance (MLA)—an ever-evolving grassroots coalition of Maya organisations, land defenders, and human rights activists that comprise the movement. We start by illustrating the current context of heightened tension that exists between the Maya and the state, and then share an overview of the movement’s political aims and programme of activities in the face of the historical, structural, and ongoing colonial forces the Maya are up against. Ultimately, this profile will demonstrate how Maya communities in Belize are practising ‘non-metaphorical decolonisation’ and engendering ‘Indigenous resurgence’ whilst mobilising for land, dignity, and a peaceful future.     

For the public good: Urban youth advocacy and the fight for public education

This article examines a grassroots movement for public education that has recently emerged to challenge corporate-style education reformers. These reformers became well-established in the early 21st century promoting the business strategies of capitalism such as school choice, competition, privatization, and closure. To understand how and why local communities are fighting for public education while embracing a much older, traditional notion of the common good, this article takes Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a case study, situating the struggle for public education in historical and political contexts. It also places the corporate-reform and grassroots movements in a social and economic framework, and it pays special attention to the urban youth who stand at the center of much of the policy debate on public education, considering the ways in which young people themselves express political agency through activism.     

Grievances do matter in mobilization

This article proposes that by studying grievances as not only materially but also ideationally constituted claims, scholars can gain analytical leverage on puzzles of social movement emergence and development. This meaning-laden approach to grievances recognizes that the ideas with which some claims are imbued might be more conducive to motivating political resistance than others. The approach is inherently grounded in context—scholars begin by understanding the meanings that grievances take on in particular times and places. But it is also potentially generalizable; as scholars uncover the ways in which apparently different grievances may index similar ideas across time and place, those grievances can be categorized similarly and their potential relationship to social mobilization explored. Drawing on evidence from the 2000 Bolivian water wars, the article proposes that market driven threats to subsistence resources offer one such potential categorization.     

Women’s mobilisation in the Portuguese revolution: context and framing strategies

This article examines the role of women’s mobilisations related to the 1974 Portuguese revolution. An in-depth analysis of three women’s organisations through archival research and interviews with participants highlights the ways in which they participated in a cycle of contention between 1974 and 1977. Examination of framing strategies demonstrates the effects of political and cultural context. In particular, I demonstrate that movement–party alliances informed and constrained the diagnostic and prognostic frames of women’s movements on feminism and the revolution. Opportunity structures are shown to vary for different organisations within the same cycle of contention. Facing relatively closed opportunities, two of these organisations pursued framing strategies that articulated with the Left-dominated master frame of the cycle in order to carve out spaces for gender-specific demands while rejecting the label of feminism. The third organisation, instead, presented a countercultural frame that alienated the organisation from party and movement allies. Unable to overcome ideological divisions and rivalries, the three organisations perceived each other as competitors, rather than potential allies. While party–movement cooperation contributed to the emergence of a fractionalised women’s movement, it also provided important support structures to aid women’s organisations to mobilise in a cultural and political context that was closed to feminist demands.     

Welfare Recipients or Workers? Contesting the Workfare State in New York City

This paper addresses how New York City's workfare program has structured opportunities for collective action by welfare recipients. As workfare blurs the distinction between wage workers and welfare recipients, it calls into question accepted understandings of the rights and obligations of welfare recipients and fosters new claims on the state. The concept of "cultural opportunity structures" can help to explain the political mobilization of workfare participants if it is linked to a Durkheimian tradition of cultural analysis attentive to symbolic classification. The dramaturgic approach to culture exemplified in the work of Erving Goffman can usefully complement this structural approach if a narrow focus on frames and framing processes is broadened to include interaction rituals and ceremonial profanation.     

PEACENIKS AND WARMONGERS' FRAMING FRACAS ON THE HOME FRONT:

Research on collective action framing has tended to focus on inter- and intramovement interpretation of grievances, often assuming that hegemonic frames are taken for granted. The Persian Gulf conflict of 1990–1991 offers an empirical opportunity to extend the theoretical boundaries of social movement framing by incorporating, and identifying, the active framing strategies of dominant actors. From this vantage point, we can begin to see in what ways both dominant and oppositional discourses (and policy) are aided and constrained.     

Mobilization by images: TV screen and mediated instant grievances in the Umbrella Movement

This article discusses the effects of the televised images of the use of tear gas on people participating in the Umbrella Movement. Although the role of the Internet and social media in political mobilization has been widely discussed, the importance of television cannot be overlooked. This article argues that the widely transmitted broadcasts of live images of the police firing tear gas into the protesting crowd generated “mediated instant grievances” in a substantial sector of the viewing public, thus contributing to the size and scale of the Umbrella Movement. The study reported here provides evidence for this argument by analyzing the results of a survey of protesters that were on site during the early stage of the movement (N = 969). The study sought to determine whether and how the television images were related to the participants’ political attitudes, reasons for participation, and views of self-mobilized actions. The findings showed that, in particular, mediated instant grievances motivated the participation of the “amateur protesters” in the movement.     

‘Systemic thinking’, ‘regenerative culture’, and new forms of prefigurative politics: challenges for the global left

ABSTRACT

One of the aspects of the current crisis of the Left is an ‘epistemological blindness’ that prevents it from identifying opportunities for its own renewal. That includes the dismissal of the contribution of prefigurative forms of collective action which do not fit its institutionalized orthodoxies. Their most significant expression is a range of grassroots initiatives based on ‘systemic thinking’ and aimed at promoting a ‘regenerative culture’. It includes non-capitalist economic initiatives, such as those of the transition movement, social and solidarity economy and the Global Ecovillage Network, as well as of the temporary communities created by Occupy Wall Street movement and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. They regard social polarization, patriarchy, and the crisis of democracy as interconnected dimensions of a civilizational dysfunction that asks for whole-systems solutions. Such approach, if adopted by the Left, may contribute to its renewal and political strengthening.     

‘My land,your social transformation’: Conflicts within the landless people movement (MST), Rio de Janeiro,Brazil

The Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra (MST) is one of the best-known and most prominent rural social movements. The unequal distribution of land in Brazil, and the neglect of this problem by successive Brazilian governments contributed greatly to the organisation of rural movements striving for the implementation of land reform in the country. The struggle for land therefore frames the MST collective action and legitimates its raison d’être as a social movement. The MST framing process, carried out mainly by the movement leaders and organisers, intends to unify the social movement by articulating private beliefs, interpretations and preferences into shared values and meanings. However, this process of framing does not take place without competition or/and conflict: leaders are many times forced to compete with other institutions, with the media, or even with inherited cultural understandings which provide alternative frames. This paper focuses particularly on the conflicting process of framing internal to the MST. More specifically, the present paper looks at how the MST leaders/organisers frame, and interpret, community and land differently from the MST settlers/followers whose lived experiences and inherited cultural understandings naturally informed their perceptions both on community and land.     

How Do Intergroup Grievances Develop in the Absence of Oppression? Revolutions and Political Parties in Nineteenth‐Century Uruguay

Political sociologists often assume that widespread grievances require a long legacy of intergroup oppression. Yet in nineteenth‐century Uruguay, supporters of the White and Red political parties developed intense grievances against each other even though a legacy of oppression was missing. For explaining this puzzle I present an alternative perspective. It states that grievances first originate among political elites, which mobilize the masses through selective incentives in order to impose their will. If elites and masses are bound by close ties, sustained mobilization facilitates cross‐class group identification and allows grievances to “trickle down” from the top to the bottom of the social structure.     

Community Organizing and the Detroit Water Struggle: Report from the Front Lines

At this moment in history, both the need for macro social work approaches and interest in macro social practice among social workers are growing. One macro approach that is particularly well-suited to confronting current political and economic conditions is grassroots community organizing. Some authors have suggested that most successful efforts at community organizing are those which can link the lived experiences of grassroots community members to larger movements for social justice. The struggle for access to affordable water in Detroit is a prime example of such an effort. In 2014, indignation at the announcement that the city would be shutting off the water of all those who could not afford to pay their water bills, combined with resistance to the imposition of emergency management on the city, galvanized a movement that brought together a wide variety of community members, activists, and organizers. As a participant-observer in this struggle, I conducted videotaped interviews with 15 organizers and activists concerning their views on the successes and challenges they have witnessed and the crucial “next steps” for community activists in Detroit. This article reports on these interviews and examines the lessons for community organizers that emerged from them.     

Abortion Counselling in Britain: Understanding the Controversy

This article reviews literature from a number of disciplines in order to provide an explanation of the political controversy attached to the provision of abortion counselling. It will show how this is an area of health policy debate in which women's reproductive bodies have become a setting for political struggle. The issue of abortion counselling in Britain has undergone a number of discursive shifts in response to political manoeuvring and changing socio‐legal framing of abortion. In particular, the article shows how much of the controversial reframing of abortion counselling was a tactical shift by political actors opposed to abortion per se, and this work is critiqued for not contextualising abortion. The article then focuses on women's abortion experiences and discusses research that shows how women's decision‐making processes, and responses to an abortion, are related to gendered socio‐cultural contexts: the extent to which women having an abortion feel they have transgressed societal norms and values, for example, is likely to affect their abortion experiences. Finally, it is suggested that providing a non‐judgemental context, and challenging negative discourses on abortion, may be the most effective way of minimising the possibility of negative emotions.     

Mobilizing Gender to Promote Peace: The Case of Machsom Watch

The binary model that presents women as peaceful and men as warfaring is a common conception of war and peace. Despite increasing levels of gender equality in most spheres of public life and decreasing gender segregation in institutions in many parts of the world, the associational link of men to war and women to peace remains widespread. Focusing on the Israeli women??s peace organization, Machsom Watch, this article uses a content analysis of interactions between Machsom Watch activists, soldiers and Palestinians to examine how gendered political opportunity structures affect and are affected by interactions between individuals, organizations and institutions. The paper highlights the contradiction between Machsom Watch??s form as a women-only organization and their framing and report language, which is non-gender specific. I argue that this contradiction emerges from their strategic negotiation of the gendered political opportunity structure as well as their culturally bounded experiences of gendered interactions and embodied gender norms. More generally, I argue that by understanding political opportunity structures as being bound by cultural norms that create distinct sets of opportunities and constraints for different groups of people, scholars can better understand the particular manifestation of social movement action and thereby more fully account for human agency in social and political structures. Additionally, this paper encourages social movement scholars to understand social movement framing as both a product of political opportunities and constraints as well as an influence in the formation of the political opportunity structure.     

Strategic Framing of Adat in Land-Acquisition Politics in East Sumba

This article is about the strategic use of adat arguments in the politics of large-scale land acquisition. While customary (adat) communities are commonly depicted as small local minorities living in the forests and being guardians of the environment, in many situations such communities occupy a majority position within the district. Majority adat communities are internally differentiated into categories of actors with varying and conflicting interests. This article focuses on Sumba in eastern Indonesia, where state and adat powers are not opposed but historically aligned. We analyse how five common ways of framing adat in Sumba are currently being deployed in land-acquisition politics, in situations supporting plantation land acquisition or protesting against farmers’ land dispossession. We draw attention to what we call ‘strategic adat framing’ as a political activity. The article calls for analysing the historical and social context of local deployments of adat for understanding the impact of current government pro-adat policies.