“Information overflow” & social movements

Dear class,

It became apparent last class that some of you (a lot of you?) were not too happy with our discussion of “social movement theory”, either because it was too much to swallow in 50 mns, or because it was too abstract. I apologize if I did not come across in a clearer, easier manner, but I needed to put at least some of that content across before we got to next class. In any case, here is a shorter, hopefully more useful overview with some extra materials for you:

1) Social movement theory, as the name clearly indicates, provides a conceptual frame to study social movements. As I mentioned in class, there are characteristics that help define what a social movement is/what it does:

A social movement is a form of collective action outside normal institutional channels. In other words, they are kind of informal political participation. This means that in a democracy like Germany, you are not happy with current anti-terrorism legislation, you could try and effect change through the German state institutions. You could for instance contact your elected member of parliament to raise the concerns with her/him, or you could try to get elected by running a campaign focused on that issue. But if instead you mobilized friends and acquaintances, and other members of civil society, and together you formed a protest movement which sought to change the legislation through non-instituional means (like protesting in front of the Bundestag every day, or symbolically burning the text of the legislation in front of TV cameras, or distribute pamphlets to people passing by), you would have formed a social movement.

From this first aspect, we reach two other characteristics. The first is that social movements are change-oriented in their claims and goals – meaning that through their collective actions, they try to change something which they identified as a problem in need of solving. In the case of my example, all of the people in the social movement share the belief that current German anti-terrorism legislation is wrong (for a variety of reasons, no need to get into that just yet). They have a grievance, and they want to address that. This is why Charles Tilly has often referred to his own research on social movements as a study in the politics of contention, or contentious politics.

The second characteristic of social movements is that they usually makes claims on the State or some other authority which they believe has the capacity to address their problem/grievance and change it for the better. David Meyer elaborates: “The state has the capacity to process claims, adjudicate disputes, and make decisions binding on losers. Movements may also seek to enlist or provoke other social or political institutions, both below and above the level of the nation-state, to augment their influence on the state. Nonetheless, the state remains the focal point of social movement claims and activities.” (Mayer 2004: 166)

Moreover, social movements exhibit a degree of organization. Although a social movement is not an organization per se, it is an organized way to mobilize resources. In other words, even if the social movement you started against German anti-terrorism law did not turn into an official organization (like an NGO or a political party), and even if your social movement does not comprise any organizations who share your vision and your goals (like a citizen’s council, or the policemen’s association), there still has to be an organization of activities: someone has to plan events, write texts, invite people to attend rallies, paint protest signs, etc.

This means that social movements develop what Charles Tilly calls a repertoire. In other words, since they are acting collectively outside/at the margins of formal political institutions, they cannot use the processes/tools for change available to them in state bureaucracy (such as legislative petitions, or police complaints). Social movements have thus developed their own set of strategies for action. Charles Tilly identified three key dimensions of social movement strategies:

1. a sustained, organized public effort making collective claims on target authorities (let us call it a campaign)

2. employment of combinations from among the following forms of political action: creation of special-purpose associations and coalitions, public meetings, solemn processions, vigils, rallies, demonstrations, petition drives, statements to and in public media, and pamphleteering (call the variable ensemble of performances the social movement repertoire); and

3. participants’ concerted public representations of WUNC: worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment on the part of themselves and/or their constituencies (call them WUNC displays)

Also, social movements has some degree of persistence in time. That means that they are not spontaneous and short-lived events (like a single protest, or a single person who sent 100 letters to the government, and then suddenly stopped without mobilizing anyone else, organizing another event, or achieving some of his/her goals). Rather, they define an agenda, and they organize events which seek to achive that agenda over time with some degree of consistency in their methods, members, etc..

Social movements, therefore are crucially about the mobilization of resources. These resources can be materials resources (like money, or computers, or mobile phones), but also moral resources, or cultural ones. (Wikipedia’s page on social movement theory, despite very basic, provides a good, well-referenced introduction to this). For instance, the social movement we have been using as an example so far (trying to change current German anti-terrorism law), would be a good collective way of mobilizing human resources (people, such as volunteers to distribute pamphlets), but also moral resources (imagine you invited a tortured innocent man who was very famous, and has spent years talking about the need to ban torture in all forms), as well as cultural ones (if you organized a rally in front of the Bundestag, and you got Tokyo Hotel to play there and publicly speak in support of your cause, therefore drawing on their power as a cultural icon in Germany to boost your message).

This shows that social movements are part of larger political processes, and respond to needs and opportunities within the political process. In other words, the fact that new anti-terrorist law has been passed in Germany, and the fact that there has been some initial reluctance and heavy discussion in the formal political institutions opens up a series of opportunities for your social movement to act.

Finally, and crucailly for our next class, social movements work through a mechanism which authors have called “framing”. A frame is like a shared story, a shared narrative. For instance, in California there was recently a legislative initiative to ammend the state constituion and ban same-sex marriage (which has previously been made legal in California and several other states). The legislative proposal, which was democratically voted on, was knows as Proposition 8 (or Prop 8). If you had travelled to california recently, and you found yourself in the middle of a protest, you would have probably had difficulty in understanding the message they were putting across – how would you understand signs of “Say no to Prop 8″? That would probably mean nothing to you, because (i) you were not within the frame of that social movement, and (ii) their framing strategy had not been successful outside the US (in other words, their narrative had not reached you, or had not made a sufficient impact on you, to either understand the issue, or take their side). Next Monday, when we discuss the concepts of ideology and religion as explaining factors in terrorist activities, we will be speaking precisely of that – frames or narratives, and their imporance in mobilizing people to act.

Which brings us to the crucial point: why on Earth would I spend so much time talking about social movement theory, and what dos it have to do with our topic, terrorism??

As you may have realized by now, terrorist groups or terrorist organizations can be defined as social movements, as in most cases – as we have discussed in class – terrorism is a tactic employed by individuals working within a group os some sort, rather than working alone. Whether this means that a group evolves from a peaceful social movement to a terrorist one (i.e. emplying political violence in the ways we analysed in session 2) – as Mr. Kien suggested – or whether they have employed violent means from the start, the point is that terrorist organization share most (perhaps even all) of the other characteristcs of social movements listed above.

OK, so as descriptions and labels go, social movement theory can be applied to the study of terrorist groups. But why should it? What are the advantages of using this conceptual framework? To help you answer that, below I provide you with some readings suggestions…

Further reading

1. Social Movement theory (general reading)

Della Porta, Donatella & Mario Diani (2006) Social Movements – an introduction

McAdam et al. (1996) Comparative perspectives on social movements

Snow et al. (2004) The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (if you are interested in this book, let me know, I have the digital version in a PDF file I can send)

Tarrow, Sydney (1994) Power in movement: social movements, collective action, and politics

Tilly, Charles (2004) Social Movements, 1768-2004

2. Social movement theory & political violence

Della Porta, D. (1995/2006) Social movements, political violence and the state: a comparative analysis of Italy and Germany

Tilly, Charles (2003) The politics of collective violence

Wiktorowicz, Quintan (ed.) (2004) Islamic Activism – a social movement theory approach

3. Social movement theory & terrorism

Della Porta, D. (2001) “Terror against the State” in Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology

Gentry, Caron (2004) “The relationship between new social movment theory and terrorism studies” in Terrorism and Political Violence 16 (2): 274-293