Introduction
On May 30th, 2010, six ships left Turkey and approached the coast of Israel/
Palestine to deliver supplies to the coastal enclave of Gaza. Most of the ships
were owned by a Turkish NGO called the IHH (˙Insani Yardım Vakfi, or
Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms).1
On board were over 600 peace,
humanitarian, and pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel activists determined to break the
blockade with which, since 2007, Israel had been strangling the economy of
Gaza. Approaching the coast, the flotilla was attacked from sea and air by an
Israeli commando squadron. When the attack ended, nine activists lay dead
or dying, and a number of Israeli commandos were wounded, some of them
seriously.
How did this happen, and what does it have to do with “contentious politics”?
In 2007, the Gaza Strip, a detached part of the Palestinian territories,
was taken over from the more moderate Palestinian governmental party, Fatah,
in a bloody coup by the radical Hamas group. From that point on, the Israeli
army began to limit access to Gaza, both for fear of arms getting into the
hands of Hamas militants, who had been attacking Israeli settlements, and to
isolate Hamas, an Islamist group that continued to call for Israel’s destruction.
Those measures were not sufficient to prevent home-made missiles from killing
Israelis living in towns near the border. Under pressure from public opinion and
with an election approaching, in January 2009, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)
launched a massive land and air attack on the population of Gaza, destroying
thousands of buildings, damaging a UN humanitarian center, and killing over
a thousand people.
1 The IHH describes itself as an Islamic charity that was formed to provide aid to Bosnia in
the mid-1990s. It has been involved in aid missions in Africa and Asia and in the Palestinian
territories, and it played an important role in provisioning Gaza after the Israeli blockade began
in 2007. The IHH is technically an NGO, but it maintains ties with the ruling Islamist Justice
and Development Party in Turkey. Its top fundraisers are Turkey’s Islamist merchant class. The
organization is banned in Israel. For more information, go to www.ihh.org.tr/Haber Manset
Ayrintilar.160±M5563920baaa.0.html (in Turkish).
1
2 Power in Movement
After the January 2009 “operation,” Israeli pressure became even greater,
turning Gaza into a virtual prison for the million-and-a-half Palestinians living
there. While Israel allowed in food and medicine, it controlled water and
electricity supplies and blocked the entry of anything that could conceivably
be used to construct weapons – including fertilizer, metal, and computer chips,
as well as a list of nuisance items that included, at one time or another, light
bulbs, candles, matches, books, musical instruments, crayons, clothing, coffee,
tea, cookies, and shampoo.
The blockade had three major defects: First, it increased the influence of
foreign humanitarian groups, including the IHH. Second, it had a devastating
impact on Gaza’s economy, increasing the power of Hamas through which
almost all foreign aid was distributed. And third, it created a flourishing underground
economy and a class of smugglers bringing in supplies through tunnels
from Egypt. This led to constant Israeli attacks on the smugglers’ tunnels and
to rising tensions between Israel and Egypt. Cut off from the world, unable
to get the supplies needed to rebuild their homes, the Gazans relied on the
sympathy of fellow Arabs, the United Nations, various humanitarian groups,
mainly from Western Europe, and Turkey, since 2002 under the leadership
of a moderately Islamist party attempting to better its relations with fellow
Muslims in the Middle East.
In January 2010, planning began for the flotilla that would leave Turkey
in May to try to challenge the blockade. The IHH “brought large boats and
millions of dollars of donations to a cause that had struggled to gain attention
and aid the Palestinians. Particularly galling to Israel,” the New York Times
noted, “is the fact that the group comes from Turkey, an ally, but one whose
relations with Israel have become increasingly strained.”2
Both directly and
through its ties with the Turkish government, the Israeli government gave
warnings to turn back, but the flotilla’s leaders refused, and on the 31st, a
squadron of Israeli warships and helicopter gunships attacked.
The flotilla was not unprepared: When Israeli commandos were lowered
onto the ships on ropes from their helicopters, they were at first overwhelmed by
well-trained Islamist militants. Several of the Israeli soldiers lost their weapons,
which were turned on the attackers. But the numbers and the firepower of the
IDF proved too much for the defenders. When the melee ended, nine militants
had been killed and a number of Israeli attackers wounded, two of them
seriously.
Although the IHH action was deliberately provocative,3
seldom was there
so stark a contrast between the peaceful tactics of a movement and the violent
response of its target. Though an Israeli government spokesman painted the
activists as “an armada of hate and violence in support of the Hamas terror
2 New York Times, June 1, 2010.
3 As a board member of the group said, “We became famous; we are very thankful to the Israeli
authorities.” New York Times, June 1, 2010.
Introduction 3
organisation . . . ,”4
the international press and progressive groups responded
with outrage. Predictably, the Arab and Palestinian press were the most violent
in their denunciations, but the European press was almost as vehement; the
usually conservative Economist editorialized, “A policy of trying to imprison
the Palestinians has left their jailer strangely besieged.”5
More surprising, the
normally pro-Israeli New York Times pronounced that the Israeli blockade
must end.6
Governments around the world were quick to respond. Denmark, France,
Greece, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Egypt, and South Africa all summoned Israeli
ambassadors to condemn the attack. Greece suspended joint military exercises,
and Turkey withdrew its ambassador and cancelled military cooperation
and joint water projects. Leftwing governments, such as Nicaragua’s, suspended
diplomatic relations, but even more friendly governments, such as Ireland’s,
cancelled an appearance of Israel’s ambassador before a parliamentary
committee.7
Most important, Israel’s only ally, the United States, condemned
the violence and called for an end to the boycott of Gaza.
But more striking than the reactions of the press or the politicians was
the overwhelming reaction of nonstate actors around the world. Civil society
groups, social movements, unions, and religious groups (including some Jewish
ones) condemned the attack on the flotilla and organized protests in dozens of
cities. In the Arab world, 285 civil society groups signed a statement against
the Israeli action; in South Africa, unions called for making every municipality
an “Apartheid Israel Free Zone”; in Britain, UNITE called for a policy of
divestment in Israeli companies; in Norway, the chair of the largest Norwegian
union federation called for divestment by the state’s pension fund; and in
Sweden, the port workers’ union called for a boycott of Israeli ships.8
A number
of other groups – including a coalition of European Jews – either immediately
launched ships in the direction of Gaza or planned to do so in the near future.
The most widespread response was a call for a boycott.9
And in the days
after the attack, a number of well-known performance artists cancelled their
4 Statement of Danny Ayalon, Deputy Foreign Minister, on May 31, 2010, quoted in www.
guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/31/q-a-gaza-freedom-flotilla. Visited on June 8, 2010.
5 The Economist went on to point out that the attack on a Turkish ship and the killing of nine
Turkish citizens (one of them with a U.S. passport as well) “is depriving Israel of a rare Muslim
ally and mediator.” The Economist, June 5th–11th, 2010, pp. 13–14.
6 The Times criticized the Obama Administration’s tepid response to the attack, urging the government
to join other major powers in calling for an end of the blockade. New York Times, June
1, 2010. President Obama satisfied himself by characterizing the blockade as “unsustainable.”
Visited at www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/opinion/02wed1.html, June 10, 2010.
7 These selected reactions are reported in “Activism News” on its Web site at electronicintifada.net/v2/article11318.shtml.
Visited June 7, 2010.
8 These reports also come from “Activism News,” cited in note no. 7.
9 The diffusion of the boycott call was remarkable. A simple Google search for “Gaza & boycott”
came up with more than one million five hundred thousand “hits.” A narrower search for “Gaza
& boycott & unions” produced 568,000. And what I thought would produce only a few “hits” –
a search for “Gaza & boycott & artists” – led to 182,000 hits!
4 Power in Movement
appearances in Israel. What had begun as an effort by a radical Islamist group to
break a blockade ended in a global wave of negative publicity and a widespread
call to boycott Israel, whose leaders refused to cooperate with an international
investigation of the killings. But the combination of the brazen attempt to
break the blockade, the killing of nine civilians in international waters, and the
widespread condemnation of Israel’s behavior did have consequences. In the
United States, it began to dawn on foreign policy elites that the Israeli alliance
was becoming a liability.10
In the World Zionist Congress, a split occurred
between a liberal majority that urged the Israeli government to soften its stand
and a vocal minority that attempted to block the majority resolution.11
And in
Israel itself, in late June, the government bowed to international pressure and
agreed to soften the blockade.12
what was happening here?
What does the story of the Israeli attack on the Turkish-led “flotilla” tell us?
We could interpret it in moral terms, either as the attempt of an intrepid band
of missionaries to help their desperate co-religionists, or as the justified attempt
of a besieged nation to protect its security. We could see it as an example of
how small-power politics can threaten to up-end big-power relationships. We
could also see it as an example of what I call “contentious politics” – what
happens when collective actors join forces in confrontation with elites, authorities,
and opponents around their claims or the claims of those they claim to
represent.
From a contentious politics perspective, we can take away seven important
lessons from the Israeli attack on the flotilla and the response to it:
First, the range of actors in the story goes well beyond the traditional subject
of “social movements.” Two major states, Israel and Turkey, the Islamist movement
Hamas, a flotilla packed with humanitarian, peace, and pro-Palestinian
NGOs, Israeli voters, European unions and governments, and global public
opinion all came together in the conflict over Gaza. If we were to focus only on
social movements, we would have told a rather truncated story. In this book, I
will develop a relational approach to contentious politics, which focuses more
10 As the usually conservative American security commentator Anthony Cordesman wrote,
“ . . . the depth of America’s moral commitment does not justify or excuse actions
by an Israeli government that unnecessarily make Israel a strategic liability when it
should remain an asset.”
Go to www.normanfinkelstein.com/anthony-cordesman-is-whistling-a-new-tune/. Visited June
8, 2010.
11 For a report from a surprised liberal group that was involved in passing the resolution, go to
www.jstreet.org/blog/?p-111o. Visited June 18, 2010.
12 The Security Cabinet’s decision can be found at http://www.pmo.gov.il/PMOEng/
Communication/Spokesman/2010/06/spokemediniyut170610.htm. Visited June 18, 2010.
Introduction 5
on the interactions among divergent actors than on the classical subject of
social movements.
Second, the story shows how, under certain conditions, even small and
temporary groups of collective actors can have explosive effects on powerful
states. Without the provocation of the “freedom flotilla,” it is doubtful that
the world’s attention would have focused on the festering sore of Gaza, or that
Israel would have softened its blockade.
Third, the story illustrates the importance of spirals of political opportunities
and threats in opening windows for contentious politics. Even in Israel,
Leftist opposition groups gathered to protest the Israeli raid and were met with
hostility by rightwing opponents.13
We will give great attention to such spirals
and to the “cycles of contention” that they constitute.
Fourth, the story tells us that we cannot understand episodes of contention
without examining how contentious and institutional politics – including electoral
politics – intersect. In the spring of 2010, Israel was governed by a weak
and divided center-right coalition under a leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, who
had already shown his willingness to bow to extreme xenophobic opinion.
The threats to his government from the Right were important factors in the
decision to attack the flotilla – an action that produced an opportunity for
movement actors to mobilize. In this book, I will give particular attention to
the interaction among contentious and institutional politics.
Fifth, the story shows the importance of what I will call “modular performances
and repertoires” of collective action. The boycott is by now a familiar
form of contention, instantly recognizable around the world. But it wasn’t
always so; contentious politics has to be learned, and once forms of contention
are seen to be viable, they diffuse rapidly and become modular. So common
is the boycott form that pro-Israeli groups responded to the Swedish boycott
threat with a boycott threat of their own!14
An important theme of this book
is the modularity of forms of contention and their diffusion.
Sixth, the story demonstrates the growing importance of transnational networking
and mobilization, including mobilization through the Internet. Not
only did the activists on the flotilla come from across the sea and represent
several nations; an almost instant and overwhelming response to their actions
came from around the world – including from the international Zionist community.
We will investigate this growth of transnational contention and ask
whether it is giving rise to a “global civil society.”
Finally, the story shows how widespread what we will call the “social movement
repertoire” has become. Some scholars have wondered whether the world
is becoming “a social movement society” (Meyer and Tarrow, eds. 1998). But
that term first surfaced in the 1990s, when it seemed that peaceful forms of
contentious action were spreading among ordinary people. With the turn of
13 Go to http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/leftist-and-rightist-israelis-clash-at-gaza-flotillaprotest-in-tel-aviv-1.294359
for a report on this clash. Visited June 8, 2010.
14 Go to www.israelforum.com/board/showthread.php?t=10127. Visited June 7, 2010.
6 Power in Movement
the new century, and especially after September 11, 2001, the phrase “social
movement society” has taken on a new and more forbidding meaning. We will
ask whether transgressive politics is beginning to overwhelm contained politics,
and, if so, what are its implications for civil politics. But first we must clarify
two key terms that will be employed in this book and their relationship to one
another: social movements and contentious politics.
Social Movements in Contentious Politics
Ordinary people often try to exert power by contentious means against national
states or opponents. In the last fifty years alone, the American Civil Rights
movement, the peace, environmental and feminist movements, revolts against
authoritarianism in both Europe and the Third World, and the rise of new
Islamist movements have brought masses of people into the streets demanding
change. They often succeeded, but even when they failed, their actions set in
motion important political, cultural, and international changes.
Contentious politics occurs when ordinary people – often in alliance with
more influential citizens and with changes in public mood – join forces in
confrontation with elites, authorities, and opponents. Such confrontations go
back to the dawn of history. But mounting, coordinating, and sustaining them
against powerful opponents is the unique contribution of the social movement –
an invention of the modern age and an accompaniment of the rise of the modern
state. Contentious politics is triggered when changing political opportunities
and constraints create incentives to take action for actors who lack resources on
their own. People contend through known repertoires of contention and expand
them by creating innovations at their margins. When backed by well-structured
social networks and galvanized by culturally resonant, action-oriented symbols,
contentious politics leads to sustained interaction with opponents – to social
movements.
How ordinary people take advantage of incentives created by shifting opportunities
and constraints; how they combine conventional and challenging repertoires
of action; how they transform social networks and cultural frameworks
into action – and with what outcomes; how these and other factors combine
in major cycles of protest and sometimes in revolutions; how the Internet and
other forms of electronic communication are changing the nature of mobilization;
and how the social movement is changing in the twenty-first century –
these are the main themes of this book.
These themes take on special moment given the vast spread and growing
diversity of contentious politics today. Just think of the variety of social
movements since the 1960s: first civil rights and student movements; ecology,
feminism, and peace movements; struggles for human rights in authoritarian
and semi-authoritarian systems; Islamic and Jewish religious extremism in the
Middle East and Hindu militantism in India; anti-immigrant violence in Western
Europe and Christian fundamentalism in the United States; ethnic nationalism
in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union; and suicide bombings in Iraq,
Introduction 7
Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Over the past five decades, a wave of new forms
of contention has spread from one region of the world to another, and among
different social and political actors.
Not all these events warrant the term “social movement,” a term I will
reserve for sequences of contentious politics based on underlying social networks,
on resonant collective action frames, and on the capacity to maintain
sustained challenges against powerful opponents (see Chapter 1). But all are
part of the broader universe of contentious politics, which emerges, on the one
hand, from within institutional politics, and can expand, on the other, into revolution.
Placing the social movement and its particular dynamics historically
and analytically within this universe of contentious politics is a central goal of
this study.
The Approach of the Study
In this book, I will not attempt to write a history of social movements or the
broader field of contentious politics. Nor will I press a particular theoretical
perspective on my readers or attack others – a practice that has added more heat
than light to the subject. Instead, I will offer a broad theoretical framework
for understanding the place of social movements, cycles of contention, and
revolutions within the more general category of contentious politics. Too often,
scholars have focused on particular theories or aspects of movements to the
detriment of others. One example is how the subject of revolution has been
treated. It is mainly seen in comparison with other revolutions, but in isolation
from ordinary politics and almost never compared with the cycles of protest
that it in some ways resembles (but see Goldstone 1998). We need a broader
framework with which to connect social movements to contentious politics
and to politics in general.15
This book takes up this challenge.
contentious collective action
The irreducible act that lies at the base of all social movements, protests,
rebellions, riots, strike waves, and revolutions is contentious collective action.
Collective action can take many forms – brief or sustained, institutionalized
or disruptive, humdrum or dramatic. Most of it occurs routinely within institutions,
on the part of constituted groups acting in the name of goals that
would hardly raise an eyebrow. Collective action becomes contentious when
it is used by people who lack regular access to representative institutions, who
act in the name of new or unaccepted claims, and who behave in ways that
fundamentally challenge others or authorities.
Contentious collective action serves as the basis of social movements, not
because movements are always violent or extreme, but because it is the main
and often the only recourse that most ordinary people possess to demonstrate
15 For this argument with illustrative syntheses, see McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001.
8 Power in Movement
their claims against better-equipped opponents or powerful states. This does
not mean that movements do nothing else but contend: they build organizations,
elaborate ideologies, and socialize and mobilize constituencies, and their
members engage in self-development and the construction of collective identities.
Moreover, some movements are largely a-political, and focus on their
internal lives or those of their members. But even such movements, as sociologist
Craig Calhoun reminds us, encounter authorities in conflictual ways,
because it is these authorities who are responsible for law and order and for
setting the norms for society (1994b: 21). Organizers exploit political opportunities,
respond to threats, create collective identities, and bring people together
to mobilize them against more powerful opponents. Much of the history of
movement/state interaction can be read as a duet of strategy and counterstrategy
between movement activists and power holders.
“Collective action” is not an abstract category that is outside of history
and stands apart from politics (Hardin, 1982; 1995). Contentious forms of
collective action are different from market relations, lobbying, or representative
politics because they bring ordinary people into confrontation with opponents,
elites, or authorities. This means that the particular historical, cultural, and
power conditions of their society in part determine and in part are determined
by contentious politics. Ordinary people have power because they challenge
power holders, produce solidarities, and have meaning to particular population
groups, situations, and national cultures.
This means that we will have to embed the general formulations of collective
action theory into history with the insights of sociology and political science
and anthropology. In particular, we will see that bringing people together in
sustained interaction with opponents requires a social solution – aggregating
people with different demands and identities and in different locations in concerted
campaigns of collective action. This involves, first, mounting collective
challenges, second, drawing on social networks, common purposes, and cultural
frameworks, and third, building solidarity through connective structures
and collective identities to sustain collective action. These are the basic properties
of social movements.
The Basic Properties of Movements
With the emergence of the social movement in the eighteenth century, as I will
show in Part I, early theorists focused on the three facets of movements that
they feared the most: extremism, deprivation, and violence. Both the French
Revolution and early nineteenth century industrialism lent strength to this negative
reaction. Led by sociologist Emile Durkheim (1951), nineteenth century
observers saw social movements as the result of anomie and social disorganization
– an image well captured in the phrase “the madding crowd” (see the
review in McPhail 1991).
While the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the normalization
of movement activism into Social Democratic and Labor Parties, the
Introduction 9
movements of the interwar period – in the form of Italian fascism, German
Nazism, and Soviet Stalinism – fit the image of violence and extremism
fostered earlier by the French and Industrial Revolutions. With the exacerbation
of ethnic and nationalist tensions after the fall of communism in 1989–1992
and the terrorist outrages of the first decade of the twenty-first century, this
negative view of social movements has been reinforced. We saw this view reemerge
in the “ancestral hatred” views of the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s,
most of them uninformed by social movement theory. We saw it again in the
anti-immigrant violence in Europe, which evoked the horrors of the interwar
years. And we see it most dramatically in the reactions to the militantism of Al
Queda and other Islamist movements since the turn of the century.
But these are extreme versions of more fundamental characteristics of social
movements. Extremism is an exaggerated form of the dramatization of meaning
that is found in all social movements – what I will call in Chapter 7
“movement framing”; deprivation is a particular form of the common purposes
that all movements express; and violence is an exacerbation of collective
challenges, often the product of public clashes with police, rather than the
intention of activists. Rather than defining social movements as expressions
of extremism, violence, and deprivation, they are better defined as collective
challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained
interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities.16
This definition has four
empirical properties: collective challenge, common purpose, social solidarity,
and sustained interaction. (For a similar definition, see Tilly and Wood 2009.)
Let us examine each of these briefly before turning to an outline of the book.
collective challenges
Collective action has many forms – from voting and interest group affiliation to
bingo tournaments and football matches. But these are not the forms of action
most characteristic of social movements. Movements characteristically mount
contentious challenges through disruptive direct action against elites, authorities,
other groups, or cultural codes. Most often public in nature, disruption
can also take the form of coordinated personal resistance or the collective
affirmation of new values (Melucci 1996).
Contentious collective challenges most often are marked by interrupting,
obstructing, or rendering uncertain the activities of others. But particularly in
16 Charles Tilly writes:
Authorities and thoughtless historians commonly describe popular contention as
disorderly. . . . But the more closely we look at that same contention, the more we
discover order. We discover order created by the rooting of collective action in
the routines and organization of everyday social life, and by its involvement in a
continuous process of signaling, negotiation, and struggle with other parties whose
interests the collective action touches.
See his The Contentious French (1986: 4).
10 Power in Movement
authoritarian systems, where overt protest is likely to be repressed, they can
also be symbolized by slogans, forms of dress or music, graffiti, or renaming
of familiar objects with new or different symbols. Even in democratic states,
people identify with movements by words, forms of dress or address, and
private behavior that signify their collective purpose.17
Contention is not limited to social movements, though contention is their
most characteristic way of interacting with other actors. Interest groups sometimes
engage in direct challenges, as do political parties, voluntary associations,
and groups of ordinary citizens who have nothing in common but a temporary
coincidence of claims against others (Burstein 1998). Nor are contentious
challenges the only form of action we see in movements. Movements – especially
organized ones – engage in a variety of actions ranging from providing
“selective incentives” to members, to building consensus among current or
prospective supporters, to lobbying and negotiating with authorities, to challenging
cultural codes through new religious or personal practices.
In recent decades, just as interest groups and others have increasingly
engaged in contentious politics, movement leaders have become skilled at combining
contention with participation in institutions. Think of the healthcare
debate that roiled American politics in 2009–2010. Although it was dominated
rhetorically by the debate in Congress and financially by well-heeled Washington
lobbies, much of the public saw it through the lens of the so-called “Tea
Parties” – in imitation of the Boston Tea Party, which helped to touch off the
American Revolution – and the “town meetings” at which well-orchestrated
challenges were organized against members of Congress who supported reform
(see Chapter 5).
Despite their growing expertise in lobbying, legal challenges, and public
relations, the most characteristic actions of social movements continue to be
contentious challenges. This is not because movement leaders are psychologically
prone to violence, but because they lack the stable resources – money,
organization, access to the state – that interest groups and parties control. In
appealing to new constituencies and asserting claims, contention may be the
only resource that movements control. Movements use collective challenge to
become the focal points of supporters, gain the attention of opponents and
third parties, and create constituencies to represent.
common purposes
Many reasons have been proposed for why people affiliate with social movements,
ranging from the desire of young people to flaunt authority all the way
to the vicious instincts of the mob. While it is true that some movements are
marked by a spirit of play and carnival and others reveal the grim frenzy of
the mob, there is a more common – if more prosaic – reason why people band
17 Such movements have been characterized as “discursive” by political scientist Mary Katzenstein,
who studied the movement of radical Catholic women in America in her Faithful and Fearless
(1998). I will return to the relations between discourse and collective action in Chapter 7.
Introduction 11
together in movements: to mount common claims against opponents, authorities,
or elites. Not all such conflicts arise out of class interest, but common or
overlapping interests and values are at the basis of their common actions.
Both the theory of “fun and games” and that of mob frenzy ignore the
considerable risks and costs involved in acting collectively against well-armed
authorities. The rebel slaves who challenged the Roman Empire risked certain
death when they were defeated; the dissenters who launched the Protestant
Reformation against the Catholic Church took similar risks. Nor could the
African American college students who sat-in at segregated lunch counters in
the American South expect much fun at the hands of the thugs who awaited
them with baseball bats and abuse. People do not risk their skin or sacrifice
their time to engage in contentious politics unless they have good reason to do
so. It takes a common purpose to spur people to run the risks and pay the costs
of contentious politics.
social solidarity
The most common denominator of social movements is thus “interest,” but
interest is no more than a seemingly objective category imposed by the observer.
It is participants’ recognition of their common interests that translates the
potential for a movement into action. By mobilizing consensus, movement
entrepreneurs play an important role in stimulating such consensus. But leaders
can create a social movement only when they tap into and expand deep-rooted
feelings of solidarity or identity. This is almost certainly why nationalism and
ethnicity or religion have been more reliable bases of movement organization
in the past than the categorical imperative of social class (Anderson 1990;
C. Smith ed. 1996).18
Is an isolated incident of contention – for instance, a riot or a mob – a social
movement? Usually not, because participants in these forms of contention typically
have no more than temporary solidarity and cannot sustain their challenges
against opponents. But sometimes, even riots reveal hints of a common
purpose or solidarity. The ghetto riots all over America in the 1960s or in Los
Angeles in 1992 were not movements in themselves, but the fact that they were
triggered by police abuse indicates that they arose out of a widespread sense of
injustice. Mobs, riots, and spontaneous assemblies are more an indication that
a movement is in the process of formation than movements themselves.
sustaining contention
Long before organized movements began, contentious politics took many forms
on the scene of history – from food riots and tax rebellions to religious wars
18 Some students of social movements take the criterion of common consciousness to an extreme.
Rudolf Heberle, for example, thought a movement had to have a well worked-out ideology.
See his Social Movements: An Introduction to Political Sociology (1951). But others, such as
Alberto Melucci, think that movements purposefully “construct” collective identities through
constant negotiation. See Melucci’s “Getting Involved: Identity and Mobilization in Social
Movements” (1988).
12 Power in Movement
and revolutions – as we will see in Chapter 2. It is only by sustaining collective
action against antagonists that a contentious episode becomes a social movement.
Common purposes, collective identities, and identifiable challenges help
movements to do this; but unless they can maintain their challenge, movements
will evaporate into the kind of individualistic resentment that James Scott calls
“resistance” (1985), will harden into intellectual or religious sects, or their
members will defect from activism into isolation. Sustaining collective action
in interaction with powerful opponents marks the social movement off from the
earlier forms of contention that preceded it in history and accompany it today.
Yet movements are seldom under the control of a single leader or organization;
how can they sustain collective challenges in the face of personal fear or
egotism, social disorganization, and state repression? This is the dilemma that
has animated collective action theorists and social movement scholars over the
past few decades. My strongest argument will be that it is changes in public
political opportunities and constraints that create the most important incentives
for triggering new phases of contention for people with collective claims.
These actions in turn create new opportunities both for the original insurgents
and for late-comers, and eventually for opponents and power holders. The
cycles of contention – and in rare cases, the revolutions – that ensue are based
on the externalities that these actors enjoy and create. The outcomes of such
waves of contention depend not on the justice of the cause or the persuasive
power of any single movement, but on their breadth and on the reactions of
elites and other groups.
I will turn to these political opportunities and constraints in Chapter 8. But
here it is important to underscore what I do not mean by this. I do not claim that
“objective” opportunities automatically trigger episodes of contentious politics
or social movements, regardless of what people think or feel. Individuals need
to perceive political opportunities and to be emotionally engaged by their claims
if they are to be induced to participate in possibly risky and certainly costly
collective actions; and they need to perceive constraints if they are to hesitate to
take such actions. As we will see in the following chapters, individuals are often
slow to appreciate that opportunities exist or that constraints have collapsed.
This in turn helps to explain the important role of movement entrepreneurs
in launching efforts such as the “freedom flotilla” – individuals and groups
who seize opportunities, demonstrate their availability to others, and thereby
trigger the cycles of contention that will be discussed in Chapter 10. It also
explains why so many movements tragically fail – because their leaders perceive
opportunities that are either weak or evanescent.
An Outline of the Book
In the past twenty years, and influenced by economic thought, some political
scientists and sociologists began their analyses of social movements from the
puzzle that collective action is often difficult to bring about. That puzzle added
a lot to social movement theorizing, but it is only a puzzle – not a sociological
Introduction 13
law – because, in so many situations and against so many odds, collective action
often does occur, on the part of people with few resources and little permanent
power (Lichbach 1995).
Examining the parameters of collective action is the first task of Chapter 1.
But the book will also approach three equally important problems: First, what
are the dynamics of mobilization once it has begun; second, why are movement
outcomes so varied; and, third, why do they so often fail to achieve their stated
goals? Although Chapter 1 outlines these theories in a general way, evidence for
them will be found in the movements and episodes analyzed in the remainder
of the book.
In Part I, I will show how and where the national social movement developed,
first in the eighteenth century West, where the resources for turning
collective action into social movements could first be brought together over
sustained periods and across territorial space, and then in more recent periods
of history around the world. The focus of Chapter 2 is on what I will
call, following the work of Charles Tilly, the modern “repertoire” of collective
action. Then, in Chapter 3, I will turn to the changes in society that supported
that transformation and, in Chapter 4, to the impact of capitalism and state
building on the crystallization of modern contentious politics. Once the main
forms of “modular collective action” were established, social movements could
be diffused through Western state expansion, through print and association,
and through the diffusion of these repertoires, first across the West and then
across the globe. That will be the argument of Chapters 2 to 4 of the book.
But even deep-seated claims remain inert unless they can be activated. Part II
will outline the four main powers that activate claims into action. In Chapter 5,
I will examine the three main forms of contentious politics that movements
employ – violence, disruption, and contained forms of action. In Chapter 6,
I will deal with the major social and organizational bases that help to form
movement organizations. In Chapter 7, I will examine how movements “make
meanings,” by constructing identities, mobilizing emotions, and developing
collective action “frames.” In Chapter 8, I will examine the kinds of political
opportunities that trigger episodes of contention and the kinds of threats –
especially threats from the state and the police – that limit them. These are the
four main powers I see in movement.
In the third section of the book, I will turn from these analytical aspects of
contentious politics and social movements to their interaction and dynamics.
Contentious politics is nothing if it is not relational. Chapter 9 lays out an interactive
approach to contentious politics that is based on the specification and
examination of a number of key mechanisms: mechanisms such as mobilization
and demobilization; campaign building and coalition formation; diffusion and
scale shift; and radicalization and institutionalization.
These mechanisms are the analytical building blocks of the cycles of contention
that will be studied in Chapter 10. The argument of this chapter is that
once a cycle of contention is triggered, coalitions are formed, campaigns are
organized, and the costs of collective action are lowered for other actors, and
14 Power in Movement
master frames and models of activism become more generally available. The
movements that arise in such contexts do not depend as much on their internal
resources as on generalized opportunities in their societies, and elites respond
less to single movements than to the general context of contention that they
must deal with.
Such periods of generalized disorder sometimes result in immediate repression,
sometimes in reform, often in both. But in political/institutional and
personal/cultural terms, the effects of cycles of contention seldom correspond
to a single movement’s visible goals. These effects are noted both in the changes
that governments initiate and in the periods of demobilization that follow. They
leave behind permanent expansions in participation, in popular culture, and in
ideology, as I will argue in Chapter 11.
If the national social movement was linked to the rise of the modern national
state, the central question raised by the latest wave of contention is whether we
are seeing the development of a transnational movement culture that threatens
the structure and sovereignty of the national state. The same question can
be asked of the plethora of transnational “NGOs” and civil society groups
that have sprung up around the globe in the last few decades. As routine
and bureaucratic in their way as protests against international institutions are
disruptive and erratic, these transnational NGOs play an increasing role in
linking domestic social movements both to one another and to the institutions
that are increasingly responsible for regulating the global economy, fighting
climate change, and attempting to combat human rights abuses. These are the
questions I will turn to in Chapter 12.
This will take us, in the conclusions, to the contentious politics of the current
epoch and to three important new issues: “globalization,” lethal conflict,
and the interactions between movements and states. In the last decades of the
twentieth century, a wave of democratization spread across the world, culminating
in dramatic changes in southern Europe in the 1970s, in Latin America
in the 1980s, and in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism.
But also in the 1990s, a new wave of “ugly” movements, rooted in ethnic and
nationalist claims, in religious fanaticism, and in racism, broke out, bringing
the world to a peak of turbulence and violence that it has not known for
decades. Radical changes in electronic communication and cheap international
transportation have reinforced these connections, creating the possibility of a
new age of “global” social movements, but they have also given states unprecedented
capacities for suppression.
Where protest and contention have become easier to mount and are largely
legitimized; where police and power holders prefer to discuss tactics and issues
with movements rather than repress them; where the media or the courts settle
questions that once were fought over in the streets – in these conditions, will
the historical form of the social movement be absorbed into ordinary politics,
as were the strike and the demonstration in the last century? Or will the sheer
volume of contention submerge the routine processes of electoral and interest
Introduction 15
group participation in a turbulent sea of unruly politics? The shape of the future
will depend not on how violent or widespread contention has become, but on
how it relates to states, capitalism, and the international system. Because all
three of these are undergoing profound change, in the century that lies ahead,
the world may be experiencing a new and far-reaching power in movement.
34 Power in Movement
seen in relation to those they challenge and to influential allies, third parties,
and the forces of order, in the context of the specific type of regime in which
they operate (Tilly 2006).
Chapter 9 specifies some of the key mechanisms and processes through which
challengers interact with opponents, allies, third parties, and institutions. But
these interactive dynamics will be visible only through examination of more or
less extended trajectories of contention, to which I turn in Chapter 10. That
chapter, which ranges from relatively pacific protest cycles to fully fledged
revolutions, will focus on how varied groups of people mobilize at once and on
how contention diffuses through campaigns and coalitions. It will also touch
on a too-little-studied process of contentious politics: how and why these same
people demobilize.
Chapter 11 turns from the dynamics of cycles to the outcomes of cycles of
contention. In such general episodes of contention, policy elites respond not
to the claims of any individual group or movement, but to the overall degree
of turbulence and to the demands made by elites and opinion groups, which
only partially correspond to the demands of those they claim to represent.
That is why Chapter 11 has the paradoxical title “Struggling to Reform” –
because individual movements almost never satisfy their largest ambitions. The
important point is that, although movements usually conceive of themselves
as outside of and opposed to institutions, acting collectively inserts them into
complex political networks, and thus within the reach of the state.
Movements – and particularly waves of movement that are the main catalysts
of social change – cannot be detached from national struggles for power. But in
the last decade or so, a number of protest campaigns have clearly transcended
national boundaries. What do they portend for contentious politics and, more
broadly, for the shape of the future international system? Chapter 12 will
employ the approach developed in the book to examine complex interactions
between insiders and outsiders in the world polity.
The book closes by raising questions about three major issues in the study of
contentious politics: First, how do movements interact with institutions, particularly
electoral institutions; second, what about the “warring movements”
that threaten the peace and stability of ordinary people; and, third, is the world
becoming a “movement society,” one in which the line between institutional
and unruly politics is increasingly erased, or is the threat of transgressive contention
producing ever more repressive states?