Social Movements

The Structure of Collective Action

The voluntary coming together of people in joint action has served as a major engine of social transformation throughout human history. From the spread of major world religions to community-led public health campaigns for reducing debilitating vector-borne diseases at the village level, collective mobilization may lead to profound changes in a wide variety of contexts and societies. At key historical moments, groups have unified in struggle in attempts to overthrow and dismantle systems of oppression and subordination, as observed in indigenous peoples' resistance to colonialism and in rebellions launched by enslaved populations. In the twenty-first century, collective action by ordinary citizens around the world could prove decisive in slowing down global warming and in supporting planetary survival. In short, the collective mobilization of people creates a powerful human resource that can be used for a range of purposes. In this volume we explore a particular type of collective action — social movements.

The study of social movements has increased markedly over the past two decades. This is largely the result of theoretical and empirical advances in sociology and related fields as well as an upsurge in collective action in the United States and around the world. The variety of mobilizations examined by students of social movements ranges from the anti-Trump resistance to anti-neoliberal and austerity protests in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Already by 2011, global protests reached such a crescendo that Time magazine crowned the "Protester" as the "Person of the Year" (Andersen 2011). Then, in stunning fashion, citizens broke the record for the largest simultaneous demonstrations in the history of the United States, with the women's marches in 2017 and 2018. With so much social movement activity occurring in the twenty-first century, some experts predict we are moving into a "social movement society" (Meyer 2014) or a "social movement world" (Goldstone 2004).

On the basis of the best systematic evidence available from global surveys and "big data" collections of protest events over time (Ward 2016), social movement activity continues to be sustained around the world at heightened levels in the contemporary era (Dodson 2011; Karatasli, Kumral and Silver 2018). Indeed, over the past two decades groups engaging in social movement activities have not just proven to be impressive by their scale and intensity of mobilization, but have also transformed the social and political landscapes in the United States and across the globe. A brief sketch of some of the largest movements, including the anti-Trump resistance, immigrant rights, and movements for economic and climate justice, exemplifies these claims.

Women's March and Anti-Trump Resistance

The Women's March against the newly inaugurated Trump administration in early 2017 represented the largest simultaneous mass mobilization in US history, with the organizers, in the opening of their mission statement, explicitly stating a threat to the protection of rights, health, and safety as the primary motive for the unprecedented demonstrations. Activists repeated the marches again in January 2018 with equally impressive levels of mobilization. The initiators of the mass actions strived for an intersectional strategy to unite women and others against structural exclusions along the lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The Women's Marches were held in hundreds of US cities and drew between four and five million participants (see figures 1 and 2), including people in dozens of countries outside the United States. The movement immediately evolved into the "Resistance" and has sustained mobilizations against subsequent exclusionary policies and public gestures by the Trump administration against immigrants, women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and LGBTQ communities (Meyer and Tarrow 2018).

Immigrant Rights

Between February and May 2006, the immigrant rights' movement burst on to the public scene in dramatic style with massive demonstrations and rallies in large and small cities in dozens of US states (Bloemraad, Voss, and Lee 2011; Zepeda-Millán 2017). The participants found motivation to take to the streets from new legislation (House Bill 4437) passed in the Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives that would make living in the United States without proper documentation a serious criminal offense for the undocumented, as well as for those aiding them. The impending negative consequences associated with this legislation mobilized communities throughout the national territory, with several cities breaking records for protest attendance. The resources used to mobilize the movement included organizations of churches, radio stations, public schools, and an emerging pan-Latino identity (Mora et al. 2018). With some of the demonstrations drawing up to a million participants, Congress backed down and shelved the legislation in a stalemate between the House and the Senate. The power of mass collective action had prevented the implementation of a punitive law that potentially would have led to widespread disruption of working-class immigrant communities in the United States. A similar campaign emerged in the summer of 2018 against the Trump administration's policy of family separation of immigrants seeking asylum at the US-Mexican border, with protest events reported in over seven hundred cities.

Movements around the Globe for Economic Justice

Between 2000 and 2018, from the advanced capitalist nations of Europe and North America to large swathes of the developing world, citizens launched major campaigns against government economic cutbacks and privatization of social services and the state infrastructure — or what economists and sociologists call the economic policies of neoliberalism. Labor flexibility in France, austerity in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, and economic reforms in Argentina, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, and India all drew hundreds of thousands of people to public plazas and mass demonstrations demanding protection of their social citizenship rights — the basic right to a modicum of economic welfare provisioned by the state (Somers 2008).

The global movement for economic justice took off in the wealthy capitalist nations in the late 1990s and early 2000s with major protest events outside of elite financial summits in Seattle, Prague, Davos, Doha, Cancun, Quebec City, and Genoa. The mobilizations kept up steam by aligning with movements in the global South via the World Social Forum network. In July 2017 the global economic justice movement...