Social Movement Theory: Past, Presence & Prospect



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contestation

Contextual variation

In what follows we will elaborate on contextual variation. Given that this is a chapter in a book on social movements in Africa, the framework will be discussed against the background of this continent’s (contextualized) contestation. Conflict in Africa is still widespread and tenacious and is often rooted in material poverty, scarcity, ecological decline and inequality. The intergroup conflicts are partly related to historical and current international engagements in Africa but also emanate from local tensions and the workings of unequal, corrupt socio-political systems. These international, national and local conflicts translate into and shape daily life and have long-term effects that fuel conflict in new forms. Indeed, if anything, Africa is the continent to observe contextualized contestation.



Supranational.

These days it becomes more and more important to take international dimensions of contestation into account, so also for contestation in Africa. First, political and economic liberalization processes have had a profound impact and perhaps even a certain causative influence on the emergence of new―or the transformation of existing―social movements. Second, socio-political changes, shaped by donor-country pressure, global regimes of development policies/ideals and democratization, human rights discourses and religious expansion (i.e. Islam) appear to have a crucial impact on contestation in Africa. And third, streams of migration created diasporas in which flows of ideas and resources such as money, organizational experience, but also education influences the mobilizing structure and thus contentious politics in home countries. These wider liberalization and globalization processes (both in terms of influx and out flux) have since influenced national political systems and shaped mobilizing structures and had its impact on contentious politics in Africa in ways that remain largely unclear.

In social movement literature it is increasingly acknowledged that social movement activity evolves in response to globalization processes84. Studies examine how contention currently moves from the national to the transnational level85. Scholars identified, for instance, the mechanisms and paths through which this scale shift occurs86, the tight relationship between global governance institutions, nation-states, and transnational social movements87, and the multilayered opportunity structures in which movements nowadays operate88. Briefly, all these studies show that the socio-political context in which movements operate to spread their aims and ideas is not simply national, nor only supranational anymore, but a mix of supranational, national and local influences.
Nation.

Nations vary in terms of the circumstances they create for contentious politics. The political opportunity structure, the openness of the political system for challengers, the access points available for people to defend their interests and express their opinions, the temporal political configuration, are all identified as determinants of the incidence and type of protest in democratic polities89. On the African continent states are claimed to be failing, in many countries levels of democratization tend to be low and many countries are being led by corrupt dictators. Apart from pervasive mal-governance and gross abuse of state power, the nature and role of ‘ungoverned political spaces’ across the continent is poorly understood: how they enhance conflict and how they translate into contentious politics is poorly understood. Although social movement literature is rather elaborated as far as the effects of repression are concerned still little is known about the influence of supranational processes on contention within a nation. How do, for instance in Zimbabwe―arguably one of the world’s most repressive states―international lobbies, boycotts, food- and medical care, or resources provided by diasporas create chances for social movements to prevent or to promote social change? While mal or non governance, failing states, repression and corruption are not unique to Africa, their direct political impact is probably greater than elsewhere, inhibiting institution-building, development and fair distributions of livings. Again it remains a question how the sphere of governance, politics, power and the state in specific countries influences the mobilizing context and the quality and the quantity of contentious politics.



Mobilizing context.

The mobilizing context in a country can be described in terms of demand, supply, and mobilization90. The demand-side of protest refers to the potential of protestors in a society; the supply-side refers to the characteristics of the social movement sector in a society; mobilization refers to the techniques and mechanisms that link demand and supply..



Demand. A demand for protest begins with levels of grievances in a society91. The deep insecurities of life in many African countries―ecological, material, social, political and health (notably due to AIDS)―may have a direct impact on perceived grievances and thus conflict behaviour. Also (new) religious identities seem to develop, in some forms and settings, resulting in radical contentious politics. Moreover, it seems plausible that a demand for change is (re)defined by Diasporas as well. How these grievances are being shaped by the (supra)national context and translated into demand for protest is an interesting but so far unanswered question. Even less is known about the role of the mobilizing context as translator, facilitator and organizer of ethnic conflict, religious confrontations and conflicts around resources. Why do certain grievances end up in contentious politics that originate in conflicting principles while others do end up in contentious politics originating in conflicting material interests?
Supply. The supply-side of contentious politics concerns the characteristics of the social movement sector in a society, its strength, its diversity, its contentiousness. Traditionally, the social movement sector is conceived of as a conglomerate of movement organizations such as trade unions, associations, liberation movements or civil society organizations92, which provides the more or less formalized infrastructure on which contentious politics is built93. Increasingly, however, we see protest participation rooted in everyday networks of participants and social movement actors involved in diffuse and decentralized networks94. How does the political system (be it a repressive system or the lack thereof) shape the supply-side? Do due to repression and/or bans on open mobilization, organizations go underground and turn into loosely coupled networks? Egypt and Yemen, where inclusive informal social networks (rather than formal organizations) are an essential mechanism for spreading islamist ideas95, offer examples in place. Does in divided countries with a failing political system (e.g. Nigeria) religious identifications influence the political arena when religious community leaders create alternative routes for mobilization? What do activists and political actors of a previous generation do after their ‘projects’ have ended in success or failure? Examples here are the evolution of the former leaders and membership of anti-apartheid movements (the UDF and the ANC) and their changing careers. These political actors emanated from social movements and have transformed them96. How do social movements and actors evolve in the current African postcolonial conditions shaped by liberalization and globalization? How do, for instance, large resourceful organizations like the UN with their influential human rights and democratization frames shape and influence the supply-side? Globalization entails in Africa also the rapidly growing role of China (and other Asian countries) on the African continent, and often evokes counter-responses by Africans.

Mobilization. Processes of mobilization bring a demand for protest together with a supply of protest opportunities. Globalization, the development of network society and information society has changed mobilization techniques radically. New information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as the Internet, e-mail, and cell phones have changed the ways in which activists communicate and mobilize. Do the for Africa typical grassroots mobilization change by these new communication technologies? And how do social actors mobilize for change in a very repressive political system, or for that matter, who is addressed in a situation of non- or mal governance? The spread of innovative ideas and practices plays a central role the process of scale shift97, how does that influence the mobilization techniques activists employ? At a general level, demand, supply, and mobilization are supposedly shaped by the supranational and national context. At a specific level, the mobilizing context is further coloured by characteristics of the contestation, esp. the issue. Little is known about the way mobilizing contexts vary, how such variation is determined, or how it impacts on the characteristics of contestation.

Contestation

Who participates in protest, what are their socio-demographic characteristics, are they elites, or ordinary Africans? What do they protest for, i.e. which issues? What forms of protests are employed, i.e. demonstrations, sit-ins, lobbying, riots and how were they mobilized, through what channels, by which techniques? These are the focal questions of the study of contestation.

Who participates in protest? Some scholars argue that new ICTs help to fabricate new connections among people from diverse backgrounds, resulting in mobilizing structures that might be more diverse and inclusive on gender, race and ethnicity, and nationality98. Indeed, protest participation has gradually normalized; all sorts of people resort to protest to demand change99. But is this also the case for the African continent? Do the most deprived people also take onto the streets, or is it the (foreign) elite? Moreover, the question remains whether new ICTs are as influential in Africa as they appear to be in the Western world?

The question of what people protest for focuses on issues and motivation. Issues may have different origins: i.e. conflicting principles or conflicting material interests. For extremely deprived people the struggle to survive takes up all their time and energies, does this imply that mainstream African protest had its origin in material interests and that instrumental motivations push people onto the streets?



What forms of protests are employed? The action repertoire is influenced by the (supra)national and mobilizing context, do activists organize large mass-based organizations, do they lobby, organize petitions, or does discontent turn into bread riots? Obviously, all these forms of contestations have their own motivational dynamics and are appealing to different citizens.
Contentious politics: where to go?

In the previous sections we have discussed how developments in the real world influenced the study of contention. We started with classical approaches such as mass society and collective behaviour theories which tried to explain large movements before the Second World War such as Nazism and Communism. The growth of social movement activity with a goal-oriented and rational focus in the 1960 called for more structural and rational approaches as the political process and resource mobilization approach and more socio-constructivistic approaches from cultural sociology and social psychology. Since the 1990s activists mobilizing for social change operate in a dramatically changing social-political context. Social movement scholars reacted with pleas for synergy, all making a case for synergizing structural and socio-constructivistic approaches. We concluded with the presentation of an explanatory framework for contextualized contentious politics in which we integrate influences from supra(national) and mobilizing contexts on contentious politics within a country. Obviously, a comprehensive master frame that brings these elements together is still to be built. Probably, the most important challenge is the integration of the proposed concepts. In that regard, moving from static to more dynamic explanations of contentious politics is important. The recent conceptual shift proposed by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly100, to look for mechanisms and processes that occur in many different kinds of movements and that lead to different outcomes depending on the specific contexts within which they occur may be a fruitful direction. Indeed, studying contentious politics in a more dynamic way would do more justice to the theoretical and empirical richness of the concepts and may be crucial to gain better insights into the processes at hand. Yet, compared to 60 years ago the study of contentious politics has become richer, more sophisticated, and more synergized. The decades of the ‘war on paradigms’101 of the 1980s and 1990s seem to be replaced by a decade of ‘synergy’.


To conclude
We hope our ‘roadmap’ has been useful in exemplifying what approaches has been used to the study of social movements the last 60 years and that our explanatory framework will be useful to social movement scholars all over the globe, but especially in Africa. Indeed, social movements have been well studied in the European and Latin American context but only sporadically in African contexts, and then mainly in South Africa. We feel that current developments across African societies may invite social movement scholars to try and explain these dynamics of contention by applying insights from the social movement literature as developed in non-African contexts and we hope our framework will accommodate these endeavours.

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4 Norris, P., Walgrave, S. and Van Aelst, P., ‘Who Demonstrates? Anti-State Rebels, Conventional Participants, or Everyone?’. Comparative Politics


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