Social Movement Theory: Past, Presence & Prospect

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.

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.

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..

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?

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’.

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