Neo-imperialism in solidarity organizations’ public discourses: collective action frames, resources and audiences

While neo-imperialism is becoming increasingly discussed within academia and by public intellectuals this paper hypothesizes that due to resource needs of social movement organizations, neo-imperialism is not be a major diagnostic frame used by international solidarity organizations in the Global North. We tested this hypothesis by examining diagnostic collective action frames used online by 30 organizations across three solidarity movement issues: climate justice, refugee solidarity, and debt relief. While the frame was infrequently used across the organizations, results reveal that those organizations that did utilize the frame with some regularity had constituencies that have suffered from historical forms of imperialism. A qualitative analysis was used to locate the contexts in which the frame was used and the prominence these uses had within the organizations’ public broadcasting

Media exposure of novel protests: domestic femininity in news coverage of the Great Railway Adventure protests

Social Movements often incorporate masculinity into protest events as a means of achieving media attention. This attention is then used to mobilize, increase membership, and generate social and political outcomes. This article explores the media attention potential of novel social movement actions that deal with ‘domestically feminine’ elements of protest. This article examines the case of the Great Railway Adventure, a series of protests in England organized by the Craftivist Collective and Climate Rush incorporating feminine dress, craftwork, and food. It analyzes the success of these elements in generating media attention and the role the elements play in news media’s framing of the protests. By employing a qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles, I found that the elements were able to achieve limited levels of media attention through novelty and situational irony when combined with more standard elements of direct action campaigning. These elements also shaped the content of many but not all of the news articles

Advances in social movement theory since the global financial crisis

The social movement literature in Western Europe and North America has oriented much of its theoretical work towards micro-, meso-, and macro-level examinations of its subject of study but has rarely integrated these levels of analysis. This review article broadly documents the leading theoretical perspectives on social movements, while highlighting the contributions made in recent years with regard to the wave of protests across the globe – typified by the Occupy Movement and the ‘Arab Spring’ – and grievances that are relatively novel in qualitative or quantitative form such as austerity, precarity, and a sense of democratic deficiency. While these novel social processes have invigorated the specialized arena of ‘social movement studies’ and generated a resurgence of work on social movements beyond the field, this article argues for the need to interconnect levels of analysis in order to develop a more insightful account of contemporary contentious politics

The impacts of environmental movements

The impacts of environmental movements (EMs) are indirect and mediated outcomes of efforts by actors ranging from environmental NGOs to grass-roots activists to influence environmental policies and practices of governments and corporations, usually by mobilizing public opinion. With fewer resources than industry groups, EMs’ impacts are dependent on mass media coverage, the fluctuating salience of environmental issues, and political opportunities. EMs influence policy by deploying scientific knowledge, more successfully where they have special expertise. In international negotiations, EMs have acted as brokers between North and South to influence global environmental policies. In authoritarian states, EMs have enlarged scope for civil society and democratic participation

Social Representations of Protest and Police after the Genoa G8 Summit: A Qualitative Analysis of Activist Accounts of Events

The Genoa G8 Summit was marred by violence and conflicts between police and activists. Afterwards, these different groups constructed clashing discourses about the events. In turn, these discourses sustained different types of social representations about the nature of the conflict. Earlier analyses of hegemonic social representation examining the Italian press suggested that non-violent activists were subject to processes of delegitimisation and that they were identified with black bloc activists (Cristante, 2003; Juris, 2005; Zamperini & Botticini, 2006). Conversely, in this study we analyze activists\u2019 accounts of the protest and of the violent police repression. We examine a collection of published texts (N= 223) posted on a \u201ccyber-wall\u201d online as part of a collaborative project from three Italian media outlets: Il Manifesto, Radio Popolare, Carta. These texts represent a form of \u201ccounter-narrative\u201d produced by a stigmatized group to contest the dominant discourse, creating a tripartite of relations between non-violent activists, police and the black bloc . The analysis of these texts shows that activists represent the protest as a battle between two groups. Activists describe police as coercive, incompetent, and as the enemy. While the black bloc was perceived to have damaged the protest they were not depicted as the enemy. Cognitive, emotive and behavioral factors associated with these representations are highlighted and discussed, together with the implications for future intergroup relations between activists and the police

Revisiting Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual: A Roundtable for Perspectives on Academic Activism

In this roundtable discussion, we revisit Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual (1993) as a departure for examining how and where academic activism can take place. This is situated both within and apart from existing public struggles, including #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) and other current movements. Academic activism will be explored as an intellectual project that may at times problematise notions of the public, the intellectual, and the activist. We will examine how academic activism contributes to activist projects, while also interrogating how “public” representational claims are made. This includes important questions: who is responsible for publics that are not yet constituted as such? What voices are not yet heard, seen, or understood? And what is the role of academic activists in relation to these? This in turn raises ethical questions of how to represent and be accountable to the disadvantaged and/or subaltern. In addressing these issues, the roundtable will explore activism both inside and outside the classroom, offering various figurations of academic activism. The discussion will draw on the participants’ experiences of university teaching and popular education within local contexts, as members of staff at Birmingham City University in the UK

Dynamic interactions in contentious episodes: social movements, industry, and political parties in the contention over Heathrow’s third runway

While the literature on dynamics of contention has proliferated, its focus on movement onset, mobilisation, and outcomes could be used to understand interactions between actors during episodes of contention. While the authors of Dynamics of Contention acknowledge the importance of these interactions, more insight is needed into what shapes these relations and how they change over time. Here, an attempt is made to test the dynamic model as it pertains to interactions, utilising the case of the proposed third runway at Heathrow airport, which included a variety of environmental campaigners, powerful corporations, political actors and parties, and a countermovement. The campaign is broken down into phases that represent the predominant interactions between actors, and the process of phase changes is explained using a process-tracing approach. The findings highlight the importance of cognitive mechanisms over objective factors. However, explanations offered by more static models retain some explanatory power and therefore should not be discarded altogether

Climate Change Movements In The Global North

The climate change movement in the Global North developed after years of scientific evidence accumulated on the topic. Even in those early years, however, it was members of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) who ensured that policymakers would begin to act. As politicians around the globe became interested in addressing the problem, ENGOs and activists worked to push their national delegations to increase their commitments to reduce emissions. This was particularly true during the COPs, which also featured protests outside the conventions by those who demanded more action and those calling for climate justice. Climate justice was a call by the Global South and solidarity activists for equity, sustainability, and development in any policies. A as the international consensus around managing climate change included what climate justice activists called “false solutions” – policies that benefit corporations and do little to reduce the extraction of fossil fuels. Therefore, climate justice activists became increasingly hostile toward the COPs, which resulted in increased mobilization and non-violent civil disobedience. In addition to international campaigning, local and national activists mobilized their efforts to impact community and policy changes. This chapter explores some of those campaign

Political Engagement Trajectories of Youth Activists Following Recruitment into High-Intensity Mobilisation

Using in-depth interview data of young adults who participated in the University of Kent student occupation, this paper 1) explores the process by which young people enter into and engage in high-intensity mobilisation and 2) seeks to understand how this mobilisation (and prior engagement) impacts future political trajectories of these youth activists as they grow into adulthood. Recruitment and initial engagement in high-intensity mobilisation correspond to concepts used to explain civic engagement in Verba, Schlozman and Brady’s (1995) civic voluntarism model. Political trajectories following high-intensity engagement appeared to correspond with engagement prior to participation in the occupation, with those who had lower levels of prior engagement able to sustain their activism well beyond the initial high-intensity engagement. Those with greater activist experiences prior to the occupation and earlier in their youth reduced their engagement following the high-intensity mobilisation. While patterns of trajectories from young adulthood to adulthood appeared, the causal mechanisms varied significantly