bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Pacifism
Authors: Alcalde Javier
Published: September 2022

The term “pacifisim” was first used in 1901, although the idea can be traced back to the beginning of recorded human history across all cultures. Anglo‐American pacifism opposes war and other forms of violence by combining advocacy of personal nonparticipation in war with a commitment to use nonviolent means of resolving conflict. From the European perspective, pacifism would include the efforts to achieve international peace and mutual understanding. Whether pacifism is expressed through a political movement or as a specific ideology, it can be based on moral, religious, or pragmatic principles. From a strictly rational perspective, pacifists are aware of the costs of war and violence and therefore believe in other ways of resolving conflicts.
Police Autonomy
Authors: Jobard Fabien
Published: September 2022

The police usually enjoy a great amount of autonomy, of which two levels can be distinguished. The first level (micro level) is called police discretion, and is used by rank‐and‐file officers. Daily police matters call for quick if not split‐second decisions by individual officers on the beat, like bringing someone to the police station, approaching an apparent source of disorder, or following or abandoning the task given by a superior in order to help someone in trouble. The second level (macro level) is the autonomy exercised by the police as an institution. This autonomy is conceptualized in relation toward the authorities (usually political or judicial authorities), which give the police their mandate.
Political Science and the Study of Social Movements
Authors: Andretta Massimiliano
Published: September 2022

Social movements have been studied from the perspective of several disciplines – sociology, anthropology, social psychology, economics, and political science. When we conceive of social movements as political phenomena we need to take seriously their relations with the political context in which they act. Clearly, many, if not most, social movements are embedded in political institutions. For this reason, the discipline of political science is of importance in understanding the close link between political institutions and social movements, and how politics matters in shaping social movements in different contexts.
Public Opinion and Movements
Authors: Vráblíková Kateřina
Published: September 2022

Although public opinion would seem to be a crucial factor for achieving a large‐scale mobilization and impacting politics and public policy, it has not yet received much attention in the social movement literature. There are probably a number of reasons for this lack of attention: (i) data on public opinion suitable for social movement scholars are not usually covered in publicly available opinion surveys and to gather them is costly; (ii) requirements for data gathering would be even more demanding than for standard surveys because more developed research designs going beyond one survey at one time, such as public opinion across geographical units or longitudinal data, are needed; (iii) public opinion is frequently studied by political science, while social movements are a primary focus of sociology. This entry first defines what public opinion is, and how social movements can influence it, and then presents two ways in which public opinion can play a significant role for social movement activism.
Tactics
Authors: Doherty Brian , Hayes Graeme
Published: September 2022

When we refer to the tactics used by social movements, we mean forms of action that have been deliberately chosen with the aim of influencing or coercing one or more of opponents, the general public, and fellow movement activists. These features are so central to the nature of social movements that consideration of movement tactics inevitably entails an understanding of other aspects of social movements, including organizational resources, collective identity, and social and political context, all of which affect the availability and meanings of tactical choices. Yet, as many have noted, while accounts of tactics used in particular protests are ubiquitous, conceptual analysis of tactics per se and especially of how protest groups choose their tactics is relatively rare. There are good reasons for this. First, if tactics are deliberate choices made by groups it is often difficult to ascertain who made the choices and how; activists interviewed after the event may give self‐serving and inaccurate accounts of how decisions emerged. Second, movement tactics are relational and situational; their deployment and effects (intended or not) are co‐produced in interaction with others, and groups cannot always be sure how their opponents, public authorities, media, allies, and even their own supporters and activists will react and ascribe meaning to them. Particular tactics may be chosen in an expectation of their likely impacts on the behavior of others, but these expectations may be misplaced and opponents may counter movement tactics successfully.
Anti‐Crime Movements (Latin America)
Authors: Davis Diane E. , Willis Graham Denyer
Published: September 2022

Legacies of authoritarianism and contested state formation have left Latin America awash in violence, with rates of homicide, murder, kidnapping, and robbery on the rise. Cities have been particularly hard hit, owing to unemployment, income inequality, and other structural causes including neoliberal economic reforms and drug trafficking. With minimal progress in curtailing violence despite government efforts otherwise and limited public trust in state capacities to reduce criminality due to high rates of police corruption or a weak judicial system, citizens take security matters into their own hands. Their actions coalesce in an array of anti‐crime social movements, broadly defined here as collective action targeted against the perpetrators or enablers of rampant criminality and insecurity.
Anti‐Japanese Colonization Resistance (Taiwan)
Authors: Chou Wan‐Yao
Published: September 2022

There were two stages in the Taiwanese anti‐Japanese colonization resistance. The first stage was armed struggles against Japan's takeover which took place between 1895 and 1915. The second was characterized by nonviolent movements led by intellectuals from 1920 to 1936. In terms of methods, goals, and participants, very few connections existed between these two modes of anti‐colonial activity.
Anti‐Slavery Movement
Authors: King Marissa D.
Published: September 2022

The movement to abolish slavery and end the slave trade, which began first in Europe and then the United States at the end of the eighteenth century, was one of the first modern social movements. The abolition movements in France and Britain, which sought to end the slave trade among the colonies, and the movement to end slavery in the United States shared critical qualities that set them apart from earlier reform efforts. In the early eighteenth century, social protests were primarily short‐lived outbursts mounted by loosely connected groups that were geographically constrained and emphasized local demands. In contrast, the anti‐slavery movement was sustained, formally organized, transcended disparate geographies, and often directed their claims toward the state. The birth of the modern social movement was defined by a shift in the repertoires of contention – the set of actions activists use to assert their claims – from parochial, bifurcated, and particular to cosmopolitan, modular, and autonomous. The anti‐slavery movement's innovative early utilization of the media, religious organizations, and formal organizations in its organizing efforts was key to the movement's ability to develop a sustained geographically dispersed movement that transcended national boundaries and acted as a catalyst for the abolition of slavery, thereby making it one of the most significant modern social movements. Moreover, it was one of the first social movements to transcend national boundaries, making it one of the earliest transnational social movements.
April Revolution (Korea)
Authors: Son Jaesok
Published: September 2022

The April Revolution refers to the protest movement against the dictatorship in South Korea, which took place in April 1960, and its aftermath. It is also known as the April Uprising or simply by the date of the peak day of the revolt, the “4.19.”
Chávez, César Estrada
Authors: Jenkins J. Craig
Published: September 2022

César Estrada Chávez (1937–1993) was a civil rights activist, community organizer, and founder of the United Farm Workers of America (UFWA), the first union to successfully organize agricultural workers in the United States. A self‐educated follower of Gandhi's nonviolent protest strategy and Catholic theories of penance, he began his organizing career in 1952 with the Community Service Organization (CSO), a civil rights organization for urban Mexican Americans in California. In 1958, he became executive director of the CSO but, due to an abiding commitment to organizing farm workers, resigned in 1962 to found the National Farm Workers Association, the predecessor of the UFWA. In August 1966, he became director of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC), a merger of the NFWA and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC/AFL‐CIO), which he led until his death on 23 April 1993. Chávez's major contribution was applying a nonviolent protest strategy to the challenge of organizing farm workers, a group that suffered intense discrimination, little community cohesion, and high levels of poverty, even as they labored in the most profitable sectors of American agribusiness. In 1994 Chávez was posthumously recognized with the Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor, for his work on behalf of Mexican American civil rights and the rights of farm workers to organize, and in 2003 a US commemorative postal stamp was issued in his honor.
Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (El Salvador)
Authors: Almeida Paul D. , Marquez Luis Rubén González
Published: September 2022

The Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, FMLN) was officially established in El Salvador in October 1980 as a coalition of five left‐wing political factions – the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP), the National Resistance (RN), the Communist Party of El Salvador (PCS), the Popular Forces of Liberation (FPL), and the Central American Workers' Party (PRTC). Agustín Farabundo Martí was a communist organizer in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was executed along with other political leaders in January 1932 by the regime of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. Each of the five FMLN political forces maintained their own armed militias by late 1980. With this unification of the armed Left in El Salvador, the FMLN launched a general offensive against an unelected military–civilian junta in January 1981. The offensive failed to dislodge the prevailing regime after two weeks of heavy fighting on a national scale. However, the FMLN was able to secure rearguards in the eastern and northern provinces and garner enough civilian support to sustain an armed conflict against the government until a United Nations‐backed peace accord was signed and put into place in January 1992. The formation of the FMLN and its political existence since the peace accords demonstrate its indispensable relationship to social movement mobilization.
Indigenous Sovereignty Movements (Canada)
Authors: Wilkes Rima , Côté Rochelle , Denis Jeff
Published: September 2022

British Columbia is Indigenous territory. It is Indigenous territory because Indigenous peoples have never ceded their land or rights via treaties and because treaty land is about sharing rather than ceding as conceptualized in a Western legal framework. According to the 1763 Royal Proclamation, treaty‐making with Indigenous nations is the only way the Crown (or government) can acquire territory in Canada. Despite this legal rule, the government in British Columbia has sold Indigenous land, and rights to the resources contained on this land, to third‐party interests, with the justification that this land is “Crown” land. The ongoing situation in British Columbia provides one example of the grievances of Indigenous peoples in Canada.
Freedom Summer (United States)
Authors: McAdam Doug
Published: September 2022

Freedom Summer is the colloquial term by which we now refer to one of the major campaigns in the US civil rights movement. Known at the time simply as the Mississippi summer project, Freedom Summer was the brainchild of Robert Moses, veteran field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Though officially sponsored by a coalition of civil rights groups, the SNCC was the driving force behind the 1964 project. The ostensible goal of the project was to register as many black voters as possible in advance of the 1964 presidential election. But there was perhaps a more important underlying aim. At the time of the project the SNCC had been working in Mississippi for three years with little to show for its effort. The organization's work in the state was at a stalemate. By bringing a large number of Northern, mostly white, student volunteers to the state to work during the summer, the organization hoped to break the stalemate. More to the point, they hoped that the presence of the white volunteers would bring the national media as well, helping to dramatize the continued denial of civil rights to black Mississippians as well as the ongoing violence against civil rights workers in the state.
Hackers
Authors: Stobaugh James E. , Cross B. Remy
Published: September 2022

Computer hacking and online protests have developed into part of the standard repertoire of social movement organizations (SMOs) looking to disrupt oppositional institutions or gain exposure for their cause. While many, and perhaps most, SMOs maintain an online presence in the form of a website or social media presence, some groups make more explicit use of the ubiquity of online life to advance their agendas. This type of movement activity has become so common that the term “hacktivist,” a portmanteau of “hacker” and “activist,” has come to refer to the loose collection of behaviors affiliated with it.
Health Movements (United States)
Authors: Taylor Verta , Zald Mayer
Published: September 2022

Health social movements are collective campaigns to bring about change in medical and public health policy, beliefs, research, and practice. In American society, social movements attempt to influence healthcare at many levels. At the macro level, movements historically have mobilized a range of interest groups and moral and political values both to advocate and forestall national health insurance and to modify existing programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans' healthcare benefits. Social movements also develop around alternative specializations and different systems of diagnosis and treatment, seeking to reshape professions, organizations, and modes of service delivery. Health‐related collective action that addresses the way we think about, understand, and experience disease is also pervasive in American society; movements use and create emotions, identities, and ways of framing health issues to politicize the illness experience. Finally, larger social movements in the United States concerned with inequalities of race and ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality target medical power and authority, campaigning for equal access and health equity.
Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979
Authors: Parsa Misagh
Published: September 2022

The Iranian Revolution took many experts and scholars by surprise. Iran had been one of the most rapidly industrializing third‐world countries and possessed a powerful, loyal army and secret police able to repress and demobilize all opposition. Compared to many other twentieth‐century revolutions, armed struggle played little role in the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty, which came to power in 1925 when Reza Shah Pahlavi ousted the previous dynasty. Instead, Iran's urban population, organized in part through mosque networks, carried out the mobilization and collective actions that formed the basis of the revolution. More importantly, the revolution's outcome diverged sharply from other modern revolutions where revolutionary movements fought in the name of secular ideologies, such as nationalism or socialism. Iran's revolution, in contrast, produced theocracy.
Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement
Authors: Bosi Lorenzo
Published: September 2022

The Northern Ireland civil rights movement was a proactive movement that demanded the expansion of civil rights and the end of the systematic sociopolitical exclusion of the minority Nationalist community in the region. The movement pressed for equality for the minority within the state rather than pursuing the traditional Nationalist and Republican aspiration to reunite Ireland and bring an end to the Northern Ireland state. The movement was a loosely organized coalition of ideologically diverse forces in which strong local groups played a central role. It enjoyed large‐scale support among the Nationalist minority in Northern Ireland, and broad popular support in the Republic of Ireland, but was strongly opposed by large sections of the unionist majority in Northern Ireland who saw it as a front for Nationalist and Republican opposition to the state. The Northern Ireland civil rights movement organized large‐scale marches, sit‐ins, and occupations that placed severe pressure on the state and provoked British government intervention to force the Northern Ireland government to make concessions. Many of the movement's demands were quickly granted, but its campaign was associated with increasing street violence and, as political violence escalated in 1969, the movement faded into the background, and militant Republican organizations came to the fore.
Labor Movement (Latin America)
Authors: Stillerman Joel
Published: September 2022

During the twentieth century, the labor movement profoundly affected the politics and societies of Latin America, the region including Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. The labor movement is here defined as workers' organizations with the capacity and willingness to engage in collective action. While labor protest dates back to slave brotherhoods and artisan associations formed after Spain and Portugal's fifteenth‐century colonization of the region, this entry focuses on the twentieth century, when unions formed in many countries.
Lenin (V.I. Ylianov)
Authors: Gubin Oleg
Published: September 2022

Vladymir Ilyich Ylianov (Lenin) (1870–1924), the Russian revolutionary, is generally regarded as the founder of the Bolshevik social movement and the creator of the USSR. He realized Marx and Engels's dream of a socialist revolution that would bring down capitalism and replace it with socialism – a society based, ideally, on the dictatorship of the proletariat, public property, and a centrally planned economy, with greater equality and social justice for working‐class people. Despite the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent collapse of Soviet socialism in the 1990s, many Russians, especially those of 55 years and older, and those aged 18–21, view Lenin's role in Russian history more positively than negatively. Lenin's cremated body remains in his mausoleum on Red Square, and Russian society is divided over its removal and burial according to the Christian Orthodox tradition.
Mandela, Nelson
Authors: van Kessel Ineke
Published: September 2022

As one of the leaders of the resistance against apartheid in South Africa, Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) constructed and lived different images of himself over the years to suit his various audiences at home and abroad. His roles included those of youth activist, volunteer‐in‐chief in campaigns of civil disobedience, lawyer, defendant, and prisoner, leader of the African National Congress (ANC), commander‐in‐chief of the ANC's armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the world's most famous political prisoner, president of South Africa (1994–1999), and elder statesman, as well as that of universal icon in the struggle for justice and reconciliation. However, Mandela's opponents portrayed him differently, with the South African government framing him as a terrorist and a communist. The label “terrorist” was also used by the US government, which placed Mandela and other leading ANC members on a list of “terrorists” who were barred from entering the country unless a waiver was granted by the US secretary of state. Mandela's name was finally removed from this list in July 2008, just before his ninetieth birthday.
March First Movement of 1919 (Korea)
Authors: Shin Gi‐Wook
Published: September 2022

The March First Movement (Samil Undong) was the first nationwide nationalist movement in Korea. The Korean Peninsula was “annexed” to imperial Japan in 1910 and, despite much armed resistance, Koreans experienced a decade of minimal rights under a brutal colonial regime. In the aftermath of World War I, and specifically indicated at the Versailles Peace Conference, the international climate began to change, giving Korean leaders a glimmer of hope for national independence from Japanese rule. Inspired by Woodrow Wilson's idea for national self‐determination for weak nations, Korean student and intellectual leaders in Tokyo published a statement in February of 1919 demanding national liberation from the Japanese colonizers. Organizers hoped to spark resistance within the Korean community while simultaneously appealing for help at an international level. Even the future president of South Korea, Syngman Rhee, who resided in the US, took part in the movement by attempting to attend the Versailles Conference in an effort to personally appeal to President Wilson for Korea's independence.
May Fourth Movement (China)
Authors: Cadot‐Wood Antoine
Published: September 2022

The May Fourth movement, in a narrow sense, refers to a series of student demonstrations that occurred in Beijing on 4 May 1919. The demonstrations were in response to territorial concessions made by Chinese delegates at the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War I. In a broad sense, however, “May Fourth movement ” also serves as an umbrella term for a series of political, social, and intellectual movements that began nearly ten years prior, known collectively as the New Culture movement.
Molly Maguires (United States)
Authors: Martin Andrew
Published: September 2022

The history of organized labor in most industrialized nations tends to be quite violent. This is especially true in the US, where employers often relied upon their own private security force, or the apparatus of the state, to quell labor unrest. Many labor unions during this period fell victim to a political and economic climate that granted business elites considerable discretion in ridding their workforce of union influence. Notorious instances included the lynching of Wobbly activists like Joe Hill, the Haymarket Riot of 1886 in Chicago, and a railway strike in 1877 that resulted in significant civilian casualties inflicted by state militia. These and other instances of violence, not surprisingly, led some unions, and many individual workers, to respond with violence of their own. The case of the Molly Maguires is an especially interesting historical example of the violence that sprang out of contentious industrial relations in America.
Moral Panics
Authors: Fillieule Olivier
Published: September 2022

The term “moral panics” (MPs) first appeared as an academic term at the beginning of the 1970s, in the well‐established field of sociology of deviance and labeling along with the emerging sociology of mass media. It was the pioneering studies of Jock Young on the social meaning of drug use and of Stanley Cohen on the media‐inspired confrontations between youths which developed and effectively launched the concept of MPs to its present status as a central tool of sociological and media analysis, as well as a common phrase in popular discourse. Since then, the conceptualization of moral panics has benefited from several theoretical innovations. The original model drew mainly on symbolic interaction and labeling theory in relation to deviant behavior, but also on other theories, such as those interrogating collective behavior, social problems, and social movements. Ironically, the success of the concept has also resulted in loose or outdated theoretical applications and increased questions about its efficacy. However, the concept and theory of MPs retain all their pertinence and still offer us a heuristic analytical tool by which to study social movements.
Modernity of Nationalism
Authors: Hechter Michael , Asadzade Peyman
Published: September 2022

Nationalism is widely perceived to be one of the leading threats to order in the contemporary world. Many lives have been ruined or lost in its name and, as a consequence, nationalism swirls in perpetual controversy. Part of the problem is that it seems to be an uncannily protean phenomenon. Nationalist political demands differ from place to place and time to time: sometimes they are linguistic, sometimes religious, and sometimes cultural in a more diffuse sense. Strong nationalist movements often emerge in a given territory, subside, and then suddenly reemerge years later to nearly universal surprise. Whereas the literature on nationalism is voluminous and growing at an increasing pace, there still remains a lack of conceptual agreement among scholars of the subject.
“Orange” and “Colored” Revolutions (Former Soviet Union)
Authors: Tescione Sara
Published: September 2022

The term “Orange revolution” refers to the massive protest campaign that characterized the Ukraine in the aftermath of its 2004 presidential elections as a reaction to the manifest falsification of the electoral results by the incumbent authoritarian regime of Leonid Kuchma. Protests began on 22 November, prompted by the widespread perception that the results of the vote between the pro‐regime candidate Viktor Yanukovych and the opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko had been severely rigged in favor of the former. As the suspects of electoral fraud were confirmed by the numerous domestic and international election observers, an increasing number of protesters started to mobilize across the country, engaging in peaceful sit‐ins, strikes, and rallies. Sustained pressure from hundreds of thousands of orange‐clad protesters, who permanently camped at Maidan, Kyiv's Independence Square, in below‐zero temperatures for several days, led to negotiations between the government and the opposition and eventually to the decision of the Ukrainian Supreme Court to nullify the vote and call for a rerun of the elections. The final results of the internationally monitored second run‐off on 26 December indicated the clear victory of opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, who received 52 percent of the votes while 44 percent voted for Yanukovych. On 23 January 2005, following the certification of the results by the Supreme Court, Yushchenko was sworn in, thus becoming Ukraine's third president since the country's independence in 1991.
Paris Commune
Authors: Offerlé Michel
Published: September 2022

The Paris Commune of the spring of 1871 was essentially an emergent and makeshift government that ruled Paris from late March to 28 May 1871. It emerged largely as the result of a series of interconnected events: the Franco‐Prussian War and France's defeat; the fall of the Second Empire associated with an uprising among discontented French workers and other Parisian residents; the siege of Paris by Prussian forces and their defeat; the attempt to restore order within Paris, which failed on 18 March; and the flight of the government to Versailles. Following the 26 March municipal election (with a low participation of 230,000 out of 485,000 registered voters), the Commune assumed control of the city. However, its reign was short lived, as it ended on the afternoon of 28 May, with the surrender of the last barricade after one week of fires and street fighting. This week of fighting, known as
La semaine sanglante
(the bloody week), resulted in an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 insurgents killed or summarily executed. The few communes in the provinces lasted but a few days. The 72 days of the Commune's existence have generated several thousands of books and articles, and it still generates scholarly inquiry and debate. The word “commune” is ambiguous: it harks back to the basic structure of the local French administration – a municipality (
une commune
); it evokes the insurrectional Commune of the 1792/1793 French Revolution; and it appears in ideologies of direct government from the 1850s onward. The aim of the 1871 Commune was not merely governance; it was primarily military: to fight against the Versailles government (
les “Versaillais”
).
Peasant Rebellions (Imperial China)
Authors: Hung Ho‐Fung
Published: September 2022

China's imperial history was characterized by a dynastic cycle, in which the decay and collapse of a dynasty was often triggered by peasant rebellions. Many of these rebellions followed a similar pattern. A dynasty that prospered on the abundance of cultivable land and natural resources would inevitably encounter depletion of those resources when its population grew. Hardship inflicted by rising population:land ratio, in tandem with the concentration of landownership having developed over time, drove many to believe that the dynasty's mandate of heaven had gone and a new bearer of the mandate was about to emerge. When a new dynasty was established, the rulers usually expanded the available land by colonizing uncharted regions. They would also even out landownership. These measures, together with the relief of population pressure owing to turbulent dynastic transitions, created the foundation for the dynasty's heyday. Then resources would diminish again with rising population and the cycle would be repeated.
Peronism
Authors: Rossi Federico M.
Published: September 2022

Peronism is one of the main social and political movements in contemporary Argentina. It owes its name to its founder Juan Domingo Perón – three‐time president of Argentina (1946–1952, 1952–1955, and 1973–1974). Peronism is a national‐populist movement related to the first incorporation of laborers into Argentina's political arena. The movement since then has evolved and diversified. The origins, ideology, internal organization, popular culture, and transformations until the present are analyzed here.
Regionalist Movements
Authors: Bosi Lorenzo
Published: September 2022

Research on regionalist social movements lies at the intersection of two fields: studies of ethnic conflicts and studies of social movements. The term “regionalist movements” is used, in a broadly defined sense, to encompass a large spectrum of sociopolitical movements which share the claiming of sovereignty over a particular territory. They include activities that range from small‐scale, sporadic events to well‐developed campaigns that demand territorial rearrangements such as home rule, devolution, separatism, diaspora settlements, independence and/or secession. Cases in point, just to mention a few, are the Basques and the Catalans in Spain, the Welsh, the Scots, and the Northern Irish in Great Britain, the Corsicans and Bretons in France. One of the distinctive characteristics of the regionalist movement family is its internal diversity in relation not only to its goals, but also to its identity, ideology, organizational forms, and the repertoires used. Ethnic identity, for example, is not a requirement for regionalist mobilization. Nevertheless, it is usually instrumentally constructed and organized in the process of collective action as it helps to overcome the seemingly natural resistance of individuals to get involved in movement activities. Thus many regionalist movements invoke ascribed characteristics such as culture and language, as well as histories of ethnic discrimination and systemic subordination from political and/or economic participation, which can be real or only perceived as such.
Social Movements (India)
Authors: SinghaRoy Debal K.
Published: September 2022

Indian society has long been a breeding ground for a range of tribal, caste, peasant, worker's, women's, ethnic, regional, environmental, human, gay, and animal rights movements, and many other social movements under the auspices of varied ideologies and organizations. This entry outlines the emergence and dynamics of some of these movements in the context of societal transitions in contemporary India.
Solidarity (Poland)
Authors: Piotrowski Grzegorz
Published: September 2022

Solidarity (Solidarność in Polish) was a social movement, based on a trade union, that emerged in Poland in 1980. It was not only the biggest social mobilization in history (it is estimated that approximately 9–10 million people became members of Solidarity in a country of 35 million); many commentators also stress its leading role in overthrowing the communist regime in Poland as well as in the rest of Eastern Europe.
Chinese Communist Revolution, Strategies of the
Authors: Feng Shizheng
Published: September 2022

The victory of a revolutionary struggle depends on the effectiveness of the strategies. Mao Zedong argued that the success of the Chinese communist revolution relied on the three grand strategies that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had adopted – party building, armed struggle, and the united front. Mao praised them as the CCP's three magic weapons. Yet, between 1921 and 1935, the CCP was most of the time under the strong influence of the Communist International (Comintern), and its strategy was rather incoherent, to say the least. It was only after 1935, and especially after the 1940s when Mao ascended to become the CCP's paramount leader, that these grand strategies became the guiding principles of the revolution.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) (United States)
Authors: Polletta Francesca
Published: September 2022

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed in the spring of 1960 to support the student sit‐ins against segregation that were sweeping the South. By 1962, the group had metamorphosed into a cadre of activists who combined direct action with political organizing in the most repressive areas of Mississippi and southwest Georgia. Never a membership organization, SNCC (pronounced “Snick”) had 160 staffers at its largest. It lasted only eight years and it could take credit for no landmark civil rights legislation or policy. Yet, then and now, SNCC's influence far outstripped its size, longevity, or easily measurable accomplishments.
Victim Movements
Authors: Latté Stéphane
Published: September 2022

Over the last three decades, “victims” have become in most Western democracies one of the central figures in the field of social movements. While, in order to make their voices heard, increasing numbers of activist groups claim to be “victims,” the number of books and articles which either celebrate or denounce the advent of a “nation of victims” has been growing. Yet few sociological studies have taken the political uses of this category seriously. After briefly tracing the genealogy of victim movements, this entry will then identify the originality of this new contentious repertoire. Then, it will show how the study of this emerging form of protest has shed light on three blind spots of the sociology of collective action: the emotions of protest, the role of the traumatic event in the activist recruitment, and the gendered dimensions of social movements.
Women's Movements
Authors: Crossley Alison Dahl , Hurwitz Heather McKee
Published: September 2022

Women's movements are among the most continuous, consequential, and diverse social movements. Participants in women's movements respond to gendered structures of oppression and opportunity to mobilize for a variety of goals. Targets of women's movements include institutional, cultural, and interactional arenas. Perhaps more than any other movement, women's movement participants rely on developing oppositional cultures, communities, and collective identities both as social change in and of itself and as tactics to create other types of social change. Across the globe, individuals of various racial/ethnic, national, sexual, and gender identities (including genderqueer and trans women) participate in and lead women's movements. While many women's movements embrace a feminist identity and seek to advance the social position of women, it is not always the case. Women also mobilize around claims that are unrelated to or in opposition to feminism.
Women's Movements (Africa)
Authors: Tripp Aili Mari
Published: September 2022

African women's movements became especially visible after the 1990s. Women's organizations were increasingly characterized by their associational autonomy from the government and from the dominant political party. In contrast to the first three decades after independence, they began to acquire their own resources, selected their own leadership, and forged their own women's rights agendas in ways that were no longer dictated by the ruling party or government. Although the movements had new agendas, leaders, and funding sources, they sometimes drew on precolonial ideologies (e.g. of political motherhood) and older protest tactics (e.g. shaming authorities and grieving). They also drew on experiences of women during the independence movements and armed liberation movements and built on the experiences of women's mobilization during the earlier single‐party era.
Culture and Social Movements
Authors: Williams Rhys H.
Published: September 2022

Culture encompasses the symbolic and expressive dimensions of social life. Culture includessets of symbolssuch as language,intangible, abstract “mental products”such as ideas, beliefs, values, and identity, and themeanings given to material objectssuch as clothing, decorations, art objects, buildings, and the like. Contemporary sociological work has abandoned any dichotomy between “culture” and “social structure” to instead examine the ways culture is analytically embedded in all aspects of human society, including within institutions, organizational routines, and social networks. Thus, culture, as variously understood, is key to understanding the emergence, development, and impact of social movements.
Moral Shocks/Outrage
Authors: Arthur Mikaila Mariel Lemonik
Published: September 2022

Many analysts of social movements are interested in how it is that people come to participate in social movement activity. The decision to participate is not a simple one – social movement participants may face significant risks and personal costs, such as arrest or violence, if they become involved. In addition, individuals often perceive social movements as being able to obtain desired goals without their own personal action, a dilemma that has come to be known as the “free rider” problem. Some popular explanations for individuals' decisions to join social movements have included biographical availability and mobilization through preexisting social networks. However, there are individuals who participate in social movements without being connected to any existing networks or being in any significant way biographically available. The moral shocks perspective shows how these individuals, often ignored in research about participation in social movements, can recruit themselves into social movement activity due to their experience of a moral shock.
Networks and Social Movements
Authors: Diani Mario
Published: September 2022

The relation between networks and movements has been analyzed from two main perspectives. The most popular one, especially in North American sociology, has treated networks as important facilitators of individuals' decisions to become – and remain – involved in collective action. At the same time, analysts have looked at social movement networks as the structure of the links between the multiplicity of organizations and individual activists committed to a certain cause. Looking at the logics with which social actors choose their partners has shed light on the processes structuring complex organizational fields. In both approaches, networks have been treated as preconditions as well as consequences of action: individuals participate in collective activities and organizations promote events and campaigns using preexisting networks, but they also generate new networks and solidarities through their actions. In other words, they modify the social structures in which they are embedded through agency.
Al‐Qaeda
Authors: Likuski Anne
Published: September 2022

Originally established by Osama bin Laden as a vanguard for worldwide Islamist revolution, al‐Qaeda became notorious for the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. In response, the US launched a global “War on Terror” which weakened bin Laden's organization, but which, paradoxically, allowed al‐Qaeda to reinvent itself as a decentralized social movement. The terrorist attacks in Madrid and London in 2004 and 2005 sprang from this movement, as did the so‐called regional affiliates of al‐Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Algeria, and elsewhere. The expansion of al‐Qaeda after 2001 backfired though, as the violence that was carried out in its name spiraled out of control and failed to win the support of the Muslim masses. After Osama bin Laden was killed by US Special Forces in 2011, the movement began to openly fragment, as illustrated by the rift between al‐Qaeda and the self‐proclaimed “Islamic State,” which grew out of al‐Qaeda's affiliate group in Iraq, in 2014. Osama bin Laden's vision of creating a unified Muslim front to fight the US and Israel ultimately failed, because his radical anti‐imperialist agenda was incompatible with the territorially based goals of revolutionary Islamism.
Bisexual Movement
Authors: Klesse Christian
Published: September 2022

Bisexual movements have been politically active in many parts of the world for several decades. They first emerged in the aftermath of gay liberation mobilizations in many Western countries and have articulated distinctive agendas within gender and sexual politics, often in conjunction with lesbian and gay, queer, feminist, transgender, LGBTQ, and other social movements. Bisexual activism has unfolded according to different trajectories within different countries. Nowadays, bisexual politics also tackle issues regarding gender‐ and sexuality‐related rights within the transnational political sphere of human‐rights activism.
Environmental Movements
Authors: Rootes Christopher
Published: September 2022

Environmental movements are networks of informal interactions among individuals, groups, and organizations that are engaged in collective action motivated by concern about environmental issues. Their forms of action and issue focuses have varied over time and from place to place. Sometimes confrontational or involving civil disobedience, they have more often sought to mobilize and inform the public in order peacefully to pressure governments and corporations to cease environmentally damaging practices and to promote environmentally sustainable alternatives. Increasingly, concerns to conserve biodiversity within nations have been subsumed by efforts to dramatize threats posed by global climate change and pollution to human life and the environment. Although environmental movements are most evident within nation‐states, modern communications have facilitated internationally coordinated campaigns and the efforts of deliberately internationalist environmental movement organizations. A global environmental movement marrying the concerns of environmentalists in the global North with those of the global South is not yet fully realized but is increasingly in prospect.
Hooliganism
Authors: Vliegenthart Rens
Published: September 2022

The study of hooliganism – violence committed by sport fans – has been an isolated area of academic inquiry, despite the fact that scholars with varying backgrounds have studied the phenomena. Sociological, anthropological, and psychological explanations for the occurrence of hooliganism have been given. These explanations too often emphasize the irrational character of the violent behavior: hooligans are considered to be outrageous, emotional, and involved in a highly ritualized act. In many respects, these assumptions about violent fans resemble the psychological and “convergence” explanations made about participants in protests and riots in the 1960s. However, while social movement scholars have since considered alternative explanations for participation in protests, and even riots, such as shared mobilizing grievances, students of hooliganism have until recently not considered fan violence as inspired by such motivations. This is unfortunate, since oftentimes hooliganism could well be driven by grievances and the urge to express them.
Moral Economy Theory and Peasant Movements (Latin America)
Authors: Trevizo Dolores
Published: September 2022

Eric Wolf, Joel S. Migdal, and James C. Scott offered compatible explanations about agrarian revolts and revolutions in the developing world that continue to resonate for Latin America. Before presenting their “moral economy” theory, along with important criticisms of that work, this entry first defines some terms. This is followed by an application of moral economy arguments to exemplary cases of recent peasant and indigenous‐peasant movements in Latin America.
Nationalist Movements
Authors: Johnston Hank
Published: September 2022

Nationalist movements are a unique type of social movement that makes political, economic, and cultural demands on behalf of a national group or “nation.” The term is often used synonymously with social science concepts such as ethnonationalism, regional nationalism, ethnolinguistic movements, secessionism, and separatism. All these are to be distinguished from general movements of attitude and sentiment under the banner of state nationalism, which is often encouraged by governing regimes to solidify and/or mobilize public opinion in times of war, political contention, or decreasing legitimacy. Significantly, state nationalism is often officially encouraged against minority nationalisms and can lead to a spiral of violent confrontations. More than most social movements, nationalist movements have a powerful emotional dimension that derives from bonds of collective identity, place, history, tradition, and communal conflict with majority groups, imparting a we‐versus‐them simplification of complex group relations and histories. It is not uncommon that collective violence erupts from these passions, as seen in several bloody nationalist movements of the twentieth century: Northern Ireland, Palestine, and the Basque region. Nationalist movements in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, and Kosovo all chipped away at the former state of Yugoslavia and caused devastating wars.
Occupy Wall Street Movement
Authors: Gautney Heather
Published: September 2022

Occupy Wall Street is an ongoing series of protests, initiated on 17 September 2011 in lower Manhattan's financial district, against alarming trends in social inequality, high rates of home foreclosure and unemployment, and the excessive influence of corporate and financial interests on government. The protests attracted large numbers of participants and gained widespread international attention due to the movement's broad appeal, to “the 99 percent,” and tenacious use of nonviolent protest against variably heavy‐handed police response.
Rumor in Collective Behavior and Social Movements
Authors: Fine Gary Alan
Published: September 2022

At the heart of collective action is the desire for secure information. When people gather together, definitive knowledge is often in short supply and the desire is great. Uncertainty produces fear and as a consequence there is an insistent desire to know, placing oneself and one's community on a firmer footing. Whereas formal institutional actors (states, economic institutions, agencies of social control) generate forms of official knowledge, communities without legitimated information‐gathering processes depend on uncertain knowledge (or what has been termed “truth claims”). Access to secure information reflects the political structure, and, within movements and collective behavior, rumor plays a vital role.