bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) (United States)
Authors: Flacks Richard
Published: September 2022

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was the leading national organization in the white student movement of the 1960s. SDS originated as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), whose roots were in the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, founded in 1905. The latter group, founded by such notables as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Walter Lippmann, became the League for Industrial Democracy in 1921. SLID was its youth wing and was part of the burgeoning student Left of the 1930s; it declined in membership and visibility through the 1950s. The mobilization of black students beginning in 1960, and the stirrings then of political interest on the part of some grouplets of white students, provided opportunity for a revitalized organized student Left. Al Haber, seeing that the SLID was an organizational shell with some resources, led an effort to change its name to Students for a Democratic Society, and actively recruited a number of student activist leaders to construct an ideological center for the emerging student movement. One of those he recruited, Tom Hayden, editor of the University of Michigan
Daily
agreed to draft a manifesto for SDS and the wider movement. This draft was debated and adopted, along with a new constitution, at the founding convention of the newly constituted SDS in June 1962, at a United Auto Workers conference center in Port Huron, Michigan. The conference was attended by several dozen students from campuses in the northeast and Midwest. Many of these, like Hayden, were student government leaders and campus activists; a number of leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to the Port Huron meeting.
Symbolic Crusades
Authors: Morimoto Shauna A. , Worden Steven
Published: September 2022

Looking back from today's diverse and fluid society, American theorists in the first half of the twentieth century appear to have been unduly narrow in their collective action theorizing. Early studies addressed primarily instrumentally oriented forms of collective action. Specifically, research focused on those that sought mainly to advance or defend the tangible economic or political interests of their adherents. Analysts dismissed noneconomic or nonclass‐related struggles as trivial, epiphenomenal, or expressions of personal pathologies. Thus, theorists offered few frameworks equipped to analyze struggles to reform or ban noneconomic practices and preferences, especially those that did not appear to directly affect the activists themselves.
Weatherman (United States)
Authors: Glass Pepper G.
Published: September 2022

Weatherman (also known as Weathermen, The Weather Underground, and The Weather Underground Organization) was a revolutionary organization that staged violent and dramatic events, especially bombings, across the US. The group formed in the late 1960s, continuing into the 1980s when it disbanded as members became increasingly isolated and smaller in number.
Women's Movements (Australia)
Authors: Maddison Sarah
Published: September 2022

In many ways, the women's movement in Australia might be understood as a diffusion of women's movements elsewhere in the West. Both the so‐called “first wave” of the movement, with its focus on the struggle for the franchise, and the “second wave” of mobilization in the 1970s, bore close resemblance to similar waves of mobilization in the UK and the US. Even the more recent phenomenon of a “generation war” among feminists centered on the contested notion of an emerging “third wave” of feminist activists seemed to have its genesis in struggles far away. Such a comparison, however, misses the unique contribution that the Australian women's movement has made to both feminist repertoire generally, and, more specifically, to research and reflection on the relationship between women, feminist movements, and the state.
Women's Movements (Europe)
Authors: Bereni Laure
Published: September 2022

Women's movements in Europe appeared during the second half of the nineteenth century, a time of nation‐state building and slow progress toward the realization of democratic principles. Women were excluded from the political realm, but they could increasingly organize on behalf of their (constrained) identities as women. Among the various emerging women's organizations, mostly dedicated to philanthropic and social reform work, some sought to challenge women's subordination to men. By the first decades of the twentieth century, a number of these organizations began to identify as “feminist,” after the term coined by French suffragist Hubertine Auclert. While not all women's movements overtly struggled against gender hierarchy and saw themselves as feminist, all addressed women as a constituency and devoted a large part of their energies to work
for
women.
Women's Movements (Japan)
Authors: Nikaido Kosuke
Published: September 2022

The telltale signs of the remarkable level of success that the discourse of feminism and the accompanying politico‐social movement of women's liberation have had on society and culture in Japan are quite visible, in spite of the country's reputation as a rather patriarchal and traditional society. For instance, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, first instituted in 1985 and considered largely symbolic and toothless then, has nevertheless been strengthened repeatedly through a number of reforms. In the twenty‐first century, the principles of egalitarianism and gender neutrality with respect to hiring, promotion, and so on, are widely accepted and deeply entrenched, at least at the level of the ideal, if not always at the level of practice. The relatively small but dedicated and tireless group of attorneys, feminist activists, academics, and lawmakers who have done the lion's share of the work of prodding and pressuring the government can also in large part take credit for some other notable accomplishments, like the Domestic Violence Prevention Act of 2001 and 2004.
Zapatista Movement (Mexico)
Authors: Estrada‐Saavedra Marco
Published: September 2022

The National Liberation Zapatista Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) was formed in 1983 from the National Liberation Forces (Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional, FLN), a subversive organization formed in the late 1960s in northern Mexico, inspired by the Cuban Revolution. FLN set up a guerrilla movement whose aim was the spread of socialism in Mexico. However, FLN was virtually wiped out by the federal government in the early 1970s. Former members of the FLN managed to regroup and settle in the southeastern state of Chiapas in 1983, mainly along the hilly region of Los Altos, in the northern area of the state in the Lacandon jungle, where they pursued similar goals to those of the late FLN and created EZLN, a grassroots‐based organization. With this organizational base, EZLN was able to expand its ranks and lead the 1994 armed rebellion.
Direct Action
Authors: Moore Kelly , Shepard Benjamin
Published: September 2022

Direct action is strategic political activity in which users seek redress by targeting the people, institutions, and practices that they wish to change. In contrast, indirect political action uses intermediaries, such as elected representatives, to effect change. Direct action is not only an instrument to force others to change. Participants in direct action often see themselves as enacting the values that are important to them, such as fellowship and nonhierarchical relations. It is used by revolutionaries, religious groups, and many others. Groups on the left, right, and center of the political spectrum have used direct action. Direct action is most common among groups that are prohibited from or have limited access to legal participation in institutionalized politics. These include, for example, prisoners, members of ethnic, sexual, and religious minorities, women in some places and times, and students and other young people.
Emotion and Social Movements
Authors: Gould Deborah B.
Published: September 2022

Etymologically, emotion and movements (in the sense of protest) are related. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, emotion
, meaning “a physical moving, stirring, agitation,” comes from the Old French
emouvoir
, meaning “stir up,” and from the Latin
ēmovere
, meaning “move out, remove, agitate,” from
ex
‐ meaning “out” and
movere
meaning “to move.”
Movement
comes from the postclassical Latin
movementum
, meaning “motion,” and earlier,
movimentum
, meaning “emotion,” “rebellion,” or “uprising.” The verb “to move” – which means “to affect with emotion” and “to prompt or impel toward some action” – links emotion and movements and suggests a frequent accompaniment. We might expect, then, that studies of social movements and other forms of protest politics would foreground the role of emotion in mobilization. History shows, however, that scholars of protest have been and continue to be ambivalent about emotion.
Nonviolence/Nonviolent Action
Authors: Schock Kurt
Published: September 2022

Nonviolence is an evolving theory and practice of empowerment committed to social equality and justice that attempts to minimize violence in everyday life and promote social change. Nonviolence may entail holistic approaches aimed at all forms of violence, including direct, structural, ecological, and cultural (symbolic and epistemic), or it may apply specifically to engaging in conflict without resorting to violence.
Formal Models and Computer Simulations
Authors: Oliver Pamela
Published: September 2022

A formal model is a mathematical representation of some single process, in this case a process that is believed to be common and important in at least some social movements. Closely related are computer simulation models that link multiple mathematical expressions to represent different actors or types of actors in a system. This type of modeling is different from empirical statistical modeling, in which there is a data set of cases and variables, and regression techniques are used to estimate the coefficients for predicting dependent variables from independent variables. Instead, the “data” are all internal to the model itself. However, the results of empirical studies may be used to inform the nature of the mathematical relations or the numerical parameters in the model. An important subtype of computer simulation models is agent‐based simulations in which each actor's behavior is a function of a set of mathematical relations, the expressions determining one actor's behavior are in part a function of other actors' behavior, and the computer program generates the interactions among these actors over time. Some formal or computer models express determinate relations in which the same inputs will always produce the same results. Many models contain probabilistic elements, in which the mathematical expressions increase or decrease the probability that a given action will be taken; probabilistic models yield different results each time they are run, and analysis of them focuses on the distribution of possible outcomes for a given set of inputs.
Postcommunism and Social Movements
Authors: Císař Ondřej
Published: September 2022

Social movements in the postcommunist world are generally believed to be underdeveloped and weak. Given that various social movements and their organizations form a standard group of collective political actors in the established democracies nowadays, one might even wonder whether the extant regimes in postcommunist East Central Europe can at all claim to be real democracies. In terms of political mobilization, they seem to be miles away from the Western social movement societies, defined by the presence of capable, institutionalized, and professionalized activist organizations. Going beyond the East/West dichotomy, this entry presents a more complex picture of postcommunist social movement activism.
Social Media
Authors: Gardner Beth Gharrity
Published: September 2022

The implications of social media for social change are fueling incredible debate at the time of this writing. This is being driven by the unprecedented diffusion of social media technologies and services, such as text messaging, email, blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and the like, over the first two decades of this century. For movement scholars, more important than the new digital technologies themselves are their consequences for social movements and protest. To be sure, there is no shortage of fodder for theoretical and empirical questioning. Not only has social media been ascribed a pivotal role in the coordination of rapid, massive, and – in some cases – revolutionary mobilizations in geopolitical contexts as diverse as Iran, Moldova, and Tunisia, but they lend new meaning to the iconic phrasethe whole world is watchingas actors broadcast events in real time to international audiences. Through the variety of available, easy to use designs, social media enable novel forms of one‐to‐many and many‐to‐many communication that reveal surprising contours of an evolving virtual public sphere. By altering the communication landscape these technologies are changing the terrains of contentious politics. They broadly call into question long‐standing assumptions about social movements.
Anti‐feminist Movement (United States)
Authors: Blais Mélissa
Published: September 2022

Anti‐feminism refers to organized forms of opposition to feminism, in contrast to more widespread attitudes such as sexism (hostility toward women) and misogyny (hatred of women). It is sometimes defined as a “backlash” to women's liberation and feminism; political, social, and cultural resistance of privileged groups – men, white or upper class – to progressive social change, to restore or maintain power and privileges that are challenged. Its conservative and even reactionary posture set it apart from many other social movements (workers', student, civil rights, etc.). Even though both Old and New Left organizations that tend to accuse feminists of dividing the movement and harming the anti‐capitalist or anti‐racist struggles may harbor anti‐feminism, it is mainly to the right or the extreme right of the political spectrum that we see anti‐feminism constituting a countermovement; that is, an organized form of backlash. This phenomenon has been studied from different perspectives, including political opportunities. The anti‐feminist countermovement is, a priori, the consequence of the “success” of the feminist movement. The development of the countermovement is marked by a mimetic logic: its symbols, aspects of its discourse, forms of organization, and tactics are borrowed from the feminist movement. Finally, like feminism and other social movements, the anti‐feminist countermovement involves numerous more or less interrelated tendencies that organize different campaigns and develop diverse frames, relying in turns on religious (God's will), biological (sexual nature), legal (rights and equality), social (family), and psychological (crisis of masculinity) arguments. Studies of anti‐feminism in the United States usually identify four forms or tendencies of the anti‐feminist countermovement: (i) anti‐suffrage; (ii) anti‐ERA (Equal Rights Amendment); (iii) anti‐choice or “pro‐life”; and (iv) men's rights activism.
Autonomous Movements
Authors: Fominaya Cristina Flesher
Published: September 2022

Autonomous movements often go unnoticed by outside observers and scholars, yet have been the driving force behind some of the most sustained and powerful mobilizations of recent decades. While many pundits dubbed the Arab uprisings, Occupy Wall Street, or the Indignados of Spain as spontaneous unprecedented eruptions, seemingly arising from the ether, nothing could be further from the truth. Although present in many countries around the world, most scholarship on autonomous movements is grounded in research on Europe, where autonomous movements have been a thriving part of social movements mobilizing around a wide range of issues including anti‐capitalism, squatting, peace and nuclear disarmament, climate change, global justice, anti‐racism, anti‐roads and critical mass, environmentalism, feminism, anti‐militarism, anarchism, and more. Autonomous groups and movements rarely explicitly identify as such (the Autonomen in Germany, and the autonomous workers movements in Italy, with groups like Autonomia Operaio, are important exceptions), and prefer anonymity in public or a wide range of creative names that highlight target issues rather than the organizations or groups. They reject what they regard as the acronym fetishization (or “alphabet soup”) of more traditional institutional Left groups.
Bathroom Activism
Authors: Davis Alexander K.
Published: September 2022

Bathroom activism – whether in the United States or abroad – often carries a negative connotation. Within the last decade, the deluge of political attention devoted to restroom access for transgender Americans has been described by political pundits and trans activists alike as a “bizarrely outsize” distraction from more substantive issues: workplace discrimination, healthcare access, educational exclusions, and beyond. Likewise, India's Right to Pee campaign, which gained notoriety for challenging the collection of fees for public toilet use only for women, was just as notorious among the Mumbai media for seeming more than “a little frivolous.” However, as restroom‐related scholarship in recent years has revealed, bathroom activism is – and has always been – entwined with bigger social and political questions: What do cultural categories like gender and race mean, and when are they relevant to the physical and interactional architecture of everyday life? Who is public space meant to serve, and how does the material makeup of public infrastructure, by extension, include or exclude certain types of bodies? How should abstract ideological values, like a commitment to “equality,” “public health,” or “social progress,” be translated into concrete institutional practices? And above all, which individuals and organizations hold the power to answer such questions? In other words, the literature on so‐called “potty politics” overwhelmingly indicates that bathroom activism should simply be considered
activism
– no qualifier necessary.
Capitalism and Social Movements
Authors: Rossi Federico M.
Published: September 2022

Capitalism and social movements dynamics are intimately related, but they are also undertheorized in social movement studies. Even though many social movement struggles around the world are directly or indirectly related to a socioeconomic issue, extensive analysis of the political economy of movements has been largely ignored by North Atlantic social movement scholars. This oversight is particularly concerning considering that the claims of movements generally include calls for alternative politico‐economic models and for social justice, broadly conceived. However, this path of the North Atlantic literature was not followed in the rest of the world, where most social conflicts happen. Thus, beyond the growing interest in the North and the sustained interest in the South, the discussion about capitalism and social movements is still not organized as a political economy of social movements. This entry offers a theoretical alternative with the proposal to analyze capitalism as a relational process constituted by temporal, spatial, and phenomenological dimensions. The aim is to recouple these dimensions of capitalism and social movements in dynamic terms to bring together a political economy of social movements superseding the functionalist notion of grievance construction and mobilization.
Civil Wars and Social Movements
Authors: della Porta Donatella
Published: September 2022

While social movements and civil wars have empirical overlaps, the respective fields of study rarely consider each other, as civil war studies focused mainly on macro root‐causes rather than on the meso dynamics of collective action. As Elisabeth Wood noted, “scholars who work primarily on social movements and on civil wars largely work in isolation from one another, with too few analyzing the relationship between the two forms of political opposition as instances of the broader field of contentious politics … Yet scholars of social movements and civil wars share an emphasis on the dynamics of escalation of violence and social mobilization.” Only more recently has research looked at civil wars as often involving social movement dynamics, both at their onset and in their dynamics, singling out some main mechanisms in the shift from social movements to civil wars. Considering trajectories of escalation as moments of time intensification, della Porta et al. pointed at the need to analyze these as contingent and open‐ended processes. Conditions such as the double weakness of civil society and the state, the presence of entrepreneurs of violence, as well as normative and material resources for violence, ethnic and tribal divisions, and domestic and international military interventions must therefore be considered as factors that influence the chains of actors' choices, rather than as structural determinants.
Digital Activism (Latin America)
Authors: von Bülow Marisa
Published: September 2022

Latin America is a pioneering region in the use of digital technologies to achieve political change. Innovative and dynamic forms of digital activism have proliferated in the region since the end of the 1980s. However, digital technologies have not been used by all activists alike, nor have they had the same impacts. Instead of a linear trend toward expanded and better appropriation of digital technologies for activism, the region illustrates a more complex process. Obstacles related to the digital gap, inequalities in terms of speed and affordability of services, and variation in actors' abilities to use the internet remain relevant. Furthermore, even when these obstacles do not exist or are overcome, how and even whether to make a digital turn remain hot topics of contestation among activists.
Ethnic Studies and Social Movements
Authors: Armbruster‐Sandoval Ralph
Published: September 2022

Ethnic studies departments, including African American studies, Asian American studies, Chicana/o/x studies, and Native American studies, emerged from the social ferment of the late 1960s. Students of color, along with some progressive and radical white students, called for critical, culturally relevant education that would liberate oppressed peoples all over the world. Nineteen‐sixty‐eight was the “year of the boomerang,” as the “wretched of the earth” (people of color, indigenous people, working‐class people, women, queer people, and many others) rose up and demanded their freedom. Naming the enemy – colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, institutional racism, fascism – students of color, particularly black students, organized and participated in “high‐risk” actions such as sit‐ins, strikes, occupations, and even armed self‐defense. While iconic moments such as the 134‐day strike at San Francisco State University (SFSU) led by the Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front (twLF) in 1968–1969 and the Columbia University student strike in 1968 are well known, many other protests occurred that same year. At the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), for example, black students took over a key building that housed all campus computer records in October 1968. Students threatened that unless several key demands were met, including the establishment of a black studies department, the records would be destroyed. Shortly thereafter, the UCSB Black Studies Department was opened, as was the Chicano Studies Department after Chicana/o students mobilized and held a historic conference known as El Plan de Santa Barbara in April 1969. The UCSB Chicano Studies Department was the first such academic unit in the entire UC system.
EuroMaidan
Authors: Nikolayenko Olena
Published: September 2022

The EuroMaidan, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, is a case of an “urban civic revolution” marked by a large concentration of protesters in the urban space and popular demands for political freedoms. The term “EuroMaidan” is a product of combining the words Europe and Maidan, denoting open space or a town square and in particular referring to the Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) in the capital city of Ukraine. Furthermore, given a long record of anti‐government protests in the center of Kyiv, the Ukrainian‐language word
Maidan
has become synonymous with mass mobilization against the ruling elite. The president's abrupt decision not to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union at the Eastern Partnership summit triggered protests in November 2013. However, mass mobilization quickly transcended the foreign policy issue and raised a wider range of demands centered around the notion of human dignity, which engendered another name for the revolution. Specifically, brutal police beatings of peaceful protesters, mostly university students, backfired and drove thousands of people into the street. According to a nationally representative survey conducted by the Institute of Sociology, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 4.3% of Ukraine's adult population participated in Kyiv‐based protests, and 5.3% of the population joined anti‐government protests outside the capital city. Furthermore, over the course of three months, thousands of people provided in‐kind support and donated money for protesters. The EuroMaidan resulted in the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 although Ukraine has yet to implement a series of reforms to meet requirements for EU membership in the aftermath of Russia's invasion of the country in 2022.
Evangelicalism as a Social Movement
Authors: Hill Graham
Published: September 2022

Investigations of American evangelicalism can be divided into two broad groups: those that focus on the personal, experiential, and emotional techniques and effects of evangelicalism as a set of practices of selfhood; and those that focus on the mobilizing and coalition‐building techniques and effects of evangelicalism. The nexus of these two dimensions of evangelicalism lies in identity, personal and collective, and evangelicalism is a potent social movement in so far as it offers effective techniques on both the selfhood and the organizational sides of the identity question. On both of these dimensions evangelicalism has become an ever‐more obvious empirical challenge to the private religion/public politics distinctions that have tended to guide liberal societies attempts to regulate and understand religion. American evangelicalism emphasizes the emotional and the personal in a way that challenges institutional categories of religion like denomination, ritual, and doctrine, and it has become so intertwined with conservative political mobilization that some scholars are hesitant to understand some of these popular strands of evangelical engagement in the conceptual terms of “religion”. It is this combination, emotionally intimate and politically combative, that gives American evangelicalism its identity‐building and movement‐mobilizing force.
Food Sovereignty Movements
Authors: Sandoval Laura Mendoza , Wathne Sophia
Published: September 2022

The concept of food sovereignty was born out of the activism of the global peasants movement La Via Campesina. Since its inception food sovereignty has traveled far beyond its origins, and this entry looks at those origins and its current use by social movements. The most recent and widely accepted definition of food sovereignty is from the 2007 Nyéléni Forum for Food Sovereignty in Mali organized by La Via Campesina: “[It is] the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agricultural systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporation.”
Gezi Park Protests (Istanbul)
Authors: Atak Kıvanç
Published: September 2022

Taksim Square and its adjacent neighborhoods in Istanbul have historically been an ideological site for state‐making, nation‐building urban politics, as well as politics of memory and erasure. Taksim can also be regarded as a spatial symbol of contentious politics, particularly for the labor movement and eventful May Day demonstrations. At the end of May 2013, a security crackdown on a handful of activists camping in Gezi Park next to Taksim Square backfired on an unprecedented scale, culminating in perhaps the largest urban upheaval in Turkey's recent social and political history. Urban mobilization was, at its onset, directed toward the demolition of Gezi Park according to a plan by the Istanbul municipality, then run by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), to replace it with a commercial‐touristic replica of an Ottoman military barracks, which was razed in the early years of the Turkish Republic. Police brutality against peaceful protesters trying to block the ongoing demolition, documented and spread virally through social media channels, sparked public outrage, and jolted masses into a large‐scale anti‐government uprising that lasted for weeks. Police violence throughout the protests killed eight people and injured thousands.
Anti‐Austerity Protests (Greece)
Authors: Kousis Maria
Published: September 2022

The global financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent austerity strategies adopted by supranational and national power‐holders led to anti‐austerity protests in many countries. However, those in Greece, a high public‐debt South European country, stand out for their intensity, scale, innovation, duration, and outcomes, in response to a sequence of harsh bailout packages by the Troika – the European Commission (EC), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Being the epicenter of the Eurozone crisis, in a period marked by dramatic increases in unemployment, inequalities, attributions of responsibility, political turbulence, diminishing trust, and loss of sovereignty to the Troika, Greece was the first Eurozone member‐state threatening the euro with a possible “Grexit” and a potential domino effect. In 2010, therefore, Greece received the biggest IMF loan historically, in relation to quota, rescuing the non‐Greek banks. Based on the above, scholars analyzing cross‐national data have described the Greek case as “extreme,” “paradigmatic,” “the perfect storm,” of “highest deteriorating conditions” and illustrative of a bailout‐enforced “humanitarian crisis.” It is consequently of no surprise that the outcomes of anti‐austerity protests in Greece are vivid in the political and economic spheres, especially in social movement parties and solidarity (alternative action) organizations.
Ku Klux Klan
Authors: McVeigh Rory
Published: September 2022

Few American social movements compare to the Ku Klux Klan in terms of longevity and capacity to attract millions of members and adherents. The Klan first rose in 1865, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, and Klan chapters (or Klaverns) are today scattered throughout the nation. To its supporters, the Klan has represented a “100 percent American” organization promoting patriotism, law and order, and the core values of those it represents. Yet in reality, the Klan has exemplified the dark side of civil society in the United States and has deployed violence fueled by bigotry to protect and advance white privilege and to deny basic rights to those deemed as enemies.
Central American Asylum Seekers' Caravans as a Political Act
Authors: Menjívar Cecilia
Published: September 2022

In the run‐up to the 2018 midterm elections news media were saturated with images of Central American immigrants traveling north in “caravans,” accompanied by images and metaphors of an “invasion of illegal aliens,” a commonly used xenophobic trope with a long history in the United States. Using a range of triggering terminology to instill fear in the population, President Trump and officials from his administration also warned the public that there were gang members, criminals, Middle Easterners, and possibly even terrorists among these asylum seekers. According to these officials, the Democrats or perhaps Venezuela might be behind these “caravans.” These tropes, broadcast nonstop in the news media, were meant to instill a sense of threat and insecurity among Americans. Amid the panic created, the Department of Homeland Security even issued an alarmist factsheet about the caravan, which included a list of the suspected nationalities in the caravan (from Somalia, India, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh among others), and the assertion that there were 270 individuals with criminal histories along the caravan route. The president regularly sent messages (via interviews with the media or his Twitter account), to a public already primed to fear immigrants, that crime and criminals were filtering through the southern border and that the invaders needed to be contained (statements he made throughout his term in office). Accordingly, the administration's response was “Operation Faithful Patriot,” which included the deployment of up to 15,000 active‐duty military troops to Texas, Arizona, and California. And even though the broadcasting of such alarmist declarations decreased dramatically immediately after the midterms, the commander‐in‐chief did order 5600 American troops to be deployed to the border, where they remained for months waiting for the “caravan” to arrive. The media spectacle might have been part of the election strategy because the secretary of Homeland Security dropped the name “Operation Faithful Patriot” on election day in 2018. Regardless, border authorities have used tear gas on the migrants who have tried to set foot on US soil to seek asylum.
Migrant Solidarity and Social Movements (Europe)
Authors: della Porta Donatella , Steinhilper Elias
Published: September 2022

Mobilizations by and in support of migrants have proliferated since the 1980s in response to the securitization of migration policies and the increasing diversification of societies in various parts of the world. In Europe, these practices amplified and gained broad public visibility during the so‐called “long summer of migration” of 2015, when hundreds of thousands of migrants escaped from war‐torn regions in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa to seek asylum in Europe, moving from the countries of first arrival to those of desired destination. Along their way, civil society organization mobilized at an unprecedented level in solidarity with migrants, performing both protest and direct social assistance. Analytically, in these mobilizations “acts of citizenship” by migrants claiming access to rights interacted with acts of solidarity, in which individuals and groups engaged on behalf of others. This entry has a threefold structure. First, we recall how both “contentious moves” by migrants a pro‐beneficiary mobilizations unfolded during the “long summer of migration.” Second, we discuss practices of migrant support as complex and hybrid forms of engagement, often at the border between contentious politics and humanitarianism. Third, we document how migrant support is increasingly challenged by a shrinking space for civil society in a polarized social climate, in which migration and cultural diversity are at the core of political conflict.
Monuments, Movements, and Race
Authors: O'Connell Heather A.
Published: September 2022

Monuments are a prominent feature of the public landscape. Defined as standalone structures – most often made out of stone – they serve to recognize a person, place, or event from the past. These more dominating (and expensive) structures are distinct from historical markers or plaques that describe a historical event or building. However, the prominence of monuments stems not just from their physical dominance; they are closely connected to perceptions of the past (i.e. collective memory).
Muslim Brotherhood: Ideology, Organization, and Activism
Authors: al‐Anani Khalil
Published: September 2022

The Muslim Brotherhood is one of the most important groups and movements of political Islam around the world. It operates under different names that vary from one country to another. The Muslim Brotherhood is also one of the largest social movements that seeks to achieve social, political, religious, and cultural reform in the Muslim world. The group emerged in the early twentieth century and spread widely throughout the Arab and Muslim world and became one of the most influential movements in the political, social, and cultural realms. It has millions of supporters and sympathizers from Malaysia and Indonesia to Morocco, as well as in Europe and North America.
Nuit Debout
Authors: Felicetti Andrea
Published: September 2022

The Nuit debout movement emerged in France in spring 2016 from mobilizations against a labor reforms proposal (
loi travaille
), known as the El Khomri law after Myriam El Khomri, who was French Socialist minister of labor at the time. In the wake of the introduction of the El Khomri bill to parliament on 17 February 2016 activists had discussed the idea of using public spaces to bring together different mobilizations. On 31 March, at the end of a day of general strike, daytime occupations of public squares, authorized mass demonstrations, and small unauthorized ones, activists called for a
nuit debout
to occupy the highly symbolic Place de la République, in Paris. Previously latent and fragmented groups and new activists joined in the protest, with substantial involvement from students, workers, teachers, unions, and housing rights, anti‐development, and alterglobal activists. The movement's call for action resonated widely and an estimated 390,000 participants joined demonstrations across France on that day. In the following months, the movement also involved citizens with no activist background and a network of about 400 Nuit debout groups was established, mostly in France but also abroad. When the El Khomri bill was approved by parliament in August, the movement declined in visibility. However, some of its grievances and repertoire reemerged in the Yellow Vests movement, which began in 2018.
Protest
Authors: Snow David A.
Published: September 2022

When social movement scholars write about protest, they typically reference protest events occurring in public spaces. These events encompass various types of protest activities such as marches, rallies, demonstrations, pickets, strikes, and vigils, which may occur as stand‐alone activities or in various combinations thereof, such as marching to the site of a rally or demonstration. Inasmuch as such events are often sponsored and organized by an anchoring social movement or coalition of movements, there is little question but that the analysis of protest events is fundamental to understanding aspects of the dynamics and operation of social movements. Yet, it is argued in this entry that the tendency to treat protest and protest events as parallel terms for the same phenomena constricts our understanding of protest in a number of ways. First, most protest events function as the public face of an existing movement or as the upsurge of an underlying animating sentiment pool. Much like the metaphoric tip of an iceberg, protest events generally signify a broader and deeper base of organizational and/or corresponding cognitive and affective support or sentimentality, which are too often overlooked. Second, a research focus on protest events also implies that protest which doesn't congeal into public, collective, embodied protest events rarely merits analytic attention. Thus, by yoking protest to protest events, as if they are the same, the broader character and multidimensionality of protest is glossed over and misconstrued.
Red Pilled (or Pilling)
Authors: Gray Dylan , Bernatzky Colin
Published: September 2022

Among the latest concepts to burgeon from reactionary and right‐wing networks is the metaphor of the “red pill.” The term is deployed in a variety of ways – functioning as a noun, verb, and adjective – and its meaning has gradually expanded to encompass a wide ideological spectrum ranging from mainstream conservatism to far‐right extremist radicalization. In its broadest sense, the phrase “red‐pilled” is used to designate an individual who has developed a right‐of‐center oppositional consciousness against myriad dominant cultural values that undergird the project of liberal democracy, particularly with respect to gender and racial equality. As a verb, “red‐pilling” is used to denote processes of political and ideological persuasion through which red‐pilled individuals strive to awaken others into viewing the world through an alternative epistemic lens. The term is a reference to the 1999 film
The Matrix
, in which the protagonist is confronted with the choice to either blissfully accept his taken‐for‐granted understanding of reality – to take the “blue pill” – or to confront unpleasant, uncomfortable truths about the nature of his reality – to take the “red pill.”
Right‐wing Populism and Populist Movements
Authors: Froio Caterina
Published: September 2022

Right‐wing populism (RWP) refers to a populist form of the right. If the political right broadly identifies those actors and ideologies that, according to Norberto Bobbio's classic definition, consider that inequalities between people are natural and that the state should not intervene to curb them, populism is still a contested concept. While disagreement exists on whether it constitutes an ideology, a style, or a communication strategy, a minimalist definition qualifies populism as a Manichean distinction between the “good people” and the “corrupt elites,” and the belief that politics is about respecting the general will of the people. Hence, right‐wing populism can be understood as a belief in a political order with natural inequalities not only between the “people” and the “elites,” but also between the “people” themselves. RWP includes but it is not limited to the populist radical‐right, which can be distinguished because its core ideological features are nativism (or ethnocentrism) – a combination of nationalism and xenophobia – and authoritarianism, the belief in a strictly ordered society where infringements to the radical right's moral standards must be punished. RWP politicians may also present religion and religious identities as a constitutive feature of the native culture (like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland).
Social Movement Unionism
Authors: Gortanutti Giulia , Lauber Johanna , Zajak Sabrina
Published: September 2022

The idea of social movement unionism (SMU) originated from debates between scholars in the fields of sociology of work, labor studies, and developmental studies in the late 1980s. These scholars were aiming to create a new vision of international labor studies in order to overcome academic Eurocentrism as well as the division of studies of “Western” workers and trade unions and workers and social movements in the global South. The first mentions of SMU described new forms of trade unionism emerging in the global South, where trade unions adhered to a more grassroots and mobilizing approach for promoting social change. The concept acknowledged this development and integrated the perspective of union activists which connected their work to a global analysis of: (i) capitalist expansions and transformations; (ii) patriarchal, technical, imperial, and military forms of power; and (iii) the appearance of new social movements. From its conception, SMU has been a term that seeks to both analyze and influence activism in a broader sense and trade unions' strategies in particular.
Street Art and Social Movements (Argentina)
Authors: de León Jimena Ponce
Published: September 2022

Visual art is political and this role is even stronger when it is displayed as an act of political disruption. During crises, the walls on urban streets become canvases visible to everyone. The impact of having a mass audience is constrained, however, by the need for legal authorization. For most of its history, Argentina has alternated between democratic and authoritarian regimes, making street art an important aspect of the so‐called “cultural battle” of social movements. Moreover, Argentinean street art represents a new alternative channel for the application of free speech.
Trade Unions in the Gig Economy
Authors: Cini Lorenzo , Tassinari Arianna
Published: September 2022

As the global gig economy grows in size and relevance, trade unions across the world have increasingly attempted to more systematically organize and represent gig economy workers. Unions seeking to intervene in the gig economy face a host of challenges related both to the characteristics of the gig economy labor process and to the legal framework within which gig workers have thus far been inscribed. These challenges include the workforce's physical dispersion, particularly pronounced for online labor platforms, which hinders workers' capacities to build associational power; the potential pervasiveness of forms of “techno‐normative” control to which gig workers are subject; the internal fragmentation and differentiation of the gig workforce, which might hinder the consolidation of solidaristic attachments among workers; and gig workers' legal classification as independent contractors, which limits the applicability of institutions of collective bargaining and the ability to use conventional channels for workers' voices.
Universal Basic Income Movements
Authors: Guzmán‐Concha César
Published: September 2022

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a social policy proposal backed by a variety of civil society organizations, social movements, advocacy networks, and, more recently, by some political parties and party members, from all sides of the ideological spectrum. UBI is hardly a new concept, but it has taken on a new life in recent years. The interest in UBI that is perceived in the public debate can be explained by structural, long‐term factors such as the rise in income insecurity, increasing inequalities vis‐à‐vis deep socioeconomic and demographic changes, and the limitations of means‐tested social assistance programs. However, the growing salience of UBI can be also attributed to the continuous efforts of various waves of activism over recent decades.
Feminist Movements (Central and Eastern Europe)
Authors: Ana Alexandra
Published: September 2022

After the fall of the socialist regimes, the development of feminist movements in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) was subsumed into the general depiction of civil society in the region – as weak, nonparticipatory, and with a low capacity for mobilization, explained as a reaction to the former compulsory participation in collective action. The availability of funds during the democratization process supported an early institutionalization of social movements which engaged in transactional activism – favoring strategic networking and cooperative problem‐solving with policymakers, rather than mobilizing constituencies. While donors' support enhanced professionalization and consolidated the organizational capacity of social movement organizations (SMOs), financial dependence contributed to goal displacement and lowering the politicization of local issues. This rather hostile picture was supported by analyses undertaken under the transitology school of thought that consolidated tropes about postsocialist states – at the beginning of their institutional building pursuit, catching up with the West. Recent studies evoke a multiplicity of social movements that use various repertoires of action to address different audiences, while adapting to the diverse, sometimes contrasting, structures of political opportunity across countries.