Mobilization of rights in times of crisis: a review of social movements theory/Mobilizacao de direitos em tempos de crise: uma revisao da teoria dos movimentos sociais.

AutorVestena, Carolina Alves

Introduction

The field of research on social movements has produced, at least since the 1970s, multiple analytical perspectives. They have focused on the observation of the internal dynamics of movements, the construction of their identities, their forms of performance, as well as their organization and mobilization of resources. The field was initially categorized within the disciplines of sociology; meanwhile, with the transnationalization of networks of movements themselves, the research on social movements also spread to the political science, international relations and, finally, the field of law. One of the central movements in this context was the Global Justice Movement, which brought together activists worldwide organized around social justice struggles and which also criticized the "there is no alternative" motto reporting the problems of economic globalization.

From the continuous observation of movements in their local and transnational dynamics, the uses of law have been analyzed on the one hand as part of the strategies and resources mobilized by the movements and, on the other hand, as part of the institutional structures of opportunity or repression. Increasingly law has become the subject of reflection in the field of social movements theory. Such reflection, however, is often marked by the lack of a more in-depth analysis of the ambivalent role of the legal form in social relations, a debate that has long been held by the materialist theory of law. Considering this diagnosis, this article aims at highlighting possible pathways to be developed for an analysis of the forms of mobilization of rights from the point of view of social movements that also consider the complexity of the legal form. For this purpose, the work is divided in three parts. The first brings a review of the different (theoretical) research phases in the field of social movements. The second focuses on the current debates on social movements, protests and austerity policies. And finally, the third presents a discussion based on the articles in this dossier and propose a research agenda that analyzes the struggles for social rights in times of austerity as a strategy of mobilization for social movements.

  1. Social movements research towards a materialistic approach

    Many social scientists have already dealt with the question of the relationship between individual agency and the demand for social change. (1) Social movements research as a discipline however established itself in the 1960s. The emergence of the discipline is characterized by its detachment from the Marxist theory and the influence from the mass psychology. According to Chesters and Welsh (2010, p. 3), this was central to the development of two research streams in the Global North: a European one, mostly based on Marxist theory, and a US American one, based on the approach of mass psychology studies. This contrast is reflected in the different views of the phenomenon of protest and the further development of the research field. In the US tradition, collective behavior has been addressed especially with regard to individual human action. The so-called European research focuses more on the causes of protests and the role of collective identity for social change.

    During this phase, institutions were rarely included in the analysis of collective mobilization. They were only relevant if they did not function properly--"as a result of an economic or political crisis"--and lead to the dissatisfaction and mobilization of people, thus stimulating the irrational fears and emotions of the masses. The combination of structural functionalism and socio-psychological studies has been defined under the theory of relative deprivation (Kern 2008, 5). This theoretical approach was particularly criticized for the fact that many studies have devoted themselves to the psychological processes and developed a "distanced relation by the researchers to their subject" (Kern 2008, 10).

    In the 1970s, resource mobilization theory questioned the psychological assumption of a mass driven by irrationality, building a central critique on the perspectives of the former research approaches. On the basis of empirical studies, it was shown that collective actors "use" their means "aiming at certain goals" (Kern 2008, 10). This perspective goes beyond the general reproach, widespread within the Global North, that social movements would adopt a pathological and divergent attitude towards democratic institutions (Chesters and Welsh 2010, 5). The work of McCarthy and Zald (1977) is a central example of this theoretical change. The fact that the expectation, disappointment and discrepancy between claim and reality do not always lead to a protest movement has been since then investigated in details in order to reveal which concrete mechanisms trigger individuals to collective action (Kern 2008, 12). This criticism contributed significantly to a shift of the research focus in the field from the causes to the mechanisms of mobilization (Kern 2008, 12), and therefore, to the forms of organization, which have been developed through empirical studies.

    This perspective was synthetized around the "resource mobilization approach", which has been further constantly reinterpreted (Kern 2008, 12). Between the 1980s and the 2000s social movements research experienced a new boost. Theoretical frameworks such as the "framing approach" (see e.g. (Goffman and Berger 1986; Benford and Snow 2000)) and the "theory of political opportunity structures" (cf. Kitschelt 1999) were developed during this period and are still considered today as the key concepts of social movements research (Della Porta and Diani 2006; Kern 2008, 11).

    This change of perspective in the field also applies to the approach "contentious politics" (cf. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Tilly and Tarrow 2006; Tarrow 2011). From mobilization causes, through mobilization mechanisms, to the analysis of protest waves and their related events, a new focus was created in the social movements research. These current approaches aim at describing, on the one hand, the relationship between mobilizations and institutions; and, on the other hand, the organizational and strategic processes of movements (Della Porta and Diani 2006). Tilly, Tarrow, and other successors of the contentious politics approach are also classified in the field of social theory and represented within this field as they bring the theory of movements in dialogue with the critical societal analysis (Tarrow 2011). However, most of the researches in this field were carried out mainly at the local and micro level. Their results give insights into the detailed characteristics and strategies of the movements, but they often ignore a relational analysis of the concrete problems and a theoretical embedding (Della Porta 2015a).

    Social movements research developed around several axes in the global context. In Europe, as already mentioned, in partial detachment from the Marxist thought, at least until the economic and financial crisis of 2008, the historical division between "old and new social movements" has a special significance. According to Kern (2008, 11), the emergence of the ecology, peace and new women's movement in the early 1970s dominated the field as the "particularly relevant research topics". For some scholars, the issues of work, or labor movements, shall be neglected as the theme of an old, already surpassed social phenomenon to which social theory and social movements research should pay little attention (see the criticism of Hetland and Goodwin 2014). Against the class-debate, the post-materialist approaches have acquired a special meaning also in the Global South (cf. Habermas 1990; Habermas 2014; Offe 1985; Laclau and Mouffe 2014). These perspectives focus on the new politicization strategies and antagonisms within different social groups in the context of over-complex societies (Chesters and Welsh 2010, 14).

    The conceptual separation of "old and new" social movements has been further adopted in the social sciences without problematization (Rucht 1994; Klein, Legrand, and Leif 1998). Another important cleavage in the movements research is the distinction between right-wing and "left" or "popular" social movements. Particularly in Europe, especially in Germany, a large part of the social movements research is dedicated to the phenomenon of right-wing populism and its forms of organization. (2)...

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