(PSM3c) Political Sociology and Social Movements III: Social Movements - Tactics, Responses and Outcomes

This panel brings together critical analyses of various aspects of social movements such as movement strategies and tactics, responses from those in the position of power and authority, and multilayered outcomes of movements. Examining empirical cases from a diverse political context, the papers present nuanced analyses of the role of emotions in shaping social movements’ strategies, the choice of movement tactics in dealing with an authoritarian government not willing to negotiate and compromise, protest management tactics especially the violent response of the state, and outcomes of environmental movements in a hybrid political regime. Tags: Politics, Social Movements

Organizers: Marie-Lise Drapeau-Bisson, Carleton University, Omar Faruque, University of New Brunswick Fredericton; Chair: Catharina O'Donnell, Harvard

Presentations

Lesley Wood, York University

Eventfulness, Emotion and Social Movement Strategy

Examining internal processes within movements, this paper asks, how do emotionally intense events shape subsequent movement strategies? Bringing together Sewell, McAdam, Sewell, Bourdieu, and symbolic interactionist insights on temporality and emotion, this paper analyses over 40 interviews with Toronto activists to understand how the post-event assessment of three events (a victory, an activist suicide, and a repressive event) affects subsequent movement strategy. The paper shows how these assessments vary in terms of their emotional and temporal characteristics. The patterned relationship between trauma, grief and hope; and past, present and future orientations shape activist logic. Understanding the way that these features of activist assessments shape movement strategy gives us a better understanding of the direct and indirect impacts of transformative events.

Zitian Sun, McGill University

Pitfalls of Popularity: The Radicalization Dynamics in the 1989 Tiananmen Student Movement

In the late 20th century, the 1989 Tiananmen Student Movement (TSM) was one of the most ambitious democratic struggles worldwide. The death of a liberal political figure, Hu Yaobang, inspired millions of students and workers to march on the streets of Beijing on April 15, demanding political liberalization and democratic reform. Yet, after rounds of negotiations, students and the government failed to reach an agreement. Several student leaders mobilized a hunger strike to pressure the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party. However, radical tactics conflicted with the ongoing negotiation and marginalized the position of the more moderate negotiators. Eventually, on the night of June 3, the government ordered its military to repress the movement and brought the process of Chinese democratic reform to a halt. This tragic outcome for what had been such a hopeful movement raised a question: Under what condition does radicalization contribute to movement failure when regime-movement negotiation is feasible? In this article, I process-trace both elites’ interactions and the movement’s dynamics via historical archives to answer the question. First, in contrast to existing accounts on radical mobilizations, I argue that radicalization, as in escalation in demands and tactics, can be a nonviolent identity formation process without state repression. In the TSM, student mobilization decreased when the Chinese government offered to negotiate. Leaders employed cultural repertoires to highlight their legitimacy, gain political leverage via continued mobilizations, and avoid possible repression. Spectacular but nonviolent hunger strikes facilitated a distinctive moral authority of students, paralyzing the state’s bureaucratic establishment via demonstrations and strikes. Second, I argue that radicalization and its associated mass mobilization reshape elites’ coalitions and regime-movement alignments via a symbiotic dynamic. Radical discourses with cultural repertoire weaken the movement by undermining both the moderate negotiators and soft-liner elites. During the hunger strike, radical leaders disrupted negotiations and deeded any possible compromises with the state as traitorous behaviors against the movement. Moderate student leaders failed to extract meaningful concessions from the regime soft-liners, leading to a regime-movement standoff. Alternatively, this process became an opportunity for the regime hard-liners to exploit the standoff by marginalizing soft-liners, ceasing negotiations, and eventually repressing the movement violently. In brief, my case study indicates that radicalization in responding to the practical needs of mobilization and regime-movement interactions generates unintended consequences and contributes to the movement’s eventual demise. Radical tactics and repertoires establish an interconnected relationship with regime elites, but they generally undermine the concession extraction capabilities of the movement. Furthermore, I also demonstrate that China’s weak civil society in the 1980s is not the only contributing factor to the failure of the democratic transition. Instead, the radical dynamic in the movement remains equivalently critical. This paper sheds light on how social movement dynamics lead to violent repressions and the consolidation of authoritarian rule.

Kristen Bass, University of Toronto

Trends in U.S. and Canadian Higher Education Protest and University and Police Responses, 2012-2018: The 2012 Quebec Student Strike

This paper describes the protest movements that roiled university and college campuses in the U.S. and Canada in the 2010s and key strategies used by university administrations and police to manage them. The analysis draws on an innovative new dataset, the Higher Ed Protest Dataset , which combines machine learning and sociological hand-coding. We identify more than 5,600 distinct higher education protest events involving 605 universities and colleges in the United States and Canada between 2012 and 2018, based on analysis of more than 16,000 campus newspaper articles. The paper outlines trends in these protests and in protest management and details these dynamics in three major protest waves: (1) a large-scale strike campaign opposing tuition increases in Québec in 2012, met with extreme policing tactics; (2) Black student-led organizing against racism at University of Missouri, Columbia in 2015, which prompted resignations of top administrators and inspired a wave of solidarity protests across the U.S.; and (3) mass demonstrations against former U.S. President Donald Trump in the fall of 2016 and early 2017. The overarching goals of this paper are twofold: to characterize major patterns in recent episodic contention in higher education and to center universities as important geographic sites, incubators, targets, and institutional managers of campus activism. Our findings contribute to the critical sociological study of social movements at the intersection of higher education, organizations, and policing. This conference presentation will focus on the Canadian story within these protest trends—the 2012 Québec student strike—and the contribution that this empirical case makes to the study of protest events and protest management. As a higher education protest, the Québec 2012 student strike is empirically and theoretically important in three key respects. First, the Québec student strike was organized at a remarkable scale, for months on end. Much of the activity centered in Montréal, but students went on strike and protested in Québec City and other cities and towns throughout the province. Second, the strike had a distinctive focus on class politics and opposition to neoliberal capitalism. As the strike continued, it arguably evolved beyond student-centric issues into a more general social democratic and anti-capitalist movement. A third distinguishing feature of the strike was the extreme violence of the police response and, more generally, the state’s heavy-handed attempt at repressing protest. The Québec student strike highlights several important contributions made by the Higher Ed Protest Dataset for the study of social movements more broadly. Multiple newspapers and newspaper reports provide insight into campaign coordination across institutions, empirically demonstrating how protests are situated in a multi-institutional field. Relatedly, the relationship data allows us to more closely trace the interplay between different groups involved in organizing and campaign development, which goes under-appreciated in most protest event analysis scholarship. Lastly, our data on police allows us to understand the state’s heavy-handed direct responses to coordinated action both on and off-campus, adding to scholarship on protest policing.

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Non-presenting authors: Ellen Berrey, University of Toronto; Nathan Kim, Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR); Alex Hanna      Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)

Omar Faruque, University of New Brunswick Fredericton

'Political Settlement' and Social Movements in Bangladesh

In recent years, the Bangladeshi government has adopted several long-term economic plans to make Bangladesh a middle-income country by 2021 and a high-income country by 2041. Rapid and diverse industrialization was identified as a key driver of the accelerated economic growth required to meet these ambitious targets. Since the inception of this development agenda, social movements have emerged, contesting its neoliberal desires. Local- and national-level popular mobilizations against an open pit coal mine in a densely populated agricultural area ( Phulbari Protirodh Andolon, PPA ) and a coal-fired power plant and other industrial infrastructure near an ecologically vulnerable mangrove forest ( Sundarbans Raksa Andolon, SRA ) were the most contentious cases confronting Bangladesh’s growth-oriented neoliberal development agenda. Slow violence (dispossession and injustice due to delayed destruction of livelihood resources resulting from environmental dangers), evasion of environmental laws and policies, and lack of consultation and deliberation with local communities, who will bear the brunt of environmental injustice, were their key grievances. Both movements demanded the cancellation of these two ‘development’ projects. Notwithstanding their broad popular support, these mobilizations ended with a mixed outcome. In the case of the PPA, grassroots mobilization forced the government to accept their key demands. On the other hand, the government did not pay any heed to the SRA’s grievances. Using a comparative analysis of movement dynamics, this paper assesses the divergent outcomes of these two social movements. Sociological research on economic development and social movements focuses on how specific modes or epochs of development in the Global South generate social movements challenging the state’s policy choices vis-à-vis economic development. In the contemporary era of economic development dominated by neoliberal rationality, social movements confront the state’s policy agenda, which, more often than not, gives primacy to the role of transnational capital. Social movement scholars consider the effects of both internal (organizational characteristics) and external (political opportunity or threat) factors to analyze movement outcomes. Building on these conceptual insights from sociology of development and social movement studies and using empirical findings extracted from a set of in-depth interviews with movement activists involved with PPA and SRA and other civil society actors, this paper examines the outcomes of both Bangladeshi protest movements in the context of the political environment in which they emerged and developed. A critical feature of such a political environment is its hybrid political regime, characterized by authoritarianism and extractive political institutions. This paper argues that such characteristics of the Bangladeshi political environment influenced social movement dynamics in such a way that their outcomes remained far short of victory. Adding further insights from the ‘political settlement’ framework, which considers the distribution of power among social organizations in a polity, particularly in the Global South, this paper problematizes the interplay of internal and external contexts of social movements to develop a nuanced understanding of movement outcomes in Bangladesh. In doing so, it theorizes the challenges of social movements in a hybrid political context in an era of democratic backsliding and assesses the prospects of deepening the political participation of a wider population to influence policy choices and development outcomes. It demonstrates that although social movements, which grew out of grievances caused by the perceived impacts of development interventions, can overcome internal challenges to achieve their collective goals and thereby influence development outcomes in their desired ways, this is a challenging task for social movements in a hybrid political context where specific political settlement (a combination of horizontal and vertical power) determines their opportunities and threats. As a result, the prospects of deepening democratic participation to shape development outcomes in such a political context remain a critical task for oppositional collective actions. Notwithstanding these challenges, there are positive signs. Social movements can achieve gains; cumulative gains will lead to broader success in reforming or reversing development agenda.