10 Social Movements, Protest and Resistance
The indefinite space of social interactions periodically and irregularly produces social movements. Researchers grappled with traceable and aberrant qualities of political mobilizations. On the one hand, embedded class inequalities are destined to produce cyclical protests against unfair organization of relations of production. On the other hand, the very concept of creativity rejects deterministic social explanations and replaces it with events whose temporality is both historical and untimely.
“The thing is, I became more and more aware of the possibility of distinguishing between becoming and history. It was Nietzsche who said that nothing important is ever free from a “nonhistorical cloud.” This isn’t to oppose eternal and historical, or contemplation and action: Nietzsche is talking about the way things happen, about events them-selves or becoming. What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actualized in particular circumstances; the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of history. History isn’t experimental,’ it’s just the set of more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment with something beyond history. Without history the experimentation would remain indeterminate, lacking any initial conditions, but experimentation isn’t historical.” (Deleuze, 1990/1995, pp. 170-171).
Historical in the sense that social movements operate with a limited set of instruments and within political conjunctures. Untimely, because they draw on a whole index of historical experience that informs them in an ungeneralizable way. Untimeliness also bears witness to the space where experimentations and utopic imaginations do not have a predetermined horizon of realization. Breaking with the status quo, political movements sail towards open seas. Returning from their creative elaborations to the historical conditions, they project leaps of history. What’s taken as granted for one generation is the impossible win of a forgotten generation of a century ago.
Expressing the themes and questions of all the disciplines, the study of social movements is a testament to how political sociology makes its own object of study and is made by what it’s studying. In her self-description as a researcher of lived meaning of resistance, Begona Aretxaga calls this movement a double displacement. Activism displaced by scholarship and scholarship displaced by political activism.
Distinguishing social movements, protests, and resistance
The objectification of political action beyond the procedures of representative democracy comes with challenges. These challenges are faced with different theoretical approaches. We will look at resource mobilization theory, framing theory, and new social movements. Crossing diagonally the analytics of social movements, we will discuss the conceptual and historical significance of the concept of resistance. Eschewing an overtly positivistic approach, we will also offer some notes on the literary treatment of political problems in reference to the modern classic The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.
In political science and sociology, resource mobilization theory conceptualizes the material and logistical requirements of sustaining a social movement in general (McCarthy & Zald, 1977). Thereby, the content around which the organization develops and the ideological critique of modern society are bracketed. Thus, resource mobilization theory represents a historical materialism without a central historical ontology of class-conflict. There is also a degree of depoliticization by means of focusing on logistics.
Influenced by interpretative schools in sociology, framing theory looks at more discursive levels at which social movements interact with the large pubic (Benford & Snow, 2000). Shifting from an individual’s self-presentation to a movement’s self-presentation, framing theory examines communicative challenges facing social movements in the circulation of their message across media.
Indicating the evolution of industrial society to information society based on the centrality of media-based exchanges, this approach to social movements delves into the play of meaning more than the substrate that carries the messages. This semantic turn is symptomatic of the culture of self-branding and neoliberal entrepreneurial self.
Research Project: Marketing social movements: creating political capital vs. appropriation
Pick an uprising, social movement, or subcultural practice and research its subsequent impact on the political culture. Measure its transformative effect against its assimilation into mainstream. Are there also unintended consequences to the given mobilization? How would you write the story of endogenous and exogenous generation of the political process?
Compare and contrast the impact of anti-war protests in achieving their intended effect as well as in shifting the public culture at large in the cases of the Vietnam War (1960s) and the invasion of Iraq (2000s).
Refer to the following quote that distinguishes between encyclopedic, pedagogical, and commercial approaches to concepts. What concept of social movement does more justice to their immanent potentialities?
By encyclopedic, students may address the immense number of dimensions through which political fronts and registers are formulated, from housing to immigration, from epistemic pluralism to convergence of struggles. Tackle the difficulties social movements face in navigating a capitalist playing field. How does corporate culture infuse and transform political theory and practice?
“The post-Kantians concentrated on a universal encyclopedia of the concept that attributed concept creation to a pure subjectivity rather than taking on the more modest task of a pedagogy of the concept, which would have to analyze the conditions of creation as factors of always singular moments. If the three ages of the concept are the encyclopedia, pedagogy, and commercial professional training, only the second can safeguard us from falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third-an absolute disaster for thought whatever its benefits might be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalism.” Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy?
While scholarship represents the identifiable patterns of social movements, there is also an idealization of a particular stage of liberal democratic civil society. A philosophy for the unprecedented and creative aspects of social movements, the incomplete and open-ended character of political history is missing. Major political movements often emerge as surprises and in response to events in the narrow sense, informal organizations may pop up. After the fact, scholars often project to the past necessities at work in an attempt to preserve the faith in the explicability of social process.
Protest and Resistance
In time, anthropological study of forms of resistance and political subjectivities will enrich and challenge the frameworks of political science and sociology that operate under idealized parameters of capitalist, liberal democracies at the expense of erasing fundamental contradictions of these political systems. Anthropology, by conducting fieldwork at the margins, offers perspectives where the political emerges in far from ideal conditions.
From transformative projects of social movements whereby a new consciousness is popularized or a policy win is achieved, the concept of resistance looks at practices of subordination, push-back, withholding of resources, and gossiping in James Scott’s seminal work on “Hidden Scripts” of the weak. Focusing on an agrarian context where farmers are crushed under overtaxation, lacking a public sphere, Scott shows, how they find ways to undermine power structures without being able to transform them. Political resistance does not amount to heroic abilities of the social movements. Instead, it is done from a position of weakness with more modest aims. Instead of the task of pushing history forward attributed to the working class in historical materialism, the work on resistance reports scenes where total subversion of the power structure is not possible. Inspired by anarchist political philosophy and practice, here, the goal is to attend to lateral politicizations. How to create forms of organization that do not reproduce existing relations of power? Instead of inevitably imitating the army or party structures of mainstream political bodies, the aim is to put into practice alternative modes of living. Thus, direct methods of action are used beyond their instrumental uses for seizing an office.
The culture of resistance, the knowledge that is produced and circulated in and outside of the academy, displays the lessons of earlier political movements. Decentralization is the remedy for the excess of centralization. Lateral organizational circles with voluntary participation are the antidote to obligatory hierarchical organizations. In a move reminiscent of Tolkien’s epic story, where the Promethean gift of power (the ring) is deliberately returned to the fire it came from, as this power becomes a burden too heavy for humans to bear. By destroying the circle of unification, the ring, the story demonstrates a pedagogy of power at the time of growing industrial abilities in warfare, production, and surveillance, which risks the loss of more fragile beauties of life. Himself a veteran of the 1st World War, where he lost countless compatriots, Tolkien monumentalizes the experience of the first half of the 20th century in his modern epic. As such, it also stands as a modern mythological source for challenging the over-idealization of civil society in the topical and methodological orientation of the mainstream political sociological literature. Instead, this literary treatment of politics of the age traverses environmental, geological, and metaphysical registers.
At times, social movements produce their own orthodoxy. The years of weakness and oppression fuel what Nietzsche calls ressentiment, which psychologically justifies violence without measure when hitherto powerless and oppressed finally achieve a position of power. Similiar to Poggi’s articulation of the alliance between the primus inter pares monarch and urban trade centers in favoring integration of markets, Nietzsche finds in what he figuratively terms as slave morality a conjunction between political interests of the priest (which means also for him the scholars and scientists) in negating life-affirming values in favor of nihilistic metaphysical principles and relatively powerless groups that needs to/wants to sublimate poverty and the senselessness of pain into a moral story.
Debate on new social movements
Simultaneous to the decolonization movement of the 1950s and 1960s, new social movements diverted or expanded, depending on the theoretical point of taken, central concerns of political movements. Identification of their political status itself became a political problematic. The problem of self-referentiality in politics is yet to be treated at the conjunction of philosophy of logic, mathematics, history, and political sociology. Here, by way of developing perspectives from the vantage point of view of different social movements, we favor a pluralist epistemology in the absence of a master narrative. Yet, plurality does not imply a solution to contradictory problematics arising out of each of these political concerns with different senses of urgency and futurity. Compared to indefinite perpetuation of the state’s self-perpetuation (where self often refers to play of difference and nonidentity), social movements are marked by dynamic qualities such as irruption and dissipation, waves and cycles (Issevenler, 2023). Arguably, there can be no conclusive science, i.e., knowledge of the relationship of continuity of state to discontinuity of social movements.
By presupposing one another and challenging one another, the historical relationship of state and social movements that can be compared to infinite series of prime numbers in its foundationality and ungeneralizability or musicality that combines objective relations in mathematics with temporal or reverberating aesthetics of subjective feeling, the study of social movements is a voyage both to the borders and centers of political sociology. State secures the possibility of social movements. Social movements demand reform and revolution; they call for new laws, and they break laws. Social movements end up producing new political regimes and, conversely, are brutally repressed and banished by the state. The state finds its legitimacy in popular movements and selectively appropriates the culture of social movements to overcome systemic crises.
Feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ+ movement, and anti-war movements emerged in resonance and dissonance with working-class movements and anti-colonial nationalist movements. The uneven character of the political field and the non-linear character of history become apparent in this conjunction of forces. Depending on context or contextualization, as givenness of context is problematic, acts may be seen as progressive or reactionary. Different master narratives and priorities attempt to function as meta-languages in the description of political reality.
Midpoint in the story of The Lord of the Rings, two hobbits (characters with seemingly no supernatural features) find themselves in an ancient forest where, according to the legend, live tree-herders, known as Ents. Ents are taught to speak by Elves who represent rare, elevated, and refined qualities in this universe. If Earth and cosmos form a circle, Elves are the north stars. They held on to wisdom and they point the way. Yet, they are departing this world. In their story, perhaps Tolkien is mourning the end of an era -the end of metaphysics and the beginning of the reign of physics.
Treebeard, the chief of the Ents, finds the hobbits lost in the raging war and gives them a shade where they can rest and sleep. He sings to them of the disappearance of Entwives who were also taught the art of gardening by Elves. Upon waking up, hobbits with some difficulty try to communicate to Treebeard the magnitude of war. Treebeard, in response, decides to gather an Entmoot, an assembly or council of Ents to process the news and give a response to little hobbits.
In a play on temporality and scales, Tolkien expresses different speeds at which history moves according to different experiences. Hobbits grow weary of how slow the meeting is progressing as Treebeard tells them, after a number of hours,s that they have just exchanged greetings and are far from any kind of decision.
“You must understand, young hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in old entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.”
After several days of deliberations, Ents decide not to join the war and stay neutral. Hobbits, angry and clever, decide to trick Treebeard into moving in a direction where he would see the scale of destruction of trees, so that he changes his mind. This works, and upon the cry of Treebeard, the remaining Ents from distant parts of the forest start walking towards Isengard, the factory of Saruman, the wizard who collaborates with Sauron.
This is not our war,” said Treebeard. “Yet I am going to Isengard. I may not come back. That is my business. But I shall go there. I had a feeling that I was waiting for something. I have lived to see days of many partings. But now the parting of the ways has come. The last march of the Ents!”
In their entanglement with geopolitics and colonization, the field of social movements exceeds the space of communicative action in the narrow sense and navigates a much more unstandardized field of political struggle, drawing on heterogeneous dimensions of force, aesthetics, and tradition. New concepts, demands, and horizons are articulated at times, eroding the very ground of the possibility of their emergence. Their politics become inherently a matter of negotiation.
While nationalism allows recognition of individual subjectivity in the figure of the citizen, allowing a legitimate breakdown of feudal bonds, it prescribes a new set of roles for women. While economic independence opens up grounds for further possibilities of political and cultural independence from patriarchy, there is also further and new kinds of exploitation emerging in capitalist modernity based on gender roles. While historical materialism allows articulation of unpaid/devalued reproductive labor, it also translates the question of gender and sexuality into the master signifier of value, limiting possibilities of making sense beyond the economic framework. Feminists will develop new ideas on gender socialization by reaching beyond the confines of sociology towards film studies and psychoanalysis to lay bare the role of masculine desire in the formation of knowledge-objects. While womanhood is being dis-identified from motherhood in terms of gender roles, non-reproductive, alternative, and aberrant sexualities will be explored.
Similar to the status of resistance with respect to mass organization of class politics, there is at times multiplication and at times breakdown of given conceptions of political action.
Hartman (2016), in her critique of historical materialism, points out how enslaved women are not treated as political subjects. She shows the shortcomings of a political theory that recognizes class politics only in the so-called productive sphere and in the striking or fugitive black men. The bodies of black women in slavery become the vessel that carries capitalism into modernity, therefore, they become crucial links in the reproduction of capitalism, making their bodily practice inherently political. The reproductive sphere, the household, is politicized at through practices at the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and class, without treating these as meaningful as mere free-floating signifiers/identities derived from demography.
Marking gender and sexuality, Hartman theorizes concrete situations and practices where particularity of history enters into a dialogue with the universality of identity to change the meaning of both. The finite history of relations entered by different political subjectivities allows conceptualization of their emergence and transformation instead of locking the political chart of distribution of identities once and for all. As Clough writes of Morrison’s Beloved “African-American story remains a story in bits and pieces, not a unifying memory but starts and stops of rememory, a reconstruction of a story that cannot be completely narrated, a story instead makes visible the erasure, the forgetting, the disremembering (Clough, 1998, p. 124)
Narrating political experience
Pride (2014) dir. Matthew Warchus : sexual politics and the attack on unions
Pride is a historical drama set in the UK during the 1984–85 miners’ strike. It follows the real-life story of a group of LGBTQ+ activists in London who form “Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners” (LGSM). Despite social and political differences, they raise funds and form an unlikely alliance with a Welsh mining community. The film explores the Thatcher-era attack on unions, showing how the government and police targeted striking miners, the intersection of class struggle and queer rights and the evolution of solidarity, where mutual respect grows from initial prejudice and mistrust.
- How does the film address homophobia within the working-class mining community?
- How does the alliance in Pride challenge the idea that sexuality and class politics are separate struggles?
- What role does visibility play in the LGBTQ+ activists’ political strategy?
News From Home (1977) dir. Chantal Akerman: intercontinental transmedia c(h)ord between the mother and the daughter
In this experimental film, the young Belgian artist Akerman reads her mother’s letters to her over shots of New York City Streets where she hopes to launch her film career. While the anxious and loving voice of her mother was transmitted through the medium of letters across the ocean, Akerman invents her aesthetic language in her medium. In this overlay, there is an exploration of both artistic autonomy and separation anxiety.
- How would you analyze speed and temporality as concrete dimensions of this intersubjective negotiation? What is the impact of delays and artificial simultaneities? Delays between different sequences of voiceover and delays of Akerman’s letters as her mother complains of the diminishing frequency of her communication.
- What role do the various media play in the unfolding of subjective meaning? How would you put the letters of the mother and the camera of Akerman in an interplay?
- How do different modalities of media, such as transmission and reception, give dimensions to creative subjectivity? In the classical rite of passage to adulthood, children are expected to “kill” their parents, typically rendered in a son-to-father relationship in media, whereby assertion of independence and responsibility for one’s own choices is performed. How would you compare the bare coming-of-age “story” of News From Home to this archetypical formula? In the chapter on the individual, we explored the story of Oedipus and Antigone insofar as these have influenced for millennia the way Western thought tackled inner tensions of family and political community. Butler argued that there’s something excessive to heteronormativity in Antigone’s sexuality as well as in her gender and family roles. How would you formulate the differentiation of Akerman in a transmedia context? How does she find an alternative to brutal separation? The film, lacking the words of Akerman herself, arguably shows a case of non-separation and symbiotic futurity. How’s the conjunction of visual (her vision of the life of New York City environments and population) and auditory (her reading of her mother’s letters) tracks derived from different subjects offer a new type of synthesis beyond merger and individuation?
- Having gone through a series of criticisms of how society achieves its reproduction in this book, thereby laying bare the political ontologies of society, what affirmative reproductive arrangements can you positively propose whereby the temporal existence of society can be reckoned with?
- Walter Benjamin in his philosophy of history offers the thought of “the end of history” where open-historicity of politics and reproduction are reduced to the status of myth. Instead, he argues for culminating, arresting moves that exits historical time of infinite reproduction of society.
- Under what conditions political sociology can move beyond descriptive boundaries of scientific activity into prescriptive projection marked by existential situatedness of the researcher, reader, student and public at large? Insofar as normalization embedded in given parameters of political contexts and political communication involves an inevitable already-made axiom of choice vis-a-vis how we steer and center analysis, irrespective of our descriptive or prescriptive modes, is there a possibility of being non-prescriptive?
Works Cited
Akerman, C. (Director). (1976). News from home [Film]. Institut national de l’audiovisuel; Paradise Films; Unité Trois; ZDF.
Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (2000). Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.611
Benjamin, W. (1940). Theses on the philosophy of history. In H. Arendt (Ed. & Trans.), Illuminations (pp. 253–264). Schocken Books. (Original work published 1940)
Clough, P. T. (1998). The end(s) of ethnography: From realism to social criticism (2nd ed.). Peter Lang.
Hartman, S. (2016). The belly of the world: A note on Black women’s labors. Souls, 18(1), 166–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2016.1162596
Işsevenler, T. (2024). Technical temporalities of the transitional protest movements. International Political Anthropology, 17(2), 243–270. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14364679
McCarthy, J. D., & Zald, M. N. (1977). Resource mobilization and social movements: A partial theory. American Journal of Sociology, 82(6), 1212–1241. https://doi.org/10.1086/226464
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1994). The two towers (2nd ed.). Houghton Mifflin. (Original work published 1954)
Warchus, M. (Director). (2014). Pride [Film]. Pathé; BBC Films; British Film Institute; Calamity Films; Ingenious Media.
Media Attributions
- 00001-scan_2025-05-29_16-10-33 © Marable, Manning; Freedom: a photographic history of the African American Struggle. 2002