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201 books match the query 'Social movements' and 12 start with p

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Passionate Politics

Edited by Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Emotions are back. Once at the center of the study of politics, emotions have receded into the shadows during the past three decades, with no place in the rationalistic, structural, and organizational models that dominate academic political analysis.

With this new collection of essays, Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta reverse this trend, reincorporating emotions such as anger, indignation, fear, disgust, joy, and love into research on politics and social protest. The tools of cultural analysis are especially useful for probing the role of emotions in politics, the editors and contributors to Passionate Politics argue. Moral outrage, the shame of spoiled collective identities, or the joy of imagining a new and better society, are not automatic responses to events. Rather, they are related to moral institutions, felt obligations and rights, and information about expected effects, all of which are culturally and historically variable.

With its look at the history of emotions in social thought, examination of the internal dynamics of protest groups, and exploration of the emotional dynamics that arise from interactions and conflicts among political factions and individuals, Passionate Politics will lead the way toward an overdue reconsideration of the role of emotions in social movements and politics generally.

Contributors:
Rebecca Anne Allahyari
Edwin Amenta
Collin Barker
Mabel Berezin
Craig Calhoun
Randall Collins
Frank Dobbin
Jeff Goodwin
Deborah B. Gould
Julian McAllister Groves
James M. Jasper
Anne Kane
Theodore D. Kemper
Sharon Erickson Nepstad
Steven Pfaff
Francesca Polletta
Christian Smith
Arlene Stein
Nancy Whittier
Elisabeth Jean Wood
Michael P. Young

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Pathways to Prohibition

Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes

Ann-Marie E. Szymanski

Duke University Press, 2003

Strategies for gradually effecting social change are often dismissed as too accommodating of the status quo. Ann-Marie E. Szymanski challenges this assumption, arguing that moderation is sometimes the most effective way to achieve change. Pathways to Prohibition examines the strategic choices of social movements by focusing on the fates of two temperance campaigns. The prohibitionists of the 1880s gained limited success, while their Progressive Era counterparts achieved a remarkable—albeit temporary—accomplishment in American politics: amending the United States Constitution. Szymanski accounts for these divergent outcomes by asserting that choice of strategy (how a social movement defines and pursues its goals) is a significant element in the success or failure of social movements, underappreciated until now. Her emphasis on strategy represents a sharp departure from approaches that prioritize political opportunity as the most consequential factor in campaigns for social change.

Combining historical research with the insights of social movement theory, Pathways to Prohibition shows how a locally based, moderate strategy allowed the early-twentieth-century prohibition crusade both to develop a potent grassroots component and to transcend the limited scope of local politics. Szymanski describes how the prohibition movement’s strategic shift toward moderate goals after 1900 reflected the devolution of state legislatures’ liquor licensing power to localities, the judiciary’s growing acceptance of these local licensing regimes, and a collective belief that local electorates, rather than state legislatures, were best situated to resolve controversial issues like the liquor question. "Local gradualism" is well suited to the porous, federal structure of the American state, Szymanski contends, and it has been effectively used by a number of social movements, including the civil rights movement and the Christian right.

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People before Highways

Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making

Karilyn Crockett

University of Massachusetts Press, 2018

A landmark fight for urban justice that changed whose voices shape our cities

In 1948, inspired by changes to federal law, Massachusetts government officials started hatching a plan to build multiple highways circling and cutting through the heart of Boston, making steady progress through the 1950s. But when officials began to hold public hearings in 1960, as it became clear what this plan would entail—including a disproportionate impact on poor communities of color—the people pushed back. Activists, many with experience in the civil rights and antiwar protests, began to organize.

Linking archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and oral history, Karilyn Crockett in People before Highways offers ground-level analysis of the social, political, and environmental significance of a local anti-highway protest and its lasting national implications. The story of how an unlikely multiracial coalition of urban and suburban residents, planners, and activists emerged to stop an interstate highway is one full of suspenseful twists and surprises, including for the actors themselves. And yet, the victory and its aftermath are undeniable: federally funded mass transit expansion, a linear central city park, and a highway-less urban corridor that serves as a daily reminder of the power and efficacy of citizen-led city making.

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Polarizing Development

Alternatives to Neoliberalism and the Crisis

Edited by Lucia Pradella and Thomas Marois

Pluto Press, 2015

The global economic crisis has exposed the limits of neoliberalism and dramatically deepened social polarization. Yet, despite increasing social resistance and opposition, neoliberalism prevails globally.

Radical alternatives, moreover, are only rarely debated. And if they are, such alternatives are reduced to new Keynesian and new developmental agendas, which fail to address existing class divisions and imperialist relations of domination.

This collection of essays polarizes the debate between radical and reformist alternatives by exploring head-on the antagonistic structure of capitalist development. The contributors ground their proposals in an international, non-Eurocentric and Marxian inspired analysis of capitalism and its crises. From Latin America to Asia, Africa to the Middle East and Europe to the US, social and labour movements have emerged as the protagonists behind creating alternatives.

This book’s new generation of scholars has written accessible yet theoretically informed and empirically rich chapters elaborating radical worldwide strategies for moving beyond neoliberalism, and beyond capitalism. The intent is to provoke critical reflection and positive action towards substantive change.

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Politics and the Class Divide

Working People and the Middle Class Left

David Croteau

Temple University Press, 1994

Finalist for Transformational Politics Book Award, American Political Science Association, 1996 "In this useful introduction to the connection between social class and political participation in the modern United States, David Croteau explores the 'class divide' separating middle-class activism and working-class non-participation in left political and social movements." --Labour History Review "People don't believe they have a say anymore, so they've given up." That's the cynical conclusion of one worker in this study of the relationships between working people and the middle-class left. This rare accessible book on class differences in American life examines the impact of class status on an individual's participation--or non-participation--in the political process. Focusing on the relative absence of white working-class involvement in many contemporary U.S. liberal and left social movements, David Croteau goes straight to the source: members of the working class and activists in the environmental, peace, women's, and other social movements. Croteau rejects standard assumptions that apathy or simple conservatism explain working-class nonparticipation. Instead, he highlights the role of class-based resources and explores how varying cultural "tools" developed in different classes are more or less helpful in navigating and influencing the existing political environment. Commonly, he finds, the result is a middle-class sense of power and entitlement and a working-class sense of powerlessness and fatalism. Contemplating the future of social movements, he explores how lack of diversity hurts the effectiveness of what have become isolated middle-class movements, and proposes solutions that would increase the future political participation of working people in social movements.

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Politics of Legitimacy

State-Society Relations and Patterns of Chinese Politics

Dingxin Zhao

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A sweeping work on China that interrogates how states gain, maintain, and lose legitimacy.

The Chinese communist state has survived massive social changes, including the introduction of capitalist markets, an ongoing explosion of technological innovation, and an unprecedented jump in wealth and education, accompanied by a major cultural transformation. How has China managed to maintain its power even as the ground has so profoundly shifted? In Politics of Legitimacy, Dingxin Zhao argues that state power can be legitimized in three ideal-typical ways: a set of values upheld by the state (ideological legitimacy), recognized political processes such as regular competitive elections (procedural legitimacy), and the state’s capacity to provide public goods (performance legitimacy).

Building on this theoretical framework, Zhao analyzes different aspects of Chinese politics, including the tragic ending of the 1989 pro-democracy movement, the weak development of mass-based nationalism in post-Mao China, the reasons behind China’s economic success, the anti-establishment tendency of the Chinese mass media and social media, and the sources of political tension in China, despite a superb economy. Moreover, Zhao’s innovative framework is widely applicable beyond China, shifting our attention from regime-type categories to the tools and relationships that determine their survival or collapse, and illuminating the current global emergence of conservatism and religious nationalism.

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Post/Revolutionary Conditions

Renewed Visions of the Iranian Freedom Struggle

Alborz Ghandehari

Northwestern University Press, 2025

An exploration of how the Iranian people have renewed their longtime struggle for freedom

The Woman, Life, Freedom uprising is only the latest manifestation of a century-long struggle for liberation in Iran. This ongoing movement for justice has encompassed two revolutions against domestic dictatorship and foreign imperialism, as well as a series of uprisings since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which was followed by a new era of repression. Post/Revolutionary Conditions: Renewed Visions of the Iranian Freedom Struggle offers an intersectional analysis of how progressive and radical movement builders have reenvisioned liberation in the post-’79 era, despite new forms of oppression under the Islamic Republic and from US and other foreign imperial powers. Bringing together a diverse array of sources, including oral histories with Iranian labor, student, and gender justice organizers, as well as resistance literature and art, Alborz Ghandehari challenges narratives that treat working-class, feminist, queer, and oppressed ethnic minorities’ movements as separate from one another. Post/Revolutionary Conditions demonstrates how such potent reimaginings of collective liberation and a radically democratic future have been shaped by multiple generations of protest and kindred struggles globally.

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Precarious Democracy

Ethnographies of Hope, Despair, and Resistance in Brazil

Benjamin Junge

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Brazil changed drastically in the 21st century’s second decade. In 2010, the country’s outgoing president Lula left office with almost 90% approval. As the presidency passed to his Workers' Party successor, Dilma Rousseff, many across the world hailed Brazil as a model of progressive governance in the Global South. Yet, by 2019, those progressive gains were being dismantled as the far right-wing politician Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency of a bitterly divided country. Digging beneath this pendulum swing of policy and politics, and drawing on rich ethnographic portraits, Precarious Democracy shows how these transformations were made and experienced by Brazilians far from the halls of power. Bringing together powerful and intimate stories and portraits from Brazil's megacities to rural Amazonia, this volume demonstrates the necessity of ethnography for understanding social and political change, and provides crucial insights on one of the most epochal periods of change in Brazilian history.

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Prisms of the People

Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America

Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Grassroots organizing and collective action have always been fundamental to American democracy but have been burgeoning since the 2016 election, as people struggle to make their voices heard in this moment of societal upheaval. Unfortunately much of that action has not had the kind of impact participants might want, especially among movements representing the poor and marginalized who often have the most at stake when it comes to rights and equality. Yet, some instances of collective action have succeeded. What’s the difference between a movement that wins victories for its constituents, and one that fails? What are the factors that make collective action powerful?

Prisms of the People addresses those questions and more. Using data from six movement organizations—including a coalition that organized a 104-day protest in Phoenix in 2010 and another that helped restore voting rights to the formerly incarcerated in Virginia—Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa show that the power of successful movements most often is rooted in their ability to act as “prisms of the people,” turning participation into political power just as prisms transform white light into rainbows. Understanding the organizational design choices that shape the people, their leaders, and their strategies can help us understand how grassroots groups achieve their goals.

Linking strong scholarship to a deep understanding of the needs and outlook of activists, Prisms of the People is the perfect book for our moment—for understanding what’s happening and propelling it forward.

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Promises of 1968

Crisis, Illusion and Utopia

Vladimir Tismaneanu

Central European University Press, 2011

This book is a state of the art reassessment of the significance and consequences of the events associated with the year 1968 in Europe and in North America. Since 1998, there hasn't been any collective, comparative and interdisciplinary effort to discuss 1968 in the light of both contemporary headways of scholarship and new evidence on this historical period. A significant departure from earlier approaches lies in the fact that the manuscript is constructed in unitary fashion, as it goes beyond the East–West divide, trying to identify the common features of the sixties. The latter are analyzed as simultaneously global and local developments. The main problems addressed by the contributors of this volume are: the sixties as a generational clash; the redefinition of the political as a consequence of the ideological challenges posed to the status-quo by the sixty-eighters; the role of Utopia and the de-radicalization of intellectuals; the challenges to imperialism (Soviet/American); the cultural revolution of the sixties; the crisis of 'really existing socialism' and the failure of "socialism with a human face"; the gradual departure from the Yalta-system; the development of a culture of human rights and the project of a global civil society; the situation of 1968 within the general evolution of European history (esp. the relationship of 1968 with 1989). In contrast to existing books, it provides a fundamental and unique synthesis of approaches on 1968: first, it contains critical (vs. nostalgic) re-evaluations of the events from the part of significant sixty-eighters; second, it includes historical analyses based on new archival research; third, it gathers important theoretical re-assessments of the intellectual history of the 1968; and fourth, it bridges 1968 with its aftermath and its pre-history, thus avoiding an over-contextualization of the topics in question.

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Protestors and Their Targets

James Jasper

Temple University Press, 2020

The strategic interactions between protestors and their targets shape the world around us in profound ways. The editors and contributors to Protesters and Their Targets—all leading scholars in the study of social movements—look at why movements do what they do and why their interactions with other societal actors turn out as they do. They recognize that targets are not stationary but react to the movement and require the movement to react back.

This edited collection analyzes how social movements select their targets, movement-target interactions, and the outcomes of those interactions. Case studies examine school closures in Sweden, the U.S. labor movement, Bolivian water and Mexican corn, and other global issues to show the strategic thinking, shifting objectives, and various degrees of success in the actions and nature of these protest movements.

Protesters and Their Targets seeks to develop a set of tools for the further development of the field’s future work on this underexplored set of interactions.

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