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Two major anti-sweatshop groups—United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and SweatFree Communities—pursued similar goals in different social arenas: college campuses and city governments. This article examines their shared strategy of gradual escalation, demonstrating how social movements must balance coercion and consent to effectively pressure authorities. Both groups aimed to enforce pro-labor rights codes for apparel industry partners, using distinct yet escalating strategies. USAS employed extra-institutional tactics like sit-ins and hunger strikes, while SweatFree Communities leveraged electoral politics. Both began with awareness-raising efforts, such as teach-ins and film screenings, before escalating to coercive tactics—protests and sit-ins for USAS and mobilizing key voting blocs for SweatFree Communities. Despite operating in different arenas, both groups followed a pattern of building legitimacy before applying structural power.

How did a local protest motivated by the murder of a poet’s son grow into a national social movement? In this article, I examine the role of framing in the upward scale shift of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD), a contentious actor that brought together victims of the Mexican war on crime, activists, and organizations to protest against violence. Following recent work on frame analysis, I analyze the different and contrasting reasons that led several groups from across the country to align with the MPJD’s frames and find them as resonant. In addition, I discuss why, despite the existence of common goals, ideological incompatibilities caused multiple MPJD allies to withdraw their participation in the alliance shortly after the latter’s initial actions.

Protest raises the visibility of a social movement, and this affects all organizations affiliated with the movement’s group identity. Although the mutually beneficial relationship between protest and social movement organizations is well documented, we argue that protest does not necessarily aid other, more mundane types of affiliated organizations in the same manner. Specifically, we expect that increases in protest participation will favor the viability of organizations targeting an audience close to the group identity but not of organizations with an audience in which some members share that identity and others do not. We evaluate these claims using a data set of pro-lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) protest events and local organizations in U.S. cities using a fixed-effects panel design with instrumental variables. Findings show that increases in protest participation decrease the presence of organizations that engage LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ audiences, especially local businesses that simultaneously bridge multiple groups of owners, customers, and clients.

Differential participation in violent protests has been explained in terms of protesters' personal values, biographical availability, and network embeddedness. However, the form of mass protest may be influenced less by the microstructure of protesters and more by their collective past experiences of resistance. Through the South Korean candlelight protests of 2008 and 2016-2017, this article examines novices' and repeaters' perceptions of nonviolent protest. Onsite survey and interview data show that previous frustrating protest experiences in 2008 made repeater protesters more perseverant, even when violence was expected. Repeaters had little faith in \"disciplined\" protests, whereas novices hoped for change through \"peaceful\" protests. I argue that previous experiences of resistance and their outcomes influenced protesters' perceptions on the efficiency and legitimacy of violent protest. By examining protesters' varying perseverance, which mediates the condition of violence, this article advances the relationship between violence and civic participation. Keywords: candlelight protest, differential participation, novice, protest experience, repeater, South Korea, violent protest

In 2011, Chilean students mobilized in the largest demonstrations since the country’s return to democracy. Students in some other Latin American countries have also carried out mass demonstrations in recent years. What explains students’ participation in mobilizations in Latin America? This article argues that financial grievances generated by neoliberal education policies and the massification of higher education are major causes of student protest participation. In addition, it shows how weak organizational linkages with ruling political parties increase the likelihood of mobilization. The theory is explored through a case study of higher education policy, student-party linkages, and student mobilization in Chile from 1990 to 2011. A statistical analysis of a survey of Chilean students demonstrates that a working-class background, using debt to finance education, and weak programmatic connections to parties in power are associated with higher levels of protest participation. En el año 2011, los estudiantes chilenos se movilizaron en las protestas más grandes del país desde el retorno a la democracia. Los estudiantes en otros países latinoamericanos también han realizado movilizaciones masivas en los últimos años ¿Qué explica la participación de los estudiantes en protestas en América Latina? Este artículo sostiene que los malestares financieros generados por políticas educativas neoliberales y la masificación de la educación superior son causas importantes de la participación estudiantil en protestas. Asimismo, el artículo demuestra cómo las conexiones débiles con los partidos políticos oficialistas aumentan la probabilidad de movilización. La teoría es explorada a través de un estudio de caso de políticas de educación superior, conexiones entre estudiantes y partidos, y movilización estudiantil en Chile entre 1990 y 2011. Un análisis estadístico de una encuesta de estudiantes chilenos demuestra que un origen de clase trabajadora, el uso de créditos para financiar la educación, y las conexiones programáticas débiles con los partidos en el poder están asociados con mayores niveles de participación en protestas.

William A. Gamson's career was nothing less than remarkable. A prolific scholar, Gamson wrote at least eight books and more than a hundred articles from 1961 to 2014. And he bequeathed social movement studies substantial theoretical contributions and methodological innovations in numerous areas including coalitions, resource mobilization, political opportunities, framing, and culture. His legacy also includes pioneering simulation games both for teaching and for use by social movements, novel pedagogies (in part inspired by his wife, sociologist, Zelda Gamson), and a well-articulated scholar-activist model that has—and will continue—to inspire. This article discusses his extraordinary career and his legacy for social movements, academia, and beyond.

Field analysis, inspired largely from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, is becoming widely used in sociology today. In A Theory of Fields Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam elaborate selectively on Bourdieu's thinking to offer a conceptual framework for better understanding the creation, institutionalization, and transformation of \"mesolevel social spaces\" where actors compete, often through cooperation and coordination, for material and status rewards. In lieu of calling those spaces markets, organizations, networks, systems, or institutions, as is commonly done in the specialized subfields of social movements, political sociology, organizations, and institutional work in political science, FM propose the language of \"strategic action field.\" They argue that their strategic action field perspective can link agency to structured social spaces and serve as an integrative conceptual umbrella for these fragmented subfields of scholarly specialization. This review presents and evaluates this intellectual field strategy to provide a common and integrative conceptual framework, while calling attention to its key strengths and weaknesses.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

This article is a study of the consequences of brokerage for movements, and particularly for the role of political parties within social movements. My findings indicate that brokerage creates opportunities for minor groups to play a crucial role in mobilization, something that comes at a cost to a movement’s structure. I make my case with a study of brokerage in action, based on activist interviews, events data, and network data collected from the Scottish independence movement. Results demonstrate that the likelihood of the governing Scottish National Party participating in movement events only increases with the number of participating movement organizations. As the movement organizations transitioned from a referendum campaign to an autonomous movement, under-resourced peripheral groups took the lead in brokering the Nationalist movement.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, Barabaig pastoralists sustained a vibrant grassroots social movement that agitated to reclaim the grazing land from which they had been removed under Tanzania's post-independence nationalization program; however, by the year 2000, the movement had largely fizzled out, even though many of its goals remained unmet. Why did such a long-standing movement demobilize so rapidly? Employing the mechanism-process model of analyzing social movements, I argue that its leaders' pursuit of foreign donor funds led to the depoliticization of the movement's goals and separated the leaders from their base. This caused rank-and-file members to feel alienated, leading to movement demobilization. Demonstrating the link between donor funding and movement decline adds to our understanding of causes of demobilization, an undertheorized phase of the cycles of contention.

When considering “terrorists” and “terrorism,” the focus tends to be on violence—the threat of violence, its aftermath, the ideology and belief systems that lead to it, and so forth. Political violence, however, represents only a portion of the repertoire of collective action that is available to “terrorists.” Images from “dissident” Irish Republican events and photo-elicitation interviews with activists who participated in these events show that: (1) the repertoire of “violent” organizations includes nonviolent political activity; and (2) the organizational structures and affective incentives that sustain activism in nonviolent voluntary associations and social movement organizations also sustain activism in organizations that embrace physical force or “terrorism.” In combination, these findings show that “dissident” Irish Republicans are likely to persist into the foreseeable future. More generally, the findings also show that our understanding of “terrorists” and “terrorist organizations” will be enhanced if we focus less on their violent activities and more on their similarities with nonviolent activists and organizations.