Mobilization Forum: Awkward Movements

Several years ago, Gay Seidman complained in an article in Mobilization that scholars of the South African antiapartheid movement had so ignored the role of armed struggle as to leave the impression that the movement and its most famous leader, Nelson Mandela, were nonviolent in the Gandhian mold. In fact, Mandela was the first military commander of the African National Congress. He owed his popularity among black South Africans in part to his close identification with the armed wing of the movement. Seidman’s goal was not only to set the record straight. She argued that ignoring the movement’s use of violence foreclosed important questions about the relations between popular mobilization and guerilla campaigns. It also left unchallenged social movement scholars’ tendency to treat violence as something that is done to protesters, or, when it is done by them, as a symptom of movement decline rather than as sometimes boosting popular morale (Seidman 2001). Sociologists have written about the methodological and ethical difficulties of studying movement groups that are illegal, violent, inaccessible, or ideologically unappealing (e.g., Blee 2003; Esseveld and Eyerman 1992; Kriesi 1992). Seidman’s piece suggested that groups that are ideologically appealing pose challenges of their own. But it also made central the theoretical consequences of neglecting what I think of as awkward movements, ones whose composition, goals, or tactics make them difficult to study or theorize. Scholars may avoid certain movements, groups, and dynamics for obvious reasons. Groups that use illegal means are often difficult to gain access to, and even when researchers do not fear for their own safety, they may worry about endangering the people they study. Many of us study progressive social movements because we embrace their aims: indeed, some of us straddle worlds of academia and activism. It is hard to spend time and energy on groups that one finds ideologically noxious. But movement groups may also be conceptually awkward. They are uncomfortably close to something else that is not a movement. Groups like the Promise Keepers may seem too close to self-help groups; those like the American Legion or the Veterans of Foreign Wars may seem too close to interest groups; those like the American Jewish Congress may seem too close to denominational groups. Of course, we have to draw some lines between movements and phenomena that are not movements. Conceptual boundaries serve an analytical purpose. But I suspect that the lines separating movement groups from, say, interest groups, charities, terrorist organizations, unions, nongovernmental organizations, and self-help groups often reflect the idiosyncrasies of how subfields have developed rather than anything intrinsic to the phenomena themselves. Yet, casual classifications of this type have real import for our theories of mobilization. As Dave Snow (2004) observed several years ago, a tendency to treat as paradigmatic movements that are targeted to the state has made it difficult to theorize the many movements that are not targeted to the state: movements for reform within the Catholic Church, for example, or movements aimed at transforming cultural understandings and identities. Should one simply look for a parallel to political opportunities to account for the emergence of these