Globalization and social movements: how people organize across borders to challenge power

Overview Beginner

In 2011, a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after police confiscated his fruit cart and humiliated him. His act of desperation triggered protests that spread across Tunisia, then across the Arab world, then around the globe. Within months, dictators fell in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. Within a year, the Occupy movement had set up encampments in over 80 countries. Within two years, the #MeToo movement would transform conversations about sexual harassment on every continent.

None of this was planned. All of it was connected.

Globalization and social movements are intertwined phenomena. Globalization refers to the growing interconnectedness of the world through trade, communication, migration, and cultural exchange. Social movements are organized, collective efforts to promote or resist social change. In the twenty-first century, social movements operate on a global scale: activists in one country can communicate with, learn from, and support activists in another in real time.

This unit covers the major social movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, examined from multiple national and cultural perspectives. We will study anti-globalization protests, the Arab Spring, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, climate activism, LGBTQ+ rights, labor movements, and indigenous rights movements. We will examine how digital technology has transformed activism. And we will pay attention to who gets left out of the standard narratives — the Global South activists who preceded Greta Thunberg, the indigenous movements that have been defending land for centuries, and the labor movements in developing countries that rarely make Western headlines.

Globalization: what it is and who it serves Beginner

Globalization is not a single process. It is a cluster of interconnected changes in economics, politics, culture, and communication that have accelerated since the late twentieth century.

Economic globalization refers to the integration of national economies through trade, investment, supply chains, and financial markets. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the European Union, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are institutions that facilitate economic globalization. The effects are contested: globalization has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty (particularly in China and India) while increasing inequality within many countries and undermining labor and environmental protections.

Political globalization refers to the growth of international institutions and governance structures — the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the World Health Organization — that operate above the level of the nation-state. These institutions are influential but limited: they depend on the voluntary cooperation of sovereign states and are often criticized for reflecting the interests of powerful countries.

Cultural globalization refers to the spread of ideas, media, values, and practices across national borders. Hollywood movies, K-pop, McDonald's, and social media platforms are agents of cultural globalization. The effects are ambivalent: cultural exchange enriches and connects people, but the dominant direction of cultural flow is from the West (particularly the United States) outward, raising concerns about cultural imperialism and the homogenization of local traditions.

Communication globalization refers to the revolution in digital communication — the internet, smartphones, social media — that has made it possible for people to communicate instantly across vast distances. This is the dimension of globalization most directly relevant to social movements, because it enables activists to coordinate, share information, and mobilize supporters on a global scale.

Who benefits from globalization?

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former chief economist at the World Bank, argued in Globalization and Its Discontents (2002) that globalization has been managed in ways that disproportionately benefit wealthy countries and powerful corporations at the expense of developing nations and ordinary workers. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, Stiglitz argued, imposed structural adjustment programs on developing countries that required privatization, deregulation, and cuts to social spending — policies that increased poverty and inequality while benefiting foreign investors and local elites.

This critique is not shared by everyone. Jagdish Bhagwati, another prominent economist, argued that globalization has been the most effective poverty-reduction mechanism in human history. The evidence supports parts of both arguments: globalization has reduced absolute poverty dramatically (the percentage of the world's population living in extreme poverty fell from approximately 36% in 1990 to approximately 9% in 2020) while increasing inequality within many countries and creating winners and losers within every society.

The anti-globalization movement Beginner

The first major social movement to emerge in response to economic globalization was, fittingly, the anti-globalization movement (also called the alter-globalization or global justice movement). The movement gained visibility in 1999, when tens of thousands of protesters converged on Seattle to disrupt a meeting of the World Trade Organization.

The protesters included labor unions concerned about job losses, environmentalists worried about the weakening of environmental regulations, indigenous groups fighting for land rights, farmers resisting the expansion of industrial agriculture, and anarchists opposing corporate power. The coalition was diverse and sometimes internally contradictory: labor unions wanting to protect American jobs had different interests than indigenous groups in the Global South who wanted to protect their land from both foreign corporations and their own governments.

The Seattle protests were not the beginning of the movement. They had precedents in the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, which began on January 1, 1994 — the day NAFTA took effect. The Zapatistas, an indigenous Maya movement led by the Subcomandante Marcos (a masked spokesperson whose real identity was concealed), used the early internet to communicate their struggle to a global audience. They were among the first social movements to recognize and exploit the potential of digital communication for transnational activism.

The alter-globalization movement raised important questions about democratic accountability in global governance. Who elected the officials at the WTO? Who voted for the policies of the IMF? The movement's answer was that international financial institutions were undemocratic, unaccountable, and serving corporate interests rather than the interests of the people affected by their policies. This critique influenced subsequent debates about trade policy, sovereign debt, and the governance of the global economy.

The Arab Spring: revolution and its aftermath Beginner

The Arab Spring began in December 2010, when Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid triggered nationwide protests against unemployment, corruption, and political repression. On January 14, 2011, Tunisia's president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, fled the country after 23 years in power.

The protests spread to Egypt, where hundreds of thousands of people occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo, demanding the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. After 18 days of sustained protest, during which the government shut down the internet and deployed security forces, Mubarak resigned on February 11, 2011, ending 30 years of authoritarian rule.

The movement spread to Libya, where an armed uprising backed by NATO military intervention overthrew and killed Muammar Gaddafi. It reached Yemen, where President Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down after 33 years. It reached Bahrain, where a Sunni monarchy violently suppressed a predominantly Shia protest movement with the support of Saudi Arabian troops. It reached Syria, where peaceful protests against Bashar al-Assad escalated into a devastating civil war that has killed over 500,000 people and displaced millions.

The aftermath of the Arab Spring complicates the narrative of democratic triumph. Tunisia, where the movement began, established a fragile but functioning democracy — the only Arab Spring country to do so. Egypt held elections that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power, then experienced a military coup in 2013 that returned the country to authoritarian rule under General (later President) Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Libya descended into civil war and state collapse. Syria's civil war became a proxy conflict involving Russia, Iran, Turkey, the United States, and numerous regional powers. Yemen fell into a civil war that produced one of the worst humanitarian crises of the twenty-first century.

The Arab Spring demonstrates both the power and the limits of social movements. The movements succeeded in toppling dictators. They did not, in most cases, succeed in building democratic institutions to replace them. The reasons are complex: entrenched military and security forces, the absence of civil society organizations, regional geopolitics, economic crises, and the difficulty of building democratic governance from scratch in societies with no recent democratic experience.

Whose Arab Spring?

The standard Western narrative of the Arab Spring — young, tech-savvy protesters using social media to overthrow dictators and demand democracy — is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The protests were not only driven by young, middle-class, internet-connected activists. They included workers, farmers, religious groups, women's organizations, and people from rural areas who had no access to social media. The demands were not only for democracy. They were for economic justice, dignity, an end to corruption, and the right to participate in decisions that affected their lives.

The role of social media was real but overstated. In Egypt, the revolution was organized as much through mosques, labour unions, and face-to-face networks as through Facebook and Twitter. The government shut down the internet for five days during the height of the protests, and the protests continued and grew. Social media was a tool, not a cause.

Occupy Wall Street and global inequality Beginner

On September 17, 2011, a group of protesters set up an encampment in Zuccotti Park, a privately owned public space in Lower Manhattan, near Wall Street. The protest was inspired by the Arab Spring and by the anti-austerity movements in Europe, particularly the indignados (the indignant ones) in Spain, who had occupied public squares earlier that year to protest unemployment, austerity, and political corruption.

The Occupy movement's slogan — "We are the 99%" — captured the central grievance: the concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a tiny elite at the expense of the vast majority. The slogan was inspired by statistical analysis showing that the top 1% of income earners in the United States had captured a disproportionate share of economic growth since the 1970s, while wages for the middle and working classes had stagnated.

Occupy encampments spread to over 80 countries. The movement adopted a leaderless, consensus-based decision-making structure — general assemblies in which anyone could speak and decisions required the agreement of all participants. This structure was deliberately democratic, but it was also unwieldy and sometimes prevented the movement from developing coherent demands or political strategies.

The movement was criticized from the left for failing to develop a political programme, and from the right for lacking clear goals and for the disorder associated with the encampments. By the end of 2011, most Occupy encampments had been cleared by police. The movement dissipated as an organized force, but its influence persisted: the language of "the 1% versus the 99%" entered mainstream political discourse, and the issues it raised — inequality, corporate power, the influence of money in politics — became central to subsequent political campaigns.

Black Lives Matter Beginner

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement began in 2013, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, in Florida. Three Black women — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — created the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, which became the name of a decentralized movement against police violence and systemic racism.

BLM gained national and international prominence in 2014, after a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager. Protests erupted in Ferguson and spread across the United States. The movement drew attention to the pattern of police killings of Black Americans, the militarization of police forces, and the failure of the criminal justice system to hold officers accountable.

The movement peaked in the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Floyd's death, captured on video and viewed millions of times, triggered the largest protest movement in US history. An estimated 15 to 26 million people participated in BLM protests across the United States. Protests also occurred in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, Japan, Australia, and dozens of other countries.

BLM in global context

Black Lives Matter resonated globally because police violence and systemic racism are not uniquely American problems. In the United Kingdom, protests drew attention to the disproportionate use of stop-and-search powers against Black Britons and the legacy of colonialism. In France, the movement connected to long-standing grievances about police violence in the banlieues (suburban housing projects) populated predominantly by people of North African and sub-Saharan African descent. The death of Adama Traore, a young Black man who died in police custody in 2016, became a focal point for French protests against police racism.

In Brazil, which has the largest Black population outside of Africa, BLM connected to the struggle against police violence in favelas (informal settlements), where Brazilian military police kill thousands of people each year, the vast majority of them Black. In Nigeria, the #EndSARS movement targeted the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a police unit notorious for extortion, torture, and extrajudicial killings. The #EndSARS protests in 2020 were the largest in Nigeria's recent history and were explicitly connected to the global BLM movement.

BLM also generated backlash. Critics argued that the movement was too decentralized, that some protesters engaged in violence and looting, that the rhetoric was divisive, and that the slogan "defund the police" was politically counterproductive. Within the movement itself, there were debates about strategy, leadership, and the relationship between protest and policy change.

#MeToo: from local to global Beginner

In October 2017, the actress Alyssa Milano encouraged women who had experienced sexual harassment or assault to share their stories on social media using the hashtag #MeToo. The response was overwhelming: within 24 hours, the hashtag had been used over 12 million times. Within weeks, it had spread to over 80 countries and been translated into numerous languages.

The movement was not Alyssa Milano's creation. Tarana Burke, a Black activist, had founded the "Me Too" movement in 2006 to support survivors of sexual violence, particularly young women of colour in low-income communities. Burke's work was grassroots, community-based, and focused on providing resources and support to survivors. The social media explosion in 2017 brought the phrase to a global audience but shifted the demographics of the conversation toward white, middle-class, professional women — a shift that Burke herself noted.

#MeToo also generated backlash. In France, 100 prominent women published an open letter arguing that the movement had gone too far, conflating seduction with harassment and creating a "puritanical" climate. The letter reflected genuine cultural differences in attitudes toward sexuality and public life, but it was also criticized for minimizing the experiences of women who had experienced serious harassment and assault.

#MeToo around the world

The #MeToo movement took different forms in different countries:

China. The Chinese #MeToo movement emerged in 2018, when university students and young professionals began sharing accounts of sexual harassment. The movement was quickly censored by the Chinese government, which removed social media posts and detained activists. Despite censorship, the movement persisted through creative use of coded language and offline networks. In 2021, tennis player Peng Shuai accused a former senior government official of sexual assault. Her social media post was deleted within minutes, and she disappeared from public view for weeks, sparking an international outcry.

India. India's #MeToo movement gained momentum in 2018, when women in journalism, entertainment, and academia publicly accused powerful men of harassment and assault. The movement built on years of feminist activism in India, including the mass protests following the gang rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi in 2012. The Indian #MeToo movement highlighted the intersection of gender, caste, and class: women from lower-caste and lower-income backgrounds face sexual violence at higher rates but receive less media attention and less legal protection.

Egypt. In 2020, Egyptian women used social media to share accounts of sexual assault, targeting powerful men in entertainment and business. The movement was significant because public discussion of sexual violence was largely taboo in Egypt. Some accusers faced legal retaliation, including charges of "morality" offenses and "spreading false news."

Sweden and Iceland. These countries, already known for strong gender-equality policies, saw #MeToo strengthen existing movements and lead to concrete policy changes. Iceland made the gender pay gap illegal in 2018. Sweden passed a law requiring explicit consent for sexual activity. The movement in Scandinavia demonstrated that #MeToo was not only about exposing abuse but about changing the legal and institutional frameworks that enabled it.

Climate activism: the Global South was here first Beginner

Greta Thunberg became the face of climate activism in 2018, when she began skipping school to protest outside the Swedish parliament with a hand-painted sign reading "Skolstrejk for klimatet" (School strike for climate). Her solitary protest inspired the Fridays for Future movement, which mobilized millions of students in over 150 countries.

Thunberg's impact is real and should be acknowledged. But the standard media narrative — a lone European teenager ignites a global climate movement — erases decades of climate activism by people in the Global South who have been fighting the effects of climate change long before it became a mainstream concern in wealthy countries.

Pacific Island nations have been raising the alarm about rising sea levels since the 1990s. The leaders of Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands have used every international forum available to them to argue that climate change is not a future threat but a present reality that threatens the very existence of their nations. Anote Tong, president of Kiribati from 2003 to 2016, spent years advocating for climate action and even purchased land in Fiji as a potential relocation site for his country's population.

African climate activists have been organizing for decades. Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist who founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, organized women to plant trees, combat deforestation, and challenge authoritarian land policies. She was beaten, arrested, and vilified by the Kenyan government before receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 — the first African woman to do so ^[maathai].

Indigenous communities in the Amazon, the Arctic, and across the Americas have been defending their land and ecosystems from extraction and destruction for centuries. These are not environmental movements in the Western sense — they are struggles for cultural survival, land rights, and self-determination that happen to align with environmental protection because indigenous land management practices are often far more sustainable than industrial alternatives.

Indian climate activists have organized against coal mining, dam construction, and deforestation for decades. The Chipko movement of the 1970s, in which villagers in Uttarakhand hugged trees to prevent them from being felled, is one of the earliest and most iconic examples of grassroots environmental activism. The Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement), which opposed the construction of large dams on the Narmada River, brought together environmental concerns with the rights of displaced communities.

The point is not to diminish Thunberg's contribution. It is to recognize that climate activism has a long history, most of it outside the Global North, and that the people who have been most affected by climate change have been fighting it the longest.

LGBTQ+ rights: progress and persecution Beginner

The global landscape of LGBTQ+ rights is a map of profound inequality. As of 2025, same-sex marriage is legal in over 30 countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Uruguay. At the same time, same-sex sexual activity remains criminalized in approximately 60 countries, and punishable by death in several.

This disparity reflects different cultural, religious, legal, and political traditions. But it also reflects colonialism. Many of the laws criminalizing homosexuality in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean were imposed by British colonial authorities and left in place after independence. India's Section 377, which criminalized "carnal intercourse against the order of nature," was a British colonial law enacted in 1861. The Indian Supreme Court struck it down in 2018, after decades of activism by Indian LGBTQ+ organizations.

LGBTQ+ movements around the world

Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage in 2019, after years of activism and a controversial referendum. The movement faced organized opposition from conservative Christian and family-values groups, but succeeded through a combination of legal strategy, public education, and political organizing.

South Africa was the first country in Africa to legalize same-sex marriage, in 2006. The country's post-apartheid constitution, adopted in 1996, explicitly prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation — one of the first constitutions in the world to do so. But legal equality has not eliminated social discrimination, and LGBTQ+ people in South Africa, particularly in rural areas, continue to face violence and stigma.

Poland and Hungary have moved in the opposite direction, with governments actively opposing LGBTQ+ rights. Poland's ruling Law and Justice party declared "LGBT-free zones" in parts of the country. Hungary's government passed a law banning the "promotion of homosexuality" in schools and media. These developments reflect a broader pattern in which LGBTQ+ rights are contested as part of a cultural battle between liberal and conservative visions of society.

Uganda passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act in 2023, which imposes life imprisonment for same-sex relations and the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality." The law was supported by American evangelical Christian organizations that have been active in promoting anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in African countries, raising questions about the role of foreign actors in shaping domestic policy.

The global LGBTQ+ rights landscape demonstrates that progress is not linear or inevitable. It is contested, uneven, and shaped by colonial legacies, religious institutions, political strategies, and the activism of people who risk their safety and freedom to demand equality.

Labor movements: from factories to gig economy Beginner

Labor movements were among the first organized social movements in the modern world, and they remain among the most important. The struggle for the eight-hour workday, workplace safety regulations, the right to unionize, minimum wage laws, and social security systems was won through decades of organizing, striking, and sometimes violent confrontation between workers and employers.

The geography of labor movements has shifted. In the early twentieth century, the centres of labor activism were in the industrializing West — the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the centres shifted to the Global South, where industrialization moved in search of cheaper labor.

Bangladesh. The garment industry in Bangladesh employs approximately 4 million workers, the vast majority of them women, who produce clothing for Western brands under conditions that would be illegal in the countries where the clothing is sold. The Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013 killed 1,134 people and injured over 2,500. The disaster triggered protests and led to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a legally binding agreement between brands and trade unions to improve factory safety. The accord was a significant achievement, but enforcement remains uneven and working conditions in many factories remain dangerous.

China. Labor organizing in China faces unique challenges because independent trade unions are illegal. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the only legal union, is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and does not represent workers in negotiations with employers. Despite this, workers have organized strikes and protests, particularly in the manufacturing centres of Guangdong province. These actions are typically local and spontaneous rather than part of a coordinated national movement, because the government suppresses any organization it perceives as a threat to its authority.

The gig economy. In wealthy countries, the nature of work has changed dramatically. The rise of gig economy platforms — Uber, DoorDash, Amazon, and others — has created a new category of workers who are classified as independent contractors rather than employees. This classification denies them minimum wage protections, unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, and the right to unionize. Gig workers have organized in several countries: Uber drivers in the UK won the right to be classified as workers (not contractors) in a 2021 Supreme Court ruling. Delivery riders in Spain, Australia, and the United States have organized strikes and protests.

Indigenous rights movements Beginner

Indigenous rights movements are among the longest-running and most important social movements in the world, though they receive less attention in mainstream Western media than movements organized by non-indigenous people.

Standing Rock (2016-2017). The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their allies protested the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was designed to carry crude oil beneath Lake Oahe, the tribe's primary source of drinking water. The protests drew thousands of people from across the United States and from indigenous communities around the world. The movement used social media to share images and videos of police using water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets against protesters in sub-freezing temperatures. The pipeline was completed under the Trump administration, but the movement raised national awareness of indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, and the failure of the consultation process.

Amazon defenders. Indigenous communities in the Amazon rainforest — in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and other countries — have been defending their land against logging, mining, oil extraction, and agricultural expansion for decades. These struggles are environmental, cultural, and existential: the destruction of the rainforest destroys the communities that depend on it. The murder of indigenous leaders and environmental activists in the Amazon is a persistent problem. Brazil has one of the highest rates of killings of environmental defenders in the world.

Australia. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have fought for land rights, self-determination, and recognition since European colonization began in 1788. The Mabo decision of 1992, in which the Australian High Court rejected the doctrine of terra nullius (the legal fiction that Australia was unoccupied when the British arrived), was a landmark. The ongoing Uluru Statement from the Heart, which calls for a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament, represents the current phase of this struggle.

Canada. The Idle No More movement, which began in 2012, was a grassroots movement by First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples to protest legislation that threatened indigenous sovereignty and environmental protections. The movement used round dances, teach-ins, and social media to raise awareness and build solidarity. The discovery of unmarked graves at former residential school sites in 2021 intensified national attention on the legacy of colonialism and the ongoing injustices faced by indigenous communities.

Digital activism: social media as tool and trap Beginner

Digital technology has transformed social movements in ways that are both empowering and dangerous.

The benefits. Social media enables rapid communication, coordination, and mobilization. Activists can share information in real time, document police violence, organize protests, and build solidarity across borders. The Arab Spring, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and #EndSARS all relied heavily on social media for communication and mobilization. Hashtags function as organizing tools that allow people to find each other, share stories, and build collective identity.

The limitations. Social media activism is often shallow and temporary — a phenomenon critics call slacktivism or clicktivism, in which people express support for a cause by liking, sharing, or retweeting without taking more substantive action. Social media algorithms prioritize engagement over accuracy, creating environments where misinformation spreads rapidly. Movements that rely on social media are vulnerable to surveillance, censorship, and digital repression by governments.

Digital repression. Governments around the world have developed sophisticated tools for monitoring, censoring, and disrupting online activism. China's Great Firewall blocks access to foreign social media platforms and monitors domestic communications. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other countries have shut down the internet during periods of political unrest. Russia has passed laws criminalizing online speech that criticizes the government or the military. Surveillance technology, often developed by Western companies, is sold to governments that use it to monitor and suppress dissent.

The paradox of digital activism is that the same tools that enable mobilization also enable surveillance and repression. Social media platforms are designed to collect data, and that data can be accessed by governments. Activists who use digital tools to organize protests are also creating records of their activities that can be used against them. The balance between the benefits and risks of digital activism depends on the political context: in democracies with strong privacy protections, digital tools are relatively safe. In authoritarian states, they can be dangerous.

Visual: globalization and social movements timeline Beginner

Figure: Major social movements in the era of globalization, showing how movements originate across the world and influence each other through transnational networks.

GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS — SELECTED TIMELINE
1994  Zapatista uprising (Mexico)          [Global South]
1999  Battle of Seattle / WTO protests     [Global North]
2001  World Social Forum (Brazil)          [Global South]
2004  Green Belt Movement grows (Kenya)    [Global South]
2006  Me Too founded by Tarana Burke (US)  [Global North]
2009  Green Movement (Iran)                [Global South]
2010  Arab Spring begins (Tunisia)         [Global South]
2011  Occupy Wall Street (USA)             [Global North]
      Indignados (Spain)                   [Global North]
2012  Idle No More (Canada)                [Global North]
2013  Black Lives Matter founded (USA)     [Global North]
2014  Umbrella Movement (Hong Kong)        [Global South]
2016  Standing Rock (USA)                  [Global North]
2018  #MeToo goes global                   [Global]
      Fridays for Future (Sweden)          [Global North]
2019  Sudan revolution                     [Global South]
      Hong Kong protests                   [Global South]
      Same-sex marriage, Taiwan            [Global South]
2020  #EndSARS (Nigeria)                   [Global South]
      BLM global protests                  [Global]
2022  Mahsa Amini protests (Iran)          [Global South]

Check your understanding Beginner

Formal definitions Intermediate

Globalization. The process through which the world is becoming increasingly interconnected through the expansion of trade, communication, migration, and cultural exchange across national borders. Globalization operates in multiple dimensions — economic, political, cultural, and communicative — and its effects are uneven: it creates winners and losers within and between countries. The sociological study of globalization examines not only the economic and technological processes of integration but also the social movements that resist, reshape, and respond to globalization.

Social movement. A collective, organized, sustained effort by a group of people to promote or resist social change. Charles Tilly defined social movements as a distinctive form of contentious politics in which ordinary people make collective claims on authorities, other holders of power, or the general public ^[tilly2004]. Social movements differ from isolated protests, riots, or interest-group lobbying in their sustained organization, their use of repertoires of contention (marches, strikes, boycotts, petitions, occupations), and their framing of grievances as social rather than merely personal problems.

Political opportunity structure. The set of political conditions and institutional arrangements that facilitate or constrain social movement activity. Sidney Tarrow's framework identifies several dimensions of political opportunity: the openness of the political system to new actors, the stability of political alignments, the availability of elite allies, and the state's capacity and propensity for repression ^[tarrow2011]. Movements are more likely to emerge and succeed when political opportunities expand — for example, when elite alignments shift, when new institutional channels open, or when the state's repressive capacity is weakened.

Framing. The process by which social movements construct and communicate meanings, interpretations, and narratives about the issues they address. David Snow and colleagues' framing theory identifies three core framing tasks: diagnostic framing (identifying a problem and attributing blame), prognostic framing (proposing solutions), and motivational framing (providing reasons to participate) ^[snow1986]. Framing is not merely communication — it is a strategic activity through which movements define reality, recruit participants, and mobilize collective action.

Transnational advocacy networks. Networks of activists, nongovernmental organizations, international organizations, and sometimes sympathetic governments that work across national borders to promote shared norms and values. Keck and Sikkink's concept describes how activists in countries with limited domestic political space can leverage international networks to put pressure on their own governments through a mechanism they call the "boomerang pattern" ^{[keck_sikkink1998]}.

Key concepts: political opportunities, framing, and digital mobilization Intermediate

This section examines three theoretical frameworks that sociologists use to understand how social movements emerge, grow, and achieve (or fail to achieve) their goals.

Political process theory

Doug McAdam's political process theory, developed in his study of the US civil rights movement, argues that social movements emerge when three conditions converge: expanding political opportunities, indigenous organizational strength, and cognitive liberation (a shift in consciousness through which people come to believe that change is possible) ^[mcadam1982].

The civil rights movement illustrates all three conditions. Political opportunities expanded when the Cold War created pressure on the US government to address racial discrimination (the Soviet Union used American racism as propaganda). Indigenous organizational strength existed through Black churches, colleges, and civic organizations (the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). Cognitive liberation occurred when the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956) demonstrated that the racial order could be challenged.

Political process theory has been criticized for being too focused on the political system and not enough on the cultural and emotional dimensions of movements. It also tends to be US-centric, and its applicability to movements in authoritarian contexts, where political opportunities are severely restricted, is debated.

Framing and resonance

Snow and colleagues' framing theory focuses on the meaning-making activities of social movements ^[snow1986]. Movements do not simply respond to objective conditions. They construct interpretations of those conditions and present them in ways designed to resonate with potential supporters.

The #MeToo movement illustrates the power of diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing. The diagnostic frame identified sexual harassment and assault as systemic problems, not isolated incidents. The prognostic frame proposed accountability for perpetrators, changes in workplace policies, and cultural transformation. The motivational frame provided a reason to participate: sharing your story was both a personal act of courage and a contribution to collective change.

Framing is not a neutral activity. Movements compete with counter-movements, media narratives, and government propaganda for control of the interpretive frame. The success of a movement depends partly on whether its frames resonate with the values, experiences, and emotions of the people it is trying to mobilize.

Resource mobilization

Resource mobilization theory, developed by McCarthy and Zald in the 1970s, emphasizes the practical resources that movements need to sustain themselves: money, organizational infrastructure, leadership, communication channels, and access to decision-makers. The theory argues that grievances are ubiquitous — many people are dissatisfied with their conditions — but movements only emerge when resources are available to organize collective action.

This perspective is useful for understanding the organizational dimension of movements, but it has been criticized for underestimating the role of emotions, identity, and moral conviction in driving participation. People do not join social movements only because resources are available. They join because they are angry, because their identity is at stake, because they believe in a cause, or because they have been personally affected by injustice.

Piven and Cloward: the disruptive power of the poor

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's Poor People's Movements (1977) challenged the assumption that social movements need formal organizations, resources, and leadership to be effective ^{[piven_cloward1977]}. They argued that the most effective actions of poor and working-class people are often spontaneous, disruptive, and unplanned — mass strikes, riots, rent strikes, and other forms of direct action that disrupt business as usual and force elites to respond.

Piven and Cloward's argument is particularly relevant to understanding movements in the Global South, where formal organizational resources are often scarce and where the most effective mobilization sometimes takes the form of mass disruption rather than organized lobbying. The Arab Spring, the #EndSARS movement in Nigeria, and the land occupation movements of Latin America all illustrate the disruptive power that Piven and Cloward described.

Comparative framework: movements across regions Intermediate

Latin American social movements

Latin America has one of the richest traditions of social movement activism in the world. The region's movements have addressed land reform, labour rights, indigenous sovereignty, women's rights, environmental justice, and opposition to military dictatorship.

Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement (MST), founded in 1984, organizes landless rural workers to occupy unused land, establish cooperative farms, and demand agrarian reform. The MST has settled hundreds of thousands of families and has become one of the largest social movements in Latin America. Argentina's piqueteros (picketers), who emerged during the economic crisis of 2001, organized road blockades and protests against unemployment, austerity, and political corruption. Bolivia's indigenous-led movements against water privatization (the Cochabamba Water War of 2000) and gas extraction (the Gas Conflict of 2003) brought down presidents and shifted national policy.

These movements share several features: they are rooted in local communities, they use direct action and disruption as primary tactics, they combine economic demands with cultural and political ones, and they operate in contexts of deep inequality and weak democratic institutions.

African social movements

Africa's social movements are diverse and often underreported in Western media. South Africa's anti-apartheid movement is one of the most significant social movements of the twentieth century, combining internal resistance (trade unions, community organizations, youth movements) with international solidarity campaigns and armed struggle. The movement succeeded in dismantling apartheid in 1994, though the economic inequalities it fought against persist.

In West Africa, the #EndSARS movement in Nigeria (2020) demonstrated the potential for youth-led digital activism to challenge state violence. In East Africa, the Green Belt Movement in Kenya and similar environmental initiatives have linked women's empowerment to environmental sustainability. In North Africa, the Arab Spring's origins in Tunisia challenged assumptions about political stagnation in the region.

African social movements face distinctive challenges: state repression, limited digital infrastructure in rural areas, ethnic and religious fragmentation, and the legacy of colonialism and structural adjustment programs that weakened civil society institutions.

Asian social movements

Asia's social movements span an enormous range of political contexts, from established democracies (India, Japan, South Korea) to authoritarian states (China, Myanmar, Vietnam) to hybrid systems (Singapore, Thailand).

India has one of the most vibrant civil societies in the world, with movements addressing caste discrimination, religious nationalism, gender violence, land rights, environmental degradation, and labour conditions. The Narmada Bachao Andolan, the Chipko movement, and the ongoing farmers' protests illustrate the diversity and persistence of Indian activism.

South Korea's democracy movement, which culminated in the June Democratic Uprising of 1987, successfully transitioned the country from military dictatorship to democracy through sustained student and labour activism. The movement's success was built on decades of organizing, university networks, labour union mobilization, and international pressure.

Myanmar's democracy movement, led for decades by Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy, succeeded in establishing a civilian government in 2015 after decades of military rule. The 2021 military coup reversed this progress, and the ongoing civil resistance movement faces severe repression. The movement uses social media, strikes, and civil disobedience, but the military's willingness to use lethal force has limited the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance.

Exercise Intermediate

Competing perspectives on social movements Master

Structural approaches: political opportunity and resource mobilization

Structural approaches to social movements focus on the conditions that make mobilization possible: political opportunities, organizational resources, and institutional access. These approaches have the advantage of being testable and comparative — they can be applied to movements across different countries and time periods to identify patterns.

The limitation of structural approaches is that they can understate the role of agency, emotion, and culture. Movements do not simply respond to structural conditions. They interpret those conditions, construct meanings, and make strategic choices that shape their trajectories. Two movements facing similar structural conditions may take very different paths because of the choices their leaders and participants make.

Constructivist approaches: framing, culture, and identity

Constructivist approaches focus on the meaning-making activities of social movements: how movements frame issues, construct collective identities, and engage in cultural production. Alberto Melucci's work on "collective identity" emphasized that social movements are not simply responses to objective grievances but are processes through which people construct shared definitions of reality and shared commitments to action ^[melucci].

Constructivist approaches capture dimensions of movements that structural approaches miss — the emotional, cultural, and symbolic dimensions of collective action. But they can be criticized for being too focused on discourse and not enough on material conditions. A movement's success depends not only on its framing but on its resources, its organizational capacity, and the political context in which it operates.

Critical approaches: power, colonialism, and the Global South

Critical approaches to social movements emphasize the role of power, colonialism, and global inequality in shaping both the conditions that produce movements and the movements themselves. These approaches ask: whose grievances get taken seriously? Which movements receive media attention and international support? Which are ignored or suppressed?

Arturo Escobar's work on social movements in Latin America argues that Western social movement theory was developed primarily through the study of Western movements and may not adequately capture the dynamics of movements in the Global South, where the state may be weaker, civil society less institutionalized, and the stakes more immediately existential. The Zapatistas, for example, are not simply a social movement in the Western sense. They are an indigenous community exercising self-governance, maintaining cultural practices, and resisting the encroachment of global capitalism on their territory.

This perspective challenges the assumption that there is a single theoretical framework that can explain all social movements. Movements in different contexts may require different analytical tools, and the tools developed in Western academia may carry implicit assumptions about the nature of the state, civil society, and political participation that do not apply everywhere.

Connections Master

• Race, ethnicity, and gender 30.05.01 connects through the intersectional dimension of social movements. BLM, #MeToo, and indigenous rights movements all operate at the intersection of race, gender, and class. The global pattern of LGBTQ+ rights cannot be understood without the framework of race, ethnicity, and colonialism. Feminist critiques of globalization highlight its gendered effects.

• Deviance and social control 30.06.01 connects through the criminalization of protest, the policing of social movements, and the use of social control mechanisms against activists. The prison-industrial complex is a target of social movement activism. The distinction between legitimate protest and criminal deviance is itself a social construction that movements challenge.

• Urbanization and demography 30.08.01 connects through the urban concentration of social movements, the role of cities as sites of protest, and the demographic dimensions of movements (youth bulges, migration, urbanization). The Arab Spring was concentrated in cities. Climate activism addresses the demographic and environmental consequences of urbanization. Migration movements are shaped by demographic patterns.

• Psychology: social psychology 29.07.01 connects through shared concepts: conformity, obedience, group dynamics, persuasion, and collective behaviour. Social movements are collective phenomena that depend on the same social psychological mechanisms — conformity, social identity, persuasion — that social psychology studies. The bystander effect applies to political participation: people are less likely to act when others are present but inactive.

• Philosophy: democracy 20.07.01 connects through foundational questions about democratic participation, the legitimacy of protest, and the role of civil society in democratic governance. Social movements are a form of democratic participation that exists outside formal electoral politics, raising questions about the boundaries of legitimate dissent and the obligations of democratic states to respond to protest.

• World history: colonialism and imperialism 32.15.01 connects through the colonial origins of many of the inequalities that social movements contest. Anti-colonial movements were among the most significant social movements of the twentieth century. The legacy of colonialism shapes contemporary movements through economic structures, political institutions, legal codes (including anti-LGBTQ+ laws), and cultural attitudes.

Historical and philosophical context Master

The emergence of the modern social movement

Charles Tilly's historical research traced the origins of the modern social movement to the late eighteenth century in Britain and France ^[tilly2004]. Before the modern social movement, collective action took different forms: bread riots, peasant revolts, religious pilgrimages, charivaris (rough music protests). The modern social movement, Tilly argued, is distinguished by its use of sustained campaigns of claims-making, its repertoire of contention (public meetings, demonstrations, petitions, strikes), and its public displays of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (WUNC displays).

The anti-slavery movement, which began in Britain in the late eighteenth century and spread to the United States and elsewhere, is often considered the first modern social movement. It exhibited the key features Tilly identified: sustained campaigns, organized repertoires of contention, and public displays of moral worthiness and commitment. It was also a transnational movement, connecting activists across the Atlantic and establishing patterns of international solidarity that would be replicated by subsequent movements.

The labour movement of the nineteenth century, the women's suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the anti-colonial movements of the mid-twentieth century extended and transformed the repertoire of social movement activity. Each movement developed new tactics (the general strike, the hunger strike, the boycott, the march on the capital), new organizational forms (trade unions, political parties, nongovernmental organizations), and new ideological frameworks (Marxism, feminism, nationalism, pan-Africanism).

The new social movements of the late twentieth century

The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s — the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, the LGBTQ+ rights movement — differed from earlier movements in ways that sociologists have debated. Some theorists, following Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci, argued that these "new social movements" were qualitatively different from the "old" class-based movements: they focused on cultural and identity issues rather than material redistribution, they operated outside traditional political institutions, and they challenged forms of domination (patriarchy, homophobia, environmental destruction) that were not primarily economic ^[melucci].

Other theorists, particularly those in the Marxist tradition, argued that the distinction between "old" and "new" movements was overstated: identity-based movements were addressing the cultural superstructure of the same economic system that class movements addressed, and the material basis of cultural oppression (unequal pay, housing discrimination, environmental racism) connected identity politics to class politics.

The debate between these perspectives remains unresolved. What is clear is that the social movements of the late twentieth century expanded the range of issues that collective action could address, developed new organizational forms (non-hierarchical, consensus-based, decentralized), and demonstrated that cultural change could be as important as political and economic change.

The digital turn

The rise of the internet and social media in the early twenty-first century transformed social movements. Manuel Castells, in Networks of Outrage and Hope (2012), argued that digital networks enable a new form of social movement — networked, decentralized, and capable of rapid mobilization — that is qualitatively different from the hierarchical, institutionalized movements of the twentieth century ^{[castells2012]}.

Castells's analysis captures something important about movements like Occupy, the Arab Spring, and #MeToo, which relied heavily on digital communication and operated without centralized leadership. But it may overstate the novelty of networked organization: earlier movements also operated through networks (the Underground Railroad, anti-colonial networks, Cold War dissident networks), even if those networks were slower and more localized.

The digital turn has also created new vulnerabilities. Social media platforms are owned by corporations that can censor, deplatform, or surveil activists. Governments can shut down the internet, monitor communications, and use digital tools to identify and suppress dissent. The same infrastructure that enables mobilization also enables repression.

Philosophical questions

The study of social movements raises questions that are fundamentally philosophical. Under what conditions is protest legitimate? When does protest become revolution? Is violence ever justified in the pursuit of social change? What obligations do citizens have to participate in movements that address injustices they may not personally experience? What is the relationship between social movements and democracy — are movements a sign of democratic health (citizens exercising their voice) or democratic failure (citizens forced outside formal institutions to be heard)?

These questions have been addressed by political philosophers from diverse traditions. Hannah Arendt argued that the right to revolt is the foundation of all political freedom. John Rawls's theory of justice provides a framework for evaluating whether the demands of a social movement are legitimate. Frantz Fanon's analysis of anti-colonial violence argued that colonization is itself a form of violence that justifies violent resistance. Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophy of nonviolent direct action argued that peaceful protest is both morally superior and practically more effective than violence.

The philosophical dimension of social movements is not academic. It shapes the strategic choices that movements make, the public's evaluation of those movements, and the historical judgement of whether a movement's actions were justified.

Bibliography Master

Social movement theory:

• Tilly, C. — Social Movements, 1768-2004 (Paradigm Publishers, 2004).
• McAdam, D. — Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 (University of Chicago Press, 1982).
• Tarrow, S. — Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, revised ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• Snow, D.A., Rochford, E.B., Worden, S.K. and Benford, R.D. — "Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation", American Sociological Review 51(4), 464-481 (1986).
• Piven, F.F. and Cloward, R.A. — Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (Pantheon, 1977).
• Melucci, A. — Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (Temple University Press, 1989).
• Castells, M. — Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Polity, 2012).

Globalization:

• Steger, M.B. — Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, 3rd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Stiglitz, J. — Globalization and Its Discontents (W.W. Norton, 2002).
• Keck, M.E. and Sikkink, K. — Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Cornell University Press, 1998).
• Della Porta, D. and Tarrow, S. (eds.) — Transnational Protest and Global Activism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).

Climate and environmental movements:

• Maathai, W. — Unbowed: A Memoir (Knopf, 2006).
• Klein, N. — This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Simon and Schuster, 2014).

Labour and indigenous movements:

• Nash, J. — We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines (Columbia University Press, 1979).
• Escobar, A. — Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Duke University Press, 2008).