Contentious politics and the so called new social movements

During my PhD-education I came to be more and more interested in social movements. For me this has be a drastic shift from my previous research on primarily state actors and public officials, but also a logic consequence of my interest in politics. During the beginning of this phase I wrote an article called "from aid organization to political movement" where I developed a notion that had been seen throughout Europe during the last decade: the old division between humanitarian aid organizations and traditional social movements have become more and more blurred. 

But one of my key difficulties in social movement studies were a rather strong notion of social movements as something new. A common concept within this field of study is that social movements arose in the 1960's when people gathered around trying to change societies values rather than economic conditions. This is based from a division were the classical socialist massmovement lost their relevance in a society with a economically well situated middle class as lead political actor.

This is of course an over-simplification of an entire field, but I still, like Pichardo have come to wonder on what is new with these new social movements? If we look at history there are several examples of social movements aiming to contend societies conditions well before the 1960's. Just to name a few during the last century we have the rising suffragette movement in Europe and the us, the anti-war movement during WWI and the sexual reform movement during the 1930's. The example I know best is the latter, were people from all over the social strata tried to change norms in sexuality. 

I am not alone in thinking from this perspective. In the historigraphy of social movement scholarship there exist a wide criticism towards the new social movement paradigm. Often it is linked to a crisis within empirical scholarship were marxist theory and its emphasis on base and superstructure could no longer explain how contentious politics were made. Instead scholars from primarily italy and France launched a concept of new social movement studies, which aimed to describe how collective identity were made in the new movements. To me this was an excellent addition to the scholarship, since collective identity is one of the key parts of political mobilization. But it does not however reflect upon why certain movements succeed or how they ultimately reach their goal. 

Demonstration arranged by Refugees Welcome 2015

However, during the last year I have become increasingly familiar with the work of Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly and Douglas McAdam. Even though these scholars does not explicitly adress the new social movement paradigm, they do however put forwards the notion that social mobilization can not be explained by collective identity solely. Their theory instead tries to incorporate various scholarship on mobilization, ranging from the notion of framing (how social movements create a basic scheme of intpretention of social issues) to more abstract concepts such as allegiancy building. To me this have meant a possibility to not buy a catch all theory of simplistic nature, but rather to discover various aspects of movements within the field of contentious politics. Therefore I do not view myself as a scholar of new social movements, but rather as a scholar of movements and contention. But perhaps that might change, one of the charming things with being in academia is the it creates new routes for thinking politically.

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