Social Movement Participation and the “Timing” of Involvement: The Case of the Northern Ireland civil Rights Movement

2007 ◽  
pp. 37-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Bosi
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Movement Participation

Pathways to Modes of Movement Participation: Micromobilization in the Nashville Civil Rights Movement

Social Forces ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 255-280
Author(s):  
Larry W Isaac ◽  
Jonathan S Coley ◽  
Daniel B Cornfield ◽  
Dennis C Dickerson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Prior Experience ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The Core ◽  
Workshop Training ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Movement Participation

Abstract We employ a unique sample of participants in the early 1960s Nashville civil rights movement to examine within-movement micromobilization processes. Rather than assuming movement micromobilization and participation is internally homogeneous, we extend the literature by identifying distinct types of pathways (entry and preparation) and distinct types (or modes) of movement participation. Pathways into the Nashville movement are largely structured a priori by race, by several distinct points of entry (politically pulled, directly recruited, or professionally pushed), and by prior experience or training in nonviolent direct action. Participation falls into a distinct division of movement labor characterized by several major modes of participation—core cadre, soldiers, and supporters. We demonstrate that pathways and modes of participation are systematically linked and that qualitatively distinct pathways contribute to understanding qualitative modes of movement participation. Specifically, all core cadre members were pulled into activism, soldiers were either pulled or recruited, and supporters were pulled, recruited, or pushed. Highly organized, disciplined, and intense workshop training proved to be integral in becoming a member of the core cadre but not for soldier or supporter roles. We conclude that social movement studies would do well to pay more attention to variability in structured pathways to, preparation for, and qualitative dimensions of movement participation. These dimensions are critical to further understanding the way movements and their participants move and add insights regarding an important chapter in the southern civil rights movement. The implications of our findings extend to modes of movement activism more generally.

Responses in the west of Ireland to civil rights protest in Northern Ireland, 1968–72

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (159) ◽  
pp. 58-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Madden
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The West ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Government ◽  
West Of Ireland

Abstract1968 has become synonymous with the large-scale global protests of that year. International scholarship has increasingly sought to examine instances of these protests in global peripheries, and amongst the most studied examples is Northern Ireland. The growth of civil rights protest in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, which emerged from long-standing feelings of exclusion amongst the Catholic minority of the predominantly Protestant polity, was influenced by a broader international discourse of protest associated with the long 1968, notably the African-American civil rights movement. Simultaneously, in the west of Ireland, a number of protest groups also emerged in the late 1960s, frustrated at their communities’ perceived neglect by the government of the Republic of Ireland. This article will examine the emergence of these protest movements, discussing groups in the Galway Gaeltacht and other peripheral rural areas of Connacht, student activists in University College Galway, and campaigns challenging racism against the Travelling community. It will argue that they were influenced by the global protests associated with the long 1968, most notably by events across the border. For the purpose of the article, the ‘west of Ireland’ refers to the five Connacht counties of Galway, Roscommon, Mayo, Sligo and Leitrim.

Struggling to be Noticed: The Civil Rights Movement as an Academic Agenda Setter

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (04) ◽  
pp. 813-817 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harwood K. McClerking ◽  
Tasha S. Philpot
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
Movement Activity ◽  
Noticeable Increase ◽  
Agenda Setter ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
American Society

While the study of Black politics in the American context has not been a top priority in political science, it is indisputable that this topic in general is more likely to be discussed in the discipline's journals in recent decades than in the more distant past. What accounts for this noticeable increase in prominence? How did the study of Black politics move from total obscurity to occupying a more significant (although still relatively marginalized) position within mainstream political science? To answer these questions, we draw a parallel between politics and political science. Specifically, we posit that the increased focus on African American politics is due to Black agency in the form of social movement activity, which reached its zenith during the civil rights movement. Before the civil rights movement, we note as numerous others have, that the racially conservative views of American society in the nineteenth century resulted in Black politics being an understudied area. We argue, however, that as social movement activity increased the salience of racial issues in America, so too did it raise the importance of race for political scientists.

Extraordinary Isolation? Woodrow Wilson and the Civil Rights Movement

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-217
Author(s):  
Nicholas F. Jacobs ◽  
Sidney M. Milkis
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
Early Form ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
The Great Migration

This article explores the contentious and dynamic relationship between Woodrow Wilson and a nascent, diverse civil rights movement from 1912 to 1919. The pivotal relationship between Wilson and the early civil rights movement emerged out of two concurrent and related political developments: the increasing centrality of presidential administration in the constitutional order and the growing national aspirations of political strategies and goals among reform activists. Not only do we illustrate an early form of social movement politics that was largely antithetical to the administration's objectives, but we also trace how the strategies adopted by civil rights leaders were contingent on an early, still-to-be institutionalized administrative presidency. We highlight Wilson's involvement in the racial unrest that emerged from the debut of the film The Birth of a Nation and in the race riots that accompanied the Great Migration and World War I in his second term. These early twentieth-century episodes legitimized a form of collective action and helped to recast the modern presidency as an institution that both collaborated and competed with social movement organizations to control the timing and conditions of change.

British Intervention

2019 ◽  
pp. 176-196
Author(s):  
Brendan O’Leary
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
British Government ◽  
The North ◽  
Modern Media ◽  
Irish Government ◽  
Normative Order

The puzzle addressed in this chapter is why one British government intervened in Northern Ireland in 1969 and why another eventually resorted to direct rule in 1972. British conduct in this period stands out in comparison with the inactivity of their predecessors during similar historical junctures when the Ulster Unionist Party had been able to repress Catholic or nationalist discontent. Though the preference of many British officials was to shore up the Stormont regime, the civil-rights movement had corroded the previous normative order protecting the UUP’s control because its marchers demanded British rights for British citizens, in the full glare of modern media. The immediate precipitants of intervention in the loss of control by the RUC and the Specials are examined. They took place against the background of the mobilization of Irish forces and field hospitals and riotous pogroms directed against Catholics in Derry and Belfast. Whether Northern Ireland was reformable is addressed, as are the dynamics of the descent into loyalist violence, British counterinsurgency, and IRA insurgency. The development of Irish government policy toward the North in 1969–70 is treated in a brief appendix.

#BlackLivesMatter: An Analysis of the Movement as Social Drama

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-110
Author(s):  
Leslie Kay Jones
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
The United States ◽  
Technological Determinism ◽  
Movement Mechanics

Scholars agree that the United States is experiencing a new black civil and human rights movement called #BlackLivesMatter and that the Internet is pivotal to that movement. Protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and in Baltimore, Maryland, dominated national attention for months through 2014 and 2015. Protesters have successfully gained the attention of elite power brokers, a necessary step in the social movement process. #BlackLivesMatter has many insights to provide about mobilization, if researchers take black American discursive power and intellectual production more seriously as subjects of analysis. This article argues that a dramaturgy framework reveals important meaning making that occurs on the periphery of a social movement. In this periphery, my analysis shows that black social media publics are harbingers of racial progress. Introducing the concept of a Greek Chorus to the dramaturgy framework better clarifies the role that Twitter plays in the movement as a public space where outside observers negotiate their own meaning making surrounding the movement’s claims and strategies. Conceptualizing movement mechanics in this way provides a clearer understanding of the importance of digital media in the contemporary black civil rights movement without relying on technological determinism, reducing social media to a structural component of the movement, or undermining the importance of physicality to protest.

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