What Social Identities Can Tell Us about Violence in Social Movements, and Vice Versa

AK Thompson’s “Ten Theses” is a timely and compelling piece. It challenges collective action scholars to address the nature, bases, and consequences of violence and physical force in a manner that does not position these as anomalous or outside the bounds of “normal” or “normative” action (a tendency that sees violence and physical force more regularly addressed on the other side of soft academic borders, such as that separating social movement and protest scholars from scholars of “terrorism”). I want to address this challenge here by reflecting on what my “home” discipline of social psychology can offer in terms of insights, and (more importantly) what blind spots and limitations remain. For convenience, I adopt a rather conventional and narrow working definition of “violence” as involving physical force, rather than a broader (but equally valid) definition that encompasses any act (including speech) that can cause hurt or harm.

Editorial

In this first issue of 2021, we find ourselves still in this strange space of a viral pandemic that first emerged in 2019. Yet contentious politics persists in public places, and the present issue reflects Contention’s continued efforts to publish interdisciplinary research-based articles from around the world.

Some Psychological Implications of Black Struggle

Yet another long, hot summer in 2020 brought to the broader consciousness—in the US and well beyond—what Black folks have known for centuries about the ways in which racial hegemony relies on the acute violence of a police knee on a prone neck and the chronic violence of prisons, prefects, and (public housing) projects (for discussions, see Bulhan 1985; Omi and Winant 2014; Sidanius and Pratto 1999). In their commentary, AK Thompson makes too many important points for us to address in this brief commentary. Thus, as research psychologists with a transdisciplinary social-behavioral approach to protest, resistance, and societal change, we focus on what we see as Thompson’s most psychologically oriented theses: II, III, V, and VI. In sum, we see Thompson as arguing that social movements necessarily include a (more or less latent) threat of violence (II) and that this violence is noticed and suppressed because it challenges (III) the logic (economic, political, and cultural), the ethics, and the formalization (legal, political, and institutional) of racial hegemony (V). In addition, we take Thompson to argue that Black freedom struggles are, and have always been, flexible in means and aims (VI), adjusting strategically to the multifaceted dynamics of oppression and resistance.

The Relationship between Dimensions of Collective Action, Introversion/ Extroversion, and Collective Action Endorsement among Women

Given the psychosocial benefits of collective action for minority group members, we explored how the personality trait introversion/extroversion may contribute to current understandings of what motivates collective action among women. Dimensions of collective action that are consistent with introversion (e.g., low risk) were expected to predict greater endorsement of collective action among introverts, whereas dimensions consistent with extroversion (e.g., public) were expected to predict greater endorsement among extroverts. One hundred and seventy-nine women completed an online questionnaire, and regression analyses showed that among introverts, collective action rated lower in risk and social cost, but higher in effectiveness and formality predicted greater endorsement. Among extroverts, collective action rated as more public (vs. private) predicted greater endorsement. The implications of utilizing personality profiles to enhance collective action are discussed.

Parties, Movements, Brokers

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.

Why “Dissident” Irish Republicans Haven’t Gone Away

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.

A Penchant for Protest?

Much has been made of the Millennial generation’s seemingly low rates of political participation. Some argue that this generation is politically apathetic, while others suggest that Millennials have eschewed traditional politics in favor of protest as a means of political participation. Drawing on Canada’s 2013 General Social Survey (Cycle 27, Social Identity), I employ an exploratory latent class analysis to determine whether the Millennial generation can be usefully categorized according to their participation in various forms of political, civic, and social movement activities. I then use binary logit regression to determine how well the biographical availability hypothesis explains Millennial politics. This research reveals that Canadian Millennials may be grouped into four categories: the politically unengaged, the politically expressive, the civically engaged, and activist. Support for the biographical availability hypothesis is mixed. As expected, students are more likely to be activists and parenthood reduces the odds of being politically expressive or an activist, but home ownership does not decrease the chances of Millennials being politically engaged and increases the chances of being civically engaged. Younger Millennials (ages 15–24) are much more likely to be politically unengaged compared to older Millennials (ages 25–34).

Digitally Dismantling Asian Authoritarianism

In April 2020, a Twitter war erupted under the hashtag #MilkTeaAlliance. It united users from Thailand, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in a fight against Chinese techno-nationalists’ attempts to shame public figures into supporting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s framing of geopolitics. In the months that followed, Thai, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong activists continued to lend support to each other through their use of this and other hashtags. Why does the #MilkTeaAlliance hashtag resonate with so many? What political contexts preceded the consolidation of the #MilkTeaAlliance, and how may this alliance reshape geopolitical landscapes off-line? We approach these questions from our perspective as activists embedded in these movements. We argue that the formation of the #MilkTeaAlliance unites voices that are marginalized diplomatically, discursively, and affectively by the CCP, and—more crucially—generates valuable affective and physical forms of intra-Asian solidarity against authoritarianism in the region.

Violence, Social Movements, and Black Freedom Struggles

George Floyd’s murder by police on 26 May 2020 set off a cycle of struggle that was notable for its size, intensity, and rate of diffusion. Starting in Minneapolis, the uprising quickly spread to dozens of other major cities and brought with it a repertoire that included riots, arson, and looting. In many places, these tactics coexisted with more familiar actions like public assemblies and mass marches; however, the inflection these tactics gave to the cycle of contention is not easily reconciled with the protest repertoire most frequently mobilized during movement campaigns in the United States today. This discrepancy has led to extensive commentary by scholars and movement participants, who have often weighed in by considering the moral and strategic efficacy of the chosen tactics. Such considerations should not be discounted. Nevertheless, I argue that both the dynamics of contention witnessed during the uprising and their ambivalent relationship to the established protest repertoire must first be understood in historical terms. By considering the relationship between violence, social movements, and Black freedom struggles in this way, I argue that scholars can develop a better understanding of current events while anticipating how the dynamics of contention are likely to develop going forward. Being attentive to these dynamics should in turn inform our research agendas, and it is with this aim in mind that I offer the following ten theses.

How Students on College Campuses Created Opportunities for Workers in Sweatshops

Political opportunity structure (POS) refers to how the larger social context, such as repression, shapes a social movement’s chances of success. Most work on POS looks at how movements deal with the political opportunities enabling and/or constraining them. This article looks at how one group of social movement actors operating in a more open POS alters the POS for a different group of actors in a more repressive environment through a chain of indirect leverage—how United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) uses the more open POS on college campuses to create new opportunities for workers in sweatshop factories. USAS exerts direct leverage over college administrators through protests, pushing them to exert leverage over major apparel companies through the licensing agreements schools have with these companies.