Social Movement — Definitions & Origins

• Srilatha Batliwala — collective action in response to inequality, oppression or unmet demands; organised groups pursuing common agendas over time.
• Turner and Killian — loosely organised endeavours by large groups to achieve specific goals within constitutional limits; Toch — collective efforts to address shared problems.
• Rajni Kothari — movements as non-party political processes, autonomous and distinct from conventional structures.
• Two defining features — collective action and the aim to promote or resist change.

Origins

Lorenz von Stein introduced the term (History of the French Social Movement), viewing movements as dynamic forces opposing the static state. Linked to democratisation and the Industrial Revolution; early British movements against slavery and for the franchise (Jeremy Bentham); post-war peace and environmental movements.

Factors — M.S.A. Rao M.S.A. Rao: relative deprivation (discontent drives change — the Naxalite movement), structural strain (norms clash with aspirations), revitalization (movements offer positive alternatives).

Old vs New Social Movements

• Jurgen Habermas — the shift is a silent revolution, from economic security toward rights, quality of life and autonomy.
• Rajni Kothari — NSMs rose in the 1970s out of dissatisfaction with parliamentary democracy; elite capture pushed the marginalised toward non-party political formations (NGOs, women’s, environmental, tribal).
• Gail Omvedt — NSMs offer new definitions of exploitation beyond Marxism, focusing on groups it ignored — Dalits, Shudras, women.

The “silent revolution” — the shift in collective action. Old SMs (material / economic · class-based · through parties) → New SMs (identity & culture · post-material · within civil society).

Features of NSMs & the Debate on ‘Newness’

Features

• Diverse social bases without a clear structural role (Hegedus); plural ideologies (Larana, Johnston and Gusfield); focus on symbolic and cultural identity; the personal (dress, relationships, lifestyle); non-violent tactics; decentralised, segmented structures.
• Alan Scott — NSMs are primarily social and cultural, aiming to change values rather than seize power; they operate within civil society, defending it against technocratic states.

The newness debate

• Critics — similar movements existed since the Industrial Revolution; thin empirical evidence; “new middle class” undefined; Francis Fukuyama — old liberal values remain predominant even in post-industrial societies.
• Andre Gunder Frank and Marta Fuentes — some concerns (ecology, universal peace) are genuinely new, but many have historical antecedents; Ramachandra Guha — “empty stomach” environmentalism of the South vs the “full stomach” environmentalism of the North.

the material-to-post-material shift (Habermas’s silent revolution); diverse base (Hegedus); plural ideologies; identity and the personal; non-violent, networked repertoires; civil-society location (Alan Scott); Habermas and Claus Offe beyond Marxist class reductionism.

Theories of Social Movements

Limits of classical Marxism — economic and class-identity reductionism (Canel). Variations within NSM theory — Jean Cohen and Alberto Melucci (civil-society action), Inglehart and Dalton (post-materialism), Hunt, Benford and Snow (identity via interaction), Melucci and Gusfield (submerged networks).

Identity, Autonomy & Resistance

• Bertaux — subjectivity is central; participants driven by moral feeling, not self-interest. Alberto Melucci — collective identity is constructed and negotiated through networks.
• Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison — movements generate new ideas by challenging dominant assumptions: cognitive praxis. Jean-Paul Sartre — atomised individuals can rapidly become a unified group on recognising shared discontent. Marxian — the shift from class-in-itself to class-for-itself.
• Alan Scott — three dimensions of autonomy: personal autonomy (women’s liberation), its extension to the group, and the autonomy struggle to pursue goals free of interference; personal freedoms are political.
• Anthony Giddens — actors convert resources to control their conditions; Michael Mann — compliance stems from a lack of means, not will; James C. Scott — the hidden transcript: subordinates critique power through rumour, song and jokes.

Types & Scope of Movements

By aim

• Migratory (large-scale migration — Bangladesh to India); reform (partial change, thrives in democracies); revolutionary (overthrow the system — French, Russian); resistance / reactionary (push back — fundamentalist movements, the Ku Klux Klan); alternative (individual behaviour change). Also rigid, traditional (the Luddites) and group- vs individual-based.

By scope

• Trans-national / global (World Social Forum); localized (environmental, cultural); multi-layer (local to international).

Movements, Pressure Groups & Parties

Civil disobedience is a tactic within movements, not a synonym — popularised by Henry David Thoreau, used by M.K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.; movements reject definite political affiliation.

Alan Rosenthal* (worldwide decline of representative democracy) · Pierre Rosanvallon* (“post-representative”) · empirical signs — falling turnout, shrinking membership, personalisation · movements as an alternative link (the Section 377 judgment) · net — they supplement, not substitute, parties.

UPSC 2013 — Is the rise of social movements a sign of the opening up of popular space in the political process or the decline of representative politics? Examine.

Hannah Arendt* (concerted collective action) · Habermas (the public sphere) · Nancy Fraser (the counterpublic) · opening of space (Arab Spring, anti-apartheid, Chipko) vs decline of representation (Burke, Oakeshott, Nisbet; Eric Hoffer, Christopher Lasch*).

Movements in India & Latin America

India

• Collective identities of caste, ethnicity, gender and region — the Kamtapur Movement (Rajbanshi autonomy), the Telangana Statehood Movement, the Maadiga and Thudum Debba movements (re-categorisation of SCs and STs).
• Also the Chipko Movement, Narmada Bachao Andolan, the anti-corruption movement, Pinjra Tod (2015), Bekhauf Azadi (2017), the online #MeToo movement and the Kudankulam protest.

Latin America

• Theory adapted to local conditions — control of resources, civil liberties, origins in civil society under repressive regimes, a shift to rural areas (the Chiapas/Zapatistas in Mexico); peripheral problems under global capitalism and rural identity, often ignored in Western theory.

Sidney Tarrow* (the state as target) · Charles Tilly* (high- vs low-capacity democratic states) · movements give minorities a platform · the Aam Aadmi Party from Anna Hazare’s 2011 strike · Myanmar; yet movements can also work against democracy.

women’s rights to bodily safety and health; the #MeToo campaign; safe and legal abortion (Amnesty International in Argentina, Ireland, Poland, South Korea); WHO/UN — nearly one in three women face intimate-partner or sexual violence; the 2030 target.

LGBT as an NSM tied to quality of life; recognition under the third generation of human rights (Karel Vasak); the NALSA judgment (2014); the Navtej Singh Johar case striking down Section 377; transgender candidates and widened participation.

NSMs in Developed vs Developing Societies

not every human demand is material (Marxist reductionism cannot grasp them); youth, feminist, peace, ecological and civil-rights movements; Habermas reads them as protests against the size and rationality of the state; Subrata Mukherjee and Sushila Ramaswamy on decentralised organisation; Manuel Castells (networked resilience); Nancy Fraser (recognition and redistribution); Vandana Shiva and Ramachandra Guha; Asef Bayat’s caution against romanticising NSMs.

Criticisms & Assessment

• Criticisms of NSMs — lack of novelty; thin empirical evidence; a one-sided leftist focus; undefined terms (“new middle class”); the predominance of old liberal values (Francis Fukuyama).
• Yet NSMs mark a real shift — changing values, structures and identities; they challenge older, especially Marxist, theories by stressing non-material goals and new identities, and contribute to democracy by raising issues formal structures overlook.

The synthesis — three complementary channels between society and the state. Society (demands · interests · identities) → Three channels (parties · pressure groups · movements — complementary, not rivals) → The State (authoritative decisions & policy).

Their relative weight shifts with the nature of the state — capitalist or socialist, developed or developing — and with the depth of democratisation. Parties remain indispensable for aggregating interests and forming governments; pressure groups and movements widen the space in which citizens act between elections.