Leitz, L. - Power and Protest. Etc. (Emerald Publishing, 2021)

POWER AND PROTEST
RESEARCH IN SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS, CONFLICTS, AND
CHANGE
Series Editor: Lisa Leitz
Recent Volumes:
Volume 24: Consensus Decision Making, Northern Ireland and Indigenous
Movements, Edited by Patrick G. Coy
Volume 25: Authority in Contention, Edited by Daniel J. Myers and Daniel
M. Cress
Volume 26: Edited by Patrick G. Coy
Volume 29: Pushing the Boundaries: New Frontiers in Conflict Resolution
and Collaboration, Edited by Rachel Fleishman, Catherine
Gerard and Rosemary O’Leary
Volume 32: Critical Aspects of Gender in Conflict Resolution, Peacebuilding,
and Social Movements, Edited by Anna Christine Snyder and
Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe
Volume 33: Media, Movements, and Political Change, Edited by Jennifer Earl
and Deana A. Rohlinger
Volume 34: Nonviolent Conflict and Civil Resistance, Edited by Sharon
Erickson Nepstad and Lester R. Kurtz
Volume 35: Advances in the Visual Analysis of Social Movements, Edited by
Nicole Doerr, Alice Mattoni and Simon Teune
Volume 37: Intersectionality and Social Change, Edited by Lynne M. Woehrle
Volume 39: Protest, Social Movements, and Global Democracy since 2011:
New Perspectives, Edited by Thomas Davies, Holly Eva Ryan
and Alejandro Peña
Volume 40: Narratives of Identity in Social Movements, Conflicts and
Change, Edited by Landon E. Hancock
Volume 41: Non-State Violent Actors and Social Movement Organizations:
Influence, Adaptation, and Change. Edited by Julie M. Mazzei
Volume 43: Bringing Down Divides: Special Issue Commemorating the Work
of Gregory Maney (1967 – 2017). Edited by Lisa Leitz and Eitan
Alimi
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RESEARCH IN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, CONFLICTS,
AND CHANGE VOLUME 44
POWER AND PROTEST:

HOW MARGINALIZED
GROUPS OPPOSE THE
STATE AND OTHER
INSTITUTIONS
EDITED BY
LISA LEITZ
Chapman University, USA
United Kingdom – North America – Japan

India – Malaysia – China
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First edition 2021
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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ISBN: 978-1-83909-835-2 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83909-834-5 (Online)
ISBN: 978-1-83909-836-9 (Epub)
ISBN: 0163-786X (Series)

For my precious family:
My parents David and Judy Hassall, and my sister Jane.
Katayoun and our sons Hyde and Thomas.
CONTENTS
About the Authors xi
List of Contributors xiii
Introduction to Power and Protest, RSMCC Volume 44 1

Lisa Leitz and Paige N. Gulley
SECTION I
THEORIZING THE POWER OF PROTESTORS
The Reclamation Master Frame: A Visual Study of the Arab
Uprisings 11
Mounira M. Charrad, Amina Zarrugh and Hyun Jeong Ha
Understanding Strikes in the 21ST Century: Perspectives from the

United States 37
Chris Rhomberg and Steven Lopez
Group Size and the Use of Violence by Resistance Campaigns:

A Multilevel Study of Resistance Method 63
Christopher J. Cyr and Michael Widmeier
Marginalization and Mobilizing Power in Nonviolent Social

Movements 91
Selina Gallo-Cruz
SECTION II
POWER OF INSTITUTIONS AND TRADITION
Illegitimacy, Political Stability, and the Erosion of Alliances:
Lessons from the End of Apartheid in South Africa 119
Eric W. Schoon and Robert J. VandenBerg
ix
x CONTENTS
Whaling in Korea: Heritage, Framing, and Contention against

International Norms 145
Bradley Tatar
Mobilizing for Religious Freedom: Educational Opportunity

Structures and Outcomes of Conservative Christian Campus
Activism 175
Jonathan S. Coley
Epilogue: Updates to Research in Social Movements,

Conflicts, and Change 201
Lisa Leitz
Index 203
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Mounira M. Charrad (PhD, Harvard University) is an Associate Professor of

Sociology at the University of Texas-Austin. Her book, States and Women’s
Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, won national
awards. Her articles have appeared in major scholarly journals. Her current
research focuses on secular feminists and authoritarianism in Tunisia.
Jonathan S. Coley received his PhD in Sociology from Vanderbilt University and
is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Oklahoma State University. His research
focuses on social movements, politics, religion, and sexuality. His first book, Gay
on God’s Campus, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in
2018.
Christopher J. Cyr is an Associate Research Scientist at OCLC. His research

looks at how public and private services are provided to communities in several
contexts. Christopher holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of
Colorado, and he is also a Senior International Fellow at the World Engagement
Institute.
Selina Gallo-Cruz is Associate Professor of Sociology at College of the Holy

Cross. Her research has been published in European Journal of Cultural and
Political Sociology, Interface, Social Movement Studies, Sociology Compass,
Sociological Forum, and other volumes. In Political Invisibility and Mobilization,
Selina examines women's movements against war.
Paige N. Gulley has an MA in War & Society from Chapman University. She has
written on French colonialism in Algeria, and she enjoys studying colonial the-
ory, hermeneutics, and the lives of women in nontraditional fields. Her current
research focuses on female recreation workers during World War II.
Hyun Jeong Ha (PhD, University of Texas-Austin) is an Assistant Professor of

Sociology at Duke Kunshan University, China. Her research focuses on the
experience of sectarianism among Christian minorities in Egypt. Her work has
appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies and on the blog of the Baker Institute, Rice
University.
Lisa Leitz is the Delp-Wilkinson Professor and Department Chair of Peace

Studies at Chapman University. Her book, Fighting for Peace: Veterans and
Military Families in the Anti-Iraq War Movement, won the 2015 American
Sociological Association’s Peace, War and Social Conflict Outstanding Book
xi
xii ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Award. She serves as the Series Editor of Research in Social Movements, Con-
flicts, and Change.
Steven H. Lopez is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Ohio State Uni-

versity. His research focuses broadly on work, labor, employment, and society.
He has studied and written about auto work, route sales, union organizing, and
nursing home work. His current work focuses on experiences of precarity and
unemployment.
Chris Rhomberg is a Professor of Sociology at Fordham University. His research

focuses on historical and contemporary issues of labor, race, urban development
and politics in the United States. He is the author of The Broken Table: The
Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor (Russell Sage, 2012).
Eric W. Schoon is Assistant Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University.

His interests include political sociology, social movements, comparative historical
sociology, culture, and research methods. His work has appeared in outlets
including the Journal of Politics, Social Forces, Sociological Methods & Research,
Social Problems, and Sociological Science.
Bradley Tatar, Associate Professor in UNIST, is a cultural anthropologist who

has researched revolutionary movements in Latin America. Presently based in
South Korea, he researches social movements that are changing human inter-
actions with nature. His publication includes Transnational Frontiers of Asia and
Latin America since 1800 (with Jaime Moreno Tejada).
Robert J. VandenBerg is an assistant professor of criminal justice at Norwich

University – The Military College of Vermont. His work focuses on violent
extremism and contentious politics, and he is the author most recently of
“Legitimating Extremism: A Taxonomy of Justifications for Political Violence,”
published in Terrorism and Political Violence.
Michael Widmeier is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of

North Texas. He also serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Webster
University in the History, Politics, & International Relations Department. His
research interests include civil conflict, political violence, rebel group organiza-
tion, social movements, and terrorism.
Amina Zarrugh (PhD, University of Texas-Austin) is an Assistant Professor of

Sociology at Texas Christian University. Her research focuses on politics and
forced disappearance in North Africa and race/ethnicity in the United States. Her
work has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies and The Journal of North African
Studies.
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Mounira M. Charrad Department of Sociology, University of

Texas-Austin, USA
Jonathan S. Coley Department of Sociology, Oklahoma State
University, USA
Christopher J. Cyr OCLC, USA
Selina Gallo-Cruz Department of Sociology and Anthropology,
College of the Holy Cross, USA
Paige N. Gulley Department of History, Chapman University,
USA
Hyun Jeong Ha Division of Social Sciences, Duke Kunshan
University, China
Lisa Leitz Department of Peace Studies, Chapman
University, USA
Steven H. Lopez Department of Sociology, The Ohio State
University, USA
Chris Rhomberg Department of Sociology and Anthropology,
Fordham University, USA
Eric W. Schoon Department of Sociology, The Ohio State
University, USA
Bradley Tatar Division of General Studies, UNIST, Korea
Robert J. VandenBerg School of Justice Studies and Sociology, Norwich
University – The Military College of Vermont,
USA
Michael Widmeier Department of Political Science, University of
North Texas, USA
Amina Zarrugh Department of Sociology and Anthropology,
Texas Christian University, USA
xiii
INTRODUCTION TO POWER AND
PROTEST, RSMCC VOLUME 44
Lisa Leitz and Paige N. Gulley
All discussions of social movements and social change revolve around power:
Who has it? How is it imposed? How can we change its dynamics? Often our
analysis is clouded by assumptions built into contemporary knowledge structures
and ideas of the “other.” In order to move scholarship forward, we have to take
inequalities seriously, consider new forms and expressions of power, and carefully
examine when challenges to power fail or thrive—just as the chapters of this
volume do.
During the COVID-19 global pandemic, individuals across the United States
and many other nations came out of lockdown and took to the streets to protest
police killings of Black people. These protests, reminiscent of the 2014 Black
Lives Matter (BLM) protests which began in Ferguson, Missouri, reignited
global conversations about racialized policing, as well as numerous forms of
structural, cultural, and individual racism (see Beaman, 2017, 2019; Bonilla &
Tillery, 2020; Clayton, 2018; Duncan-Shippy, Murphy, & Purdy, 2017; Gallagher,
Reagan, Danforth, & Dodds, 2018; Hayward, 2020; Ince, Rojas, & Davis, 2017;
Mundt, Ross, & Burnett, 2018; Ray, 2020; Szetela, 2020; Taylor, 2016; Yang,
2016). The marches, sit-ins, and petitions demonstrate what Sidney Tarrow’s
(1998) extensive overview of the ways people have challenged the state simply
called Power in Movement. Online video conferences, social media, and artistic
campaigns centered minority voices and sought to empower people to resist
inequity and state power and violence. Furthermore, the lead organization
described one of its goals as “build[ing] local power,” which can create a world
“where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to
thrive” (Black Lives Matter, 2020). Activists’ signs and words have illuminated
the racialized operation of power in numerous institutions and highlighted the
implications of these power dynamics on both individual and group psychology.
Power comes in many forms, even the bare human body, as seen in Portland,
Oregon, where a young woman, dubbed “Naked Athena,” struck yoga and ballet
Power and Protest

Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Volume 44, 1–8
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 0163-786X/doi:10.1108/S0163-786X20210000044001
1
2 LISA LEITZ AND PAIGE N. GULLEY
poses in front of federal authorities until they left (Read, 2020). Despite the
intense repressive tactics of the police, she was neither arrested nor harmed. Much
can be made of her light skin color, whereby this woman’s racial position allowed
her to elude harm and to obtain largely positive media attention (see also
Jackson, 2020). Such protests urge us to examine not only the power wielded by
police and stripped from minorities but also the powerful role of racial and
institutional identities of individuals, which can be wielded in politics and other
arenas.
The global reemergence of the BLM Movement encourages scholars to
reexamine state, people, embodied, and identity-based power. So too, the chap-
ters in this volume focus on the various ways power operates in conflicts,
including how individuals utilize it despite identities that many believe would lack
power. The breadth of the authors’ analyses of power demonstrates the inter-
disciplinarity of the Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change series,
incorporating numerous theoretical and research traditions. Many chapters continue
this series’ history of building novel and interdisciplinary conceptions, which
demonstrate the insufficiency of the dominant theories and move beyond them to
suggest new ways of understanding conflict.
THEORIZING MOVEMENT POWER

The first section in this volume, entitled “Theorizing the Power of Protesters,”
focuses on how we understand protestors’ demands and their use of the resources
available to them. Chapters by Gallo-Cruz and Rhomberg and Lopez particu-
larly draw attention to the need to reconsider how power is theorized in move-
ments. Drawing on examples from around the world, this section examines how
culture shapes the ways protestors frame their messages and choose their stra-
tegies based on their own potential sources of power. The papers in this section
provide new insights into how and why protestors succeed against governments
initially unwilling to provide concessions.
In the first chapter of this volume, Mounira M. Charrad, Amina Zarrugh, and
Hyun Jeong Ha examine how protestors frame their demands in ways that are
both universal and highly personal. This framing offers powerful motivation,
which sustains protestors for extended periods of time, even in the face of intense
repression. Focusing on the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya,
the authors examine over 3,500 photographs taken during the protests to identify
individual demands, as depicted on signs and through other visual symbols. They
find that the antigovernment messages expressed by protestors focused on the
government depriving its citizens of what they believed was rightfully theirs. This
leads the authors to develop the reclamation master frame, in which people
demand that the government return stolen rights or satisfy unfulfilled promises.
Charrad, Zarrugh, and Ha discuss three specific areas in which protestors
demanded reclamation: (1) their right to trustworthy leaders, (2) the ability to
take pride in their nation, and (3) the public memory of the victims of state
repression. By framing the government’s actions as a betrayal of its people,
protestors asserted the legitimacy of their struggle and characterized their

demands as a return to, rather than a break from, the norm. Their demands were
also highly personal, especially those invoking the memory of victims of state
violence, and this personal investment in the protests encouraged average citizens
to continue protesting for weeks, despite ongoing state repression. Charrad,
Zarrugh, and Ha’s research broadens our understanding of the ways in which
protestors can frame their demands and the correlation between framing and
success in social movements, suggesting the need for further research on the
potential power of movements to shape collective memory in ways that shift the
balance of governmental power.
While framing plays an important role in protestor success or failure, equally
important in understanding movements’ power is their use of the resources
available to them. In the second paper in this section, Chris Rhomberg and
Steven Lopez utilize a case study of fast food workers’ living wage campaign to
demonstrate the need for a more comprehensive understanding of the various
types of power available to protestors. Focusing on labor movement theories,
Rhomberg and Lopez argue that traditional understandings of labor disputes
prove insufficient when applied to modern-day strikes. They expand upon the
power resources approach to argue that workers rely primarily on their ability to
organize collectively, which the authors call “associational power.” Workers then
build upon their associational power by deploying the power resources, or points
of leverage, available to them. Contrary to other scholars who link specific power
resources to specific periods or industries, Rhomberg and Lopez argue that all
types of power resources exist in all struggles and that it is the interplay between
the various power resources and workers’ collective action that leads to a
movement’s success or failure. Though Rhomberg and Lopez highlight the need
for labor-specific forms of analysis, their study demonstrates the importance of
delineating mechanisms within types of protestor power and the centrality of
collective action to social change.
Continuing the focus on the power of collectivity, Christopher Cyr and
Michael Widmeier study the correlation between group size and campaigns’ use
of violent or nonviolent tactics. Examining data on over 250 instances of protests
against the state in the second half of the twentieth century, Cyr and Widmeier
test several hypotheses, which provide important nuance for the general con-
clusions that have come out of the extensive quantitative analysis comparing
nonviolent and violent campaigns in the work of Erica Chenoweth and her
collaborators (Chenoweth, 2008; Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011; Day, Pinckney, &
Chenoweth, 2015). Cyr and Widmeier find that nonstate actors with broader
support, such as pro-democracy campaigns, are less likely to employ violence,
while groups less reflective of their nation are more inclined to utilize guerilla
tactics and other violent means. If a country is already democratizing, that
increases the likelihood that a campaign is nonviolent. Organizing along ethnic
lines, particularly if the ethnic group is a small proportion of the population, or
around Marxist ideology is correlated with the use of violence, likely as a result of
these groups’ limited support base. Further, campaigns opposing occupation by
foreign states are less likely to be violent only when the population they fight for
is large. Cyr and Widmeier’s conclusions about the correlation between popu-
lation size, ideology, and state conditions suggest avenues for future examinations
of when and which groups will believe that power can be obtained nonviolently.
In the final chapter of this section, Selina Gallo-Cruz proposes a new frame-
work for understanding marginalized groups’ use of nonviolent power. Chal-
lenging existing understandings of protestor power that emphasize the universality
of strategies and motivations across cases, Gallo-Cruz uses a social constructionist
lens to highlight the significance of a group’s specific origins and position in
society as it relates to their goals, the state’s repression of them, and the resources
available to them. She uses the Mothers of the Plaza Mayo’s struggle during the
Argentine Dirty War to demonstrate that marginalized groups can derive power
from their social and historical position. In the case of the Mothers, she finds that
their lack of power in the eyes of the regime allowed them to successfully organize
without becoming targets of repression themselves. Their lack of political expe-
rience also gave them greater credibility as they spoke out in the international
arena, drawing global attention to their struggle and increasing international
pressure on the regime.
Gallo-Cruz urges us to consider not only actors’ socially constructed position
but also the specifics of the conflict itself, highlighting how the Mothers’ strategies
and use of power evolved with the conflict. Further, their tactics continued after
the conclusion of the Dirty War, as the women continued to seek justice for their
loved ones and hold perpetrators responsible for their crimes.
This first section of the book offers important directions for theorizing how
participants in social movements that seem to lack power may utilize it to make
social change. Throughout this section, the authors demonstrate the need to
broaden our understanding of the sources and use of protestor power and its
correlation with movement success. In the chapters that follow, we expand the
examination of power to some of the other powerful forces in social movements.
POWER OF INSTITUTIONS AND TRADITION

From a focus on protestor power, we move into Section II, which examines the
role of institutions and traditions, which are not always synonymous with one
another. Institutions work to govern those under their control, be it the students
at a university, the citizens of a nation, or the governments of the world. The
standardized rules that they apply do not take into account the variations within
these populations, and sometimes directly contradict the traditions of certain
communities. In a clash between the institution and tradition, which contextual
factors and strategies determine the outcome? This section will interrogate the
sources and strength of institutional power, allowing us to better understand the
circumstances that contribute to or challenge that power.
The first chapter in this section examines the ability of an institution to
maintain power despite overwhelming opposition, demonstrating that the sources
of institutional power are not always immediately apparent. Eric Schoon and
Robert VandenBerg focus on the apartheid government of South Africa, an
institution long recognized as illegitimate by both the majority of the South

African population and the international community. Challenging the predomi-
nant understanding that illegitimacy breeds political instability and is a catalyst
of regime change, Schoon and VandenBerg highlight that the apartheid regime
remained in power for decades despite both national and international opposi-
tion. Drawing on a variety of media reports, government records, United Nations
transcripts, and memoirs published by key actors, they examine the rise of the
ruling National Party in the late 1940s, its success in maintaining power for
decades, and its defeat in the first all-race election in 1994. Rather than focusing
on individual factors like international pressure or economic recession, the
authors synthesize these various forces to analyze their cumulative effect on the
regime’s power.
Schoon and VandenBerg find that the National Party relied on the support of
allies from various sectors, including academia, business, and international pol-
itics, that allowed it to maintain power despite its illegitimacy. Only when these
relationships began to crumble did the apartheid regime begin to lose power.
Significantly, Schoon and VandenBerg assert that the National Party’s illegiti-
macy did not directly affect its hold on power; rather, illegitimacy eventually
destroyed the regime’s relationships with its most important allies, which were the
source of its power. Their analysis provides important insight into the indirect
effects of illegitimacy on political regimes, laying theoretical groundwork for the
examination of similar conflicts.
The next two chapters in this section focus on the use of tradition to challenge
the power of institutions, analyzing the conditions under which such challenges
are successful. Bradley Tatar’s chapter takes us to South Korea to examine a
traditional practice in conflict with international norms. Tatar details the rise of
the pro-whaling movement in the South Korean city of Ulsan and the move-
ment’s strategic use of heritage and tradition to oppose the international ban on
whaling. Focusing on the confrontation between Korean pro-whaling protestors
and Greenpeace activists during the 2005 meeting of the International Whaling
Commission in Ulsan, Tatar draws on media reports and interviews with pro-
testors on both sides. He finds that Korean pro-whaling protestors strategically
framed their position as an issue of local heritage, constructing a tradition of
whaling that has become an important part of the community’s identity. In doing
so, pro-whaling activists acknowledged that anti-whaling is the global norm and
framed their demands as an exception to, not the removal of, the norm. Tatar
argues that by using the language of heritage and local tradition, protesters were
able to garner support from those outside of their community and eventually
succeed in their efforts to gain an exemption from international regulations. His
work highlights the ways in which tradition can be strategically constructed and
employed by protesters who wish to challenge institutionalized norms.
Appeals to the power of tradition do not guarantee the success of a movement,
however. In the final chapter in this section, Jonathan Coley analyzes the efforts
of conservative Christian activists on college campuses to gain exemptions from
university policies, specifically as they relate to the inclusion of LGBTQ1 students.
Coley details how conservative Christian student organizations at Vanderbilt
University asserted that the ability to discriminate based on sexual orientation

and religious belief was an issue of religious freedom. Drawing on campus
newspaper reports, policy statements, and ethnographic observations made
during the protests, Coley outlines students’ ultimate failure to gain the exemp-
tions they demanded. He finds that the conservative Christian activists were
unsuccessful due to certain characteristics of Vanderbilt University itself.
Developing the concept of “educational opportunity structures,” Coley argues
that a combination of university factors, namely the institution’s prestige, wealth,
religiosity/secularism, and public/private nature, shapes the likelihood that a
university will ultimately prevail over student activists.
EXAMINING POWER
This volume continues Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change’s
multidisciplinary and multimethod examination of both how social movements
challenge power structures and the ways that power shapes the context and
range of experiences in a conflict. Moving beyond international relations
scholars’ continued emphasis on states, as noted in previous volumes of
Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change (e.g. Coy, 2017), this
volume emphasizes the complex web of actors in international and national
conflicts and the power in collective action, or what many within the nonvio-
lence tradition refer to as “people power” (Ackerman & Kruegler, 1994; Carter,
2013; Elwood, 1997; Schock, 1999, 2004; Zunes, 1999). In fact, many of these
chapters highlight the limits of governmental power and demonstrate the power
of marginalized groups.
Analyses of power are necessary beyond academic circles and political
discourse, and such examinations are often a critical aspect of the strategic work
of nonprofits, social movements, community organizations, and other agents for
social change. We invite submissions to Volume 46, which will examine these
organizations’ engagement in power struggles, and particularly welcome those
examining the role of race and ethnicity in conflicts and social movements. As
mentioned earlier, BLM offers many important avenues for examining the
continuing significance of race, and we invite analyses of this movement. The
summer of 2020 has seen waves of antiracism protests around the globe, which
have sparked relatively rapid changes to police policies and evoked promises
from parliamentary bodies, companies, universities, and artistic stakeholders in
Europe and the United States to be more inclusive (King, 2020; McAuley, 2020;
Rich & Hida, 2020). These developments offer exciting opportunities for exam-
ining protestors’ use of violence/nonviolence, as well as other aspects of strategy,
tactics, mobilization, and resources, in order to better understand what methods
lead to success, failure, or placation. While Volume 46 will be open to all sub-
missions, one section will be devoted to BLM and other movements for racial
equity and the operation of race in social movements, and we encourage sub-
missions examining these issues in social change organizations beyond those
considered protest groups.
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SECTION I
THEORIZING THE POWER OF
PROTESTORS
THE RECLAMATION MASTER
FRAME: A VISUAL STUDY OF THE
ARAB UPRISINGS
Mounira M. Charrad, Amina Zarrugh
and Hyun Jeong Ha
ABSTRACT
We examine frames expressed during the Arab Uprisings that toppled

authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya in 2011. Through a visual
analysis of 3,506 photographs taken at protest sites, we identify a new type of
master frame, the “reclamation” master frame, in which protestors assert their
right to what they feel they should have but has not been delivered or has been
stolen from them by dictators. In the cases we consider, protestors reclaimed
their right to (1) integrity of governance; (2) a proud nation, and (3) the
dignity of the victims of state violence. They framed their struggle as a
redefinition of the relationship between state and citizens. Identifying the
master frame of reclamation as central to the Arab Uprisings, we argue that it
helps us understand how protestors sustained mobilization over days and weeks
in the face of brutal repressions. We suggest that it opens avenues for research
on protests in authoritarian regimes.
Keywords: Master frame; protests; social movements; authoritarianism;

reclamation; visual analysis
INTRODUCTION
The protests of the Arab Spring shook an entire world region. They represent a
mass mobilization that occurred with breathtaking rapidity, swept through
Power and Protest

ISSN: 0163-786X/doi:10.1108/S0163-786X20210000044004
11
12 MOUNIRA M. CHARRAD ET AL.
several countries, faced brutal repression, involved diverse constituencies, suc-

ceeded in bringing down authoritarian regimes, had no robust self-declared
organizational leadership, and erupted as a surprise to most national and inter-
national observers. As such, they warrant continued investigation by social
movement analysts.
A key contribution of our study is the focus on discourse and emotion in
the mobilization of protestors during the Arab Spring in contrast to existing
approaches that focus on examining the structural conditions of the upris-
ings, such as economic injustices and lack of political freedom. The study
illuminates how protestors mediated and expressed their demands regarding
the structural violence of the previous regimes. We identify the meanings
that protestors used to convey the sense of despair, and also the hope, that
they experienced as is reflected in their willingness to risk their lives. Dis-
daining any idea of reforms, they quickly moved to ask for an end of the
regime. They also expressed deep seated revulsion toward the leadership in
place.
What frames captured their anger? What shared meanings sustained mobi-
lization and unified protestors in the face of danger? What constructs did pro-
testors bring to the site of demonstrations? What messages did they voice? We
consider these questions by focusing on the common themes that appeared in
Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, where regimes rapidly collapsed following the Arab
Uprisings (in contrast to other states in the region where regimes remained in
place or protracted civil conflicts ensued).1 We offer a case study by considering
a set of protests that influenced each other and had common features. Once
protests started in Tunisia, there was a cascading effect with protests in Egypt
and Libya. The three countries developed common themes of protest and it is
these common themes that we seek to capture in formulating the master frame
of reclamation.
Our findings suggest that, with remarkable consensus in demanding an end
to the regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, protestors centered their protests
on a master frame of “reclamation” in which they reclaimed what they felt was
their right to have and that the dictators never delivered or took away from
them: integrity of governance; commitment to the nation; and dignity of the
victims of state violence. The protestors used three frames to voice their demand
for regime change. Taken together, the frames amount to a master frame, an
umbrella that we call a “reclamation master frame.” As one protest sign
poignantly read, “You killed our brothers. You stole our wealth. You burnt our
oil. Go to Hell.”
The assertion of right combined with the notion that the ruler violated it is
central to the reclamation master frame. Reclamation is defined in the Oxford
Dictionary as “the process of claiming something back or of asserting a right.” In
being driven by “a desire for a redefinition of the relationship between state and
citizens” (Masri, 2017, p. 51), people asserted their right to all they saw as
rightfully theirs. The reclamation master frame involves the notion of a perpe-
trator (in this case a dictator) who has stolen or never delivered what the
The Reclamation Master Frame: A Visual Study of the Arab Uprisings 13
protestors feel is their right to have (integrity, nation, loved ones). The right to
have may apply to something that people once enjoyed, but not necessarily so. It
may apply as well to something that people think they should have, regardless of
whether they had it in the past.
A dominant narrative of the 2011 Arab Uprisings has emphasized economic
demands, such as limited job opportunities for educated youth and rising food
costs, as well as the repression of Islamic expressions under authoritarian
regimes. We agree that economic conditions and religious repressions are
underlying structural conditions that led to the protests, a point that has been
well-documented (Achcar, 2013; Amin et al., 2012; Campante & Chor, 2012;
Hoffman & Jamal, 2014; LaGraffe, 2012). We address here a different question,
however. We wish to find out how protestors framed their protest and what
themes they expressed day after day when they took to the streets and risked
their lives in mass protests. In considering this question, we did not find direct
and widespread reference to economic demands or religious themes. Meanings
that people shared in coming together in repeatedly bloody protests did
not express simply and directly the structural hardships that brought them to
the brink.
With all the accounts on the Arab Spring, which we discuss below, we believe
that key puzzles remain. A major question is how the protests persisted for days
and weeks, even though they were not clearly directed by a strong single organi-
zation. Equally puzzling is the rapidity of the cascading effect from one country to
the others. We suggest that framing motivated protestors and kept them motivated
in the face of repression. Furthermore, the particular frame of reclamation reso-
nated in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya alike, which shared a brutally repressive,
pervasively corrupt, long-standing presidential regime pursuing neoliberal eco-
nomic programs with extreme inequalities and deep suffering. Agreeing with Yaghi
(2018 on innovative tactics in Tunisia) that frame resonance can substitute for lack
of resources or unified leadership, we focus on the frames that sustained protests.
Another contribution of the study resides in its methodology and the use of
photographs. We employ a qualitative method based on visual analysis by
considering thousands of photographs of protests showing posters, props,
drawings, and other ephemera. As Gould (2015) suggests, “The ephemera that
materialize and instantiate a movement’s collective action frames – its leaflets,
fact sheets, T-shirts, stickers, buttons, posters, banners…are particularly rich
sources” (p. 255) for exploring meanings and frame making. We see the method
as innovative with the possibility of opening new opportunities for research on
frames in protest under conditions where the printed word is silenced, as in
authoritarian regimes that repress freedom of expression. This method is uniquely
suited to illuminate dimensions of activism that would otherwise go overlooked.
The discussion that follows begins by outlining features of the Arab Uprisings
as a dramatic outburst suited for our methodological approach and by reviewing
the literature. We then consider the conceptualization of the reclamation master
frame and our methodology. The analysis proceeds with our findings and con-
cludes with implications for further research.
DRAMATIC OUTBURSTS IN AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES

A series of dramatic outbursts, the protests of the Arab Spring, took analysts by
surprise. As Goodwin (2011) notes,
…no social scientist or political analyst in either the West or the Arab world itself claims to
have predicted these uprisings…. We were all taken by surprise (p. 452; see also Gause III,
2011; Kurzman, 2012, p. 379).
Metaphors of earthquake, bombshell, or explosion abound. Sustaining

themselves by becoming a daily occurrence and spreading across cities and
countries, the uprisings brought, in a remarkably short time, the rapid collapse of
regimes that had for decades appeared unshakable in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya
(see timing in Table 1).
Even though “broad-based popular mobilization is difficult to achieve because
it requires bridging … disparate interests” (Goldstone, 2015, p. 398), the Arab
Spring succeeded in fostering such broad-based popular mobilization, bringing
together diverse groups (Goldstone, 2011). Some groups participated more than
others and there were variations in the constituencies of participants in different
countries (Kandil, 2012). For example, providing detailed evidence on the basis
of surveys fielded in Egypt in June 2011 and in Tunisia in October 2011, a few
months after the protests, Beissinger, Jamal, and Mazur (2015, p. 2) write:
Whereas participants in the Egyptian Revolution were disproportionately middle-aged, middle
class, and professional, participants in the Tunisian Revolution were younger and significantly
more diverse in social composition, with workers, students, and the unemployed also
mobilizing in significant numbers.
Nevertheless, the groups that participated were able to come together in

protest and in demanding the end of the regime.
The extent to which the protests were spontaneous with “people coming
together in concert,” to use Hannah Arendt’s phrase – or organized by leadership –
has been much debated. No single organization claimed leadership for each and
every event of the mass uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and people in the
streets used cell phones and social media profusely to communicate and network
(Khondker, 2011; Lotan et al., 2011). Some scholars have emphasized spontaneity
and grassroots mobilization (Pearlman, 2013; Pilati, Acconcia, Suber, & Chen-
naoui, 2019). Other scholars, however, have discussed mesolevel institutions that
undergirded the uprising, including youth movements in all the three countries
under study, Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and
trade unions like the UGTT (Union Générale des Travailleurs Tunisiens) in
Tunisia.
For example, considering “first movers,” Clarke and Koçak (2018) show how
youth groups used the Internet as a tool of mobilization in Egypt. El-Ghobashy
(2011) indicates how the uprisings in Egypt involved a combination of sponta-
neity and organization among protestors who had over time gained experience
with “street action.” Gunning and Baron (2013) argue that the protests in Egypt
were the culmination of several distinct waves of social protest, which had
engaged political, labor, general economic/wage, and religious protests over the
preceding decade, and that the coming together of these previously distinct
movements, all driven by police brutality, made the revolution of January 25,
2011 possible. Charrad and Reith (2019) show how what started as local spon-
taneous protests in rural Tunisia later evolved into a larger movement with
partial involvement of the national labor union and exiled activists.
The Arab Spring occurred in a context of long-term dictatorial presidencies,
which we refer to as authoritarian regimes. By “authoritarian regime,” we
mean broadly political systems in which the general population has limited
and/or circumscribed influence on politics either formally or informally, and in
which dissidence is repressed, sometimes brutally. Ben Ali assumed the presi-
dency for 23 years (1987–2011) in Tunisia, Mubarak for nearly 30 years
(1981–2011) in Egypt, and Gaddafi (1969–2011) for 42 years in Libya. In each
of the regimes, political dissidents were forced underground, incarcerated,
exiled, or forcibly disappeared by the state. Although with variations over time
among countries, the absence of freedom of press and of an independent
judiciary accompanied political repression for decades across all the three states
(Chomiak, 2011; Dickinson, 2011; Moumneh, 2010; Swed & Weinreb, 2015;
Vandewalle, 2006).
With only limited attention to framing, recent studies of the Arab Spring have
pointed toward factors that influenced the course of the uprisings including
international relations and regime type (Menaldo, 2012; Ritter, 2015), the role of
old and new forms of media (Cherribi, 2017; Howard & Hussain, 2013; Tufekci &
Wilson, 2012), and democratization (Bellin, 2018; Moghadam, 2013). Other foci
include the role of the military and police (Barany, 2011; Ismail, 2012; Ketchley,
2014), historical parallels to other revolutionary movements (Keddie, 2012;
Weyland, 2012), and the role of religion (Hoffman & Jamal, 2014; Madhi, 2013).
Focusing on social class, scholars have pointed toward the weight of economic
inequality, especially in rural areas and poor urban zones (on the history of
tensions between central states and rural areas, see Charrad, 2001, 2011), cross-
class coalitions, and the significance of labor-related demands in the years pre-
ceding the Arab Spring (Beinin, 2012; Buehler, 2014; Goldstone, 2011). Other
scholars have addressed the gendered dimensions of the uprisings and their
aftermath (Allam, 2017; Charrad & Zarrugh, 2014; Langhi, 2014; Rizzo, Price, &
Meyer, 2012). Other studies still have questioned the role of minority groups (Ha,
2017; Maddy-Weitzman, 2015; Matthiesen, 2012).
In considering framing during the Arab Uprisings, existing studies have
focused primarily on selected news channels in the Middle East and the world
(Bruce, 2014; Karyotakis, Panagiotou, Antonopoulos, & Kiourexidou, 2017), on
how the social media of political groups of different persuasion revealed political
fragmentation in a single country (see Moore-Gilbert, 2019 on the case of
Bahrain), or on how framing helped the development of innovative tactics in the
particular case of Tunisia (Yaghi, 2018).
While the studies above on framing all examine some important aspect of the
Arab Spring protests, more attention needs to be paid to the substance of the
frames that motivated and sustained the protests in the three countries. In
focusing on frames and on the reclamation master frame, we aim to address issues
that we still find puzzling despite the contributions in the literature. One issue is
what themes, meanings, and emotions sustained the protests for days and weeks
in the face of brutal repression and in the absence of a strong, clearly identifiable
organization. The other is the cascading effect and shared meanings among
countries. Since the literature has focused on structural forces or on the use of
social and news media often in one country, we still have questions about these
two issues. We are therefore shifting the focus away from structural factors that
have contributed to the Arab Uprisings toward the types of frames and meanings
that mobilized protestors during the time of the protests and in three countries
where regimes rapidly collapsed. Rather than considering news channels, and
social media or tactical innovation in a particular country, we center the attention
on constructs as they existed at the site of mass protests in all three countries. We
find framing to offer an in-depth, qualitative analysis of meaning-making as an
important source of solidarity among protestors across several countries.
MEANINGS AND THE RECLAMATION MASTER FRAME

Framing is what leads many people to go from “the balcony to the barricades”
(Benford & Snow, 2000, p. 615). Our analysis of the Arab Spring protests rests on
perspectives that emphasize frames, meanings, and emotions. We take at heart
Kurzman’s (2012) suggestion not only to recognize long-term structural factors
but also to “attempt to understand the lived experience of the uprisings (p. 377)
… through the process that Max Weber called verstehen” (p. 385; see also
Kurzman, 2004), often translated as interpretive understanding of social action.
In relying on verstehen and searching for meanings expressed in the Arab
Uprisings, we build on a major line of scholarship that has focused on the
communicative work of social movements. Using a theory of “framing” as
essential to mobilization (Benford & Snow, 2000; Johnston, 2005; Snow, Benford,
McCammon, Hewitt, & Fitzgerald, 2014; Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford,
1986), scholars have underlined the importance of meanings and emotions in the
dynamics of social movements (Barberena, Jimenez, & Young, 2014; Collins,
2001; Goodwin, 1997; Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001; Jasper, 1999;
Kurzman, 2008, 2012; Pearlman, 2013; Polletta, 2009). Insufficient in themselves,
however, individual emotions must be channeled into meanings and frames that
provide collective justification for continued resistance (see Benford & Snow,
2000; Gamson, 1992; Gould, 2015; Kurzman, 2008, 2012).
Frames furnish reasons for protest. They offer particular vocabularies that
help individuals connect with each other while articulating why the injustices exist
and why mobilization should occur. We find the following characterization
useful:
Like a picture frame, an issue frame marks off some part of the world. Like a building frame, it
holds things together. It provides coherence to an array of symbols, images, and arguments, …
(Ryan & Gamson, 2006, p. 14).
Examples of frames from our analysis are reviling dictators as tyrants and
thieves; mobilizing the flag in new and unexpected ways; and reclaiming the
deceased from years earlier.
When scholars have addressed frames under authoritarian regimes, they
have generally considered a single frame of “injustice” in one country, as in
China’s land rights protests (Hess, 2010), the Cuban online blogosphere
(Vicari, 2014), the opposition to the Mexican regime of Echeverria in the
1970s (Neria & Aspinwall, 2016), the single case of Egypt (Clarke, 2013) and
commentary on YouTube channels covering protests in Bahrain (Al-Rawi,
2015), or the theme of dignity in Egypt from 1956 to 2011 (El Bernoussi,
2015).
Master frames are broader than single frames, however. According to Snow
and Benford (1992), master frames “provide the interpretive medium through
which collective actors associated with different movements within a cycle [of
protest] assign blame for the problem they are attempting to ameliorate” (p. 139).
Some well-documented master frames include the “equal rights and opportu-
nities” frame of the civil rights movements in the United States and the injustice
and justice frames, among others (Benford, 2013; see a list of master frames in
Benford & Snow, 2000, p. 619). Benford and Snow (2000) point out that there are
only a handful of frames that are “sufficiently broad in interpretive inclusivity,
flexibility, and cultural resonance to function as master frames” (p. 619). Of the
studies they identify, most examine master frames in liberal democracies, with the
exception of Noonan (1995) who considers women’s movements in Chile. These
master frames, shaped by the conditions of liberal democracies where protest had
in principle been allowed over the long run, are not directly applicable to the
Arab Uprisings, which emerged all of a sudden in authoritarian contexts that
repressed any form of public opposition.
We see the reclamation master frame as an important complement to the
types of master frames that have been prevalent in other settings. Benford and
Snow (2000, p. 619) indicate that, according to Swart (1995, p. 446), “frames
that have been adopted by two or more distinctive movements, and thus
function as master frames, exist…because they are ‘culturally resonant to their
historical milieu.’” With its focus on reclaiming what dictators never delivered
or took away, the master frame of reclamation has been “culturally resonant”
in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya in the historical moment of the Arab Uprisings,
as a culture of having been deprived and morally violated had developed for
several decades (on morality in protests, see Jasper, 1999) in all three
countries.
Like other master frames, the reclamation master frame is an analytic
construct that encompasses single frames. Inductively derived from our
analysis of the photos and observations of the single frames we identified in
them, the reclamation master frame offers the theoretical advantage of
providing a synthetizing concept that is broader than any one of the single
frames that constitute its parts at the same time as it expresses their common
denominator.
METHODOLOGY: VISUAL ANALYSIS

Our methodology allowed us to examine signs, props, and materials that
protestors utilized during demonstrations. We selected photographs only if
they exhibited all of the following criteria together: (1) the photograph had
to include at least one person who could be clearly identified as an anti-
regime protestor based on captions, (2) the person(s) shown in the photo-
graph had to mobilize signs, props, or physical behaviors and gestures
communicating a meaning, and (3) the signs had to be legible to the
authors, i.e., complete, clear, and large enough to be understandable.2 More
specifically, we define a protest sign as any material featuring writing, art,
or images. A prop is any item mobilized during the protests, such as flags,
effigies, bloody garments, or coffins. Physical behaviors are gestures used to
communicate a message, such as a crowd mimicking being handcuffed or
tying flags together. Using our three criteria indicated above, we examined
3,506 photographs in the photograph archives of the sources we considered
and describe below.
Our choice to examine photographs has allowed us to observe the salient
visual images that protestors used in framing grievances. As Simonds (2013)
suggests, the art of activism can inform sociology. In considering photographs,
we join a group of scholars who have relied on visual resources utilized by actors
in protests and activism and have called attention to the contribution of visual
analysis to the study of social movements (Adams, 2002; Doerr, Mattoni, &
Teune, 2013; Kubik, 1994; Santino, 1999; Taylor, Kimport, Van Dyke, &
Andersen, 2009; Tschabrun, 2003; Zuev, 2010).
The sources we consulted include Reuters and McClatchy Tribune (via Fac-
tiva database), Getty Images, and the Associated Press. We chose these sources
because they collectively provided image data for both U.S. and international
print and online news media and were the main sources with extensive publicly
available photographic coverage of the protests. Two of the authors collected all
3,506 photographs from photograph archives in each source by using the search
term “protest” for each country during each respective period of antiregime
protests (for example, “Tunisia, protests”).
We focus on the period preceding regime collapse. By regime collapse,
we refer to the resignation, escape, or death of the state leader and not to
basic transformations in state and class structures as studied by scholars of
social revolutions (Skocpol, 1979). We also focus on rapid regime collapse,
which occurs over the course of weeks or a few months rather than years.
In the cases of Tunisia and Egypt, we consider the onset of protests until
the escape or resignation of the state leadership. In Libya, we take the
period between the onset of protests and the beginning of an armed uprising
supplemented by NATO aerial bombardment (which later culminated in the
death of Muammar Gaddafi) as the period of preregime collapse. See
Table 1 for details regarding periodization and the cities photographed
across sources.
Table 1. Periodization and Geographic Location of Photographs.

Cases Periods for which Data were Total Number of Cities Featured in Photographs
Collected Days
Tunisia December 17, 2010–January 14, 29 Primarily capital city of Tunis but
2011 also Cité Ettadhamen, Regueb, Tala,
and Sidi Bouzid
Egypt January 25, 2011–February 11, 18 Primarily in Cairo but also in
2011 Alexandria, Giza, Sheikh Zuweid,
Sinai, and Suez
Libya February 15, 2011–March 19, 33 Primarily in eastern city of Benghazi
2011a but also in Ajdabiya, Derna, Massa
(sometimes referred to as “Masaed”
in media captions), Nalut, Tobruk,
Zawiya, and Zintan
a
Although Gaddafi’s death on October 20, 2011 represents the fall of the regime in our
operationalized definition of regime collapse, we understand NATO’s intervention to
demonstrate the incompetence of state leadership to assume its duties and maintain control of
the state. The revolutionary scene in Libya shifted in late March from a popular uprising to a
militarized, internal conflict aided by foreign military intervention. In addition, we focus on this
period of roughly one month for Libya in order to collect data for a comparable period as the
Tunisian and Egyptian cases, while still ensuring the integrity of the case by examining Libyan
protestor responses to the anticipated, and subsequently implemented, no-fly zone by the United
Nations, Resolution 1973.
As a qualitative method of analysis, the coding proceeded on the basis of

Glaser and Strauss’ (1967) constant comparative method of grounded the-
ory. This method aims to generate theory through the iterative process of
comparing and evaluating data. Grounded theory approaches to visual data
are a relatively new focus in scholarly work and are predicated on symbolic
interactionist understandings of interaction as a key site for the construction
of meaning in social life (Konecki, 2019). Drawing from his study of
existing scholarship employing grounded theory to examine visual empirical
data, Konecki (2019) proposes that scholars employing grounded theory
perform “multislice imagining” to the analysis. “Multislice imagining” refers
to the acknowledgment that “visual data are multilayered” and that any
analysis of a photograph should consider layers including (1) the context in
which an image has been created, including by whom and for what pur-
pose, intent, and motivation, (2) the mediation of the image, including
where it has been presented and to what audiences, (3) the content and
style of the image, including all details of the image and its structure, and
(4) how the image has been received, including reflecting upon the implicit
audience that may have been anticipated when the image was circulated
(Konecki, 2019).
In keeping with the grounded theory approach to visuals, we outline our
methodology along these important points above. We acknowledge the context in
which the image was created in selecting photos from professional photography
agencies. Professional photographers may offer their own constructions of reality
that reflect their professional interests or world views. As Goldstein (2007) states
in regard to employing visuals in research, “Every photograph represents the
photographer’s choices, hence his interpretation of reality” (p. 75). This is
reflected in part in the distribution of photographs across the three cases we
consider here. Across the sources, we examined 111 photographs for Tunisia,
2,829 for Egypt, and 566 for Libya, totaling 3,506 photographs, as we found
them in our sources. The discrepancy in numbers is due to a number of factors.
Since the Tunisian uprisings occurred first in rural and remote areas (Charrad &
Reith, 2019) and came as a surprise, it took a number of weeks until the media
understood them as a major protest “worth” covering. The larger number of
photographs for Egypt is due to the fact that protests there started later than
those in Tunisia, that they occurred largely in cities, and that the country
attracted greater media attention in part because of an existing infrastructure of
photojournalists who had a base in Egypt, from which they produced coverage of
the entire Middle East and North Africa. In Libya, the state responded to the
uprising with greater violence than in Tunisia or Egypt, which delayed the entry
of professional photographers for quite a while. Additionally, because of its size
and tradition of leadership in the Arab world, Egypt has historically attracted
more international attention.
In drawing on professional photographs, we acknowledge both the strengths
and boundaries of our approach. We believe that the strengths prevail when one
aims to understand framing during unexpected protest under conditions of
brutal repression. The strengths of professional photographs include that they
are publicly disseminated and provide details about the locations and dates of
the events depicted, which contextualizes the photographs. Accessibility and
details on location and date make photographs amenable to systematic
collection in a way that other photographs, as for example those on social
media, are not, since important information about the latter (such as city and
date of the photograph) can be extremely difficult to collect. In addition,
photographs offer insights on a broad scale during unexpected moments of
upheaval and danger, when the collection of other forms of data, such as
interviews, is less feasible.
We recognize that photographs are mediated in particular ways that may
influence the substance of the photograph. Professional photographers circulate
photographs to international audiences, from whom they seek to command
attention and viewership. In the case of commercial photography and photo-
journalism, photos that portray conflict and violence tend to receive greater
accolades (Greenwood, 2012), especially perhaps in coverage of the Middle East
and North Africa, where stereotypes of violence prevail. Accordingly, the
professional photographs to which we have access do not represent the entire set
of photographs that may have been taken during the uprisings. While other
media, such as videos of protests, would further enrich and complement the
photographic data collected here, such media also suffer from similar
shortcomings as professional videographers determine which scenes and settings

are worthy of being filmed.3
However, despite the selective aspects of photographic production, photo-
graphs nevertheless represent important aspects of reality (Becker, 1974). Several
considerations help mitigate the limitations of the photographs we used. The
sheer, large number of photos, 3,506, suggests that we captured a broad range of
photographers’ interpretations of the protests, not those of a selected few. Many
photography agencies considered here, which sell photographs to widely circu-
lated newspapers such as the New York Times, purchased photographs directly
from citizen journalists who had immediate access to sites of protest and whose
perspectives directed the agencies toward what they deemed significant in the
course of the demonstrations (Batty, 2011). The point was further affirmed in the
examination of the websites of the news agencies, which indicates that the pro-
fessional photographers included a number of Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan
nationals. This offers a greater range of possible constructions of reality than
would be the case if the photos only reflected those of foreign photojournalists.
Given the considerations above, we are confident that the photos we analyzed
constitute a reasonably accurate representation of an important reality that took
place during the Arab Uprisings.
In regard to the content of the image, we closely analyzed all aspects of each
image in accordance with the grounded theory approach (Konecki, 2019). We
did “open coding,” a process that involves the “‘opening up’ of the text in order
to uncover ideas and meanings it holds” (Benaquisto, 2008, p. 86). Just as text is
analyzed as closely as possible, line-by-line in the case of interviews, we
analyzed images thoroughly, including from the top of a photograph to the
bottom, and made observations about its composition and features. Among the
many features we observed in the photographs, we closely analyzed settings, the
embodiment of participants, and the props mobilized during demonstration.
Following the principles of open coding, we created and modified categories of
themes throughout the analytical process until we identified key themes. Two of
the authors divided the 3,506 photographs and independently open-coded them
in an effort to identify common themes. The authors then met to discuss the
themes that they observed in the photographs that each reviewed. They openly
coded a small selection of the photographs together to ensure intercoder
reliability.
We concluded that three themes – reclaiming integrity of governance, the
nation, and dignity of victims of state violence – emerged as common across
the countries of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya in the period under consideration.
With these three themes, the authors conducted focused coding in the second
stage, and each author proceeded to code half of the total number of pho-
tographs to determine which of the three themes they exhibited. The photo-
graph is treated as the unit of analysis. The protest signs, posters, and slogans
were written in Arabic, French, English, and Italian. The authors of this
article, who together have proficiencies in all languages above, undertook the
translations.
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION: RECLAMATION MASTER

FRAME ENCOMPASSING INTEGRITY, NATION,
AND PEOPLE
Based on our analysis, we document and discuss here the three frames of protest
that we found predominant in the protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya and that,
together, we see as constituting the “reclamation” master frame.
First Frame: Reclaiming Integrity of Governance from Corrupt Tyrants

Protestors expressed moral outrage at the corruption and depravity of their
leadership. They showed revulsion toward their leaders whom they depicted as
tyrants who had violated the country and stolen its wealth. We see the intense
revulsion as a longing for a different form of governance, one that has integrity
and respect for the people. In reclaiming the integrity of governance from cor-
ruption, protestors sought to reclaim wealth and resources of the country that
they considered owed to them but denied because of clientelism and enrichment
by the governing elite.
The theme of leaders as diabolic thieves was associated with corruption at the
highest levels of the state. A poster in Egypt read: “We want our money back.”
Tunisian protestors referred to Ben Ali’s financial misconduct, as illustrated by a
sign reading “Plus de dictateur! Plus de voleurs!” (“No more dictator! No more
thieves!”) and accused the regime of corruption, fraudulence, and embezzlement.
Grievances about corruption were directed not only at Ben Ali himself but also at
the members of his family for alleged illicit use of public assets, as an extreme
form of patrimonialism was widely perceived to pervade the allocation of
resources in the country (Lawson, 2015). During a protest in early January, one
sign specifically condemned the “privileges of Trabelsi,” in reference to Ben Ali’s
wife, Leila Trabelsi, who was reported to own 1,000 pairs of shoes and 1,500
pieces of jewelry (Middle East Online, 2011).
Protestors projected the deep sense of violation that they had experienced. The
messages addressed directly the immorality of the corrupt leader. As Goodwin,
Jasper, and Polletta (2000) remind us, frames “generally only work when
they have an emotional impact on people” (p. 78). Moral outrage at leaders’
corruption was emotionally resonant with protesters in all three countries.
The protestors depicted state leaders in terms of depravity, greed, cruelty, and
exploitation. We interpret photographs showing instances of leader defacement,
the hanging of effigies, and the burning of material associated with the regime
(such as books, flags, and money) as revulsion toward the leader, who is depicted
as having stolen the wealth and dignity of the country, and thus deserving pun-
ishment and loathing. Dictators were portrayed in photographs and posters
through animalistic or satanic depictions, in mass burnings of government-made
signs representing heads of state, and in the hanging of effigies meant to sym-
bolize collective rejection of the leadership.
Common were the depictions of Mubarak and Gaddafi as vampires and
demons, as exemplified in the representation of the Libyan leader in Fig. 1. In
a similar vein, a Tunisian protestor held a sign stating in Arabic “The party
[Ben Ali’s] is an enemy of the people” and showing Ben Ali adorned with a
Nazi swastika and a skull, common symbols of a poison or fatal substance.
The message of enmity posited Ben Ali and his party as lethal to the health of
the country and, in the imagery of a skull, as hellish or as a grim reaper.
Likewise, Mubarak was depicted wearing a German army uniform or Hitler’s
hairstyle.
Fig. 1. Example of Frame No. 1. Benghazi, Libya. February 23, 2011. A

Libyan holds a poster featuring a caricature of Gaddafi who sits in a trashcan labeled
in Arabic “Dustbin of History” with a blood-drenched raised hand and writing above
him that reads “I am the only Satan.” His teeth are notably pointed to indicate a
venomous character or Dracula and a Star of David is featured prominently
on his chest. © Reuters.
Shoes, which often signify filth and disgust in the Middle East, were used in
multiple ways to humiliate and reject the leadership. People waved their shoes
collectively as a gesture of insult to Mubarak, especially during his frequent

appearances on late-night national broadcasts announcing that he would
not resign. In other instances, an Egyptian protestor raised his shoe in which
he had put a photograph of Mubarak and, in the eastern city of Suez,
several Egyptians carried a large carpet with shoes placed atop an image of
Mubarak’s face.
Meant to reject state leaders by expressing how much protestors reviled them,
animal portrayals pervaded the protests. In Libya, Gaddafi was depicted as a pig,
a dog, and a monkey. In direct response to Gaddafi’s reference to dissidents as
“rats” and “cockroaches” when he addressed the nation one week after the initial
uprisings, several protestors represented him as a rat or cockroach, inverting and
reappropriating the language that Gaddafi had used to degrade them (Spencer,
2011). Protestors mocked Gaddafi also as a monkey by inverting his name to
“Girdaffi,” as “gird,” in Libyan Arabic pronunciation, is the term for monkey.
A message that transpired through the protests is that only by getting rid of their
leaders would people regain a sense of the integrity of their own country. This is
reflected in the heavy use of the term “Degage” (French for get out), which first
appeared in Tunisia to become later a common slogan of the Arab Uprisings in
other countries.
Second Frame: Reclaiming the Nation

Reclaiming nation and state constituted a resounding second frame in all three
countries. Protestors used national flags not only to express anger with the
present and but also hope for a better future. The overwhelming theme we
found was an assertion of belonging to the nation, attachment, and commitment
to it. The theme of reclaiming the nation and the state appeared with several
related meanings: absolving the nation and state that had been soiled, vitiated,
deformed, crippled while in the dirty hands of the dictators; reappropriating the
nation and state away from the dictators and giving it back to the people; and
gaining pride in the nation and state by making them better than what they had
been.
The dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, which followed from national
independence movements at the end of colonial rule by European powers, placed
state power in the hands of a few and excluded input from ordinary citizens who
generally felt left out of national politics. Protestors sought to claim a voice in
politics as a legitimate right, one that they should have, even though they never
experienced it in the postcolonial nation state. They showed pride in and hope for
a new nation. We found the message of reclaiming nation and state to be
powerful during the protests and to be strikingly future-oriented.
Across the photographs, protestors mobilized a range of flags such as fabric
flags, handmade paper flags, face paintings in the color and shape of their
national flags, and flags used as headscarves. Flags were, at times, demonstrably
homemade or simply drawn on poster board. People waved flags, hung them
around the protest site, and, in many cases, draped their bodies in them or kissed
the flags in a demonstration of love for the nation. Protestors showed imaginative
ways of using the flag. Many photographs featured images of the national flag
painted on cheeks, foreheads, arms, and faces. Many showed young people with
flags painted on them or carrying flags.
Tunisians in the streets chanted the national anthem at the same time as they
carried flags, stirring strong emotions of those witnessing the scene. Demon-
strators used national flags along with their written signs. For example, in Egypt,
they waved flags printed with Arabic and English words, “25 JAN” and “Yanāīr
25,” to commemorate the mass mobilization that ignited 18 days of protest
starting on January 25, 2011. Fig. 2 offers an example of how flags were mobi-
lized during protests in Egypt.
Fig. 2. Example of Frame No. 2. Cairo, Egypt. January 30, 2011. Protesters
mobilize an Egyptian flag with handwritten messages. © Getty Images.
Protestors in Libya shunned the solid green flag that flew over Libya during
Gaddafi’s rule. Instead, they mobilized around the pre-Gaddafi flag, charac-
terized by red, black, and green stripes with a white crescent and star in the
middle, the national flag of the postcolonial period when a weak monarchy
ruled from 1951 to 1969. Its mobilization can be regarded as a direct rejection of
Gaddafi and his visions for the country. Although one could read nationalist
overtones in the display of the pre-Gaddafi flag, we did not detect references to
an idealized past state characteristic of the literature on nationalism (Herder,
1968; Hobsbawm, 1983). Since Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya went from a long-
lasting colonization to decades of authoritarianism until the Arab Spring, it
should come as no surprise for the protestors to ignore the past and focus
instead on creating a new day for themselves and their country.
Third Frame: Reclaiming the Dignity of Loved Ones

In the third frame, protestors reclaimed the dignity of the missing and deceased.
They demanded justice for their loved ones. They wanted acknowledgment of the
state’s violence, including the release of people who were unjustly detained, and
the acknowledgment of the disappearances and deaths of people who were killed
by the regime. The reclamation of loved ones had multiple meanings. These
included (1) the release of individuals imprisoned for political opposition, such as
bloggers; (2) the return of bodies of individuals disappeared and never
acknowledged by the state; and (3) the recognition of loved ones as martyrs
rather than criminals as the state would contend and as activists for justice.
Protestors expressed the pain that their leaders had inflicted on them by killing
or abducting their loved ones. We have included in this regard all instances of
photographs depicting mobilization around coffins, bloodied garments, pro-
testors brandishing bullets, or references to imprisonment of specific individuals
who remained missing or were abducted by the regime. In order to reclaim the
deceased or missing, protestors often raised photographs of their relatives.
Though many of the relatives had died 30 or 40 years earlier, protestors brought
with them framed photographs of their loved ones, sons, brothers, and fathers, to
the site of protest.
In Tunisia, advocacy for the release of political prisoners was a common
feature of protest signs in both the capital city of Tunis and the city of Regueb,
close to Sidi Bouzid, where Bouazizi’s self-immolation precipitated the Arab
Spring. For example, during a protest a large group of protestors raised their fists
in unison, placing one hand across another to mimic being handcuffed (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3. Example of Frame No. 3. Tunis, Tunisia. January 14, 2011. Protesters
collectively hold hands up as if handcuffed, in solidarity with relatives and fellow
citizens who have been victims of state violence. © Getty Images.
In other instances, the demands for freedom of political prisoners applied to

specific individuals, including Slim Amamou, Hmadi Kaloutcha, and Azyz
Amamy, many of whom were young bloggers or journalists who had openly
criticized the regime, written in newspapers that had been banned and were
imprisoned by the state or forcibly disappeared (PEN America, 2011).
In Libya, a primary protest location of a courthouse alongside the beach in the
eastern city of Benghazi became the site of an extensive mural of photographs,
primarily those of individuals killed in 1996 in what is regarded as a killing
of over 1,200 political prisoners incarcerated in Abu Salim Prison in Tripoli
(Zarrugh, 2018). Individuals mobilized personal photographs, often kept in the
ornate framing that had adorned the walls of their homes, thus transforming the
protest site into a commemoration of dead or disappeared relatives and a vivid
symbol of state brutality under Gaddafi. The wall of photographs not only
acknowledged the brutality of the past but also reiterated the continuity of regime
violence, as new photographs of the recently deceased were hung alongside the
old when the regime intensified its violence to quell the uprisings.
Photographs showed symbols of contemporary violence, such as bloodied
shirts and garments, also being mobilized, as protestors waived them during
protest or displayed them in the streets in both Egypt and Libya to demonstrate
the continuity of state aggression against the citizenry. Photographs in Egypt
captured men holding spent bullet casings in their palms or showing empty bullet
cartridges to prove the presence of gunshots by riot police during protests.
Egyptian protestors also commemorated victims of the mass protests by
marching with photographs and real or symbolic coffins of victims. People hung
portraits of victims at Tahrir Square with signs describing them as “heroes”
whose deaths will never be in vain. One of the signs read “We will not forget you,
… Mustafa Samir al-Dawa.” Yet another sign featured the claim that the “blood
of the martyrs will not be lost” alongside photographs of two brutally killed men.
In the Arab Uprisings, the protestors held their leaders accountable for the death
of their loved ones, a radical political act in itself to express anger at regime
violence.
Three Frames Constituting the Reclamation Master Frame

Every one of the three single frames we found conveys the notion of protestors
reclaiming what they see as their right which a perpetrator violated, deprived
them of, or stole from them. Together they constitute a reclamation master
frame. In accusing the previous regime of stealing, appropriating, corrupting, or
destroying integrity of governance, nation, and human lives, the protestors
formulated a master frame. The central concept is that of reclaiming what pro-
testors see as a right that has been violated. In another context, the reclamation
master frame could encompass other single frames while the concept of violation
of rights and reclaiming them may itself remain applicable.
To highlight a master frame as encompassing several single frames aims at
helping us understand messages protestors expressed overall in a given set of
protests. It does not follow that other themes were never expressed. For instance,
protestors in Egypt occasionally mobilized bread during protests in a gesture

communicating economic insecurity and expressing the poverty that a large
proportion of Egyptians have endured across the country. In contrast, this frame
was observed once or twice in Tunisia and not at all in the Libyan case. In
another example, the third frame was most evident in Egypt and Libya most
likely because these two countries had exhibited more or better documented state-
orchestrated extrajudicial killings and forced disappearance than Tunisia. Indeed,
most protests involve a multitude of single frames, as they are complex, messy,
confusing, and often bloody events. Single frames, however, do not necessarily
connect to other single frames to amount to a master frame. Only some do. Our
analytic objective has been to capture the similarities in framing among the three
countries and the overall master frame that encompasses single frames. A detailed
discussion of variations among the countries is outside the scope of this article.
The reclamation master frame meets the criteria for master frames offered by
Snow and Benford (1992) in that it provided the interpretive medium for
movements in several sites within a cycle of protest during the Arab Uprisings.
It involves several key dimensions of framing identified by frame theorists. All
collective action frames must “serve to identify social injustices, to focus and to
summarize grievances, to organize disruptive action and to express disruption,
and to posit oppositions and solutions” (Beckwith, 2001, p. 301). Snow and
Benford (1988) refer to these aspects of framing as diagnostic framing, prog-
nostic framing, and motivational framing. Gamson identifies the important
work of collective action frames as defining the identities and agency of an
aggrieved group and the injustice to which they are responding (Johnston &
Noakes, 2005). While these approaches are largely complementary, we find
Snow and Benford’s (1988) vocabulary productive for our case because it points
to the dimension of motivating publics who have been enduring injustice for
decades to act.
The reclamation master frame involves diagnostic, prognostic, and motiva-
tional framing. Diagnostic framing communicates new interpretations of existing
reality to potential movement participants. The reclamation master frame com-
municates that the prevailing regime, and specifically the dictator in charge, has
taken something of value from the people and that it is rightfully theirs. Prog-
nostic framing compels participants to identify a solution to the problem or social
injustice. The reclamation master frame offers the solution of reclaiming that
which is valuable and that people have a right to have by demanding the resig-
nation of the leadership in place. It is precisely the framing of a vast scope of
injustices that leads participants to see a solution in demanding resignation of the
leadership. Social movement scholarship often finds, however, that diagnostic
and prognostic framings are insufficient to compel people to avidly join social
movements. In addition, prospective participants must feel motivated to join in
some way and feel that there is a reason for their personal contribution. Moti-
vational framing in the reclamation master frame reasserts to participants that
they should have ownership of their country and their livelihoods and that the
only way to do so is to participate in reclaiming the political system from the
existing regime in the hope of creating a new one.
CONCLUSION
Throughout the first months of 2011, people occupied the streets and risked their
lives to demand the ousting of authoritarian leaders in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.
Using a visual analysis of thousands of photographs taken of protests during the
uprisings, we find that protestors commonly produced across the three countries
what we interpret as a “reclamation” master frame focused on reclaiming what
they felt was their right to have: integrity in governance, nation, and dignity of
loved ones. First, through depictions of Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi as rabid
villains, evil thieves, malicious vampires, and corrupt criminals, protestors
framed their protests as total rejection of their leaders. Secondly, mobilizing
national flags to emphasize their love for their country and their trust in a better
future, protestors claimed their intent to redeem the nation from the leaders they
despised. Thirdly, they framed their protests as reclaiming the dignity, memory,
and identity of relatives and fellow citizens disappeared or killed by the state.
We have found the three frames we have identified to be dominant and
common in all three countries and to appear repeatedly in the period leading to
regime collapse. Demands for jobs and calls for Islam as motivating the protests
remain valid explanations for the underlying structural causes of the uprisings. It
is remarkable, however, that protestors in all three countries framed their protests
in other terms when they channeled their moral outrage during demonstrations.
The frames were constructed in terms centered on the overall theme of having
been wronged by state leaders and wanting a redefinition of the relationship
between ruled and ruler.
Since the protests lacked a robust, single, nationally present, organizational
leadership even though different mesolevel groups gave guidance, we suggest that
framing is likely to have sustained mobilization in the face of bloody repression.
It took courage to encounter the security forces in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya day
in and day out. Protestors had to share meanings and emotions to keep going and
bring these together in a master frame that made enough sense to motivate them
over days and weeks. We suggest that the reclamation master frame did that in
the climate of repression that prevailed.
We see the reclamation master frame as opening avenues for further research.
We should expect it to apply to a range of other uprisings, but not all. More than
specific to the Arab Uprisings, it is likely to appear in settings where corruption,
authoritarian governance, and state violence characterize the political system. In
considering the Arab Uprisings, we have identified a combination of the three
frames that captured the meanings expressed by protestors and together consti-
tute the reclamation frame common to Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. In other set-
tings, although the particular frames or their combination may vary depending
on context, they may still amount to a reclamation master frame. The particular
frames that appear in any given context can only be assessed through careful
empirical investigation. The key point is that the core dimension of the recla-
mation frame is a claim against the state or a political regime expressed as a
demand that what protestors see as rightfully theirs be either returned or deliv-
ered. Reclamation can apply to something of value that protestors feel they had
at some point but was taken away from them or to something that they see as
rightfully theirs but was never delivered by the authoritarian regime. The viola-
tion of a right previously enjoyed, or never enjoyed but considered legitimate,
thus serves as the basis for a reclamation master frame.
The analysis adopted in this article reveals the extent to which protestors used
visual representations, including inscriptions on their own bodies and multiple
props, to express and frame their demands. The use of visual imagery by dem-
onstrators themselves represented one major strategy of meaning-making during
the protests. State authorities or social movement leaders in repressive regimes
cannot readily control the proliferation of visuals, which, therefore, offer the
potential for observers to witness the expressions and meanings of ordinary
movement participants.
The visual approach we take here represents the beginning of a number of
possible projects on protests beyond the Arab Uprisings, including other
instances of uprisings in similarly highly authoritarian contexts where political
expression through the written word and in news media is severely repressed and
where collective protest comes to the fore at a rhythm and in forms that few
expect. Future research may extend the visual methodology we have outlined
here to consider photographs circulated by citizen journalists on social media
platforms or in videos filmed of the protests. One could analyze videos alongside
photographs to provide additional context for a protest, including the audible
chants and dialogue that would enrich the narrative.
By focusing on the period immediately preceding regime collapse in each
country, we do not suggest that the same frames will necessarily surface in the
future. It is precisely here that the strength and contributions of this study rest.
The empirically based discussion of the frames in a moment in time during the
protests offers us insights into the nuances of protestor demands and expressions
before they become tainted later in ideological reconstructions of the events.
Photographs have allowed us to capture frames as protestors shared them, in a
way that other forms of evidence would make difficult. This approach is
particularly significant in the study of periods of rapid and unexpected political
upheavals such as the Arab Uprisings. The reclamation master frame may be a
useful concept to analyze other authoritarian contexts where protestors allege
that a powerholder has unrightfully deprived them of something or someone that
they feel they should have and risk their lives to demand change.
NOTE: Photos are available upon request from the authors.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For helpful suggestions and comments on earlier versions, we are grateful to anon-
ymous reviewers, Ari Adut, Ron Angel, Javier Auyero, Michael Brenner, Sheldon
Ekland-Olson, Mary Freifeld, Becky Pettit, Bryan Roberts, Nestor Rodriguez,
Michael Young, and members of the Power, History and Society Faculty/Student
Network at the University of Texas, Austin. We also wish to thank members of the
Comparative and Historical Sociology seminar at the University of Texas, Austin,
and of the New School for Social Research 2012 Annual Sociology Conference for
feedback on early formulations of ideas presented here.
NOTES
1. We chose to focus on the cases of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya for several reasons. All
three countries experienced a regime collapse that occurred rapidly after the onset of
protests and demonstrations. Other states that ultimately experienced a regime collapse
endured popular demonstrations that took place over the course of several more months.
In Yemen, for instance, the regime ultimately collapsed but this occurred after over a year
after protests began.
2. We include a discussion of props and symbolic behaviors, such as mobilizing a mock
coffin or emulating handcuffed wrists, because they constitute examples of enacting
framing. Benford and Hunt (1992), drawing on a dramaturgical approach to social
movements, examine how social movement actors engage in performances that are
essentially motivated by “scripts” constructed and inspired by the ideas implicit in framing:
“While framing provides actable ideas, scripting moves these ideas one step closer to
enactment. It casts roles, composes dialogue, and directs action” (p. 39). The symbolic
gestures and behaviors in the photographs are poignant illustrations of the ideas embedded
in the three frames identified in this article.
3. An important avenue for future research might include the analysis of photographs
and videos posted to social media platforms by citizen journalists, who might offer alter-
native interpretations of the protests and demonstrations. This, however, is beyond the
scope of this study.
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UNDERSTANDING STRIKES IN THE
21ST CENTURY: PERSPECTIVES
FROM THE UNITED STATES
Chris Rhomberg and Steven Lopez
ABSTRACT
After decades of declining strike rates in the industrialized world, recent years
have seen a surge of militant walkouts in the global South, political strikes in
Europe, and unconventional strikes in nonunion sectors in the United States.
This new diversity of strike action calls for a new theoretical framework. In this
paper, we review the historical strengths and limits of traditions of strike theory
in the United States. Building on the emerging power resources approach, we
propose a model based on a multidimensional view of associational power,
power resources, and arenas of conflict in the economy, state, and civil society.
We demonstrate the utility of our approach via a case analysis of strikes in the
“Fight for $15” campaign in the United States.
Keywords: Labor movement; strikes; power resources; social movements;

Fight for $15; alt-labor; unions; labor unions
INTRODUCTION
What has happened to the strike? Globally, the first decades of the twenty-first
century have shown a diverse set of patterns diverging from traditional strike
theory. In the United States, large, conventional strikes nearly disappeared: an
average of 269 major work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers occurred
annually during the 1970s, but by the 2000s that number had fallen to 17, and in
2009 there were no more than 5 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019). In Europe,
the decline of economic strikes has coincided with a rise in mass political strikes
aimed at government austerity policies (van Der Velden et al., 2007; Hamann,
Power and Protest

ISSN: 0163-786X/doi:10.1108/S0163-786X20210000044005
37
38 CHRIS RHOMBERG AND STEVEN LOPEZ
Johnston, & Kelly, 2013). At the same time, recent years have seen surges of
strike activity in countries like China, without any established institutions of
collective bargaining (Zhang, 2015).
Even in the United States, some unions have continued to strike and win
(Lopez, 2004; Martin & Dixon, 2010). Led by strikes of public school teachers,
the 20 major work stoppages that began in 2018 were the highest number since
2007, and the 485,000 workers involved the most since 1986 (US Bureau of Labor
Statistics, 2019). And thanks to the ongoing “Fight for $15” campaign, led by
short, demonstration strikes of fast food workers, a demand that only recently
seemed politically impossible has been swiftly adopted in major American states
and metropolitan areas: By mid-2019, seven states and the District of Columbia,
representing around 30% of the US workforce, had approved measures to phase
in a $15 minimum wage, more than twice the current federal level (Marr, 2019).
How are we to understand these events? In the postwar era, the field of industrial
relations (IR) viewed strikes as a strategic weapon within institutionalized systems
of collective bargaining in advanced capitalist countries (Kochan, Katz, &
McKersie, 1994) – but today’s strikes are emerging in regions where those institu-
tional frameworks have never existed, where they are no longer normative, and
where they are under attack. Traditional theory seems no longer very relevant, or at
least is confined to limited historical and geographic conditions. As Godard (2011,
p. 282) observes, “even within the field of IR the topic of strikes seems largely to
have been forgotten.” Instead, many labor studies scholars have turned to more
general theories of social movements, finding a useful tool kit for understanding
opportunity structures, resource mobilization, discursive framing, and other social
movement processes (Dixon & Martin, 2012; Fantasia, 1988; Gentile & Tarrow,
2009; Lopez, 2004). But simply borrowing concepts from social movement theory,
while providing many insights, does not help us understand what is distinctive about
labor mobilization and especially strikes. For that, we need an analysis of the
patterns of inequality and conflict in the employment relationship.
Fortunately, labor scholars have begun to put labor unrest back at the center,
by carefully theorizing the sources of worker’s power as workers and developing
new frameworks for understanding strike mobilization in the contemporary
period. An emerging approach, dubbed the “power resources approach” or PRA
(Schmalz, Ludwig, & Webster, 2018), draws on analyses by Wright (2000), Silver
(2003), and Chun (2009) of structural, associational, and symbolic forms of
worker power in the employment relationship. This framework, developed from
global case studies and internationally comparative research, emphasizes how
workers and their organizations can act strategically in the face of changing
capitalist employment relations.
The PRA is an exciting approach, particularly because it promises to clarify
how the resources available to labor movements are embedded in specific social
structures. Unfortunately, however, it suffers from several important, inter-
connected shortcomings. First, it tends to conflate power (the ability to act
collectively) and power resources (the sources of leverage) (see Brookes, 2018).
Second, scholars studying different cases have come up with proliferating lists of
different kinds of power resources, leading to sometimes incommensurate or
Understanding Strikes in the 21ST Century 39
confusing terms of debate. Third, despite identifying new and diverse power
resources, the PRA falls short of theorizing the terrain upon which these
resources are deployed. Researchers agree that context is important, whether
historical, geographic, institutional, or otherwise, but we still lack a sufficient
framework to identify and compare different contexts. Finally, the PRA does not
have a coherent account of the relationships among different types of power
resources. Some scholars highlight those resources emergent in a given case, while
others associate particular forms with specific historical periods, industries, or
struggles, without theorizing how multiple power resources are always at play
and interact with each other.
In this article, we build on the PRA to address each of these shortcomings.
First, we make a fundamental distinction between the ability of workers to act
collectively (associational power and its organizational forms) and power
resources, which we define as sources of leverage rather than forms of power in
their own right. Second, our approach reduces the proliferating taxonomies of
power resources to three key types: structural, legal, and discursive, which we
believe can contain the more nuanced or intermediate definitions. We conceive of
associational power as activating structural, legal, and discursive resources within
and across three analytic dimensions or arenas: structural position from the
economy, law from the state, and discursive power from civil society. Unlike some
writers, we view associational power as the central fulcrum of worker power, the
key to activating various power resources spanning the economy, state, and civil
society. Finally, rather than locating different power resources in different periods,
industries, or struggles, we insist that associational power and all three forms and
arenas of power resources are implicated in every episode or wave of labor unrest.
Understanding the conjuncture of associational power and structural, legal, and
discursive resources is both necessary and sufficient (i.e., contains other interme-
diate types of resources) for understanding concrete cases.
In what follows, we begin by addressing the historical context of our own
theoretical traditions in the United States. We trace the development from
traditional IR or economic theory to the political critique of institutionalization
and the turn from labor relations to social movement theory. We then take up the
PRA approach and offer our critical reconstruction of it. Finally, we demonstrate
the utility of our approach by applying it to the current case of American fast
food workers and the “Fight for $15.”
STRIKES IN CONTEXT: THEORETICAL TRADITIONS

Strikes vary across countries and national contexts, and likewise strike theories
have reflected distinct conditions of historical development in the employment
relationship and its governing institutions (van Der Velden et al., 2007). In late
nineteenth century US, strikes often centered on broad economic grievances (e.g.,
demands for an eight-hour working day) or basic rights of unions to be recog-
nized by employers. With few established procedures for collective bargaining,
large strikes were seen by elites as a fundamental threat to public order and the
structure of society (Brecher, 1997; Montgomery, 1980). This reaction gave rise to
a legal regime of “judicial repression” (Hattam, 1992; Dubofksy, 1994). For
decades, federal courts repeatedly struck down workers’ rights to organize and
act collectively as violations of property rights and combinations in restraint of
trade. Meanwhile, the state had little administrative capacity to regulate labor
relations, and all too often employers and authorities responded to protest with
armed guards, police, or troops. As Lipold and Isaac (2009, pp. 178, 200) report,
in the United States between 1877 and 1947, more than 1,000 strike-related
deaths were recorded across a dozen industries, and “the vast majority of
strike deaths were suffered by strikers (or their sympathizers) and the over-
whelming majority of death was produced by state agents.”
In the industrializing countries of Europe, nascent workers’ unions forged
alliances with social democratic or labor parties around demands for citizenship
rights, bringing working-class mobilization into electoral politics and targeting
the central state (Hyman, 2001; Shorter & Tilly, 1974). In the United States,
however, federal government hostility led to the doctrine of “voluntarist” eco-
nomic trade unionism (Forbath, 1991). In the vast, decentralized, and fractured
American polity, organizers focused on the workplace as the site of greatest
potential leverage and power. The unions that most successfully adopted this
approach (and hence survived) were often those that possessed critical skills in
production, like the craft unions of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
Such unions could strike against a limited number of specific employers and
extract material concessions without threatening the entire social order and
attracting the hostility of the state (Edwards, 1981, pp. 234–237).
Voluntarism did not prevent conflict from spilling over into civil society, and
bitter struggles persisted into the twentieth century. For some unions, mobiliza-
tion included outreach to workers through local (often immigrant) community
networks. Maintaining solidarity during strikes was often a contest that impli-
cated neighbors, friends, and family, and, in urban consumer sectors (like
breweries and bakeries), protests included boycotts that relied on popular sup-
port. Yet even the more radical syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World
shared the voluntarist focus on exercising power through the workplace, inde-
pendent of state intervention (Kimeldorf, 1999).
Strike Theory I: The Economic Model

The focus on the workplace led to the rise of an alternative view of strikes in the
early twentieth century. For reformers such as John R. Commons, William
Leiserson, and others who founded the discipline of IR in America and whose
ideas underpinned the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), no funda-
mental conflict of interest existed between labor and capital. Rather, labor strife
signaled an unnecessary breakdown in relations between employers and workers,
caused not by capitalism but rather industrial dictatorship (Vinel, 2013).
Replacing industrial dictatorship with democratic institutions capable of man-
aging conflict would provide a rule-based framework that would allow disputes to
be settled without resort to violence.
The New Deal reformers, therefore, sought to establish a “constitutional

government in industry” that would stabilize relations between employers and
workers to allow for greater cooperation and harmonization of their interests
(Vinel, 2013, p. 71; see also Lichtenstein & Harris, 1996). Through the National
Labor Relations Board (NLRB, the administrative agency established under the
NLRA), the state set rules for negotiations but did not intervene to ensure set-
tlements. To maintain the integrity of the bargaining relationship, the right to
strike was explicitly protected in the language of the NLRA and affirmed by the
Supreme Court. Yet a tension remained between the Act’s goals to protect
workers’ rights and equalize their bargaining power with employers and its leg-
islative justification of protecting the flow of commerce and reducing industrial
strife (White, 2016).
Like voluntarism before it, state regulation did not eliminate conflict. Amer-
ican employers continued to resist unions in the workplace, and the number of
strikes per million employees in the United States was actually higher during the
postwar decades than during the 1920s or ‘30s (Edwards, 1981, p. 13). Never-
theless, the procedural infrastructure established under the NLRA channeled the
resolution of labor disputes away from politics and from other actors in the
community. As labor relations solidified around contractual negotiations
between unions and individual employers, strikes were no longer seen as cata-
strophic breakdowns of social order. Rather, the institutional context was largely
taken for granted as postwar strike theory focused on the economics of the
bargaining relationship.
Economic theories assumed a market transaction in which labor and man-
agement each possessed organizational security and calculated the costs and
benefits of the decision to strike. Work stoppages imposed pain on both sides, as
employers lost production and profits and workers lost wages and subsistence
(Reder & Neumann, 1980). Ideally, through negotiation each side could estimate
the other’s room for concessions and reach agreement without enduring the
actual costs of a strike. Strikes were seen as an accident or mistake, reflecting a
failure in bargaining due to imperfect information or behavioral psychology
(Hicks, 1963). At the macrolevel, observers also noted the strong correlation of
strike frequency with short-term fluctuations in the business cycle; that is, strikes
increased in a growing economy when labor markets were tight and wages lagged
behind inflation (Ashenfelter & Johnson, 1969).
In the workplace, the postwar system of collective bargaining delivered eco-
nomic gains to unionized workers and directly contributed to the reduction of
income inequality in the United States (Western & Rosenfeld, 2011). At the same
time, the theoretical assumptions of organizational security and cost-benefit
calculation relied on a historically contingent formation of strong institutions
governing relations between business and labor. Indeed, the economic model of
strikes was strongest in the United States in the post–World War II period, after
the implementation of the NLRA (Snyder, 1975, p. 265; Rubin, 1986). The
theory had less to say about nonunionized workers excluded from institutional
protections, however, and eventually it lost much of its explanatory power once
those protections began to break down (Kaufman, 1992).
Strike Theory II: The Institutionalist Critique

In the wake of the social movements of the 1960s, new left critics began to
question the orientation of traditional strike theory. Instead of celebrating the
peaceful resolution of labor disputes, they argued that institutionalization had led
to the co-optation of unions and a “taming” of the strike (Aronowitz, 1973;
Serrin, 1973). This was followed in social science by a turn to a more political/
organizational perspective that focused on how law and political institutions
shape workers’ capacity to mobilize (Shorter & Tilly, 1974; Snyder, 1975). Under
the postwar labor management “accord” strikes became highly regulated, with
profound effects on their form and content.
For example, the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the NLRA outlawed strikes
for recognition as well as secondary boycotts and picketing, while the courts
enjoined most “wildcat” strikes during the life of the contract (McCammon, 1990).
Employers adamantly resisted union efforts to bargain over the managerial control
of the firm, and the law did not protect workers who struck for such demands
(Kochan et al., 1994). As a result of these limits, most walkouts took the form of
the “contract strike,” limited mainly to issues of compensation and work rules and
arising at moments of contract renewal.
The postwar accord represented an historic shift in the US government policy
from repression to what McCammon (1993) called a legal regime of “integrative
prevention.” Ironically, however, the institutionalist critique emerged just as a
wave of deindustrialization and job loss undercut union membership and as the
regime itself was about to collapse. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired the
striking federal air traffic controllers and busted their union, the Professional Air
Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). The outcome of the PATCO strike
announced a critical change in the American government’s attitude to workers’
rights (McCartin, 2013). As implemented by Reagan’s appointees to the NLRB
and reinforced by the federal courts, it marked the rise of a new anti-union legal
regime in the federal government and the return of a form of “judicial repression”
of workers’ rights to act collectively (Rhomberg, 2012).
In that context, the law no longer steered the actors toward peaceful, nego-
tiated settlements within institutional channels. Rather, the meaning of the strike
shifted from an economic tactic and protected legal right to a more high-risk
confrontation over the continued existence of the collective bargaining relation-
ship. Many strikes became in effect “recognition” strikes, in which the stakes
were not only the economic issues on the table but whether employers were
willing to negotiate with unions at all. Thus, as with the economic model of
strikes, the institutionalist critique of the postwar system became less relevant as
the regime of labor relations itself was transformed.
Post-strike Theory: Social Movement Analysis

By the end of the twentieth century, private sector union membership in the
United States had fallen below 10% of employed workers (Hirsch & Macpherson,
2019). Meanwhile, alternative forms of mobilization began to appear among
groups of marginalized workers previously unorganized by unions or denied
collective bargaining rights under the law, like immigrant (including undocu-
mented) workers, day laborers, domestic workers, and others in a range of
independent, informal, or precarious jobs (Clawson, 2003; Fine, 2006). Such
efforts often necessarily organized away from the workplace, as in nonprofit
worker centers based in ethnic communities, coalitions of unions with churches or
minority and women’s groups, and corporate campaigns aimed at the consuming
public. Forgoing traditional strike tactics, these “alt.labor” strategies often went
outside the framework of the NLRA though they did not ignore the law as a
whole. Instead, campaigns often targeted local and state governments, seeking
court enforcement of claims for back pay for wage and hour violations or passage
of “living wage” laws and other state legislative or regulatory reforms (Milkman
& Ott, 2014).
As interest in strikes and labor disputes fell among economists and legal
scholars (Estlund, 2006), labor movement studies enjoyed a rebirth in sociology.
Departing from both the economic and institutionalist paradigms, researchers
drew increasingly from social movement theory developed outside the traditional
labor relations field. Such concepts have greatly influenced sociological research
on strikes. Scholars have drawn on the resource mobilization perspective to study
the dilemmas and conditions under which trade unions seek to mobilize external
allies as resources during strikes (e.g., Dixon & Martin, 2012; Lopez, 2004;
Mirola, 2003). Others have examined the role of internal trade union resources
(Dixon, Roscigno, & Hodson, 2004; Manky, 2018). Ganz (2009) takes this
further by developing the concept of strategic capacity, i.e., the characteristics of
social movement organizations (SMOs) conducive to the production of innova-
tive and creative action.
Processes of social movement framing during strikes have been examined in
numerous studies (Schmitt 1993; Conell & Conn, 1995; Martin, 2003; Coley,
2015; Danaher & Dixon, 2017; Levine, Cobb, & Roussin 2017). These studies
have treated strikes as rich case studies for describing how social movement
actors seek to mobilize meaning in intentional ways. Related to this is a stream of
research focusing on how strikes both galvanize and rely on processes of col-
lective identity (Fantasia, 1988). Researchers have traced processes of collective
identity formation by investigating strikes as “protest waves” in themselves (e.g.,
Conell & Conn, 1995; Roscigno & Danaher, 2004), as well as processes of
intermovement influence through which other social movements affect the pro-
pensity of workers to engage in strikes (Isaac & Christiansen, 2002). Finally,
scholars have investigated the role of the political context on labor militancy,
showing that, like other movements, strikes as episodes of collective action can
emerge as responses to both opportunities and threats (Stillerman, 2003; Martin
& Dixon, 2010; Elfstrom & Kuruvilla, 2014; Barrie & Ketchley, 2018).
Taken together, this body of research adds to our understanding of American
workers’ struggles, allowing a closer analysis of the relations among labor,
community, and other cultural movements across civil society as a whole. Yet the
analysis of strikes sits uneasily within the social movement paradigm, as is
sometimes recognized by movement scholars themselves. Tarrow (2011, p. 217),
for example, acknowledges that the conditions affecting workers’ strikes are
different than in other social movements, leading to different patterns of out-

comes. In their comprehensive study of American collective protest events from
1960 to 1986, Soule and Earl (2005, p. 362n8) deliberately excluded strikes and
work stoppages “because the dynamics of institutionalization in labor likely differ
from the rest of the protest sector given the legal institutionalization of collective
bargaining and laws governing strikes.”
This recognition that labor mobilization may have distinctive dynamics points
to an important conundrum in social movement theory highlighted by Walder
(2009): while movement-specific differences in social and political structures are
necessary for understanding particular movements and episodes of protest, such
differences appear as accidental, untheorized background elements in a social
movement paradigm focused on general “processes of mobilization.” But since
processes of mobilization are always embedded in specific social and political
structures, understanding those processes requires theorizing the social and
political structures that comprise movement context.
To their credit, scholars of social movements have begun to confront the
question of context. Tilly (1998, pp. 86–91) saw exploitation as a basic driver of
categorical inequality between those who control and profit from labor-
demanding resources and those excluded from the full value of their labor on
those resources. For Tilly, exploitation “plays a part in almost all processes that
generate durable inequality,” while its inherent volatility leads to conflict, bar-
gaining, and struggle among the actors involved. From the resource mobilization
perspective, Edwards, McCarthy, and Mataic (2018, p. 88), for example, urge
scholars to attend to “durable patterns of inequality in the social, economic, and
spatial distribution of resources” and invite attention to the way that “specific
SMOs, coalitions, issue campaigns, or event organizers mobilize resources”
(Edwards et al., 2018, p. 89).
In the case of strikes, this would mean theorizing not only the institutionali-
zation of organized labor but also the employment relationship that gives labor
mobilization its unique context. The employment relationship – i.e., the structure
of the production process and the labor market and the forms of state regulation
that govern them – distinguishes workers’ struggles as struggles in and about work.
This context, and the power relations within it, affects the availability of
resources and their relationship to one another. Fortunately, we do not have to
start this analysis from scratch: labor researchers have recently developed a
model that explicitly theorizes these relations, in what has come to be called
the PRA.
THE POWER RESOURCES APPROACH

The idea that wage workers have the potential collective power to disrupt pro-
duction by withholding their labor can be traced back as far as Adam Smith and
perhaps beyond. More recently, Perrone et al. (1984) proposed the concept of
workers’ positional power – i.e., the extent to which labor has the power to disrupt
downstream production by virtue of its strategic location within the division of
labor. This concept, developed further by Wallace, Griffin, and Rubin (1989),
was influential in Wright’s (2000) distinction between workers’ associational and
structural power. For Wright, associational power describes
the various forms of power that result from the formation of collective organizations of workers
[including] unions and parties but [also] a variety of other forms, such as works councils or
forms of institutional representation of workers on boards of directors in schemes of co-
determination, or even, in certain circumstances, community organizations (2000, p. 962).
Structural power consists in “the power of workers as individuals that results

directly from tight labor markets or from the strategic location of a particular
group of workers within a key industrial sector” (2000) Wright then focuses on
associational power as a means for achieving institutional class compromises that
include the possibility of durable positive-sum outcomes as in social democratic or
neocorporatist regimes like postwar Sweden and Germany.
Silver (2003), on the other hand, takes Wright’s notion of structural power –
especially what she calls workplace bargaining power arising from strategic locations
within a production process, such as an assembly line or supply chain – and makes it
central to her analysis of global labor unrest in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies. Silver grounds workers’ power in the development of the capitalist economy
across historic waves of industrialization. She shows how employers responded to
militancy with both concessions and a range of temporary “fixes,” including spatial
fixes to relocate production away from areas of labor strength; technological fixes
aimed at controlling the shop floor; and boundary-drawing fixes to limit the scope of
concessions along lines defined by gender, race, or geography. Such tactics post-
poned but did not resolve capital’s confrontations with labor, as every new site of
major industrial development led to new waves of labor unrest and the formation of
powerful new working classes demanding change. Silver’s theory successfully pre-
dicted that rapid industrialization in China, for example, would lead to large-scale
labor unrest – as it soon did in the historic strike wave there beginning in 2010
(Zhang, 2015).
Silver acknowledged that most of her analysis focused on structural rather
than cultural relationships (2003, p. 33). Chun (2009) filled this gap by adding
symbolic power as a distinct, third type of worker power. Chun argued that low-
wage, marginalized immigrant, minority, and women workers are often excluded
from social and legal protections and face a prior struggle for recognition of the
legitimate standing of their labor and rights as workers. Such workers can
mobilize using symbolic power, not within formal institutional channels but
through the moral order of the public sphere. This takes the form of “classifi-
cation struggles” aimed at “redefining what it means to be a ‘worker’ and an
‘employer’ in the eyes of the public” rather than in the workplace or the state.
Workers exert symbolic leverage by organizing “public dramas” that transform
workplace disputes into “moral crises” for the larger community, pressuring
employers to respond to public opinion (2009, pp. 17–18).
A paradigmatic illustration of symbolic power in the United States is the
Justice for Janitors (JfJ) strategy developed by the Service Employees Interna-
tional Union (SEIU). Rather than organizing for NLRB elections at each
janitorial subcontractor, the JfJ strategy targeted the building owners or corpo-
rations who were the prime contractors for the cleaning firms. Organizers focused
on the urban community, building solidarity among often immigrant workers
and mobilizing public support through media-oriented protests designed to
pressure owners to provide the resources for a standard agreement for all con-
tractors (Rolf, 2016; Rosenblum, 2017).
Together, Wright, Silver, and Chun identified three types of workers’ power in
the employment relationship: structural, associational, and symbolic. Clearly,
there is much conceptual congruence here with elements of social movement
theory, e.g., structural opportunities and threats, organizational resources and
repertoires, and symbolic framing and collective identity. The advantage of the
PRA, however, is its firm grounding in the interdependencies of the employment
relationship, the analysis of capitalist development, and workers’ mobilization as
workers. As the PRA has gained salience, others have continued to expand on the
framework and refine the typology of workers’ power.
Thus, Zhang (2015) finds “legitimacy leverage” in the workplace as a kind of
ideological power Chinese auto workers use to extract concessions from
employers and the government. Without independent unions or conventional
collective bargaining rights, workers use the threat of disruption to pressure the
Chinese Communist Party concerned with stability and political legitimacy, using
the Party’s own rhetoric to make it live up to its official ideology on behalf of
workers. Lambert, Webster, and Bezuidenhout (2012) identify logistical power as
an extension of structural leverage, based on the disruption of supply chains
across wider transportation and distribution networks, while Stillerman (2017)
adds urban spatial patterns and ability to shift scale from local to national arenas.
Brookes (2013) distinguishes two more forms in institutional and coalitional
power. Institutional power describes the “capacity of workers to influence the
behavior of an employer by invoking the formal or informal rules that structure
their relationship and interactions” (p. 188). These rules include laws and
established practices that govern workers’ rights, employment conditions, col-
lective bargaining, welfare policies, and institutions for enforcement of the same.
In turn, coalitional power is the “capacity of workers to expand the scope of
conflict by involving other, nonlabor actors willing and able to influence an
employer’s behavior” (p. 192). Workers draw on social ties, mutual values and
interests, and shared identities to reach out for allies among neighbors, com-
munity leaders, religious groups, politicians, consumers, and other actors from
local partners to transnational NGOs.
Others have deepened the analysis of associational power. Gumbrell-
McCormick and Hyman (2013, pp. 30–31) disaggregate trade unions’ associa-
tional power into categories of organizational participation, moral discursive
power, and strategic innovation. In her study of Walmart workers in Chile, Bank
Munoz (2017) finds determinants of effective associational power in strategic
capacity, internal democracy, militancy, and autonomy from political parties.
These concepts give us further tools for analysis. Yet, as Schulze-Cleven (2017,
p. 407) observes, the problem now is perhaps “too many theorized types of power
resources to guide cross-case comparisons [or] speak to the complex causal

processes that give rise to each theorized form of influence.”
One recent attempt at synthesis comes from Schmalz et al. (2018), who pro-
pose a comprehensive framework with four types of power resources (Fig. 1).
Schmalz et al. keep the existing definition of structural power, but limit associ-
ational power to the internal features of workers’ associations, including mem-
bership size/participation/cohesion and organizational infrastructure and
efficiency. They identify institutional power as an independent form, but lump
symbolic and coalitional power together as “societal power.” They present their
schema as follows:
Fig. 1. Trade Union Power Resources. Source: Schmalz et al. (2018).
THE POWER RESOURCES APPROACH:

A RECONSTRUCTION
We are deeply indebted to Schmalz et al.‘s efforts to achieve consensus within the
PRA and move the debate forward. They highlight the relational dynamic
between employers and workers, and they rightly emphasize the importance of
context in understanding the alignment of power in any particular case. We seek
to build on their approach, but with several critical revisions. In particular, we
believe the PRA (1) continues to conflate power and power resources; (2) mis-
understands the basic types of power resources; (3) lacks a clear conception of the
arenas where these resources are deployed; and (4) does not theorize the con-
junctural relationship among power and power resources.
Brookes (2018, p. 256) suggests that associational power is “most usefully
conceptualized as the capacity of workers to mobilize themselves and to act
collectively” in the face of opposition. This capacity, we suggest, includes, but is not
limited to, the organizational resources that Schmalz et al. identify. Associational
power, shaped by societal conditions, both draws on and creates organizational
resources: even a spontaneous wildcat walkout relies on and creates social networks
of solidarity constituting the fleeting organizational form of that instance of asso-
ciational power (Fantasia, 1988). Associational power, then, is power in action,
comprising both mobilization and its organizational forms.
As power in action, however, associational power is distinguished from power
resources, which are better understood as sources of leverage that remain only
potential until workers are able to mobilize them, e.g., to carry out a strike or
stage a public drama (see Bank Munoz, 2017, p. 11–12). We think these power
resources can be condensed into three basic types: structural power resources (e.g.,
strategic locations in production processes or labor markets); legal resources (such
as laws protecting or restricting worker rights); and discursive resources (such as
powerful symbols, narratives, and identities). Each of these three power resources
is analytically distinct and irreducible to the others, each represents an important
source of potential leverage for collective action, and together we think they are
robust enough to contain further distinctions. For example, if institutional power
resources are ultimately backed by their fixation in law, in effect they are asso-
ciational power applied within the context of the state. Likewise, coalitional power
resources can be seen as associational power applied to the activation of networks
and solidarity from actors in civil society (Schmalz et al. 2018, pp. 121–122).
Third, Schmalz et al. stress the importance of context but do not provide a
sufficient framework to identify its parameters, show where power is deployed, or
compare contexts across cases. So, for example, institutional power resources can
vary greatly across nation states, including the industrialized democracies of
North America, Western Europe, and Asia Pacific, and developing countries
throughout the world (Brookes, 2013, p. 192). Following Wright (2000), Schmalz
et al. distinguish levels of analysis including the workplace, industrial sector, and
“society” but do not explain the causal terrain that shapes conditions at these
levels or others. As a result, their schema offers a menu of different power
resources for action, but not a map for discerning actual power relations in a
concrete case. To provide that map, we propose a simple model that distinguishes
the analytic dimensions of the economy, the state, and civil society as arenas
where movements and their opponents exercise power (Hyman, 2001; Carley,
Jenkins, & Smith, 2001; see Fig. 2). Theorizing the terrain of conflict in this way
allows us to examine not only the associational power and power resources
available to workers but also the limits on that power arising from the legacies of
prior conflicts in each arena (Lopez, 2004).
This brings us to our fourth and final point of critique and reconstruction.
Every real event of mobilization is shaped by the conjuncture of power resources
available and deployed across the three arenas. Each arena features a critical
power resource: structural leverage in the economy, law in the state, and
discourse in civil society, but associational power spans all three arenas and
encompasses both internal organizational and external coalitional power
resources. The three arenas are analytical dimensions and are not empirically
Fig. 2. Associational Power and Power Resources in Context.
isolated from each other: governments regulate the economy including the labor
market and the workplace, organizations draw upon legal rights and popular
frames in the community, and workers bring their values and group identities
with them on the job and in the political sphere. Tracing the developmental paths
in the economy, the state, and civil society reveals how those junctures come
together and change over time and across different cases.
We turn now to an elaboration of our model. First, the economy includes the
paths of capitalist development that constitute the interdependence between
employers and workers in the employment relationship (Murray & Schwartz,
2019). The availability of structural power resources is affected by factors like
integration into the global economy, location in commodity chains or exposure to
competition or cyclical fluctuation, dependence on skill versus technological
displacement, the concentration or dispersal of workers in production, levels of
unemployment and informalization, and access or exclusion in the labor market.
In the United States, the financialization of the economy has led to the
“hollowing out” of the corporation, as firms outsource employment, hire part-
time or temporary employees or independent contractors, and adopt other
practices of the “fissured” workplace (Weil, 2014). In the fast food industry, the
system of franchise ownership links large “brand” corporations with retail outlets
operated by franchisees. The brand corporations effectively control the labor
process but deny responsibility for wages or compliance with labor laws, while
the franchisees face intense pressure to cut costs. Local outlets serve mass
consumer markets and employ women, minority, and immigrant workers for
low-wage jobs, often with precarious conditions including involuntary part-time
hours, irregular scheduling, and wage theft (Allegretto et al., 2013).
Second, in the arena of the state, governments vary in their economic policies
and regulation of employment and can range from violent repression to institu-
tional incorporation of the labor movement. The state also governs access to
social protections and benefits that help workers sustain their livelihoods against
the market, and its internal organization (e.g., centralization vs. dispersal to
regional authority, relative openness vs. closure to popular pressure) affects its
capacities for regulation and reform. Schmalz et al. (2018, p. 121) stress that
institutional incorporation is a two-edged sword for labor movements, not only
protecting workers’ rights but also restricting or channeling their action. The
institutional settlements in each country reflect the legacies of past struggles and
negotiations, but Schmalz et al. also note the relative durability of such settle-
ments across economic cycles and political changes. While institutional power
resources can include formal and informal arrangements, ultimately the critical
power resource is law and its ability to fix or solidify relations through govern-
ment authority, the protection and legitimation of rights, and adjudication of
contracts (Cohen, 1999).
Private sector unions in the United States are governed under the NLRA,
which defines workers’ rights to organize, bargain collectively, and strike.
Decades of case decisions by the federal courts and the NLRB have now
significantly undermined the statute, leading to a return of a form of judicial
repression of unions (Rhomberg, 2012). Since the 1980s, an entire industry of
anti-union lawyers, consultants, and security firms has arisen, and employers
unlawfully fire workers for union activity in as many as one out of every three
union election campaigns (Bronfenbrenner, 2009; Logan, 2008). Other forms of
worker protection likewise have eroded. The federally mandated minimum wage
is set by Congress but has no automatic adjustment for inflation; its current rate
of $7.25 per hour is below the federal poverty line for a full-time worker with a
family of two (Cooper, 2017). The growing number of independent contractors,
including those in the “gig” economy, is not covered by federal wage and over-
time standards, unemployment insurance, social security, or rights to unionize
under the law (Weil, 2014).
Third, the idea of civil society has been defined in various ways, but here we
mean simply those social relations not reducible to either the economy or the
state. Those include formal voluntary associations as well as more informal social
ties, networks of family and friends, and everyday forms of community. Relations
in civil society support the emergence of social spaces where people learn about
and discuss common concerns and develop norms, identities, and repertoires of
action independently of the market and the state (Fraser, 1992; Tarrow, 2011
[1994]). The concept of civil society is by no means limited to the institutions of
Western liberal democracies, nor is it inherently emancipatory (Cohen, 1999). It
remains, however, a “multiorganizational field” whose diverse streams of
discourse create the possibility for innovative or oppositional cultures and action.
Even in societies where the public sphere is repressed or dominated by the
government, those conditions affect how people form collective identities and
solidarity (Fernandez & McAdam, 1988; Pang, 2019).
Civil society in the United States is a deeply fragmented yet dynamic terrain,
with contradictory and cross-cutting paths of race, gender, class, citizenship, and
other enduring categories of inequality and group formation (Hunter, 2013;
Naples, 1998; Rhomberg, 2004). Current workers’ movements react to and draw
from labor history and from the cultural and organizational legacies of the civil
rights, feminist, community organizing, and immigrant movements, among
others (Ganz, 2009; Kurtz, 2002; Milkman, 2000). Together, these form a distinct
civic ecology or field of strategic action among groups (Fligstein & McAdam,
2011; Orr, 2007).
Collective actors rarely depend on only one form of power resources in
isolation; the conjuncture of associational power and power resources across the
three arenas is a basic feature of all cases of mobilization (Juravich, 2018).
Indeed, strong structural power resources are typically the exception; most
workers in most sectors lack significant structural power most of the time. This is
especially true for low-wage service employees, precisely the groups that have
figured most prominently in recent organizing in the American labor movement.
To further illustrate our model, we apply it here to the seemingly anomalous
recent wave of strikes by fast food workers in the United States. We look to the
power resources available in each arena, their conjuncture, and how they have
been used in the “Fight for $15” campaign.
CURRENT STRIKES IN THE UNITED STATES: THE CASE

OF FAST FOOD
The US fast food industry employed at least 2.5 million frontline, nonmanagerial
workers in 2012, the year the Fight for $15 movement began in earnest. Average
hourly wages were under $9 or less than $19,000 per year at full time, and most
workers did not get full-time hours. Contrary to stereotypes, most workers were
not teenagers: 68% were single or married adults who were not in school, and 26%
were raising children. Nearly three-quarters (73%) were women, 23% were African
American, 20% Latino, and 15% born outside the United States (Allegretto et al.,
2013; Ruetschlin, 2014; Schmitt & Jones, 2013).
These workers have few structural power resources: jobs are low-skill, workers
are easily replaced, and the production process is discrete and scattered among
thousands of franchisee employers. The average number of employees per
establishment is 17, and even a complete shutdown of any one site would not
necessarily affect other sites (Weil, 2014, p. 129). When the SEIU began reaching
out to fast food workers in 2011, it could not depend on the economic resources
of a traditional strike, much less the porous legal protections of the federal
government. Rather, the union turned first to the arena of civil society.
Drawing from its JfJ repertoire, the union worked through long-standing
partnerships with community groups like New York Communities for Change
in New York City and Action Now in Chicago (Gupta, 2013.) On November 29,
2012, around 200 workers from some 40 fast food outlets in New York City
engaged in a one-day walkout. In the largest work stoppage in the industry to
that time, strikers and supporters gathered in front of a McDonald’s in midtown
Manhattan and raised core demands of a $15 hourly wage and the right to form a
union without intimidation (Eidelson, 2012). The New York City strike attracted
wide attention and quickly sparked a larger movement, with coordinated strike
actions across multiple cities. By the end of 2016, the campaign had mobilized at
least a dozen such national one-day strikes, with participation from tens of
thousands of workers and supporters and solidarity actions in some 30 other
countries (Greenhouse, 2016).
The fast food walkouts show how the employment relationship shapes both
the conflict and the power resources available to the movement. Even with tens of
thousands of participants, the strikers have comprised only a tiny fraction of the
total number of fast food employees nationally. The one-day demonstrations
have rarely shut down the restaurants, causing little disruption for most con-
sumers and imposing almost no direct economic costs on the brand corporations.
Rather, the walkouts have been important for their use of discursive power
resources, internally and externally.
Internally, the strikes reinforced solidarity among the workers, allowing them
to overcome their fears and experience the power of collective action. With a
heavily minority and female workforce, organizers explicitly invoked the cultural
legacy of the African American civil rights and women’s rights movements
(Harris, 2013). Externally, the walkouts captured public attention in a way that
traditional media campaigns and even boycotts and demonstrations alone could
not achieve. The image of workers risking their jobs for dignity in a sector that
was ubiquitous to consumers and the popular epitome of low-wage work
possessed a powerful frame resonance in the public sphere. Along with the 2011
Occupy protests and the similar walkouts at Walmart, the fast food strikes
dramatized the problems of low wages and income inequality and transformed
mainstream civic and political discourse.
The problem remained, however, how to convert the discursive resources into
workplace leverage and institutional change. Here, SEIU has relied on two
strategies that illustrate the conjuncture of power resources and their deployment
across arenas: First, it has escalated pressure on the brand corporations to push
for improved standards and a path toward union negotiations, and second, it has
used legislative action around local minimum wage laws to raise incomes for
workers (Eidelson, 2013). In short, the campaign has followed a path from civil
society through the state in order to achieve change in the economy.
Following the JfJ model, organizers avoided seeking NLRB elections at the
franchisee outlets, instead targeting public protests at the brands and especially
industry leader McDonald’s (Resnikoff, 2014). At the same time, the campaign
began efforts to alter the power resources within the state, directly contesting the
legal construction of the fissured workplace and the anti-union labor law regime.
In a challenge to precedent, it filed charges with the NLRB naming McDonald’s
as a “joint employer” with its franchisees liable for unlawful retaliation against
strikers. The strategy aimed to open the way to legal recognition in the
workplace, and in July 2014, the NLRB General Counsel under President Barack
Obama agreed and authorized complaints against the corporation and its outlets
(Rhomberg, 2018). The campaign received a setback, however, with the 2016
election of Donald Trump as president. Trump’s appointees on the NLRB have
systematically reversed prolabor decisions from the Obama years, including the
case against McDonald’s (McNicholas, Poydock, & Rhinehart, 2019; Selyukh,
2019).
By contrast, the movement’s greatest economic gains have come through a
second prong of political action, around local and state minimum wage laws. In
April 2012, the regional SEIU coalition Working Washington began organizing
subcontracted immigrant, minority, and white workers in and around the Seattle-
Tacoma International Airport in SeaTac, Washington, a small, working-class
suburb of Seattle. When the employers refused to recognize them, the campaign
turned to a municipal ballot initiative to mandate a $15 wage at the airport and
related area businesses. After a vigorous grassroots effort, SeaTac voters passed
the referendum in November 2013 by just over 1% (Rolf, 2016; Rosenblum,
2017).
The SeaTac initiative covered only a small number of employees, but together
with the fast food strikes it had a powerful impact on the concurrent city elections
in Seattle, contributing to the election of Mayor Ed Murray and socialist
Councilor Kshame Sawant. Once in office, Murray convened a committee of
business, labor, and community leaders co-chaired by David Rolf, head of the
40,000-member SEIU Healthcare 775NW, while Sawant began organizing to put
an alternative initiative on the November 2014 ballot. The mayor’s committee
negotiated an agreement to phase in $15 over a 3–7-year period, and on May 29,
2014, the city council voted unanimously for the proposal. Nearly one year after
it witnessed its first local fast food strikes, Seattle became the first major Amer-
ican city to approve a $15 minimum wage (Rosenblum, 2017).
Other cities soon followed, but along paths shaped by their own political
environments and civic ecology. In Los Angeles, the movement drew from other,
non–SEIU-led labor and community actors, including the Los Angeles Alliance
for a New Economy (LAANE) and the politically powerful Los Angeles County
Federation of Labor (LACFL). On May 19, 2015, Los Angeles city councilors
voted 14-1 to raise the minimum wage in the city from $9 to $15 by 2020. In San
Francisco, a coalition led by public employees union SEIU Local 1021 pressured
the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to authorize a ballot initiative to raise the
minimum to $15, and Proposition J won in November 2014 with 77% of the vote.
Internal rivalries within SEIU, however, threatened to disrupt the effort to take
the campaign statewide. By March 2016, however, the various groups reached a
deal with state lawmakers, and in April, Democratic Governor Jerry Brown
signed legislation raising the state minimum to $15 by 2022 (Rhomberg, 2018).
New York State displayed yet another path to reform. Cities there do not have
authority to set their own minimum wage, but the governor can order a special
board to review wages in an industry and implement changes without approval
by the legislature. Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo initially opposed
the $15 wage backed by the powerful SEIU building service Local 32BJ and
the New York Working Families Party, but in May 2015, he convened a wage
board that recommended an increase for 180,000 employees of fast food chain
restaurants. The following April, Cuomo negotiated a budget deal with state
legislators to phase in gradually a $15 wage in all industries by 2022 (Rhomberg,
2018). As of the end of 2019, five more states had passed $15 minimums including
Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, as well as the
District of Columbia (Marr, 2019).
The fast food strikes galvanized popular momentum for a $15 wage and
helped spark an ongoing wave of reform. Once mobilization extended from an
economic focus on the corporations to political campaigns for a higher wage,
however, the movement entered a different arena with a different set of actors,
rules, resources, and strategies. The minimum wage campaigns have so far suc-
ceeded in liberal big cities or states with democratic governors and legislative
support and have relied on powerful allies within SEIU and other established
unions. In other regions, the movement faces strong countermobilization from
business interests particularly under Republican-dominated state governments.
At least 25 states have passed laws preempting cities from adopting higher
minimum wages, including measures in Alabama, Missouri, and Iowa to take
away increases already passed by cities and counties in their states (Chang, 2017;
National Employment Law Project, 2017).
The experience of the Fight for $15 shows the dynamic character of associa-
tional power and its ability to discover, adapt to, or realign the power resources
available in the economy, state, and civil society. In less than a decade, the
campaign has won extraordinary gains that few observers anticipated at the
outset. The strategy also has its limits, however, and perhaps its greatest challenge
is building sustainable organization in the workplace. By the end of 2016, SEIU
had spent at least $40 million dollars on the Fight for $15, including $10 million
in 2016 alone (Greenhouse, 2015; Lewis, 2017). Without union recognition and
contracts with employers, however, the effort has not yet produced new dues-
paying union members in fast food.
SEIU has been criticized for using the protest strikes for media exposure rather
than job-based worker organization, putting the movement on a terrain in which
employers have substantial discursive resources of their own: In 2013 alone,
McDonald’s spent nearly $1 billion on advertising (Hume, 2014; Rosenblum,
2017). The struggle to alter labor law has been at least temporarily stymied under
the Trump administration, and the 1.9-million member SEIU itself faces the loss
of financial resources from the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision allowing
public sector workers to avoid paying for union representation (Elejalde-Ruiz,
2018).
For its part, SEIU has broadened the base of the Fight for $15, bringing in its
campaigns with health aides, airport workers, and others, and it has strengthened
ties with social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo (Haines Whack,
2017). Workers at McDonald’s in 10 cities struck on September 18, 2018 to
protest the company’s failure to address sexual harassment of its employees, and
the campaign has partnered with the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund to support
charges filed by dozens of workers with the federal Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, naming both McDonald’s and its franchisees in cities

across the country (CBS News, 2018; Corbett, 2018). Finally, in September 2019,
the powerful, 175,000-member SEIU Local 32BJ announced a unionization drive
among workers at McDonald’s and corporate-owned Chipotle outlets in the New
York City area (Greenhouse, 2019). It remains to be seen if these tactics can
achieve the twin goals of “$15 and a union” in fast food.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

“Where capital goes, conflict goes,” Silver (2003, p. 41) writes, looking over the
history of auto workers’ struggles in the twentieth century. We agree, yet the
diversity of strike activity in the twenty-first century is not easily grasped by
traditional theoretical frameworks. As we have shown, current strikes cannot be
seen simply in terms of an economic logic that assumes stable institutions pro-
tecting normalized relations of collective bargaining. Similarly, the political
critique of those institutions for channeling or containing workers’ grievances is
less useful when those institutions no longer function as they once did. In the
United States, research on strikes has largely been subsumed under a broader
social movement paradigm. While social movement theory offers valuable
insights on the forms and processes of mobilization, however, it abstracts from
the specific contexts for strikes by treating them as generic forms of protest. For
us, the key to understanding strikes is their status as episodes of conflict grounded
in the changing structure and regulation of the employment relationship.
In this paper, we engage with the PRA as the best way to capture the par-
ticularities of strike activity. We build on the PRA in order to synthesize a
framework that can identify variation across contexts, make possible meaningful
case comparisons, and allow us to understand new and emerging strikes in
relation to the history of capitalist development. We believe our case study of the
fast food strikes and the Fight for $15 campaign in the United States shows the
advantages of our model over existing PRA frameworks.
First, we provide a clear, simplified map that distills key power resources
unique to each arena – structural leverage from the economy, law from the state,
and discourse from civil society. These may be combined in different iterations
including institutional and coalitional power resources, but associational power
as we have described it remains at the center, because it is still required to
mobilize the other power resources. Thus, elements of the Fight for $15 strategy
were already present in the current repertoire of the American labor movement –
JfJ and the use of discursive power resources, the worker center model of
community-based organization, the passage of local living wage laws through
grassroots campaigns and institutional influence – but the movement’s success at
combining and mobilizing these resources explains the speed with which it has
produced such remarkable outcomes.
Second, our approach focuses on the conjuncture or interplay of associational
power, power resources, and the terrain of contest rather than treating each of
these as independent variables existing side-by-side (Bieler, 2018). In the fast food
case, the path to reform in the workplace lies through the mobilization of
resources in the civil society and alternative venues within the state, rather than
relying on the strikers’ weak structural power on the job. This allows us to
identify their short demonstration walkouts as a new or different type of strike –
the symbolic strike – distinct from the open-ended contract or recognition strikes
of earlier conjunctures and deploying a different set of power resources.
The symbolic strike is not a magic solution, nor do we present it as a general
model of contemporary labor action. It emerged and operates within the current
labor regime in the United States, with its erosion or denial of protections for
diverse groups of workers, yet comparable conditions may hold in other countries
or contexts. Regimes themselves are also the target of contention and subject to
change, as in the movement’s successful shifting of legal power resources at the
level of state and local governments. Unlike the traditional institutionalist
critique, this approach is neither static nor unidirectional but highlights oppor-
tunities for labor movements to achieve and exercise institutional power.
Our framework also allows us to plot the interactions between workers’
mobilization and the countermobilization by employers and their allies. These
occur on a terrain that can change across time, space, and scale. Thus, changes in
national political administrations affect the composition of the NLRB and the
prospects for challenging the legal construction of the fissured workplace through
the federal government. Similarly, the decentralized system of city and state
governments under American federalism provides opportunities for reform in
some jurisdictions while presenting barriers in others.
Finally, our analysis illustrates the dynamic between associational power as
collective action and the organizational forms that action takes. Episodes of
mobilization not only draw on existing organizational resources but can also
create the space for new ones – recruiting new members and developing internal
capacities – to be sustainable. Such innovations make possible new forms of
agency and bring an irreducible contingency to events of collective action (Lee,
2019; Sewell, 1996).
This underlines the importance of achieving associational power in the
workplace as well as in other arenas and brings us back to the employment
relationship. Long-term shifts in the power relations surrounding employment
reflect changes across the three arenas, as in the rise of industrial unionism
alongside and shaping the New Deal, or of service sector and public sector
unionism alongside and shaped by the civil rights and women’s movements
(Lichtenstein & Harris, 1996; Johnston, 1994; Windham, 2017).
While we propose our model as a way to explain strike activity, we also believe
the PRA can contribute to advancing debates in social movement theory. As
discussed above, Walder (2009) notes the separation of contemporary social
movement theory from the older tradition of political sociology from which it
emerged. That older tradition was concerned with the relationship of social
structure with the “political orientation of mobilized groups and the aims and
contents of movements.” By contrast, social movement theory largely takes those
as given and focuses instead on mobilization. The result is that movement theory
tries to
…explain the conditions under which a movement – of any type – can grow and succeed, but
we no longer have explanations to offer about variation in the substantive content of a
movement – the type of politics that it represents.
We believe our version of the PRA can help bridge the divide between
mobilization and the content of movements, because it draws attention to the
systemic relationships – here, the structure and governance of employment – that
generate the categorical inequality and conflict between employers and workers
(Tilly, 1998). The focus on power resources and their arenas shows the stakes for
actors involved in labor struggles, because it sees mobilization in terms of the
reordering of relations of power. Our concept of associational power embodies
the range of political orientations in the movement, not as by-products of
political opportunities or rhetorical framing (Walder, 2009, pp. 403–406) but as
prospective or practical solutions to the structural problems of the employment
relationship.
But every movement has its historic context. As Tilly (1998, p. 136) notes,
categorical group inequalities often overlap, and are organized in the economy,
regulated and enforced through the state, and affect cultural identity and
everyday life in civil society. Attention to systemic relations of racial, gender, and
urban inequality could highlight the structural, legal, and discursive power
resources available to minority, women’s and community organizing movements,
their prospects for intersectional alliances, and the strategic choices they face.
Thus, we believe that the approach we outline here can help social movement
scholars take a fresh approach, one that looks beyond the forms and mechanisms
of contention to the particular actors and contexts involved in the specific
movements or waves of mobilization under study. This suggests the broader
relevance of the PRA and its contribution to social movement research.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors gratefully acknowledge helpful comments by Jasmine Kerrissey, Pablo
Perez Ahumada, Joel Stillerman, Joshua Murray, Michael Schwartz, Eddie Webster,
and the reviewers for Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change. Any errors
remain our sole responsibility.
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GROUP SIZE AND THE USE OF
VIOLENCE BY RESISTANCE
CAMPAIGNS: A MULTILEVEL
STUDY OF RESISTANCE METHOD
Christopher J. Cyr and Michael Widmeier
ABSTRACT
We examine why some groups use violence while others use nonviolence when
they push for major political change. Nonviolence can be less costly, but non-
state actors must mobilize a large number of people for it to be successful. This
is less critical for violent rebellion, as successful attacks can be committed by a
small number of people. This means that groups that believe that they have the
potential to mobilize larger numbers of people are less likely to use violence.
This potential is related to the lines along which the group mobilizes. Campaigns
mobilized along ethnic or Marxist lines have fewer potential members and are
most likely to use violence. Prodemocracy campaigns have a higher number of
potential members and are more likely to use nonviolence. For movements
against a foreign occupation, campaigns in larger countries are more likely to
use nonviolence. These predictions are supported in a multilevel logit model of
campaigns from 1945 to 2006. The mechanism is tested by looking at the
interactive effect of democratic changes on the likelihood of nonviolence and
looking at a subsample of 72 campaigns that explicitly draw from certain ethnic
or religious groups.
Keywords: Civil war; nonviolent resistance; protest; rebel groups;

mobilization; conflict
Power and Protest

ISSN: 0163-786X/doi:10.1108/S0163-786X20210000044006
63
64 CHRISTOPHER J. CYR AND MICHAEL WIDMEIER
In the early twentieth century, citizens of India conducted a campaign of

resistance against British colonial rule. The leader of these protests, Mahatma
Gandhi, embraced nonviolence, saying, “nonviolence is the greatest force at the
disposal of mankind, it is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction
devised by the ingenuity of man” (Gandhi & Attenborough, 2001). Around the
same time, citizens in Kenya began to oppose British rule, employing nonvio-
lent methods of resistance as in India. Despite both movements taking place at
similar times and targeting the same regime, the Indian and Kenyan opposition
movements experienced different outcomes. In India, with a substantially larger
population than Kenya, nonviolent protest eventually played a key role in the
British withdrawal in 1950. In Kenya, however, the British government quickly
squashed the protests. As nonviolent tactics had proven to be ineffective,
Kenyan resistance organizations eventually turned to violent rebellion in an
attempt to expel British rule.
The cases of India and Kenya raise several important questions concerning
resistance movements and the choice between violence and nonviolence. Why
was nonviolence effective when the Indian people targeted the British govern-
ment, while it was not effective in Kenya? What factors accounted for Kenyans’
decision to turn to violence?
These questions are salient as the empirical record reveals a good deal of
variation in the choice of strategies that groups employ when they campaign
against their government. The case of the Philippines in the 1980s is a clear
illustration of this historical variance. The New People’s Army, a Maoist rebel-
lion, initiated a campaign of guerilla warfare against the government of the
Philippines. A contingent of the minority ethnic Moro Islamic community also
organized a rebellion against the state, launching a violent separatist movement.
Within the same relative time period, the People Power movement emerged as yet
another faction organized in opposition to the Philippine government. However,
the People Power campaign stood in contrast to the New People’s Army and the
Moro insurgency, as it was a prodemocracy organization that used nonviolent
tactics.
All three movements stood in opposition to the government of the Philippines,
but the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Marxist New People’s Army used
violence, whereas People Power employed a nonviolent approach. While these
groups targeted the same regime, their resistance strategies diverged when it came
to the choice of violent versus nonviolent tactics. What accounts for this variation
in tactics? Here, we explain differences in the use of violence and nonviolence by
looking at how ex ante expectations of success, based on each group’s potential
number of supporters, impact the tactics of nonstate actors when they organize
large-scale resistance efforts against a government.
Previous researchers have largely studied civil war at the state level, using state
characteristics such as GDP per capita and the presence of mountainous terrain as
explanatory variables that influence the likelihood of the outbreak of civil conflict
(Collier & Hoeffler, 2002; Fearon & Laitin, 2003). However, research efforts that
rely on country-level data do not account for variation in the features of the
groups that decide to rebel. In recent years, scholarship has emerged that examines
Group Size and the Use of Violence by Resistance Campaigns 65
this variation (Cunningham, Gleditsch, & Salehyan, 2009). Because these studies
generally only examine groups actively engaged in rebellion, they cannot consider
the onset of violent conflict as a dependent variable. Here, we examine this
variation by considering groups that are actively mobilized against the state, but
vary on their use of violence or nonviolence.
We argue that the choice between nonviolence and violence is an instrumental
decision on the part of the nonstate actor, based on which tactic is viewed as
being more likely to increase the likelihood of securing concessions from the state.
To this point, previous research has established that nonviolence can be more
effective than violence for resistance movements attempting to gain concessions
or alter their status quo (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011). Carrying out nonviolent
tactics is generally less costly to groups than the use of violence, but the number
of supporters that a group mobilizes is critical to the success of nonviolent
organizations. Groups that are unable to mobilize a large network of supporters
are not able to hold the large rallies and general strikes that are hallmarks of
successful nonviolent resistance (Cunningham, 2013). Conversely, group size and
the success of mobilization efforts are less important for groups that employ
violence. Terrorist attacks only require one person to inflict damage, and guerrilla
groups can hide from the state to maintain a violent resistance campaign with
relatively few people. Because of this, groups that anticipate having a large
support base are more likely to use nonviolence due to its lower costs and greater
effectiveness. Those that anticipate facing limitations on the development of their
group and the size of their support base are more likely to use violence. This
decision is made due to the notion that groups are aware of the need for a
substantial number of followers in order to execute nonviolent approaches
successfully.
We form testable hypotheses regarding the probability that a group will
employ violent versus nonviolent means of resistance. We focus on the lines along
which groups are mobilized, and how this can act as an ex ante indicator of
the group’s support base. Groups mobilized along ethnic or religious lines are
generally unlikely to attract support outside of their specific ethnic or religious
group. This creates a theoretical cap on the number of potential supporters that is
lower than the size of the population as a whole. Furthermore, there exists many
types of resistance campaigns that have difficulty gauging their level of support ex
ante, such as those mobilized along Marxist lines. Groups with no inherent lim-
itations on future organizational growth are unable to determine whether they will
cease to exist on one hand or grow to include tens of thousands of cadres. These
two types of campaigns, therefore, are more likely to use violence as they have no
expectation that they will become large enough to effectively use nonviolence. On
the other hand, groups such as prodemocracy campaigns are typically more
inclusive than many other types of movements. As a result of this, a prodemocracy
campaign could potentially mobilize large sections of a country and recruit a
diverse set of followers. This mobilization mechanism makes these campaigns
significantly more likely to use nonviolence than those with limited mobilization
potential. Among campaigns designed to expel a foreign occupation, the likeli-
hood that a campaign will use nonviolence increases as the population of the
occupied country increases. Simply put, campaigns in opposition to foreign

occupation in populous states will have a broader pool of potential followers to
draw from than those in a smaller state, thus making the former campaigns more
likely to use nonviolence.
We test our predictions using data on resistance campaigns from 1945 to 2006.
We also test the mechanism behind our hypothesis in two ways. First, we examine
the interactive effect of democratic change and prodemocracy mobilization on
the likelihood of violence. In states that are becoming more democratic, where
prodemocracy movements have a larger potential support base, the relationship
between prodemocracy mobilization and nonviolence is stronger. We then
examine a subsample of 72 campaigns mobilized along ethnic or religious lines.
Our model implies that campaigns that represent large ethnic or religious groups,
relative to the country as a whole, have potential to mobilize more supporters
than ones that represent smaller groups. The former groups are therefore less
likely to use violence. The results provide some initial support for this expecta-
tion, with one caveat. Five of these campaigns drew from groups that make up a
majority of their state’s population, which gives them significant influence over
the findings. In two of these cases, the choice of tactics was driven largely by
external events, thus these two cases are excluded from the analysis. When these
are included, the results are significant at the 90 percent level of confidence but
not the 95 percent level of confidence.
In the first section of this chapter, we review the previous literature on civil
conflict and nonviolent resistance. We then present our theory, which offers an
account of why some groups use violence while others use nonviolence when they
seek political change. Next, we outline the research design and methodology used
to test our hypotheses. We then present the statistical models that facilitate the
testing of our hypotheses, and the findings of our quantitative analyses. Finally,
we conclude with a discussion of the implications of our analysis and suggestions
for future research.
PREVIOUS RESEARCH
Violent Conflict
Violence imposes costs on all parties, which can be avoided if parties negotiate
rather than fight. Because of this, all parties to a conflict are better off if they can
reach a settlement without fighting, making violent conflict ex post irrational.
Despite the irrationality of war as an outcome, all parties can be rational, ex ante,
in their decision to go to war (Fearon, 1995). One reason for this is that parties
have incomplete information about each other’s capabilities. This can make it
difficult to find a negotiated settlement that all parties prefer, ex ante, to fighting.
These information problems can help explain why civil wars happen, as gov-
ernments and potential rebel groups do not have complete information about
each other’s capabilities prior to conflict.
Previous scholarship on civil conflict has largely focused on the features
that make some states more likely to experience civil conflict than others. The
states most likely to experience violent rebellion are the ones where rebellion is
most likely to be successful. This is predicted by variables such as the existence
of prior protest or rebellion, weak central government, mountainous terrain
and the presence of lootable natural resources that can be used to fund
rebellion (Collier & Hoeffler, 2002; Fearon & Laitin, 2003; Lichbach & Gurr,
1981).
Prior research has also considered the relationship between ideology and the
use of violence by armed groups. Scholars have studied the influence of ideology
on terrorists’ selection of targets (Drake, 1998), how ideology and group orga-
nization drive violence (Humphreys & Weinstein, 2006; Weinstein, 2007), the role
of armed groups’ ideology during the Cold War (Kalyvas & Balcells, 2010), and
how indiscriminate violence is influenced by ideology (Thaler, 2012). Sanin and
Wood argue that “all armed groups engaged in political violence – including
ethnic separatist groups – do so on the basis of an ideology, that is a set of ideas
that include preferences…and beliefs” (Sanin & Wood, 2014, p. 214). Here we see
ideology cast as a framework from which nonstate actors base their decision-
making, including if and to what extent they will employ violence. Thus ideology
shapes not only those groups built upon an explicitly ideological line of mobili-
zation such as Marxism or democracy but also those whose formation and
growth was based upon organizational structures such as antioccupation move-
ments, ethnicity, or religion.
This scholarship generally does not account for the fact that civil war results
from the strategic interaction between the state and a nonstate actor. Early work
posited a “mobilization of discontent” model, which theorized that the strength
of resistance organizations relative to the state was key in forecasting conflict
(Gurr & Lichbach, 1986). By only looking at state characteristics, it is impossible
to understand nonstate actor characteristics that lead some groups to engage in
violent rebellion. Empirically, we observe states that make concessions with some
groups to avoid conflict while simultaneously refusing to make concessions with
other groups that end up rebelling. This would suggest that we must look at
nonstate actor characteristics to fully understand why civil wars begin in some
cases while negotiated settlements happen in other cases.
Civil conflict scholars have long recognized this issue. The problem has per-
sisted, however, due to the difficulty of identifying the relevant groups ex ante.
The limited body of literature that examines civil conflict dyadically uses dyads of
states and groups actively engaged in rebellion. This “sidesteps the problem of
classifying potential rebels ex ante” (Cunningham et al., 2009). These research
designs, however, do not vary in terms of whether or not a civil war happens. As
such, it does not allow for the study of civil war onset as a dependent variable.
Here, we address this lack of negative cases by incorporating nonviolent resis-
tance as the alternative to political violence and civil war. This facilitates the
study of potential rebel group characteristics that results in rebellion in some
cases and nonviolent resistance in others, which illustrates the nonstate actor
aspect of the interaction. To understand why nonviolent resistance movements
represent the negative cases of civil war and political violence, it is necessary to
examine scholarship on nonviolent resistance.
The analytical starting point for this study is the resistance campaign,1 which
we take as a given entity. Thus, the focus of this research is not on if or how
campaigns come into existence, but on if or how existing campaigns choose a
violent or nonviolent path to achieve their aims. This is an important distinction,
as it raises the caveat of selection bias in the construction of the dataset and
analyses. While a significant number of country-year observations are lost by
excluding negative cases of campaigns that do not occur, the aforementioned unit
of analysis is the appropriate choice given our research question. Scholars exam-
ining the occurrence of conflict-related phenomenon (Sambanis, 2001; Yair &
Miodownik, 2016) have operationalized dependent variables to include the
negative outcome as it was within the theoretical and methodological framework
of their studies. Here, we focus upon the more limited scope of divergent
violence–nonviolence pathways within a domain of extant movements. We thus
explore the following puzzle – among movements that emerge to resist the state,
why do some use violence? Thus, we posit that concerns over selection bias on the
dependent variable are mitigated by the analytical scope of this project. Our
subsequent analysis is structured with campaigns rather than country-years as the
unit of analysis.
Nonviolent Resistance
Scholars of civil war have begun to draw from a rich body of academic research on
nonviolent resistance (Ackerman & Kruegler, 1994; Sharp, 1959, 1973). Nonvio-
lent action refers to political acts outside normal political channels that do not
involve violence or the explicit threat of violence. Rooted in many religions,
nonviolent resistance emerged as a serious method of political contention in the
nineteenth century to promote nationalist and labor interests. Mahatma Gandhi
contributed greatly to the philosophy of nonviolence by using it to advocate for
political change in India (Schock, 2013).
Conflict scholars have painted nonviolent resistance as the other end of the
spectrum from violent rebellion. Both types of movements seek political change
within their country, involve rallying large groups of people, and operate
through irregular political channels. Lichbach examined violent and nonviolent
responses to government repression of nonviolent dissent (Lichbach, 1987). His
research was at the forefront of a large body of literature on the link between
repression and dissent (Davenport, 2007; Moore, 1998) and repression and
nonviolence (Chenoweth, Perkoski, & Kang, 2017). Lichbach also studied how
variance in the level of organization of peasant movements influenced the
selective incentives offered to recruits to overcome the collective action problem
(Lichbach, 1994), illustrating the salience of the structure of nonstate actor
groups. Chenoweth and Stephan show that nonviolent resistance campaigns are
more likely than violent rebellions to be successful in achieving their goals
(Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011). These movements generally draw a greater
number of participants, are more tactically innovative, and are better able to
encourage defections among the military. Scholars have since built upon this
contrast between violence and nonviolence. They have shown, for example, that
movements that express a gender-inclusive ideology are more likely to use nonvi-
olence than violence (Asal, Legault, Szekely, & Wilkenfeld, 2013). Researchers
have also looked at phase shifts, where groups switch from nonviolence to
violence or vice versa (Dudouet, 2012; Shellman, Levey, & Young, 2013), group
fragmentation and commitment to nonviolence (Cunningham, 2013; Pearlman,
2012), and the correlates of the onset of nonviolent campaigns (Chenoweth &
Ulfelder, 2017).
One debate within the research on nonviolent resistance is whether nonviolence
represents a point on a continuum of violence, or whether it is its own distinct
phenomenon. As Schock explains,
Generally, scholars of social movements and revolution have assumed that political action
falls along a continuum from conventional political action to nonviolent resistance to violent
resistance. When the goals cannot be attained through institutional channels, then challengers
adopt nonviolent protest; if that is not effective, then violence is adopted (Schock, 2013).
Others, however, disagree with this view. Svensson and Lindgren argue that
the two types of campaign typically have different aims, natures, and outcomes.
This would suggest that they are separate phenomena, rather than a continuum
(Svensson & Lindgren, 2011).
Here, we take the former view that the two strategies of contention represent
different ends of a continuum. We view nonviolent resistance as happening in
the shadow of the possibility for violent rebellion. We take this view for three
reasons. First, nonviolent resistance campaigns commonly switch tactics in
response to state actions. Second, even when nonviolent campaigns remain
committed to nonviolence in the face of state repression, it is common for
violent campaigns to simultaneously emerge that draw from a similar popula-
tion and have similar goals. Third, even if the leadership of a campaign is
committed to nonviolence and able to police its membership to prevent the
outbreak of violence, they are not able to credibly signal this to the state. As
such, the state must consider the extent to which nonviolent campaigns,
particularly stronger ones, have the potential to use violence in the future. We
do not argue that all resistance campaigns are viewed as potential rebel groups,
but that all campaigns are viewed as threats to the status quo that may employ
violence as relations vis-à-vis the state evolve over time. We posit that the
composition of the campaign in terms of its mobilization structure can serve as
a signal to the state concerning its potential strength should violence occur.
We argue below that the likelihood of the use of violence varies among
prodemocracy, Marxist, ethnic/religious, and movements to expel a foreign
occupation.
Because of this continuum, major nonviolent campaigns can be seen as the
negative cases of civil war. They represent cases when a group has a grievance
against the state, is mobilized to address this grievance outside of normal political
channels, but choose not to engage in violence. By understanding why some
groups engage in nonviolent resistance while others engage in rebellion, we can
better understand the rebel component of the strategic interaction between the
state and nonstate actors that result in conflict.
THEORY
We assume that violence is instrumental, or a means to an end rather than an end.
This means that nonstate actors choose violence and nonviolence based on which
strategy they think is more likely to be effective. History provides some anecdotes
that support the idea that members of resistance movements employ this strategic
logic. Supporters of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a violent resistance move-
ment, put this logic succinctly. Shaiquer Maloku described the use of violence,
“None of us want war. We have been given no choice. It is the only way we will be
free” (Hedges, 1998). Another KLA supporter, Adem Demeci, said
I will not condemn the tactics of the Kosovo Liberation Army because the path of nonviolence
has gotten us nowhere. People who live under this kind of repression have the right to resist.
The Kosovo Liberation Army is fighting for our freedom (Hedges, 1998).
This suggests an instrumental view of violence. The view of violence as a

necessary means to an end is hardly surprising, as the Serbian government did not
take the KLA’s ability to inflict harm on them seriously. Early on in the war,
Veljko Odolvic, Serbia’s administrator in Kosovo, stated in early 1998,
We have wiped out one terrorist group, maybe the biggest and most important one, but there are
dozens of others. The armed resistance is strong. It is probable that we will see renewed terrorist
attacks in the days ahead. There are other terrorist gangs now preparing their members... We
cannot speak of an end to the operation until these terrorist cells are liquidated. This may take a
little more time. (Hedges, 1998)
This lack of a desire for violence on the part of the Kosovars, and the lack of
seriousness with which the Serbian government treated the KLA in the initial
phases of the conflict, suggest that organizations employ violence because they
view it as necessary to inflict costs on the state.
Nonviolence imposes lower costs on its members. That is not to say that
participants in nonviolent resistance campaigns do not take any risks. Many have
been jailed or killed for openly opposing their regimes. These risks, however, are
assumed to be less than those associated with violence, where thousands of
participants in armed rebellion commonly lose their lives during the course of the
conflict. Regimes have an easier time cracking down harshly on violent rebellions
than on nonviolent resistance campaigns, and face fewer international costs for
doing so.
In addition to having lower costs, previous research has established that
nonviolence can be more likely to extract state concessions than violence. Nonvi-
olent campaigns tend to have more legitimacy, encourage broader participation,
and are more difficult for states to justify putting down with violence, creating
higher costs for states that do not give concessions (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011).
While nonviolence can be less costly and more effective for some groups, not
all groups have reason to believe that nonviolence will be effective. For nonvi-
olent resistance campaigns, the number of people mobilized is a key factor in
determining its effectiveness. Rallies, boycotts, and general strikes are unlikely to
get noticed, or be effective, when they only have a small number of participants.
Large protests that fill the streets, on the other hand, can gain international
attention, and broad general strikes can cause significant economic damage to the
state. As such, group size is a critical factor for the success of a nonviolent
resistance campaign (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011).
While having many members is useful for violent groups, it is not as critical
to their ability to impose costs on the state as it is for nonviolent campaigns
(Cunningham, 2013). A lone bomber can inflict significant damage on the state,
and violent campaigns can be effective with a small number of covert individ-
uals. As such, violent campaigns have reason to believe that they might be
effective without a large number of participants, while nonviolent campaigns
are unlikely to make the same calculation.
The critical importance of having many supporters for nonviolent resistance
campaigns, but not for violent rebellions, has implications for the choice of
strategy on the part of the nonstate actor. Groups that do not anticipate having a
large support base might anticipate that they can only gain state concessions
through violence, while groups that anticipate having a larger support base have
more reason to believe that they can gain state concessions through nonviolent
resistance.
While decisions about violence and nonviolence are generally made before full
mobilization, group size cannot be observed ex ante. Instead, nonstate actors
must look to proxies that are known ex ante that impact the number of people
that they are likely to mobilize. When these proxies indicate that a group is likely
to have a large support base, it is more likely to use nonviolence. When these
proxies indicate that their support base will be relatively small, a group is more
likely to use violence when they mobilize against the state.
Lines of Mobilization
The lines of mobilization for a nonstate actor can proxy for their potential size. By
line of mobilization, we refer to the goals that they express and support base they
draw from. We focus on four different types of groups: prodemocracy movements,
Marxist movements, ethnic or religious movements, and movements to expel a
foreign occupation. We focus on these lines because they were the most commonly
expressed goals of the campaigns identified in the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns
and Outcomes (NAVCO) dataset, which documents cases of nonstate actors
engaged in major antistate political activity (Chenoweth, 2011). They are not
exhaustive, but encompass 89% of campaigns. They are also not mutually
exclusive, as some campaigns have multiple primary goals. We argue that these
lines of mobilization differ in the degree to which they present an information
problem, and in the potential size that they could reach during resistance campaigns.
Because of this, they differ in their likelihood of using violent tactics rather than
nonviolent tactics.
Prodemocracy Movements
Prodemocracy movements occur when nonstate actors within the population push
for more democratic policies from the government. Prodemocracy movements
have an advantage in that they are inclusive. Democracy gives most individuals
within society the ability to participate and push for policies that will benefit them
(Boix, 2008). There are some groups that stand to be hurt by democratization. In
addition, there may be cases where member of a minority ethnic group run a
country, and may prefer autocracy to dominance by a majority group. These
caveats notwithstanding, prodemocracy movements stand to benefit a large
portion of society. This gives them a large potential base of support. Because
of this, prodemocracy movements have reason to believe that nonviolence will
be effective. This means that prodemocracy movements are most likely to use
nonviolent tactics.
H1. Mobilization along prodemocracy lines leads nonstate actors to be less
likely to use violent tactics as opposed to nonviolent tactics.
Marxist Movements
Marxist movements anchor themselves to a Marxist, communist, Maoist, or leftist
ideology, typically one that is different from the ideology of the state. In theory,
then, a Marxist group’s potential support base would be anyone who would prefer
a Marxist government to the one currently running the state. Identifying who has
Marxist preferences ex ante, however, is problematic for both the state and the
nonstate actor.
In autocratic states, citizens who privately oppose the regime can face sig-
nificant sanctions for publicly expressing those preferences. This gives potential
supporters incentives to avoid expressing Marxist preferences during times of
peace, but bandwagon should a Marxist movement appear capable of toppling
the government (Kuran, 1989). In democratic states, citizens with Marxist pref-
erences have historically had incentives to keep those preferences private, as
many democracies have prosecuted citizens suspected of being communist. This
makes it difficult to gauge the size of the potential support base for a Marxist
movement ex ante. This means that Marxist movements are more likely to feel
that violence is their best option for contesting the state.
H2. Mobilization along Marxist lines leads nonstate actors to be more likely
to use violent tactics as opposed to nonviolent tactics.
Ethnic or Religious Movements

When groups mobilize along ethnic or religious lines, they claim to represent the
interests of one or several groups within the state. Unlike ideological preferences,
ethnic and religious characteristics are ascribed and more easily observed (Eck,
2009). Many of these features are socially constructed, and deal more with political
circumstances than birth (Eifert, Miguel, & Posner, 2007). Even though they are
socially constructed, contentious politics tends to harden ethnic identities due to
hypernationalist rhetoric, which can render them intractable (Kaufmann, 1996;
Wucherpfennig, Metternich, Cederman, & Gleditsch, 2012).
If we assume that all members of an ethnic or religious group form the
potential support base of a nonstate actor that mobilizes along ethnic or religious
lines, and members of other ethnic or religious groups that are not part of the
campaign are unlikely to be supporters, then this creates a cap on the support
base. While other types of movement have the potential to mobilize citizens from
almost every sector, ethnic or religious movements can generally only expect to
appeal to a portion of the population. This means that, if their demands are held
constant, ethnic or religious movements are less likely to anticipate that they will
draw the large numbers of people necessary for nonviolence to be successful. In
order to achieve their goals, they must be able to demonstrate an ability to inflict
costs on the state. This leads to the prediction that nonstate actors who mobilize
along ethnic lines are more likely to use violent tactics.
While ethnic and religious cleavages are distinct phenomena that do not
always overlap, we combine groups mobilized along ethnic and religious lines in
this analysis. We do this because both types of mobilization work similarly for the
theoretical mechanism proposed here. Both types of groups explicitly attempt to
appeal to only a portion of society. ISIS, for example, only attempted to appeal
to members of Iraq’s Sunni community rather than Iraq’s population as a whole.
Since the relative size of ethnic and religious groups within a country is known ex
ante, the state has an observable proxy for the potential size of a group that
mobilizes along one of these two lines, and that expectation varies with the size of
the ethnic or religious group. Because of this similarity in how the theoretical
mechanism works, and the difficulty in teasing apart ethnic and religious cleav-
ages in many cases (the Irish Republican Army, for example), we consider them
jointly in this analysis.
H3. Mobilization along ethnic lines leads nonstate actors to be more likely to
use violent tactics as opposed to nonviolent tactics.
Movements to Expel Foreign Occupation

Some nonstate actors seek to expel a foreign occupation, most commonly a
colonial power. Like prodemocracy movements, these have the potential to have
a broad appeal and mobilize a large portion of society. While some elites within a
society may benefit from foreign occupation, it is assumed that the majority of the
population does not see this as beneficial. These movements, however, suffer from
one disadvantage that prodemocracy movements do not suffer from. While
participants in prodemocracy movements target their own state, participants in
antioccupation movements target another state. Typically, these states are major
world powers. They have the ability to not only control their own state but also
establish a presence on foreign soil. Because of this, antioccupation movements
must impose greater costs on the state in order to get the state to calculate that
making concessions is a better option than preserving the status quo. As the
population of occupied countries increases, so does the number of people that
they could potentially mobilize. Antioccupation movements in these large
countries can pose a credible threat to mobilize a large group of people against
the occupier. This means that antioccupation movements in larger countries are
more likely to anticipate that nonviolence will be effective.
H4. When nonstate actors are mobilized to expel a foreign occupation, the
likelihood that they will use violent tactics decreases as the size of the population
increases.
Alternative Explanations
It is possible that the above hypotheses may be correct for other reasons than the
mechanism proposed above. In this section, we test for this possibility in two
ways: we look at the interactive impact of democratic changes and prodemocracy
mobilization on the likelihood of nonviolence, and the impact of ethnic group size
on the use of nonviolence.
Our first test looks at prodemocracy movements. It is possible that prode-
mocracy movements are more likely to be nonviolent for ideological reasons,
rather than strategic regions. Democracy is commonly seen as a nonviolent means
for coordinating conflict over leadership in a country (Przeworski, 1991). These
nonviolent ideals may translate over to the way that people push for political
change. If this is the case, then the empirical finding that prodemocracy move-
ments are less likely to use violence would not necessarily provide support for the
theoretical model developed here, which is driven by potential group size rather
than ideology.
We test for this possibility by looking at the interactive impact that a change in
a state’s level of democracy prior to mobilization has on the likelihood that pro-
democracy movements will use nonviolence. These democratic changes can influ-
ence the potential size of a prodemocracy movement by impacting how many
people might be willing to pay the costs of participation. Changes in political
system mobilize or demobilize sections of the population, which can alter the
strategic calculation for an antigovernment movement. Democratization can cause
newly empowered people to engage in political participation, while movements
toward authoritarianism can demobilize people who previously participated in
politics. The direction of this change impacts the number of potential activists that
are expected to openly participate in a prodemocracy movement.
We look at whether a country is becoming more democratic or more autocratic.
If ideology explains the relationship between prodemocracy movements and
nonviolence, then there is no reason to believe that there would be a significant
relationship between political change and the use of nonviolence. Democratic
ideology is a constant among prodemocracy movements, and any nonviolent
ideals that come from support for democracy would exist among members of the
group regardless of their state’s change in its level of democracy. As such, there
would not be a significant interactive relationship between a state’s level of
democratic change and the likelihood that prodemocracy movements would use
nonviolence.
Conversely, if the number of supporters that a prodemocracy movement could
potentially mobilize explains their likelihood of using nonviolence, then we would
expect to see the strongest relationship in states that are becoming more demo-
cratic. Democratization opens up the political system to a new part of the pop-
ulation, creating a group of people who are newly empowered to participate
politically. In addition, people in democratizing states might feel fewer of the
traditional disincentives to participation, as there is less risk of jailing for pro-
democracy activism. There is also a greater possibility that people in the popu-
lation may be more willing to test out their new political freedoms. As a result,
prodemocracy movements have a greater potential size in states that are becoming
more democratic, and are more likely to use nonviolence.
In states that are becoming more autocratic, the opposite is true. There are
generally disincentives from participating in politics because of the state imposing
new restrictions on mobilization of the population, and punishments for citizens
that participate outside of the regular political channels. When these changes are
happening, citizens are less likely to join a prodemocracy movement, even if they
might sympathize with its values. This gives prodemocracy movements in states
that are becoming more autocratic a lower number of potential supporters. While
overall these movements are still expected to be less likely to use violence, the
relationship is expected to be less strong than in democratizing states. Because of
this, the relationship between mobilization along prodemocracy lines and the use
of nonviolence is expected to be especially strong in states that are becoming
more democratic.
H5. The negative relationship between prodemocracy mobilization and the use
of violence over nonviolence is strongest in states that are in the process of becoming
more democratic.
An alternative explanation for the relationship in H5 is that it may be driven by
the relationship between state democracy and nonviolent resistance. Since nonvi-
olent resistance is generally accepted as part of politics as usual in democracies,
groups may be more apt to mobilize nonviolently in states that are democratizing.
However, as shown in the tests below, there is actually a positive relationship
between a state’s level of democracy and the likelihood that a campaign will use
violence. This means that democracies are more prone to violence overall when an
antistate campaign arises. Because of this, a negative finding between democratic
change and the likelihood of a prodemocracy movement using violence is likely not
due to the norms of democracy.
The subsample of nonstate actors mobilized on ethnic religious lines allows for
another test of the causal mechanism. If groups with a larger potential support
base are more likely to use nonviolence, then it would follow that groups that draw
from a larger ethnic or religious group would be less likely to use violence than
those that draw from a smaller group. If ethnically mobilized groups are more
predisposed to violence for reasons other than those outlined above, for example
due to ancient hatreds or the nature of ethnic conflict, there is not a strong reason
to believe that large groups would be less predisposed to violence.
H6. When nonstate actors mobilize along ethnic lines, the probability that
they will use violent tactics decreases as the size of the group that they represent,
relative to the whole population, increases (Table 1).
RESEARCH DESIGN
To test hypotheses one through four, we use the campaigns identified in the
NAVCO dataset from 1945 to 2006 (Chenoweth, 2011). Resistance campaigns are
operationalized here as the campaign captured in the NAVCO dataset. NAVCO
describes campaigns as “continuous and lasts anywhere from days to years” and
Table 1. Summary of Hypotheses.

Line of Mobilization Information Potential Level of Probability of Violence (Hypothesis)
Problem Support
Prodemocracy Low Most of the Low (H1), especially in states that

population are democratizing (H5)
Marxist High Unknown High (H2)
Ethnic/religious Low Part of the High (H3), but decreases as group
population size increases (H6)
Expel Foreign Low Most of the Decreases as population increases
Occupation population (H4)
“have discernable leadership and often have organizational and operational names,
distinguishing them from random riots or spontaneous mass acts” (Chenoweth &
Lewis, 2013, p. 416). This dataset includes groups mobilized with the goals of ether
separatism, regime change, expelling foreign occupation, or self-determination. In
order to be included in the dataset, campaigns must have a minimum of 1000
participants since these groups are selected based on maximalist goals. Potentially
small rebel groups may make lesser demands, and this research design controls for
this possibility.
The dependent variable is the use of violent tactics relative to nonviolent tac-
tics. In practice, most campaigns involve a mixture of violence and nonviolence.
This variable was operationalized by using an existing variable and event
descriptions from the NAVCO dataset, which codes for a group’s primary method
of resistance. For this project, the NAVCO primary method variable viol, which
individually captures groups’ use of nonviolent or violent tactics. Within the 256
observations in the data, there are 154 observations of nonviolent campaigns (just
over 60%) and 102 instances of violent campaigns (just under 40%). Nonviolent
campaigns rely primarily on tactics such as protests, sit-ins, civil disobedience, and
general strikes. Violent campaigns can include these types of tactics, but also
include a major violent component, based on a threshold of 1000 battle deaths
(Chenoweth, 2011). This means that cases must have major violence to be
considered violent. Protests that are primarily nonviolent, but include a low level
of violence with a small number of deaths, are considered nonviolent. Some
campaigns involve groups that use primarily nonviolence, and splinter groups that
use primarily violence. In Kosovo, for example, an unsuccessful nonviolent
movement in the early 1990s led to the launch of the violent KLA. In these cases,
where the leadership groups are separate entities, they are coded as two different
campaigns.
The key independent variable for this study is the campaign’s line of mobili-
zation. This variable was coded by the authors. The coding decisions were made
by using the NAVCO codebook case descriptions first and foremost as they
generally provide relevant and succinct detail on the campaigns. When further
information was necessary for coding decisions, we conducted web and print
searches for secondary scholarly sources. These sources included journal articles,
books, policy and journalistic accounts of campaigns, and other web-based aca-
demic resources. Each case was coded as “ethnic or religions,” “prodemocracy,”
“Marxist (or other leftist),” “designed to expel a foreign occupation,” or “other.”
For ethnic or religious campaigns, we looked for evidence that groups either
explicitly recruited from one or a few specific ethnic or religious groups, or
explicitly represented specific groups. An example of this category is the Libera-
tion Tigers of Tamil Eelam of Sri Lanka, commonly known as the “Tamil Tigers.”
For prodemocracy lines, we looked at whether there is evidence that one of the key
demands of the movement was a liberalization of the political system, such as with
the Zimbabwe African People’s Union. For Marxist campaigns, we looked for
evidence that the group explicitly espoused a Marxist, communist, Maoist, or
other leftist ideology as part of its primary message. A case of the Marxist line of
mobilization in the data is Pathet Lao in Cambodia. For campaigns designed to
expel a foreign occupation, we looked for evidence that one of the key demands
was independence from foreign rule or decolonization, seen in Vietnam with the
North Vietnamese National Liberation Front group. “Other” campaigns generally
involved right wing ideology, military coups, or countercoups. The Contras in
Nicaragua are an example of a group coded as “Other.” The goals are not
mutually exclusive. The antiapartheid protests in South Africa, for example, were
mobilized along ethnic lines, but also included a strong prodemocracy message.
Since neither goal appeared to overshadow the other, as the two were intertwined,
this campaign was coded as both ethnic and prodemocracy. Summary statistics are
provided in Table 2.
Since violence results from the interaction of rebel groups and states, it is
necessary to control for state characteristics. First, it is possible that groups may
base their tactics on the state’s regime type. To control for this, we include the
Polity IV score of each location, which captures the level of democracy in the
country one year before the beginning of the campaign (Marshall & Jaggers,
2011). We also control for GDP per capita and total population, which both
predict political violence (Fearon & Laitin, 2003). In order to reduce missing
Table 2. Summary of Campaign Types.

Campaign Type Number of Campaigns Examples of Campaign Type
Prodemocracy 79 Orange Revolution (Ukraine); Zimbabwe

African People’s Union (Zimbabwe)
Marxist 35 Mujahideen (Iran); The Shining Path (Peru)
Ethnic or religious 76 Tigray People’s Liberation Front (Ethiopia);
Irish Republican Army (Northern Ireland)
Expel foreign occupation 38 Intifada (Palestine); Taliban (Afghanistan)
Other 28 Revolutionary United Front (Sierra Leone);
Hundred Flowers Movement (China)
Total 256
observations, we construct yearly averages from different data sources for each of
these variables. The decision to use annual averages to account for missingness in
the data was based upon the fact that GDP per capita and population typically do
not fluctuate significantly on a year-to-year basis or within small periods of time.
For GDP per capita and population, data come from the Quality of Government
Dataset (Teorell, Samanni, Charron, Holmberg, & Rothstein, 2010). The Quality
of Government data was used to operationalize these variables as it captures latter
years of the temporal domain not covered by commonly used datasets such as
Fearon and Laitin (2003) or Sambanis (2004). We also control for whether the
target state was experiencing another conflict. These data come from Fearon and
Laitin (Fearon & Laitin, 2003).
We control for the start year because there is evidence that nonviolence has
become more popular, relative to violence, over the second half of the twentieth
century. The start year refers to the initial year in which the campaign existed and
conducted organized activities, per the NAVCO dataset. We also control for
previous concessions by the regime, which is defined as the number of successful
campaigns that existed during the time period under observation, 1945 to 2006.
Governments might build a reputation for giving concessions, which could in turn
cause other nonstate actors to believe that they are facing a more conciliatory
government (Walter, 2006). As a result, actors in states that give more concessions
might be less likely to use violence.
Finally, we control for the use of violent repression by the regime. Regime
violence might radicalize the population, triggering violence, or groups that
anticipate being met with regime violence may be more likely to use violence
themselves (Lake & Baum, 2001). In addition, violent repression can decrease
the costs of participation in a violent insurgency relative to nonparticipation
(Kalyvas & Kocher, 2007). Since the theory presented here is based on the
notion that nonviolence is less costly, and this may not be the case in more
repressive states, it is necessary to consider the impact that state repression has
on the choice of tactics. These last three variables come from the NAVCO
dataset (Chenoweth, 2011).
We use a multilevel logistic regression to test hypotheses 1–5. The regression
includes campaigns nested within countries. This model accounts for the fact that
the test uses variables associated with the campaigns themselves, and variables
associated with the countries in which they take place. In addition, this type of
model uses fixed effects to factor in the possibility that some countries may differ
from others in the overall probability that they will experience violence or
nonviolence. We do not employ robust or clustered standard errors when con-
ducting the multilevel analyses. This is due to the multilevel modeling process
serving as a superior mechanism for clustering standard errors relative to the
commonly used alternatives for correcting standard errors such as commands that
run robust or clustered specifications (Cheah, 2009).
To test H6, we include the variable of group size relative to the population as
a whole taken from the Ethnic Power Relations dataset (Min, Cederman, &
Wimmer, 2008). Testing H6 presents several challenges because the sample
includes only 76 campaigns mobilized along ethnic or religious lines. Due to this
small number of observations, missing data become problematic, limiting the

ability to use controls such as level of democracy and GDP per capita. We
include controls only for variables available for virtually all cases in the dataset,
which include the campaign goals, the existence of a simultaneous violent
campaign with similar goals, external support, and regime use of violence (all
available in the original NAVCO dataset). We also control for the total excluded
population. Walter argues that governments that face more potential ethnic
challengers are less likely to make accommodations (Walter, 2006). As such,
ethnic groups that campaign in a state with a large excluded population may be
more likely to use violence to accomplish their goals.
Due to the small number of observations, extreme values of the key inde-
pendent variable (group size) have a large impact on the size and significance of
the coefficient. In particular, findings are largely driven by five cases of groups
that make up more than 50 percent of the population: The Shiite rebellion in
Iraq (63% of population), the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (62%), the Hutu
rebellion in Burundi (85%), and the Anti-Apartheid (51%) and Defiance Cam-
paigns (51%) in South Africa. Due to the concern that the Iraq and Burundi
cases could have undue influence on the coefficients, they are excluded from the
analysis. It should be noted that the exclusion of two violent cases makes for an
easier test of H6. As such, the results should be treated as suggestive rather than
conclusive.2
FINDINGS
The first five models include each of the dummy variables identified in Hypotheses
1–4. Model 1 shows all of the dummy variables in the same model, while Models
2–5 each show just one of the dummy variables. Model 5 shows the interaction
between antioccupation mobilization and state population. Coefficients are pre-
sented below, with standard errors in parentheses (Table 3).
The marginal effects for each type of campaign are shown in Table 4. Pro-
democracy campaigns are significantly less likely to be violent than other types
of campaign. This falls in line with H1. In Model 2, where only the dummy
variable of prodemocracy campaign is included, the baseline probability of
violence being used is 0.80 when all other variables are held at their means.
When campaigns are mobilized along prodemocracy lines, however, the prob-
ability drops to 0.23, indicating that the likelihood of a prodemocracy campaign
using violence is low.
Marxist campaigns are the most likely of all campaign types to be violent.
This provides support for H2. In Model 3, which only includes the Marxist
dummy, mobilization along Marxist lines brings the probability that a campaign
will use violence from 0.55 to 0.96 when all other variables are held at their
means.
As predicted by H3, campaigns mobilized along ethnic or religious lines are
more likely to be violent. While significant, the substantive effect is not as large as
that of Marxist or prodemocracy campaigns. In Model 4, mobilization along
Table 3. Use of Violence as Function of Lines of Mobilization.

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5
Campaign Variables
Democracy 23.85 (1.79)* 24.44 (1.20)*
Marxist 6.27 (3.18)* 6.08 (2.42)*
Ethnic or religious 4.79 (2.30)* 3.69 (1.02)*
Expel occupation 20.57 (1.66) 0.90 (2.12)
Previous concessions 1.14 (1.07) 0.44 (0.65) 0.96 (0.69) 0.61 (0.50) 0.49 (0.41)
Regime violence 0.62 (1.20) 0.66 (0.81) 2.05 (1.05) 0.39 (0.74) 1.15 (0.65)
State-level Variables
GDP per capita 0.00 (0.00)* 0.00 (0.00)* 0.00 (0.00)* 0.00 (0.00)* 0.00 (0.00)*
Population 0.00 (0.00)* 0.00 (0.00)* 0.00 (0.00)* 0.00 (0.00)* 0.00 (0.00)*
External conflict 0.49 (1.94) 1.06 (1.16) 1.96 (1.28) 0.91 (0.99) 1.21 (0.80)
Polity (lagged 1 year) 0.27 (0.13)* 0.18 (0.06)* 0.29 (0.10)* 0.20 (0.06)* 0.19 (0.05)*
Beginning year 20.10 (0.05)* 20.06 (0.03)* -0.10 (0.04)* 20.10 (0.03)* -0.09 (0.02)*
Interaction
Expel occupation* 0.00 (0.00)
Population
Constant 207.92 118.85 205.66 209.75 178.82
N 188 188 188 188 188
Note: *Significant at 95% confidence level.
ethnic or religious lines, compared to other forms of mobilization, brings the

probability of violence from 0.48 to 0.86 when all other variables are held at their
mean.
Groups aiming to expel a foreign occupation did not have a significant impact
on the use of violence. This was expected because these types of campaigns, while
they can mobilize most of the population, tend to target strong military powers.
The impact of this type of campaign is expected to depend on the size of the
population of the country where the campaign occurs. The marginal effect of the
cross-level interaction in Model 5, between mobilization to expel a foreign occu-
pation and population size, is displayed in Fig. 1.
This graph indicates that, at low population levels, antioccupation campaigns
do not significantly differ from other campaigns in their likelihood to use violence.
As population increases, however, the impact becomes negative. This indicates
that antioccupation campaigns are less likely to be violent in states with larger
populations, providing support for H4.
To test whether the strength of the negative relationship between mobiliza-
tion along prodemocracy lines and the use of nonviolence depends upon the
level of democratic change, we interact our prodemocracy variable with the
“change” variable from the Polity IV dataset (Marshall & Jaggers, 2011). This
variable measures the net continuous change in Polity IV score, with substantive
positive or negative changes coming over a period of less than three years.
Following the standard practice for revised polity scores, cases of authority
Table 4. Marginal Effects of Lines of Mobilization on Use of Violence.

Variable Probability of Violence at Probability of Violence at
Minimum Value Maximum Value
Model 2
Democracy 0.80 0.23
GDP per capita 0.74 0.01
Population 0.62 0.19
Polity (lagged 1 year) 0.49 0.77
Beginning year 0.77 0.47
Model 3
Marxist 0.55 0.96
Model 4
Ethnic 0.48 0.86
collapse are coded as having a change of “0,” and cases of foreign interruption
are coded as missing. Cases of no polity change are also coded as having a net
change of “0.” This creates a continuum of values that ranges from 216 to 16 in
country-years included in this dataset. The results from this are displayed
in Table 5.
The results provide support for H5. Fig. 2 displays the interaction graphically.
At high levels of negative change in level of democracy, the relationship between
mobilization along prodemocracy lines and the use of violence is insignificant or
slightly positive. In countries that are becoming more democratic, the relation-
ship is sharply negative. This provides support for the idea that the choice of
tactics for prodemocracy movements is driven by the strategic situation that
campaigns find themselves in, rather than by ideology. While a state’s level of
democracy increases the likelihood that a nonstate actor will use violence, as
shown in Model 2, states that are becoming more democratic see less violent
prodemocracy movements.
Finally, we regress the size of the ethnic group with the likelihood of violence
in a subsample of cases where rebellion occurs along ethnic or religious lines. The
results are shown in Model 7, on Table 6. As predicted by H6, there is a sig-
nificant negative relationship between group size and the likelihood of violence,
with larger ethnic groups more likely to mobilize nonviolently rather than
violently.
Fig. 1. Population and Likelihood of Violence for

Antioccupation Campaigns.
Table 5. Change in Polity Score and Likelihood of Violence for

Prodemocracy Campaigns.
Model 6
Campaign-level Variables
Democracy 25.18 (1.56)*
Previous concessions 0.66 (0.79)
Regime violence 0.28 (0.94)
GDP per capita 0.00 (0.00)*
Population 0.00 (0.00)*
External conflict 1.18 (1.29)
Polity (lagged 1 year) 0.22 (0.07)*
Change in Polity IV score 0.15 (0.11)
Beginning year 20.07 (0.03)*
Interaction
Democracy* change in Polity IV score 21.32 (0.86)
Constant 145.77
N 188

Fig. 2. Change in Polity Score and Likelihood of Violence for

Prodemocracy Campaigns.
Table 6. Use of Violence as Function of Group Size.

Model 7
Campaign Variables
Group size 27.92 (3.99)*
Goal of regime change 6.68 (2.62)*
Goal of secession 2.93 (1.42)*
External support for campaign 1.33 (1.30)
Simultaneous violent movement 3.64 (1.37)
Regime in interstate conflict 0.91 (1.46)
Regime used violence 1.57 (1.85)
Total excluded population 3.50 (2.41)
Constant 241.91
N 67
ROBUSTNESS CHECKS
Models 1–5 control for the year that the campaign began, based on the idea that
there might be a trend toward nonviolence. An alternative possibility would be to
control for whether the campaign began during or after the Cold War. During the
Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union covertly supported violent rebel
groups as part of their foreign policy, which might have increased the viability of
violence during this time period, and the attractiveness of this strategy. In the time
since, this support may have decreased, making violence a less viable option.
Model 8 in Table A1 of the Appendix presents the results with this Cold War
variable as a control instead of the beginning year. The main findings for pro-
democracy, Marxist, ethnic, and anti-occupation campaigns do not change in
terms of their sign and significance. This suggests that the results presented here
are robust to an alternative specification of one of the key control variables.
The results could also be biased due to missing cases. While the data includes a
total of 256 campaigns, some of cases drop out of the model because they are
missing values for the control variables. GDP per capita and population are the
controls most affected by missing data. Model 9 in A1 presents the results with
these two variables excluded. The results are similar in terms of the sign and sig-
nificance for the key independent variables, suggesting that the results presented
above are not driven by the exclusion of cases where data on those variables is
absent.
Model 7, which deals with groups mobilized along ethnic or religious lines,
drops out two cases from the model due to the large size of the ethnic group
having a major impact on the model, and the circumstances of each dropped case
suggesting that they were driven by external factors. It is possible, however, that
this could bias the results. In the interest of transparency, Model 10 in Table A2
of the Appendix presents the results with these cases included.
The p-value on the main finding, that larger ethnic groups are more likely to use
nonviolence, drops to 0.055 in Model 10. This means that the coefficient falls just
short of the 95% level of confidence. It is, however, significant at the 90% level of
confidence. This represents an important caveat in the findings of Model 10, as it
suggests that the results might not be robust to the inclusion of additional cases, or
that some cases have circumstances that may override the incentives presented in
the above theory. As such, the results dealing with ethnicity should be treated as
suggestive rather than conclusive, and represent a direction for future research as
more cases of groups mobilized along ethnic or religious lines pushing for major
political change to happen in the world, and these can be included in new models to
give a more complete understanding of the phenomenon.
Finally, an alternative specification of the variable used to control for popula-
tion was incorporated into the analysis. In accordance with existing work on civil
conflict, the natural log of population was calculated to account for the skewed
distribution of population across the countries in the dataset. The log-transformed
variable was included in all model specifications (Models 1–6; 8) in which popu-
lation was used as a control. In all models incorporating logged population, the
performance of the line of mobilization variables was consistent with those in the
original models. In a few instances, control variables that were initially statistically
significant were found to be just shy of significance at the 95% level of confidence.
Given the consistent performance of the primary independent variables, the ana-
lyses’ findings remain robust following the alternative specification for population.
Additional analyses were conducted to determine the relationship between

the primary variables of interest after controlling for ethnic and religious
fractionalization. Given the prominent role accorded to ethnicity and religion in
the theoretical framework of this chapter, we run each of the models above
including controls for both ethnic and religious fractionalization. These can be
found in Table A3 of the Appendix. The analyses indicate robust findings for all
of the primary independent variables across all of the multilevel models, as the
direction of the coefficients and significance were consistent with the original
multilevel models. For each multilevel model, ethnic fractionalization had a
positive relationship with violence, while religious fractionalization indicated a
negative relationship. However, both variables were statistically insignificant in
all models. For the logistic analyses, the models were overdetermined as missing
observations led to a significant reduction in degrees of freedom. In sum,
our findings proved to be robust after the fractionalization controls were
incorporated.
CONCLUSION
We analyze the choice of violent rebellion versus nonviolent resistance. We argue
that, in order to understand why some groups use violent tactics while others use
nonviolent tactics, it is necessary to look at the potential size of their support
base. Nonviolence resistance can be effective, and a way for groups to avoid the
costs of violent rebellion, but its success depends on the ability of the group to
mobilize a large number of people. Groups with a smaller cap on the size of their
support base are less likely to calculate that nonviolence will be effective, and
more likely to engage in violent rebellion. Groups with a larger cap are more
likely to calculate that they will be able to mobilize a sufficient number of people
for nonviolent resistance to be effective, and are more likely to choose this tactic.
Groups that mobilize along prodemocracy lines have the potential to mobilize a
large portion of society, and are more likely to employ nonviolent resistance as a
result. For Marxist campaigns, it is difficult to gauge the size of their potential
support base ex ante, making them more likely to use violence. Groups that
mobilize along ethnic or religious lines have a smaller potential support base,
making it more difficult to extract concessions nonviolently. Because of this, they
are more likely to use violence. Finally, groups mobilized with the goal of expelling
foreign occupation have a large potential support base, but typically target a great
power. Because of this, these groups face a higher threshold for how many people
they must mobilize for nonviolent resistance to be successful. This means that
antioccupation campaigns are more likely to be violent in countries with small
populations than countries with large populations. All of these predictions are
supported using data on violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns from 1945 to
2006. We then test the mechanism by looking at the impact of shifts in Polity IV
score on the likelihood of prodemocracy campaigns using violence, and the impact
of ethnic group size on the likelihood of violence for ethnically mobilized groups.
Both of these tests support our theory.
These findings suggest that we should not group all of these types of movement
together when analyzing how states deal with potential rebel groups. While nonvi-
olence may be more effective than violence for some groups, these results show that
nonviolence may only be viewed as the optimal method of resistance for relatively
large groups. Other, smaller groups cannot anticipate that nonviolence is likely to
accomplish their goals, and therefore must use violence to signal their strength. For
these groups, it is possible that violence is more effective than nonviolence.
Our chapter builds upon prior work on the use of nonviolence in resistance
campaigns by illustrating the scope conditions of lines of mobilization under which
nonviolence is effective. We feel this contribution can be of utility to policymakers
facing decisions on how to respond to resistance as they will be equipped with
expectations on the use of violence on the part of the campaign based nature of its
mobilization. Additionally, this project adds to existing knowledge of the behavior
of different types of nonstate groups at distinct temporal periods of resistance to
the state. While we have an understanding of the implications of nonstate actors
organizing along ideological, separatist, or antioccupation cleavages during civil
conflict, our analysis sheds light upon the influence of this organizational dimen-
sion on the dynamics of resistance prior to the outbreak of war.
There are several avenues for future research that build upon the findings of this
project. First, examining the relationships between lines of campaign mobilization
and the use of violence from a country-year, rather than campaign-year, format
would enable researchers to test the hypotheses contained herein from a different
methodological perspective. This design would help to identify the causal factors
behind why some countries experience violent versus nonviolent resistance in a
given year as well as why they experience any resistance campaigns on an annual
basis. Another potential outgrowth of this project would be to further unpack
resistance movement characteristics to uncover additional attributes that influence
the use of violence or nonviolence. Examining the links between nonviolence and
movement leadership characteristics or the issues motivating resistance would be
particularly fruitful areas of future research.
NOTES
1. The terms “resistance campaign” and “group” are used interchangeably here. We
conceptualize “group” broadly, including resistance campaigns that may be more loosely
structured than other resistance groups such as rebel organizations.
2. In Iraq, the conflict happened in the wake of Operation Desert Storm and violence
was already occurring in the country. In Burundi, the conflict was part of a larger trend of
Hutu and Tutsi violence in the region. Syria and South Africa are still included in the
analysis because there is not as strong a reason to believe that outcomes for those cases
were driven by extenuating circumstances. In South Africa, nonviolence was used by a
coalition that made up over half of the population, in line with H6. In Syria, the Muslim
Brotherhood represented the majority Sunni Muslims and used violence. While this runs
counter to H6, it appears to be a case that H6 predicts poorly rather than a special case
necessary to drop. While it is possible that cases of groups that drew from less than 50% of
the population were also, in some cases, driven by extenuating circumstances, these are still
included, as their presence does not have as drastic an effect on the findings due to their
values not being extreme outliers.
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APPENDIX
Table A1. Use of Violence as Function of Lines of Mobilization.

Model 8 Model 9
Campaign Variables
Democracy 25.24 (2.40)* 24.96 (1.54)*
Marxist 7.61 (3.79)* 5.43 (2.35)*
Ethnic or Religious 5.14 (2.55)* 3.24 (1.44)*
Previous concessions 1.42 (1.34) 0.65 (0.84)
Regime violence 0.31 (1.38) 0.10 (1.12)
GDP per capita 0.00 (0.00)*
Population 0.00 (0.00)*
External conflict 1.13 (2.22) 0.67 (1.02)
Polity (lagged 1 year) 0.33 (0.16) 0.14 (0.06)*
Post Cold War 22.67 (1.74)
Beginning Year 20.08 (0.03)*
Constant 5.90 149.92
N 188 238
Table A2. Use of Violence as Function of Group Size (Burundi

and Iraq Included).
Model 10
Campaign Variables
Group size 27.41 (3.86)
Goal of regime change 7.20 (2.63)*
Goal of secession 3.11 (1.41)*
External support for campaign 1.35 (1.32)
Simultaneous violent movement 3.64 (1.39)*
Regime in interstate conflict 0.96 (1.47)
Regime used violence 1.83 (1.82)
Total excluded population 3.87 (2.40)
Constant 247.16
N 69

Table A3. Use of Violence as Function of Lines of Mobilization (Controls

Included for Ethnic and Religious Fractionalization).
Model 11 Model 12 Model 13 Model 14 Model 15
Campaign Variables
Democracy 24.08 (1.90)* 24.68 (1.24)*
Marxist 6.43 (3.31) 6.06 (2.42)*
Ethnic or religious 4.76 (2.33)* 3.69 (1.02)*
Previous concessions 0.97 (1.09) 0.38 (0.69) 0.88 (0.70) 0.57 (0.51) 0.47 (0.43)
Regime violence 0.61 (1.28) 0.77 (0.86) 2.02 (1.07) 0.31 (0.76) 1.13 (0.66)
GDP per capita 0.00 (0.00)* 0.00 (0.00)* 0.00 (0.00)* 0.00 (0.00)* 0.00 (0.00)*
Population 0.00 (0.00) 0.00 (0.00) 0.00 (0.00) 0.00 (0.00) 0.00 (0.00)
External conflict 0.36 (1.96) 0.79 (1.17) 1.83 (1.29) 0.80 (1.00) 1.17 (0.83)
Polity (lagged 1 year) 0.28 (0.13)* 0.18 (0.06)* 0.29 (0.10)* 0.20 (0.06)* 0.19 (0.05)*
Beginning year 20.11 (0.05)* 20.07 (0.03)* 20.11 (0.04)* 20.11 (0.03)* 20.10 (0.02)*
Ethnic 1.85 (2.67) 1.22 (1.57) 1.57 (1.78) 0.80 (1.39) 0.65 (1.08)
Fractionalization
Religious 21.52 (2.54) 20.54 (1.55) 20.93 (1.67) 21.52 (1.40) 20.85 (1.09)
Fractionalization
Constant 227.68 147.11 226.02 218.19 191.50
N 181 181 181 181 181

MARGINALIZATION AND
MOBILIZING POWER IN
NONVIOLENT SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Selina Gallo-Cruz
ABSTRACT
In the growing field of nonviolent social movement studies, questions of power

are often layered in inquiries into drivers of mobilization and dynamics of
success, from the individual to the societal level. The different ways margin-
alized groups utilize power are not adequately theorized, however. Here I
address paradigmatic approaches to understanding power in nonviolent move-
ments, identifying conceptual limitations to explaining stratification among
nonviolent resisters. In response, I develop a framework for better under-
standing the socially constructed origins of nonviolent power among different
mobilized groups. I first provide a sociology of knowledge survey of common
theories of power in nonviolent mobilization. I also review literature on mobi-
lization among marginalized populations to identify valuable insights lacking in
nonviolent movements studies. I then explore one case of marginalized nonvi-
olent resistance, that of the Mothers of the Plaza Mayo who mobilized for
an end to the Argentine Dirty War. Through this case, I develop a social
constructionist framework that can be generalized to better understand how
stratification shapes nonviolent resistance differently for different actors. I
conclude by proposing a general framework of inquiry, guiding scholars to pay
attention to four dimensions of conflict and resistance when examining the
power dynamics of nonviolent movements: the temporal context of conflict, the
degree of repression, actor status and positionality, and how nonviolent stra-
tegies and tactics correspond to each of these dimensions.
Keywords: Marginalization; mobilization; social constructionism;

nonviolence; power theory; The Madres of the Plaza Mayo
Power and Protest

ISSN: 0163-786X/doi:10.1108/S0163-786X20210000044008
91
92 SELINA GALLO-CRUZ
Scholars have long debated the sources and nature of power in the polity. Studies
of state power tend to center on detailing the institutional origins of political
influence and change. In social movements studies, questions of power are often
layered in inquiries into drivers and dynamics of mobilization and mobilizing
success, from the individual to the societal level. In the growing field of nonvi-
olent studies, debates over whether power emerges through structure or rational
strategies have sometimes led to intellectual stalemates over the best ways of
understanding the origins, dynamics, and outcomes of nonviolence. The types of
power marginalized groups utilize and the ways they utilize this power are not
adequately theorized in conventional power-theorizing frameworks. More trou-
bling to those of us focused on stratification in and across movements is the
blanket assumption that nonviolent resistance might appeal to all actors for the
same reasons or that nonviolent tactics might have universal outcomes, no matter
which groups employ them and under different contexts, despite sometimes great
disparities in social status and stratification.
Here I conduct a meta-theoretical assessment of current approaches to under-
standing power in nonviolent movements. A sociology of knowledge of nonviolent
studies illuminates the conceptual advantages and oversights of different theories. I
focus on one variable I believe is significant but undertheorized across intellectual
camps, that of how marginalized groups find nonviolent power. To begin to
expand theorization of marginalization in nonviolent mobilization, I develop a
social constructionist framework of nonviolent power. I argue that understanding
how contextually unique actor statuses intersect with mobilizing opportunities
helps to account for varied dynamics intrinsic to a stratified population. To
illustrate the social construction of actorhood and power in a mobilizing field, I
depict different opportunities for different expressions of actorhood as linked to
different potential outcomes.
I begin by surveying distinctive theses in nonviolent studies on how power
develops. I sketch these approaches in a comparative and temporal map of conflict
to illuminate how these different analyses of power diverge over the stages of
conflict and in their definitions of how power is realized. I then explore one case
study of a movement of marginalized nonviolent actors, the Mothers of the Plaza
Mayo in Argentina. This case helps to better illustrate how marginalized actor
status can expand the paradigm’s limited purview on nonviolent power. I conclude
with an outline of four analytical dimensions necessary to consider to understand
how marginalized actors experience and navigate nonviolent mobilizing power in
different ways.
POWER IN NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE

The power of nonviolence is understood to emerge through the power of people to
organize, persuade, disrupt and interrupt, and redirect social forces in entirely
nonviolent ways to the favor of social change. But different ontological assump-
tions inhere in different theoretical explanations of this power.
Social scientists conceptualize nonviolence as a form of claims making
comprising at least one or sometimes all of four types of political change efforts:
Marginalization and Mobilizing Power in Nonviolent Social Movements 93
(1) protest and persuasion, including marches, rallies, and symbolically charged
forms of public advocacy, (2) noncooperation, including boycotts and general
strikes, (3) intervention, including roadblocks or occupations (Sharp, 2008), and
(4) alternative institution-building, where resisters build new social systems that
effectively transform and provide alternatives to the contested features of targeted
social systems (Kurtz & Kurtz, 2015; Smithey & Kurtz, 1999).
Scholars have scrutinized hundreds of cases of effective nonviolent resistance.
Because this research has resulted in the construction of typologies of forms of and
orientations toward action and change (Carter, Clark, & Randle, 2009; Chenoweth,
2011; Lakey, 1968; Maney, 2007); the identification of different components of
nonviolent mobilization linked to favorable outcomes (Ackerman & Kruegler,
1994; Chenoweth & Stephan, 2012; Gregg, 1935; Kurtz & Smithey, 2018; Sharp,
1973, 2005, 2008; Smithey & Kurtz, 1999); and the assessment of the confluence of
conditions with actions that shape movement success or failure (Bartkowski, 2013;
Nepstad, 2011, 2013b, 2015; Ritter, 2015; Schock, 2005, 2015), a meta-level survey
helps to make sense of the divergent ways scholars have come to conceptualize and
study power in nonviolent resistance.
A comparison illustrates that power is conceptualized differently in different
conflict phases: from potential to action, to outcome; and, power is conceptualized
in distinctively different ways, as domination over common resources or as the
realization of a creative goal.
A great number of “people-power” studies, particularly the studies of savvy
strategy developing from a Machiavellian framework, focus on how power even-
tuates in a desired outcome, where one group wins out over the other.1 One general
thesis on people-power, therefore, defines power as domination (of a variety of
economic, political, social, and cultural resources), which occurs in a hierarchical
system of how contended resources will be distributed to the favor of one group
over the other. This thesis ends in an eliminative outcome where one group’s power
is gained only because it is taken from another. This thesis can be developed
through a variety of approaches at different entry points in the development of
different phases of power.
Nonviolent campaign studies and many of the latter stage nonviolent revolution
studies follow this trajectory. It is a widely held assertion among political theorists
that power is most effectively analyzed as an outcome, many of these studies
emphasizing conflictual and competitive outcomes, or power-over concerns (see
Joseph, 2004). This limited purview helps focus in on competition among con-
tenders in an agreed upon political field but de facto eliminates concerns over
groups that vie for completely different political goals than those held by incum-
bent power-holders.2
However, a review of different types of nonviolent power studies reveals that a
power outcome need not always be eliminative. A second general thesis hones in
on favorable conditions as driving strategic and tactical success. Political process
accounts more often than strategy-focused campaign studies give greater intro-
spection to whole movement lifetimes, expanding the frame beyond climactic,
regime-change stand-offs (Lakey, 2011; Tilly, 2004). Indeed, many frameworks
aim to simply provide a map of elements in the social environment which are
theorized as operable conditions to facilitate power development over the lifetime

of a conflict. The concept of “field theory” in social movements study, pioneered
by Ray’s (1999) comparative analysis of Indian women’s movements, has
more recently gained good conceptual traction and does just this type of social
mobilizing power mapping, seeing power as contingent on how different social
actors are located differently throughout early, high, and late conflict periods.3
Political process accounts can follow either of two different outcome trajec-
tories denoted in Fig. 1, ending in power-over accounts of domination-oriented
resource struggles (see, for example, Fox Piven, 2008; Paley, 2001) or detailing
how movements forge new social and political spaces in a society at large. For
marginalized groups, gaining power in society at large often means a larger-scale
mobilization effort but importantly, gaining power entails mobilization for
inclusion into a polity or, mobilization aimed at transformation and extension of
power-sharing within the polity, not necessarily the elimination of another
groups’ power in that polity. It is therefore crucial to demarcate the distinction
between “power-over” focused studies from “power-to” mobilization scholarship,
the latter tracing power as empowerment. Power-to focused organizers in the US
Civil Rights movement aimed at expanding access to resources among Blacks,
not in taking those resources away from whites; the women’s movement focuses
on creating equality for women, not in arresting the power of sexism for women
to oppress men; the gay rights movement seeks to gain inclusion and equal rights
for LGBTQ individuals, not to take those rights away from heterosexual indi-
viduals; and many in the environmental movement aim to institute healthy and
sustainable living practices and policies, as so many strands of nonviolent peace
movements promote creative initiatives without regard to elimination of any
targeted groups. These are all examples of power-to nonviolent movements.
Fig. 1. Three Phases of Power.

While they may have clear contenders in campaign battles where a power-over
conceptualization is apropos, to understand the broad goals and lifetimes of these
movements necessitates a more meta-level understanding of power analysis.
Vinthagen and Chabot (2007) and Reed and Foran (2002) find power a useful
concept for explaining both processes of mobilization and outcomes. These
studies present a social constructionist thesis (see also Baumgarten, Daphi, &
Ullrich, 2014; Eyerman, 1991; Fuist, 2013; Jasper, 1997; Johnston & Klandermans,
1995; Meyer, Whitter, & Robnett, 2002; Polletta, 1999b; Polletta, 2004; Polletta,
2006) in outlining the social and historical changes that enable the empowerment
of resisters into broad-based mobilization. In this sense, they share a general
conceptual affinity with other social constructionist theories of political change
that find concepts like discursive structures (or framing), legitimacy, and
authority more useful mechanisms for understanding what drives social and
political change at a macro-level when utilitarian frameworks prove insufficient
(see Jepperson, 2002; Koenig & Dierkes, 2011). Still, this analytical refraction
does not account for the different experiences of marginalized actors within and
across these movements.
I add to the need for greater attention to contextual location and variation, a
more nuanced understanding of how marginalized actors engage with nonviolent
resistance techniques with differing dynamics and outcomes. Marginalized actors
are positioned at a different nexus of organization within the polity, so the
geography of what constitutes an alignment of favorable political, economic, and
cultural conditions varies greatly (Cockburn, 1999; Enloe, 2014). As Oliver
(2013) has noted,
Some groups have more influence; some are repressed more. In particular, the political
opportunities available to members of majority ethnic groups are different from those available
to isolated disadvantaged ethnic minorities. Opportunities for resourceful ethnic minorities are
different from those for resourceful ethnic majorities. General social movements theory should
incorporate these distinctions into its core. Otherwise, it risks marginalizing itself by claiming that
a general theory is a theory of affluent majorities and relegating movements by oppressed
minorities to the periphery of theoretical concern (235–236).
MARGINALIZATION AND MOBILIZATION

While analytical blind spots persist in social movements theories that tend to treat
mobilization trajectories as largely unified (Armstrong & Bernstein, 2008), in-depth
case analysis of movement sectors reveals layers of mobilization, inter-movement
divisions, and hierarchical arrangements of mobilizing labors (Balser, 1997;
Barkan, 1986; Cole & Luna, 2010; Crawford, Rouse, & Woods, 1993; Doetsch-
Kidder, 2012; Edwards & Marullo, 1995; Gamson, 1995; Jakobsen, 1998;
Kretschmer, 2014; Reyes & Ragon, 2018; Robnett, 1997; Sartain, 2007; Woehrle,
2014; Wolfson, 1993), all of which can follow various lines of stratification, along
lines of class, race, ethnicity, citizenship, education, and gender, for example.
Analysts of special movements among the most marginalized populations have
provided important historical, empirical correctives to grand theories of people-
power as a coherent organism-like social force (Aksoy, 2015; Baldez & Montoya,
2005; Boris, 1993; Boyle, 1993; Fallon, 2008; Khalil, 2014; Luna, 2009; McAllister,
1988, 1991; Paschel, 2016). And scholars working to glean insights from studies of
the most marginalized offer us several important considerations to be incorporated
into a framework for marginalized mobilizing power.
First, we understand that because marginalized actors experience oppression in
unique and overlapping ways, the nature of marginalized actors’ distinctive griev-
ances differentially shapes the nature of their resistance (Einwohner, Hollander, &
Olson, 2000; Harriss, 2006; Mattoni, 2012; Rosigno, 1994; Van Delinder, 2009).
Marginalization can create an impetus that crosses other serious social divisions in a
surge of collective mobilization (Hasson, 1993; Kuumba, 2002; Neuhouser, 1995;
Stephen, 1995; Van Delinder, 2009; West & Blumberg, 1990), but so too can it
reinforce social boundaries that impose barriers to mobilization (Freeman, 1978;
Neuhouser, 1995; Rhode, 2014; Van Delinder, 2009; Vogt, 2015). Tsutsui’s work, in
particular (2017, 2018), has shown that the social construction of actorhood can at
one historical period serve as a vector for systemic repression while, at others, or in
the shifting from local to global polities, can provide new opportunities for mobi-
lization, as the distinctive nature of actor status construction can also significantly
shift across contexts.
In her expanded review of ethnic mobilization studies, Oliver (2017) elaborates
on the foundational importance of historical legacies. She explains that how ethnic
and racial minorities are constructed in the processes of state formation directly
affects how they are stratified into unequal political and social systems. Significant
among the outcomes of these legacies, Oliver (2017) identifies: “access to demo-
cratic processes for achieving group goals, experience of repression, need for allies,
identity construction, processes of consciousness raising, and bases of mobiliza-
tion” (p. 1).
Marginalization shapes different patterns of mobilization, framing of movement
issues, the perception and arrest of different political and cultural opportunities,
and different movement identities and organizational forms (Kuumba, 2002;
Zemlinskaya, 2010). Marginalization within movements shapes which types of
actors become movement leaders and how movement leadership develops in
stratified spheres (Robnett, 1997), and the course of tactical and strategic devel-
opment and success (Asal, Legault, Szekely, & Wilkenfeld, 2013; Blee, 1991;
Einwohner, Hollander, & Olsen, 2000; McCammon, 2003), and radicalization
(Neuhouser, 1995). Considering the insights of stratification-focused mobilization
studies, I suggest an important remedy to oversights on unequal actor status is
found in closely examining the many different ways different social groups are
constructed and how these constructions shape the forms of power they pursue.
Institutional theory treats actors and thus actor statuses as historically socially
constructed. Although institutional theory tends to focus on sameness and not
stratification, institutional theory generally emphasizes that the assumptions we
make about different actors, the roles we ascribe to them, what we expect from
them in any given web of relations, all of these dimensions of actorhood are
constituted in historically unique ways across different social contexts (Meyer,
2010). “Neo” institutional theories explain that actor construction often can be
but should not be taken for granted in political and global analysis because whole
social systems of social organization are predicated on assumptions and beliefs

about who individuals are and what they are capable of (Drori, Meyer, &
Hwang, 2006; Meyer & Jepperson, 2000). This point is underscored by the fact
that there exists sometimes profound decoupling between national proclamations
of citizen entitlements and on-the-ground realizations of them, and this can
explain historically significant forms of inequality. A noninstitutional history of
global waves of women’s rights movements provides one detailed example
(Berkovitch, 2002).
Correspondingly, a feminist social constructionist theory of power contends
that much of what we have and can experience in the social world stems from the
collective identity we are socially accorded by more powerful others who domi-
nate the social institutions defining stratification. Feminist theorists have long
articulated the many ways in which women, as a social category, based on the
social construction of what can be expected of the female sex, have been assumed
to have particular abilities, strengths, potentials, weaknesses, and limitations that
have underlined the categorical ways in which they have been excluded or limited
within a range of social institutions (Bartky, 1990; de Beauvoir, 1949; Fisher &
Embree, 2000; Heinämaa & Rodemeyer, 2010; Kruks, 2001; Lorde, 2007;
MacKinnon, 1989; Mohanty, 2003; Moraga, 2015; Okin, 1989; Pateman, 1988;
Young, 1990). Ontological conceptions of actorhood undergird the unequal dis-
tribution of other more tangible forms of resources. And these more tangible
expressions have perennially galvanized constructionist theorists to think deeply
on the constitutive dimensions of such stark disparities. A social constructionist
thesis on stratification and mobilizing power writ onto studies of large scale
conflict and mobilization would posit, therefore, that the map for mobilization
may be drawn in part from macro-phenomenological scripts and expectations
orienting the dynamics of our collective relationality, as these scripts also corre-
spond to the distribution of other political, social, and economic resources. As
Mohanty (1986) has so eloquently argued, “It is not color or sex which constructs
the grounds for these struggles. Rather, it is the way we think about race, class,
and gender-the political links we choose to make among and between struggles”
(p. 207).
Critical race theorists have also followed from a social constructionist account
of inequality, detailing the ways in which individuals are assumed to possess
qualities of lesser or greater potential and ability based on their racial identities and
how these assumed powers have varied phenomenally across temporal, cultural,
and political contexts (Alexander, 2012; Appiah & Gutmann, 1996; Blum, 2002;
Bonilla-Silva, 2013; Crenshaw, 1989; Kousser, 1999; Mallon, 2006; Wilson, 2010).
This concept has salience not just for understanding how individuals deal with the
crisis of status disparity among the nexus of social worlds in which any one group
regularly travels; it has importation to a mobilization analysis of how power is
extended differently to different collective actors in different social contexts. Said
(1994) elaborated of these processes at the international level that our experiences
of oppression are so entrenched in categorical scripts and actor statuses even as
they stem from socially constructed sources, that they are able to fuel phenomenal
global political and economic transformations of power. Bracey II (2016) and
Reyes and Ragon (2018) have likewise emphasized the need for Black movements
and ethno-racial movements to theorize mobilization directly through a critical
race studies lens.
In line with this thinking, some multi-institutional analyses of political process
have raised caution to how we study the ways resources are accessed by different
mobilized constituencies, be they symbolic or material (Armstrong & Bernstein,
2008; Castellano, 2015; Oliver, 2013; Petras, 2008; Snow & Owens, 2014). Feminist
critiques of nonviolent people-power assumptions, specifically, have deconstructed
Sharpian nonviolence theory to argue that the many ways in which resources hold
different value to different collectively organized social actors reveals a serious
limitation of power-over analyses: its assumed precondition that resources hold a
common denomination of value across contenders, that conflictual actors all want
the same things (McGuinness, 1993; see also; Elshtain, 1995; Margolis, 1989).
These and other studies of the many ways in which movements explicitly committed
to nonviolence are also stratified (see Gallo-Cruz, 2016), offer many important
caveats to universalist elaborations suggesting savvy strategy or favorable condi-
tions could be arrested with equal effects across diverse and stratified populations.
In my study of women’s nonviolence movements, case comparison reveals that
some women’s movements experience an amplified political “invisibility,” that is,
they were disregarded by authorities as lacking true political power before the
conflict and, despite their best efforts to protest loudly and with great impact,
they were also ignored during the conflict (Gallo-Cruz, 2021). This biased
assumption, that women lack the power to make any meaningful political impact,
affords women an unexpected and shielded form of power, off the radar of regime
expectations and repression. To explain this phenomenon across movements and
various other mobilized but marginalized social groups, I argue that a social
constructionist framework is needed. A social constructionist lens points us to the
sociological intersection of the nature and boundaries of political conflict, as well
as the nature and degree of repression, and the historically constructed stratifi-
cation of social statuses, in interaction with the strategies and tactics of resisters.
This adds a multi-layered complexity to nonviolent power theorizing, but one
that is essential to explaining the complex stratification of power before, during,
and following political conflicts.
Below I detail one particular case study to demonstrate how a social construc-
tionist lens on marginalization enhances nonviolent power theorizing. I use this one
highly documented case study as anomaly to the normal paradigm to illustrate how
marginalized peoples may realize mobilizing power in unexpected ways, the
“unexpected” understood as a key mechanism shaping successful nonviolent resis-
tance (Gregg, 1935; Sharp, 1970). As I will illustrate below, this has occurred for the
Mothers of the Plaza Mayo in Argentina through three phases of conflict. Because
this case is extensively documented, I have utilized secondary data including
national and case histories, memoirs and interview collections, news reports,
intergovernmental organization, non-governmental organization (NGO), and
government documents, and case studies. I have employed a historical process
tracing method, examining first, the emergence and development of mobilization
among the Mothers as compared with other resistance actors in the common context
of conflict and repression then, following their mobilization strategies, experiences,

and outcomes throughout the course of the conflict and in its aftermath. This sys-
tematic examination allowed me to weigh and compare the impact of different
social-environmental variables upon the Mothers’ mobilization efforts and their
strategic and tactical choices (Bennett, 2008; George & Bennett, 2005; Lange, 2012;
Mahoney, 2004; Mahoney, 2012). To better understand how their socially con-
structed statuses played a role in these processes, I then scrutinized the development
of resisters’ actorhood status in the polity before, during, and in the late stages of
mobilization, and also weighed theirs and others statuses against the tactics and
strategies of each group of resisters, resources, and networks, the nature of their
different experiences of repression, and the different mobilization outcomes.
Following my exploration of the dynamics of power in this particular case, I propose
a generalizable framework that can incorporate this multi-layered analysis. I
conclude by outlining a thematic approach for applying a social constructionist lens
to the study of nonviolent mobilization and power among marginalized groups.
MARGINALIZED MOTHERS AND THE

ARGENTINE DIRTY WAR
Between 1976 and 1982, some 30,000 people, about 80% of them between the ages
of 16 and 30, were “disappeared” by Argentina’s ruling military junta. That they
have been called disappeared refers to both the manner in which they were sud-
denly removed from society without warning or due process and that it occurred
without a trace as to their whereabouts, although it is now known or assumed that
90% of them were killed. About 10% of women in captivity were pregnant and
gave birth during their imprisonment (women represented 30% of captives overall).
And an estimated 400 babies and small children, most born in captivity, were
kidnapped from these victims and placed under illegal adoptions through the
military networks of the junta.
Like other dirty wars, this was not a civil war, but a war waged by a military
government against civilians who did not voluntarily submit to the warfare and by
means that utilized state resources in subversive ways. During this dirty war, vic-
tims were abducted by military-police forces in unexpected and typically (but not
always) nighttime home raids. The victims were usually sent to detention centers
for political interrogation, were often tortured through beating, starvation,
waterboarding, masking, sexual assault, and the electrical prod was frequently used
to torture many sensitive bodily areas including the genitals. After torture, most of
the victims were held temporarily in detention centers (346 active detention centers
were reported following the war’s end) and they were eventually killed, many of
them drugged and dropped into the ocean on military “death flights.” For these
reasons, scholars now also increasingly note that the aim and effect of the dirty war
was in fact a form of genocide against the assumed political enemies of the military
state.
It was in this context that “Las Madres de la Plaza Mayo,” or the Mothers of
the Plaza Mayo, were born. This name of “Las Madres” meaning “the Mothers,”
was given to a collectively organized group of Argentine mothers of the dis-

appeared during the dirty war of the late 1970s and early 1980s, following their
critical acclaim by a supportive public. Although they were not referred to this
name throughout the conflict, they were known, rather, as “Las Locas” or the
“Crazy Women” (Fisher, 1989), a label telling of how they were received by
authorities who wished to dismiss them and their political claims. Following the
dirty war, and once the name Las Madres had been conferred, they registered a
formal organization of Las Madres de la Plaza Mayo, in honor of the location
where their weekly protests had been held in the city’s center plaza.
Although they were derided and treated with disdain by the regimes they
contested throughout the dirty war, so celebrated now are the Mothers of the
Plaza Mayo in Argentina and in world history that hundreds of public statements
have been composed and orchestrated to praise, study, analyze, and emulate their
activism, in books, journals, news and magazine articles, theses and dissertations,
websites, musical albums, peace and human rights awards, conferences and
speaking events.
Typical conceptualization of nonviolent power would be inadequate for
explaining resistance during the Argentine dirty war, for capturing the entirety of
the field of contenders and the innocently targeted victims, or for understanding
how and why the Mothers were able to mobilize in ways that forever changed the
political landscape. Firstly, the Argentine dirty war, neither a civil war, nor a
publicly orchestrated genocide, but one carried out surreptitiously by a military
engaged in a haphazardly organized repression, and its resistance, cannot fit neatly
into a traditional nonviolent campaign or regime change movement framework.
The early field of conflict was at first characterized by a harsh anti-insurrectionist
campaign that came to be known as the “Proceso,” or the “Process.” This campaign
was not unique in recent Argentine history. It followed six other coups d’état in the
20th century. Like many before this one, the lines between populist support and
military takeover were blurry. It is important to note that just before this particular
junta, inflation at a rate of 335% had been used to justify a restoration of state
control via the “bombs, death, and ideology” approach that was common of other
military takeovers (Finchelstein, 2014).
A power-over approach that would focus only on the transfer of rulership
would overlook those resisters who had organized via formal political processes,
from the outset of the Proceso. While it might not seem a social movement tactic,
in this context of sweeping violent repression, it was a bold move against state
power, challenging military law with democratic process. Legal action was taken
among those most courageous to voice their resistance as they openly inquired
about missing persons, despite the disappearances that had often come with mili-
tary rule (though never of this scale, to be understood only after the war’s counts of
total disappearances). Among these resisters, many formed new organizations. An
organization called the League of Human Rights, comprised of lawyers and judges,
brazenly formally challenged the regime by filing thousands of writs of habeas
corpus, though most courts denied their processing. Many other groups organized
to place political pressure on the regime both at home and through international
lobbying. These included the Families of the Disappeared for Political Reasons;
the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights; the Ecumenical Movement for
Human Rights; the Latin American Peace and Justice Service Argentine League
(Hodges, 1991); a fathers’ group founded by an attorney, Emilio Migñone (Steiner,
2003); and the Center for Legal and Social Studies (Bouvard, 1994).
Fig. 2 details that, first, in the early stage of high repression, all the typically
identified resources utilized to facilitate resistance by organizing beyond estab-
lished legal processes, including political opportunities and indigenous networks,
were closed off. Repression ensured resistance was eliminated among those
labeled subversive, all those actors assumed threatening. This included student
groups, leftist political coalitions, lawyers, professors, union organizers, and
laborers. While about 1/3 of the disappeared were, in fact, women, they were
disappeared as belonging to one of the other social groups targeted, if not labor
organizers or intellectuals, they were hospital workers or police officers purged by
the regime. The Mothers began to vocalize opposition to the disappearances early
on. But the Mothers, many of them conservative housewives, were not counted
among the potentially threatening; they were assumed powerless. So, they were
ignored, made fun of by police and other officials they petitioned, or when they
gained attention, they were lied to or verbally harassed. That they presented
themselves as serious political contenders was made a mockery and they were
chided that their children were probably picked up as terrorists or prostitutes.
This “political invisibility,” the authorities’ disregard of the Mothers political
power, gave the Mothers an ironic and unexpected organizing space, free from
the repression others experienced.
As the Mothers mobilized more publicly in 1977, growing from 12 mothers to
hundreds of mothers, they marched in the Plaza Mayo, considered the center of
Fig. 2. Invisibility, Mobilization, and Power in Argentina.

the city and of public political importance. They marched even as repression was
executed in broad daylight. When a journalist was gunned down in public, they
petitioned the President for a meeting. Wasting no time awaiting his reception,
they also began actively lobbying foreign journalists to publicize their stories to
international audiences. They immediately gained radio time on Voz de America
and BBC radio.
Despite their disregard by the regime, the Mothers gained in regard and
respect among a population growing in fear of the regime’s impunity. Public fears
of repression heightened and many people silenced themselves of open opposition
for their own safety. Many also began to take confidence in the “Crazies”
marching on the Plaza. Soon, people come to them with reports of more disap-
pearances. Then, 300 Mothers gathered nearly 24,000 petitions and presented this
petition to the regime, demanding knowledge of the disappeared. Still, they were
largely ignored and the disappearances surged in numbers, with 36% of them
occurring in 1977 and over 51% occurring during the Madres’ growing mobili-
zation in the following years.
Just as they were dismissed as irrelevant to the political field, more repression
created more mothers looking for their disappeared loved ones, and the move-
ment grew. New Mothers found power in spaces off the radar of the regime’s
repressive focus. On the one hand, their power, unseen by the regime, could be
considered in a “power-over” analysis, the power of peace and reconciliation over
the violence of the disappearances and the torture and detainments. But the
Mothers’ claims during the early and high stages of conflict had nothing to do
with political rule. They simply wanted to know where their loved ones were and
demanded their safe return. Thus, pushing this limited conception of power on
the Mothers’ campaign limits a full understanding of their mobilization efforts.
Theirs was also an empowerment-focused movement, the Mothers mobilizing a
“power-to,” the power to envision a democratic society, a fair and just process for
all citizens. It was both a campaign-based movement, but not for resources the
regime wanted, and a movement to restore human rights, expand citizenship in a
time of political repression, and rebuild democracy, a transformative effort.
It is important to document how their efforts at this stage of the conflict also
traversed political fields, working at once as domestic organizers and as lobbying
authorities in international and transnational fields.4 Tactically, the Mothers
wrote reports on disappearances they had learned about, and documented their
condemnations of the regime on paper money and in flyers inserted into Church
missals. They lobbied international professionals visiting Argentina for their
conferences and tourists that had come for the World Cup, scouring the papers
for news of any large group of international outsiders scheduled to come. Soon
they raised funds to travel to the Vatican to lobby the Pope and to Washington
D.C. to meet with Senator Kennedy and a number of other international NGOs.
These expanded field-mobilization efforts also render the typical framework
limited to fully explain the Mothers’ nonviolent mobilizing power. The regime
continued to ignore the Mothers and focused their efforts instead on international
diplomatic meetings in France and in Geneva where their diplomatic standing
with powerful international others was called into question. But the Mothers
acted as vital vectors of information to these outside authorities. The Mothers

had been constantly collecting and funneling reports through foreign journalists.
They would gain visibility only through proxy of external authorities. When
theirs and others’ reports flooded the offices of the US Embassy, the Inter-
American Commission on Human Rights and the Organization of American
States who in turn demanded the regime offer information and explanation, the
regime acknowledged to outsiders that some “subversives” had been detained, as
they then scrambled to cover the extent and nature of those detainments. The
Mothers were both visible and influential in the expanded transnational field of
human rights.
That their power is socially constructed is emphasized by this expanded field
analysis. In comparison of the Mothers’ mobilization effects at home and abroad,
it is apparent that their socially constructed status had a direct effect on their
organizing outcomes. Because they were disregarded in the local polity as “crazy
housewives,” the Mothers amplified their social and political power by shifting
their focus into an expanded conflict field. Somewhat to their surprise, they
gained heightened visibility and respect in this international arena. To add to the
limitations of the regime’s disregard of the Mothers’ efforts, the Mothers’ polit-
ical inexperience at home gave them even greater credibility as truth-telling
advocates among the international human rights community. Their efforts were
picked up by human rights groups in Sweden, France, and around the world.
Starting with a generous donation of $25,000 kronos from a group of supporters
in the Netherlands, other groups began to raise money to support the Mothers’
formal registration as an NGO that could work for a peaceful end to the dirty
war. They also were befriended by Catholic peaceworker Adolfo Perez Esquivel
who invited a small group of them to receive the Nobel Peace Prize with him in
1980. Their altered ontological status in the transnational conflict field opened
access to resources and opportunities and skills for action otherwise cut off at
home.
It was in these socially constructed political spaces where the Mothers were
ignored domestically and lauded internationally that they could both oppose the
repression, demanding its end, as they also prefiguratively envisioned the most
desirable transformation. For this reason, a conflict resolution and post-conflict
field analysis is vital in explaining the power of the marginalized. In its final stage,
the war came to an end through a combination of internal and external pressures.
Some of these were geopolitical changes, as the regime at the time (the presidency
had changed hands from Rafael Videla to Roberto Viola in 1981 and to Leopoldo
Galtieri in 1982) could no longer stand up to its opponents abroad. The Mothers
had effectively continued to ramp up their mobilizing efforts, and they became an
internationally critically acclaimed formal human rights organization. The
Mothers’ organized some of the largest protests the country had known,
demanding information and reconciliation following the disappearances, orches-
trating a large 24-hour march around the plaza, an occupation of the Cathedral,
and a public ten-day fast in the city center.
Instead of inter-systemic battles for power, however, the Mothers, still unrec-
ognized as true contenders by the regime, worked for a counter-systemic power.
This stems in part from their marginalized social position as Mothers of the dis-
appeared inspired their exceptional approach to justice and reconciliation. They
persisted long after the war and the democratically elected transition in 1983. The
Mothers continued large marches in the Plaza but now, each one held a photo of
their loved-one disappeared. Their mobilizing power still grew as they became a
beacon of justice and healing. By the late 1980s, their marches included tens of
thousands of supporters. They demanded information about the fate of each victim
of the dirty war and refused official efforts to close the doors on the past, proposals
to compensate families economically for their losses, or to exhume bodies buried as
final documentation of the end of the dirty war. The Mothers pushed for prose-
cution of all involved, resisting amnesty offered to lower ranking officers, and they
collected and publicized a “Gallery of Repressors,” officers they wanted held
accountable for their crimes. A newer committee of Mothers called themselves the
“Grandmothers of the Plaza Mayo” and began focusing exclusively on the
reuniting of the babies born in captivity and put up for illegal military adoptions.
Through DNA testing, the Grandmothers have organized the reunification of
approximately 25% of kidnapped children with their genetic grandparents and
extended families. Through so many other efforts they have mobilized against any
conclusion to the dirty war’s impunity that would not bring justice for lives lost
and disrupted. In this way, many scholars have praised their efforts as completely
reconfiguring the “politics of memory” in Argentina, instituting a new legacy
commitment to human rights (Barahona de Brito, González Enrı́quez, & Aguilar,
2001; Bosco, 2004; Jelin, 1994). This act of power, waged far into the post-conflict
period, is also not a power-over any one regime nor is it a solely formal political
campaign. Rather, it is a deeply political movement pushed forward through
radical and transformative cultural ideals about justice, reconciliation, and
healing.
An assessment of the different mobilization trajectory of the Mothers of the
Plaza Mayo offers a foundational framework for understanding marginalization in
mobilization. The Mothers’ passage and mobilization through three phases of
conflict was characteristically different than other activists who mobilized against
the regime for a number of reasons. First, their status at the outset of the conflict
relegated them as “unthreatening” and assumed powerless and thus fortuitously off
the radar of repression. In several unexpected ways, the disregard the Mothers
experienced proved beneficial to this particular context of high repression.5 Their
mobilization strategies and tactics grew over the period of conflict in ways
significantly shaped by their status and the changing nature of the local field as well
as their movement into new and different fields. As the local mobilizing field was
closed off during growing repression, the Mothers mobilized freely in unrecognized
spaces, then with greater visibility, regard, and respect in international spaces
gaining new resources and support for their cause. Their power in the transnational
arena grew the Mothers’ authority to work on reconstruction efforts and as
internationally recognized leaders of the human rights movement in Argentina
following the dirty war. Equally important to their unique structural opportunities,
their social experience as housewives and Mothers gave them a distinctive social
understanding of justice that in turn equipped them with a distinctive approach to

reconciliation and political transformation far into the post-conflict period.
A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONIST FRAMEWORK

A social constructionist framework is much needed to address the myopia in power
theories that, by default, assume all actors to be driven by common motivations, in
pursuit of common outcomes, or engaged with common strategies and tactics in
the same ways. Time and political geography constitute foundational consider-
ations as the nature of conflict and repression is contextually dependent. A social
constructionist approach means that we first ask, “how could this have happened
differently?” and then scrutinize contextual commonalities and distinctions to
understand why.
Here I have explored in depth the socially constructed nature of actor status in
the case of the Mothers of the Plaza Mayo. To emphasize the socially constructed
nature of actorhood is not to rob individuals of their agency, as rational-choice
theorists so often wrongly surmise. Rather, the social construction of actor status
is an understanding of central importance to the study of inequality. Different
actors’ statuses, as they have developed and continue to be constrained by a
convergence of historical forces and social institutions, have much to tell us about
why otherwise equally capable individuals realize different levels of power in any
given polity. My objective here is to bring this vital understanding into the study
of nonviolent mobilization and power. To do so, we must give greater attention
to the particular forms of power the most marginalized of resisters realize, even
(and perhaps especially) in highly repressive environments.
Through enduring historical economic, political, and cultural legacies, this
socially constructed status imposes a structure of stratification relegating some
actors to be treated quite differently than others, in both settled and unsettled
times. The nature of socially constructed statuses also leads marginalized actors
toward different motivations and resources for navigating conflicts in unique
ways. This may result in mobilizing opportunities distinctive to the particular
ways these actors have experienced political repression. The socially constructed
nature of marginalized statuses is emphasized through comparative analysis, both
historical and transnational, as the context of the field and the actors’ position in
it become more apparent.
I urge scholars to consider multiple layers that together shape the contours of
how nonviolent strategies and tactics are engaged with and how they work. Stra-
tegies and tactics are employed in dynamic social fields, each differentially
impacted by an idiosyncratic historical legacy and also the intersection of patterned
social institutions and power relations.
The diagrams I have provided offer a pictorial framework for understanding
how marginalization shapes the mobilization pathway. A social constructionist
analysis can follow through four analytical dimensions to add greater specificity
to the unique trajectories of different movement histories. Scholars should pay
special attention to each movement’s: stages of conflict, degree of repression,
actor status and positionality, and particular and changing engagements with
different nonviolent strategies and tactics as these other dimensions shift.
Stages of Conflict
A stage of conflict examination helps to explain how and why movements have
followed particular trajectories. A data-driven analysis will help to determine how
many stages to demarcate and which to focus on. In my diagrams, I have depicted
the conflict resolution as a transition defining line with the post-conflict period as a
third stage. But my qualitative historical analysis of the movement of the Mothers
of the Plaza Mayo unpacks how the Mothers’ identities, strategies, and power
changed form, leading up to, through and following this demarcation of electoral
regime change. For different studies, the resolution period could be scrutinized in
greater detail when trying to understand the nature of nonviolent tactical outcomes
or distinctive actors’ roles in this post-conflict process. Certainly, this period is one
in which marginalization tends to reappear, deepen, or change form and minorities
become politically invisible in new ways. Although, if understanding the rela-
tionship between strategical and tactical efficacy and regime change is the object of
analysis, outlining and studying mobilization through earlier stages may be more
pertinent.
Period analysis should also be considered with degree of repression, as the
nature of repression is liable to change corresponding with how new actors enter
the field at different stages, or how strategies and tactics shift, and following other
political, economic, and social changes. My analysis has demonstrated that both
forms of “power-over” and “power-to” nonviolent mobilization may change over
time. To understand how and why, we must give greater attention to the unique
sociological ecological properties of each conflict stage.
Repression
The nature and degree of repression is an essential variable determining part of
how nonviolence works and how different actors mobilize. In the Argentine dirty
war, repression was uniquely socially constructed as it followed the regime’s
collective perception of who threatened their power. Repression closed oppor-
tunities for some and opened new opportunities for others.
The study of repression is broad in political sociology and international studies,
an extensive review of which is beyond the scope of this article. As of late,
nonviolent scholarship has given closer attention to how repression follows resis-
tance, both violent and nonviolent (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011), military loyalties
or defection (Nepstad, 2013a), and in the face of global waves of rightwing
populism (Sombatpoonsiri, 2018). Kurtz, Smithey, and colleagues (2018) detail the
myriad ways in which repression can undercut regime authority and open new
opportunities for nonviolent power.
I have emphasized the unexpected effects of socially constructed statuses on
repression, where marginalized actors elided the most heinous violence because
they were not assumed to be serious political contenders. While other forms of
marginalization lead to direct targeting, violence, and killing, the degree of
repression and its socially constructed development and execution merits close
sociological scrutiny in any study of nonviolent resistance. But it should be
studied in interaction with other dimensions of the social construction of the field
of conflict. Scholars should ask, “Why have repressors focused on the targets they
pursue?” And, “How?” Also important to ask is, “Who have they ignored?” And,
“Why?”
In the case of the Mothers of the Plaza Mayo, I traced the changing nature of
repression following the Mothers’ lobbying of outside authorities to whom the
regime was more attentive and deferential. Where Goffman (1956) once pre-
sented a social constructionist account of the nature of deference and demeanor
as a form of obligated regard for others, both subordinate and symmetrical, the
opposite frame can be applied in a repression analysis. We should ask, “Who is so
regarded as worthy to challenge or attempt to eliminate as a contender through
violence?” And concordantly, we should also ask who is not and why. Answering
why impels us to study the historical development of the field (before, during, and
sometimes following the conflict) as well as the historical nature of how actor
statuses and their relations have been constructed within that field.
Actor Status
The status of the Mothers of the Plaza Mayo changed little from the time pre-
ceding the onset of the dirty war through their early and even high stages of
mobilization; at least, their status changed little within the domestic field in the
eyes of repressors. It was important for me to research the stratification of
Argentine society before the dirty war to better understand how their status acted
as a key variable imbuing them shielded from repression and thus with enhanced
mobilizing power. The statuses of their children, as intellectuals and legal and
labor advocates, were statuses immediately targeted by the junta as threatening
and potentially powerful. But the junta was working with a different cognitive
understanding of power than the people were and the international human rights
regime.
In their theory of the cultural construction of modern agency, Meyer and
Jepperson (2000) trace common global tropes of modern actorhood extending
Mead’s thesis that we create ideas of Others and how actors are to correspond with
them in distinctive role-playing exercises, though Meyer and Jepperson (Meyer &
Jepperson, 2000) focus on a modern, global scale. From these historically partic-
ular constructions, they argue, socially constructed forms of agency follow, as
authority, legitimacy, and the responsibility to act follow scripted legacies. Here I
suggest we add a stratification lens to understanding the social construction of
actorhood, as stratification studies have helped to underscore how very different
conceptualizations and constructions of otherhood are writ on institutions and into
politics during both settled and unsettled times. We cannot fully understand the
power of nonviolent mobilization without first parsing out the particularities of
different conceptions of actorhood that lead some actors to repress others, but not
all others, and some resisters to support the strategies and tactics that uphold their
ideals of who should be entitled to particular rights and forms of citizenship.
Strategies and Tactics

Only after understanding these three contextual layers of history, repression, and
actor status and stratification, can scholars fully understand how different
nonviolent strategies and tactics are employed to build people power. Much has
been written on which strategies and tactics are powerful across social contexts
and which are constrained by different social, political, and economic forces.
Nonviolent studies have not yet given close enough scrutiny to how different
actors use nonviolent mobilizing tactics with disparate outcomes and how these
are related to pre-existing forms of social stratification.
I have presented a framework for considering mobilization over the development
of a conflict, under different degrees of repression, and corresponding to different
actors who may have distinctive conceptualizations and motivations for their
grievances. Scholars wanting to better understand how marginalization shapes
mobilization and nonviolent power should ask questions of strategic and tactical
efficacy through the lenses of history, political context, and stratification. A social
constructionist approach could be applied to Sharp’s (2008) taxonomy of nonviolent
resistance forms (protest and persuasion, nonviolent intervention, and noncooper-
ation) through a case comparative approach that analyzes historical stages,
repression, and actor status and stratification with success in each of forms
of nonviolent resistance. Campaign databases such as the NAVCO dataset 3.0
(Chenoweth, Pickney, & Lewis, 2017) includes tactical selection data from 26
countries. The Swarthmore Global Nonviolent Action Database is another excellent
resource that, like NAVCO, is campaign organized, but can provide a starting point
into a study of movements.
Questions that could be asked of strategies and tactics and layered into a
multi-dimensional analysis include, “How have historically marginalized actors
come to experience repression in new ways?” “Do different nonviolent tactics
shape these trajectories?” “How does repression change tactical choices and
outcomes for marginalized groups?” “How does political invisibility change the
strategic and tactical choices of marginalized movements?” And, “Which forms
of tactics do marginalized resisters use with greater success and under different
degrees of repression?”
IN CONCLUSION
One way to begin to understand how marginalization shapes nonviolent mobi-
lization is to remind ourselves of some of the lessons we have learned from the
most general level study of conflict. Not all conflicts are equal. Some conflicts
unfold between comparable contenders. Others deepen already profound power
disparities. Some develop quickly. Others grow slowly and take decades or longer
to resolve. Some conflicts consume whole societies. Others are carefully managed
in isolated and targeted incidences.
Nonviolent conflicts also occupy diverse forms. Here I have taken a survey of
different sociological approaches to conflict to better understand how questions
of inequality among resisters often lie outside of the typical frame. To remedy this
oversight, I have developed a social constructionist approach to understanding

marginalization, mobilization, and power through one case study that provides
some generalizable insights. This framework highlights actor status as one sig-
nificant variable explaining nonviolent strategic and tactical opportunities and
successes.
General level surveys of tactical and strategic effectiveness have provided
foundational knowledge of when and why nonviolence works. This knowledge
now begs the important questions of, for whom does nonviolence work, how, and
under what conditions? Future studies should question the stratification dynamics
among marginalized peoples that may differently affect the ways they find mobi-
lizing power. As socially constructed techniques for conflict resolution, much
greater specificity and nuance must be given to understanding how different actors
engage with nonviolent strategies and tactics in divergent ways and with unequal
outcomes. I suggest we begin to acknowledge that visibility and power have
vantage points defined by sociological legacies in societies with great diversity and
often great inequality. The social constructionist framework I have provided makes
for an excellent starting point for scholars to dig more deeply into case studies on
nonviolent power and to begin to illustrate how inequality maps onto fields of
conflict in some predictable and some unexpected ways.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author offers thanks to the support of the Kroc Institute’s Gender, Conflict, and
Peacebuilding Fellowship and research support provided by College of the Holy Cross
as well as to scholars’ generous insights in presentations given at the UC Irvine Center
for the Study of Democracy, the University of New Mexico Sociology Department, and
the Smith College social movements colloquium. Many careful suggestions from editors
and anonymous reviewers helped to make this a much-improved manuscript.
NOTES
1. This definition of power as outcome is also common among social movement scholars
that address the “power in movement,” where power is identified in sweeping changes in
the organization of personal lives, in policy, or in the structure of the polity more generally
(Tarrow, 1998). Scholars have noted that a much greater number of social movements
studies attempt to disentangle what leads to successful power outcomes (Banaszak, 2005).
This could mean an outcome that in effect achieves a “balancing of power,” where political
power is shared by multiple actors in a strategic effort to hedge a monopolization of power
by any one, more powerful actor (Lobell, 2014). Or it can provide more agnostic accounts
of how variables of different forms of social power coalesce into broad-based mobilization.
2. Lukes’ seminal thesis on power, power he defined as outcomes defined by resource-
domination (1974, also 2005), fits squarely in this model. Lukes, like Sharp and also
Gramsci on whom Lukes draws, has assumed power to be waged in a competitive and
eliminative fashion where “A exercises power over B, when A affects B in a manner
contrary to B’s interests” (1974:27). Furthermore, Lukes elaborates that the distortion of
B’s interests and the complete usurping of B’s power better qualifies A’s true and complete
power over B. While different scholars in the family of Marxian power theory analyses
differ on the subtleties of how power works through different combinations of material
conditions and cultural-ideological orientations, the Machiavellian notion that consent

must be withdrawn from the oppressor has become the operative measure of power among
“power-over” studies (Fox Piven & Cloward, 1966; Gamson, 1975). Gramsci, Bourdieu
(1972), and Foucault (1990) could all fold into such a power-theory family tree on this
account.
3. Some of these attempts follow a more utilitarian outlining of key conditions (see
Fligstein & McAdam, 2015) and others work out more cultural-analytical explanations of
the various tracks in which different types of institutional arrangements can follow through
from one phase of power to another (Armstrong & Bernstein, 2008), although such field
theorizing has yet to engage with power explicitly and extensively.
4. This field-shifting mobilization might be considered a “boomerang” strategy to bring
outside political pressures to bear on domestic authorities (see Keck & Sikkink, 1998).
Although, the Mothers were admittedly acting out of desperation to do anything and
everything to end the dirty war and, unlike other NGOs studied in the development of the
boomerang concept, the Mothers had no transnational ties or organizational associations
before their mobilization against the dirty war.
5. Elsewhere (Gallo-Cruz, 2021) I elaborate on how the Mothers’ political invisibility
helped to allow them a free space for collective action (see also Polletta, 1999a).
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SECTION II
POWER OF INSTITUTIONS AND
TRADITION
ILLEGITIMACY, POLITICAL
STABILITY, AND THE EROSION OF
ALLIANCES: LESSONS FROM THE
END OF APARTHEID IN SOUTH
AFRICA*
Eric W. Schoon and Robert J. VandenBerg
ABSTRACT
Illegitimacy is widely identified as a cause of revolution and other forms of

transformative political change, yet when and how it affects these processes is
ambiguous. We examine when and how illegitimacy affects the stability of
political regimes through a historical analysis of South Africa’s National Party
(NP) and its apartheid regime, which lasted from 1948 to 1994. Many scholars
of South Africa identify the regime’s illegitimacy as a catalyst for the end of
apartheid. Yet, consistent with assertions that illegitimacy does not result in
political instability, the NP maintained power for decades despite a domestic
crisis of legitimacy and a global movement that decried the apartheid regime’s
illegitimacy. Interrogating this contradiction, we detail how the regime’s
illegitimacy contributed to the negotiated revolution in South Africa when it
resulted in unacceptable costs for the allies that the government depended on for
survival, motivating those allies to withdraw support. Building on our findings, we
detail how turning attention to the ways that illegitimacy affects relationships
with allies – rather than particular outcomes, such as revolution or state failure –
allows us to account for variation in both when and how illegitimacy matters.
Keywords: Apartheid; illegitimacy; legitimacy; revolution; South Africa;

relational sociology
*
Authorship is equal and alphabetically listed.
Power and Protest

ISSN: 0163-786X/doi:10.1108/S0163-786X20210000044010
119
120 ERIC W. SCHOON AND ROBERT J. VANDENBERG
Illegitimacy is widely identified as a cause of revolution (Beck, 2011, 2014;

Sharman, 2003), state failure (Goldstone, 2008), and other forms of trans-
formative political change (Roscigno, Cantzler, Restifo, & Guetzkow, 2015;
Wimmer, Cederman, & Min, 2009; Wimmer & Min, 2006), yet the way that it
affects these processes is ambiguous. Multiple scholars have observed that there
are no evident mechanisms linking illegitimacy to political instability (e.g.,
Kurzman, 2004; O’Kane, 1993; Pakulski, 1986). This collection of scholarship
highlights that, while legitimacy may foster stability and compliance with
authority systems, authority systems may nevertheless retain compliance and
stability while being perceived as illegitimate (see also Beck, 2017). Thus, despite
illegitimacy being frequently identified as a cause of political transformation,
when and how illegitimacy matters remains unclear.
Our purpose is to examine when and how illegitimacy affects the stability of
political regimes. We do this through an analysis of the National Party (NP) in South
Africa, which controlled the South African government from 1948 until the first all-
race elections in 1994. As a minority government that retained power through
systematic repression of ethnoracial and political minorities, the NP government
existed in what Lipset (1959) defines as a crisis of legitimacy, facing opposition from
an overwhelming majority of the citizens over whom it held power. Consistent with
arguments that illegitimacy cannot explain political instability, the NP maintained
power for nearly a half-century despite widespread domestic illegitimacy and the rise
of a global movement against apartheid. Nevertheless, defying then-contemporary
expectations, in 1990 the NP initiated negotiations for a transition away from
minority rule while at the height of its material capacity (Giliomee, 1995; Waldmeir,
1997; Welsh, 1990), and both expert assessments during the late apartheid era and
subsequent research by area specialists have attributed the end of the NP’s reign to
its illegitimacy (e.g., Asmal, 1989; Bakker, Raab, & Milward, 2012; du Toit, 1981;
Tambo, 1984; Tötemeyer, 1985; Waldmeier, 1997; Welsh, 1990). This inconsistency
between the seeming inconsequence of illegitimacy to the NP’s persistence and the
ultimate centrality of illegitimacy to its demise reflects theoretical debates over
illegitimacy’s causal relevance, and thus provides a unique historical lens for
examining how illegitimacy affects political instability.
Our analysis shows that as perceptions that the apartheid regime was
illegitimate grew more widespread, allies of the NP began to experience social,
political, and economic costs because of their association with the regime, leading
them to withdraw their support. As we detail below, the NP’s ability to retain the
support of its cadres and the white South African population depended on its
ability to preserve diplomatic standing in the international community, bolster
economic growth, and sustain an ideologically committed base. It depended on
relationships with key allies to accomplish these tasks. In the face of a growing
opposition to apartheid, these allies experienced mounting pressure from their
own constituencies to support the anti-apartheid movement, ultimately leading
them to break with the NP. Thus, white – primarily Afrikaner – South Africans
faced growing global isolation, prompting efforts from within the NP to end the
system of minority rule.1
Illegitimacy, Political Stability, and the Erosion of Alliances 121
These historical processes offer important insights into the relationship between
illegitimacy and political stability. First, our analysis highlights the importance of
alliances for understanding the effects of illegitimacy. Rather than illegitimacy
affecting the regime’s stability directly, we detail how illegitimacy impacted the
regime’s relationship with its allies. Thus, rather than assuming illegitimacy acts as
an independent variable that produces a particular type of change in the dependent
variable (i.e., regime stability), our analysis supports a relational perspective
(Emirbayer, 1997) that sees the effects of illegitimacy manifested in the dynamics of
interaction. Second, and relatedly, this focus on the relational dynamics of illegit-
imacy is important because it helps to account for why illegitimacy appears to
matter a great deal in some cases but little in others, and why illegitimacy did not
appear to adversely affect the apartheid regime for much of its history. The majority
of those who viewed the regime as illegitimate throughout its rule had limited
capacity to directly influence the regime itself. However, these actors successfully
influenced the allies that the NP depended on, prompting them in turn to abandon
the regime. Thus, we observe the effects of the NP’s growing illegitimacy indirectly
and non-linearly, with negative perceptions of the regime influencing behavior
within the broader network of relationships that the NP relied on politically,
economically, and ideologically. Third, this relational approach to illegitimacy
helps us move beyond the long-standing conflict between constructivists and realist
positions that respectively privilege normative considerations versus material fac-
tors to explain sociopolitical outcomes. Rather than treating explanations that
privilege illegitimacy as incompatible with explanations that privilege economics or
instrumental considerations, we show how economic and instrumental factors are
intertwined with normative considerations.
LEGITIMACY, STABILITY, AND REVOLUTION

Numerous scholars have argued that legitimacy is necessary for durable political
stability (e.g., Beetham, 2013 [1991]; Call, 2012; Hechter, 2009; Zelditch &
Walker, 2003). Legitimacy fosters stability because it imposes normative pressure
to maintain the order as it exists (Beetham, 2013 [1991]). The effects of legitimacy
on the stability of a social order are demonstrated in experimental research,
which finds that legitimacy creates structural bias against instability such that the
validity of entities or practices has a direct negative effect on attempts to foment
change (Thomas, Walker, & Zelditch, 1986; Zelditch & Walker, 1984, 2003).
These studies support the assertion that generalized acceptance of a social order’s
legitimacy motivates compliance with the order, even among those who
individually do not believe in its legitimacy (Zelditch & Walker, 1984, 2003).
Based on the stabilizing effects of legitimacy, many studies of political processes
have advanced the corollary assertion that illegitimacy will result in political
instability. Illegitimacy is thus often identified as a key causal condition for
explaining transformative political change (e.g., Hechter, 2009; Sharman, 2003;
Wimmer et al., 2009; Wimmer & Min, 2006). Still, some scholars have challenged
the assertion that illegitimacy (or a loss of legitimacy) causes extreme manifestations
of political instability, such as revolution or other forms of state failure (e.g.,

Kurzman, 2004; O’Kane, 1993; Pakulski, 1986; Skocpol, 1979). Their arguments
imply that the effects of legitimacy and illegitimacy are asymmetric: while legiti-
macy might bolster the stability of a political system, illegitimacy does not cause
instability.
Among those arguing that illegitimacy does not cause instability, some point
to the fact that, throughout history, many regimes have exercised power in the
absence of legitimacy (Beck, 2017; Pakulski, 1986; Skocpol, 1979). In her study of
social revolutions, Skocpol (1979) critiques legitimacy-based explanations of
social revolution by highlighting the importance of intra-regime stability and
material power rather than popular perceptions. Others highlight the fact that
legitimacy is relative, arguing that political instability can be explained equally
well without invoking legitimacy at all. For instance, in her critique of research
that privileges legitimacy or illegitimacy in explanations of political processes,
O’Kane (1993) argues that any given entity will be viewed as legitimate by some
but illegitimate by others, and thus illegitimacy cannot effectively explain the
instability of regimes. Similarly, Kurzman (2004) contends that a loss of legiti-
macy only matters in the context of revolution when viable alternatives are
present, in which case evaluations are relative rather than absolute.
The Relationality of Legitimacy

While prominent critiques challenge legitimacy-based explanations of political
instability, they also emphasize a particular feature of legitimacy and illegitimacy,
which stands to inform our investigation into when and how illegitimacy affects
regime persistence: relationality. Legitimacy is often analyzed as an attribute or
property – something that an entity either has or does not have (Suddaby,
Bitektine, & Haack et al., 2017) – that affects the likelihood of various outcomes
for the entity in question (e.g. Call, 2012). However, foundational theories of
legitimacy conceptualize the construct as embedded in relationships rather than
as an attribute of the entities in those relationships (e.g., Beetham, 2013 [1991];
Johnson, Dowd, & Ridgeway, 2006; Zelditch & Walker, 1984). This is evident in
Weber’s (1978 [1924]) essays, which explore how legitimacy bolsters sub-
ordinates’ support or acceptance of authority (see also Zelditch & Walker, 2003).
In Weber’s writings, legitimacy is not something that an entity simply has or
does not have, but rather something that emerges via interaction between an
authority and its subjects. This relational dynamic is most explicit in Weber’s
discussion of charismatic authority, where he observes that charisma itself is not
the basis for legitimacy. He writes, “This basis lies rather in the conception that it
is the duty of those subjects to charismatic authority to recognize its genuineness
and to act accordingly” (Weber, 1978 [1924], p. 242). Thus, rather than
conceiving of legitimacy as an attribute that is simply present or absent, legiti-
macy is understood as emerging through interaction. The significance of this
distinction is reflected in the considerable attention Weber paid to the instability
of charismatic legitimacy (see Schoon & West, 2018). This instability results from
the fact that the operative relationship is between an individual and her or his
followers rather than between more durable institutions (i.e., traditional positions
of power or bureaucratic systems) and their subjects.
The importance of the relational dynamics of legitimacy for understanding the
stability or instability of political systems is emphasized by Skocpol (1979, p. 32),
who writes,
what matters most is always the support or acquiescence not of the popular majority of society
but of the politically powerful and mobilized groups. … Even after great loss of legitimacy has
occurred, a state can remain quite stable … especially if its coercive organizations remain
coherent and effective.
Skocpol’s statement suggests that different relationships have distinct impli-

cations for a political regime. Moreover, the relevance of illegitimacy may be
contingent on the nature and importance of the relationship. Subsequent research
similarly emphasizes how states and regimes must maintain relationships with
multiple audiences (Beck, 2011, 2014; Hafner-Burton & Tsutsui, 2005; Keck &
Sikkink, 1999; Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997), each of which evaluates
legitimacy on different terms and has varying capacities to influence the exercise
and stability of political power (O’Kane, 1993; Schoon, 2015, 2016, 2017).
Research highlighting the relationality of legitimacy provides two critical
insights into how illegitimacy affects regime stability. First, it suggests that a loss
of legitimacy may occur in some relationships but not in others. Second, it
highlights how certain relationships matter more for regime persistence than
others. Taken together, this scholarship suggests that understanding when and
how illegitimacy affects regime stability requires an examination of how evalu-
ations of legitimacy affect the dynamics of interaction within the relationships
that regimes depend on to maintain their multiple and complex functions.
METHODS
In the sections that follow, we examine when and how illegitimacy affects the
stability of political regimes through an analysis of the National Party (NP), its
period as the dominant force in South African politics, and its eventual loss of
power. Our goal is not to provide a novel explanation of how apartheid ended, but
rather to account for the role that illegitimacy played in the end of apartheid and to
situate the effects of illegitimacy in relation to material and political conditions. To
this end, our analysis began with a review of scholarship on the end of apartheid.
Synthesizing across existing explanations, we traced the history of the NP in South
Africa. We specifically sought to identify mechanisms that facilitated the NP’s rise,
explanations of how it maintained power, and explanations for the fall of the NP.
Many of these explanations privileged different causal conditions (e.g., international
pressure, economic recession, legitimacy deficits). Rather than adjudicate these
explanations, we used them to construct a multicausal understanding of the condi-
tions that contributed to the end of apartheid, and examined the relationships among
these conditions. As we detail below, this synthesis led us to focus on specific allies
of the regime operating in three domains – international politics, business, and
academia – whose withdrawal of support jointly precipitated the NP’s historic
reversal in initiating negotiations with the opposition.
We used this historical background as a point of departure for examining

more specifically how assessments that the NP was illegitimate influenced the end
of apartheid. Reactions to the NP were varied and often polarized across
different sectors of South Africa’s population and among international actors.
Moreover, reactions to the NP and apartheid evolved from the 1950s through the
1990s. Building on our synthesis of prior scholarship, we compiled primary
sources about key events and decisions by allies identified in our review of
existing scholarship. These primary sources allowed us to identify how illegiti-
macy impacted those decisions and actors. Sources included period news reports
(located using electronic news archives including EBSCOhost, Gale, LexisNexis,
and ProQuest), government reports, public statements, and interviews given by
key actors and officials, memoirs published by key actors involved in the
apartheid regime or the opposition movement, United Nations resolutions and
transcripts, videos of floor debates in the United States congress, and essays
published in the ANC’s political journal Secheba that reported on meetings with
allies of the regime.
Operationalizing Illegitimacy
Definitions of legitimacy vary widely, as do approaches to operationalization (see
Suddaby et al., 2017). Following recent research in political sociology and political
science (e.g., Call, 2012; Schoon, 2015), we rely on Suchman’s definition of legiti-
macy as “the perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable,
proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values,
beliefs, and definitions” (1995: 574) and conceptualized illegitimacy as the inverse of
legitimacy (see Schoon, 2014). For the purposes of our analysis, we focus specifically
on evaluations of the apartheid regime that were rooted in normative or moral
judgments. Some researchers define illegitimacy in more general terms as
“worthiness of opposition” (Lamb, 2014, p. iv), or in more legalistic terms as a
violation of established rules (Beetham, 2013[1991]). However, the former
approach allows for the possibility of evaluations that are more material in nature,
while the latter focuses more on legal frameworks, which the NP regime funda-
mentally altered in the course of governing. Here, our goal was specifically to
distinguish normative opposition to apartheid from material or strategically
motivated opposition to the regime. Consistent with this goal, we treated explicit
condemnation of the NP or apartheid regime as morally or normatively undesir-
able, improper, or inappropriate as evidence of evaluations of illegitimacy.
CASE BACKGROUND: THE RISE AND FALL OF

THE NATIONAL PARTY AND APARTHEID
By any measure, the negotiated end to apartheid in South Africa stands as one of
the most anomalous moments in modern political history. After nearly a half-
century in power, the Afrikaner-dominated National Party – whose white
supremacist vision had long-defined the South African state – unexpectedly
sought a compromise with the opposition on a new constitutional dispensation,

ultimately handing over power to the activists and guerrillas they had sought to
repress just a few years earlier. Explanations for why this occurred have
repeatedly emphasized the NP’s loss of legitimacy as central to this political
revolution (e.g., Asmal, 1989; Bakker et al., 2012; du Toit, 1981; Tambo, 1984;
Tötemeyer, 1985; Waldmeir, 1997; Welsh, 1990).
At the time of the NP’s rise to power, white minority rule was a defining
feature of the prevailing colonial order (see Saunders, 2000). However, by the
early 1960s, South Africa along with neighboring Rhodesia and the Portuguese
possessions of Angola and Moçambique were conspicuous outposts of white rule
in a period of rapid decolonization (de Blij, 1962). Branded as a relic of the
former colonial order, the apartheid regime incurred the enduring enmity of the
Organization of African Unity – a multi-country organization established in part
to ensure the sovereignty and independence of African nations – and other
formerly colonized countries, as well as Eastern Bloc powers eager to expand
their influence in the global South (ANC 1967; Klotz, 1995; Pfister, 2003; Vosloo,
1978). South Africa’s deteriorating standing in the world community was
particularly evident at the United Nations, where a majority of member states
voted to expel the South African delegation from the General Assembly in 1974
(Svenbalrud, 2012). South Africa would come to occupy a distinct place as an
outcast state, condemned in numerous UN resolutions, subject to a far-reaching
assemblage of economic sanctions, and the target of a mandatory arms embargo.
Domestically, from the time that the NP rose to power, the government faced a
popular crisis of legitimacy, where major groups in society lacked access to power
through the established political system (Lipset, 1959). The NP drew its support
from a unified Afrikaner electorate, which was large enough to outvote the smaller
population of English-speaking whites. The NP’s electoral success, however, relied
entirely on the disenfranchisement of non-white South Africans (Trapido, 1963).
These conditions motivated a broad, multiracial coalition of native Africans,
Coloreds, Indians, and white leftists to oppose the NP and the imposition of its
apartheid agenda from the outset.2 This group, led by the African National
Congress (ANC), challenged the government first through nonviolent means, then
later through acts of sabotage and guerrilla warfare (Jordan, 2004; Mandela,
1964, 2013 [1994]). Nevertheless, at no point did the opposition pose a meaningful
military threat to the government, which maintained the capacity for repression
throughout the NP’s period in power (Ellis & Sechaba, 1992). In the early 1960s,
the government crippled organized opposition, imprisoning many key leaders of
the African National Congress (ANC) and other opposition organizations, while
forcing the rest into exile (Bakker et al., 2012). Still, opposition continued to boil
below the surface, and in 1976, black youth took to the streets to protest racial
inequality in education in what became known as the Soweto uprising (Mafeje,
1978; Mandela, 2013 [1994], ch. 80). Soweto marked the beginning of a renewed
period of popular opposition to NP rule.
Although never reaching a sufficient magnitude to threaten the overthrow of
the NP directly, domestic resistance to Afrikaner minority rule had, by the mid-
1980s, catalyzed a global anti-apartheid movement, as well as precipitating
something like a permanent state of siege across the country. David Welsh, a
political scientist working at the University of Cape Town at the time, summa-
rized the NP’s situation as follows:
At present – and contrary to what many outsiders appear to believe – the South African
government is not on the verge of collapse, putatively requiring only concerted heave to topple
rotting structures. Its crisis of legitimacy endures, but its coercive power remains formidable,
and probably no more than a small degree of its potential was deployed in putting down the
violence of 1984-6. (Welsh, 1990, p. 9).
Mike Louw, who served at the time as deputy director of South Africa’s
National Intelligence Service, put the dilemma in more personal terms:
The entire world turned their backs on us; my children were growing up knowing that the world
hated them that they were welcome nowhere. The entire nation was being stigmatized
(interview with Waldmeir, 1997, p. 50).
In his own account of the period, Nelson Mandela similarly emphasized the
role that legitimacy concerns played in breaking the “illegitimate, discredited
minority regime” (Mandela, 2013 [1994], p. 597):
The enemy was strong and resolute. Yet even with all their bombers and tanks, they must have
sensed they were on the wrong side of history. We had right on our side, but not yet might. … It
simply did not make sense for both sides to lose thousands if not millions of lives in a conflict
that was unnecessary. They must have known this as well. It was time to talk. (Mandela 2013
[1994], p. 525).
Thus, while armed opposition played a role in the NP’s departure from power,
even by the admission of apartheid’s opponents, it was not actually overthrown
by force of arms (see also Ellis & Sechaba, 1992).
Situating these factors in relation to one another, explanations of why
apartheid ended point to a coalescence of conditions associated with international
relations, the domestic economy, and the ideological foundations of apartheid, all
of which helped to catalyze the negotiated revolution that ended the NP’s reign
(see Giliomee, 1995). In her extensive first-hand account, Waldmeir (1997) details
how foreign allies, South African business interests, academics working out of
institutions such as Stellenbosch University, and Afrikaner religious denomina-
tions such as the Dutch Reformed Church (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk)
played key roles as strategic partners of the regime, and how changes in their
stance toward apartheid motivated shifts in state policy. While other scholarship
details how the Dutch Reformed Church actually lagged behind the NP in
embracing reforms (Kuperus, 1996), on each of the three remaining fronts dis-
cussed by Waldmeier there were specific actors or groups of actors whose
changing positions were instrumental in prompting the leadership of the NP to
reverse course on its long-standing policies.
Diplomatically, the NP depended on the patronage of the United States, whose
support insulated it from the effects of international condemnation and growing
economic sanctions. In the domestic context, the NP’s ability to maintain a robust
economy depended on a mutually beneficial relationship with white leaders in the
South African business community. Of particular importance in this domain was

the Anglo-American Corporation, a mining conglomerate that dominated the
South African economy to such an extent that its subsidiaries accounted for roughly
half of the shares traded on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (Lelyveld, 1982).
Finally, the NP depended ideologically on Afrikaner institutions of higher educa-
tion – most notably the prestigious Stellenbosch University – both to provide an
intellectual justification for the persistence of apartheid and to train the NP’s cadres.
For each of these allies – the United States government, the Anglo-American
Corporation, and Stellenbosch University – we trace the sequence whereby each
actor’s commitment to supporting the status quo eroded, ultimately setting in
motion changes that extended far beyond the actors themselves.
ALLIES, SURVIVAL, AND THE EFFECTS

OF ILLEGITIMACY
In the following sections, we provide an overview of the relationships between the
NP and the key allies in international relations, business, and academia who were
instrumental to the regime enduring for more than four decades. We then detail
how assessments that the NP was illegitimate altered the orientations of these
allies toward the NP, prompting them to withdraw support.
International Relations
During the decades of global rivalry between Western nations and the Soviet
Union, South Africa’s strategic position on the trade routes around the Cape of
Good Hope, its well-trained military, and its consistent opposition to commu-
nism all served to endear it to American policymakers. The tendency to view
events in southern Africa through a Cold War lens similarly colored US attitudes
toward the ANC and its partner organization, the South African Communist
Party (SACP). Thus, for most of the Cold War period, the division between the
first-world and second-world camps in international relations provided a firm
foundation for US support of the NP (see Betts, 1979).
In addition to these diplomatic considerations, the capital interests anchoring
US support for the NP closely intertwine with domestic factors. Leaders of the
US and other capitalist countries were reluctant to forgo the loss of prosperity
likely to arise from forfeiting South African trade to other economies (Kaempfer,
Lehman, & Lowenberg, 1987). In 1983, at the height of the struggle over
apartheid, the United States was the leading source of South African imports,
shipping over 2.2 billion dollars in goods that year (Belli, Finger, & Ballivian,
1993, p. 68). The consensus that partnership with South Africa was beneficial to
capital interests and conducive to prosperity in the American and British econ-
omies served as a major obstacle to global efforts to pressure the NP diplomat-
ically and economically (Svenbalrud, 2012; Taylor, 2000), allowing the NP to
mitigate many of the political costs associated with South Africa’s growing global
isolation.
South African Business

In addition to ensuring white political supremacy and the strict separation of
races, apartheid also sought to achieve the economic advancement of the Afrikaner
population. Beginning in the early twentieth century, the Afrikaner nationalist
movement was oriented toward providing Afrikaners with opportunities to over-
take the wealthier English-speaking whites while keeping the non-white population
locked in a position of subordination (O’Meara, 1977; Trapido, 1963; cf.; Pretorius
& Vosloo, 1974). This left the South African business community in a position
that was, on balance, quite favorable to wealth accumulation. Economically,
the apartheid system deflated the cost of widely-available black labor, effectively
underwriting a significant portion of the operating costs for white-owned
businesses.
The NP depended heavily on cooperation from business in order to execute
their agenda in a manner viewed as legitimate by their white constituencies and
foreign partners. With the cooperation of significant portions of the business
community, South Africa achieved rapid economic growth in the 1950s and
1960s, allowing the NP to deliver on their campaign promise to economically
elevate the Afrikaner population (Trapido, 1963). The importance of South
Africa’s business elite to the NP’s efforts to maintain the support of the voting
population is most pointedly illustrated by the relationship between the NP and
the Anglo-American Corporation. Although noted for the liberal views held by
its upper management, Anglo-American nevertheless called in government
security forces to suppress striking black miners in the 1970s and again in 1987,
and the ANC in its subsequent submission to the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission would point to evidence of extensive collaboration between Anglo-
American and the apartheid security apparatus (ANC 1997; Battersby, 1987). In
its final report, the Commission found that Anglo-American benefited materially
from the apartheid regime, providing less to its black workers in terms of wages
and housing even than what was permitted under apartheid-era laws (Tutu, 1998,
p. 34). Furthermore, the value of Anglo-American’s endorsement of the NP is
evident in Anglo-American’s efforts as one of the most visibly reformist actors in
the South African business community to make the case against sanctions in the
foreign press, and to do so with a credibility that the government itself could not
marshal (see Relly, 1986).
In this respect, Anglo-American was not unique among South African
businesses, many of which profited handsomely under apartheid (Tutu, 1998)
while buttressing the economic viability of NP rule. This afforded
Anglo-American specifically – and the business community at large – a form of
veto power over the policies of the apartheid regime. Business elites declined to
exercise this veto for several decades when conditions in South Africa were
generally favorable to their interests. However, once it became apparent that the
apartheid model was no longer profitable, the business community withdrew
support from the NP and began openly negotiating with the opposition and
campaigning for reform.
Academia
Academics and educators played central roles in the Afrikaner nationalist
movement from its earliest beginnings (O’Meara, 1977) and were some of the
most loyal supporters of the apartheid regime (Hugo, 1998). The Afrikaans-
speaking institutions of higher education were bastions of support for the NP.
In contrast to the English-speaking white universities where the discipline of social
anthropology provided an academic forum for criticizing apartheid, the analogous
field of volkekunde (Afrikaans for ethnology) taught in the Afrikaner universities
served to advance an essentialist perspective on race and ethnicity. As such,
volkekunde differentiated between ethnic categories in a way that supported the
NP’s vision of racial separation and provided a scientific framework for justifying
apartheid policies (Gordon, 1988; Sharp, 1981).
In addition to providing an academic foundation for apartheid, Afrikaans-
speaking academia also rendered an important service to the government by
reinforcing the socialization of educated young Afrikaners into the apartheid
ideology (Kotzé, 1990). Under the NP, South African institutions of higher
education stood at the apex of a pedagogical system engineered to reproduce
racial inequality (Johnson, 1982), and the Afrikaans universities in particular
functioned as training grounds for the NP ruling class. This was especially true of
Stellenbosch University, which historically occupied a vital place in Afrikaner
cultural life (Duffy, 2003; Perlez, 1989). Nearly all of the NP leaders who served
as head of government during the apartheid era had ties to Stellenbosch,
including Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, who taught sociology there before
going on to become the political architect of the apartheid system (Miller, 1993).
An additional agent of political socialization at the Afrikaner universities was the
Afrikaans National Student Union, which functioned as a wing of the Afrikaner
nationalist movement and served as a training ground for future leaders of the
NP (Gordon, 1988; O’Meara, 1977; Waldmeir, 1997, p. 209).
Yet, academics exerted their strongest influence through the support of race-
based policy-making. Afrikaner anthropologists played a leading role in
designing the segregated system of native African (Bantu) Education that served
as the pedagogical cornerstone of apartheid (du Toit, 1984). The inequalities that
were institutionalized through this system were among the core grievances of
black youth against the government (see Mafeje, 1978; Unterhalter, 1989).
Intellectuals also exerted influence outside the universities through powerful
institutions like the Afrikaner Brotherhood and the Dutch Reformed Church.
The Brotherhood – a political secret society that held enormous sway in NP
circles – was intimately bound up with the Afrikaner intelligentsia from the very
beginning (O’Meara, 1977), and its chairman during the 1980s was a professor
and vice-chancellor at the Rand Afrikaans University (Hugo, 1998, pp. 32–33).
The Dutch Reformed Church was similarly enmeshed with the NP (Waldmeir,
1997, p. 269), and the church’s political positions were heavily influenced by
academic theologians. Furthermore, the highly networked character of the
Afrikaner upper class ensured that prominent intellectuals often enjoyed close
personal ties with the political elite. Perhaps, the most telling illustration was the
at-times contentious link between Professor Willem de Klerk and his brother,
President Frederik Willem (“F. W.”) de Klerk (see de Klerk, 1991).
Illegitimacy and Alliance Erosion

The NP’s allies in international relations, business, and academia were each
instrumental in their own way to sustaining the apartheid regime. Following the
renewal of the anti-apartheid rebellion in the late 1970s and the rise of the global
anti-apartheid movement, the NP’s allies reassessed their ties to the regime,
ultimately withdrawing their support in whole or in part, and in many cases
initiating collaborations with the ANC and other opposition movements working
to eliminate apartheid. While the NP and apartheid were long viewed as illegit-
imate by the majority of the South African population and condemned by many
states and by the United Nations, the regime’s hold on power only became
untenable when the constituencies who viewed the NP as illegitimate expanded to
the point that the NP’s allies were adversely affected by their ties to the regime.
On the diplomatic front, moral and normative opposition to apartheid had
been growing worldwide almost since the moment of its inception, although the
US resisted redirecting their policies vis-à-vis South Africa until fairly late in the
process. One of the early catalysts for condemnation had been the Sharpeville
massacre, which led the UN Security Council to call on South Africa to
“abandon its policies of apartheid and racial discrimination” (UNSC, 1960).
Although South Africa had faced condemnation in diplomatic circles for its racial
policies for decades, the 1976 Soweto uprising marked a watershed in South
Africa’s international standing as domestic opposition to the NP gained greater
international attention, and perceptions that apartheid was illegitimate gained
broader salience (Mafeje, 1978). Following Soweto, forceful resistance to
apartheid became an inescapable fact of South African life. The government
responded by increasing repression and implementing restrictions on press
freedom (Lever, 1981). Meanwhile the UN registered global opposition to the
NP’s policies in South Africa by unanimously imposing an arms embargo, finding
that “the acquisition by South Africa of arms and related matériel constitutes a
threat to the maintenance of international peace and security” (UNSC, 1977,
p. 5, italics in original).
As a new generation of politicized black youth left South Africa to join the
ANC in exile, the liberation movement seized the opportunity to step up its
guerrilla war against the apartheid state and reconstitute underground political
networks which had been defunct inside the country since the government
crackdown of the early 1960s (Barrell, 1992). The resumed armed struggle and
the support it garnered from the non-white population inside South Africa
strengthened the ANC’s hand as it dispatched its emissaries all over the world.
The opposition movement established de facto embassies known as “exile mis-
sions” in numerous foreign capitals, directly challenging the legitimacy of the
sitting government in the councils of nations (Pfister, 2003, p. 52).
The introduction of a new constitution in 1983 that provided political repre-
sentation for South Africa’s Colored and Indian populations (but not native
Africans) constituted an attempt by the government to bolster its legitimacy

domestically and stem the rapid erosion of its support internationally
(Tötemeyer, 1985; Van Vuuren, 1985). Although it achieved some minor success
in co-opting Colored and Indian support for the government, the new constitu-
tion fueled black opposition, further driving resistance that played a pivotal role
in undermining support for apartheid both within the white South African
population and abroad (Waldmeir, 1997). Citing the low turnout among Col-
oreds and Indians eligible to vote in parliamentary elections and growing resis-
tance in the streets, the ANC leadership in exile called on the non-white
population to render South Africa ungovernable:
We have succeeded to mobilize and unite millions of people to reject the legitimacy of the
apartheid regime, to unite behind the organized democratic forces of our country as their
authentic representatives and to accept consciously the perspective of a united struggle for a free
South Africa, refusing to be misled by false promises of reform and gradual adaptation or
amendment of the apartheid system (Tambo, 1984).
In a similar vein, the UN Security Council responded to the new constitution

by resolving that
only the total eradication of apartheid and the establishment of a non-racial democratic society
based on majority rule, through the full and free exercise of universal adult suffrage by all
people in a united and unfragmented South Africa, can lead to a just and lasting solution of the
explosive situation (UNSC, 1984, italics in original).
At this juncture, the US was governed by a conservative administration

reluctant to break ranks with the Afrikaners. However, a highly organized and
increasingly influential social movement against apartheid was gaining ground
within the US. – even within the Republican Party (Klotz, 1995; Moorehead,
1987) – transforming the NP’s illegitimacy from a tangential foreign policy
consideration into a salient issue for the American electorate. As a growing
number of Americans demanded action, defending the NP became increasingly
untenable for the Reagan administration. These problems were exacerbated by
the pugnacious nature of South African President, P. W. Botha. At the very
moment in May 1986 when South Africa was engaged in delicate negotiations
with the British Commonwealth over the future of apartheid, Botha ordered his
air force to strike suspected ANC installations in three neighboring countries.
This incident in turn helped propel the passage of the Comprehensive Anti-
Apartheid Act (CAAA) over President Reagan’s veto (Waldmeir, 1997,
pp. 96–97; cf.; Taylor, 2000).
The business community in South Africa experienced similarly costly pressure
in the face of the anti-apartheid movement. In the private sector, the open break
with the NP could be traced back to a structural flaw in the apartheid labor
market. Under apartheid, as many skilled jobs as possible were reserved for white
workers, while black workers were almost entirely confined to menial labor.
However, the growth of the South African economy created a demand for skilled
workers, and many more native African workers were gradually allowed to fill
higher-status jobs. This change precipitated the belated recognition of black trade
unions, establishing organized labor as one of the few official channels through
which black South Africans could legally register their political grievances
(Financial Times staff, 1981). Mobilizing this new opportunity, black trade unions
organized work stoppages known as political strikes, motivated not by grievances
against the employer but rather against the government itself. Finding themselves
in the position of supervising a politicized workforce that viewed the government
as illegitimate, business leaders began to undertake political activity themselves,
giving rise to institutions such as the Consultative Business Movement (Nel &
Grealy, 1989; see also; Mandela, 1990). Furthermore, with a worldwide move-
ment against trading with or investing in South Africa taking hold, the Anglo-
American Corporation and other companies operating in the region came under
enormous pressure to present themselves as a liberalizing force in South African
society (Coker, 1981; Kaempfer et al., 1987; Mangaliso, 1997; see also; Relly,
1986). In doing so, they began criticizing the status quo and publicly reaching out
to the opposition (Lieberfeld, 2002; Nel & Grealy, 1989).
Much like the business community, Afrikaner academics were also enmeshed
in a transnational community of thinkers and institutions and faced mounting
pressure over their support for the NP in the form of academic boycotts. However,
the growing consensus that the apartheid regime was illegitimate permeated the
South African academy more subtly but perhaps more powerfully through
engagement with the international scholarly community. The Afrikaner univer-
sities were connected to the wider world of academia through the exchange of
visiting scholars and publication in international journals. While Afrikaner aca-
demics would strike a very different tone in discussing the South African situation
in an overseas forum compared with at home (e.g., compare Pretorius & Vosloo,
[1974] with Vosloo, [1978]), the privilege afforded by Afrikanerdom’s most pres-
tigious institutions of higher education clearly offered a freedom to question NP
dogma to an extent not available elsewhere (Perlez, 1989). As a result, Stellen-
bosch in particular would play a leading role in the negotiated end of apartheid.
The End of Apartheid

As the deterioration of the NP government’s legitimacy increasingly affected the
NP’s allies, those allies withdrew their support. This withdrawal of support
rendered the status quo in South Africa untenable and set the stage for the
transition of power. In many cases, the NP’s allies also took steps to recognize
and negotiate with the opposition movement, thus tacitly legitimating the ANC
at the cost of the NP. This process marked the beginning of a consensus for
change in South Africa which laid the foundation for the end of minority rule. In
this respect, the transformation of American policy toward South Africa is
instructive. The Reagan administration had always steadfastly adhered to a policy
of constructive engagement, avoiding moral condemnation of South African
policies while promoting commercial investment on the theory that economic
growth and a strong bilateral relationship would be more conducive to reforming
apartheid than confrontation (Crocker, 1980; cf.; Relly, 1986). Beyond its
unwillingness to directly pressure South Africa for reforms, the administration
engaged in wide-ranging strategic collusion with the NP to ensure American

hegemony in Southern Africa (Cokorinos & Mittelman, 1985).
When he became embroiled in a showdown with Congress over the
Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, President Reagan made clear that his
decision to veto the measure was based on the military and economic importance
of the relationship with South Africa, stating that “No single issue, no matter
how important, can be allowed to override in this way all other considerations of
our foreign policy” (C-SPAN, 1986). In contrast, advocates of the CAAA
focused explicitly and almost exclusively on the illegitimacy of the NP regime.
As Representative Mel Levine of California said during the floor debates
regarding the veto override,
This administration has remained unmoved, with its feet stuck in cement and its head stuck in
the sand as one of the most important moral struggles of our time – the battle against apartheid
– passed it by. … Mr. Speaker, the case for even modest sanctions, such as this bill now
contains, now is compelling. The moral case for such action is overpowering (C-SPAN, 1986).
Representative William Gray of Pennsylvania framed the decision to override

in even starker terms:
[T]he president said that [passage of the CAAA] would just be moral posturing. Well, let me tell
you something my friends. Sometimes we need to feel good about who we are, what we stand
for, and what we participate in. … Today we have a choice. We can stand with P.W. Botha,
apartheid, and Ronald Reagan. Or, we can stand with the American people. I hope that we
stand with the American people (C-SPAN, 1986).
By adopting the CAAA over Reagan’s veto, Congress bypassed the accepted
purview of the executive branch in US foreign relations in a move that was
unprecedented in the twentieth century, dictating a radical change in policy
toward South Africa.
The fact that normative factors were able to overwhelm Cold War strategic
considerations in determining US policy toward South Africa at a time when the
Soviet Union remained a very real challenge to American interests only serves to
underscore the extent to which the NP’s growing illegitimacy was undermining
the regime on the world stage. According the exiled South African law professor
Winston Nagan, the CAAA was,
of vital importance because it calls for explicit recognition of the South African national
liberation movements … and their affiliates[,] and recognizes the role they will play in the
process of projected negotiations designed to end apartheid. The recognition of a national
liberation movement – however unified – by the U.S. government sends a powerful signal to the
global community that the liberation movement is a legitimate force (Nagan, 1987, p. 338).
The passage of the CAAA constituted a major blow to the apartheid state. In
passing it, Congress demonstrated the extent to which a bipartisan consensus
surrounding the illegitimacy of state-sanctioned racial supremacy was over-
coming a long-entrenched commitment to reflexive anti-communism. The pas-
sage of the CAAA also underscored the extent to which the anti-apartheid
movement had taken hold worldwide, showing that it could forge a bipartisan
consensus to redirect the policy of one of South Africa’s closest allies over the
objections of its own chief executive (Klotz, 1995).
This abandonment of the apartheid regime by its foreign backers was mirrored
inside South Africa by economic and intellectual elites, who increasingly
distanced themselves from the government and began dealing directly with the
ANC. A major shift registered in September 1985 when the chairman of the
Anglo-American Corporation led a delegation of South African businessmen to
Zambia to meet with ANC leaders, despite vociferous protests from the gov-
ernment that the meetings would lend the opposition “legitimacy and respect-
ability” (Cowell, 1985). In short order, it became one of many such delegations,
allowing the ANC to present itself as a credible government-in-waiting and
emphasizing the degree to which events were outpacing the NP in South Africa
(see Lieberfeld, 2002; cf.; Kurzman, 2004). In 1987, the South African business
community reached out to the Mass Democratic Movement (a semi-legal front
for the exiled ANC) in an effort to negotiate a solution to costly political strikes
(Nel & Grealy, 1989). With the political stock of the NP steadily dwindling and
the future of South Africa seeming increasingly uncertain, major commercial
interests such as Anglo-American saw it as being in their interest to deal directly
with the ANC (Waldmeir, 1997, pp. 73–74, 79). Here, the explicit calculus
appears to have been material. However, the volatility that the business com-
munity aimed to stem was the direct result of the growing domestic and inter-
national anti-apartheid movement, which forcefully decried the illegitimacy of
the regime.
At the same time, a growing number of scholars at Stellenbosch University
and elsewhere were openly challenging the morality of apartheid. From the mid-
1980s onward, meetings of South African academics with the ANC became
increasingly common (Lieberfeld, 2002). Initially, these meetings were frowned
upon at home, so much so that in 1985 the government withdrew the passports of
a group of Stellenbosch students to prevent them from traveling abroad to meet
ANC leaders (van der Merwe, 1997, pp. 20–22). However, as more and more
prominent white South Africans went overseas to encounter for themselves the
ostensible enemy, the taboo on meeting with the opposition rapidly weakened
(Waldmeir, 1997, pp. 63–69). In 1987, a group of dissident intellectuals visited
with opposition leaders in Dakar, Senegal (ANC 1987; Lieberfeld, 2002,
pp. 363–364), and the following year a group of prominent Afrikaners that
included professors from Stellenbosch sat down in West Germany with the ANC
and representatives of the Soviet Union, breaking a long-held prohibition on
contact with the communist superpower (Schmemann, 1988). By the end of the
decade, meetings with the long-time enemy had become sufficiently normalized
that a group of law faculty – most of them Afrikaners – from nine prominent
South African universities met openly with the ANC in neighboring Zimbabwe
for a conference on the role the law would play in a future South Africa (van der
Westhuizen, 1989). These traveling groups of executives and professors were
better positioned to gain insight into the thinking of the ANC leadership than
what was available to the government directly, leading the National Intelligence
Service to tacitly approve the meetings by asking the Stellenbosch philosophy
professor Willie Esterhuyse to serve as a confidential channel to the ANC on its

behalf (Esterhuyse, 2012; Waldmeir, 1997, pp. 75–76).
Although the tangible impact of academic boycotts on South African uni-
versity life appear in retrospect to have been modest (Baumert & Botha, 2016),
the psychological effects were profound. One South African academic referred to
“the dead chilly international atmosphere [which had] a much greater inhibiting
effect than overt boycott action” (quoted in Haricombe, 1993, p. 519). In the face
of this pressure, a growing number of scholars began to openly challenge the
legitimacy of apartheid. Early in 1987, the jurist James Fourie and the economist
Sampie Terreblanche (the latter a long-time NP advisor) publicly resigned from
the NP in protest against the slow pace of apartheid reforms (Financial Times
staff, 1987). Shortly afterward, there was an academic revolt against the NP at
Stellenbosch University when Terreblanche and 26 other professors published a
statement of no-confidence in the government, calling the president’s efforts at
reform a “sham” (Nelan, 1987, p. 38). Reporting on the events at Stellenbosch,
Washington Post reporter William Claiborn (1987, p. A1) wrote, “In a drastic
departure from National Party policy, the group [of faculty] called for black
participation in Parliament in a way that is ‘acceptable to the majority’…”
Claiborn (1987, p. A1) quotes Terreblanche, who said,
We want full black participation in the decision-making processes… This implies that we
recognize that a situation will eventually be reached in South Africa in which whites…will
relinquish their exclusive and decisive ability to enforce decisions which have consequences for
all South Africa’s people.
When a pro-NP newspaper attempted to minimize the statement as the work of

a handful of malcontents in a faculty of over 700 members, an additional 300 of
their colleagues stepped forward to add their signatures (Friedrich, Hawthorne, &
Nelan, 1987). Coming from the intellectual capital of Afrikanerdom, this was a
stinging rebuke to the NP. That same month, Willem de Klerk, a respected
journalist and academic, resigned from his post as editor of the Afrikaans weekly
Rapport in protest over government interference in his paper’s political coverage.
This move was symbolically significant not only because of de Klerk’s status as
one of South Africa’s foremost political commentators but also because his
brother was at the time chairman of the NP and next in line to become president
of the country (see de Klerk, 1991).
While businessmen and professors were protesting and openly parleying with
the opposition, a new generation of academics were also drawing the Afrikaner
churches in a reformist direction. Much of the credit for this goes to Johan Heyns,
a professor of theology at the University of Pretoria (see Waldmeir, 1997, pp. 11,
138–139). One of Heyns’ most notable public achievements was securing
permission from the government for a pro-ANC demonstration to go ahead in
Cape Town in September 1989 – a decision that was seen as a major step for the
NP on the road to ending apartheid. In this effort, he rallied the support both of
the business establishment (the managing director of Shell South Africa marched
at the head of the procession) as well as the British ambassador to South Africa. In
the words of Patti Waldmeir, the Financial Times’s South Africa correspondent,
President de Klerk “knew he could not afford to alienate, simultaneously, the

West, the Church, the business community, 30000 black Capetonians – and the
redoubtable Mrs. Thatcher” (1997, p. 139).
Driven by these developments, the pace of political change in South Africa
accelerated dramatically. On February 2, 1990, President F.W. de Klerk made an
unanticipated declaration lifting restrictions and prohibitions on a wide array of
opposition organizations, including the ANC and SACP, releasing political
prisoners, ending media censorship, radically reducing the use of emergency
powers, and freeing Nelson Mandela (de Klerk, 1991, pp. 42–45). Nine days
later, Mandela walked out of prison and into leadership of the ANC (Mandela,
2013 [1994], ch. 100).
This began four years of negotiations between NP and ANC to establish the
framework for a democratic South Africa. Talks broke down multiple times as
civil violence pitting ANC supporters against members of the Zulu-dominated
Inkatha Freedom Party swept the countryside and black townships. Discredited
by decades of apartheid and by evidence of collusion with Inkatha in its
campaign against the ANC, the government lacked the legitimacy to restore
order as the country careened toward civil war (Mandela, 2013 [1994]; Waldmeir,
1997). Leveraging its extensive ties with the opposition, the Anglo-American
Corporation and other members of the business community stepped into the
breach by establishing networks of civic organizations to address the violence
and intervening to negotiate between the warring parties (Charney, 1999,
pp. 192–193). Under enormous pressure to deliver a political resolution, NP and
ANC compromised on a formula for transition to multiracial democracy,
opening the way for South Africa’s first election open to all races in the spring of
1994. The ANC’s landslide victory and the inauguration of Mandela as South
Africa’s first black president marked the completion of the negotiated revolution
and the restoration of the South African state’s legitimacy both domestically and
internationally.
DISCUSSION
Interrogating the assertion that the NP’s widespread illegitimacy contributed to
the negotiated end of apartheid, our examination of the historical processes that
culminated in the transition to multiracial democracy offers insights into when
and how illegitimacy affects the stability of political regimes. From the start of its
reign, the NP government faced a domestic crisis of legitimacy. Nevertheless,
sharply limited suffrage and restrictive labor laws effectively undermined the
legal, political, and economic ability of the country’s non-white majority to
oppose the regime. Moreover, given its economic and strategic importance within
the context of the Cold War, the government of South Africa was able to foster
strong alliances with Western powers and bolster South Africa’s economy,
thereby further insulating the NP from domestic challenge. Similarly, economic
growth, strong support from business leaders, and ideological support from the
academy helped the NP maintain the allegiance of its voting constituency. Under
these conditions, the government was capable of countering both violent and civil
opposition domestically. Similarly, just over a decade after coming to power, the
apartheid regime faced rapidly diminishing international illegitimacy. Beginning
in 1960, South Africa was condemned by successive UN resolutions and ulti-
mately subjected to wide-ranging sanctions. However, unerring support from the
US and continued support from business elites in South Africa helped mitigate
the economic and political effects of these sanctions for decades.
It was not until the NP’s allies were adversely affected that the apartheid
regime’s illegitimacy posed a threat to its persistence. As global opposition to
apartheid expanded, constituents in the US increasingly demanded action on the
part of their government, forcing a reckoning between long-standing policies
supporting South Africa and the growing political salience of opposition to
apartheid. Similarly, as South Africa’s economy evolved and business required
more skilled labor than the white population could satisfy, a growing contingent
of non-white laborers who collectively denounced the regime as illegitimate began
organizing and pressured businesses to rethink their relationship with the gov-
ernment through the widespread use of political strikes. In academia, the
importance of international exchange for South African academics coupled with
the rapid marginalization and subsequent ostracization of scholars who provided
a scientific veneer to justify apartheid era policies resulted in a sea change in the
dominant views of Afrikaner academics. The effects of this transformation
reverberated through the upper echelon of the NP due to close connections
between the NP leadership and leading Afrikaner intellectuals, undermining the
NP’s strongest claim that apartheid was scientifically and theologically justified.
As the NP’s most important allies began to withdraw support from the regime,
their hold on power became untenable. Significantly, Welsh (1990) pointed out at
the time that the government’s coercive power remained formidable and argues
that if the government had chosen to do so, it likely could have held on to power
much longer than it did (see also Ellis & Sechaba, 1992, p. 200; Mandela, 2013
[1994], p. 525). Yet, the NP was isolated it from its traditional sources of support,
and the arrangements whereby it had previously been able to retain power
without relying purely on coercive force were undermined. Faced with his gov-
ernment’s steadily deteriorating position, President de Klerk decided to begin
negotiations with the opposition in an effort to retain some level of political
power for South Africa’s white minority (see de Klerk, 1998).
Rather than threatening the persistence of apartheid directly, illegitimacy
contributed to the apartheid regime’s demise only when it began to damage the
regime’s relationships with key allies. Thus, rather than arguing that illegitimacy
has causal primacy over material or strategic considerations, we observe these
conditions as intersecting. In the case of the US Congress’ passage of the
Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, we see that moral and normative evalua-
tions actually did take precedence of material and strategic arguments. In the case
of the business community, growing normative and moral opposition ultimately
influenced material considerations, and in the academy we see a combination of
the two. However, with each of these allies, we are able to understand the impact
that illegitimacy had on the end of apartheid.
Our findings extend prior observations that legitimacy and illegitimacy may
have different implications depending on who is making the evaluation (see
Schoon, 2015) and provides insights into why illegitimacy matters a great deal in
some cases, but little in others. Moreover, our findings align with Kurzman’s
(2004) assertion that legitimacy or illegitimacy only matter insofar as there is a
viable alternative to the regime. The ANC’s efforts to cultivate its own legitimacy
as a credible government-in-exile were instrumental to its success in fomenting
change (see Bakker et al., 2012; Pfister, 2003). Our analysis does, however, offer
additional insights into how such alternatives matter for the effects of legitimacy.
In this case, having a viable alternative may have been a necessary condition, but
it was insufficient for fomenting political change. The ANC – which was estab-
lished decades before the rise of the NP – began building support gradually over
the years and already had widespread support prior to the beginning of the
negotiated revolution. Thus, while the ANC’s viability as an alternative to the
apartheid regime inarguably contributed to the negotiated revolution, our find-
ings suggest that the withdrawal of support was a more proximate cause for the
transition of power.
Consistent with neo-institutionalist approaches to the study of legitimacy (see
Suchman, 1995), research on state legitimacy typically isolates the various social
fields that a state operates within, distinguishing between (among others) legiti-
macy in international society (e.g. Hafner-Burton & Tsutsui, 2005) or the world
system (Meyer et al., 1997) versus legitimacy at the domestic or subnational levels
(i.e. Beck, 2014; LaFree & Morris, 2012; Lipset, 1959; Sharman, 2003). Our
analysis demonstrates the importance of examining how these fields are con-
nected by tangible social relationships, such that perceptions of illegitimacy at a
domestic level (e.g. in the US) can influence interactions at the international level,
and evaluations of illegitimacy in a political domain can directly influence
interaction in the field of business. In this way, understanding how illegitimacy
affects political stability requires us to look at how legitimacy affects interaction
within relationships between actors rather than simply focusing on how legiti-
macy or illegitimacy affects interactions between positions in a given social field.
These insights into the effects and dynamics of illegitimacy stand to inform
research on the role of legitimacy and illegitimacy in more contemporary cases of
political instability. For example, shortly after the Syrian Civil War emerged
from the 2011 revolutionary wave in the Middle East, more than two thirds of all
United Nations member states condemned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and
his regime as illegitimate and recognized the Syrian National Coalition as the sole
legitimate representative of the Syrian people (Lund, 2017). While available
evidence shows that both the Assad regime’s use of violence and the regime itself
were widely viewed as illegitimate, the regime was able to survive and, as of this
writing, has gained the upper hand in the Civil War with the assistance of Russia
and other international actors. On its face, this case appears to add to the list of
regimes that have retained power despite widespread loss of legitimacy (Beck,
2017). Yet, our analysis helps to situate why such widespread illegitimacy failed
to weaken the regime’s hold on power. While more than 116 countries signed a
declaration stating that Bashar al-Assad had lost legitimacy, these countries
posed little direct threat to the regime. Moreover, Russia engaged in extensive
efforts to avoid sanctions and justify providing direct support of the Assad regime
(see Schoon & Duxbury, 2019). Thus, our findings help to situate why illegiti-
macy failed to matter in this case, while it appears to have mattered a great deal
in others.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank Barış Büyükokutan, Richard Lachman, Austin
Knuppe, the participants in The Ohio State Department of Sociology Power,
Inequality, and Economy working group, and at the University of Michigan
Department of Sociology Theory Workshop for helpful comments and critiques on
earlier versions of this paper. Any errors remain the sole responsibility of the authors.
Please direct correspondence to Eric W. Schoon, Department of Sociology, 238
Townshend Hall, The Ohio State University, 1885 Neil Avenue Mall, Columbus, OH
43210–1222. E-mail: Schoon.1@osu.edu.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The authors are unaware of any conflicts of interest.
NOTES
1. The Afrikaners are a white population concentrated in southern Africa who descend
from Europeans (mainly Dutch, French, and German) who settled in the region from the
17th century onward.
2. Under apartheid, each resident of South Africa was classified as either White
(European-ancestry), Black (indigenous African), Colored (mixed-race), or Indian
(i.e., descendants of immigrants from British India).
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WHALING IN KOREA: HERITAGE,
FRAMING, AND CONTENTION
AGAINST INTERNATIONAL NORMS
Bradley Tatar
ABSTRACT
South Koreans in the city of Ulsan claim that eating whale meat is a tradition,
but what is the role of SMOs in making whaling into a tradition identified with
a local identity? In following account of a confrontation that took place in
Korea between anti-whaling protesters from Greenpeace and local defenders
of whaling, it is shown that tradition is not an inevitable outcome of conserving
the past; instead, it is an outcome of mobilization, framing, and choices made
by movement participants. Tradition in the whaling town of Ulsan was formed
through the encounter between opposed social movements, prompting stra-
tegic choices of counterframing, frame bridging, and the dissonance between
framing and feeling rules. Through the encounters with transnational activ-
ists, the Korean defenders of whaling refashioned themselves as rooted cos-
mopolitans, utilizing global norms to justify local practices in the name of
heritage and tradition.
Keywords: Discursive opportunity structure; framing; Greenpeace; heritage;

Korea; whaling
INTRODUCTION
Prior to 1986, the port city of Ulsan in the southeastern corner of South Korea
boasted an active fleet that harpooned minke whales in the East Sea of Korea.
Ulsan’s long history of whaling is remembered today with nostalgia in a way that
is shocking to persons who believe that whales should not be hunted. A visitor to
the Jangsaengpo Whale Museum in Ulsan wrote,
Power and Protest

ISSN: 0163-786X/doi:10.1108/S0163-786X20210000044011
145
146 BRADLEY TATAR
I had a difficult time walking through this museum[…]I was expecting to see a museum dedicated
to whales and found a museum that described how whales were caught and processed for their
meat. (Hines, 2007)
However, what may be more shocking to outsiders who visit Ulsan is that
upon exiting the museum, one faces a long avenue with an array of restaurants
specializing in the sale of minke whale meat.
In contrast, the people in the Jangsaengpo district believe that the museum’s
focus on whaling reflects their history and their collective destiny. Many of the
local residents donated whaling implements and other artifacts for display in the
museum. Upon the opening of the museum in 2005, Ulsan South District Chief
Executive Lee Che-ik proclaimed, “The opening of the Whale Museum revives
the forgotten history of whaling and lets us think of whales as a living resource for
tourism” (Lee, 2005b). The notion that whaling is not only a revival of the past
but a hope for the future is a signature concept of the Korean pro-whaling
mobilization centered in the Jangsaengpo neighborhood of Ulsan. Hence, it
may be properly referred to as the whaling revival of Ulsan, for its effort to blend
history, identity, and commercial success (Figs 1 and 2).
The target of protest for the Ulsan whaling revival is the South Korean gov-
ernment, which issued a decree in 1986 that made whaling illegal in South Korea,
in response to the moratorium on commercial whaling approved by the Interna-
tional Whaling Commission (IWC), of which Korea is a member. However, in
1995, the residents of Jangsaengpo organized the first whale festival in Korea, with
whale meat provided for festival patrons. The neighborhood residents lobbied for
the creation of an exhibit hall, to commemorate the importance of whaling in their
history (Kyungsang Ilbo, 2003). However, when the news came that the city of
Ulsan would host the 57th meeting of the IWC in 2005, city officials decided to
expand the planned exhibit hall into a museum. Currently, the museum is a
centerpiece of the Jangsaengpo Whale Culture Zone (WCZ), a whale-themed lei-
sure park for tourists (Choi, 2017). The development of the WCZ has coincided
with a campaign to legalize whaling and to promote the consumption of whale
meat (Tatar, 2014). In this manner, the campaign to revive whaling is institu-
tionalized in the heritage industry that was created for tourists.
It is necessary to ask, why do whaling and whale meat consumption continue
as a tradition in Ulsan? The importance of whaling cannot be explained by the
fact that it is traditional, since many traditions are abandoned once they are no
longer needed. Many former whaling communities around the world have moved
on to whale-watching, a non-lethal form of tourism (Hoyt & Parsons, 2014; Neves,
2010). Furthermore, the city of Ulsan is no longer economically dependent on
whaling, having been transformed into a center of automotive manufacturing,
shipbuilding, and petrochemicals. In the following, it is argued that the Korean
revival of whaling became a desirable goal of collective action as a reaction
to the Korean program of industrialization and its attendant ideology of
modernization.
The origins of the Korean whaling revival can be identified in two episodes of
heightened mobilization, one immediately after the democratization of the country
Whaling in Korea 147
Fig. 1. Map showing location of Ulsan in relation to other Korean cities.
in 1987, and another which occurred in 2005. Each of these episodes should be
understood as responding to a specific political opportunity structure, which refers
to the aspects of a political system which may either encourage or discourage
mobilization of a particular group (McAdam, 1996; Meyer, 2004; Meyer &
Staggenborg, 1996). Political opportunity structures include both stable and vol-
atile dimensions (Gamson & Meyer, 1996), and clearly the democratization of
South Korea presented a new opportunity structure to those who resented the ban
on whaling. Furthermore, the hosting of the IWC meeting by the city of Ulsan in
2005 and the arrival of a contingent of Greenpeace protesters presented a volatile
and challenging situation, as well as new opportunities to present the case for
whaling.
One of the most important responses to the political opportunity structure is
framing, the “active, processual phenomenon” by which beliefs and meanings
148 BRADLEY TATAR
Fig. 2. Jangsaengpo Whale Museum in 2015, with the restored whaling ship
Jinyang 6 in the foreground. Photo by author.
are produced and disseminated to legitimize and motivate social movement

mobilization (Benford & Snow, 2000, p. 614). A frame is an “interpretive
package” (Ferree, 2003, p. 308) which is aimed at social movement members,
bystanders, and policy makers, and it is negotiated as a set of shared meanings
that emerge through the definition of a situation as one in need of change
(Benford & Snow, 2000). The functions of a frame are diagnostic (identifying the
cause or apportioning blame for a problem), prognostic (identifying the actions
to be taken), and motivational (activating emotions and identifications that
impel action) (Benford & Snow, 2000). Frames acquire meaning in relation to
discursive opportunity structures, the “institutionally anchored ways of thinking”
that make certain ideas easier to accept and hence more “resonant” with a public
(Feree, 2003, p. 309).
The interactive relationship between framing processes and the changes in the
political structures are critical to understanding the emergence of social move-
ments (McCarthy, McAdam & Zald, 1996). Framing processes may serve to
undermine the legitimacy of an existing political structure, but they also must
respond to the disadvantages imposed by the existence of a dominant discourse
which produces differentials of opportunity, imparting more resonance to some
frames rather than others (Ferree, 2003; McCammon, Muse, Newman, & Terrell,
2007). To evaluate the resonance of a frame, Ferree (2003, p. 308) argues, it is
necessary to observe how the frame is connected to hegemonic ideas, prior his-
tories of contention, material interests, and also core values and identities. Thus,
frames are connected to a discursive opportunity structure, the “institutionally
anchored ways of thinking that provide a gradient of relative political accept-
ability to specific packages of ideas” (Ferree, 2003, p. 309). The strategic uses of a
frame will differ according to the local institutions, history, and culture, so it is
important to compare the outcomes of strategic framing in different national

contexts (Ferree, 2003; McCammon et al., 2007).
Since the early 1970s, transnational organizations such as Greenpeace have
carried out anti-commercial whaling mobilizations around the globe (Epstein,
2008; Szerszynski, 2002). Generally, the whaling issue is portrayed as arraying local
against global norms in many varied local contexts. Hence, it is important to
compare the framing processes of anti-whaling and whaling mobilizations in
different societies. Tarrow (2005) draws attention to the different ways that frames
are utilized by contentious actors in transnational and local contexts, arguing that
internationalization is a discursive opportunity structure that empowers actors who
are rooted to a locality, the rooted cosmopolitans. The rooted cosmopolitans
introduce transnational norms by framing them in national and subnational con-
texts (Tarrow, 2005, p. 46). In this perspective, the framing approach is appropriate
for the study of how transnational norms enter into local politics. Given that
frames are units of meaning shaped (both unintentionally and intentionally) by
actors through their choices (Ferree, 2003), the study of frames is methodologically
appropriate for investigating how transnational norms are transformed through
their deployment in local discursive opportunity structures.
Currently, a perspective that highlights the agency of actors mobilized by SMOs
is much needed for the study of contentious transnational politics of whaling, as
most existing research relies on the world-polity approach, which examines how
ethical, legal, and social norms are diffused through the international society,
creating an impression of global consensus but in fact provoking local reactions
(Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997). Although it is a productive approach for
the study of contention, it is one that focuses on the “dynamic relations between
states” (Epstein, 2006, p. 32), and the relations between non-state actors do not
come into sharp focus.
Another approach which relegates social movements to epiphenomenal status is
the spatial-ontological study of assemblages. Through this approach, Choi (2017)
and Blok (2014) already have demonstrated that Korean and Japanese whaling
traditions have been transformed through adoption of transnational frames. Both
in Korea and in Japan, whaling supporters incorporated global forms of knowl-
edge and ethics into local practices of whale meat consumption, strategically
making their departure from global norms seem less radical. However, these
authors do not portray social movements as a major part of the process of the
selective adoption of transnational norms. Instead, they argue that selectivity is
exercised by the ethno-epistemic assemblage, a network of spatial relations which
enrolls specific norms along with humans, animals, materials, technologies,
ontologies, and social practices. The assemblage selects and controls the global
flow of cultural and non-cultural materials, with humans themselves exerting little
influence.
The following case study from Korea illustrates that whaling mobilization is
not a case of local versus global norms, but of the incorporation of the global in
the local. This is premised on the idea that “movement actors are agents who
make decisions about how to respond to opportunities” (McCammon et al., 2007,
p. 732). It is crucial that studies of whaling should provide accounts of
150 BRADLEY TATAR
micromobilization and contests of framing to illustrate the decisive role of

movement participants in the incorporation of global norms into local concep-
tions and practices of whaling. A few whaling studies have focused on SMO
mobilizations (Bailey, 2012; Blok, 2008; Erikson, 1999; Singleton, 2004), and the
current one will expand the comparative perspective.
The Korean whaling revival also affords a case study that illustrates the
transformation of frames. Snow (2004, p. 393) called attention to the lack of
empirical studies that demonstrate the ways in which framing processes recon-
stitute culture, relative to the larger number of studies of frame alignment pro-
cesses. The following account of Korean whaling shows a realignment of local
frames in relation to transnational institutions which is indicative of cultural
transformation.
In the following, attention is focused on the mobilizations that occurred in
the city of Ulsan in 2005, as the city hosted the 57th annual IWC meeting. The
meeting set the stage for confrontation between pro-whaling and anti-whaling
movements. It is usual that confrontations occur within the IWC meeting, as
delegates clash over the appropriate policies for cetacean management (Bailey,
2012; Iliff, 2008). Nevertheless, in 2005, there was also significant conflict
occurring outside of the meeting, spilling into the streets. The anti-whaling forces
were led by the Korean Federation of Environmental Movements (KFEM),
which had invited their allies in Greenpeace International to bring a contingent of
protesters to Korea. The pro-whaling forces were represented by the Jangsaengpo
Defenders, a neighborhood coalition, and its allies in the Ulsan city government.
The face-to-face confrontations between these locally mobilized groups of pro-
testers illustrate some of the ways in which the IWC as an institutional structure
produces norms but does not control their meanings; the confrontation process is
one in which meanings are locally remade and recombined through contentious
encounters.
The work that follows draws upon participant-observation, ethnographic
interviews, and textual analysis of media documents. Eleven interviews were
carried out with the Jangsaengpo activists and the public officials of the Ulsan
Namgu Bureau of Whale Tourism between 2009 and 2013. Five interviews were
carried out with anti-whaling activists. Participant-observation was carried out by
the author at the Ulsan Whale Festival, from 2010 through 2016. Newspaper
reports were collected from the Internet; these news stories are here quoted and
interpreted in relation to the author’s understandings gained from participant-
observation at whale-related public events in Ulsan and interviews with local
participants. Greenpeace maintained a weblog (Greenpeace, 2005b) of the daily
events at the Whale Embassy Occupation, but this document was removed from
the Internet in 2014. However, a number of press releases and descriptions of the
events in Jangsaengpo remain on the Greenpeace website, including photographs
which enable identification of the Jangsaengpo activists who met with Green-
peace and KFEM. Special thanks is due to Jim Wickens, who was the organizer
of the Whale Occupation Embassy in 2005, for assisting the author to understand
the events of the protest. However, the following interpretation is entirely the
author’s own and may contain errors of misrepresentation.
In the following, the confrontation which took place in Ulsan in 2005 will be
portrayed as a local manifestation of a worldwide conflict between the various
social groups arrayed behind the anti-whaling and pro-whaling positions. Hence,
the first section provides background on the global whaling conflict and the
institutionalization of pro-whaling and anti-whaling norms within the IWC.
The second section will broadly outline the specific frames utilized in the
worldwide conflict over whaling, in order to present the idea that local conflicts
play out differently through the strategic use of framing. Following up on the
description of pro-whaling and anti-whaling frames, the selective use of specific
frames by the proponents of the whaling revival in Jangsaengpo will be
explained. In the fourth section, the confrontation between the activists of
Greenpeace/KFEM and the Jangsaengpo Defenders which took place in 2005
will be narrated, and the fifth section will detail the cultural changes that
occurred in Korea directly as a result of the encounter. The sixth section pro-
vides discussion and interpretation of the accounts of face-to-face negotiation
and the emergence of tradition and heritage as resonant counterframes within
the specific discursive opportunity structure of Ulsan. The final section concludes
that the cosmopolitan use of transnational frames exerts transformational
changes in the culture of whaling.
THE IWC AND THE WHALING CONFLICT

The Korean conflict over whaling appears to reflect the global conflict that has
occurred within the International Whaling Commission (IWC) between the pro-
whaling and the anti-whaling member countries. The IWC was founded in 1946
with the goal of managing the exploitation of whales as a resource, but since the
1970s, its mission has shifted to conservation and even the protection of whale
species (Bailey, 2009; Epstein, 2008; Heazle, 2004; Iliff, 2008). In particular,
the IWC has served to promulgate an anti-whaling norm at the global level
when the member countries voted for a pause in whaling, now referred to as the
moratorium on commercial whaling. As a policy since 1986, the moratorium
has garnered vigorous opposition from the countries that label themselves as
whaling nations – Japan, Norway, and Iceland – because whaling is a significant
part of their national identities (Blok, 2008; Epstein, 2008). However, subna-
tional communities have also emerged to voice a claim to whaling, arguing that
it is integral to their culture and to their collective identities (Epstein, 2008;
Singleton, 2018). Cultural anthropologists have also argued that coastal com-
munities have the right to defend their whaling traditions and cultural distinc-
tiveness, against the homogenizing influence of global capitalism (Ii, 2013;
Kalland, 2009).
The notion that global ethical norms are imposed by Western countries upon
other societies in the manner of “cultural imperialism” has figured large in the
Japanese defense of whaling (Morisita, 2006). Although the IWC is an organi-
zation of countries that have voluntarily ratified the International Convention
for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW), Korea, Chile, and Peru only joined the
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IWC after facing extreme pressure from the IWC member states (Birnie, 1985).
Furthermore, the United States has legislated a unilateral mandate to pursue
punitive sanctions against other nations, beginning the 1969 amendments to the
Endangered Species Act of 1966 (Birnie, 1985). It was followed in 1971 by the
Pelly Amendment to the Fishermen’s Protective Act of 1967, granting presi-
dential powers to impose embargo on fishery products from nations deemed
to carry out activities harmful to marine conservation (Epstein, 2008, p. 146).
Finally, in 1979, the Packwood-Magnuson Amendment to the Fisheries Con-
servation and Management Act required exclusion of nations from fishing within
the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of the United States if their nationals had
violated international conservation policies. Both South Korea (Birnie, 1985,
p. 949) and Japan (Morisita, 2006) have been on the receiving end of these US
sanctions until agreeing to withdraw objections to resolutions on the floor of
the IWC.
Scholarship on whaling politics has shown that the anti-whaling movement
emerged first, and the movements to continue whaling emerged as countermove-
ments (Blok, 2008; Epstein, 2008; Riese, 2017). At the interstate level, the pro-
whaling mobilization is based on the norm of national sovereignty over territorial
resources and at the local level is based upon the norm of cultural relativism and
the rights of communities to maintain whaling traditions. Since 1982, subnational
communities have forged their identities in opposition to the international mora-
torium on whaling, drawing upon the discourse of rootedness, in contrast to the
transnational and deterritorialized identity of anti-whaling activists (Epstein, 2008,
p. 241).
The IWC distinguishes between commercial whaling and Aboriginal Subsis-
tence Whaling (ASW), the latter carried out for the preservation of indigenous
cultures, and its products to be distributed through tribal and kinship networks
rather than commercial markets. However, Kalland (2009) and Bailey (2008,
p. 302) point out that in many parts of the world the cultural aspects of whaling
are not limited to aboriginal peoples. Hence, the distinction between commercial
whaling and ASW is ambiguous, with a “lack of clarity and specificity” (Bailey,
2008, p. 300), which has enabled the anti-whaling activists to frame ASW as
merely a disguised form of commercial whaling. The ambiguity of the anti-
commercial whaling frame also enabled the aboriginal peoples to ally with the
small-scale whaling communities of Norway, the Faeroe Islands, Greenland, and
Iceland, forming a transnational countermovement to defend and promote sus-
tainable whaling and hunting of other marine mammals (Bailey, 2008). As a
result, Bailey concludes that the anti-commercial whaling norm failed to become
established worldwide, through the rise of a transnational whaling advocacy
network.
The origins of the Korean mobilization in defense of whaling are dissimilar
from the cases of Norway, Japan, and Iceland, and the Korean case deserves
closer analysis. The question to address in the Korean case study is whether the
transnational norms of “whaling is a tradition and a cultural right,” and “whaling
is sustainable,” will automatically translate to Korea, or only under specific
circumstances. It is true that anti-whaling activists have campaigned against
aboriginal whaling, arraying them against the most vulnerable and ancient
remnants of indigenous communities (Bailey, 2008; Erikson, 1999). Blok (2013,
2014) has shown that the Japanese government has tried to take advantage of this
contradiction by portraying Japanese whaling as equivalent to other indigenous
whaling cultures, but with little success in convincing other nations and NGOs.
Meanwhile, Korean whale meat consumers claim to respect the anti-commercial
whaling norm by consuming the meat from cetacean bycatch (Choi, 2017). World-
wide, the variations in success of the anti-commercial whaling norm suggest that a
distinction between commercial whaling and indigenous whaling is not inherent
in the norm itself, but emerges locally through the framing processes carried out
by SMOs and activists.
Hence, the framings of anti-whaling and anti-commercial whaling have resul-
ted in distinctive outcomes in Korea, owing to the discursive opportunity structure
of Korean politics. Generally, in Korea as elsewhere in the world, the anti-whaling
SMOs and activists are portrayed as cosmopolitan in orientation and transna-
tionally networked, while the defenders of whaling are portrayed as parochial
traditionalists. However, in the following description of a confrontation between
Greenpeace protesters and Korean whaling revivalists, it is shown that an
exchange of ideas took place which transformed the whaling revivalists into rooted
cosmopolitans. The mechanism of this exchange and transformation was frame
bridging.
FRAMES OF WHALING AND ANTI-WHALING:

A GLOBAL COMPARISON
According to Snow and Benford (1992), master frames are those which are
generic, have a very general domain, and do not correspond to a specific social
movement (Snow & Benford, 1992). For example, the frame of “sustainability”
can apply equally well to the idea of sustainable harvest of whales, as it does to
the notion of protecting whale species for conserving biodiversity. Yet, in spite of
their generality, the master frames have the ability to organize and assemble other
frames, which are “derivative” (Snow & Benford, 1992). Hence, hearing the term
“sustainability,” we know the theme is related to human relations with the
environment, although the ideological content may locate anywhere on the
spectrum of ecocentric to anthrocentric. Master frames tend to diffuse in cycles,
spreading out to SMOs throughout the ideological spectrum (Snow & Benford,
1992).
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of framing is that the same frame
can be used by social groups that have opposed or incompatible ideologies
(Oliver & Johnston, 2000). One clear example of this is the frame of extinction
that was examined in the work of Ladle and Jepson (2010). The concept of
species extinction has been variously defined by social actors with different
ideological agendas. Ladle and Jepson (2010) present a typology of seven
different extinction frames, each defined differently and corresponding to a
different set of institutionalized social practices. For example, the concept of
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“Linnean extinction” generates a mood of urgency and crisis which can generate
support for policies that create protected areas for wildlife; the concept of
“ecological extinction” supports and legitimizes the activities of zoological parks
and other entities that carry out breeding programs in captivity (Ladle & Jepson,
2010, p. 110). Overall, the notion of extinction invokes anxieties about loss,
decline, and crisis. It exerts an emotional valence through its rules of feeling
(Bröer & Duyvendak, 2009), which can be added to other frames. The extinction
frame operates as a master frame, which “organizes and assembles” other frames,
enabling the processes of amplification, bridging, and extension (Ladle & Jepson,
2010, p. 98).
The processes of movement-specific frames are frame bridging, frame ampli-
fication, frame extension, and frame transformation. These serve in various ways
to carry out the functions of frame alignment, which is the linkage of “inter-
pretive orientations” between the beliefs, understandings, and goals of the indi-
viduals who participate in social movements and the SMOs that organize their
joint activities (Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986, p. 464). The pro-
cesses of frame alignment are crucial to micromobilization, because social
movement participants are ideologically and culturally heterogeneous, and the
leaders of the SMO must communicate the salient aspects of the situation in a
way that can motivate and unify the participants’ actions toward a common goal
(Ketelaars, Walgrave, & Wouters, 2017; Oliver & Johnston, 2000). Some frames
have a greater mobilizing capacity than others, so movement organizers and
participants experimentally search for a greater “resonance” of frames (Ketelaars
et al., 2017). Bröer and Duyvendak (2009) argue that variations in resonance can
be better understood if “rules of feeling” are added to “rules of framing,” by
which movement participants may make choices based upon their emotional
responses to a frame. They point out that a lack of fit “between people’s framing
and feeling rules and the rules of dominant discourses” is likely to result in an
experience of dissonance and a proliferation of counterdiscourses (Bröer &
Duyvendak, 2009, p. 341).
One of the most important processes of frame bridging occurred in the linking
of animal rights and welfare to species conservation. Ideological commitment to
animal rights leads to demand for the care and welfare of individual animals, often
leading to conflict with species conservation, which may involve lethal population
control measures or other efforts for the benefit of the species at the expense of
individual animals (Callicott, 1988). The pioneering “Save the Whales” campaigns
of the 1970s transformed the great whales into flagship animals through the use of
the extinction rhetoric (Epstein, 2008). By mobilizing activists to protect indi-
vidual whales in the water and advancing claims to protect the great whale species,
Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd carried out the bridging work to link animal rights
and species conservation (Epstein, 2006).
Another important bridging frame which occurs in the whaling debate is
“science.” Environmentalist NGOs attempt to mobilize citizens and influence
policymakers by providing reliable scientific information, either carrying out their
own research or by compiling the research of others (Bailey, 2009; Yearley, 1993).
However, there is much scientific uncertainty in determining which species are
under threat of extinction (Ladle & Jepson, 2010), and scientific uncertainty has
factored into the debates within the IWC about the sustainability of whaling
(Bailey, 2009; Heazle, 2004; Iliff, 2008; Singleton & Lidskog, 2018). Several
members of the IWC Scientific Committee have argued in favor of maintaining
the moratorium on commercial whaling, based on estimates that whale species
have not rebounded to their historical abundance levels (Epstein, 2008; Singleton
& Lidskog, 2018). This claim is disputed by Japanese researchers, who also use
population abundance estimates to argue that minke whales [Balaenoptera acu-
torostrata and B. bonaerensis] are abundant and perhaps even overabundant
(Blok, 2008). While the “abundant whale” frame and the “extinction-threatened
whale” frame are ideologically opposite, they are both linked to the frame of
“science” and undermined by the frame of “scientific uncertainty.”
Finally, another crucial frame that must be considered is the “heritage” frame.
This is a frame that is generally mobilized at the subnational level to amplify the
ideology of localness, rootedness, and a sense of connection to the past (Epstein,
2008). While whaling represents a strategy of localism for community building, it
bridges with a transnational discourse of multicultural rights and cultural rela-
tivism (Blok, 2013). Hence, the emotional and affective attachment to a localized
identity is claimed as a motivation for whaling, based on the rights of commu-
nities to maintain their existence (Kim, 2015). As Singleton (2018) has argued,
the whaling communities in Europe, North America, and Asia have in fact
changed their manner of acquiring and consuming whale meat and are therefore
practicing whaling traditions that are newly invented or elaborated, but none-
theless effective in promoting traditionalist solidarities. This is certainly true in
the city of Ulsan, where the Jangsaengpo Whale Culture Zone has been con-
structed in the former wharf district. The array of luxury restaurants, the
museum, and the whale festival all provide new ways to enjoy the Korean
whaling tradition.
ORIGIN OF THE KOREAN WHALING REVIVAL

In the city of Ulsan, the wharf district of Jangsaengpo was formerly a town
developed by the Empire of Japan as a multicultural whaling station which housed
not only Koreans but also Norwegians, Chinese, and Japanese workers (Watanabe,
2009). After the defeat of the Empire of Japan and Korea’s liberation in 1945, the
Koreans in Jangsaengpo continued whaling and carried out a lucrative export trade
with Japan (Ii, 2013). The prosperity brought by whaling made Jangsaengpo
wealthy, such that Jangsaengpo was the first place in Ulsan where new consumer
items such as radios and televisions appeared in the 1960s and 70s (Go Jung-Goo,
personal communication, May 20, 2011). Today, when people remember the
prosperity of the past, they recite a canonic joke, “When a whale was hauled to port
in Jangsaengpo, even the stray dogs ran down the street with 10,000 won banknotes
clamped in their mouths!” (Fig. 3).
However, the township of Jangsaengpo, and the surrounding districts of Meam-
dong and Daehyeon-myeon were soon to undergo economic transformation.
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Fig. 3. A statue in Jangsaengpo depicting the days of prosperity bestowed

by whaling, when stray dogs were said to run with money in their mouths.
Photo by author.
Following the military coup of May 1961, the military junta issued an executive
order designating Ulsan as the site for a national industrial district. The ground-
breaking ceremony was held on February 3, 1962 in the hamlet of Napdo in
Jangsaengpo (Kang, 2012). At the ceremony, the soon to be president Park
Chung-Hee proclaimed, “Dark smoke rising from the factories is the symbol of our
nation’s growth and prosperity” (Yoon, 2006, p. 76). Industrialization was
considered to be the national destiny.
During the period of authoritarian rule in South Korean history, the ideology
of modernization constituted the discursive opportunity structure, with effects
that lasted following democratization in 1987. Under the regime of Park Chung-
hee, it was considered a national duty for all citizens and workers to aid in the
economic and social modernization of the fatherland (Moon, 2005), and anything
related to Korean tradition was portrayed as “backwards” and an obstacle to
development (Lee, 2005a). The elites promoted the adoption of Western and
Japanese culture thought to be conducive to economic modernization (Chang,
2012). Even following the democratization of South Korea in 1987, Chang argues
that “developmental citizenship” continued to prevail, meaning that the obses-
sion with economic development continued to be the dominant discourse of
governance.
During the 1960s and 70s, whaling continued, but it was excluded from the plan
for industrial development. In this same period, the industrialization of
the Jangsaengpo area caused many residents to be forcibly removed from their
homes, with the government relocating them to a tent city called Bugok-dong in
1963 (Han, 2015). This caused the disappearance of several hamlets that had pre-
viously participated in the whaling economy, although the main town of Jang-
saengpo continued whaling (Hur, 2014). Finally, in the 1980s, pollution-related
illnesses were affecting many citizens who resided in the environs of the Ulsan
factories, and the government declared a zone for emergency relocation in the area
of Meam-dong, including the Jangsaengpo whaling town (Lee, 2012). The forced
relocations depopulated the township and had a disruptive effect on the whaling
industry (Hur, 2014).
However, the residents of Jangsaengpo did not want to abandon their homes, in
spite of the pollution. Starting in 1985, they organized a committee to visit the
government offices to present the demand to remove the village from the relocation
zone designation, and members of the Jangsaengpo Youth Association worked to
keep the residents unified in opposition (Park, 2009). After years of sustained
agitation, in 1993 the government delisted the town from mandatory relocation.
Clearly, this episode of mobilization against forced relocation had an impact on
the subsequent mobilizations against the ban on whaling. The villagers themselves
made an association between the two episodes of mobilization, by arguing that
their town had declined in population as a result of the moratorium on commercial
whaling, instead of resulting from the effects of industrialization and forced relo-
cations. The attribution of blame to the whaling moratorium instead of to the
wider social and economic transformations can be understood as a “reorganization
of social memory” (Hur, 2014). The story of depopulation and urban decline is
often repeated in the Korean news media, when Ulsan citizens discuss the mora-
torium. For example,
After the prohibition of whaling, the number of residents decreased from 25,000 to 1,600. From
the early 1990s, the Ulsan Petrochemical Complex expanded to nearby areas, leaving almost no
trace of the whaling harbor (Kim, 2003).
The framing of Jangsaengpo as the “endangered community” points toward

the need to do something to save the community. Social movement frames serve to
identify a situation as unjust, to identify culpable agents, and to “articulate and
align a vast array of events and experiences” in a way that points to specific action
to be taken (Snow & Benford, 1992, p. 137). The culpable agents in this case were
government agencies, one agency seeking to relocate the town, and another
government ministry which had allowed a foreign entity (the IWC) to impose a
ban on whaling. Hence, the “endangered community” frame in Jangsaengpo calls
for action to restore the “culture of whaling.” Jangsaengpo residents have acted on
the “endangered community” frame with direct campaigning for the legalization
of whaling in Korea, but also through efforts to reconstruct the so-called “culture
of whaling” as a commodified image of the past.
In 1995, the Korean government restored local elections for mayors, city
councils, and district executives (Shin, 2004). Jangsaengpo residents leaped at the
opportunity presented by the new local political structure. They attempted to
revive their culture by organizing the first Jangsaengpo Whale Festival, now
celebrated annually. According to whale meat restaurant owner and journalist
Yoon Kyung-Tae, the purpose of the festival was to convey “the nostalgia of
whaling” and to “fortify the solidarity of the citizens” (Yoon, 2008a). A former
chairman of the festival organizing committee explained the goals of the festival
as cultural rather than political. Lee Man-Woo explained, “The festival had to be
158 BRADLEY TATAR
about more than just whale meat. We had to provide drumming, and other
performances, like they do in Taiji (Japan)” (Lee Man-Woo, personal commu-
nication, September 9, 2011). In other words, the festival organizers wanted to
turn their culture into a commodity. The idea of turning a culture into something
that can be sold and consumed is a key idea behind the notion of heritage (Oakes,
1998).
Nevertheless, as Smith (2006, p. 12) argues, heritage is a discourse that must
establish a material reality for itself in order to produce claims that it represents a
real collective identity. From the perspective of the Jangsaengpo residents, this
meant that whale meat should be available, for consumption at the festival as well
as to be sold daily at the town’s restaurants. After 1986, the only legal way to
obtain whale meat was from fisheries bycatch, which occurs when the whale is
entangled in a fishing net by accident, and is legal if the net is not targeting whales
but only fish (MacMillan & Han, 2011). According to the former director of the
Jangsaengpo Whale Museum, Park Seon-Goo, “The whale food culture is
maintained through the meat obtained from whales that were accidently caught
in nets. For the whale festival, the restaurants provide whale meat for those who
want to try the food, or who miss the taste of whale meat” (Park Seon-Goo,
personal communication, April 11, 2013).
Here it is important to make clear that the master frame of the pro-whaling
movement in Korea is not nationalism, as it is in Japan (Blok, 2008), and it is not
sustainable use as it is in Norway or Iceland (Bailey, 2009). The master frame in
Korean whaling is endangered community, which arises from the specific history
of Korean industrialization by which the Meam-dong/Jangsaengpo district was
subjected to socioeconomic changes that were harmful to the human communities
in the region. From the master frame of endangered community, the Jangsaengpo
residents carried out a bridging to the frame of heritage. Heritage frames the
efforts to “reconstruct” or “revitalize” the neighborhood, as a strategy of “com-
munity defense.” The community defense frame includes the “revival of heritage,”
as well as the frame of “bycatch is not whaling.”
Master frames which organize and articulate the movement-specific frames
provide a key for comparison between local movements. The Korean pro-whaling
activists do utilize frames borrowed from the Japanese mobilization, such as “the
abundant whale” or “sustainable use,” but for the Koreans, these frames are sub-
ordinate to the master frames of “endangered community” and “heritage.” The
Japanese pro-whaling movement uses “science” as a master frame, as the assertions
that whale species are abundant (not endangered) are based upon scientific research
and publications (Blok, 2013). Similarly, the anti-whaling SMOs also depend upon
scientific research as a source for their claims, especially the “endangered whale”
frame which derives from arguments that most whale species have not recovered to
population levels that existed before historical whaling took place (Singleton &
Lidskog, 2018). Thus, both Japanese pro-whaling and international anti-whaling
movements depend upon the “science” frame and are therefore vulnerable to the
problems of scientific uncertainty (Heazle, 2004).
Since their master frame is “heritage,” not “science,” the Korean pro-whaling
activists do not hesitate to utilize scientific uncertainty to counterframe against
the claims of environmental groups. In an interview with Jangsaengpo activist Go

Jung-Goo, from the Whale Culture Preservation Association (WCPA), he spe-
cifically targeted the scientific validity of anti-whaling claims.
If it is necessary to protect the population of whales, we will gladly do it, as long as there is
scientific evidence and precise data to support that measure. This is what we ask. Please, give
us the information, that more investigations should be carried out which show that in fact,
the whales are in danger of extinction. However, without giving us any sort of scientifically
reliable evidence, we are being told that we simply cannot hunt the whales (Go Jung-Goo,
personal communication, September 20, 2011).
Hence, for this movement activist, the validity of scientific evidence related to
whales is subordinate to the frame of heritage, not science. Mr. Go expressed his
dissatisfaction with the scientific investigations that are carried out and empha-
sized that what is most important is the social “reality” of Jangsaengpo and its
tradition. His dissatisfaction extends also to this author and other social scientists
who fail to adequately emphasize the importance of heritage.
There has not been adequate effort from the researchers to learn about the reality of Jangsaengpo.
Various researchers have come to Jangsaengpo to study it, but they only pay attention to superficial
things without trying to know the reality of Jangsaengpo. (Go Jung-Goo, personal communication,
May 20, 2011)
Another important difference from other pro-whaling movements is that the

Jangsaengpo people are no longer carrying out whaling. The other subnational
whaling communities of the world, such as the Inuit, the Faeroe Islands, and the
Makah, have revived and elaborated their traditions by actually carrying out
whaling. In contrast, the emphasis on preserving “whale food culture” has focused
the Koreans’ activism on the act of eating whale meat, rather than carrying out
whale hunts. They have developed marketing practices intended to ignite con-
sumer demand for whale meat, such as the “Korea-Japan Whale Meat Cookoff”
(Yoon, 2008c). The core group of Korean activists are not whalers, but whale
meat retail business owners, such as the journalist Yoon Kyung-Tae, who is the
founder of the Whale Meat Merchants Cooperative Association of Jangsaengpo
(Heo, 2013).
Finally, it is also important that Korean restaurant owners publicly disavow
whaling, stating that they sell only legal whale meat sourced from bycatch
(Moon, 2011). In addition to restaurant owners, the customers of whale meat
restaurants also proclaim their intentions to comply with Korea’s legal prohibi-
tion of whaling (Tatar & Jung, 2018). Researchers have found this is a tactic to
conceal that much of Korea’s whale meat retail business is sourced from illegal
whaling (MacMillan & Han, 2011). Nevertheless, the frame of “bycatch is not
whaling,” subordinated to the domain of “heritage,” is based upon the claim that
local whale meat consumption is not a violation of the moratorium. In other
words, the bycatch frame differentiates the local practice as one that does not
violate the international and national anti-whaling norms. In this sense, Choi
(2017) labeled the consumption of bycatch as a hybrid practice that combines the
whale conservation norm with the whaling norm.
160 BRADLEY TATAR
In summary, the bridging of the master frames of endangered community and

heritage is a result of the specific history of Jangsaengpo and has shaped the
whaling revival that occurred from the start of the Jangsaengpo Whale Festival
in 1995 until the present day. Having identified the master frames and the
movement-specific frames, it remains to be shown how these frames are ampli-
fied, articulated, and transformed in an actual case of micromobilization. For this
purpose, the following section describes the encounter between the activists of the
Jangsaengpo whaling revival and Greenpeace International, which occurred
in 2005.
THE WHALE EMBASSY OCCUPATION IN 2005

The city of Ulsan hosted the annual meeting of the IWC from June 20–24, 2005,
with hundreds of delegates arriving from around the world. According to the
meeting planners, it would give Ulsan the chance to establish the city’s reputation as
an international “city of whales,” and delegates would be encouraged to visit the
Jangsaengpo Whale Museum, which was scheduled to open on May 31, which is
designated as “Oceans Day” in Korea (Chosun Ilbo, 2005a, March 7). However, the
IWC meeting in 2005 also presented an opportunity to the anti-whaling activists of
the Korean Federation of Environmentalist Movements [KFEM] and Greenpeace
International, who planned a protest to influence Korea to withdraw its support for
Japanese pro-whaling policies (Chosun Ilbo, 2005b, March 18).
As they prepared for the IWC meeting, some of the Korean organizations
supporting the resumption of whaling adhered to scientific arguments, following
the Japanese example. At the 2005 IWC meeting, the Korean National Federation
of Fisheries Cooperatives [NFFC] and the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and
Fisheries [MOMAF] argued that it was necessary to begin hunting dolphins for the
purpose of scientific research and for Korea to eventually return to commercial
whaling (Chosun Ilbo, 2005d, June 20). An official statement sent from MOMAF
to Greenpeace on May 7 stated that, “These policies are based on scientific and
rational studies on cetacean resources” (MOMAF, 2005). Ulsan resident and
fisheries expert Byeon Chang-Myeong argued that whaling is necessary because
dolphins and whales contribute to depletion of fishery stocks; Byeon himself
founded the Committee for the Resumption of Korean Whaling (Lee, 2005c).
Clearly, scientific arguments for whaling abounded.
However, in the following account of the encounter between Greenpeace and
the local pro-whaling movement in Ulsan’s Jangsaengpo neighborhood, it is clear
that scientific rationales for whaling fell by the wayside, relegated to a secondary
role as cultural arguments for whaling came into the forefront. The increased
reliance on arguments for cultural rights for whaling occurred as a consequence
of the encounter with KFEM and Greenpeace. In face-to-face encounters at the
site of protest, the Korean advocates of whaling strategically argued for a cultural
need to consume whale meat. This claim to a “cultural right” was connected to
two different frames. First, the narrative of community decline produced a
movement-specific frame calling on citizens to save the Jangsaengpo community
from depopulation and extinction; activists argued it could be saved through an

economic revitalization brought about by cultural revival. This “endangered
community” frame represents the commodification of whale meat as beneficial to
the entire community, rather than merely of benefit to the owners of whale meat
restaurants. Second, the master frame of heritage justified the development of
tourism, with the idea that the whaling traditions must be passed on to future
generations. Although these discourses certainly preexisted the encounter with
KFEM and Greenpeace, the encounter led to the emergence of a novel combi-
nation of frames that subsequently took hold in Ulsan as an institutional
narrative: the idea that tourism would be the best vehicle for preservation of
whaling culture and the revival of the community.
The KFEM/Greenpeace campaign was called “Goraeya torawa” in Korean and
“Come Back Whales” in English. It began on March 18, 2005, when Greenpeace
volunteers sailed the Rainbow Warrior II into the port of Incheon to join their allies
in the KFEM (Greenpeace, 2005a). The campaign was intended to influence the
Korean vote at the IWC meeting. Setting sail from Incheon to Ulsan, the Rainbow
Warrior sailed into the Jangsaengpo harbor in Ulsan on April 4, 2005. On April 5,
KFEM and Greenpeace hosted an “open boat” event, allowing members of the
public to tour the craft. There were festive activities such as painting t-shirts with
whale emblems, musical performances, and the display of whale photographs. The
goal was to explain to the Korean public that caring for the health of ocean eco-
systems would be of equal benefit to whales and to fishing communities, and ending
whaling would be the first step in that direction (Card, 2005).
On April 7, the activists from the Rainbow Warrior began the encampment
they referred to as the Whale Embassy Occupation. They erected a geodesic dome
in front of the Jangsaengpo Whale Museum and unfurled a banner which read,
“Extinction starts here.” On a large mound of soil from the construction of the
museum, they erected numerous planks cut into the shapes of double-fluked
whale tails, to serve as funerary cenotaphs for whales killed by hunters. The
Greenpeace members resolved to occupy the spot until the city of Ulsan would
agree to cancel the construction plan for the whale meat processing plant. They
remained encamped on the spot for a total of 77 days, from April 7 until June 24,
2005 (Figs 4 and 5).
The goal of the Whale Embassy was to introduce the “extinction” frame to
the Korean public by presenting information about whales through this frame.
Located directly adjacent to the Ulsan Whale Museum, the Greenpeace activists
were able to divert the museum visitors to the encampment to provide an
ecologically-oriented educational experience about whales. They were located
in the same place where the public celebration of Oceans Day was planned for
May 31, and it was also the location for the Whale Festival to be celebrated
from June 18–31. Visitors, whether curious or hostile, were welcomed into
the embassy and engaged in conversation about the importance of whale
conservation.
However, Jangsaengpo residents felt their land had been invaded and claimed
that the activists had illegally landed on Korean soil (Yoon, 2008b). On the
morning of April 11, the protesters awoke to find a display of plastic banners with
162 BRADLEY TATAR
Fig. 4. The geodesic dome of the Whale Embassy, erected on April 7, 2005.
Photo by Jeremy Hibbert-Sutton (used with permission).
Fig. 5. Cenotaphs shaped like whales’ tails, erected on a mound of dirt

behind the Whale Embassy. Photo by Jeremy Hibbert-Sutton (used with permission).
pro-whaling slogans and pictures of bombs. According to the “Come Back

Whales” blog maintained by Greenpeace:
Translated into English, the main banner reads, “Environmentalists are killing (the livelihoods of)
fishermen, they must wake up.” More disturbing however is the means with which they suggest
they want to wake us up with two ticking bombs next to the words “Jangsaengpo Defenders.”
Other banners read “We strongly support scientific whaling for whale resource research;” “Let’s
hunt dolphins which destroy fish stocks;” “Why can’t we catch whales like the damn Japanese
do?” and the ominous words, “We will protect Jangsaengpo like our ancestors did” (Greenpeace,
2005b).
In the next few days, there were “more counterprotests by locals,” but the
initial efforts to remove the protesters were made by the authorities. The first
effort came on April 15, when officials from the IWC visited and requested the
camp to disband. On May 7, there was a meeting with officials from the Ulsan
City Council, and on May 10 the officials came to deliver eviction notices,
ordering Greenpeace to vacate the site by May 16 (Greenpeace, 2005c). Green-
peace defied these orders. There were also hostile visits from agitated groups of
fishermen and contingents of angry senior citizens, all of which increased the
tension in the Whale Embassy. Jim Wickens, leading the Greenpeace encamp-
ment, wrote on the blog that the “locals are seething.”
In an interview with the author, Mr. Wickens clarified that he was forced to
engage in strenuous efforts to convince the Greenpeace volunteer activists to
strive for the same goals. The volunteers were not ideologically homogeneous,
with some who were more focused on animal rights issues and others on envi-
ronmental issues. Some volunteers resolved to act individually or in small groups
to carry out actions not recommended by Greenpeace. “I had volunteers who
proposed to go to the sushi restaurants [that had fish tanks] and try to liberate the
fish by releasing them back to the ocean” (Jim Wickens, personal communica-
tion, March 11, 2018). In other words, he was constantly tasked with frame
alignment issues, which included bridging the animal rights and environmental
frames of anti-whaling action. The main goal of the Greenpeace volunteers was
to stop the whale meat plant from being constructed and to pressure South Korea
not to support any initiative at the IWC meeting that would grant whaling rights
to member countries.
Efforts to persuade the authorities to cancel the planned whale meat processing
plant involved lengthy meetings and standoffs. The Greenpeace delegation met
with Ulsan City Hall, the Korean Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry of
Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, and the Ministry of Trade and the Environment.
At the same time, the camp members attempted to improve relations with the local
community by offering free English lessons for children, showing free movies, and
giving presentations about whales. On May 19, a steamroller threatened to flatten
the encampment, and the following day a contingent of bulldozers arrived to
remove the mounds of dirt on which the whale tails were displayed. The Green-
peace activists fanned out to protect the mounds from the bulldozers and negoti-
ated with the construction crew.
Throughout the campaign, the KFEM and Greenpeace utilized the extinction
frame to target the local practices of Koreans in Ulsan. They sought to portray
these practices as violations of the international norms as promulgated by the
IWC and its member governments. According to the Greenpeace blog, the
volunteers visited locations where whales were being butchered, and photo-
graphed to portray these as acts violating the international norm. On one such
occasion, the whale meat processing workers intentionally spilled the animal’s
blood on the Greenpeace volunteers; on another occasion, the workers in a truck
laden with whale meat shouted at the Greenpeace volunteers (Greenpeace,
2005b). In the international news media as well, the Whale Embassy encamp-
ment focused on the local Korean practice of using cetacean bycatch, which they
viewed as a thinly disguised practice of commercial whaling. Jim Wickens was
quoted by the LA Times, “The Koreans make a big song and dance about how
164 BRADLEY TATAR
they don’t harpoon whales, but you don’t need a harpoon to kill a whale. It is
very easy to drown a whale in your net” (cited in Demick, 2005). Likewise,
KFEM organizer Choi Ye-Yong told BBC News that “the accidental catch is
not accidental” (Y.Y. Choi, as cited in Black, 2005).
The conflict with the locals reached a head on May 25, when a letter arrived
from the representatives of Jangsaengpo threatening to remove the Whale
Embassy. Accusing Greenpeace of carrying out an illegal occupation, the Jang-
saengpo residents claimed that Greenpeace was also harming the community’s
economic future by drawing negative publicity on the eve of the opening of the
whale museum, scheduled for May 31 (Kim, 2005). Although a previous ultima-
tum had been sent by the Ulsan city government, the letter was different because it
expressed the grievances of residents from the immediate neighborhood
(Greenpeace, 2005d). It was signed by the Jangsaengpo Defenders, which was
actually a coalition of four organizations: the Jangsaengpo Development Associ-
ation, the Jangsaengpo Youth Association, the Jangsaengpo Senior Citizens’
Association, and a fourth, ad-hoc association (Kim, 2005; Greenpeace, 2005d; Lee
Man-woo, personal communication, September 9, 2011).
On May 26, representatives of the Jangsaengpo Defenders mustered at the
Whale Occupation Embassy, determined to air their grievances. In an interview
with the author, protest organizer Jim Wickens explained that he had already
arranged the meeting with the Jangsaengpo contingent in advance (Jim Wickens,
personal communication, August 8, 2014). Described on the Greenpeace website
as a “showdown,” the meeting began with a tense atmosphere, as numerous
police vehicles deployed outside the tent (Greenpeace, 2005e). The Jangsaengpo
representatives began with the story of the community’s decline from a popula-
tion of 16,000 to only 1,600 as a result of the moratorium on whaling. They
explained that the opening of the Jangsaengpo Whale Museum was the com-
munity’s only hope to bring visitors and revitalize the economy of the commu-
nity. They did not demand that Greenpeace and KFEM accept the necessity of
whaling; however, they did make a request, as narrated by Mr. Wickens:
They explained that the embassy was okay, but the mounds with the whale tails behind
were painful for them, striking an all too real chord of the past, while preventing them from
embracing the future with Oceans Day and the opening of the whale museum (Greenpeace,
2005e).
The mounds resembled a traditional Korean graveyard and could ruin the image
of Jangsaengpo when visitors would arrive to the museum. In a gesture of goodwill,
Greenpeace offered to remove the whale’s tails. According to Mr. Wickens,
They could not believe what they heard and were genuinely blown away. We explained that we
would like to help find alternative ways to economically revive the community in a sustainable
but profitable way. Suddenly, the president of the community group said he wanted to learn
about whale-watching and would welcome all the advice that we could give him on this. The guy
next to him said that he would like to get the children from Jangsaengpo [Elementary] School to
come and meet us and help design banners for Oceans Day to hang from the mast. Obviously
over the moon, they added that because it was so obvious that we meant well, that Greenpeace
could stay until the end of the IWC (Greenpeace, 2005e).
Hence, the showdown meeting ended with an agreement that toned down the
visibility of the protest, while permitting the occupation to continue. The imme-
diate outcome of the meeting was a compromise and a working relationship.
According to the Greenpeace blog, the Jangsaengpo leaders invited Greenpeace
representatives to come to the village school to talk to the children about
importance of protecting whales (Greenpeace, 2005b). The locals were also eager
to learn from Greenpeace about whale-watching tourism, which was described by
the Greenpeace activists as a way to revive the village without harming living
whales (Greenpeace, 2005e). However, there was also an amplification of the
“cultural relativism” frame. Prior to 2005, the Jangsaengpo restaurants were
already relying upon the claim that bycatch is not whaling, that local practice is
different from what the international norm prohibits. In reality, the activists from
Greenpeace did not agree that bycatch is not whaling. Rather, they agreed not to
criticize or target local practices, out of respect for the local community, but
maintained their opposition to all forms of whaling. By removing the whale tail
cenotaphs, Greenpeace merely agreed to the idea that local practice should not be
targeted by the extinction frame, and their protest would be directed at the IWC
itself as the locus of international policy on whales.
However, the Korean news media reported on the conciliatory meeting with a
different emphasis, with the claim that local practice should be treated as exempt
from the international anti-whaling norm. The Korean news reports did not
mention the issue of whale tail cenotaphs, but claimed that Greenpeace had
recognized bycatch as a legitimate way to derive whale meat for the purpose of
cultural survival. For example, Yonhap News Service reported that the
Jangsaengpo delegation demanded that Greenpeace recognize whale meat as a
cultural tradition of Korea and as indispensable to the economy and survival of
Jangsaengpo (Hankyoreh, 2005, May 31). In exchange, the Jangsaengpo
Defenders agreed to actively assist Greenpeace in its efforts to protect the
environment. The report quoted Greenpeace organizer Jim Wickens as saying, “I
now understand the cultural importance of eating whale meat for the people who
live here, although my position is still against whaling and the commercial sale of
whale meat,” and added, “Greenpeace could not oppose the food customs of a
nation” (Hankyoreh, 2005, May 31).
In an interview (Jim Wickens, personal communication, March 14, 2018),
Mr. Wickens clarified why he made this shift in rhetoric based on the need for
local social acceptance of the anti-whaling norm. He pointed out that conservation
strategies imposed on stakeholders from the top-down tend to fail, as the stake-
holders must be won over in order for the policy to succeed. This is a viewpoint
shared by cultural anthropologists who study conservation issues and has been
substantiated by field studies (Igoe, 2004; Neves, 2010). Furthermore, Greenpeace
has a history of abstaining from criticizing communities that claim whaling as an
indigenous cultural practice (Erikson, 1999). Nevertheless, it was understood by
the Jangsaengpo representatives as an admission that the consumption of whale
meat is acceptable if it is not derived from intentional whaling. From this expe-
rience, the Jangsaengpo activists came to believe that Western environmentalists
feel a moral obligation to respect the culture of others. Armed with this
166 BRADLEY TATAR
knowledge, they shifted their arguments for whaling to a greater emphasis on

cultural rights.
DISCUSSION
Clearly, an episode of negotiation and frame bridging occurred involving the
Jangsaengpo Defenders and the Greenpeace contingent in Ulsan in May of 2005.
The question to address is how was it possible for this bridging to occur? The
choices made by the participants can be understood as a process of counter-
framing, and it was an interaction in which there were strategic gains made in the
short term.
First, the Greenpeace contingent responded to the framing of anti-whaling as a
foreign and imperialist imposition. Countering the image of being foreign impe-
rialists and a large-scale bureaucratic NGO, the Greenpeace activists presented
themselves as real people who were willing to listen to opposing points of view.
Through their willingness to listen and to show concern for the Jangsaengpo
community, they attempted to gain credibility with the Koreans in Ulsan.
This leads to the issue of audience, since the Greenpeace activists were clearly
aiming their discourses to influence the Korean public and not merely trying to
create images for the audiences in Western countries. From the start, the
Greenpeace activists held events intended to influence the Korean public, including
an “open boat” event when the Rainbow Warrior docked, and welcoming all
visitors to the Whale Embassy dome. They made it clear that their target was the
Korean government, which they hoped would not support Japanese resolutions at
the IWC meeting. Hence, their goal of reaching the Korean public made it
necessary to counterframe against the imperialist image.
Finally, it is important to note that Greenpeace embraced the developmentalism
of the Korean discursive opportunity structure. In addition to adopting the com-
munity revival discourse of the Jangsaengpo villagers, the Greenpeace activists at
the meeting also took on the stance that whale tourism without whaling could
provide a sustainable route to economic development. Hence, they shifted their
framing from “extinction starts here” to “develop tourist industries to save both the
whales and the endangered people of Jangsaengpo.” The resonance of the devel-
opment frame was irresistible to the Jangsaengpo contingent, and they did tempo-
rarily accept an alliance with the Greenpeace encampment.
Clearly, both the Jangsaengpo and the Greenpeace activists made some
choices that went against their gut feelings. Here it is useful to draw on the notion
of dissonance which Bröer and Duyvendak (2009) utilize to describe a clash
between feeling rules and framing rules. The dissonance between framing rules
and feeling rules produces a willingness to explore novel modes of frame bridging.
The Greenpeace activists chose to defend the rights of a whaling community,
such as their rights to cultural autonomy and community development, citing the
norm of multicultural diversity. They changed their relationship to Jangsaengpo,
formerly a target of protest, and now announced to be an ally, claiming that their
continued protests would be targeted only at the IWC.
For their part, the Jangsaengpo activists also made some choices against
their gut feelings by accepting Greenpeace as a legitimate organization that is
dedicated to an authentic cause of protecting the environment. They stopped
labeling Greenpeace as “invaders” and rebranded them as “guests” and directed
others in the village to extend hospitality to them during the period of the
encampment.
Both of these SMOs made the provisional changes in framing in order to
achieve short-term goals. The Greenpeace activists sought to avoid eviction from
the protest site and to carry out the occupation until the completion of the IWC
meeting. The Jangsaengpo Defenders sought to avoid further incidents of nega-
tive international publicity such as were accruing from coverage by international
news outlets.
Nevertheless, once the Whale Embassy dome was disassembled and the
Greenpeace activists had departed Korea, were there any remaining effects? The
main effect is that the Jangsaengpo activists were transformed into rooted cosmo-
politans of the type described by Tarrow (2005).
First, the Jangsaengpo activists gained a heightened awareness of their under-
standing of international norms, and the resonance of the cultural rights frame in
the international community. They became rooted cosmopolitans by selectively
using the frames borrowed from other cultures; in doing so they adopted the
proactive frame of heritage instead of using the scientific frames in defense of
whaling favored in Japan. They borrowed the frame of “sustainable whale
tourism” which was taken from Greenpeace and their allies in KFEM, contrasting
it with industrial development which they portrayed as harmful to the community.
Choi (2017) also provides evidence that the Jangsaengpo tourist frame of “sus-
tainable whale tourism” was taken from the anti-whaling activists, but she adopts
a theory of ontological interactions and does not attribute any outcomes to the
mobilizations of the Jangsaengpo activists or their counterframing activities. In
contrast, it is here argued that the contest of framing and counterframing that took
place in Jangsaengpo in 2005 had a lasting impact on the framing strategies of
those who took part in the mobilization.
The importance of the 2005 episode can be highlighted by indicating that the
three Jangsaengpo representatives who attended this meeting later went on to
become influential pro-whaling activists. The Greenpeace, KFEM, and Jang-
saengpo members at the meeting took a celebratory photo at the conclusion of
the meeting, which shows who participated. It is still displayed on the Greenpeace
website (Greenpeace, 2005e). The representative of the Jangsaengpo Develop-
ment Association was Yoon Kyung-Tae, who later established the Whale Meat
Merchants Cooperative Association of Jangsaengpo, and serves as its president.
He is a third generation whale meat restaurant operator. The representative of
the Jangsaengpo Youth Association was Go Jung-Goo, who is now a leader of
the Whale Culture Preservation Association, a civic organization dedicated to the
preservation of Jangsaengpo’s whaling traditions. The third Jangsaengpo repre-
sentative was Lee Man-Woo, who chaired the Organizing Committee of the
Jangsaengpo Whale Festival. He also later served as president of the Whale
Culture Preservation Association. All three of these individuals are prominent
168 BRADLEY TATAR
enough to influence the cultural policies that Ulsan Namgu has pursued in
developing the Jangsaengpo WCZ (Fig. 6).
In other words, the representatives of the Jangsaengpo Defenders were the
same activists who had defended the community against village relocation and
dispersal and who had worked to organize the Jangsaengpo Whale Festival and
lobbied for the construction of the museum. The encounter with Greenpeace
reinforced their view that heritage is the best defense and amplified the heritage
frame with a new subordinate frame, “cultural rights.” Hence, in a 2008 news-
paper article, the journalist and restaurant owner Yoon Kyung-Tae again quoted
Jim Wickens’s 2005 statement, “I now understand the cultural importance of
whale meat…” (Yoon, 2008c), using it to argue that whaling must be reinstated
for the sake of cultural continuity. Similarly, Go Jung-Goo of the Whale Culture
Preservation Association stated in 2011,
The environmental organizations from overseas acknowledge the culture of eating whales, but
they say that capture cannot be permitted, but what is happening is that our [Korean]
environmental organizations are even denying the culture of eating... How is it possible to
deny the culture…? (quoted in Lee, 2011)
In conversation with the author, he clarified, “Greenpeace said that they did not
intend to deny our Korean culture of whales, but only that they were opposed to the
illegal hunting of whales. Once they explained this, we no longer had any problem
with them [being here]” (Go Jung-Goo, personal communication, September 20,
2011).
Nevertheless, the Jangsaengpo advocates of whale meat learned that the local
and national governments are very sensitive to international publicity. On June 14,
2005, the Ulsan city government announced the decision not to build the whale
Fig. 6. Logo of the Jangsaengpo Whale Merchants Cooperative Association,

hanging on display at the Ulsan Whale Festival in 2015. Photo by author.
meat processing facility; in return, the city demanded that Greenpeace remove the
words “whale meat factory” from its website and desist from portraying Korea as
a pro-whaling nation (Greenpeace, 2005f). The city also sought to avoid criticism
from international news media, requesting that merchants refrain from selling
whale meat at the 2005 Ulsan Whale Festival; however, the merchants refused to
comply and asserted the right to sell it (Chosun Ilbo, 2005c).
In other words, the episode at the Whale Occupation Embassy in 2005 rein-
forced the idea that anti-whaling is a global norm and can count on worldwide
support, whereas the whale-consuming culture is a subordinate culture which
must petition for a special exception to the usual rule. However, based on the
principle of cultural relativism as a global norm, the special exemption cannot be
denied to Jangsaengpo. In an interview with the author, Go Jung-Goo explained,
What we are claiming here is not just the freedom to hunt whales. What we really want is for
our customs to be respected, like the respect Americans have for the native people in Alaska
(Go Jung-Goo, personal communication, September 25, 2009)
CONCLUSION
Even at the local level, movements in support of whaling cannot exist without
transnational resources, but many of these resources are developed in episodes of
confrontation. The battle over whale meat which took place outside of the 2005
IWC meeting in Ulsan illustrates the role of SMOs and the importance of inter-
actions between movements and countermovements. Through the frame bridging
that occurred, the Ulsan whaling revival was able to incorporate key frames from
the anti-whaling mobilization, including “sustainable whale tourism.” This
resulted in the promotion of a romanticized social memory of whaling in the whale
museum and the Whale Culture Zone tourist complex, which is conducive to the
increased consumption of whale meat.
The outcome of the 2005 meeting between Greenpeace and the Jangsaengpo
Defenders was not predetermined. Rather, it illustrates how social movement
actors recognize opportunities and make decisions (McCammon et al. 2007,
p. 732). Choices about framing may be contrary to the feelings and instincts of the
activists, but the dissonance produced in face-to-face interaction with a counter-
movement makes it possible to choose from frames and norms in a selective and
strategic manner. This is illustrated by the way that Greenpeace chose to support
the Jangsaengpo whaling community’s right to community development. Simi-
larly, the Jangsaengpo activists chose to selectively use the proactive framing of
multicultural identity, transforming themselves into rooted cosmopolitans who are
conversant with the norms of their opponents.
Subsequent to the episode of confrontation with Greenpeace, the actors added
to their repertoire new ways of conceiving and relating cultural traditions to local
and transnational institutions. The Korean whaling revival illustrates that the
importance of global norms is not inherent in the norms themselves; rather, what
is important is the action taken by activists in order to make a frame become
salient, or laden with clear relevance to those whom they wish to influence.
170 BRADLEY TATAR
The issue is to discover the features of the discursive opportunity structure that
can make a certain frame strategic.
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MOBILIZING FOR RELIGIOUS
FREEDOM: EDUCATIONAL
OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURES AND
OUTCOMES OF CONSERVATIVE
CHRISTIAN CAMPUS ACTIVISM*
Jonathan S. Coley
ABSTRACT
Colleges and universities in the United States are common sites of social
movement activism, yet we know little about the conditions under which campus-
based movements are likely to meet with success or failure. In this study, I
develop the concept of educational opportunity structures, and I highlight several
dimensions of colleges and universities’ educational opportunity structures –
specifically, schools’ statuses as public or private, secular or religious, highly or
lowly ranked, and more or less wealthy – that can affect the outcomes of campus-
based movements. Analyzing a religious freedom movement at Vanderbilt
University, which mobilized from 2010 to 2012 to demand the ability of religious
student organizations to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and
religious belief, I argue that Vanderbilt’s status as a private, secular, elite, and
wealthy university ensured that conservative Christian activism at that school
was highly unlikely to succeed. The findings hold important theoretical
implications for the burgeoning literature on student activism.
*
An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the
Southern Sociological Society. The author thanks Dan Cornfield, Larry Isaac, Joseph
Roso, the editor, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Please direct
correspondence to Jonathan Coley, Department of Sociology, Oklahoma State
University, jonathan.s.coley@okstate.edu
Power and Protest

ISSN: 0163-786X/doi:10.1108/S0163-786X20210000044012
175
176 JONATHAN S. COLEY
Keywords: Social movements; higher education; Christianity; religious

freedom; LGBTQ rights; qualitative methods
INTRODUCTION
The social movements literature increasingly recognizes that colleges and uni-
versities are hotbeds of activism (Van Dyke, 1998). In the 1960s, colleges and
universities served as central sites for civil rights activism (McAdam, 1982), the
second-wave feminist movement (McCammon, McGrath, Dixon, & Robinson,
2016), and the antiwar movement (Klatch, 1999). In more recent years, institu-
tions of higher education have served as sites of Latino student activism (Reyes,
2018), feminist movements (Crossley, 2017; Reger, 2018), LGBTQ movements
(Coley, 2018a, 2020; Kane, 2013), and labor movements (Dixon, Tope, & Van
Dyke, 2008), among others. Despite the centrality of colleges and universities to
much social movement activism, however, scholars have largely failed to examine
the unique characteristics of campus-based movements (see critique by Reger,
2018). Furthermore, those scholars who do write about campus-based movements
generally focus on issues of mobilization; we know little about the characteristics
of colleges or universities that make campus-based movements more or less likely
to succeed.
The topic is particularly important to consider in light of the rise of conser-
vative student activism across colleges and universities in the United States
(see, e.g., Binder & Wood, 2014; Ince, Finlay, & Rojas, 2018; Munson, 2010).
According to Binder and Wood (2014, p. 35), just over one in five college students
identifies as conservative. Several major right-wing organizations (the Young
America’s Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and the Intercollegiate Studies
Institute) are strategically mobilizing such students across hundreds of college and
university campuses in the United States to promote conservative ideologies and
combat the perceived left-wing bias of academia. Beyond such explicitly political
organizations, many Christian organizations such as Cru (formerly known as
Campus Crusade for Christ), InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Navigators, and
Fellowship of Christian Athletes are similarly organizing students across US
colleges and universities, propagating conservative Christian beliefs to combat
what they see as a secular bias of higher education (Krattenmaker, 2010;
Magolda & Gross, 2009; Schmalzbauer, 2013; Turner, 2008). Although many
conservative political and religious student organizations focus on promoting
conservative beliefs on campuses, some of these organizations also protest their
colleges’ and universities’ policies, seeking (among other things) more conserva-
tive representation among college faculty, changes to curricula, and exemptions
to nondiscrimination policies (Binder & Wood, 2014; Ince et al., 2018; Munson,
2010).
What conditions affect whether campus-based movements meet with success
or failure? In this chapter, I analyze the case of religious freedom mobilization at
a university as a way to identify the factors associated with the success or failure
of campus-based movements targeting colleges and universities. Specifically, I
analyze a religious freedom movement that mobilized at Vanderbilt University in
Mobilizing for Religious Freedom 177
Nashville, Tennessee, from 2010 to 2012. After Vanderbilt penalized a Christian

fraternity for expelling a gay member in 2010, conservative Christian student
groups mobilized to demand the ability to accept members and elect leaders on
the basis of their sexual orientation and religious beliefs. Drawing on both
observational data and insights from media reports, I show that conservative
Christian groups at Vanderbilt successfully mobilized several types of resources in
support of their movement: they raised tens of thousands of dollars to spread
word of their cause, mobilized hundreds of members of religious student orga-
nizations, and attracted the support of leaders of several national religious
organizations. However, despite the energetic backing of its conservative Chris-
tian participants, the religious freedom movement ultimately failed to achieve its
goals. Furthermore, conservative Christian student groups at Vanderbilt suffered
multiple negative consequences.
To address how a movement that was so successful at mobilizing resources and
drawing attention to its cause could still meet with failure, I adapt McAdam’s
(1982) political process framework to a campus context, arguing that movements
targeting colleges and universities are more likely to succeed when certain educa-
tional opportunity structures make schools vulnerable to change. Colleges and
universities exhibit certain characteristics that make them more or less likely to
respond favorably to student movements’ demands for acceptance and accom-
modation (Gamson, 1975), including those colleges and universities’ statuses as
public or private, secular or religious, highly or lowly ranked, and more or less
wealthy. In the case of the religious freedom movement at Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt’s
status as a private, secular, elite, and wealthy university made it a challenging
target for a movement backed by conservative Christians. I elaborate on these
results and their theoretical and practical implications later in the chapter, but first
I review past research on campus activism, outline my theoretical framework, and
elaborate on my data and methodological approach.
PAST RESEARCH AND THEORY ON

CAMPUS ACTIVISM
A growing body of work within the sociological literature on social movements
examines campus-based activism (Ince et al., 2018). Whereas much early major
work in social movement studies assumed that social movements target the state
(see critiques by Armstrong & Bernstein, 2008; Van Dyke, Soule, & Taylor,
2004), an emerging literature has shown that schools are common sites and tar-
gets of activists (McCarthy & McPhail, 2006; Van Dyke, 1998). I review this
literature with a particular focus on specific characteristics of schools that seem to
shape the emergence, forms, and outcomes of campus-based movements char-
acteristics that might, in turn, inform conceptualizations of educational oppor-
tunity structures.1
One line of research within the sociological literature on campus activism
examines predictors of student activism across colleges and universities, from
1960s student activism (Lipset, 1976; Van Dyke, 1998) to more contemporary
student activism (Coley, 2017; Kane, 2013; Reger, 2018; Soule, 1997). These
studies show that certain characteristics of colleges and universities seem to
enable student activism: specifically, schools that are elite (Lipset, 1976; Soule,
1997; Van Dyke, 1998), wealthy (Coley, 2017; Soule, 1997), secular (Kane, 2013;
Van Dyke, 1998), and able to provide funds to registered student groups (Reger,
2018) are more likely to be home to campus activist groups. By contrast, schools
that are low in status, less wealthy, religious, and lacking in funds to provide
student groups are less likely to be sites of campus activism.
Another line of research on campus activism examines the forms that campus
activism can take (e.g., Binder & Wood, 2014; Reyes, 2018; Walker, Martin, &
McCarthy, 2008). Binder and Wood’s (2014) book on conservative campus
activism compares conservative student groups at two universities, showing that
certain types of campuses are more frequently sites of disruptive or contentious
kinds of activism. Specifically, they show that a public flagship university seemed
to inspire a more provocative form of conservative activism (focused on orga-
nizing incendiary events that sparked campus-wide debates over conservative
issues) compared to an elite university where an election-focused, campaigning
form of conservative activism thrived. Similarly, Reyes’ (2018) book on Latino
student organizations shows that a public research university seemed to inspire
activism that was more contentious than activism at a residential liberal arts
college, where friendlier interorganizational collaborations developed. Com-
bined, these studies underscore how unique characteristics of colleges and uni-
versities, especially their public/private status or elite status, can shape forms of
campus-based protest.
A final strand of literature focuses on outcomes of campus activism. In gen-
eral, sociological studies examining campus-based activist groups that target
colleges and universities tend to emphasize characteristics of activist groups that
facilitate success: for example, Rojas (2006) argues that less disruptive forms of
protests (such as rallies) were more effective than disruptive protests (such as sit-
ins) in facilitating the spread of African-American Studies departments across
colleges and universities, and McCammon et al. (2016) highlight the role of
feminists’ “critical community tactics” in facilitating cultural changes in male-
dominated law schools. By contrast, Lemonik Arthur’s (2011) study of curricular
change in higher education emphasizes characteristics of colleges or universities
that shape campus movements’ prospects of success. Specifically, she highlights
the importance of colleges’ or universities’ stated missions (e.g., religious vs.
liberal arts vs. vocational) and administrations’ openness and flexibility, showing
that favorable missions and flexible administrators create opportunities for
change when movements adopt insider tactics and appropriate framing strate-
gies. In this chapter, I adopt the focus on explaining outcomes of campus
activism and similarly consider the role of schools’ religious (or secular) missions;
however, I advance the literature by examining how other structural character-
istics of colleges and universities identified in the past literature on campus
activism (e.g., schools’ public or private status, highly or lowly ranked status,
and more or less wealthy status) might shape student movements’ prospects for
success.
THEORIZING EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY

STRUCTURES AND OUTCOMES OF CAMPUS ACTIVISM
To better understand the factors shaping outcomes of campus activism, I adapt
political process theory, an influential framework for explaining the emergence,
growth, and success of social movements (McAdam, 1982). McAdam’s (1982)
theory argues, first, that social movements emerge and succeed when political
opportunity structures are open rather than closed. A political opportunity struc-
ture that is open is one where (a) the institutionalized political system is open
to challengers, (b) elites are either divided over a policy or (c) favorable to a policy
that a movement advocates, and (d) the state does not repress the movement
(McAdam, 1997, p. 26). Second, McAdam (1982) argues that social movements
emerge and succeed when they have access to resources, including human resources
(participants, leaders), physical/spatial resources (buildings/meeting spaces), and
monetary resources. Importantly, his theory stresses that resources should be
indigenous to the challenger group, lest movements put themselves at risk of co-
optation or neglect by depending on resources from outside, elite groups. Finally,
social movements emerge and succeed when groups experience cognitive liberation,
or the recognition that injustices exist, collective action is necessary to address
those injustices, and opportunities are available for collective action.
Political process theory has been highly influential in social movement studies,
inspiring numerous replications, extensions, and critiques. One of the most
prominent critiques focuses on political process theory’s focus on the political
(Armstrong & Bernstein, 2008): although the theory is helpful for explaining the
emergence and success of social movements that target the state, it is less helpful
for understanding social movements that target other institutions, such as busi-
nesses, religious institutions, or as in this case, educational institutions. In this vein,
scholars have identified the characteristics of a variety of other opportunity
structures, including gendered opportunity structures (McCammon, Campbell,
Granberg, & Mowery, 2001), discursive opportunity structures (Koopmans &
Olzak, 2004), industry opportunity structures (Schurman, 2004), and most perti-
nent to this study, academic opportunity structures (Reger, 2018).
Reger’s (2018) study, which addresses how a conservative Midwestern uni-
versity became home to an active feminist student organization, argues that
academic opportunity structures are open to campus activism when they require
students to formally register their student organizations; formal registration, in
turn, provides student organizations with access to campus funds and meeting
spaces, ensures those student organizations establish leaderships structures, and
creates paper trails facilitating institutional memory of organizations’ activities.
Like Reger (2018), I am interested in how the structure of opportunities at col-
leges and universities can shape campus activism, but I build on and extend her
work in three ways. First, I employ a broader term, educational opportunity
structures, to highlight the fact that colleges and universities’ missions often go
beyond the academic or scholastic. Second, I examine how educational oppor-
tunity structures affect the prospects for student movements’ success, in contrast
with Reger’s (2018) study, which concentrates on how academic opportunity
structures can facilitate student movements’ emergence and continuity. Following

Gamson’s (1975, ch. 3) formulation of movement outcomes, I define success as
involving both acceptance (here, allowing the existence of conservative Christian
student organizations) and new advantages/accommodations (here, allowing
those organizations to discriminate on the basis of certain characteristics such as
sexual orientation and religious belief). Finally, I draw on insights from the
previously reviewed literature on campus activism to identity additional dimen-
sions of educational opportunity structures, dimensions that may be especially
helpful for understanding the outcomes of (rather than just emergence and
persistence of) campus activism. Although acknowledging that requirements that
campus activist groups formally register with a college or university may facilitate
those campus activist groups’ endurance, requiring student organizations to
register with the university in turn allows the university to co-opt the organiza-
tion, i.e., provide the organizations with acceptance but no advantages (Gamson,
1975). Indeed, this study illustrates that a university certainly can use student
organizations’ registered status to apply rules and restrictions to those organi-
zations that may detract from those organizations’ goals or missions. Thus, I
focus on other characteristics of colleges or universities that may be more relevant
for understanding outcomes of campus activism.
I argue that colleges and universities’ educational opportunity structures vary
along at least four dimensions. First, colleges and universities vary in terms of
whether they are private or public, a characteristic that has been previously linked
to the forms that campus activist groups take (Binder & Wood, 2014; Reyes,
2018). Although private and public schools come in a variety of forms, public
schools are by definition less exclusive spaces than private schools; as a result,
public universities are more open to challengers and less willing to repress chal-
lenger groups (the openness of a polity and the level of repression being two key
concerns in McAdam’s [1997] formulation of opportunity structures). Public
universities are required by federal courts to adhere to constitutional free speech
guarantees and thus allow people representing diverse backgrounds and view-
points to form groups and hold speeches at public schools (e.g., see Reichard’s
(2010) discussion of federal court rulings about LGBTQ student groups at public
universities). This openness can even extend to people or groups that seek to deny
the rights of others; for example, in recent years, neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer
has been able to speak at a range of public university campuses because “public
institutions covered by the First Amendment must accommodate speakers”
(Bauer-Wolf, 2017, para. 10). By contrast, private colleges and universities have
much more latitude to restrict various groups’ access to campus and censor
activities or speech by groups with whom they disagree (Coley, 2018a, ch. 1).2 The
implication for understanding the prospects for student movements’ success is that
public colleges and universities are more likely than private colleges and univer-
sities to be accepting and accommodating of campus activist groups representing a
broad range of viewpoints.
Second, colleges and universities vary in terms of whether they are religious or
secular, a characteristic that has been previously linked to the emergence of campus
activism (e.g., Coley, 2017; Kane, 2013; Van Dyke, 1998) as well as the outcomes
of campus activism (e.g., Lemonik Arthur, 2011). How might this characteristic
shape the outcomes of campus activist groups? Religious colleges and universities
not only have the ability to restrict access to campus or censor viewpoints of certain
groups with whom they disagree (as with other private colleges and universities)
but also they even have the ability to discriminate on the basis of certain charac-
teristics that would normally be protected by state and/or federal laws, such as
gender identity, sexual orientation, or religious affiliation, as long as that college or
university justifies that discrimination on the basis of its religious beliefs (Coley,
2018a; 2018b). In other words, religious colleges and universities are even less open
to, and potentially more repressive of, challengers (McAdam, 1997). Overall, the
implication for understanding the potential success of campus-based movements is
that secular colleges and universities are more likely than religious colleges and
universities to be accepting and accommodating of campus activist groups repre-
senting a broad range of viewpoints. One important caveat, however, is that reli-
gious colleges or universities will likely be more accepting and accommodating of
campus activist groups representing those colleges’ or universities’ religious views.
Third, colleges and universities vary in terms of prestige. In particular, some
colleges and universities have developed reputations as elite institutions, often
signaled by high rankings in the US News and World Report’s annual report on
US colleges and universities. Elite schools are often vibrant spaces for campus
activism (Soule, 1997; Van Dyke, 1998), but are they responsive to demands by
campus activist groups? Elite institutions are often quite protective of their rep-
utations and thus look to and often follow the policies of peer institutions to
maintain their reputations among elite universities, as the literature on institu-
tional isomorphism would suggest (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; see also; Rojas,
2006). For example, there is a strong norm among elite institutions to be pro-
tective of LGBTQ rights: the first LGBTQ college and university group in the
United States was founded at Columbia University, and Cornell University and
other Ivy League colleges and universities followed closely behind (Coley, 2018a,
ch. 1). Attention to a college’s or university’s elite status, and attention to whether
an elite college’s or university’s policies align with those of other elite colleges or
universities, thus provides important clues as to whether campus activist groups
are likely to succeed. Specifically, elite institutions are more likely to be accepting
and accommodating of campus activist groups that make demands that have
been met by other elite colleges and universities; the degree of alignment with elite
schools’ policies is perhaps less of a concern for low-prestige schools.
Finally, colleges and universities vary in terms of wealth, with greater wealth
previously having been linked to a greater likelihood of campus activism (Soule,
1997; Van Dyke, 1998). Wealthy colleges and universities that benefit from large
(e.g., multi-billion-dollar) endowments and have numerous wealthy donors have
the ability to weather threats by individual donors to withhold contributions, or
threats by parents to withhold their tuition dollars, should the university not
accept a student movement’s demands. By contrast, colleges and universities with
less money are often much more vulnerable to pressures imposed on them by
their wealthiest donors, who may be quite few in number, along with pressures
imposed by tuition payers. For example, Coley’s (2018a, ch. 4) study of LGBTQ
activism at Christian colleges and universities recounts the story of Belmont

University, a nondenominational, conservative Christian university that had for
years maintained a student handbook ban on so-called “homosexual behavior,”
denied requests by LGBTQ students for an official student group, and dismissed
employees who came out as LGBTQ. Despite its long history of opposition to
LGBTQ rights, in December 2010, the school suddenly decided to adopt a
nondiscrimination policy inclusive of sexual orientation and approve an LGBTQ
student group after a donor on which it was highly dependent, Mike Curb, gave a
statement to the media strongly denouncing the school’s anti-LGBTQ policies
(“I promise you, if the matter is not resolved, I will continue speaking out about
this the rest of my life” [Coley, 2018a, p. 90]). Attention to a school’s wealth thus
provides another clue as to whether schools will be responsive to campus activists.
Specifically, wealthy institutions are less likely to be accommodating and
responsive to campus activist groups with whom its leaders disagree.
Overall, I argue that key aspects of colleges’ or universities’ educational oppor-
tunity structures – particularly, their statuses as public or private, religious or
secular, elite or non-elite, and wealthy or less wealthy – hold important implications
for understanding whether campus activist groups that target their colleges or
universities are likely to succeed. Below, I consider the role of educational oppor-
tunity structures in the outcomes of religious freedom mobilization at Vanderbilt
University while also considering the role of other aspects of McAdam’s (1982)
framework, namely, the potential role of indigenous resources and cognitive liber-
ation in the religious freedom movement at Vanderbilt.
DATA AND METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH

To examine factors shaping the outcomes of religious freedom mobilization at
Vanderbilt, I draw on ethnographic data and insights from media reports about the
religious freedom movement at Vanderbilt, which was most active from 2010 to
2012. The US News & World Report ranked Vanderbilt #17 in the nation and #2 in
the South at the time of the movement (Anderson, 2014), and Vanderbilt maintained
a sizable endowment of over $3 billion at the time of the movement (National
Center for Education Statistics, 2012), making it an elite and wealthy university in
addition to a private and secular one. Vanderbilt represents an exemplary early and
prominent site of the broader religious freedom movement, which would mobilize
even more broadly after the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex
marriage (Kazyak, Burke, & Stange, 2018).
Vanderbilt is home to many religious student organizations, including organi-
zations associated with Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim faith traditions. As
a university located in the so-called Bible Belt, though, Christian organizations
dominate the campus religious scene, ranging from parachurch organizations to
campus ministries associated with Baptist, Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran, Meth-
odist, and Presbyterian faiths (Vanderbilt University, 2019). In all, 30 Christian
organizations were present at the university during this time, and many would
become active in the religious freedom movement (Smietana, 2012).
Because the religious freedom movement drew most of its energy from the
conservative student population on campus, it may come as no surprise that
Vanderbilt has also been home to various right-wing political groups, such as
Vanderbilt College Republicans, which supported the religious freedom move-
ment. Adding further to the conservative character of campus life, Greek organi-
zations are a major presence at Vanderbilt. In 2011, 20 fraternities and sororities
existed, attracting about 40% of undergraduates (Kylie, 2011). As a 2013 Van-
derbilt Hustler report noted, Vanderbilt fraternities have had a reputation of being
discriminatory toward gay men (Blaine, 2013), and indeed the religious freedom
controversy was sparked by the Christian fraternity Beta Upsilon Chi’s (BYX)
decision to expel a gay member, as I describe in the next section.
At the same time as it is home to a variety of conservative organizations,
Vanderbilt as an institution has shown commitment to LGBTQ rights: the uni-
versity includes sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression in its
nondiscrimination policy; supports several LGBTQ student, staff, and faculty
groups; and offers a range of benefits to LGBTQ employees. The university also
funds an Office of LGBTQI Life housed in a free-standing, two-story building on
campus. As such, Vanderbilt represents a site where an institution’s commitment to
LGBTQ rights clashed with the viewpoints of many of its conservative students.
To study the religious freedom movement, I adopted an observer role on
Vanderbilt’s campus, attending a four-hour town hall facilitated by administra-
tors on January 31, 2012; a protest and a tabling event by supporters of the
religious freedom movement on February 10, 2012, and April 11, 2012; and an
event organized by Soulforce for supporters of the LGBTQ community on March
14, 2012. I also closely monitored campus discourse and local and national news
coverage about the movement throughout the 2010 to 2012 period.
To record insights about events on campus, I usually wrote initial field notes as
events were occurring. The town hall and Soulforce events, for example, were
held in classrooms with desks, making it easy to record notes in an inconspicuous
manner. In the case of events held outdoors, I recorded field notes immediately
upon returning to an office. I coded field notes by hand, with the goal of pro-
ducing summaries of basic descriptive information (such as, at the town hall, how
many people spoke, the organizational affiliations of the people who spoke, how
many were supportive of Vanderbilt’s policy, and how many were opposed to
Vanderbilt’s policy) and identifying recurring analytic themes, especially themes
relevant to the ways conservative Christian groups were involved in the move-
ment and the outcomes of the religious freedom movement.
I supplemented insights from field notes with information from media coverage
and movement websites. At the time of the movement, Vanderbilt was home to
several student newspapers, from its main paper The Vanderbilt Hustler to a satire
newspaper known as The Slant, a progressive newspaper known as Orbis, and a
conservative and libertarian newspaper known as The Vanderbilt Torch. Thus, I
collected physical newspapers produced during this time period, read all 60 articles
relevant to the religious freedom movement, and coded these articles with an eye
toward identifying information relevant to understanding the religious freedom
movement at Vanderbilt. Next, using LexisNexis, I identified news stories published
about “Vanderbilt University” accompanied with the search terms “nondiscrimi-

nation,” “sexual orientation,” or “religious freedom” from November 2010 through
December 2012; these searches uncovered 107 unique stories appearing in outlets
ranging from the Associated Press to USA Today to The Tennessean to NPR to
CNN to Fox News. I read each story, similarly coded them for information relevant
to the activities of and outcomes of the religious freedom movement, and incor-
porate relevant information or quotes. Finally, I read, watched, and analyzed all
content from the movement’s website, VanderbiltReligiousFreedom.com, including
12 videos it had uploaded to YouTube.
Ethnographic observations, media coverage, and content produced by the
movement each provided their own unique insights but were also useful for
purposes of triangulation. Specifically, because the events I observed were public,
they were generally well-covered by media outlets and reacted to on the website
of the movement itself, allowing me to verify that others made similar observa-
tions about the events. YouTube videos were especially valuable, allowing me to
provide exact quotes from events such as the town hall that I had summarized in
my field notes. I draw on such data in the following sections, which detail the
emergence, rise, and decline of the religious freedom movement at Vanderbilt.
BEGINNING OF THE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

CONTROVERSY AT VANDERBILT
In April 2010, the Christian fraternity BYX (pronounced “Bucks”) at Vanderbilt
expelled a gay member, citing its Code of Conduct, which stated that “sex is a gift of
God to be enjoyed only inside the covenant of marriage between a man and a
woman. Therefore, we will not condone such activity as homosexuality…” (Furlow,
2010, p. 1). The Vanderbilt Hustler broke news of the episode in November 2010 (see
timeline of events in Table 1), relaying the anonymous gay member’s account of his
expulsion:
“[The chapter president, Greg Wigger] said that someone had approached the officer corps and
suggested that I might be struggling with homosexuality. He would not tell me who told the
officer corps, or when, or on what basis my sexuality had come into question, but said that
the entire officer corps had been apprised of this person’s suspicion,” the 2010 alumnus told the
Hustler.
According to the 2010 alumnus, he told Wigger that he was gay. At that point, Wigger asked
the 2010 alumnus what he meant by “gay.”
“(Wigger asked if I) was … sexually active or just attracted to men? I told him that I was not
sexually active,” the 2010 alumnus told the Hustler. “He insisted that this information would
stay between the two of us. Ten days later Greg told me that I had been deactivated”…
The former member… confirmed to the Hustler that he was given the option by fraternity
president Wigger to leave the fraternity or face expulsion after having a discussion with Wigger
about his sexual orientation (Furlow, 2010, p. 1).
As news of BYX’s actions surfaced, Vanderbilt announced it would be

reviewing the constitutions of all student organizations to ensure their compliance
with the university’s nondiscrimination policy. Citing the 2010 decision Christian
Table 1. Timeline of Events.

Date Event
April 18, 2010 Beta Upsilon Chi (BYX) leader questions member about
his sexual orientation; BYX expels member 10 days later
(Furlow, 2010).
November 5, 2010 The Vanderbilt Hustler publishes its first story about the
expulsion of a gay student from BYX (Furlow, 2010).
Late November and December 2010 Vanderbilt University announces receipt of official
discrimination complaint and its intent to review
nondiscrimination policies in student groups’ constitutions
(Blaine, 2011b).
September 27, 2011 Vanderbilt University officially places four student
organizations on probation for not complying with the
university’s nondiscrimination policy (Blaine, 2011b).
January 31, 2012 Vanderbilt University holds town hall articulating its “all-
comers policy” (Blaine, 2012d).
April 9, 2012 Eleven student organizations announce they will not
comply with university’s “all-comers” policy, leading to
their departure from campus (Blaine, 2012b).
May 2, 2012 Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam announces his veto of
HB 3576/SB 3597, which would have penalized Vanderbilt
University for its “all comers” policy (Hale, 2012).
Legal Society v. Martinez, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that universities
could require Christian student organizations to be open to all students regardless
of characteristics such as sexual orientation (Russo & Thro, 2011), Vanderbilt
identified four Christian organizations that were in violation of the university’s
policy (BYX, Christian Legal Society, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and
Graduate Christian Fellowship) and placed them on provisional status, requiring
that they alter their policies or else no longer be recognized as registered student
organizations (Blaine, 2011b; Farmer, 2012).
Noncompliance with university policies regarding sexual orientation was
certainly one basis on which Vanderbilt placed organizations on probation. BYX,
for example, pushed back strongly against the idea it could not hold members to
the organization’s Code of Conduct, which prohibited homosexuality. Former
president Brent Bonetti told CNN, “What really is on the line is the integrity of
our organization” (Merica, 2012, para. 3).
In addition, Vanderbilt found fault with requirements by the Christian Legal
Society, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and Graduate Christian Fellowship that
their leaders and/or members must be Christians (Alexandrou, 2012). The rationale
for placing these Christian organizations under new scrutiny was twofold. First,
requirements that students must be Christian could be a backdoor means for
organizations to discriminate against potential LGBTQ members, since some
organizations might consider same-sex relationships (for example) to go against
Christian teachings. The university was keenly aware of events that were occurring
at other universities, including the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, which
allowed a Christian a capella group to expel a gay member on the basis of

the organization’s stated religious beliefs (Blaine, 2011b). Second, even if such
requirements that leaders be Christians were not intended to discriminate against
sexual minority students, the school argued that such requirements still constituted
discrimination on the basis of religion.
Vanderbilt’s actions infuriated many Christian student organizations. For
example, the faculty advisor to the Christian Legal Society, Carol Swain – a
conservative African-American law professor who was a frequent commentator
in right-wing media – told Fox News (2011, para. 11), “It seems reasonable to
require that leaders share the beliefs of the organizations that they seek to lead….
I see it as part of a larger attack on religious freedom that’s taking place across
the country – particularly when it comes to conservative groups.”
MOBILIZING FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

AT VANDERBILT
Following Vanderbilt’s decision to place four Christian organizations on pro-
bation, conservative Christian student groups played a key role in an emerging
religious freedom movement at Vanderbilt, which was active from the fall of 2010
through the spring of 2012. If one evaluated only the ability of student groups to
mobilize indigenous resources (in this case, resources from conservative Christian
communities), as well as facilitate cognitive liberation on the part of their par-
ticipants, one might come away with an optimistic view of the potential for the
religious freedom movement to effect policy changes at Vanderbilt.
One important task that conservative Christian student groups at Vanderbilt
seemed to fulfill was convincing their fellow conservative Christian students that an
important problem existed on campus and that it was necessary to mobilize to
address that problem – i.e., they facilitated people’s cognitive liberation (McAdam,
1982). Specifically, when Vanderbilt’s decision to sanction BYX came to light,
opponents utilized religious language and symbols to frame their central problem
not as an opposition to gay rights but as a defense of religious freedom. Thus, in
rapid fashion, the movement’s central demand shifted from allowing student
organizations to discriminate against sexual minorities to protecting the ability of
organizations to consider students’ religious affiliation in their membership and
leadership decisions (even if such a demand would still provide organizations with a
way to discriminate against sexual minorities). This religious freedom framing has
been adopted by similar anti-LGBTQ religious movements in the United States
(e.g., Kazyak et al., 2018) and other countries (e.g., Poulos, 2019); as Poulos (2019,
p. 10) describes, the increasing use of the “religious freedom” in anti-LGBTQ
movements marks a “shift from religious freedom being about the right to be free
from discrimination because of one’s religion, to being about the ‘right’ to
discriminate against others in the name of one’s religion” (emphases in original).
Related to the strategic framing of this issue, religious language and symbols
permeated the movement’s messaging and tactics. The movement called itself
“Restore Religious Freedom at Vanderbilt”; the movement placed the image of a
dove carrying an olive branch, a Christian symbol for peace, on yard signs found
outside some buildings surrounding Vanderbilt’s campus; and movement sup-
porters referenced their faith on signs they held up at protests (e.g., “My Faith 5
My Life”) (field notes). Groups also relied on the ritual of prayer in many of their
actions. For example, Vanderbilt Catholic organized daily noon prayers in front of
Vanderbilt’s administrative building in the fall of 2011 (Blaine, 2011b). Not all
people accepted the religious freedom framing. For example, some supporters
admitted that their opposition to Vanderbilt’s actions was because of their oppo-
sition to LGBTQ rights, with one letter to the editor of the Vanderbilt Hustler
being titled “Christians Can’t Be Gay” (Poythress, 2009). In addition, Vanderbilt’s
progressive newspaper Orbis ran a cover story for its February 2012 issue entitled
“Is This What Religious Groups Are Afraid Of?” featuring the image of a person
spray-painting a cross with rainbow colors. Nevertheless, the “religious freedom”
frame circulated widely on campus.
Conservative Christian groups also shaped the movement’s ability to emerge
and sustain protest actions. Further applying McAdam’s (1982) political process
model, it is clear that Christian groups provided a number of key resources for the
movement, beginning with leaders. For example, at the town hall, Baptist and
Presbyterian ministers associated with religious student organizations both stated
that commitment to the Christian faith was a requirement for them to advise
religious student organizations and that their organizations would not be able to
abide by Vanderbilt’s stance (field notes). Chaplains also lent their voices to an
aggressive media campaign; for example, Father John Sims Baker, Chaplain of
Vanderbilt Catholic, told CNN: “I think this rule does touch on this much wider
religious freedom debate going on in our country. I do think the religious groups at
Vanderbilt are being singled out in a way that other groups are not” (Merica, 2012,
para. 12). Even some national faith leaders weighed into the controversy in support
of the religious freedom movement. In the most high-profile example, leaders of the
National Association of Evangelicals, Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious
Liberty Commission, and United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote a
letter to Vanderbilt, stating, “…Vanderbilt University has abandoned its long-
standing tradition of religious tolerance. Compelling religious student groups to
forfeit their ability to have leaders who share the groups’ religious beliefs is anti-
thetical to religious liberty” (Anderson, Land, & Picarello, 2011, para. 1).
It is also quite clear that the vast majority of student leaders and student foot
soldiers mobilized by the movement were conservative Christians (Blaine, 2011a).
Near the beginning of the town hall, a member of the Christian Legal Society
asked all those who were opposed to Vanderbilt’s policy to stand. From my
vantage point, it appeared that at least two-thirds of the people in the 203-seat
room stood in opposition to the policy, and most of these people wore white shirts,
a color that symbolizes holiness in Christianity (field notes). Of the 56 people who
asked questions or posed comments at the town hall, only four expressed support
for the policy, three of whom self-identified as gay men (field notes). About 52
people spoke in opposition or skepticism, including one faculty member who
advised a student organization, two aforementioned chaplains who advised student
organizations, one employee of Vanderbilt’s call center (who reported on the many
calls he received from people opposed to Vanderbilt’s policy), three students who
were not members of religious student organizations, and 11 students who did not
clearly state whether they were members of religious student organizations (but
may have been) (field notes). Otherwise, 34 speakers clearly stated that they were
members of Christian student organizations, including Asian American Christian
Fellowship, BYX, Baptist Collegiate Ministries, Christian Legal Society, Cru,
Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Graduate Christian Fellowship, Medical Chris-
tian Fellowship, and Navigators (field notes).
In addition to providing leaders, supporters, and foot soldiers, conservative
Christian groups provided money to the movement, funding television advertise-
ments and a website. Specifically, the organization Americans United for Freedom,
led by conservative Christian activist Alan Keyes (who has described homosexu-
ality as “selfish hedonism” and has disowned his lesbian daughter [Savage, 2005,
para. 3]), ran advertisements on the Fox network in Nashville, asking, “Why is
Vanderbilt University forcing student groups to abandon their beliefs—calling
bigoted those who want their leaders to subscribe to their principles?” and advising
alumni not to donate “another dime until Vanderbilt respects religious freedom”
(Blaine, 2012a, p. 2). Americans United for Freedom is listed as the chief funder of
VanderbiltReligiousFreedom.com.
The most stunning example of outside donors’ largesse is the most difficult to
attribute to a Christian person or organization specifically. Specifically, a “con-
cerned individual” who has remained anonymous donated $32,000 for the
movement to purchase 4,000 MP3 players and headphones that were handed out
to people on campus in April 2012 (Blaine, 2012c, p. 1). I was the recipient of one
of these MP3 players. Specifically, walking by Vanderbilt’s central library one
day, I spotted several students standing around boxes full of MP3 players. One of
the students approached me and handed me an MP3 player without explanation.
When I asked why he was giving me an MP3 player, the student explained that it
was pre-loaded with a short (6-minute) video explaining the religious freedom
cause and containing endorsements from students, professors, and alumni. I was
told to take the MP3 player, watch the video, and then, if I wanted to, delete the
video and load the MP3 player with my own music (field notes). The MP3 players
seemed to represent an attempt to sway Vanderbilt student opinion toward the
religious freedom movement’s side. Although the identity of the MP3 player
donor remains unknown, it is difficult to imagine that donor is not religious, as
movement donors who have been identified by media outlets have identified as
Christians (Farmer, 2012).
A final type of resource that Christian groups provided the religious freedom
movement was meeting spaces. Groups such as Vanderbilt Catholic maintained
buildings near the campus and used those spaces to strategize (Blaine, 2012b). In
addition, on April 11, 2012, students from nearly one dozen organizations met in
the chapel on Vanderbilt’s campus for a prayer service related to Vanderbilt’s
nondiscrimination policy (Blaine, 2012b). According to The Vanderbilt Hustler,
the event drew more than 100 students (Blaine, 2012b). Although I did not
directly observe these internal events, it is plausible that these religious spaces, as
autonomous spaces possessed by the religious community, further facilitated
cognitive liberation, in that potential participants not only came to believe that
injustices were occurring and gained a sense of their efficacy (McAdam, 1982).
It should be noted that not all people of faith agreed with the religious freedom
movement at Vanderbilt. The president of Vanderbilt’s Muslim Students Associ-
ation, for example, told The Christian Post that the organization had “not had any
issues with this policy” (Gryboski, 2012, para. 9). Furthermore, the organization
Soulforce, which represents pro-LGBTQ people of faith, visited Vanderbilt on one
of its Equality Rides (modeled after the civil rights-era Freedom Rides) in response
to the religious freedom controversy in March 2012. However, this classroom event
attracted relatively few Vanderbilt students and did not inspire pro-LGBTQ pro-
tests at Vanderbilt (field notes). The loudest voices in the campus debate were
conservative Christians who supported the religious freedom movement.
OUTCOMES OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

MOBILIZATION AT VANDERBILT
If one examines only the ability of the religious freedom movement to mobilize
indigenous resources and facilitate cognitive liberation on the part of their par-
ticipants, one might come away suspecting the religious freedom movement at
Vanderbilt was in a strong position to bring about change. Yet, a further analysis of
the religious freedom movement at Vanderbilt shows that religious resources were
insufficient to lead the movement to victory; furthermore, many Christian groups
were themselves negatively impacted by their involvement in the movement.
In the end, the movement failed to achieve its stated goals. In the fall of 2011,
the university indicated it may be willing to reverse course and allow religious
organizations to enforce faith requirements for their leaders. Specifically, in a
statement to The Vanderbilt Hustler, the Associate Dean of Students acknowl-
edged, “People have come back to us and said ‘what do you mean? This is faith
based. This is our values. If we change that, we are not who we are’ and what we’ve
done is we’ve listened. We are looking at what all the issues are to make a decision”
(Blaine, 2011b, p. 2). However, at a January 2012 town hall, Vanderbilt’s Provost
Richard McCarty, a white man who was himself associated with Vanderbilt
Catholic, announced that Vanderbilt would not back off its demands that religious
organizations be welcoming to all students regardless of sexual orientation or
religious beliefs, and he articulated a new understanding of Vanderbilt’s policy as
an “all-comers policy”:
All student groups at Vanderbilt who wish to become a registered student organization, or RSO,
must complete an application process through the Office of the Dean of Students. To qualify for
this status, the leader and the advisor of the group must certify each year that the group complies
with the university’s nondiscrimination policy… We also require each group to submit its
constitution or bylaws or both for annual review in order to stand for RSO status. The
university’s policy… is an all-comers policy, or an open to all policy. Any university student in
good standing must be eligible for membership in any RSO that he or she has a sincere interest in.
Students may not be excluded from an RSO based on status—and we can include such issues as
race, nationality, or sexual orientation—nor may they be excluded based on belief. When it comes
to leadership, the same basic principle must apply… (Declarationist, 2012).
Vanderbilt’s General Counsel David Williams, an African-American man,

similarly emphasized the need for an all-comers policy and invoked Vanderbilt’s
history of expelling civil rights activist James Lawson in 1960 as a cautionary tale
of what can happen if such a policy is not followed.
Students pushed back on the policy during the remainder of the town hall,
including by pointing out a perceived double standard in allowing Greek orga-
nizations to continue operating even though they discriminate on the basis of sex.
The most contentious moment came when Jordan Rodgers, a white student and
prominent member of Vanderbilt’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) – a
national organization that, like BYX, maintains a sexual purity statement barring
leaders from engaging in “any homosexual act” (Jacobson, 2004, p. 249) – spoke
against the policy. Rodgers would later catapult to nationwide fame when he won
season 12 of ABC’s The Bachelorette, but even then he enjoyed celebrity status on
campus as quarterback of Vanderbilt’s football team and as brother of Green
Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers. He stated:
The fact is that FCA – as a national organization, its leaders need to affirm their belief in Jesus
Christ as their savior, and this affirmation is so that they can teach others… We’re fine – we
love when everyone comes, as we’ve said before, we have no discrimination for anybody who
walk[s] through our doors – but … restricting who is able to be a leader completely undermines
the mission and our vision and the direction of every single one of these organizations…
(Declarationist, 2012, emphasis added).
Rodgers then engaged in a heated back-and-forth with Williams, calling the

university’s policy a “façade” (field notes). Eventually Rodgers withdrew from the
exchange and stormed out of the room. Another member of the audience stood up,
pointed at Williams, and shouted “Shame on You!”, and he and roughly 1/3 of the
audience exited the room behind Rodgers (field notes).
That same spring, Vanderbilt revised its official nondiscrimination policy to
outline its expectations for religious groups. The nondiscrimination policy now
states that Vanderbilt expects that “religious groups on campus will conduct their
affairs in such a manner that no one will be intimidated or coerced and that
participants in any group may freely express their beliefs and values…” (Vanderbilt
University, 2018a, ch. 1). Vanderbilt also added a nondiscrimination policy FAQ,
where it acknowledged that the all-comers spirit of the nondiscrimination policy
may have not been clear in the initial policy and stated that the nondiscrimination
policy had not been “meant to be, and is not, limited to…enumerated grounds”
(Vanderbilt University, 2018b, para. 1).
After failing to convince Vanderbilt’s administrators to change their position –
and suffering the blow of Vanderbilt’s position becoming codified in the student
handbook – movement leaders then pushed members of the Tennessee state
legislature to pass legislation that would require Vanderbilt to “exempt religious
organizations from its all-comers policy,” as well as prohibit “public universities in
the state from adopting the same ‘all-comers’ rules” (Weber, 2012, para. 4). Ten-
nessee’s House of Representatives passed the bill (House Bill 3576) in a 61–22 vote,
and Tennessee’s Senate similarly passed the bill in a 19–12 vote (Weber, 2012).
However, Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Haslam vetoed the bill in his first
veto since taking office, stating, “Although I disagree with Vanderbilt’s policy, as
someone who strongly believes in limited government, I think it is inappropriate
for government to mandate the policies of a private institution” (Hale, 2012,
para. 3). Although only a simple majority vote by legislators is required to overturn
vetoes in Tennessee, the legislative session had ended by the time Haslam vetoed
the bill, so the veto stuck. At that point, the movement effectively died.
Although the movement failed to achieve its stated goals, this is not to say that
the religious freedom movement was without effects. In particular, many Christian
groups would suffer negative consequences because of their involvement in the
movement. One type of negative effect – negative not in any value-laden sense, but
in light of the movement’s goals – was the revised nondiscrimination statement.
After movement activists pushed Vanderbilt to allow religious student organiza-
tions to consider religious beliefs in their membership and leadership decisions,
Vanderbilt administrators instead codified their initial ruling through the student
handbook, at least in theory ensuring their interpretation of the nondiscrimination
policy would continue even under later administrations.
The failure of the religious freedom movement also resulted in new fractures and
schisms within the Christian faith community at Vanderbilt. About 11 student
organizations – “Asian American Christian Fellowship, Fellowship of Christian
Athletes, Cru, Medical Christian Fellowship, Navigators, Graduate Christian
Fellowship, Bridges International, Lutheran Student Fellowship, Every Nation
Ministries, Beta Upsilon Chi [BYX], and Christian Legal Society” (Blaine, 2012b,
p. 1, para. 1) – decided to leave the campus altogether, a major fracturing of the
Christian campus faith community. Those organizations that left the campus could
no longer use Vanderbilt’s name, participate in new student orientation, hold events
on campus (apart from the Divinity School’s chapel), or have access to school
financial accounts (Smietana, 2012). Those Christian student organizations that (at
least initially) remained on campus and thus complied with Vanderbilt’s policy came
under fire from leaders of the organizations that left. For example, USA Today
reported that “the divided response has prompted at least one public tongue-lashing.
Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain… [alleged] that the Baptist Collegiate Ministry
and the Reformed University Fellowship betrayed their faith by complying with the
university” (Smietana, 2012, para. 5). The report quoted Swain seemingly ques-
tioning whether such organizations were actually Christian: “It was a great disap-
pointment that these large groups did not stand with us. To be a Christian group, you
have to affirm a belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savor” (Smietana, 2012, para. 7).
Not only the organizations that left the campus but also the organizations that
remained saw their reputations sullied through association with a seemingly
anti-gay cause. Although some Christian organizations on campus had opposed
Vanderbilt’s requirement that they accept sexual minorities, other religious orga-
nizations insisted they opposed only Vanderbilt’s requirement that they accept
members regardless of belief, leading some organizations to lament they were being
lumped in with the anti-gay cause (see, e.g., Smietana, 2012). Still, critics of the
movement would question even these organizations’ motives until the end: as
previously noted, the Orbis accused religious student organizations of anti-gay
bias. Critics were also featured in national media reports, with one Vanderbilt
student leader commenting to NPR, “…obviously they can’t openly say, ‘Oh yeah,
the reason we’re so angry is because…we don’t want gay people in our organi-
zation… But you’ll hear [that] from other people like me” (Farmer, 2012, para. 11).
Finally, involvement in the religious freedom movement had biographical
consequences for its participants, damaging their reputations. Some of the damage
seemed short-lived: for example, OutSports.com, a website covering LGBTQ issues
in sports, published a story about Jordan Rodgers’ activism on this issue (Buzinski,
2012), directly accusing him of anti-gay animus. However, as Rodgers pursued an
NFL career, he clarified to the media that he would not have an issue with a gay or
bisexual teammate (Zeigler, 2013), and the issue did not seem to follow him as he
later pursued his reality television career. For others, damage was longer lasting. In
2015, over 2,000 people signed a petition calling on Vanderbilt to suspend Carol
Swain from the university; the petition cited her activism against and incendiary
remarks toward LGBTQ and Muslim populations (Vanderbilt Students, 2015). In
response, Vanderbilt’s Chancellor issued a statement stating that, at the same time
as Vanderbilt strives to be welcoming toward all people, it is also committed to
“freedom of speech and academic freedom” and thus would not take action against
Swain (Zeppos, 2015, para. 3). Still, in 2017, Swain announced her early retirement
from Vanderbilt, stating that although she will miss her students, “I will not miss
what American universities have allowed themselves to become” (Tamburin, 2017,
para. 8). The next year, Swain announced her candidacy for a special election race
to select the new mayor of Nashville, but her past comments on issues such as
LGBTQ rights (“If we must live side-by-side with gay couples in a culture with a
strong crusading homosexual agenda, our only hope is to strengthen ourselves
spiritually and intellectually for the battle that awaits us”) caused controversy early
on (Garrison, 2018a, para. 28). She finished in 2nd place with 23% of the vote
(Garrison, 2018b). In 2019, Swain once again ran to become mayor of Nashville,
but that time she attracted a slightly lower percent (22%) of the overall vote and
failed to make a run-off election (Jeong, 2019). Overall, then, the religious freedom
movement not only failed but also had negative consequences for some organi-
zations and participants.
EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURES AND

OUTCOMES OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM MOBILIZATION
AT VANDERBILT
The chapter has shown that the religious freedom movement at Vanderbilt ulti-
mately failed to change campus policies, and faith communities themselves suf-
fered negative consequences as a result of their participation. But why? In this
section, I examine the characteristics of Vanderbilt University that contributed to
the failure of the religious freedom movement; these insights, in turn, contribute
to broader theory on the conditions under which social movements targeting
colleges or universities are likely to meet with success or failure.
As noted, McAdam (1982) has argued that social movements not only emerge
but also can succeed when political (or other structural) opportunities exist,
indigenous resources are available to challengers, and potential participants

experience cognitive liberation. The evidence in this chapter suggests that the
religious freedom movement was highly successful at mobilizing resources
possessed by the Christian faith community and in convincing hundreds of stu-
dents involved in Christian student organizations of the justice of their cause and
of the need to participate in the movement. One could even argue that the reli-
gious freedom mobilized within a favorable political opportunity structure, given
the conservative nature of Tennessee’s legislature and given Vanderbilt’s location
in the Bible Belt. However, the religious freedom movement still met with failure,
and I argue that this is because the educational opportunity structure at Van-
derbilt was not conducive to the changes demanded by the religious freedom
movement. Below, I consider four facets of Vanderbilt as an institution that
might have blocked opportunities for change – Vanderbilt is simultaneously a(n)
private, elite, wealthy, and secular institution – and I assess how these charac-
teristics contributed to the movement’s failure.
First, Vanderbilt is a private institution. As discussed, private institutions have
more latitude than public institutions to constrain or censor speech and activities
by groups with whom they disagree. Although it is true that, in this case, Tennessee
legislators did pass a bill opposing the all-comers policy, Tennessee’s Governor
specifically referenced Vanderbilt’s status as a private university in his decision to
veto the bill (Hale, 2012). Status as a private institution can certainly not be
considered sufficient for Vanderbilt’s rejection of the religious freedom movement’s
demands: the existence of many private religious universities that do not allow
openly gay students and thus certainly allow student organizations to discriminate
against LGBTQ students (Coley, 2018b) would refute this possibility. However, it
is possible that Vanderbilt’s status as a private university may have been necessary
in conjunction with other characteristics to explain Vanderbilt’s all-comers policy.
Second, Vanderbilt is a secular institution. Although, in general, one might
expect secular universities to be more open environments for campus activists, in this
case, the religious identity of the campus activists clearly clashed with Vanderbilt’s
secular identity. Importantly, Vanderbilt’s lack of affiliation with a religious
denomination likely shielded it from backlash by any affiliated religious groups who
might otherwise have shifted the opinion of Vanderbilt’s leaders. Vanderbilt’s
secular status cannot be considered sufficient for explaining the school’s rejection of
the religious freedom movement’s demands, as other secular universities like UNC-
Chapel Hill have carved out religious freedom exceptions to their nondiscrimination
policies (Blaine, 2011b). However, it may have also been part of a broader set of
necessary conditions to explain Vanderbilt’s all-comers policy.
Third, Vanderbilt is an elite institution: specifically, US News ranked Van-
derbilt as the 17th top national university at the time of the movement (Anderson,
2014). The literature on institutional isomorphism (e.g., DiMaggio & Powell,
1983; Rojas, 2006) suggests that Vanderbilt would have been considering how
other elite institutions were handling religious freedom issues at that time.
Contemporaneous campus newspaper reports did discuss how other elite insti-
tutions were responding to religious freedom demands (e.g., Blaine, 2011b;
Lindsay, 2012). For example, in February 2012, The Vanderbilt Hustler printed
an Associated Press story about religious freedom controversies across US col-

leges and universities (Lindsay, 2012). The story noted that “In the past 18
months, at least 41 public and private schools have reviewed the practices of
Christian ministries whose policies require their leaders to have the same faith”
and specifically referenced an ongoing debate that had caused embarrassment for
UNC-Chapel Hill (Lindsay, 2012, p. 2), which at the time was ranked #30 in the
nation (Anderson, 2014). Another report in The Vanderbilt Hustler also high-
lighted Tufts University’s decision to ban an evangelical Christian group that had
maintained faith requirements for its leaders (Bowling, 2012); at the time, Tufts
was the #28 top national university (Anderson, 2014). In addition, in the January
2012 town hall, administrators referenced the fact that some peer institutions
were setting similar all-comers policies. For example, administrators referenced
the all-comers policy set by the University of California Hastings College of the
Law, a policy that had been the subject of the 2010 US Supreme Court decision
affirming the constitutionality of all-comers policies (Christian Legal Society v.
Martinez). As with the newspaper reports, Vanderbilt’s Provost also referenced
the embarrassment that UNC-Chapel Hill suffered because of a Christian a
capella group expelling a gay member (field notes). Altogether, then, peer insti-
tutions represented an important influence on Vanderbilt administrators. Of
course, a small number of highly ranked universities have shown less commit-
ment to LGBTQ rights and/or have articulated religious freedom policies. For
example, the University of Notre Dame, although tied with Vanderbilt in US
News’ 2012 university rankings (Anderson, 2014), had neither an inclusive
nondiscrimination policy nor an officially approved LGBTQ student group at the
time of the religious freedom movement at Vanderbilt. Thus, status as an elite
university should similarly not be considered sufficient for Vanderbilt’s rejection
of the religious freedom movement’s demands. However, it is again possible that
this characteristic could be necessary in combination with other factors for
commitment to the all-comers policy.
Finally, Vanderbilt is a wealthy institution. In 2011, when the movement was
active, Vanderbilt maintained an endowment of over $3 billion, giving it the 22nd
largest endowment in the United States and the largest endowment of any college
or university in Tennessee (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012).
Because Vanderbilt possesses such wealth, it was able to weather some alumni
donors’ threats to withhold financial contributions, threats that could otherwise
change the opinion of those setting university policies. Furthermore, although
media reports did not provide details of communications between Vanderbilt’s
Chancellor and Tennessee’s Governor, it is possible that Vanderbilt’s status as an
economic heavyweight in the region gave it some leverage in the state capitol. The
Center for Responsive Politics (2012) has documented that the amount of money
that Vanderbilt University spent on lobbying began to accelerate around this
time; in 2011, the university employed three lobbyists and spent $80,000 on
lobbying, and by 2012, the university employed four lobbyists and spent $250,000
on lobbying. Again, some other universities with similarly sized endowments (like
UNC-Chapel Hill, ranked 30th in endowment, and the University of Notre
Dame, ranked 10th in endowment) have been more accommodating to religious
freedom claims (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). Thus, Vander-
bilt’s wealth should similarly not be considered sufficient for rejection of the
religious freedom movement’s demands, but it may have combined with other
necessary factors to produce this policy stance.
Overall, although none of the aforementioned characteristics – status as a pri-
vate, elite, wealthy, or secular institution – could have on their own been sufficient
to lead to Vanderbilt’s rejection of the religious freedom movement’s demands, it is
likely that the combination of these four factors led to Vanderbilt’s commitment to
this policy. Indeed, none of the prominent cases of institutions that have responded
favorably to conservative Christian groups’ religious freedom claims exhibit all
four characteristics (e.g., religious colleges and universities such as the University
of Notre Dame are not secular and may sometimes lack others of these charac-
teristics; UNC-Chapel Hill, despite being relatively elite, wealthy, and secular, is
not a private university). Insofar as the failure of the religious freedom movement
resulted in some of the negative unintended consequences identified here (e.g.,
codified policies that the movement opposes, resulting fractures and strains within
faith communities, damaged reputations), Vanderbilt’s opportunity structure also
provides an explanation for negative impacts on the conservative Christian groups
that were involved in that movement. Future research benefiting from comparative
research designs can formally assess such possibilities through methods such as
qualitative comparative analysis, which can assess the sufficient or conjunctural
necessary conditions that comprise one or more pathways to outcomes of interest
(Ragin, 1987).
CONCLUSION
Colleges and universities are common sites and targets of social movements
(McCarthy & McPhail, 2006; Van Dyke, 1998), yet most scholarship on campus-
based movements focuses on issues of mobilization rather than outcomes; further-
more, relatively few studies consider the specific characteristics of colleges and
universities that affect the outcomes of campus-based movements (but see Lemonik
Arthur, 2011). Under what conditions are campus-based movements targeting
colleges or universities likely to meet with success or failure? In his political process
theory, McAdam (1982) suggests that social movements targeting the state can
succeed when political opportunities exist, indigenous resources are available to
challengers, and potential participants experience cognitive liberation. I have argued
that McAdam’s (1982) political process theory can be adapted to a campus context,
particularly if scholars pay close attention to unique characteristics of what I have
called educational opportunity structures, in addition to movements’ access to
indigenous resources and capacity to bring about cognitive liberation. Although the
religious freedom movement was highly successful at mobilizing resources possessed
by Christian groups at Vanderbilt and in convincing hundreds of students involved
in Christian student organizations of the justice of their cause and of the need to
participate in the movement, specific characteristics comprising the educational
opportunity structure at Vanderbilt – particularly, its combined status as a private,
secular, elite, and wealthy university – likely explain why the religious freedom
movement failed. Because Vanderbilt was under no legal or constitutional obliga-
tion to accommodate religious freedom claims (given its private status), had no
religious affiliation that made it sympathetic to religious freedom claims (given its
secular status), belonged to a tier of elite universities that mostly endorsed LGBTQ
rights, and had a large enough endowment to allow it resist pro-religious freedom
donor campaigns, it ultimately rejected the demands of the religious freedom
movement.
The chapter thus highlights the role of educational opportunity structures in
shaping the prospects for campus activism. Future research might similarly
consider the role of educational opportunity structures in campus activism and
thus extend this study’s insights in several ways. First, future research might draw
on comparative data to systematically test this chapter’s theory that educational
opportunity structures affect the success of religious freedom movements at a
wider range of colleges and universities. Second, future research could assess the
role of educational opportunity structures in shaping outcomes of other types of
campus movements beyond religious freedom movements. Third, future research
might identify additional dimensions of educational opportunity structures that
matter for outcomes of campus movements. Finally, subsequent research could
employ the concept of educational opportunity structures to address other
theoretical questions of interest to social movement scholars, such as questions
about the emergence or form of campus activism.
The chapter contributes to other literatures beyond campus activism, including
literature on religion and social movements. Scholars of religion and social move-
ments have certainly documented that religious groups have played key roles in
many social movements in the United States (see, e.g., Braunstein, Fuist, &
Williams, 2017), and this chapter confirms findings that religious groups can play
key roles in movements for social change. However, the chapter innovates in this
literature by also revealing the impacts of the religious freedom movement on the
Christian groups that participated in it, a type of question rarely addressed in
literature on religion and social movements (see also Fetner, 2008). In this case,
Vanderbilt’s decision to formally revise its nondiscrimination policy after Christian
organizations questioned Vanderbilt’s interpretation of it meant that a contested
policy was now codified. Furthermore, the Christian faith community at Vanderbilt
itself suffered fractures and strains, with eleven faith organizations leaving the
campus and with many faith organizations newly angry at each other. Finally, many
Christian organizations and leaders at Vanderbilt saw their reputations damaged
because of association with a seemingly anti-gay cause. Future research might
consider the degree to which religious communities are impacted by involvement in
other types of movements.
Finally, this study also speaks to the growing literature on “religious freedom”
issues in the United States. Religious (and especially conservative Christian) groups
are actively mobilizing alongside politically conservative groups in the United
States to promote religious exemptions to nondiscrimination policies and laws.
Yet, research on religious freedom issues tends to focus on public opinion (e.g.,
Kazyak et al., 2018), policy passage (e.g., Bentele, Sager, Soule, & Adler, 2014),
monitoring by bureaucrats (e.g., Poulos, 2019), and legal disputes (e.g., Mayrl,
2018) rather than issues associated with social movement mobilization. In focusing
on an exemplary case of religious freedom mobilization, and in illustrating the roles
Christian groups played in that movement, the study provides insights into the
strategies of Christian groups involved in the religious freedom movement and
sheds light on challenges and risks that Christian groups may face as they mobilize
in support of religious freedom.
NOTES
1. Some research outside of sociology, particularly within educational studies, also
examines campus-based movements (see, e.g., Altbach, 1981; Barnhardt, 2014; Magolda &
Gross, 2009; Rhoads, 1998). Because the focus of my chapter is engaging the sociological
debates over campus-based movements, a full review of this literature remains outside the
scope of this chapter.
2. Note, however, that private colleges and universities that discriminate on the basis of
certain characteristics protected by state and federal laws, such as race, sex, or disability
status, risk losing federal funding (Coley, 2018b).
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EPILOGUE: UPDATES TO RESEARCH
IN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS,
CONFLICTS, AND CHANGE
Lisa Leitz
Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change has a distinguished

history of publishing innovative research on international wars, peace efforts,
protests, and other mechanisms for social change. I look forward to
upholding this tradition as its third editor. RSMCC offers a unique academic
bridge in which scholars in the nonviolence and social movement traditions
converge and their scholarship merges with conflict analysis and peace-
building research. By bringing together these interdisciplinary scholars,
RSMCC incubates novel and rich theoretical insights.
In an effort to expand the diverse pool of international scholars who read
and contribute to the series as both authors and readers, and to continue the
high quality of submissions while seeking to increase the number of volumes
we produce per year, I have established an Editorial Board for RSMCC.
Please join me in welcoming these scholars, and if you have an interest in
contributing to this work, consider joining our team. The inaugural RSMCC
Editorial Board members are:
Lisa Leitz, PhD

Editor-in-Chief
Delp-Wilkinson Endowed Chair in Peace Studies, Chapman University
Eitan Alimi, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Joel Busher, PhD
Associate Professor, Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations,
Coventry University
Darren Kew, PhD
Chair of the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and
Global Governance and Executive Director of the Center for Peace,
Democracy, and Development, University of Massachusetts Boston
201
202 EPILOGUE
Cécile Mouly, PhD

Professor and Coordinator of the Research Group in Peace and Conflict at
FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) Ecuador
Patrick Coy, PhD
Editor Emeritus
Professor, School of Peace and Conflict Studies, Kent State University
I finish this volume amidst the coronavirus pandemic, which has closed
borders and created social isolation, potentially deepening or creating
international conflicts and increasing ethnonationalism. Those hardest hit by
the effects of the virus are minority racial groups, the economically disad-
vantaged, and people with disabilities, highlighting the consequences of
various inequalities in many societies. At the same time, large and diverse
crowds, often with masked protestors, have taken to the streets around the
globe to demand racial justice. These movements offer examples of innova-
tive online protest tactics and demonstrate how dramatic social disruption
provides opportunities for making positive social change to enduring
injustices.
Given the calls to recognize the effects of race on minority scholars, and
the need for further research and theory on the impact of race on wars,
peacebuilding, and activism, I commit RSMCC to being part of the solution.
First, as stated in the Introduction, a section of Volume 46 is reserved for
analyses of race and racial justice movements. Second, I commit the series to
increasing the diversity of our authors, reviewers, and editorial board to
ensure that Black and other minority scholars are part of both the decision-
making and authorship of RSMCC’s future scholarship. Finally, like Greg
Maney, to whom Volume 43 was dedicated, I have a deep commitment to
examining how social movement scholarship can be better integrated with
ongoing movements for social justice and democracy. The Editorial Board is
considering proposals for broadening the series to achieve this work. Sub-
missions to future Volumes and proposals for topically focused Special Issues
can be sent to me at rsmcc@chapman.edu or leitz@chapman.edu.
INDEX
Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling theorizing educational opportunity

(ASW), 152 structures and outcomes of,
Academia, 129–130 179–182
Actor status, 107 Campus Crusade for Christ, 176
African National Congress (ANC), Campus-based movements, 176–177
125 Christianity, 187–188
Afrikaner anthropologists, 129–130 Civil conflict scholars, 67
Afrikaner minority rule, 125–126 Civil society, 50–51
Alliance erosion, 130–132 Civil war, 64–65
“Alt. labor” strategies, 42–43 Coalitional power, 46
America’s Foundation, 176 Code of Conduct, 185
American Federation of Labor Collective action frames, 27–28
(AFL), 40 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act
Anti-whaling, 5, 153–155 (CAAA), 131, 133
Apartheid regime, 120 Conflict, 64–65
allies, survival, and effects of Constitutional government in
illegitimacy, 127–136 industry, 41
end of apartheid, 132–136 Constructive engagement, 132–133
legitimacy, stability, and revolu- Contract strike, 42
tion, 121–123 Conventional strikes, 37–38
methods, 123–124 Crisis of legitimacy, 120
rise and fall of, 124–127 Critical race theorists, 97–98
Arab Spring, 11–15 Cultural imperialism, 151–152
aspect, 15–16
Arab Uprisings, 13, 17 Democracy, 74
Argentine dirty war, 99–105 Democratic ideology, 74
Associational power, 3, 44–45, 47 Democratization, 74–75
Authoritarian regimes, 15 Diagnostic framing, 27–28
Authoritarianism, 24–25 Dignity reclamation of loved ones,
25–27
Black Lives Matter (BLM), 1, 6 “Dirty war” in Argentina, 4
“Bombs, death, and ideology” Discursive opportunity structures,
approach, 100 147–148
British rule, 64 Dramatic outbursts in authoritarian
Brotherhood, 129–130 regimes, 13–16
Bycatch, 158 Dutch Reformed Church, 126,
129–130
Campus activism
past research and theory on, Ecological extinction, 153–154
177–178 Economic
203
204 INDEX
model, 40–41 process tracing method, 98–99

strikes, 37–38 Homosexual behavior, 181–182
Educational opportunity structures,
5–6, 177, 179–180, 192–195 Ideology, 67
Egyptian protestors, 27 Illegitimacy, 120
“Endangered community” frame, and alliance erosion, 130–132
160–161 allies, survival, and effects of,
Ethnic or religious movements, 71–73 127–136
Ethno-epistemic assemblage, 149 effects of, 121
Exclusive economic zone (EEZ), operationalizing, 124
151–152 Industrial relations (IR), 38
Exile missions, 130 Institutional
Exploitation, 44 incorporation, 50
Extinction frames, 153–154 power, 46
theory, 96–97
Fast Food, 51–55 Institutionalist critique, 42
Fellowship of Christian Athletes Institutionalization, 42
(FCA), 190 Integrative prevention, 42
Feminist social constructionist theory Integrity of governance from corrupt
of power, 97 tyrants, 21–23
Field theory, 93–94 Intercollegiate Studies, 176
“Fight for $15” campaign, 38, 51 International Convention for the
Financialization of economy, 49–50 Regulation of Whaling
Frame(s), 147–148 (ICRW), 151–152
amplification, 154 International relations, 127
bridging, 154 International Whaling Commission
extension, 154 (IWC), 146, 151–153
transformation, 154
of whaling and anti-whaling, Jangsaengpo Defenders, 164
153–155 Judicial repression, 39–40, 42
Framing, 3, 16, 147–149 Justice for Janitors strategy (JfJ
strategy), 45–46
Gaddafi’s rule, 24–25
Gallery of Repressors, 103–104 Korea, 149–150
Gender-inclusive ideology, 68–69 Korean Federation of Environmental
Goraeya torawa, 161 Movements (KFEM), 150
Greenpeace, 149, 163 Korean whaling revival, 146–147,
Grounded theory, 18–19 150, 155–160
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), 70
Heritage, 158
“Heritage” frame, 155 Labor
Higher education, 176 mobilization, 44
Historical movement, 38–39
legacies, 96 scholars, 38
Index 205
Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Movement-specific frames, 154

99–100 Movements to expel foreign
Leadership Institute, 176 occupation, 71, 73
League of Human Rights, 100–101 Multi-institutional analyses of
Legitimacy. See also Illegitimacy, political process, 98
121–123 Multilevel modeling process, 78
leverage, 46 Multisclice imagining, 18–19
relationality of legitimacy, 122–123
LGBTQ Nation reclamation, 24–25
rights, 181 National Labor Relations Act
student groups, 180 (NLRA), 40, 50
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam of National Labor Relations Board
Sri Lanka, 76–77 (NLRB), 41, 50
Linnean extinction, 153–154 National Party (NP), 5, 120, 123
Logistical power, 46 rise and fall of, 124–127
Los Angeles Alliance for a New “Neo” institutional theories,
Economy (LAANE), 53 96–97
Los Angeles County Federation of New Deal reformers, 41
Labor (LACFL), 53 New People’s Army, 64
Non-governmental organization
Marginalization, 95–99 (NGO), 98–99
Marginalized actors, 95 Nonviolence, 64–65, 70–71, 92–93
Marginalized mothers, 99–105 robustness checks, 83–85
Marxism, 67 Nonviolent action, 68
Marxist movements, 71–72 Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns
Marxist New People’s Army, 64 and Outcomes (NAVCO),
Mass mobilization, 11–12 71, 75–76, 78
Master frame, 12, 17 Nonviolent resistance, 68–69
dramatic outbursts in authoritarian power in, 92–95
regimes, 13–16
meanings, 16–17 Open coding, 21
of reclamation, 12, 16–17 Orbis, 191–192
visual analysis, 17–21
Mobilization, 40, 44, 65, 95–99 Packwood-Magnuson Amendment,
lines of, 71 151–152
mobilization of discontent model, People power, 6
67 campaign, 64
Modern agency, 107 studies, 93
Moratorium on commercial whaling, Period analysis, 106
151 Photographs, 13, 17–18, 26–27
Moro Islamic Liberation Front, 64 limitations, 20–21
Mothers of the Plaza Mayo, 98–100, periodization and geographic
105, 107 location of, 19
Motivational framing, 27–28 Political invisibility, 101
206 INDEX
Political opportunity structure, Religious colleges and universities,

146–147 180–181
Political process, 93–94 Religious freedom, 176–177
theory, 179 controversy at Vanderbilt, 184–186
Political strikes, 131–132 data and methodological
Political violence, 67 approach, 182–184
Politics of memory, 103–104 educational opportunity structures
Positional power, 44–45 and outcomes, 192–195
Post-strike theory, 42–44 mobilizing for religious freedom at
Power, 1 Vanderbilt, 186–189
examining, 6 outcomes, 189–192
of institutions and tradition, 4–6 past research and theory on
power-over approach, 100–102 campus activism, 177–178
resources, 3, 47 theorizing educational opportunity
Power in Movement, 1 structures and outcomes of
Power in nonviolent resistance, 92–95 campus activism, 179–182
Power resources approach (PRA), 38, Repression, 101, 106–107
44–51 Research in Social Movements,
Pre-Gaddafi flag, 24–25 Conflicts and Change, 6
Prestige, 181 Resistance campaigns, 68, 75–76
Private schools, 180 Revolution, 120–123
Private sector unions, 50 Rooted cosmopolitans, 149
Pro-democracy campaigns, 3–4, Rootedness, 152
65–66
Prodemocracy movements, 71–72 “Save the Whales” campaigns, 154
Professional Air Traffic Controllers SeaTac initiative, 53
Organization (PATCO), 42 Service Employees International
Professional photographers, 19–20 Union (SEIU), 45–46, 54
Prognostic framing, 27–28 Sharpian nonviolence theory, 98
Protest, 64 Social change, 1
Protestors, 25 Social constructionist framework,
Public schools, 180 105–108
actor status, 107
Qualitative methods, 195 repression, 106–107
stages of conflict, 106
Rainbow Warrior, 161 strategies and tactics, 108
Reagan administration, 132–133 Social movement organizations
Rebel groups, 66 (SMOs), 43
Reclamation, 12 Social movements, 1, 16, 176
master frame, 17, 21–28 analysis, 42–44
Recognition strikes, 42 Social protest, 14–15
Regime violence, 78 South Africa, 120
Relationality of legitimacy, 122–123 South African business, 128
Index 207
South African Communist Party Vanderbilt, 182, 183

(SACP), 127 Vanderbilt Hustler, 189
South Korean government, 146 Verstehen, 16
Soweto uprising, 125 Violence, 65
Spatial-ontological study of theory, 70–75
assemblages, 149 Violent conflict, 66–68
Stability, 121–123 Visual analysis, 17–21
Statistical models, 66 Volkekunde, 129
Stellenbosch University, 129 Voluntarism, 40–41
Strategic capacity, 43
Strengths of professional Wealth, 181–182
photographs, 20 Whale Culture Preservation
Strikes, 37–38 Association (WCPA),
in context, 39–44 158–159
PRA, 44–51 Whale Culture Zone (WCZ), 146
in United States, 51–55 Whale embassy occupation in 2005,
Structural power, 45 160–165
Sustainability, 153 Whale food culture, 159
Symbolic power, 45 Whale Occupation Embassy, 150
Whale-watching tourism, 165
Taft-Hartley amendments, 42 Whaling, 145–146
Tamil Tigers. See Liberation Tigers of frames of whaling and
Tamil Eelam of Sri Lanka anti-whaling, 153–155
Theorizing movement power, 2–4 IWC and whaling conflict, 151–153
TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, nations, 151
54–55 revival of Ulsan, 146
whale embassy occupation in 2005,
Ulsan, 145–146 160–165
UN Security Council, 131 White minority rule, 125
Union Générale des Travailleurs Workplace bargaining power, 45
Tunisiens (UGTT), 14 World-polity approach, 149
Unions, 38

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POWER AND PROTEST

POWER AND PROTEST:

United Kingdom – North America – Japan

First edition 2021

Copyright © 2021 by Emerald Publishing Limited

Reprints and permissions service

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN: 978-1-83909-835-2 (Print)

ISBN: 0163-786X (Series)

About the Authors xi

List of Contributors xiii

Introduction to Power and Protest, RSMCC Volume 44 1

Understanding Strikes in the 21ST Century: Perspectives from the

Group Size and the Use of Violence by Resistance Campaigns:

Marginalization and Mobilizing Power in Nonviolent Social

Whaling in Korea: Heritage, Framing, and Contention against

Mobilizing for Religious Freedom: Educational Opportunity

Epilogue: Updates to Research in Social Movements,

Mounira M. Charrad (PhD, Harvard University) is an Associate Professor of

Christopher J. Cyr is an Associate Research Scientist at OCLC. His research

Selina Gallo-Cruz is Associate Professor of Sociology at College of the Holy

Hyun Jeong Ha (PhD, University of Texas-Austin) is an Assistant Professor of

Lisa Leitz is the Delp-Wilkinson Professor and Department Chair of Peace

Steven H. Lopez is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Ohio State Uni-

Chris Rhomberg is a Professor of Sociology at Fordham University. His research

Eric W. Schoon is Assistant Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University.

Bradley Tatar, Associate Professor in UNIST, is a cultural anthropologist who

Robert J. VandenBerg is an assistant professor of criminal justice at Norwich

Michael Widmeier is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of

Amina Zarrugh (PhD, University of Texas-Austin) is an Assistant Professor of

Mounira M. Charrad Department of Sociology, University of

Power and Protest

THEORIZING MOVEMENT POWER

protestors asserted the legitimacy of their struggle and characterized their

POWER OF INSTITUTIONS AND TRADITION

institution long recognized as illegitimate by both the majority of the South

University asserted that the ability to discriminate based on sexual orientation

We examine frames expressed during the Arab Uprisings that toppled

Keywords: Master frame; protests; social movements; authoritarianism;

Power and Protest

several countries, faced brutal repression, involved diverse constituencies, suc-

DRAMATIC OUTBURSTS IN AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES

Metaphors of earthquake, bombshell, or explosion abound. Sustaining

Nevertheless, the groups that participated were able to come together in

MEANINGS AND THE RECLAMATION MASTER FRAME

METHODOLOGY: VISUAL ANALYSIS

Table 1. Periodization and Geographic Location of Photographs.

As a qualitative method of analysis, the coding proceeded on the basis of

shortcomings as professional videographers determine which scenes and settings

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION: RECLAMATION MASTER

First Frame: Reclaiming Integrity of Governance from Corrupt Tyrants

Fig. 1. Example of Frame No. 1. Benghazi, Libya. February 23, 2011. A

collectively as a gesture of insult to Mubarak, especially during his frequent

Second Frame: Reclaiming the Nation

Third Frame: Reclaiming the Dignity of Loved Ones

In other instances, the demands for freedom of political prisoners applied to

Three Frames Constituting the Reclamation Master Frame

protestors in Egypt occasionally mobilized bread during protests in a gesture