Abolitionists and advocates of criminal justice reform in Los Angeles County have amassed some impressive victories, laying out a vision for reducing incarceration and providing care that could have national significance.
As much as organizers might wish for strategic unity, movements are diverse and messy formations that involve both inside and outside politics.
Many of today’s organizers look to the long history of party realignment for strategic orientation. Could they drive a reordering of American politics?
Politicians fear the disruptive power of a mobilized base, even when it helps them succeed.
Social change is seldom either as incremental or predictable as insiders suggest. Instead, movements win by changing the political weather, turning demands considered unrealistic into ones that can no longer be ignored.
A case study in the strange alchemy of disruption and sacrifice.
Cross-posted from Waging Nonviolence. On November 9, 1989—twenty-five years ago—huge crowds of East Germans descended on the Berlin Wall. The restless citizens were responding to an announcement by authorities suggesting that the government would loosen travel restrictions. In truth, those …
Gandhi’s demands were ridiculed and his settlement with the British disappointed many. But the Salt March was a key symbolic win that spurred India’s independence movement toward victory.
How do we know when movements have died—and when are they primed to revive?
The rapidly expanding victory around same-sex marriage demonstrates how a transformational vision can create social change.
It is an old question in social movements: Should we fight the system or “be the change we wish to see”? Should we push for transformation within existing institutions, or should we model in our own lives a different set of political relationships that might someday form the basis of a new society?
Few scholars have done as much as Frances Fox Piven to describe how widespread disruptive action can change history, and few have offered more provocative suggestions about the times when movements—instead of crawling forward with incremental demands—can break into full sprint.
