Social Movements in Advanced Industrial and Developing Societies

Parties organise to win office and interest groups organise to win decisions. Social movements organise to change what a society believes is normal — and because that is a much larger target, they are the least institutionalised, the least predictable and the hardest to evaluate of the three. A movement that loses every one of its immediate demands may still have won, if the terms of argument afterwards are its own.

What a social movement is

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• A social movement is a sustained, organised collective challenge by people who share a purpose and a solidarity, directed at changing policy, institutions, values or social relations, and pursued substantially outside routine institutional channels.
• The standard definitions differ in emphasis and agree on the elements.
  • Sidney Tarrow: “collective challenges by people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities.” The load-bearing word is sustained — a single demonstration is an event, not a movement.
  • Charles Tilly treats a movement as a campaign plus a repertoire plus WUNC displays — public assertions of worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment, which is how a movement demonstrates that it represents something.
  • Herbert Blumer‘s older formulation — collective enterprises to establish a new order of life — captures the ambition that policy-focused definitions lose.
• Five elements recur, and a case missing any of them is usually something else:
  • Collective action rather than individual dissent.
  • Continuity over time, which distinguishes a movement from a riot or a single protest.
  • A change orientation — for or against change, since counter-movements are movements too.
  • A shared ideology or collective identity that tells participants who “we” are.
  • Some organisation, however loose, and characteristically non-institutional or unconventional methods.
• Social movements are the least institutionalised of the three participatory forms, and that is their strength as well as their weakness: they can raise what no party will raise, and they cannot deliver what any party can deliver.
• The transformation between forms runs constantly in both directions: the Indian National Congress moved from movement to pressure group to party; European environmental movements produced Green parties; the Aam Aadmi Party emerged from an anti-corruption movement; and parties in decline sometimes revert to movement-like mobilisation.
• A terminological point worth noting: in much liberal and American scholarship the preferred vocabulary is resource mobilisation rather than “social movement”, a choice that is not neutral — it reframes protest as an organisational and strategic phenomenon rather than as the expression of a structural grievance.

The life cycle

• Movements have careers, and Blumer‘s four stages remain the usable map.
  • Social ferment — diffuse unrest and agitation; the grievance exists but has no name and no address.
  • Popular excitement — the grievance acquires a diagnosis and a target; leaders and framings emerge.
  • Formalisation — organisation, strategy, coalition and formal leadership appear; the movement acquires an address of its own.
  • Institutionalisation — the movement becomes a permanent organisation staffed by professionals, or is absorbed into party and state.
• Decline has four distinct modes, and conflating them ruins any assessment of success.
  • Success — the demand is granted and the movement dissolves for want of a grievance.
  • Failure — the demand is refused and mobilisation exhausts itself.
  • Co-optation — leaders are absorbed into office, committees or funding relationships, and the movement’s edge is traded for its access.
  • Repression — the state raises the cost of participation beyond what supporters will bear.
• Mainstreaming is the fifth and most ambiguous outcome: the movement disappears because its claims have become common sense, which registers as decline in every measure of mobilisation and as total victory in every measure that matters.

Types of movement

• David Aberle‘s classification sorts movements by who they aim to change and how much, and it travels across every context.
  • Alternative movements — partial change in specific individuals: temperance, road-safety and health-behaviour campaigns.
  • Redemptive movements — total change in specific individuals: religious conversion movements, and reform movements aimed at transforming a community’s practices.
  • Reformative movements — partial change in the whole society: environmental, civil-rights and anti-corruption movements.
  • Transformative or revolutionary movements — total change in the whole society: revolutionary socialist and millenarian movements.
• Cross-cutting distinctions worth carrying: reform against revolutionary by method; progressive against reactionary by direction; local, national and transnational by scale.

Old social movements

• Modern social movements begin in the industrialising West as a response to the exploitation of the working class, and the workers’ movement is the archetype from which the whole category was theorised.
• Their characteristics as a family:
  • Class as the organising base — the movement speaks for a position in the productive order, not for an identity.
  • Redistributive, material demands — wages, hours, conditions, land, employment, welfare. Bread-and-butter questions.
  • The state as the target, because the state is what redistributes.
  • Formal, hierarchical, disciplined organisation, closely tied to trade unions and to parties of the left.
  • Political and confrontational techniques — strike, demonstration, general strike, and where conditions permitted, insurrection.
  • A totalising ideology that explained the grievance, named the enemy and specified the destination.
• The family includes trade unionism and Chartism, socialist and communist movements, peasant movements across Asia and Latin America, and — in the colonised world — anti-colonial national movements, which are old social movements in structure even where their content was national rather than economic.
• Marx supplied the theory: movements express class contradiction, consciousness develops from class-in-itself to class-for-itself, and the movement’s proper destination is the capture of state power.

New social movements

• New social movements appear in the West from the 1960s — the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the student revolts of 1968, second-wave feminism, environmentalism, the peace and anti-nuclear movements, and gay liberation.
• Herbert Marcuse is conventionally treated as the intellectual father of the New Left from which they grew.
  • His One-Dimensional Man argued that advanced industrial society absorbs opposition by satisfying material wants and manufacturing false needs.
  • The integrated working class therefore ceases to be a revolutionary agent, having been bought into the system it was supposed to overturn.
  • The agents of the Great Refusal must instead be the outsiders — students, minorities, the marginal and the unintegrated, which is a fair description of who actually mobilised after 1965.
• Their characteristics as a family:
  • Identity, values and quality of life as the organising base, not class position.
  • Post-material demands — autonomy, recognition, dignity, environment, peace, participation.
  • Society and culture as the target as much as the state; the aim is often to change what people accept rather than what a ministry decides.
  • Loose, decentralised, network organisation, suspicious of hierarchy and often of leadership itself.
  • Expressive and cultural repertoires — art, theatre, street performance, film, music, symbolic occupation, and now digital media — alongside conventional protest.
  • A refusal of the state-capture goal: the objective is consciousness, not office.

The theorists of newness

• Jürgen Habermas located the new conflicts precisely.
  • Advanced capitalism produces the colonisation of the lifeworld — the penetration of communicatively structured domains of family, culture and meaning by the money and power media of the economic and administrative systems.
  • New movements arise “at the seam between system and lifeworld”, and are therefore defensive rather than emancipatory in the older sense.
  • What they contest is not distribution but the grammar of forms of life — how a society is permitted to organise meaning.
• Alain Touraine argued that in the programmed or post-industrial society, the central conflict is over historicity — a society’s capacity to produce itself, its knowledge, its models and its cultural orientations. Movements, not parties, are the actors in that conflict.
• Alberto Melucci made collective identity the core concept.
  • A movement’s primary product is not a policy outcome but a shared definition of who its participants are.
  • His “nomads of the present” live largely in latency — submerged networks in everyday life that produce meaning and solidarity without visible action.
  • They become visible only episodically, which is why counting protest events systematically underestimates what a movement is and does.
• Claus Offe described a new politics paradigm with a distinctive profile of actors (new middle class, decommodified groups, students), issues (peace, environment, human rights, unalienated forms of work), values (autonomy and identity against control and growth) and modes of action (informal internally, demonstrative and disruptive externally).
• Ronald Inglehart‘s post-materialism supplies the demand-side explanation: generations socialised in physical and economic security prioritise self-expression, belonging and quality of life, which is why new movements grew in the richest societies rather than the poorest.
• Laclau and Mouffe read them as new antagonisms irreducible to class, and made them the basis of a project of radical and plural democracy — a chain of equivalence among distinct struggles rather than their subsumption under one.

“Social movements are collective challenges by people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities.” — Sidney Tarrow

Old and new compared

• One row deserves a correction that the standard contrast obscures: leadership in both families has come predominantly from the educated middle class, and this is not a peculiarity of new movements.
  • The lower classes have supplied leadership where the movement’s base was rural and the middle class was thin — Lenin came from the middle class, Mao from the peasantry.
  • The general pattern reflects Olson’s insight rather than any moral fact: leadership requires time, literacy, networks and the capacity to absorb risk, all of which are unequally distributed.

How new are the new social movements?

• The question is a genuine scholarly dispute, not a rhetorical device, and the sceptical case is strong.
  • Craig Calhoun demonstrated that the early nineteenth century was full of identity-based, culturally oriented, non-class movements — religious revivals, temperance, abolition, nationalist and communitarian movements — so identity politics predates class politics rather than succeeding it.
  • The labour movement itself had a dense cultural and identity dimension — clubs, choirs, libraries, festivals, a whole way of life — which the “material versus post-material” contrast erases.
  • Novelty may be an artefact of theory: what changed in the 1960s may be less the movements than the Marxist framework that had made non-class movements invisible to scholarship.
• What is defensibly new, once the exaggeration is stripped out:
  • The structural context — a post-industrial economy, mass higher education, an expanded new middle class, and a welfare state that had already settled the most acute material questions.
  • The prominence of post-material values as an explicit and dominant motivation, which Inglehart’s survey evidence supports.
  • The organisational form — network rather than hierarchy, sustained without a bureaucracy, now radically extended by digital technology.
  • The scope of the target — non-state actors, corporations, cultural norms and international institutions, rather than the national state alone.
  • The transnational scale as ordinary practice rather than as rhetoric.
• The honest verdict: new social movements are new in emphasis, context and form, not in kind. Treating them as unprecedented mistakes a change in the theorist’s lens for a change in the world.

Movements are called new when the framework that used to explain everything as class stops being able to see them.

Theories of social movements

Collective behaviour

• The oldest tradition treated movements as a species of irrational crowd behaviour. Gustave Le Bon‘s crowd psychology — suggestibility, contagion, the loss of individual judgement — supplied a model that was influential and deeply hostile to protest.
• Neil Smelser‘s value-added theory made the tradition analytically respectable by specifying six determinants that must accumulate in sequence.
  • Structural conduciveness — the social structure permits this kind of action.
  • Structural strain — deprivation, conflict, ambiguity or discrepancy in the system.
  • Growth of a generalised belief — an explanation of the strain and of what would remove it.
  • Precipitating factors — a triggering event that dramatises the belief.
  • Mobilisation of participants for action — leadership and organisation convert belief into behaviour.
  • Failure of social control — the authorities’ response fails to prevent, or worsens, the mobilisation.
• The tradition’s defect is that it treats movements as symptoms of dysfunction, which cannot explain movements led by well-integrated, resourceful people.

Relative deprivation

• Deprivation alone does not explain protest, since the most deprived are frequently the least mobilised. What matters is the gap between expectation and attainment.
• James Davies‘s J-curve hypothesis: revolutions occur when a prolonged period of rising expectations and improving conditions is followed by a sharp reversal, producing an intolerable gap between what people had come to expect and what they now get.
• Ted Gurr, in Why Men Rebel, generalised this into relative deprivation as the psychological engine of political violence, mediated by beliefs about justification and by the balance of coercive capacity between challengers and the regime.
• The standing objection is that relative deprivation is nearly always present and movements are not, so it can explain motivation but not timing — which is exactly the gap the next two theories fill.

Resource mobilisation

• John McCarthy and Mayer Zald inverted the question. Grievance is more or less constant; what varies is the capacity to act on it. Movements should therefore be explained by resources, organisation and opportunity, not by discontent.
• The apparatus: social movement organisations (SMOs) as the units; a social movement industry of SMOs sharing a cause; movement entrepreneurs who create demand as well as supply it; conscience constituents who fund movements from which they do not benefit; and resources of money, labour, expertise, legitimacy and media access.
• Anthony Oberschall and Charles Tilly added the relational half: mobilisation depends on pre-existing networks and organisational density — a population already organised for other purposes mobilises faster than an atomised one.
• The tradition’s blind spot is meaning: it explains capacity brilliantly and cannot explain why people come to see a long-standing condition as an injustice.

Political opportunity structure

• Movements are shaped by the political environment they face, and their timing is explained by openings in that environment. The tradition runs from Peter Eisinger through Tilly, Tarrow, Kriesi and McAdam.
• The four dimensions usually specified:
  • Relative openness of the institutionalised political system — how many access points exist.
  • Stability or instability of elite alignments — a divided elite creates space.
  • Presence of elite allies — a faction inside the system willing to champion the challenger.
  • The state’s capacity and propensity for repression — and, critically, inconsistent repression is more destabilising than either consistent tolerance or consistent severity.
• Tarrow‘s cycles of contention describe the characteristic dynamic: an opening produces early risers, whose success demonstrates the opportunity and triggers diffusion across sectors, followed by radicalisation, exhaustion, repression and demobilisation — the whole cycle leaving behind new organisations, tactics and framings.
• The Eisinger finding worth carrying is curvilinear: protest is lowest in fully open systems, where routine channels work, and in fully closed ones, where it is suicidal, and highest in partially open systems — which is precisely the condition of most developing democracies.

Framing

• David Snow and Robert Benford supplied the missing element: movements do not find grievances, they construct them, through collective action frames that interpret a condition as unjust, attributable and alterable.
• Three core framing tasks:
  • Diagnostic framing — what is wrong, and who is to blame.
  • Prognostic framing — what should be done about it.
  • Motivational framing — why you should act, and act now.
• Frame alignment processes connect a movement’s frame to potential supporters’ existing beliefs: bridging (linking congruent but unconnected frames), amplification (heightening an existing value), extension (widening the frame to interests beyond the original), and transformation (changing how people understand the situation altogether).
• Frame resonance depends on empirical credibility, experiential commensurability and cultural narrative fidelity — which is why the same argument mobilises in one society and falls flat in another.

The contentious politics synthesis and after

• McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly attempted, in Dynamics of Contention, to fold movements, revolutions, strikes, nationalism and civil war into a single field of contentious politics analysed through recurring mechanisms and processes rather than through separate theories for separate phenomena.
• Tilly’s repertoires of contention is the durable contribution: at any historical moment, a society possesses a limited, learned, culturally available set of ways of making claims. The petition, the strike, the demonstration, the boycott, the sit-in, the hashtag and the occupation each had to be invented and diffused, and repertoires change slowly.
• Bennett and Segerberg‘s logic of connective action is the significant recent addition. Where classic collective action required organisations to solve Olson’s problem, digital networks permit mobilisation around personalised action frames shared through media, with the platform performing the coordinating work an organisation used to do.
  • This explains the recent wave of large, fast, leaderless mobilisations — and also their characteristic weakness, since an organisation that was never built cannot negotiate, cannot enforce a settlement, and cannot outlast the moment.

Social movements in advanced industrial societies

• These societies are the heartland of the new social movement pattern: post-material demands, middle-class participants, network organisation, cultural repertoires.
• Institutionalisation is the dominant long-run trajectory. Environmental, feminist and civil-rights movements have largely become professional advocacy organisations, litigators, consultancies and parties, gaining access and losing disruptive capacity in the same transaction.
• Movements have become an ordinary rather than an exceptional form of participation. As party membership fell, protest, petitioning, boycott and single-issue campaigning rose, producing what the literature calls the social movement society — mobilisation is now a routine political instrument, used by insiders as well as outsiders.
• The recent record is dense and instructive:
  • Occupy (2011) — the clearest demonstration that a movement can transform a political vocabulary, with its “1% and 99%” framing entering mainstream debate, while achieving no institutional demand of its own.
  • Black Lives Matter, reignited by the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
  • A decentralised network demanding an end to police brutality and systemic racism, and at its most radical the defunding of police departments and reinvestment in Black communities.
  • Repertoire: mass protest, social-media campaigning and community organising, with no central leadership to negotiate or to arrest.
  • It produced global awareness and symbolic change, including the removal of Confederate monuments; police budgets largely did not fall, and the substantive policy record is thin against the scale of mobilisation.
  • Fridays for Future, from Greta Thunberg‘s 2018 school strike — youth-led global climate strikes coordinated through digital platforms, demanding action consistent with the Paris Agreement. Its measurable achievement is agenda salience and the formation of a transnational generational identity rather than emissions policy.
  • Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) in France, from November 2018.
  • Began against a fuel tax increase and widened into a revolt over inequality, the cost of living and the neglect of non-metropolitan France.
  • Leaderless and coordinated online, using roundabout blockades and recurring Saturday demonstrations rather than a single organisation.
  • It forced the suspension of the tax and a package including minimum-wage measures — and blended populist and anti-austerity currents that fit no point on the left–right axis.
  • MeToo, from 2017 — treated in full below.
  • Farmers’ protests across Europe in 2024 against environmental regulation and input costs, which secured concessions and demonstrated that material, sectoral, old-style movements have not disappeared from post-industrial societies.
• The most important corrective: the reference literature’s claim that social movements are inherently a phenomenon of the left is no longer sustainable, if it ever was.
  • Right-wing movement mobilisation — anti-tax movements, anti-immigration mobilisation, the anti-gender movement, identitarian networks, anti-lockdown protest — uses the same repertoires, the same digital logic and the same framing techniques.
  • Counter-movements are a structural feature: a successful movement generates opposition proportional to its success, and the resulting movement–counter-movement dyad is often more explanatory than either alone.

Social movements in developing societies

The overlap between old and new

• The single most important comparative point is that in developing societies the old and new distinction does not hold cleanly — the two are overlapping rather than successive.
• The reason is structural, not cultural: post-material concerns cannot displace material ones in societies where material security has not been achieved, so movements carry both agendas simultaneously.
• The Indian environmental movement is the standard illustration: as an old movement it defends the livelihoods of tribal and poor communities dependent on forests, rivers and commons; as a new movement it advances ecological protection and sustainability. Neither description alone is adequate.
  • Guha and Martinez-Alier‘s environmentalism of the poor is the concept that names this properly: in the South, environmental conflict is typically a distributional conflict over access to natural resources, not a post-material lifestyle preference.
  • The canonical Indian cases carry both registers at once.
    • Chipko defended village rights over forest produce and became an international symbol of forest conservation — livelihood and ecology in the same act.
    • The Narmada Bachao Andolan fought displacement and rehabilitation for those submerged by a dam, and simultaneously contested the model of development the dam represented, taking the argument to an international funder and forcing its withdrawal.
    • The Niyamgiri struggle combined Adivasi religious and livelihood claims with an ecological one, and was resolved through gram sabha consent rather than through courts or protest alone.
• The general consequence is that developing-society movements tend to combine redistributive demands with identity and rights claims, and to have cross-class rather than middle-class compositions.

The distinctive features

• Riggs’s prismatic society supplies the frame: modern associational forms coexist with unreformed traditional structures, and movements draw on both — caste and community networks mobilised for rights-based demands.
• The state is simultaneously the target and the provider, which shapes strategy fundamentally: a movement cannot simply oppose an authority it also needs to deliver the benefit it is demanding.
• Identity is more often the vehicle of a material demand than an end in itself, which is why Northern categories of “identity politics” travel badly.
• Rajni Kothari‘s non-party political process is the key Indian formulation.
  • From the 1970s, activity that would elsewhere have gone through parties migrated to non-party political formations — grassroots groups, voluntary organisations and movements.
  • His explanation is a failure of representation: parties had ceased to perform it for the poor, and the space was occupied by whoever could.
  • D. L. Sheth and Smitu Kothari developed the account; Ghanshyam Shah produced the standard typological survey of Indian movements; Gail Omvedt analysed the anti-caste and rural movements as one linked family.
• Partha Chatterjee‘s distinction between civil society and political society is the sharpest post-colonial contribution here.
  • Civil society is the domain of proper citizens exercising recognised rights through recognised channels — a small minority in most post-colonial states.
  • Political society is the domain in which populations, rather than citizens, negotiate with the state through claims that are not strictly legal — encroachment regularised, entitlements bargained.
  • This explains why so much developing-world mobilisation is about being recognised as a legitimate claimant at all, a stage Northern movements passed through long ago and no longer theorise.

The challenges facing new social movements in developing countries

• Survival takes priority over post-material concerns. A movement asking people to sacrifice income for a value-based demand faces an obstacle that does not exist in a wealthy society.
• Repression is more available and less costly. Detention of protesters is now the single most common civic-space violation worldwide, recorded in dozens of countries in a single year, and internet shutdowns have become a standard instrument.
• Legal and regulatory constraint — registration requirements, foreign-funding statutes, tax scrutiny and administrative harassment, which reach organisations that direct repression cannot.
• Co-optation by parties, which have both the incentive and the capacity to absorb a movement’s leadership and neutralise its agenda.
• NGO-isation — donor-driven professionalisation that substitutes projects for politics, imports Northern agendas, and detaches organisations from the constituencies they emerged from.
• Fragmentation along ascriptive lines, where caste, ethnic and religious divisions cut across the constituency a movement is trying to build.
• Resource scarcity and media access — sustained campaigning is expensive, and coverage is concentrated in metropolitan and English-language media.
• The legitimacy problem — new-agenda movements are readily framed as elite, urban, foreign-funded or anti-development, a charge that has real purchase where the movement’s beneficiaries are diffuse and the project it opposes promises jobs.

Do movements strengthen democracy in developing societies?

• The strengthening case is empirically strong, and India provides its clearest evidence.
  • Movements place on the agenda what parties will not, because parties are constrained by coalition arithmetic and movements are not.
  • The movement-to-statute chain in India is the strongest single piece of evidence anywhere.
    • A grassroots campaign for wage transparency in rural Rajasthan grew into the demand that produced the Right to Information Act.
    • The right-to-work campaign produced MGNREGA; the right-to-food campaign produced the National Food Security Act; the forest-rights struggle produced the Forest Rights Act.
    • Each began wholly outside institutions and ended as statute, which is the strongest available answer to the charge that movements only obstruct.
  • Movements expand effective citizenship, converting formal rights into usable ones for populations that could not access them.
  • They provide accountability between elections, and a route for groups whose numbers are too small or too dispersed to matter electorally.
  • They train political leadership and, when they convert to parties, broaden the political class.
• The qualifying case matters and should not be omitted.
  • Movements are unrepresentative by construction — they speak for those who mobilise, and intensity is not the same as numbers.
  • Anti-institutional mobilisation can be captured: a movement against corruption can be turned into a movement against the legitimacy of representative institutions as such, which is the pathway populist leaders have repeatedly used.
  • Escalation to violence is a live risk where repression meets leaderlessness, as Myanmar demonstrated when peaceful protest against the February 2021 coup hardened into armed resistance.
  • Success can be destabilising. Toppling a government is far easier than building a successor, and the 2025 wave demonstrated that a movement without organisation has no mechanism to hold the state it created accountable.
• The balanced conclusion is that movements deepen democracy where institutions exist to receive their demands, and destabilise it where they do not — which makes the quality of representative institutions, not the movements, the decisive variable.

Comparing movements in advanced industrial and developing societies

A movement is judged by whether the demands it was refused have become the assumptions of the people who refused them.

The transnational turn

• Movements have escaped the national container, unevenly, and the mechanisms are now well documented.
  • Transnational advocacy networks and Keck and Sikkink‘s boomerang pattern: blocked domestic groups appeal outward and return as external pressure on their own state.
  • Diffusion of repertoires — tactics, framings and symbols spread across unconnected national movements, which is why the same slogans and even the same flags appear in countries with nothing else in common.
  • Global counter-summits — the World Social Forum and its “another world is possible” framing, constructed as a deliberate alternative to the elite economic forum.
• The global justice movement is the paradigm case: the Seattle protests of 1999 against the WTO, followed by Genoa and a decade of summit mobilisation, uniting labour, environmental, farmer and development constituencies from North and South against a particular model of economic integration.
• The Third World’s own movement for global justice long predates it, and its goals were and remain structural.
  • Sovereignty over natural resources and the right to regulate foreign investment.
  • Fair and stable terms of trade for primary commodities, against declining terms of trade — the Prebisch–Singer thesis.
  • Reform of global economic governance — voice and voting weight in the Bretton Woods institutions, and a rules-based rather than power-based trade order.
  • Debt relief, technology transfer, and development finance on non-conditional terms.
  • These were codified in the demand for a New International Economic Order through the G-77 and UNCTAD, and they survive in current form as demands over agricultural subsidies, TRIPS flexibilities and public health, climate finance, loss and damage, and common but differentiated responsibilities.
• South–South cooperation is the instrument the South itself controls, and its importance is threefold.
  • It builds collective bargaining power, since the asymmetry between a single developing state and the developed bloc is unbridgeable while a coordinated bloc’s is not.
  • It provides alternative sources of trade, finance, technology and development assistance, reducing the leverage that conditionality depends on.
  • It supplies models and knowledge adapted to comparable conditions rather than transplanted from unlike ones.
  • Its limits are equally structural: heterogeneity of interest within the South, competition between its larger members, and the fact that the deepest asymmetries are in finance and technology, where the South’s own capacity is thinnest.

The recent record: movements since 2019

• Hong Kong (2019–20) — triggered by a proposed extradition bill, and widening into a pro-democracy movement demanding electoral reform and police accountability.
  • Largely leaderless and online-coordinated, using mass rallies, sit-ins and a deliberately fluid repertoire summarised in its own slogan about being formless as water.
  • The bill was withdrawn — and the National Security Law of 2020 then curtailed the freedoms the movement had been defending, ending sustained protest.
  • The case is the clearest illustration that winning the stated demand is not the same as winning.
• The Indian farmers’ protest (2020–21) — against three agricultural laws, demanding repeal and a legal guarantee for minimum support prices. Led by a coalition of established farmers’ unions, using prolonged sit-ins at Delhi’s borders, tractor marches and nationwide strikes. The laws were repealed in December 2021 — a rare unambiguous movement victory.
• Myanmar (2021– ) — following the February 2021 coup, the Spring Revolution demanded restoration of the elected government and release of detained leaders.
  • Organised through a civil disobedience movement, the parallel National Unity Government, and civil-society networks; methods included mass protest, strikes and online campaigns.
  • The military responded with internet and media blackouts, mass arrest, criminal sentencing and lethal force.
  • The movement evolved from peaceful protest into armed resistance across large parts of the country — the clearest recent illustration of how repression restructures rather than ends a movement.
• Bangladesh (2024) — the student–people’s uprising, sometimes called the July Revolution.
  • Trigger: the Supreme Court reinstated a quota reserving 30% of government jobs for descendants of 1971 veterans, reversing a 2018 abolition, which job-seekers read as political patronage dressed as commemoration.
  • Organisation: the Students Against Discrimination coalition, coordinated through social platforms, using human chains, blockades and nationwide non-cooperation.
  • Escalation: demands moved from abolishing the quota to the Prime Minister’s resignation and democratic restoration, after police and paramilitary forces used live ammunition.
  • Outcome: after repression with deaths in the hundreds and by some counts well over a thousand, Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled on 5 August 2024, and an interim government was formed under Muhammad Yunus.
• Nepal (September 2025) — the Gen Z protests, the most consequential single case in the recent wave.
  • Trigger: the blocking of 26 social media platforms for failure to register under new rules, immediately after a viral “nepo kids” campaign contrasting the lifestyles of politicians’ children with mass youth unemployment.
  • Escalation: within days Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli resigned on 9 September, and government buildings including the parliament, the Supreme Court and the prime ministerial residence were burned.
  • Cost: roughly 76 dead and over 2,000 injured.
  • Succession: an interim government under former Chief Justice Sushila Karki was installed on 12 September, chosen through a Discord poll involving over 145,000 participants — an improvised selection mechanism with no constitutional standing and considerable legitimacy.
  • Consolidation: parliament was dissolved and elections held on 5 March 2026, at which the anti-establishment Rastriya Swatantra Party won a near two-thirds majority — a movement converting into a government within six months.
• The Gen Z wave of 2025 — Nepal belonged to a wider synchronised phenomenon across Indonesia, Madagascar, the Philippines, Kenya, Peru, Morocco and Timor-Leste.
  • Shared grievances: corruption, nepotism, service failure and youth unemployment in societies with young populations and shrinking opportunity.
  • Shared infrastructure: TikTok, Instagram and Discord for mobilisation, coordination and, in Nepal’s case, selection of an interim leader.
  • A shared symbol: the pirate flag from a Japanese manga series, locally modified, functioning as a transnational identifier for movements with no organisational connection to one another.
  • Divergent outcomes: Madagascar’s president fled and a military-led transition followed; several governments conceded ministerial resignations or policy reversals; several conceded nothing at all.
• India (2026) — the Cockroach Janta Party protests, the Indian instance of the same pattern.
  • Trigger: NEET examination paper leaks, the scrapping of results, and student deaths by suicide in the aftermath.
  • Naming: the label was adopted from a disparaging public characterisation of Indian youth, in the classic movement move of reclaiming a slur as an identity.
  • Organisation: memes and social media, largely decentralised, with an extended occupation at Jantar Mantar and demonstrations across Bengaluru, Jaipur, Lucknow, Mumbai and Patna.
  • Turning point: a police crackdown on 20 July 2026, injuring over a hundred protesters, widened participation rather than ending it — the classic backfire dynamic.
  • Outcome: the Education Minister resigned on 25 July 2026, and the government conceded compensation for bereaved families and amnesty for protesters.
• The pattern across these cases is consistent and analytically important:
  • Digital coordination lowers the cost of mobilisation and produces very large, very fast movements.
  • Leaderlessness protects against decapitation and co-optation and prevents negotiation, strategy and follow-through — where everyone is responsible, nobody is.
  • Movements are far better at removing governments than at constituting them, which is why the post-victory phase is where the wave’s outcomes diverge most sharply.
  • Attempts to restrict digital space backfire, because the restriction converts a diffuse grievance into a concrete, immediate and universally legible one.

Women’s movements and the politics of the body

• The most consequential recent movement family concerns bodily autonomy and freedom from sexual violence, and it is genuinely global rather than Northern.
• MeToo, from 2017, converted a phrase coined a decade earlier by Tarana Burke into a transnational mobilisation through hashtag diffusion.
  • Its repertoire is testimony — the aggregation of individual disclosures into evidence of a structural pattern, which is a genuinely novel contribution to the repertoire of contention.
  • Its achievements are cultural and procedural: workplace policy, complaint mechanisms, and a shift in the presumptions that used to attach to an accusation.
  • Its criticisms are due-process concerns, class and language bias in who can safely testify, and almost no reach into informal employment, where most of the world’s women work.
• Ni Una Menos — “not one woman less” — began in Argentina in 2015 against femicide and spread across Latin America, establishing mass street mobilisation and the women’s strike as regional repertoires.
• The marea verde or green wave grew from the same networks into a campaign for abortion legalisation, using the green handkerchief as its identifier.
  • Argentina legalised abortion in December 2020, after a decade of campaigning and one earlier legislative defeat.
  • Mexico decriminalised through its Supreme Court, and Colombia followed in 2022.
  • Taken together, the clearest demonstration anywhere that sustained movement pressure combined with strategic litigation can move an entrenched legal and religious order.
• Poland saw the Black Protest of 2016 and the far larger mobilisation of 2020 against a near-total abortion ban — hundreds of thousands in the streets, which delayed and constrained but did not reverse the restriction, illustrating the limits of mobilisation against a determined executive and a captured court.
• The United States after Dobbs (2022) produced mobilisation that shifted to the state level and to referendums, where it has won more often than it has lost.
• Iran‘s “Woman, Life, Freedom” mobilisation from 2022 began over enforcement of dress codes and became the most significant challenge to the Islamic Republic in decades — a movement in which a bodily-autonomy demand carried an entire political critique.
• India‘s trajectory runs from the anti-rape mobilisation after December 2012 and the legal changes that followed, through the Indian MeToo of 2018, to the wrestlers’ protest of 2023 over sexual harassment in a sports federation.
• The Red Lipstick Movement, referred to in recent examination framing, is best treated as a family rather than a single event, and honesty requires noting that the label has carried more than one referent.
  • Red lipstick has a long history as a political symbol — adopted by suffragists as a marker of defiance, and worn during the Second World War as an anti-fascist and patriotic statement in societies whose adversaries disapproved of cosmetics.
  • In Portugal, the hashtag campaign #vermelhoemBelém in January 2021 mobilised women — including politicians and artists — to post images wearing red lipstick in response to misogynistic remarks by a far-right presidential candidate, and has been studied as a case of feminist hashtag activism responding to the rise of far-right populism.
  • From early 2025, a TikTok-originated movement in the United States adopted red lipstick as a visible marker of opposition to the incoming administration, explicitly invoking the suffragist and anti-fascist lineage.
  • Both instances are symbolic, low-cost, identity-signalling actions of the kind digital movements specialise in.
  • Both attracted the same criticism from opposite directions — that visible symbols without organisation are merely performative.
  • The defence is Melucci’s: a movement’s first product is a collective identity, and shared symbols are how identity is built before anything else can be built on it.
• The counter-movement is now the dominant force in this field, and no assessment is complete without it.
  • A transnational anti-gender movement treats feminism and sexual-minority rights as threats to national and cultural integrity, and combines professionalised international organisations with local religious and political actors.
  • Its record includes abortion restriction, the withdrawal from and weakening of domestic-violence conventions, bans on sexuality education, the dismantling of gender-equality ministries in several states, and sustained contestation of language in multilateral negotiations.
  • Its drivers are argued to include male status anxiety amid women’s educational and economic advance, demographic panic over falling birth rates, and its adoption by right-populist leaderships as an instrument of political consolidation.
  • This is the movement–counter-movement dyad in its clearest contemporary form, and it establishes that movement gains are reversible, which the older literature on new social movements did not anticipate.

The LGBT movement and its diffusion

• The movement’s Northern trajectory runs from the Stonewall riots of 1969 and gay liberation, through the AIDS crisis and the direct-action activism it produced, to a rights-and-recognition strategy pursued substantially through courts and legislatures.
• Its achievements in developed societies are among the fastest attitudinal and legal changes recorded on any social question: decriminalisation, anti-discrimination protection, civil partnership and then marriage equality, and legal gender recognition — with 37 UN member states and Taiwan now recognising marriage equality.
• The diffusion to developing societies has occurred through several channels, and each carries a political cost as well as a benefit.
  • Transnational advocacy and the boomerang — domestic groups appealing to international bodies, treaty mechanisms and foreign publics when domestic routes are closed.
  • Norm diffusion through international institutions, including the Yogyakarta Principles as a soft-law articulation and UN human-rights machinery as a forum.
  • Litigation, which has been the decisive instrument in several developing democracies with strong courts — India’s reading down of Section 377 in Navtej Singh Johar (2018) being the leading example, followed by Supriyo (2023), in which the Supreme Court declined to read marriage equality into existing law and left the question to Parliament.
  • Regional diffusion: Botswana, Angola, Singapore, and more recently Namibia and Dominica, have decriminalised; Thailand became the first Southeast Asian state to enact marriage equality.
• Its effect on political participation in developing societies is real, and is best stated precisely.
  • It has constituted a new political constituency where none was legible before, with organisations, media presence and electoral visibility.
  • It has been litigation-led rather than movement-led in many cases, which delivers rights faster and builds less durable mobilisation — a court victory can precede rather than follow a social majority.
  • It has widened the repertoire of rights claims for other marginalised groups, since the arguments about dignity, privacy and equal moral status are transferable.
  • It has provoked a potent nativist counter-mobilisation, framed as resistance to Western cultural imposition and often using explicitly anti-colonial language, which turns an equality question into a sovereignty question and raises the cost of domestic advocacy.
• The backlash is now the stronger current globally, and the figures are the discipline on any optimistic reading.
  • 64 UN member states still criminalise consensual same-sex acts, and seven prescribe the death penalty for them.
  • Recent years have seen recriminalisation in Mali and a reversal of decriminalisation in Trinidad and Tobago, alongside severe new penal legislation in parts of Africa.
  • Elsewhere the instruments are “extremist” designations and propaganda laws, and restrictions on public assembly for sexual minorities — including in states that had been considered settled.

Movements, popular space and representative politics

• The rise of movements admits two readings, and the evidence supports both partially, which is why the question is worth taking seriously rather than resolving by assertion.
• The opening-up reading:
  • Movements bring in those whom parties do not represent — the young, the informally employed, the stigmatised, the geographically peripheral.
  • They add issues that the electoral cycle cannot process, particularly those with long time horizons like climate, or those that split every major party internally.
  • They supply continuous accountability where elections supply periodic and blunt judgement.
  • Participation has changed form rather than declined: the fall in party membership coincides with a rise in protest, petitioning, boycott and digital mobilisation.
• The decline-of-representation reading:
  • Movements grow in proportion to the failure of parties — Mair‘s void, filled by whatever can occupy it.
  • Movement politics is unrepresentative and unaccountable: intensity substitutes for numbers, and nobody can be voted out.
  • It is better at blocking than at building, since a coalition assembled against something dissolves when asked what it is for.
  • Anti-institutional mobilisation is exploitable by leaders who share the movement’s hostility to institutions and none of its purposes.
• The synthesis that fits the evidence: movements expand popular space and simultaneously register the shrinking of representative space.
  • Which effect dominates depends on whether the political system contains institutions capable of receiving mobilisation and converting it into policy.
  • Where it does — as India’s movement-to-statute chain shows — movements deepen democracy.
  • Where it does not, a movement’s victory replaces one crisis with another, which is what the aftermath of the 2025 wave is currently testing.

The digital wave made movements large enough to topple governments and left them without the organisation needed to replace one.

Conclusion

Social movements are the part of political participation that no institution designed, and they are therefore the most accurate available measure of what a political system is failing to do.

• The old–new distinction remains analytically useful and should not be applied mechanically: it describes a sequence in the advanced industrial world and an overlay in the developing world, where livelihood and recognition are demanded together because neither has been secured.
• The theoretical apparatus has converged on a workable division of labour: grievance explains motivation, resources explain capacity, opportunity explains timing, and framing explains why a long-standing condition suddenly becomes an injustice.
• The digital turn has made movements larger, faster and more transnational, and has removed the organisational infrastructure that used to convert mobilisation into durable outcomes — which is why the recent wave has toppled more governments than it has reformed.
• Above all, the assumption that movement gains accumulate has not survived. The organised counter-mobilisation against gender and sexual-minority rights establishes that what movements win, movements can take back — and that the study of social movements has to become the study of contention between movements, not only between movements and states.