What is ‘New Social Movement (NSM)’? Explain the main challenges of the NSM in the developing countries.

What is ‘New Social Movement (NSM)’? Explain the main challenges of the NSM in the developing countries. (2011, 20 Marks)

A New Social Movement (NSM) is a sustained, loosely networked collective challenge organised around identity, values and quality of life rather than class, aiming to change social norms and culture as much as state policy. The term emerged in Western Europe after 1968 for feminist, ecological, peace, student and sexual-minority mobilisations that classical Marxism could not explain.

The concept

  • Alain Touraine placed post-industrial conflict over historicity, a society’s capacity to shape its own cultural orientations.
  • Jürgen Habermas saw NSMs resisting the colonisation of the lifeworld by bureaucracy and market.
  • Alberto Melucci made collective identity their principal product; Claus Offe (1985) described a “new politics” of the new middle class.
  • Ronald Inglehart explained the demand side through post-material values.
  • Common traits: a middle-class or cross-class base, recognition claims, decentralised organisation, symbolic repertoires, and autonomy preferred to capturing state power.

In developing countries NSMs are hybrids. Ecological, Dalit, Adivasi and women’s movements fuse livelihood with identity, which Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier call the environmentalism of the poor; Gail Omvedt (Reinventing Revolution, 1993) saw India’s anti-caste, peasant and women’s movements renewing radical politics outside the old left.

Main challenges in developing countries

Socio-economic

  • Survival first. Post-material appeals struggle where incomes are insecure; participants cannot easily sacrifice wages for a value-based demand.
  • Scarce resources and media access. Sustained campaigns are costly, and coverage concentrates in metropolitan, English-language media.

Political and legal

  • Repression. Preventive detention, protest bans and internet shutdowns are cheap and routine. CIVICUS found detention of protesters the most common civic-space violation in 2025, recorded in at least 82 countries, and rates India’s civic space “repressed”. Climate activist Sonam Wangchuk was held under the National Security Act after the Leh violence of September 2025 until March 2026; Nepal banned 26 social-media platforms the same month.
  • Regulatory constraint. Registration rules, tax scrutiny and foreign-funding laws, such as India’s FCRA amendments of 2020, reach organisations that direct repression cannot; CIVICUS counted restrictive laws adopted or proposed in 66 countries in 2025.
  • Co-optation. Parties and governments absorb leaders into office, committees or schemes, trading the movement’s edge for access.

Internal

  • NGO-isation. Donor-driven professionalisation substitutes projects for politics and detaches organisations from their base.
  • Fragmentation. Caste, ethnic, religious and regional cleavages split constituencies, as when landowning farmers’ movements and Dalit labourers’ struggles pull in opposite directions.
  • Elite leadership. Educated activists articulate claims for the poor, opening a gap of representation within the movement.
  • Leaderless digital mobilisation. Platforms produce large, fast protests that cannot negotiate or sustain settlements. Madagascar’s Gen Z protests of 2025 ended in a military takeover in October, not a democratic settlement.

Ideational

  • Legitimacy deficit. Movements are framed as “anti-development”, foreign-funded or elitist, a charge with purchase where a dam or mine promises jobs; the Narmada Bachao Andolan faced it for decades.
  • Counter-movements. Nationalist and anti-gender mobilisations portray rights claims as Western imports, turning equality into a sovereignty question.

Can the challenges be met?

The record is mixed rather than bleak. Campaigns that built cross-class coalitions and engaged institutions won statutes: the Right to Information Act (2005) and the Forest Rights Act (2006). India’s youth protests over the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak forced the Education Minister’s resignation on 25 July 2026, showing that digital mobilisation can still extract accountability.

Conclusion

NSMs in developing countries carry a heavier burden than their Western counterparts: they must secure livelihoods and recognition together, against stronger states and thinner resources. Their survival depends on open civic space and on institutions willing to receive their demands, and on movements’ own capacity to organise beyond the moment of protest.