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Social Movements in the South
Afreen Alam, and Sanjeev Khagram
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Although rich scholarship and innovative
practices can be found in Southern countries like Brazil, India, South
Africa and Thailand, far too little of this information and knowledge
arrives at international centers of knowledge production and dissemination
in the North. Nor is knowledge shared sufficiently among researchers
and practitioners across Southern countries. The project on “Social
Movements in the South” aims to help fill these gaps by bringing
together scholar-activists and activist-scholars from four important
developing countries in a multi-year initiative on the topic of social
movements.
Individuals from these four countries on the project’s international
coordinating committee have been discussing such a collaborative project
over the past few years. On the basis of their individual and collective
expertise on social movements, committee members selected this topic
mindful of the current impasse in social movement scholarship—particularly
in the North and in the West. Moreover, Brazil, India, South Africa
and Thailand offer exciting and rich experiences for comparative research,
theory development, and practical innovation. Organizers share the
conviction that a cross-regional, cross-country, cross-institutional,
and cross-disciplinary research project on Southern social movements,
based primarily on the work of scholars from the South, will have
a tremendous impact on the field—and in the field.
An inductive and open-ended approach underlies this initiative. The
project intends to build from the rich experiences and understandings
of different social movements in the four countries on the basis of
the analyses of researchers and activists from each country. They
will formulate common thematic foci, methodologies, and conceptual
frameworks, and they will develop critical and constructive contributions
to social-movement theory and practice. While extant conceptual frameworks
on social movements surely will provide direction and guidance, these
precedents will not constrain the critical and creative possibilities
of the project. The core of the project will involve four workshops
and various meetings, events, and joint efforts over three years.
“Social Movements in the South”
workshops
From May 17 to 20 this past spring, the
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs hosted the first of the
four international workshops planned for the broader “Social
Movements in the South” project. A model of university-wide
collaboration, the workshop was jointly sponsored by the Weatherhead
Center, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the
Asia Center, and the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. Sanjeev
Khagram, assistant professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy
School of Government, organized the Harvard workshop. Professor Carlos
Vainer of Brazil, Professor Viviene Taylor of South Africa, Professor
S. Parasuraman of India, and Professor Surichai W’angaeo of
Thailand are coordinating the overall project, together with Professor
Khagram.
The objectives of the first workshop were threefold: to assemble scholars
to present and share initial research papers on various social movements
in their respective countries; to begin developing common thematic
foci, conceptual frameworks, and methodological approaches for a broader,
three-year project; and to discuss activities, funding, logistics,
and a timetable for the next three years. Teams of five to six distinguished
scholar-activists and activist-scholars from Brazil, India and South
Africa, and a single representative from Thailand, participated in
the workshop and will continue to be involved throughout the project.
Overall, the participants strongly believed that this initial workshop
achieved their objectives and declared their eagerness to continue
their collaborative work.
Scholars on social movements devoted the first three half-day sessions
of the workshop to sharing and discussing draft papers from each of
the four countries. The set of case studies of social movements from
each country entailed at least two that were considered “conventional”
or “modern,” such as trade union movements, and at least
two that might be understood as “new” or “post-modern,”
such as environmental movements. Scholars selected the particular
case studies of social movements across the countries in order to
provide especially rich comparisons. For example, participants presented
case studies on landless and peasant movements in each of the countries.
But at the same time a case study on Amazonian social movements in
Brazil and one on anti-privatization movements in South Africa did
not have counterparts in the other countries.
The next several sessions of the workshop were devoted to the process
of developing an initial set of common thematic foci, methodologies,
and preliminary conceptual frameworks for the overall project. It
was agreed that researchers from countries of the North and West increasingly
employ a set of conceptual tools in making sense of the emergence
and trajectories of social movements. Resource mobilization, political
opportunity structures, individual and collective identity formation,
strategic framing processes, repertoires and cycles of collective
action, cultural politics, discourse—these are some of the core
analytic elements routinely involved in explaining and interpreting
the nature, timing, location, effects, and meaning of social movements.
Indeed, the coordinating committee’s selection of the case studies
was partially based on these theoretical orientations.
But these concepts have largely been crafted by scholars working almost
exclusively from empirical research on domestic social movements operating
within Western industrial democracies. This is in spite of the fact
that a rich array of research is available on local, national, and
transnational social movements around the world. Moreover, these core
concepts mask a continuing and deep divide in U.S and Northern-Western
scholarship between the “political process” and “new
social movements” theoretical approaches. The former has been
criticized for focusing too much on the how of social movements—organization,
politics, and resources—while neglecting the why of movements.
The latter has been criticized for “throwing the proverbial
baby out with the bath water” by focusing almost exclusively
on individual motivations, inter-subjective meanings, and processes
of collective identity formation.
Research by Southern scholars has generally not featured this “Tower
of Babel” stalemate. For example, it became clear from the case
studies presented during the workshop that conventional modern movements
were very much identity-based, and most new post-modern movements
were often deeply materialist in orientation. Indeed, several innovations
in this sort of social-movement theory, which either resolve aspects
of this primarily Northern-Western debate or completely bypass it,
have been generated in countries like Brazil, India, South Africa
and Thailand.
Participants found it extremely worthwhile to compare and contrast
the conceptual themes and methodological approaches they had found
to be most illuminating and useful in their own country-based work.
It became clear that Southern scholarship also addresses several themes
that research on domestic social movements within Western industrial
democracies have either missed or forgotten, including the role of
violence, the conditioning effects of international forces (such as
the inequalities of globalization), relations between movements at
multiple levels of political authority, the challenges/opportunities
of non-democratic or differently democratic political contexts, and
the interactions between social movements and more formal nongovernmental/non-profit
organizations, among others.
Moreover, it seemed to the participants that the activity of social
movements, both within the Southern countries and transnationally,
had been increasingly more visible and seemingly more innovative than
in their counterparts in the North and West. Many, although not all,
Southern social movements seem to be on the upswings of their cycles,
are innovating new strategies and tactics of collective action, and
are infusing energy into international and transnational social-movement
structures and activities. The assertion that these Southern social
movements are “dependent” on their Northern and Western
counterparts did not seem to hold up to critical and informed examination.
Future Plans for the Project
The final two sessions focused on the activities,
organization, funding, logistics, and timetables for the rest of the
project, including the work to be completed between and during the
subsequent three meetings. The participants agreed that the overall
project will attempt to include different types of activities beyond
the three annual workshops, including: macro-comparative studies utilizing
historical and structural approaches; specific joint comparative research
projects on particular aspects and/or specific types of movements;
dialogues and joint projects with social movements within and across
countries; researcher exchanges; and graduate student exchanges.
The participants also agreed that the overall
project will attempt to generate several types of products and outcomes.
Initially, the first workshop generated between 20 and 25 research
papers on different social movements in the four countries. These
papers are being revised, refined, and disseminated in several ways:
as working papers at various institutions, as journal articles, or
as contributions to edited volumes. Over the long term, participants
foresee the production of more comparative empirical, methodological,
and theoretical papers and books on social movements.
In addition to other products, including training handbooks and guides
for social movements, participants discussed other possible project
outcomes such as strengthening relations between researchers within
and across countries, strengthening relations between researchers
and social-movement activists within and across countries, and developing
a transnational network of social-movement researchers and social-movement
activists. Finally, all participants agreed that the overall initiative
could offer insights, inputs and recommendations for further South-South-South
cooperative projects on various issues, and that future cross-disciplinary,
cross-institutional, cross-national, cross-regional projects could
also be very successful. 
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