The relationship between economic development and democratization is increasingly relevant to social movement research. While modernization theory suggests that an expanding middle class fosters democratic engagement, empirical findings remain mixed. Hong Kong provides a compelling case to examine this paradox: despite its affluent economy and sizable middle class, its democratic development remains constrained. This study examines how subjective class identity, cohort experience, and political identity-shaped participation in Hong Kong's 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement - a protest wave that began with opposition to the bill and broadened into citywide pro-democracy mobilization. Using data from 3,500 respondents collected via respondent-driven sampling, we show that a self-perceived middle-class status - not objective measures like homeownership - predicts protest participation. The post-80s generation, raised during economic prosperity yet under tightening political conditions, participates more than older cohorts. An exclusive 'Hongkonger' identity further elevates engagement. These findings demonstrate how subjective class identification, generational political socialization, and identity formation jointly drive mobilization in semi-democracies, integrating political opportunity, post-materialist, and identity-based theories and offering broader implications for middle-class activism in constrained settings.
This article examines how actors within Brazil's AIDS movement responded unevenly to the consolidation of religious conservatism in Congress and the far right's accession to executive power. While research on repression and social movements, particularly the political process approach, explore how organisations within the same movement may respond differently to shared political conditions, they tend to explain such variation through organisational capacity, access to resources, and shifting political opportunities, often treating culture instrumentally as something actors can strategically deploy. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of practice, this article adopts a relational perspective that conceptualizes responses as shaped by the interplay between habitus, capital, and position within the AIDS policy field. Based on 42 in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, the article identifies three distinct strategic responses: silent resistance, persistence, and adaptation. These position-takings were not merely tactical choices but expressions of embodied dispositions formed through distinct activist trajectories and uneven distributions of cultural, social, and militant capital. The article argues that as the political field shifted, the symbolic capital accumulated during earlier progressive cycles was devalued, producing a crisis of illusio and hysteresis for some, and new forms of legitimacy for others.
This article develops the concept of spontaneous action coalescence (SAC) to explain protest participation under conditions of high surveillance. Drawing on 26 in-depth interviews that combine media-published and researcher-conducted accounts, we explore how individuals engage in contention without prior coordination, organizational ties, or shared strategic intent. We argue that SAC captures a distinct logic of action where independent, atomized behaviors converge through visibility, imitation, and emotional resonance rather than through networks or leadership. Tracing SAC as a process - from moral and emotional triggers to situational convergence, risk-mitigating atomization, and post-protest trajectories - we demonstrate how heterogeneous and improvised actions generated collective effects. By distinguishing SAC from conventional collective action and decentralized movements, this study advances the theorization of contention in authoritarian, high-surveillance contexts.
This article proposes an analysis of the emotion management strategies that Mexican climate activists employ to overcome the emotions they feel by living in the climate crisis, particularly in their social context, all of which may be detrimental to activism. The theoretical framework combines Arlie Hochschild's emotion management theory, commonly applied in social movement studies, and the contributions of social psychology that examine emotion regulation strategies, which have been used in the study of climate emotions. The article shows how and why climate activists do emotion management to avoid eco-paralysis, burnout, or demobilisation. The interviews cited in the article are part of our five-year research (2019-2023) on emotions and climate activism in Mexico using a methodological pluralism design. When possible, we also compare the common patterns and differences among Global South and North climate activists.
This paper examines the cases of Bangladesh and Nepal, highlighting how profound economic crises and stark inequalities can ignite powerful social movements that, in turn, create opportunities to reshape the political landscape. Drawing on historical institutionalism and focusing on three key factors - economic, social, and political - this discussion seeks to provide a deeper insight into the drivers of large-scale uprisings and their potential implications in these South Asian nations.
Fatphobia, the discrimination and stigmatization of fat individuals, has increasingly been questioned by social movements articulated by civil society that fight for a broader public and political debate on this phenomenon, for the resignification of body norms and for the elimination of stigma. This article seeks to understand the discourses and actions of women belonging to fat activism in Brazil and Spain. Furthermore, this work analyzes the importance of fat activism in the social resignification of the meanings attributed to the body. This is a qualitative cross-sectional study based on 14 semi-structured interviews conducted with women who belong to fat activism in these two countries. According to their narratives, fatphobia permeates the different stages of women's life, but at a certain moment and due to an articulation of circumstances, they felt the need and were able to transform their individual experiences into collective, critical and politicized action against the pathologization of bodies and the consequent forms of oppression and violence. One of the main aspects observed in this study is the central role that this form of activism currently plays in the deconstruction of stigma and the criticism of violent practices against fat bodies.
Social movement scholars have long focused on what makes social movements successful in terms of their structural impact or in attracting resources and support. What has gained less attention is how collective action is sustained over time, along with the generative and redistributive potential of care in sustaining action. This article aims to analyse how collective action is sustained among organized tenants, examining their care work, with particular attention to spatial and temporal dimensions. Based on semi-structured and focus-group interviews with organized tenants in different Swedish cities, the goal is to investigate experiences and practices for sustaining action. The theoretical framework used distinguishes different temporal and spatial practices in the care work carried out by collective actors. It is argued that tenants manage time and space by aligning and differentiating across temporalities and by using the material and immaterial aspects of their embeddedness in space to create caring identities and solidarities.
Academic literature highlights the pivotal role of emotions in collective expressions of solidarity towards illegalised migrants: anger and compassion can motivate individuals to react against border violence, while feelings of joy, togetherness, and happiness can foster social bonds between solidarians and migrant people. But scholarly works remain mainly descriptive of nameable emotions, overlooking the formation and circulation of these affective states. As a result, they fail to account for the temporal trajectory of migrant support mobilisations. To address this limitation, I advance an affective spatial approach that combines sociological theories on emotions and social movements with critical geographies of affect. Through this theoretical lens, I examine how affects emerge and are transmitted through space, generating ambivalent emotional reactions that influence pro-migrant volunteers' engagement over time - from moments of excitement and intensification to episodes of fatigue and withdrawal. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation, I explore the emotions and affects experienced by solidarians in different sites of pro-migrant action in the area of Calais, France, between 2017 and 2019. I do this by homing in on three kinds of space: the warehouses, which generate a compulsive fascination; the distribution queues, engendering a reluctant compassion; and mobile police checkpoints, which lead to a repression of anger. Overall, by attending to the spatial dimension of emotions and affect, this article aims to shed light on the heterogeneous - and often contrasting - affective processes characterising the collective mobilisation of solidarity towards migrant people in Calais, also explaining its evolution and sustainability over time.
A substantial body of work examines how social movements draw on past struggles, circulate repertoires transnationally and preserve traditions of protest. However, less attention has been paid to the processes through which memory can fail, be silenced or erased. Existing scholarship has rarely examined how movements led by precarious actors, such as undocumented migrants' collectives, construct - and sometimes risk losing- collective memory under conditions of political hostility. In this paper, we draw on longitudinal ethnographic data to examine how collective memory and amnesia, or the relative presence or absence of institutionalized forms of memory transfers, affect organizing dynamics within the Belgian sans-papiers movement. Combining insights from the literatures on collective memory and immigrant rights organizing, we argue that collective memory work helps to explain continuities and discontinuities within the Belgian Sans-Papiers movement in the 2004-2020 period. More in particular, we argue that 'memory agents' and 'memory interfaces' serve as mnemonic infrastructures that help to store, preserve and transfer strategic, practical and other forms of knowledge within and between self-organizations. When such infrastructures break down due to external factors like state repression or internal factors like dwindling leadership or opposing challengers, the threat of collective amnesia becomes imminent. These findings underline the importance of effective collective memory work for the high-risk struggles of marginalized and oppressed communities.
In early 2025, South Korea experienced a surge of mass mobilization after President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law. Young women, queer identifying individuals, and other marginalized groups stood at the forefront of these protests, raising questions about how exclusion shapes democratic engagement. This study examines how perceived discrimination and participation in protest influence attitudes toward government responsiveness and the importance of voting. Using qualitative interviews with protest participants and nationally representative survey data, the analysis shows that discrimination is linked to political alienation, yet protest participation moderates this pattern. For those who experience exclusion, protest provides a context in which voting is reconsidered as a meaningful act rather than a formality. These findings suggest that protest can foster renewed democratic agency among structurally disadvantaged groups and highlight the conditions under which political voice is reconstituted in unequal and distrustful environments.
This article explores women frontline workers' political trajectories during the Covid-19 pandemic, based on longitudinal fieldwork (2021-2024) within two grassroots Yellow Vest Movement (YVM) groups in south-eastern France. Drawing on interview and participant observation data, it traces how ten women from feminised and precarious labour sectors politicised work outside traditional union frameworks. The YVM provided interpretive schemas and networks for making sense of dissonant workplace experiences, particularly the contrast between public appraisal and institutional and professional mistreatment. Work contestation practices, such as vaccine refusal and workplace testimonials, emerged through informal movement networks. Over time, participants developed practices of withdrawal from the state and its institutions, including bartering, naturopathy, and gardening. These trajectories reveal how cross-sphere socialisation between work and activism shaped politicisation processes during a critical juncture. The study contributes to understanding the reconfiguration of labour contention in feminised sectors and spill-over processes between labour and social movements.
The repertoire of contemporary social movements increasingly includes utilising data in strategic pursuit of their goals. In this paper, we explore the potential for co-produced crowdsourced data in the context of a global, networked movement advocating for the de-privatisation of public services. We argue that crowdsourcing can produce data to inform and strengthen alternative progressive narratives to counteract dominant elite discourses still wedded to increasingly contradictory global neoliberal political and economic governance rhetorics. The building of counter-hegemonic knowledge is particularly critical in the current moment where elite and dominant narratives are being called into question. The paper also contributes to social movement studies by developing the theoretical and conceptual framework of crowdsourcing, to improve its 'fit' for co-produced social science. In this way, the paper contributes to social movement scholarship on the role of data; the conceptual development of the methodology itself; and ongoing debates around social movements as knowledge producers.
