Brokers between distinct social movements, such as the labor and environmental movements, often face what James Jasper (2004) calls the “bridge-builder's dilemma”—they must find ways to build trust among powerful movement institutions with diverging goals and structurally differentiated interests. This article expands Jasper's concept through a study of Environmentalists for Full Employment (EFFE), a labor-environmental bridging organization active between 1975 and 1984. I argue that brokers can initially navigate the dilemma by pursuing a strategy of niche construction: they identify ways to serve powerful incumbents in both movements and channel their activities accordingly. But this can create a new variant of the problem if a contradiction emerges between their niches and their long-term goals. For some organizations, like EFFE, this situation leads to frustration, surprising strategic innovations, or even dissolution. By comparing this case with others in the literature, I demonstrate that the bridge-builder's dilemma and niche construction are concepts with broad applicability that can help explain the trajectories of a variety of inter-movement brokers.
This study examines the effects of social protest on the ideological repositioning of parliamentary elites through three social protest episodes in Latin America. After identifying and defining the mechanisms by which these effects are generated, we examine variations in the ideological response of parliamentary elites along a left-right spectrum. Such a left-right spectrum is considered appropriate given Latin America's contemporary political history. The study uses the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method to identify the ideological orientations among parliamentary elites after episodes of transgressive political contention. The analysis relies on three indices: polarization, overlap, and ideological niches. By examining these indices, we find concrete evidence of the presence and strength of the parliamentary elites’ ideological stances.
This study examines how individual protesters perceived and responded to subtle police repression during South Korea's Candlelight Protests, where unprecedented cooperation between protesters and police emerged despite latent potential for confrontation. Drawing on forty semistructured interviews, I argue that protesters’ contextualized perceptions of police generated diverse motivations for cooperation with police. Situated within protest-specific cultural, institutional, and historical contexts, protesters used the cultural framework of police legitimacy, the awareness of auxiliary police system, and the collective memory of past violent repression to assess police as active allies (protecting and helping protesters), silenced allies (auxiliary police compelled to control protests), and conditional allies (whose response depends on protesters’ characteristics). Each perception provided differential motivations for cooperation: to protect and help active and silenced allies or to prevent potential coercive repression from conditional allies. This study contributes to the repression-resistance literature by revealing understudied microlevel dynamics of protester-police relations.
Protest hesitancy remains a significant barrier to participation in social movements. This article examines how gender shapes protest hesitancy and how it can be strategically leveraged to overcome it by analyzing the Flower Demo movement against sexual violence in Japan. Interviews with 72 participants reveal how the movement's feminization of tactics, strategies, and leadership helped overcome protest hesitancy. First, Flower Demo's feminized protest actions countered stereotypes of protests as masculine and combative. Second, Flower Demo decoupled protests from politics by emphasizing inclusive goals and emotional strategies, in which simply showing up signified success. This addressed the norm that one should remain apolitical and avoid criticism and pressure, particularly for women. Third, Flower Demo's participatory leadership structure challenged the perception that activists exercise autocratic leadership. This research illustrates how normative masculine views of social movements suppress broader participation and how gender can be used as a resource to overcome protest hesitancy.
This article examines how Palestinian nonviolent resistance is understood, practiced, and evaluated by activists under conditions of settler colonialism, with a focus on the case of the Popular Struggle Committee (PSCC) in the South Hebron Hills of the Occupied West Bank. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2024, including interviews conducted both before and after October 7, 2023, we examine how grassroots actors perceive the strategic and symbolic value of nonviolence. Our discussion situates these findings within the broader scholarship on civil resistance and social movement outcomes, while grounding them in their specific historical context. The article argues that assessments of efficacy must move beyond instrumental outcomes to include maintenance, mobilization, continuity on the ground, and value changes. By grounding these dimensions in the lived experiences of Palestinian communities confronting overlapping forms of repression, this study aims to enrich broader debates on nonviolent resistance.
