Classic accounts of contentious repertoires explain change through disruption. This article introduces the concept, repertoires of alignment, to be understood as a distinct, complementary toolkit that wins by converting movement claims into targets' imperatives. Using semi-structured interviews with 53 LGBT insider activists and their allies across 36 large U.S. employers, triangulated with Corporate Equality Index reports and policy documents, we map alignment tactics that convert LGBT workplace movement's individual-level, institutional-level, political, cultural, and economic goals to corporate goals. We show how these repertoires routinize change through evaluation infrastructures rivaling the earlier accounts of contention. We propose a research agenda to extend repertoires of alignment to outsider activism and across other sectors while engaging with contentious repertoires to show how different tactical families are woven into institutional change.
Social movement mobilization is often interspersed with episodes of collaboration with other causes, groups, and constituencies. Using the case of disability rights-related protests in the United States, this paper examines inter-movement protest collaboration based on data gathered from 234 protest events between 1961 and 2021. We analyse factors associated with inter-movement protests in comparison to insular protests, including the role of goals, grievances, and threat, and then examine whether inter-movement and insular protests differ in observable goal achievement. Our findings indicate that inter-movement protests are positively associated with threat, raising awareness goals, and with the period following the Americans with Disabilities Act, but inter-movement protests are no more likely than insular protests to achieve their observable protest goals. We do find that protest goal achievement is positively associated with the simultaneous use of institutional tactics, especially working with policymakers and with litigation. With both collaboration and goal achievement, we find some key negative associations with issue areas (e.g. social welfare, education, etc.) within which the disability rights movement works. This paper contributes to a broader discussion on mobilization dynamics by addressing when, how, and why different groups and constituencies collaborate to effect change, and what they may get out of it.
The literature generally finds that many activists resort to everyday resistance as a movement enters abeyance, with political identities, activist networks, and protest claims being hidden from state surveillance. The existing discussion, however, has not sufficiently explored how various bodily practices help preserve movement legacies and the conditions under which anti-regime claims might be made. Using interview data and visual data from Instagram, this paper examines the political tattoos created during and after the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong and explores the corporeal dimension of movement continuity. It argues that while tattooing is a personal means of preserving protest experiences, political identities and emotions, the public display of tattoos allows political meanings to circulate and like-minded individuals to get connected through the sensible-sentient body. Meanwhile, the multivocal nature of visual images and tattoo designs mitigates risk and enables movement communities and political commitment to persist in both revealed and concealed forms.
This article examines the uneven participation of pro-migrant civil society organizations (CSOs) in transnational networks with local governments within the European Union. While existing scholarship has highlighted the role of internal dynamics and network configurations, the influence of national and country-specific contexts remains underexplored. To address this gap, the article analyzes how macro-level, exogenous conditions influence CSO engagement in mixed transnational networks. Building on the political opportunity structure (POS) framework, it introduces a spatially oriented perspective that integrates insights from political geography, with particular attention to countries' proximity to the EU's external borders and their functional roles along migration routes. Drawing on a comparative analysis of three CSOs based in Italy, Germany, and Spain, the study demonstrates how spatial dynamics interact with institutional access, alliance availability, and state repression to influence political opportunities. By embedding spatiality within POS analysis, the article advances a more context-sensitive understanding of transnational pro-migrant activism and contributes to interdisciplinary dialogue between social movement studies and political geography.
