Bringing leadership back in

Social movements drive economic, social, political, and cultural change. But who–or what–makes movements? Because social movement effectiveness depends largely on the extent to which participants learn how to turn individual resources into collective power, leadership development is central to movement capacity building. With rare exceptions, however, it remains understudied and under‐theorized (Aminzade, Goldstone, and Perry 2001; Barker, Johnson, and Lavalette 2001; Ganz 2010; Morris and Staggenborg 2004).We begin with the claim that leadership dynamics are key to understanding social movements. Next, we survey existing literature on leadership in adjacent disciplines and in the social movement canon to learn why it remains a relatively marginalized topic in the subfield. We argue that reducing leadership to a contrast between char-