Tag Archives: Mobilization

Organizing against mining companies during the COVID-19 pandemic: frames, tactics and the digital divide in southern Mexico

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Morosin, A., & Hein, J. E. (2025). Organizing against mining companies during the COVID-19 pandemic: frames, tactics and the digital divide in southern Mexico. Globalizations, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2025.2525034

How did movements defending the commons cope with a rise in direct State support for extractive capital during the COVID-19 pandemic? This article utilizes a mixed methods approach to explore how anti-mining organizations in southern Mexico shifted their frames and tactics at the onset of the pandemic. Content analysis of e-newsletters from two civil society organizations were combined with interviews with anti-mine activists. Electronic newsletters and other forms of communication engaged in frame extension by linking the pandemic to environmental injustice and to the State’s neglect of public health. In an effort to transcend a digital divide in rural areas impacted by neoliberal extractivism, some solidarity organizations increased their reliance on the internet, yet such digital tactics were not evenly embraced. Our findings clarify some limitations of the internet for mobilizing rural populations in mining zones, while reiterating the importance of traditional, face-to-face organizing tactics that directly challenge extractive industries.

Banal Radicalism: Free Spaces and the Routinization of Radical Practices in Far-Right Movements

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Marom, O. (2025), Banal Radicalism: Free Spaces and the Routinization of Radical Practices in Far-Right Movements. Br J Sociol, 76: 767-778. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13213

How do free spaces become radicalizing spaces? Studies of far-right radicalism have highlighted the role of insulated movement spaces in radicalizing their members. In these spaces, participants can flaunt their radical ideas and infuse them into everyday practices, forming these ideas into comprehensive and resilient worldviews. However, the salience of radical ideas in free spaces has also been found to be inconsistent and rare. This contrast makes it unclear when and how exactly free spaces contribute to the spread and persistence of radical ideas. Drawing on a 4-year ethnographic study of a radical right-wing libertarian movement in the US, this study shows how activists both highlight and downplay radical ideas creatively to solve situationally emergent challenges of coordinating action. Thus, while the movement’s free spaces created circumstances that imbued some everyday mundane practices with radical political significance, they also facilitated an opposite process: they created conditions that obscured or even undermined the political meaning of otherwise radical practices. As I argue, rather than stifling the spread of radical ideas, this banalization of radical practices is a critical component of the radicalization process itself, allowing activists to coordinate radical action among a diverse group of people and across varying situations. In this way, free spaces contribute to the coordination of radical action, even among participants who do not necessarily express radical political motivations. Thus, the findings show how people’s motivations for radical action are often articulated in the moment, in response to specific situations and the challenges they present.

Contesting the State: Embodied Threat and the Emergence of Prisoner Mobilization

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Knight, D. J. (2025). Contesting the State: Embodied Threat and the Emergence of Prisoner Mobilization. American Sociological Review, 90(4), 658-689. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224251340401 (Original work published 2025)

Prior studies cast U.S. imprisonment as politically demobilizing. This article complicates that proposition by exploring when, and how, threat under penal confinement leads people to mobilize. Using interviews with currently incarcerated and recently released men across three states, I show that although imprisonment generally fosters political inaction, collective mobilization does arise under certain conditions. First, people in prison mobilize in response to embodied threats—fundamental threats eliciting visceral reactions that signal future harm (i.e., premature death or permanent incapacitation). Second, to collectively mobilize, a subpopulation of similarly threatened prisoners must be present and see the threats as a shared problem. Collective prisoner mobilization is more likely when both conditions are present; mobilization is unlikely when neither condition is present; and individual political contention is more likely when conditions are partially present. This range of political responses among incarcerated people is more dynamic than previously reported. Imprisonment has selective political effects, mobilizing the most repressed individuals within prison to devise new strategies to contest their repression.

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Globalization, populism, and climate skepticism: untangling varieties and pathways

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Kim, J., Henry, E. A., Carter, J., & Soysal, Y. N. (2025). Globalization, populism, and climate skepticism: untangling varieties and pathways. Environmental Sociology, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2025.2536342

Drawing upon cross-national data collected by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) across 26 nations and over 28,000 individuals, this study explores the association between climate skepticism and populism, both in general, and amidst varying degrees of neoliberal globalization. Distinguishing between populism’s ideological varieties and pathways of influence, we find that right-wing and valence forms of populism are linked to greater skepticism, and left-wing populism to lower skepticism. Crucially, the impact of populism occurs both at the country level and at the individual level, indicating support for theories anticipating both top-down and bottom-up mechanisms of populist influence. We also find that the link between populism and climate skepticism depends on the level of globalization – albeit in diverse and sometimes unexpected ways, reflecting the pathway and ideology in question. These insights advance ongoing debates arguing that populism is neither inherently exclusionary or right-wing, and its diverse forms warrant further exploration. Future research can expand data collection on populism’s ideological variations and investigate how populist dynamics intersect with globalization, particularly its neoliberal variant, to shape climate attitudes.

Profile: multi-sectoral alliances in national mobilizations against extraction in Panama

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Díaz Pinzón, F., & Almeida, P. (2025). Profile: multi-sectoral alliances in national mobilizations against extraction in Panama. Social Movement Studies, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2025.2562887

Collective action against extraction tends to occur at the local level at the sites where nearby ecological damage takes place. In Panama in 2023, protests reached a national level against copper mining by a transnational corporation and successfully terminated operations. The protests endured for a month and acted as the largest outpouring of protests in Panamanian history. This study details how a massive campaign against extraction with a successful outcome builds from multi-sectoral alliances attained in previous struggles. The lessons learned from the mobilizations provide strategies for other regions in the search for equitable environmental policies that avoid threatening ecological sustainability.

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