Tag Archives: social-movements

“Choppy Waters”: Navigating Political Generational Conflict in Social Movement Organizations

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Seigler, C. P., Velasco, K., & Paxton, P. (2025). “Choppy Waters”: Navigating Political Generational Conflict in Social Movement Organizations. American Sociological Review, 90(6), 1092-1122.

Social movements are composed of distinct political generations. Yet empirical work documenting distinct generations is limited, and work detailing the conflict and problems created by generational turnover exceedingly rare. Based on interviews with 39 leaders of LGBTQ+ organizations, supplemented with longitudinal administrative text data from 1,840 LGBTQ+ organizational mission statements, we demonstrate political generational change, and conflict, in the U.S. LGBTQ+ movement. The prior “Legacy” generation is confronted by an “Emergent” generation with different understandings of sexuality/gender, intersectionality, and organizational strategies. These conflictual differences produce material and emotional consequences as the “Legacy” generation takes their resources away and members of both generations feel erased from the movement’s collective identity. Leaders navigate these “choppy waters” by taking either a harsh approach, which seeks to dismiss whichever generation is viewed as hindering their organization’s work, or an inclusive approach that views generational tension as an opportunity to grow and strengthen their organization and the larger movement. We highlight how the observed conflict between political generations prompts a serious re-evaluation of the “unity through diversity” mantra associated with this movement. Ultimately, political generations are a critical link to understanding transformation and change in social movements with clear implications for collective identity, resource mobilization, and other core social movement processes.

Race, Reform, and Recalls: The Movement Against “Progressive” Prosecutors

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Goldberg, A. (2025). Race, Reform, and Recalls: The Movement Against “Progressive” Prosecutors. The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, 1–36. doi:10.1017/rep.2025.10043

Local prosecutors in the United States have significant discretion in the criminal legal system and have traditionally wielded their power in a way that contributes to mass incarceration. Since 2016, however, “progressive” prosecutors have been elected in growing numbers on pledges to mitigate the racialized harms of mass incarceration. While scholars tie progressive prosecutors’ elections to the Movement for Black Lives (BLM), less is known about countermovement efforts—including recalls, impeachments, and suspensions, examples of extra-electoral challenges—opposing these prosecutors. To address this gap, I constructed an original database of all local prosecutors in 2012 and/or 2022 in the country’s 300 most populous jurisdictions. Findings reveal that extra-electoral challenges disproportionately target women of color, disproportionately occur in Republican-controlled states, and have nearly tripled over the last decade. I argue that extra-electoral challenges constitute a novel movement repertoire used by the political right to challenge racial justice efforts following BLM.

Anti-leftism as an aesthetic in white power punk

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Katz, N. (2025). Anti-leftism as an aesthetic in white power punk. Social Movement Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2025.2595346

White Power music scenes embrace both White Supremacy and the music cultures they situate themselves in. For White Power punk scenes, there is a reliance on the shaping and utilization of punk aesthetics to support their ideology. This paper examines how members of White Power punk bands in the United States and Germany utilize White Supremacist ideals and punk aesthetics to construct their scenes. The findings show that both the German and U.S. scenes emphasize an opposition to leftism as a core aesthetic. Opposing leftism serves as a driving aesthetic in three ways: it allows members to make sense of their music scenes, helps them create an ideological position that links music scenes together, and provides a discursive tool to connect their scenes with larger social issues.

Reactionary Politics in South Korea: Historical Legacies, Far-Right Intellectuals, and Political Mobilization

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Yang, M. (2025). Reactionary Politics in South Korea: Historical Legacies, Far-Right Intellectuals, and Political Mobilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In December 2024, South Korean president Yoon Seok-yeol stunned the world by declaring martial law. More puzzling was that Yoon’s insurrection unexpectedly gained substantial support from the ruling right-wing party and many citizens. Why do ordinary citizens support authoritarian leaders and martial law in a democratic country? What draws them to extreme actions and ideas? With the rise of illiberal, far-right politics across the globe, Reactionary Politics in South Korea provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices of far-right groups and organizations threatening democratic systems. Drawing on eighteen months of field research and rich qualitative data, Myungji Yang helps explain the roots of current democratic regression. Yang provides vivid details of on-the-ground internal dynamics of far-right actors and their communities and worldviews, uncovering the organizational and popular foundations of far-right politics and movements.

The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements

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Rossi, Federico M., ed. 2023. The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements: Oxford University Press. Retrieved 12/11/2025 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190870362.001.0001.

Since the redemocratization of much of Latin America in the 1980s and a regional wave of anti-austerity protests in the 1990s, social movement studies has become an important part of sociological, political, and anthropological scholarship on the region. The subdiscipline has framed debates about formal and informal politics, spatial and relational processes, as well as economic changes in Latin America. While there is an abundant literature on particular movements in different countries across the region, there is limited coverage of the approaches, debates, and theoretical understandings of social movement studies applied to Latin America. In The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements, Federico M. Rossi presents a survey of the broad range of theoretical perspectives on social movements in Latin America. Bringing together a wide variety of viewpoints, the Handbook includes five sections: theoretical approaches to social movements, as applied to Latin America; processes and dynamics of social movements; major social movements in the region; ideational and strategic dimensions of social movements; and the relationship between political institutions and social movements. Covering key social movements and social dynamics in Latin America from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements is an indispensable reference for any scholar interested in social movements, protest, contentious politics, and Latin American studies.