THOUGHTS - The Strategy of Protest and Revolution 1: Basic Elements (04/05/2020)

Thoughts on Strategy of Protest and Revolution 1: Basic Elements

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== 1) Literature Review (in Youtube description) ==

 

- Most students of sociology will probably be familiar with Tilly’s work on protests (the concept of WUNC is from Tilly). In this sense, the core structure of the video is built around Tilly and especially Tarrow’s book (the 3 “stages” in protest grand strategy is from Tarrow). The books are probably meant to be undergraduate-level texts, and so serve as a good introduction to a sociological analysis of social movements.

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- Denardo’s book, on the other hand, is entirely too complicated to be an undergraduate level text, as it attempts to construct a mathematical model for social movement strategy. The video’s idea of social movement grand strategy being a matter of “Issues” and “Organization” comes from Denardo, although he would also add “Violence” as a 3rd dimension in his model. He also came up with the argument that a socmov’s organizational structure directly impacts its ideological leanings.

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- Meyer, Jenness, Ingram (eds.) try and turn socmov analysis away from being focused on purely confrontational episodes, instead placing them as stakeholders within the policymaking process (i.e. Public Policy Theory). There are many hypotheses within Public Policy Theory; Meyer et al seem to focus on the idea of ‘policy monopolies’ where socmovs create a nexus with establishment figures, exchanging political support for policy influence. This is clearly where the ‘cooptation’ part of the video comes from.

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- On the other hand, the PPT hypothesis I’m more familiar with is Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework, which essentially is about how policy is essentially about ‘entrepreneurs’ matching problems to solutions and then trying to get them enacted. I took this idea and placed it in the socmov environment: under this interpretation, a movement as basically an ‘entrepreneur’ using unconventional methods to enact its policy.

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I’ll admit that I found Freelon’s article solely through Googling Black Lives Matter + WUNC. I did it because I was already quite dissatisfied with Tilly’s idea of Worthiness – I don’t think many movements try to be deferential these days!

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== 2) Thoughts on the Creation of the Video ==

 

- I originally wanted to end this video by illustrating how all the elements I described worked in practice, using the French Revolution as an example. The reason why I didn’t do that is because -as you’ll probably find out probably tomorrow - the French Revolution video turned out to be about 40 minutes long. It also wasn’t entirely fair to have people who just wanted an analysis of the French Revolution to have to slog through abstract theory first.

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- There was nothing graphically challenging about the video – writing the script was the hardest part. Theory is always so difficult to write because you have to create your own structure, rather than being guided by historical events etc…

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- I’m not sure I’ll ever get to actually using WUNC as an analytical tool for the rest of the video series – the level of analysis that it’s at is too low for these videos. But it’s a well-known concept and it would be a shame to not include it in a video about social movements.

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