Contentious entanglements: Using EPE to understand social movements
Our world is gripped by discord and strife. At least, this is the impression that many experts and casual observers, alike, glean from fervent social movement activities over the best part of twenty years. Social movements have been implicated in many of the blockades, petitions, protests, strikes, and related contentious activities aimed at countering perceived injustices and additional grievances. Indeed, many of the movements sprung up over the last two decades have become household names – for example, the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and, most recently, the anti-lockdown movement.
The study of social movements appears to be enjoying a revival in recent times. This trend is owing to the frequency of protest and related activities and other factors, including the use of digital technologies to generate mass participation as well as the emulation of movement tactics by other groups within society. Social movement activity has implications for the sustainability of economic, political, and social orders, and this phenomenon demands using the conceptual and analytical tools of social sciences for better understanding. What are social movements, and what are their impacts? These are the motivational bases for my latest book, Freedom in Contention: Social Movements and Liberal Political Economy, published under the Lexington Books “Polycentricity: Studies in Institutional Diversity and Voluntary Governance” series.
What is unique about my book is that I draw upon a blending of contemporary approaches to liberal political economy – specifically, the key insights of Austrian, Bloomington, and Virginia political economy – to consider some of the positive or empirical aspects of social movement organization, participation, and activity. By way of example of applying an Austrian insight, I see key activists partaking in ideational or norm entrepreneurship to discover ways of engaging others in agreement with a movement cause under conditions of socio-political uncertainty. Many examples abound of movements needing to devise their own methods of collective activity, including decision-making procedures, as fitted to their circumstances, which relates to Bloomington sensibilities concerning polycentric self-governance. In challenging the arbitrary, unjust prosecution of political power by governmental authorities, I refer to how social movement activities are comprehensible using Viriginia political economy intuitions.
Entangled political economy (EPE) is well represented in this book. This would be unsurprising for many readers of this post, given how EPE connects with (and in several respects extends upon) Austrian, Bloomington, and Virginia school conceptual and analytical propositions. Consistent with the “anti-substantialist” tendencies within EPE thought, I do not see social movements as homogenized and unified actors but, rather, as interactive networks of people ingrained with epistemic, moral, and perspectival diversities. It is clear from even successful movements, such as the much-esteemed American Civil Rights movement, that unity amongst participants is contingent, even at the best of times. Social movements may be implicated in several significant historical changes, but the success stories tend to divert attention from the many instances of contentious splintering and failures over the long span of time.
In keeping with EPE recognition of a range of interactions, my book chronicles the kinds of conflictive relationships existing not only within movement networks. Key movement activists and their supporters contentiously struggle against legislators, bureaucrats, judiciary, law enforcement, businesses, interest groups, and even against oppositional counter-movements for public recognition and esteem, and for generalized acceptance of the need for change. How activists engage with major corporations, and other economic enterprises, in their efforts to alter economic allocations and relations is an intriguing phenomenon and warrants additional research efforts. Speaking more broadly, the interface between social movement actors with political actors, economic actors, and others within civil society are seen to have potentially significant ramifications regarding the nature and effect of broader entanglements that constitute our structured living-togetherness.
I consider, and I trust readers of my book will agree, that EPE is a framework conducive to an enriched appreciation of that ecology of actors, and their activities, that comprise a civil society. I see the application of an EPE lens to social movement studies as a natural extension of previous intellectual innovations that have seen EPE insights applied to the investigation of bureaucratic agencies (such as central banks), firms (such as pharmaceutical companies, and others closely entwined with governmental authorities), non-profit organizations, and many other entities which occupy our networked spaces of interaction. It would be remiss of me not to refer to the manner with which movement participants not only use material resources to engender structural shifts, but extensively rely upon ideological articulation and sentiment to give meaning to their contentious actions and to try to persuade others about the case for change.
A consideration of social movement activities, and the ethical validity of participation in such contentious challenges against political authority and other hegemonic power sources, is far from a new preoccupation by liberal thinkers. It is fair to say that liberals have found cause, on numerous occasions, to discredit social movements as rent seekers or, otherwise, as disruptive agents dedicated to overturning our shared basis of material prosperity and societal cohesion. I recognize that the history of social movements is littered with illiberal causes and illiberal (especially violent) activities.
What I also point out is that social movements with functionally pro-liberty objectives have also existed, uniting peoples in the struggle for a freer world – whether it be from the yoke of oppressive government, the maladies of bigotry and discrimination, or from the painful lack of economic opportunity. So many historical and contemporary instances reveal that freedom is not gifted by dominators but must be wrested from them. The gift that is the liberal legacy of social movements, wherever it has been found, has meant that individuals get to ultimately choose who they wish to entangle with, and on what basis.
Mikayla Novak’s “Freedom in Contention: Social Movements and Liberal Political Economy” (Lexington Books) is available now.