Donatella Della Porta - Social Movements: An Introduction

1. Chapter 6

THIRD EDITION

Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani

This third edition first published 2020
2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Edition History
Blackwell Publishing Ltd (1e, 1998 and 2e, 2006)

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Names: della Porta, Donatella, 1956 author. | Diani, Mario, 1957 author.
Title: Social movements : an introduction / Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani.
Description: Third edition. | Hoboken, NJ : WileyBlackwell, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019051993 (print) | LCCN 2019051994 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119167655 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119167686 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119167679 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Social movements.
Classification: LCC HN17.5 .D45 2020 (print) | LCC HN17.5 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/4dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051993
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051994

Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: Mary Mackey Art Denver Colorado USA

This is the third edition of a book that was first published in English in 1999 (the Italian edition having appeared in 1997 with the Nuova Italia Scientifica publishing press), and then in 2006. Innumerable significant changes have taken place in the political landscape over the last decades think of the 2011 revolts across the globe, the spread of online protest activity, or the renaissance of rightwing extremism. They have been paralleled by a constant growth of research on social movements and collective action, as witnessed by the proliferation of handbooks charting the field from multiple angles, specialized journals, or references to social movement theory in the scientific literature. Both developments have shaped the drafting of the third edition. On the one hand, we have updated many of our empirical examples, including references to recent episodes of contention and trying to add more materials from a comparative angle. We have also kept, however, many references to earlier movements, as we deem important to draw our readers attention to the fact that some basic, core mechanisms of collective action may be found operating across movements that may differ substantially in timing and content. As for our treatment of the literature, given its fast and massive increase, it is even more selective and partial than in the previous two editions. Back in the late 1990s, the first edition of the book also served as a literature review of sort, bringing together, as the late Charles Tilly noted, European and American perspectives in the same introductory text. In this new edition, performing a similar mapping function would have been neither feasible, given the exponential rise in the scientific output, nor necessary, as a number of systematic accounts of growth in the field have appeared. As we have promoted some of them (della Porta ; Snow et al. 2019), we know that they can do a much better job at covering the field than we could in this book. Accordingly, this edition presents itself even more neatly as an introductory text, if not one for beginners in social research.

It is also worth reminding readers that they are not being introduced to the full range of possible intellectual approaches to the theme social movements. Significant contributions have come from fields such as history, political philosophy, anthropology, or psychology, that are almost entirely neglected here. So are important treatments of social movements by social theory broadly conceived (on that see Crossley ). Ours may not be (it certainly is not) the whole story, but it is an important story. We are delighted to be able to share its third version with our readers.

Florence and Trento, May 2019

We are grateful to our editors at Blackwell for their patience and assistance, to Daniela Chironi for her careful work on the bibliography, and to Cambridge University Press for granting permission to reproduce from Diani (2015).

In the late 1960s, the world was apparently undergoing deep, dramatic transformations even a revolution, some thought. American civil rights and antiwar movements, the Mai 1968 revolt in France, students protests in Germany, Britain, or Mexico, the workersstudents coalitions of the 1969 Hot Autumn in Italy, the prodemocracy mobilizations in as diverse locations as Francoist Madrid and communist Prague, the growth of critical Catholicism from South America to Rome, the early signs of the womens and environmental movements, that would have shaped the new politics of the 1970s: all these phenomena and many more suggested that deep changes were in the making. In 2018, the fiftieth anniversary of 1968 has stimulated reflections on its longterm effects not only on society and politics, but also on social movement studies (della Porta 2018a).