ASOA15095U Cancelled Political mobilization, democracy, and civic engagement

Political mobilization is everywhere. It reaches from people’s civic engagement in street protest to volunteering in civil society groups to professional media campaigns by non-governmental organizations and political parties. Social movements are groups, networks, and organizations of people who engage in collective action in order to reach social change or resist it. Today’s modern democracies are shaped by the struggles of the labor movement, and by social movements for women’s, gay and lesbian rights, by indigenous groups, environmentalists, peace activists and migrants’ rights activists. In recent years, new pro-democracy movements have emerged, both in authoritarian regimes and in liberal democracies, some of them with significant influence on societal developments. They include the Global Justice Movement, the Arab Spring, the Indignados movement and Occupy, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Climate Justice Movement and the Pro-Democracy movement in Hong Kong. We have also seen the emergence of new nationalist and religious movements with a far-right wing and neo-conservative political agenda such as the Tea Party, Pegida, or the Nordic Resistance Movement.

This course uses an interdisciplinary perspective that connects the literatures on political mobilization and civic engagement with research on democracy in social movements, resistance and democratization. We will discuss empirical case studies based on non-western, feminist, and geographically diverse approaches. In theoretical terms, we will explore questions of organizational democracy, diversity, and solidarity in the context of informally operating volunteer groups, professionalized ‘movement parties’ and NGOs, protest networks and grassroots democratic processes.