Social Movements

Social movements are sustained, organized forms of collective action that strive to bring about social or political change. Typically originating in civil society, they seek to change the policies and actions of the state, the practices of corporations, or the organization of society generally. Like all social relations, social movements are spatially constituted. Social movements mobilize and operate in a spatial context, are themselves spatially constituted by actors both internal and external to social movement organizations, and seek to alter sociospatial power relations.

There has been an explosion of geographical research on social movements since the late 1980s, incorporating a variety of geographic concepts. Much of the early research focused on the place-based constitution of social movements. John Agnew and R. J. Johnston argued for an understanding of politics that shifts analytical focus away from the nation-state, emphasizing instead the central importance of place-based social relations. Much of the contemporary research is rooted in Agnew's conception of place, consisting of three dimensions: (1) locale—the institutional and informal settings in which social relations are constituted, (2) location—the geographical areas and scales encompassing the settings of social relations, and (3) sense of place—the local structure of feeling. Agnew's tripartite conception underscores the fact that place-based social relations are always material and meaningful, constituted through processes that may range in scale from the local to the global.

The centrality of the local-global problematic to social struggle is highlighted by David Harvey, who, drawing from Raymond Williams's notion of “militant particularism,” argues that “ideals forged out of the affirmative experience of solidarities in one place get generalized and universalized as a model of a new form of society” (p. 32). How, and whether, locally forged ideals and solidarities become generalized has been a matter of some contention among social movement scholars.

Agnew's work suggests two different but complementary ways of thinking about how place-based social struggles relate to broader geographies. On the one hand, Agnew (1987) suggests a network approach focusing on “the ‘paths’ and ‘projects’ of everyday life, to use the language of time-geography, [which] provide the practical ‘glue’ for place in [all] three senses” (p. 28). On the other hand, he finds that “extensive fields of mediated interaction [must be understood as] managed by institutions and organizations” (Agnew, 1996, p. 131) with “hierarchical (and non-hierarchical) ‘funneling’ of stimuli across geographical scales … coming together in places where micro (localized) and macro (wide-ranging) processes of social structuration are jointly mediated” (Agnew, 1996, p. 132). Agnew clearly recognizes the importance of networks and scales, as well as structure and agency, in the constitution of place-based social struggle.

In one of the earliest in-depth geographical analyses of social movement mobilization, Paul Routledge (2003) shows how social movements in South Asia are strongly shaped through place-specific “circumstances, constraints, and opportunities” (p. 21) and how sense of place and place-based network relationships are key to understanding their dynamics. Routledge continues to explore the connection between networks and mobilization in his more recent work, examining the ways in which network strategies can build communication, solidarity, and support across scales and among diverse places. In a similar vein, Featherstone (2003) demonstrates that networked relationships among place-based struggles are to be understood as “generative, as [Page 2575]actively shaping political identities, rather than merely bringing together different movements around ‘common interests’” (p. 405).

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