How does the public support a coalition in which pro-democracy advocates and policy-based protesters join forces in street protests? When policy-based and pro-democracy groups protest together, they create a collective action frame that includes a policy component and a democracy component. In this article, I develop the frame salience theory, arguing that support for a policy–democracy protest coalition depends on which component of the joint frame is perceived to be more dominant. I argue that in authoritarian regimes, the policy component typically dominates the coalition because it is more accessible and available to the public. This perception shifts public support for the alliance towards the baseline level of support for the policy movement. In other words, public support for the alliance defaults to the baseline level of support for the policy movement. I find evidence for my argument using a survey experiment administered to 1,209 Vietnamese respondents. This article highlights a dilemma pro-democracy groups face: joining policy-based movements may boost support, but sustaining democracy after the protest becomes challenging.

While we know that the far right thrives when migration is salient in public agendas, what happens when this issue is no longer under the spotlight? Building on 25 face-to-face interviews with activists mobilized against migration during COVID-19 in Italy, this article explores far-right framing of migration as a non-salient issue. We find that far-right groups indeed reframe their messages vis-à-vis a less favourable political setting; yet they are also able to seize fresh opportunities to reactivate opposition to migration, notably via prognostic frames delivering ostensibly depoliticized views that hijack solidarity principles and emphasize pragmatic and technocratic approaches to border control and migration management. In uncovering the discursive strategies used by far-right actors to bolster their credibility and appeal when out of their comfort zone, this article contributes to the scholarly understanding of politicization and highlights the mechanisms by which far-right ideas are becoming normalized in the public sphere.

Critics point to increasing private lawsuits filed by students accused of campus sexual assault as evidence that Obama-era Title IX guidance overcorrected and favored victims at the expense of the due process rights of the accused. This overcorrection narrative powerfully reshaped the debate surrounding campus sexual assault and ultimately contributed to the rescinding of the guidance. Existing analytical tools from legal mobilization scholarship – emphasizing the deployment of litigation by social movement actors – are not equipped to identify the origins and dissemination of this political narrative. Drawing from legal complaints, media coverage and interviews with lawyers, we show how private practice attorneys with no visible movement ties helped craft the overcorrection narrative from individual lawsuits by (1) embedding political claims in legal filings, (2) amplifying the narrative in media and (3) collaborating with advocates in quantifying the litigation trend. We extend prior scholarship and illustrate how lawsuits can be both a vehicle of political storytelling and the story itself. We further argue that the ideology of liberal legalism can mask the politics of private lawsuits, making litigation a useful tool for social movement efforts to mobilize support for legal reform.

The article analyzes the network structure and dynamics of the Spanish field of catholic-inspired secular organizations (CISO-N), and their mobilization against the Euthanasia Bill amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to a relational perspective, it adopts a historical-comparative approach to political opportunities that affect the praxis of these organizations. Drawing on 7-year fieldwork, including in-depth interviews with CISO-N activists and participant observation of their demonstrations, it traces CISO-N's discourse of ‘moral panic’ and ties to religious and political organizations, particularly the far-right party VOX. We advance a novel perspective, bridging literature on assisted dying and social movement studies, particularly focusing on far-right Christian populist mobilizations. The article offers one of the first sociological analyses of euthanasia as the new moral, political, and cultural neoconservative anti-rights front, which has been mainly studied from bioethics, socio-medical studies, and medical jurisprudence perspectives.

Confronting the coming five decades from our present conjuncture demands – to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci’s famous mantra – both critical pessimism and a wilful politics of hope. In this article, we engage with the politics of climate breakdown and the responses to wider socio-ecological crises with a necessary critical pessimism. Specifically, we confront the capture of green transition imperatives by finance capital, as well as the troubling orientation of transition towards building new structures of accumulation around the vision of an electrified consumer society. We also see the coming decades being marked by the ever-increasing wealth of global asset-owning classes – who, by definition, enclose the atmospheric commons faster than any other community. Against this dystopian picture of increasingly concentrated wealth, corporate excess, and terrestrial crisis, we focus on the stubborn reproduction of socio-ecological life through various grounded projects across the world. We engage with communities who work against structural constraints to reproduce life from below through urban commoning, food sovereignty, Indigenous organising, and caretaking economies – all of which are scaling out their visions through alternative internationals. All of these projects, we argue, present a planetary and multiscalar political economy in practice, which connects grounded experience with resistance to the dynamics of capitalism at the state, corporate, and transnational levels. With lessons from these communities in mind, we call for a ‘planetary political economy of the global majority’, which prioritises the reproduction of socio-ecological life according to the visions of grounded anti-systemic projects.

This article examines the emergence, consolidation, and influence of the Cristianos por el Socialismo (CpS, or Christians for Socialism) movement as part of the overlapping political and religious transformations of the 1960s. The election of self-declared Marxist Salvador Allende in 1970 inspired a sector of the clergy to creatively converge the tenets of Marxism and Christianity. The notion of transcendence and the construction of a “New Man” appealed to the utopian aspects of both religious and Marxist thinking. The Chilean CpS had a Latin American impact, as evidenced by the First Latin American Encounter of Christians for Socialism in Santiago in 1972, and a transnational impact, as seen in the formation of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians in 1976. The analysis of CpS and its influence within and outside of Chile reveals an often-overlooked component of the Chilean road to socialism: the work of Catholics in Marxist-Christian rapprochement.

Tunisia's Islamist movement Ennahda has announced a separation of political and religious work, apparently reinforcing a “post-Islamist” argument that Islamic parties have left behind religious mobilization. However, the boundary between religious and political fields is highly porous. We ask why the distinction between religious and political activism remains a point of ambiguity within Islamism. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 48 men and women who participated in the movement in the 1970s and 1980s in Tunis and Sousse, we develop a microlevel explanation of Islamist mobilization. We argue that religious and social Islamist activism is replete with political intent, which worked through three mechanisms: a counter-hegemonic ideology, an activist engagement in social transformation, and a formal organization. These findings add empirical insights to the case of Ennahda, provide leverage in explaining the politicization of Salafist movements, and underscore the legacy of asymmetric party capacities in shaping outcomes in a democratic transition.

From Iran and Mozambique to France’s Gilets jaunes, consumer energy protests are ubiquitous today. Little historical scholarship has so far explored such “fuel riots,” the problematic moniker bestowed by contemporary policy scholars. This article argues for disaggregating the homogenous crowd of so-called rioters, instead analyzing why particular socioeconomic groups persistently take to the streets. To do this, it sketches an energy-centered approach to class with both structural and subjective axes. This analytic is applied to a comparative history of two of the best-documented energy protests of the last half-century. During the 1970s, independent truckers blocked American highways to protest the high price of motor fuel. A decade later, half a million North Indian farmers mobilized to demand cheaper and more reliable electricity. Half a world apart, the two movements shared key characteristics. They were the expression of specific class fractions whose material interests were conditioned by heavy dependence on state-mediated energy supplies. Awkwardly located between big capital and wage labor, both truckers and farmers owned stakes in the carbon-intensive means of production that left them exposed to volatility in energy quality and pricing. Both mobilized in reaction to perceived breaches of state-centered moral economies of energy which threatened this dependence, leveraging their power to interrupt supplies within the circulatory systems of fossil fuel society. Even as both movements failed in their own terms, their political resistance helped to lock in place consumer subsidies for cheap carbon-intensive energy. Such energy protests deserve a central role in our environmental histories of fossil fuel society.

Indigenous peoples in Latin America have produced some of the region’s strongest and most enduring social movements, drawing on a diverse repertoire of contention to pursue their goals. In the twenty-first century, social media have transformed the landscape of collective action, compelling Indigenous movements to navigate the evolving dynamics of digital platforms. There is an ongoing debate in the literature regarding the role of social media in mobilization. But we know relatively little about how social media fit into the tactical repertoires of Indigenous actors and what tasks these platforms are used for. This article addresses this gap through an examination of how Indigenous actors use social media during protest events. We conducted a comparative analysis of social media content produced by Indigenous social movement organizations during major protest events in three countries from 2018 to 2019. We find that the most common functions include activating supporters and exposing state violence. These functions support several of the organizations’ core mobilization tasks by providing actors with tools to complement collection action.