Social movement activism and its discontents

The activists we work with often struggle with a set of related problems. Sometimes they aren’t really convinced that their organisation’s approach is working any more, but they don’t like any of the alternatives on offer around the same issue. At other times they find themselves locked in a battle about what the right way to tackle the issue is, where their approach works quite well for one sort of campaign or target group but someone else’s approach works well for another. Sometimes they even see themselves “in glorious isolation”, convinced of their own approach but feeling there is no-one else they can effectively work with.

This short essay draws on what we’ve learned through running “Ecology of Social Movements” trainings for experienced activists from across a wide range of movements and many different European countries, to unpack something of how seeing our own group, network or organisation in a wider context can transform our understanding of what is possible and help us develop far more powerful alliances and strategies for social change.

Ecology of Social Movements as a training response

In 2017-18 a group of experienced activist educators – Gee from the Ulex Project, Laurence from the National University of Ireland Maynooth, popular educator María Llanos del Corral and movement consultant Natasha Adams started developing the “Ecology of Social Movements” (EOSM) activist training together. The thirst for this training is so great that the Ulex Project now runs one two-week EOSM course and two week-long ones a year and has recently started running them in Central and Eastern Europe as well. From 2020-21 on, the EOSM approach has helped give rise to the even larger-scale Movement Learning project, together with European Alternatives and the European Community Organising Network.

The key idea underlying the Ecology of Social Movements approach is “learning from one another’s struggles”: acknowledging just how much effort it takes us, as individuals or organisations, to get really good at one thing, and turning to each another’s experience to save us from having to reinvent the wheel every time. Ecology of Social Movements courses start with experienced activists, people who have already mastered the details of how their particular group or organisation does what it does but can also see the limitations of that approach. We come together across different countries, different issues or movements and different political approaches to see what we can learn from each other and from the wider context of activists’ “learning and knowledge production” that becomes visible as we take the time to explain why we have learned to do what we do in a certain way, for our own context – and really listen to each other as they talk about their own practical learning.

Relationship-building is key to this process: when we spend a week (or, better, two) learning, working, discussing and hanging out together we get a much richer sense of who each other is than we may have from the little bits we know about each other’s movements and contexts – or the stories we tell each other in our own organisation about why our approach is right and other organisations are wrong.

This is not about looking for harmony for its own sake, but rather a much deeper learning about the other than we can often have when we have to make decisions quickly in pressured multi-organisational coalitions (or exchange brief arguments in a meeting or on social media). This helps overcoming prejudices and unnecessary aversion without pretending that differences don’t exist – but we can see course participants developing much greater abilities to communicate across those differences and find the basis for strategic alliances.

At the end of each course, most people are very clear how much they have gained that they are going to bring back to their own organisation’s practice and their own politics – along with a few people who were already planning to create something new or looking for another approach. They have come to see their own activism and organisations as part of much wider movements, happening in many different parts of society and many different places and over a longer time frame.

Finding a fuller picture of our action within the wider movement

In a living ecosystem, there is a constant and complex interaction between landscape, climate, plants, animals, funghi and even humans that creates a rich biodiversity, resilience in the face of natural disasters or disease, and even beauty. Even just between the animals there are many different ecological niches: one might be a very specialised herbivore and another an omnivore, for example. To think of an omnivore like a bear in isolation from everything else it eats – and the scavengers that will eventually eat it – is to misunderstand it; we exist in relationship.

So too a social movement is an ecology of individuals, informal groups, formal organisations, meeting spaces, activist media, ways of doing things and many other elements. Even when a single organisation has the word “movement” in its name, or acts as if it is “the only game in town”, this is never actually true – there are others working on the same issues, in different places, or in different ways, or at different levels.

In this way, an ecology of social movements perspective allows people who have mastered what their own organisation does and are frustrated by how little they manage to achieve to see their activist work very differently – from the standpoint of the whole movement, across time and space and in many different parts of society. This opens up many different possibilities – for resilience in hard times and difficult places, for revisioning the organisation’s work, for finding unexpected friends and allies, for taking new initiatives, for thinking about movement strategy.

It’s important to acknowledge that, while this means there is definitely scope for many better relationships and improved alliance building, our movement ecology will always include some actors who we will not get on with and who we are potentially in significant competition with. Nevertheless, understanding our actions in relationship to them in ways that go beyond mere antagonism and dismissal is strategically important. While the ecology approach can help us build better relationships, sometimes relationships can’t be improved, but the attitudinal shift involved in understanding ourselves and other actors in terms of relationship can be a valuable new way of seeing and help us build stronger movements.

It also helps us to move away from “organisational patriotism”, defending the specific thing our organisation does and the specific way it does it as being the only possible way – and (when that lets us down as it often will) to avoid the desperate search for another organisation that in turn would know the only possible way to do the only thing which is worth doing.

Examples of tools

Over the one or two weeks of an EOSM training, we use many different tools that can help activists to see their organisation in this bigger picture. For example:

• Mapping out the different actors (movement organisations, informal groups and networks, NGOs, supportive media, physical spaces, funders or others) across your movement and the different relationships between them
• Working together on structured timelines identifying key moments and shifts across your movement as a whole
• Looking at the different strengths of different organisations around different capabilities – how effective are they at coming up with narratives, disrupting routines, institution-building, cooperation, prefiguration or resilience, for example?
• Exploring the relationships between strategies that challenge the system, those that work within the system and those that try to exist outside the system
• Spending real time with your peers from very different countries, movements, kinds of organisations, social contexts etc. coming to understand what shapes their approach … and how your own approach is equally context-dependent

The Movement Learning project has made many of these available here.

Examples of how different struggles are / have been interconnected:

The major structural relations in our societies (such as race, capitalism, patriarchy, industrial modernity, warfare etc.) are deep-rooted; they typically affect people in many different positionalities, express themselves in many different parts of society, and operate at many different levels (economic, political, cultural…) The key word here is different – transforming even one such relationship, even if this was possible, will still mean engaging with different positionalities, being active in different parts of society, and taking action at multiple levels. This of course calls for alliances and developing an ecology of movements.

Some obvious historical examples include:

• Popular fronts against fascism in the 1920s and 1930s and in the Resistance
• Feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements
• Struggles against nuclear power

Some contemporary examples include:

• Palestinian solidarity
• Place-based struggles against fossil fuels, mining or transport projects
• Resistance to the rise of authoritarianism and the far right

At the same time it is one thing to say (for example) “climate justice must be decolonial” and another thing entirely to actually connect the struggles in movement practice rather than as issues on paper – this is where understanding ourselves as part of an ecology of social movements helps to frame the task in a practical way.

Why this matters for our movements

Fundamentally the question is whether we want our movement to win on the large scale, or if we want our organisations to keep going in hard times (and compete with others in the same movement). Often when we look at our organisations honestly, there is a huge gulf between the reasons we founded or joined them – the change we wanted to see in the world – and what the actual day-to-day reality is.

In the worst case this can mean burnout, sectarianism, toxic organisations, in-fighting … repeatedly trying to do the same kind of thing in the same way and getting nowhere. In better cases we can often say, hand on heart, that we are doing something real and useful, but that it is a candle in the wind when faced with the scale of the problem. Rethinking ourselves not as loyal members of an organisation but as part of a large, complex and diverse movement that spans many different areas of society, many places and cultures and stretches across time can help us both to see how our useful work contributes to a wider whole and to step away from the destructive behaviours that develop when the organisation becomes an end in itself.

But this is not simply about rethinking – it is also about re-doing. In particular: how can we develop more powerful and effective alliances, across different issues, across social positionalities, across localities, and across different kinds of organisation, that allow us to genuinely change the structural context and win against the sorts of opposition we face? How can our organisation become more effective not simply in isolation but as a specific part of a wider whole?

And how can we understand the process of social change in such a way that there is not simply one narrow path to success that involves very large numbers of people doing the very specific thing we are doing, in the same way, but where we can develop solidarity, support and coordination across all the differences that we find in the wider world?

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Laurence is a Dublin-based writer, teacher and activist, and one of Europe’s best-known social movement researchers. He’s been in many different movements starting with anti-war and anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s, including helping organise the anti-capitalist “movement of movements” in Ireland, media spokesperson for a summit protest, resisting Shell, networking between movements and parties, alternative schools and kindergartens, co-running a Masters for activists, helping organise a Zapatista tour and editing several radical publications. https://laurencecox.wordpress.com

Gee has been involved in social movement organising and education since the late 1980s. He is a highly regarded trainer and has designed numerous training programmes covering areas such as psychosocial resilience in activism, the ecology of social movements, and leaderful organising. As a founding member of the Ulex Project, he is known for highly innovative work blending pedagogical methodologies. This holistic approach to activist learning has inspired numerous training initiatives across Europe. He currently steers the strategic development of the Ulex Project and its social movement capacity building programme. https://ulexproject.org