Global Injustice Symbols and Social Movements

T. Olesen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137481160
• eBook ISBN: 9781137481177
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Global Injustice Symbols and Social Movements examines our collective moral and political maps, dotted with symbols shaped by political dynamics beyond their local or national origin and offers the first systematic sociological treatment of this important phenomenon.

Chapter 1

Global Injustice Symbols

ABU GHRAIB, CHARLIE HEBDO GUANTANAMO BAY, MY LAI, Malala Yousafzai, Mohamed Bouazizi, the Muhammad cartoons, Neda Agha Soltan, Nelson Mandela, Rodney King, the Rwandan genocide, Sharpeville—at first glance the names on this list do not seem to have much in common. Yet, despite the glaring differences in character, time, and place, they share one thing: they are all injustice symbols. Injustice symbols because they refer to events and situations that involve perceived moral and political transgressions and have motivated debates about collective perceptions of right and wrong; and injustice symbols because they have, instantly or over time, attained universalized meanings that transcend their spatiotemporal root. The book rests on two guiding arguments. First, all of these symbols have been created in and through social movements. In perhaps slightly awkward terms, social movements are both consumers and producers of injustice symbols. They not only draw on and invoke existing symbols but also contribute to the formation of new ones. Second, they are all, to varying degrees, of course, global injustice symbols shaped by political dynamics beyond their local/national origin and containing meanings for audiences outside of this context. Our collective moral and political maps are dotted with such symbols. We create them as recipients and carriers of shared moral and political meanings and visions and use them to make sense of and contextualize the present. Late modern and global societies thus continue to understand themselves and communicate through symbols in ways that do not fundamentally differ from premodern and modern societies (Alexander, 2010; Alexander, Bartmanski, and Giesen, 2012; Alexander and Mast, 2006; Alexander and Smith, 2003). What nevertheless distinguish contemporary symbols are precisely the two elements specified above: their often political and global nature. The book is about such global injustice symbols and revolves around three questions: How are global injustice symbols formed? How are they employed by political actors and for what purposes? And to what extent are they reflective of a global society?

With these arguments and questions, the book addresses a lacuna in the literature on global social movements and global civil society, which has seen a small avalanche of works arrive since the late 1990s (e.g., Anheier, Glasius, and Kaldor, 2001; Anheier and Themudo, 2002; Bob, 2005; Crack, 2008; della Porta, Kriesi, and Rucht, 1999; della Porta and Tarrow, 2005; della Porta et al., 2006; Guidry, Kennedy, and Zald, 2000; Juris, 2008; Kaldor, 2003; Keck and Sikkink, 1998; McDonald, 2006; Olesen, 2005; Pleyers, 2010; Reitan, 2007; Smith, 2008; Smith, Chatfield, and Pagnucco, 1997; Smith and Johnston, 2002; Tarrow, 2005; Teune, 2010).¹ In none of these works do we find any systematic engagement with social movements’ capacity to employ and produce injustice symbols at a global level.² Rather, the predominant focus has been on institutions (political opportunity structures), resources, networks, communication (strategic framing), and organization. While studies within these traditions have significantly advanced our understanding of global social movements, they leave two research avenues and theoretical traditions unexplored. First, it might be argued that the strand of social movement theory least adapted to a global level of analysis is the cultural, dramatic, and emotional turn of the last 10–20 years within social movement studies (e.g., Alexander, 2006; Eyerman, 2006; Flam and King, 2005; Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta, 2001; Jasper, 1997, 2009; Johnston, 2009; Johnston and Klandermans, 1995). Second, the existing literature as a whole suffers from a macro-sociological deficit, which keeps us from addressing the wider question of the relationship between global social movements and society (but see Thörn, 2006, and Wennerhag, 2008, for some important deviations). The book seeks to integrate these two concerns in the concept and study of global injustice symbols. Such a focus particularly enables us to bring out three aspects: (1) global injustice symbols concern the infusion and ascription of collective values and meanings; (2) as a result, global injustice symbols are intimately related to (global) society and the social; (3) and the symbolic process is movement driven and consists of a mix of dramatic, emotional, and strategic elements. These emphases do not imply a turn away from the political. As is evident from the term “injustice,” and as will be clear in the coming chapters, global injustice symbols are all about politics. What the book insists on is to analyze how the political is rooted in and shaped by deep-lying cultural and political themes and schemas and how these dynamics increasingly occur at a global level.

With its emphasis on socially anchored themes and schemas, the book draws significant inspiration from the strong program in cultural sociology (e.g., Alexander, 2004a, 2006; Alexander and Smith, 2003). While cultural sociology has developed an impressive amount of research, its predominant emphasis has been national society. Cultural sociology seeks to establish analytical accounts identifying the productive and reproductive interaction between actors and the value systems of society. Such an exercise is considerably easier at the national than at the global level. At the former level, research can draw on and tap into century-long histories ripe with defining moments, core symbols, and identifiable political cultures, which, moreover, are well documented by historical and sociological research. To the extent that there are common histories, values, and belief systems at the global level, these are evidently “thinner,” more intangible (but certainly not absent or irrelevant as argued by Smith, 1995), and, as a result, harder to theorize and analyze. This is not to suggest that theorization and analysis of globality is absent in the field (e.g., Alexander, 2007, 2012) but rather that it lacks a systematic empirical and theoretical agenda. By providing a clear empirical reference point and an engagement between theory, concepts, and data over several case studies, the study of global injustice symbols and social movements in the present book hopes to be able to advance such an agenda within cultural sociology.

The book is structured around four chapters and case studies that refract the concept of global injustice symbols in different ways. Chapter 2 talks about global political iconography with an empirical point of departure in Nelson Mandela’s political career. Chapter 3 analyses the role of injustice symbols in the constitution of global grievance communities within political Islam, the empirical pivot being the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Chapter 4 discusses the 1994 Rwandan genocide as a global moral memory that continues to guide and inform the politics of the present. And chapter 5 addresses the process of global dramatic diffusion, that is, the globalization of local violent events, with a focus on Neda Agha Soltan, a young Iranian woman killed during protests in Iran in 2009. While the case chapters are considered to make independent analytical, theoretical, and conceptual contributions, there are obvious connecting lines between them. For example, grievance communities are typically defined by political icons and undergirded by shared moral memories. Similarly, dramatically diffused events may turn victims into political icons and anchor them in collective memories. As the following theoretical and conceptual discussions will hopefully show, these are just a few examples of how the themes, concepts, and chapters of the book may be theoretically and analytically interrelated and combined. The case chapters are followed by a concluding chapter, which employs the case studies to open up a broader political-sociological discussion of the extent to which global injustice symbols reflect a global society and public sphere. This discussion will also take a critical position highlighting issues of power, inequality, conflict, bias, and adaptation. The remainder of the present chapter lays out the general theoretical and conceptual groundwork for these upcoming analyses and debates. It begins by outlining the intimate relationship between injustice symbols and (global) society. This is followed by a detailed theoretical, conceptual, and definitional discussion of each of the core concept’s constitutive parts as well as of the concept of global social movements. Finally, it presents some notes on methodology and approach.

Injustice Symbols and Society

This section is divided into four subsections. The first subsection outlines the Durkheimian inspiration informing the concept of global injustice symbols (the concepts of symbol and injustice symbol are defined in detail in the next section). The second expands and develops this line of thinking with concepts drawn from framing and cultural theories within social movement studies. The third seeks to couple these insights to the discussion of global society. The final subsection concludes with an empirical illustration and a condensing figure.

The Role of Symbols in Society

Some time ago, Charles Tilly (1978) famously dismissed a “useless Durkheim” as a theoretical source of inspiration for social movement scholars. He was right to do so in many ways. Durkheim’s work, especially the parts pertaining to anomie and social breakdown and disorder, was an indirect or direct presence in the collective behavior tradition, which during the 1970s and 1980s came under increasing criticism for casting social movements in a predominantly irrational and apolitical light (see McAdam, 1982, for another pace-setting critique). The new generation of movement scholars coming through in the 1970s and 1980s, many of them deeply inspired by the hectic movement activity of the 1960s and 1970s, wished to portray activists as genuinely political actors with strategies and agendas. The swift repudiation of Durkheim from the social movement circle during the 1970s and 1980s had much to do with his purported association with functionalist theory and, as noted above, with a view of social movements as symptoms of social irrationality and imbalance (Emirbayer, 1996). It can, of course, be debated whether such a strong reading of Durkheim was/is justified. This is another story, however. Rather, this book wishes to emphasize the continued relevance of what might be thought of as the cultural vein in Durkheimian sociology (e.g., Alexander, 2006; Smith and Alexander, 2005) for social movement studies—a vein that primarily springs from Durkheim’s late work in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912/2001). Of particular interest here, Durkheim in that work emphasizes the inextricable relationship between symbols and society (this connection has also been documented in anthropology, e.g., Geertz, 1973; Turner, 1967). For Durkheim, society thus rests on a set of shared values and meanings enacted in rituals and often inscribed on and expressed through symbols (the kind of symbols studied by Durkheim were mainly emblems, totems, and tattoos in non-modern societies): “Without symbols . . . social feelings could have only an unstable existence . . . But if the movements by which these feelings have been expressed eventually become inscribed on things that are durable, then they too become durable” (2001: 176). Slightly translated, it tells us that symbols are carriers of collective values and meanings. Symbols thus connect individuals and groups with society and the social. Recognizing and employing a symbol is to express adherence to a certain set of social values and meanings. This also has a temporal dimension in the sense that symbols serve to “transport” values and meanings across time and generations. Put differently, the study of symbols is the study of society, a window into how collectives understand themselves and their relation to the wider social world. Symbols are constructed via moral and political binaries (e.g., Alexander, 2011), that is, a positioning of actors and acts in sacred (not necessarily in a narrow religious sense) and profane categories that negatively define each other. The symbol thus represents what is seen as right and good by a collective and, directly or indirectly, what is considered wrong and evil. This dynamic, as will be developed below, is especially evident in injustice symbolization. As the concept clearly indicates this subset of symbols are forged through a moral-political identification of acts and actors that are unjust (see also Smith, 2000).

Of course, Durkheim’s thoughts on symbols were primarily developed based on his empirical observations of aboriginal societies in Australia. Yet, he clearly considered his insights to be generalizable to the level of modern and secular society. Accordingly, several strands of Durkheim’s late work on religion have been adapted to the sociological analysis of modern societies (e.g., Alexander, 2004a; Alexander and Smith, 2003; Bellah, 1973) and social movements (especially, Alexander, 2006, but see also Emirbayer, 1996). The merit of this work largely lies in its ability to address the macro-sociological deficit identified earlier and, thus, in sensitizing us to a sociological point too often lost in the literature not only on global social movements but also on social movements in general: social movements simultaneously draw on and are important actors in the construction of the moral and political ideas and values that undergird society. Yet, despite the relevance of Durkheimian thought, the coupling between it and the study of social movements calls for some qualification and expansion. First, while symbols in Durkheim’s work generally play socially integrating roles, symbols today are infinitely more complex. This is particularly the case with injustice symbols. Injustice symbols may and should still be thought of as carriers of collective values and meanings, but in the late modern (and increasingly global) world these are generally contested, politicized, and conflictive (elaborated below). Studying injustice symbols, then, opens up to the way collective values and meanings are politically negotiated and in constant flux. Second, Durkheim mainly focused on already existing symbols and their meanings and less on the processes of their formation. But symbols do not fall out of the sky. Nowhere does this aspect come out more clearly than in the relationship between social movements and injustice symbols. As argued above, social movements not only use and employ symbols but they also play key roles in their formation.

Political-Cultural Schemas and Moral Shock

The preceding arguments do not intend to claim that the social movement literature is devoid of reflections relevant for the study of injustice symbols. Two currents in particular offer a number of useful concepts and theorizations for advancing such an agenda and giving the rather general Durkheimian insights some firm theoretical and conceptual shape. The first current, the framing school, was established in the 1980s (Snow et al., 1986; Snow and Benford, 1988) as an antidote, or rather supplement, to the dominance of structural and rationalist theory in social movement studies, the goal being to highlight the communicative and interpretive activities of social movements. As a whole, however, the emphasis in much of framing research is on the question of strategy, efficacy, and the maximization of public resonance (see Goodwin and Jasper, 1999, for a critique). It is important to underline at this point that the approach taken in this book is not incompatible with a strategic approach; as will emerge below and in the chapters that follow, the activities surrounding injustice symbol formation and employment are often permeated by strategic thinking. The concern is rather that a focus on strategy risks blotting out the socially productive side of social movements. Despite these limitations, framing scholars do offer several useful ideas that essentially serve to draw out the connection between movements and society, for example, master frames (Snow and Benford, 1992), cultural resonance (Gamson, 1995), themes and counter-themes (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989), interpretive packages (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989), and metapackages (Gamson and Lasch, 1983). Sociologically speaking, all these concepts share a basic point that movement communication is always a public-sphere-anchored and audience-dependent dialogue with society (Alexander, 2006: 231) in which socially anchored values and meanings are invoked to give direction to and generate resonance for present claims. Injustice symbols are well suited to illustrate this dynamic because they entail a complex integration of the particular and the universal. The process of universalization, that is, turning a specific event or situation into something that represents and resonates with an existing moral and political horizon of meaning, can only occur through the communicative interaction with values and meanings already available in the cultural and political structure of society.

Building upon the framing tradition, the concept of political-cultural schema is introduced to capture this dynamic. By coupling the political and cultural two things are intended. First, the term “cultural” points to the essentially late Durkheimian idea that these schemas are anchored at a deep social level and that society is constituted in and by the way human actors invoke, create, and recreate such schemas. Second, the term “political” seeks to clarify that the kinds of schemas of primary interest in the context of social movements and injustice symbols are those that involve overtly political values and meanings. The relationship between injustice symbols and schemas is dialectical and reflects the distinction recurrently made between ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1.  Global Injustice Symbols
• 2.  Political Iconography
• 3.  Grievance Communities
• 4.  Moral Memories
• 5.  Dramatic Diffusion
• 6.  A Global Society?
• Notes
• References
• Index