Struggles for Recognition: Analyzing Democratization Effects of Social Movements

Abstract

The objective of this work is to examine a model of social movement processes. The three traditional processes of social movements are incorporated into one model in order to allow a comparative discussion of the regime process encountered, identity and claim formulations used, and the shifts in the scale and scope of a movement. Movements having such a broad impact are termed struggles for recognition and culminate from the combined impact of interactions and discourses in the form of mechanisms. Each process---regime policy changes, reformulations of objectives and identities, and scale and scope shifts---has a set of associated mechanisms that dialectically impact the development, emergence and escalation of a social movement as it evolves into a struggle for recognition of citizenship status. This struggle for recognition evolves from an ongoing movement being strongly influenced by a trigger event. The Civil Rights Movement and the collective actions of citizens in the United Kingdom are investigated in this work as they are two movements with similar trigger events.