This superb volume introduces a new research agenda into the comparative literature on contentious politics, namely the study of state-mobilized movements. Most of the existing literature in this subfield involves the collective action of groups, mobilized from below, making demands on a reluctant state apparatus. Less scrutinized are those occasions when agents of the state themselves mobilize, or allow to be mobilized, segments of the population to help them advance their interests.
In an age of rising populism and assertive authoritarianism, a call to study state-mobilized movements is certainly timely. As several contributors make clear, however, the tactics of “ruling by other means” is neither new nor limited to authoritarian settings. They also make clear that such tactics have not been entirely neglected in the literature. Kristen Looney reminds us in her chapter on Taiwan that Robert C. Tucker’s notion of the “movement regime” circulated widely in the study of comparative politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Useful reviews of more recent scholarship regarding the state’s involvement in social movements can be found both in the introduction by Grzegorz Ekiert and Elizabeth Perry and in the chapter by Samuel Green and Graeme Robertson (pp. 194–97). The editors maintain, however (and correctly as far as I know) that this is the first volume to gather analyses of such movements across diverse geographical and historical settings and to propose an initial framework for further research.
This proposed framework, as with the political process model of contentious politics, is not a deductive theoretical construct from which to generate hypotheses but rather an inductively derived heuristic schema of different categories, concepts, and patterns that can assist scholars in their analyses of similar phenomena. (The chapter by Ashley Anderson and Melani Cammet on Egypt is an exception here). In good Weberian fashion, the aim is to understand rather than to predict. The empirical chapters cohere nicely around this mission and are uniformly excellent. Though most focus on one country, they also provide focused comparisons within that country across time, regions, or regimes. As in the political process model, the units of analysis in these studies are usually aggregate social categories—students, workers, peasants, veterans—rather than the individuals who inhabit them. Many chapters emphasize the importance of ideology and acknowledge the significance of identity, but again like the political process model, structural variables do most of the explanatory work.
As one might expect, the empirical chapters find no definitive answers to the questions put to them in the introduction, but in combination, they do find some interesting patterns that are summarized earlier. First, they offer a useful typology of the different functions that state agents might ask a mobilized citizenry to perform. State-supported campaigns can channel public action into creating social infrastructure by forming rural community organizations in Taiwan or coordinating volunteers to assist in the Beijing Olympics. They can organize demonstrations to shore up enthusiasm for state policies, crowd out potential protests, or simply demonstrate their ability to raise a crowd. They can also organize, or turn a blind eye to, mobs that violently suppress opponents of the regime, thereby establishing for the offending authorities some measure of plausible deniability. And, of course, ambitious actors within the state apparatus can also use such movements to undermine their rivals.
The chapters also identify diverse technologies that state agents may deploy to encourage and shape such collective action. Although the traditional technologies that elites have used to mobilize the citizenry, such as patronage and various “administrative resources,” are still on the table, they may be less necessary and less useful in an age of information technology and social media. In such cases “symbolic” resources may become more important. For example, Mark Beissinger’s analysis of broad surveys of Ukrainians during the 2004 Orange Revolutions suggests that, although patronage played a part in mobilizing counterrevolutionary crowds, appeals to Russian ethnic identity and fear of Yushchenko’s platform of Ukrainian nationalism also played an important role. In some cases, moreover, it may be enough for the authorities to signal, with a wink and a nudge, that illegal actions directed against opponents to the regime will not be subject to any investigations.
Technologies may also diffuse across boundaries. Julie Hemment finds that the Russian youth organization Nashi shifted after 2008 from a repertoire emphasizing confrontation against opponents to the regime to one that mimicked the project technologies encouraged by Western development agencies in their efforts to build civil society in Russia. These technologies sought to draw young people in with the promise of fostering professional habits that would serve them well in a modern society. This technology also seems relevant to the Chinese youth organization’s efforts to mobilize, coordinate, and channel young people’s impulses for volunteer service in that country.
One of the great strengths of the volume is its treatment of the state itself. Whereas many works in contentious studies draw a thick line dividing state and society, and too often undertheorize the state as a more or less unitary actor, the framework proposed in this volume purposefully and explicitly blurs and breaks the line between the two. First, it recognizes that the regime has many levers to use to bring citizens to their aid and that such levers, used by different parts of the state for different purposes, may work at cross-purposes with each other or even backfire. Second, it asks to what extent state agents can control the forces unleashed by their encouragement—think of the Chinese leadership’s use of nationalist demonstrations or of moderate US Republicans’ embrace of the Tea Party in 2010. Third, it explores occasions when it is difficult to distinguish between state and society: How do we characterize the policemen, prosecutors, and judges who ignored and even participated in terrorist acts against civil rights activists in Mississippi during the 1960s?
The various authors would be the first to admit that the framework needs further refinement. The introductory chapter notes the need for more research of such movements in more liberal contexts (segregationist Mississippi does not count), and I would like to see more discussion—there is some—of how different technologies travel across national boundaries. In addition, the umbrella concept of state-mobilized movements could be defined more narrowly: To what extent and under what conditions is it useful to compare coordinating volunteers for public service with organizing workers to break students’ heads?
Most significantly, as the introduction again acknowledges, the methods in this volume—except for Hemment’s ethnographic work and, to a lesser extent, the survey analyses by Mark Beissinger—do not offer enough insight into why individuals agree to join such movements. If symbolic resources really are becoming more important, then researchers must think more deeply about how they operate. For example, without such analyses, it seems difficult to explain how an openly adulterous, manifestly corrupt president could persuade so many self-identified patriotic and Christian white Americans over the age of 40 that it was appropriate to violently attack the US Capitol.
