the Intermovement
Network in the U.S. social forum process:
Comparing
Atlanta 2007 with Detroit 2010[1]
Christopher Chase-Dunn Ian
Breckenridge-Jackson
Department of Sociology and Institute for Research on World-Systems
(IROWS)
University of
California-Riverside,
Draft v. 2-3-14 6932 words
Abstract:
This article compares survey results of attendees at the United States Social
Forum meeting in Atlanta in 2007 with surveys from the U.S. Social Forum in
Detroit in 2010 to study continuities and changes in the sizes and links among
social movements. Respondents indicated their active involvement in a list of twenty-seven
social movement themes. Over half of the respondents indicated active involvement
in two or more movements. Using the overlaps among movements based on shared members
we infer the structure of links among the movements. We use formal network
analysis to examine continuities and changes in the structure of movement connections.
Our findings demonstrate. important continuities and some significant changes
in the sizes and the patterns of movement interconnections from 2007 to 2010.
We find that the overall structure
of the network of interconnected movements did not change, and was also quite
similar to that found at global meetings of the World Social Forum. In Detroit
human rights and antiracism, both of which had the highest connectedness scores
in Atlanta, significantly increased
their relative connectedness to become the major hubs linking most of the other
movement themes. But we also found that environmentalism increased both its
centrality and size, while the peace movement decreased both its size and its
centrality in the network of movement interconnections.
This article examines changes in the
organizational space of the social movements that are involved in the United
States Social Forum (USSF) process. In
this study we seek to understand the structure of connections among progressive
movements and how those connections may be evolving over time. For this purpose
we analyze results obtained from surveys of participants in the U.S. Social
Forum that was held in Atlanta in June of 2007 with a comparable survey that
was carried out at the U.S. Social Forum meeting in Detroit in June of 2010. We examine the contours of the social
movement connections found among USSF participants, and how these are changing
over time.
The Social Forum process began when
the World Social Forum was founded in Porto Alegre,
Brazil in 2001. The global, regional and local Social Forum meetings are meant
to be spaces in which movement activists can collaborate and organize
campaigns. The first national Social Forum in the United States was held in
June of 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia. We carried out a written survey of the
attendees at that meeting and another very similar survey at the USSF held in
Five hundred sixty-nine of the attendees
at the 2010 USSF in
There were more students (25% of respondents) and fewer
full-time employees (33%) than one might expect. The group was highly educated,
with more than one participant in four having a graduate or other advanced
degree. The median household income of respondents was very similar to that of
the U.S. as a whole (about $40,000 a year). As might be expected, most respondents were
from the United States., although many were born outside the
Comparing the surveyed attendees at the USSF10 with those
surveyed at the USSF07 in
There is a large scholarly
literature on networks, coalitions and alliances among social movements (e.g.
Carroll and Ratner 1996; Krinsky and Reese 2006; Obach 2004; Reese, Petit, and Meyer 2008; Rose 2000; Van
Dyke 2003; Meyer and Corrigall-Brown 2005; Juris 2008).
One of the big findings is that
coalitions among social movement organizations tend to emerge and strengthen
when the values or constituencies that are held dear by activists are strongly
threatened by repression or by counter-movements (Van Dyke 2003; Mason 2013). Our study is theoretically motivated by this
literature as well as by the analysis of world revolutions (Wallerstein
2004; Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000; Mason 2013).
The social movement literature on coalitions studies several different
levels of cooperation and differentiates coalitions that occur within broad
movement themes from less frequent coalitions that occur across the boundaries
of different social movements – inter-movement coalitions (Van Dyke and McCammon 2010). Our study is of these less frequent
inter-movement links as indicated by the co-participation of individual
activists.
Social movement organizations may be
linked with one another both informally and formally. At the formal level,
organizations may provide legitimacy and support to one another, and they may
collaborate in joint action. Informally, movements can be connected by the
choices of individuals to be active participants in two or more movements. These informal linkages enable learning and influence to
pass among movement organizations, even when there may be limited official
interaction or leadership coordination. We
assess the extent and pattern of informal linkages among movements by surveying
attendees at the USSF as to their active involvement in a designated set of
movement themes and by focusing on those individuals who profess active
involvement in two or more movements.
Those respondents who are involved
in more than one movement are more likely to be synergists (Carroll and Ratner
1996; Wallerstein 2004) who see the larger connections
among different movements and who may be more likely to play an active role in
facilitating collective action within the larger “movement of movements.”
The extent and pattern of linkages among
the memberships of social movement organizations may be highly consequential. Social
movement research has repeatedly found that network connections among
individuals are the most important factor explaining movement participation
(Snow and Soule 2010). Some forms of
connection [e.g. “small world” networks, (Watts 2003)] allow the rapid spread
of information and influence while other network structures (e.g. division into
“factions”) inhibit communication and make coordinated action more difficult. The
ways in which social movements are linked with one another can facilitate or
obstruct efforts to organize cross-movement collective action. Formal network
analysis can reveal whether or not the structure of alliances contains separate
subsets with few ties, or the extent to which the network is organized around
one or several central movements that connect the other movements by means of
overlapping members.
The
Social Forum Surveys
The
University of California-Riverside Transnational Social Movement Research
Working Group has conducted four paper surveys of attendees at Social Forum
events. We used previous studies of the global justice movements by Starr
(2000) and Fisher and Ponniah (2003) to construct our
original list of eighteen social
movement themes that we believed would be represented at the January 2005 World
Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. We also
conducted a survey at the WSF in Nairobi, Kenya in 2007 in which we used most
of these same movement themes, but we separated human rights from anti-racism
and we added eight additional movement themes (development, landless,
immigrant, religious, housing, jobless, open source, and autonomous). We used
this same larger list of 27 movement themes at the US Social Forum (USSF) in
Atlanta in July of 2007.[5]
In what follows we study changes and
continuities in the relative sizes of movements and changes in the network
centrality (multiplicative coreness) of movements.
Relative movement size is indicated by the percentage of surveyed attendees who
claim to be actively involved in each movement theme. We asked each attendee to check whether or
not they identified with, or were actively involved in each of the movement
themes with following item on our survey questionnaire:
(Check all of the following
movements with which you (a) strongly identify with and/or are actively
involved in:
(a) strongly
identify:
(b) are actively involved in:
1. oAlternative
media/culture
oAlternative media/culture
2. oAnarchist
oAnarchist
3. oAnti-corporate
oAnti-corporate
4. oAnti-globalization oAntiglobalization
5. oAntiracism
oAntiracism
6. oAlternative Globalization/Global
Justice
oAlternative
Globalization/Global Justice
7. oAutonomous
oAutonomous
8. oCommunist
oCommunist
9. oDevelopment aid/Economic development
oDevelopment aid/Economic development
10.oEnvironmental
oEnvironmental
11.oFair Trade/Trade
Justice
oFair Trade/Trade Justice
12.oFood Rights/Slow
Food
oFood Rights/Slow Food
13.oGay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer Rights oGay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer Rights
14.oHealth/HIV
oHealth/HIV
15.oHousing
rights/anti-eviction/squatters
oHousing rights/anti-eviction/squatters
16.oHuman
Rights
oHuman Rights
17.oIndigenous
oIndigenous
18.oJobless workers/welfare
rights
oJobless workers/welfare rights
19.oLabor
oLabor
20.oMigrant/immigrant
rights
oMigrant/immigrant rights
21.oNational Sovereignty/National
Liberation oNational Sovereignty/National Liberation
22.oOpen-Source/Intellectual Property
Rights oOpen-Source/Intellectual Property Rights
23.oPeace/Anti-war
oPeace/Anti-war
24.oPeasant/Farmers/Landless/Land-reform
oPeasant/Farmers/Landless/Land-reform
25.oReligious/Spiritual
oReligious/Spiritual
26.oSocialist
oSocialist
27.oWomen's/Feminist
oWomen's/Feminist
28.oOther(s), Please list
___________________ oOther(s), Please
list _________________
Table 1 below reports the numbers and
the percentages that these numbers reflect of all the actively involved movement choices. This is an indicator of
relative movement size, and changes in the percentages tell if a movement theme
has grown and or declined in popularity among the attendees as the USSF
meetings. Multiplicative coreness is a formal network
statistic that is calculated from the network affiliation matrices presented
below. Coreness tells how central a network node
(movement theme) is in the network of movement links based on the overlapping
involvements of individual attendees. A movement that is greatly tied to many
other movements by having co-members with them, and one that is the sole link
between more peripheral movements and the core of centrally located movements
gets a high score on the coreness measure. Size and coreness are
positively correlated because a larger movement is more likely to have more
ties with other movements. But size and coreness are
not perfectly correlated (see Table 5 below).
Movement Sizes at the US Social Forum
We asked participants which of these movement themes they
strongly identified with, and with which were they actively involved as
shown above. Table 1 shows the movement themes
and the numbers of participants who said they were actively involved in each of
the movements in 2007 and 2010. The number of choices of movements is
considerably larger than the total number of attendees surveyed because over
half of the respondents indicated active involvement if more than one movement
theme.
The size distribution of movement
selections in Table 1 shows that the largest movements represented at the
Atlanta meeting in 2007 were antiracism ( with 7.73%
of the choices), peace/anti-war ( with 7.57% of the choices) and human rights
(7.36 % of the choices). This means that nearly 8% of all the 2419 choices of
movement active involvement were claiming active involvement in antiracism. The
movements in Table 1 are ranked according to their percentages in Atlanta. In
Detroit in 2010 antiracism was still the largest, but the second largest was now
the environmental movement. The Pearson’s r correlation between the percentages
of the movement themes in 2007 and 2010 is .88.
The last column in Table 1 shows the
percentage growth or decline for each movement theme between 2007 and
2010. Peace/Anti-war and Global Justice
declined, as did Indigenous. We suspect that the peace movement activism
declined because of a combination of things that happened between 2007 and
2010. In the U.S. presidential election of 2008 Barack Obama had promised to
stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by 2010 it was clear that these wars
were winding down. The huge global anti-war movement that had emerged in 2003 (Meyer.
and Corrigall-Brown 2005; Reese, Petit, and Meyer 2008) had
subsided. Most observers also saw a decline in the level of activism in the
global justice movement. It is somewhat
ironic that the percentage of USSF attendees that were actively involved in the
indigenous movement declined between 2007 and 2010 because the National
Planning Committee for the Detroit event made a successful effort to involve
Native Americans from Michigan in the planning of the Detroit meeting, and the
Michigan indigenes played a very visible role in the Detroit meeting. It would
appear that despite this stress on local involvement the numbers of indigenous
activists declined. The percentage declined from 2.7% in Atlanta to 1.5% in
Detroit. [6]
Both the Slow Food and Environmental movements
seem to have grown significantly. The Slow Food movement, a protest against
mass commoditized consumption that champions locally-grown and organic foods, began
in Italy and has been spreading to the U.S. and elsewhere. The increased salience of global warming and climate justice issues have
encouraged more participation by environmental activists. Some say that anarchists are unlikely to fill
out surveys, but forty-six of our respondents in Detroit indicated that they were
actively involved anarchists. The
percentage of anarchists increased from 1.7% in Atlanta to 2.6% of movement
choices in Detroit. The high visibility of anarchists and horizontalists
in the Occupy movement in 2011 (e.g. Graeber 2013; Gitlin 2012; Milkman, Luce and Lewis 2013) suggests
that the Social Forum process may be drawing from a somewhat different crowd.
But the percentage of anarchists at the USSF increased between 2007 and 2010
(see Table 1, last column).
Table 1: Relative Sizes of Movements based on the percentages of movement themes selected as actively involved at the 2007 USSF and the 2010 USSF
We also analyzed the responses to
the question about “strong identification” with movements to compare these with
the “actively involved” question. More than twice as many people indicated “identification”
as opposed to “active involvement”, but the relative percentages were very
similar, and the network results based on the identification matrix was also
found to be very similar to the results for active involvement.
Patterns
of Linkage among the Social Movements
We use formal network analysis to
study the pattern of links among social movements based on attendees’
indications of active involvement in two or more movement themes. Network
analysis is superior to bivariate correlation analysis because it allows the
whole structure of a network to be analyzed, including all the direct and
indirect links as well as the non-links. This makes it possible to identify
cliques or factions among a set of nodes and to examine the centrality or peripherality of network nodes – in this case social
movement themes.
Table 2: Affiliations of 27 Movement Themes, Atlanta 2007
Table 2 contains the selections
of all those attendees in 2007 who selected two or more movement themes. The
diagonal contains the total of all those who selected each movement and these
are the same counts that are in Table 1 for 2007. The other cells are for
movement pairs and contain the number of affiliation selections in which
individuals profess active involvement in both movements. Excluding the
diagonal, the average cell size for Table 2 is 25 and the Standard Deviation of
the distribution of cell sizes is just less than 18.
One striking thing about Table 2 is that there are no zeros. This means
that all of the movement themes are connected with all of the other themes by
having a least a few individuals who profess active involvement in both. The
smallest number of links in Table 2 is between the Socialist and Anarchist
themes (2). Four of the attendees we
surveyed indicated that they were actively involved in both Communist and
Anarchist movements.
We used UCINet to analyze the structures of movement networks.[7] The UCINet QAP routine produces a Pearson’s r correlation coefficient between dichotomized affiliation network matrices. Pearson’s r correlation coefficient between the 2007 and the 2010 matrices was .73.[8] This is a slightly larger positive correlation than was found between the movement theme affiliations between the World Social Forum meeting in Nairobi and the U.S. Social Forum meeting in Atlanta, which was 0.71 (Chase-Dunn and Kaneshiro 2009). It is unsurprising that the Atlanta USSF would be more similar to the Detroit USSF than it would be to the Nairobi WSF, but the surprise is that the national and global affiliation matrices are so similar.
Table 3: Affiliations of 27 Movements, Detroit 2010
As with Table 2, there are no zeros in
Table 3, showing that all the movement themes are connected by some co-members.[9]
Excluding the diagonal, the average cell size for Table 3 is 17.7 and the
Standard Deviation is 11.1. That the average number of
overlaps in 2010 was 7.2 smaller than in 2007. In order to use formal network analysis we
must dichotomize this matrix by choosing a cutting point that defines strong
versus weak ties among movement pairs. As
in our earlier research (Chase-Dunn and Kaneshiro 2009), we selected a tie
strength cut-off of one-half of a standard deviation above the mean number of
movement interconnections to define a “strong” linkage. All the cells below
that cutting point are assigned a value of zero and those at or above are
assigned a value of one.
From these scores, network diagrams for
2007 (Figure 1) and 2010 (Figure 2) are produced.[10]
Figure 1: Atlanta USSF 2007 Intermovement Network
Diagram
Figure 2: Detroit USSF 2010 Intermovement Network
Diagram
Comparisons of the
USSF 2007 and the USSF 2010
The purpose of comparing the USSF 2007 intermovement network with that found for the USSF in 2010
is to examine the question of stability and change in the network of social
movements participating in the social forum process, and to look for
differences that might indicate changes or that might stem from the fact that
the meetings were held in different locations and were organized under rather
different circumstances. There are big differences between the cities of
Atlanta and Detroit. And the political and economic situation in the U.S. changed
a lot between 2007 and 2010. The election of President Barack Obama in 2008 and
the advent of a global financial crisis and economic slow-down were major
intervening events.
Regarding stability, the overall
structure of the two movement networks did not change. They are both multicentic structures in which a few central movement
themes link all the rest. Human rights is an inclusive
movement that overlaps with many other movements, and so its centrality in both
national and global movement networks is not surprising. The U.N. Declaration
of Human Rights is a totemic document of global governance and even those who
contest the meaning of these values by championing the rights of communities or
the rights of nature, or by emphasizing the rights of
women or of oppressed groups continue to identify with the overall concept of
human rights.
Both the International Council of
the World Social Forum and the National Planning Committee of the US Social
Forum learned from experiences in Atlanta and tried to make changes to improve
the Detroit meeting of the US Social Forum.
For example, there was a big public protest by a group of indigenous
activists at the end of the Atlanta meeting. The National Planning Committee
for Detroit made a strong effort to contact local indigenous groups from
Michigan early on and to get them to help organize the Detroit meeting and to
play a central role in plenary events and marches. Both meetings were explicitly intended by the
WSF International Committee to be organized by, and intended for, activists
from grass roots movement within the United States. Global and national NGOs
and national unions were allowed to participate, but they did not play a
central role in organizing the meetings. The “internal
Figures 1 and 2 above visually
display the network structures based on overlaps among activists who said they were
actively involved in more than one of the movement themes. The group of
movement themes in the upper left corners of Figures 1 and 2 contain those
movement themes that did not have enough overlaps to be included above the
cut-off points used to calculate network position. In 2007 the Anarchists were
in this relatively isolated group, whereas in 2010 they made it into the main
network because they became more connected with other movement themes. The
Health/HIV and Indigenous movement themes were in the main network in 2007 but
in 2010 they appeared to decline in network centrality and were in the group of
isolates.
Regarding overall network structural
features the results for 2007 and 2010 are quite similar. In both years the
movement themes are connected in a single network that is multicentric.
There are no major subnetworks in which sets of
movements are exclusively connected with one another, but not with other
subsets. What changes from 2007 is the relative centrality of some of the movement themes.
Multiplicative coreness indicates the extent to which a network node possesses a high density of connections with other nodes. The coreness scores presented in Table 4 have been calculated based on the dichotomized interaction matrices produced from Tables 2 and 3 above. Less coreness is characterized as possessing few interconnections. Nodes with high coreness are often capable of greater coordinated action and a greater mobilization of resources, while nodes with less coreness are not. Table 4 shows the coreness scores, the ranks of the movements that are also displayed in Figures1 and 2 above, and Table 4 also shows the amount of change in coreness scores between 2007 and 2010.
|
Rank
in 2007 |
2007 Coreness |
Rank
in 2010 |
2010 Coreness |
Change
in Coreness |
|
|
Human Rights |
1 |
0.313 |
1 |
0.322 |
0.009 |
|
Antiracism |
1 |
0.313 |
2 |
0.319 |
0.006 |
|
Peace/Anti-War |
3 |
0.31 |
8 |
0.278 |
-0.032 |
|
Migrant/Immigrant
Rights |
4 |
0.302 |
5 |
0.285 |
-0.017 |
|
Women's/Feminist |
5 |
0.293 |
7 |
0.282 |
-0.011 |
|
Environmental |
6 |
0.285 |
3 |
0.31 |
0.025 |
|
Anti-corporate |
7 |
0.281 |
5 |
0.285 |
0.004 |
|
Anti-globalization |
8 |
0.264 |
9 |
0.25 |
-0.014 |
|
Global
Justice / Alternative Globalization |
8 |
0.264 |
14 |
0.176 |
-0.088 |
|
Fair
Trade/Trade Justice |
10 |
0.244 |
4 |
0.29 |
0.046 |
|
Labor |
10 |
0.244 |
13 |
0.185 |
-0.059 |
|
Media/Culture |
12 |
0.221 |
11 |
0.222 |
0.001 |
|
Gay/Lesbian/
Bisexual/ Transgender/Queer Rights |
13 |
0.173 |
12 |
0.197 |
0.024 |
|
Housing
Rights |
14 |
0.125 |
18 |
0.026 |
-0.099 |
|
Indigenous |
15 |
0.1 |
20 |
0 |
-0.1 |
|
Jobless
Workers/Welfare Rights |
16 |
0.05 |
16 |
0.092 |
0.042 |
|
Health/HIV |
16 |
0.05 |
20 |
0 |
-0.05 |
|
Food
Rights/Slow Food |
18 |
0.048 |
10 |
0.238 |
0.19 |
|
Socialist |
19 |
0.025 |
19 |
0.015 |
-0.01 |
|
Development
Aid/Economic Development |
20 |
0 |
15 |
0.102 |
0.102 |
|
Anarchist |
20 |
0 |
17 |
0.044 |
0.044 |
|
Autonomous |
20 |
0 |
20 |
0 |
0 |
|
Communist |
20 |
0 |
20 |
0 |
0 |
|
National
Sovereignty/ National Liberation |
20 |
0 |
20 |
0 |
0 |
|
Open-Source/
Intellectual Property Rights |
20 |
0 |
20 |
0 |
0 |
|
Peasant/
Farmers/ Landless/Land Reform |
20 |
0 |
20 |
0 |
0 |
|
Religious/Spiritual |
20 |
0 |
20 |
0 |
0 |
|
*Note:
Movements with equal coreness scores were given the
same rank |
|||||
Table 4: Multiplicative Coreness Scores and
Ranks of Movements in the USSF07 and USSF2010 Networks
The movements in Table 4 are sorted from
high to low based on their coreness scores at the
Atlanta meeting in 2007. In 2007 there
was a multicentric network with three movements
sharing the center – human rights, anti-racism and peace (see Figure 1 above).
Other very central movements were immigrant rights, feminists and
environmentalists.
Much of the structure of movement
linkages was retained at the 2010 USSF in Detroit, though there were some
important changes in the positions of particular movement themes. The last
column of Table 4 shows how much the coreness score
of each movement changed from 2007 to 2010. In Detroit human rights and
antiracism, both of which had the highest connectedness scores in Atlanta, increased
their relative connectedness scores, remaining the major hubs linking most other
movement themes. And this increase in connectedness happened despite that both
human rights and anti-racism decreased their sizes relative to other movement
themes (see Table 5 below). The peace movement decreased from 3rd to
8th in the connectedness ranking of movement themes. Immigrant
rights fell from 4th to 5th while environmentalism
increased its level of connectedness from 6th to 3rd and
also increased its relative size.
There were other big changes. Alternative globalization went down from the 8th
to the 14th position; fair trade/trade justice went up from 10th
the 4th position; labor went down from 10th to 13th
position and Slow Food/Food Rights went up from 18th to 10th
position. The second largest change score was that of development aid/economic
development which moved from rank 20 to rank 15. Anarchists moved up from rank 20 in
2007 to rank 17 in 2010. And the jobless
workers/welfare rights movements also increased their centrality, though their
ranking remained the same.
Several movements shifted out toward the
periphery of the movement network. The biggest shift of this kind was that of
the indigenous movement, which went from rank 15 in 2007 to rank 20 in
2010. We already noted above that the
relative size of the indigenous movement appears to have decreased (Table 1). The
second largest negative change in the coreness
measure was that of housing rights, which went from rank 14 in 2007 to rank 18 in
2010 and it also decreased in relative size. And the global justice/alternative
globalization movement (from 8 to 14), labor movement (from 10 to 13), and
health/HIV movement (from 16 to 20) moved further toward the outer edge. While its coreness
score change was moderately negative, the peace/anti-war movement dropped steeply
from its central position at 3rd all the way to 8th in
the coreness ranking. Nine movements did not change their ranking in
the coreness scores and 16 had change scores of less
than .03.
|
Change in Size |
Change in Coreness |
|
|
Human Rights |
-1.37 |
0.009 |
|
Antiracism |
-0.56 |
0.006 |
|
Peace/Anti-War |
-2.09 |
-0.032 |
|
Migrant/Immigrant Rights |
0.24 |
-0.017 |
|
Women's/Feminist |
-0.79 |
-0.011 |
|
Environmental |
1.34 |
0.025 |
|
Anti-corporate |
0.54 |
0.004 |
|
Anti-globalization |
-0.74 |
-0.014 |
|
Global Justice / Alternative Globalization |
-2.08 |
-0.088 |
|
Fair Trade/Trade Justice |
0.03 |
0.046 |
|
Labor |
-0.08 |
-0.059 |
|
Media/Culture |
0.38 |
0.001 |
|
Gay/Lesbian/ Bisexual/ Transgender/Queer Rights |
0.38 |
0.024 |
|
Housing Rights |
-0.41 |
-0.099 |
|
Indigenous |
-1.22 |
-0.1 |
|
Jobless Workers/Welfare Rights |
-0.03 |
0.042 |
|
Health/HIV |
0.02 |
-0.05 |
|
Food Rights/Slow Food |
2.42 |
0.19 |
|
Socialist |
0.45 |
-0.01 |
|
Development Aid/Economic Development |
0.19 |
0.102 |
|
Anarchist |
0.88 |
0.044 |
|
Autonomous |
0.23 |
0 |
|
Communist |
-0.10 |
0 |
|
National Sovereignty/ National Liberation |
0.26 |
0 |
|
Open-Source/ Intellectual Property Rights |
0.60 |
0 |
|
Peasant/ Farmers/Landless/Land-Reform |
0.57 |
0 |
|
Religious/Spiritual |
0.34 |
0 |
Table 5: Changes in Sizes and Coreness Scores between 2007 and 2010; Pearson’s r correlation = .67
Size and coreness
are positively correlated because a larger movement is more likely to have more
ties with other movements. But these two dimensions are not perfectly
correlated (r= .67), and when we look at changes in both the relative size and
the coreness of movements from 2007 to 2010, we
sometimes find movements that decreased in size but increased in coreness and vice
versa (see Table 5). This is possible because a movement can be more linked
with other movements despite that it decreases in size. Movement themes that
got relatively smaller while increasing in network coreness
were human rights, anti-racism and jobless workers/welfare rights (underlined in Table 5). Movement themes
that got larger while decreasing in relative network centrality were immigrant
rights, health/HIV and socialist (bolded in Table 5).
Conclusions
The results
presented in this article are, in some ways, unsurprising. Our earlier studies (that
used the eighteen movement themes that we originally developed for our survey
of the World Social Forum meeting in Porto Alegre,
Brazil in 2005), found substantial stability in the structure of inter-movement
connections. This held even when comparing the results of our survey at the US
Social Forum in Atlanta with two global meetings of the World Social Forum
(Porto Alegre in 2005 and Nairobi in 2007 (Chase-Dunn
and Kaneshiro 2009). This implies that U.S. political
culture and the global political culture represented by the World Social Forum
process at its international meetings are rather similar entities, and this has
important implications for the analysis of transnational social movements as
well as the larger context of global civil society.
In this article we are using a larger
list of 27 movement themes to compare two U.S. Social Forum meetings, and we
find even greater stability in the structure of movement alliances and relative
sizes. Regarding movement sizes, the
Pearson’s r correlation between the percentages in Table 1 above is .88. The QAP Pearson’s r correlation coefficient
between the 2007 and the 2010 matrices in Tables 2 and 3 is .73.
There were, however, some important
changes. While the overall network structure retained a multicentric
form with four or five movements occupying the center of the network and being
similar to one another in terms of relative coreness,
some of these central movements changed positions with other movements that
were less central in 2007. Environmentalists
were centrally located in all of our earlier results, but they were not as
important as they became in the Detroit meeting of the U.S. Social Forum. They
displaced peace/anti-war at the very center of the movement network and nudged
the migrant/immigrant rights and women’s/feminist movements slightly out from
the center. While food rights/slow food increased in size and development
aid/economic development decreased in size, both increased their network
centrality. The peace movement dropped from 3rd to 8th in
connectedness rank, while the indigenous, housing rights, global justice, and
labor movements lost both centrality in the movement network and relative size.
Some of these changes in size and
centrality may have had to do with the changing salience of movement
topics. Environmentalism is on the rise,
especially the climate justice movement. The decreased size and coreness of the peace movement may have been related to the
promises of the Obama administration to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and
Afghanistan. As mentioned above, the slow food/food justice movement has been
spreading from its point of origin in Italy and this may account for its
increase in size and coreness between 2007 and 2010. It
is plausible that the declining size and coreness of
the global justice movement between 2007 and 2010 was a consequence of how
economic stress, even when global in scope and causation, focusses activists on
more local problems.
The apparent decrease in network
centrality and relative size of the indigenous movement theme is an ironic
outcome which occurred despite the great efforts of the USSF organizers to
showcase indigenous issues in Detroit. We surveyed 66 activists in Atlanta who
identified themselves as actively involved in indigenous issues, but only 26 in
Detroit. And the relative centrality of these in the connectedness matrix also
declined. One possibility is that indigenous activists were so busy at the Detroit
meeting that they did not have time to respond to our survey. The other
possibility is that attendance of indigenous activists actually declined as a
response to the issues raised by the unhappy indigenous activists in Atlanta,
who took control of the closing plenary session to protest perceived
indignities. Because we do not know whether or not our sample of attendees was
a random sample we cannot be sure. The solution here would be to have access to
registration data for these meetings with enough detail to be able to check
survey results against the registration data.
Perhaps the most important result of our
studies of intermovement networks is the finding of a
rather stable multicentric structure of relations
among movements at both the global and the national levels. The geographical locations
of meetings and world historical events obviously have impacts on this
structure, as we found in comparing Porto Alegre with
Nairobi, but the basic underlying structure is being reproduced. The collective
action problem is how to mobilize coordinated organizational instruments that
can help humanity to deal with the huge challenges that it has created for
itself in the 21st century. The Social Forum process remains an
important venue in that effort.
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