Week 2: Extremism - threat or source of innovation?

In this lecture I introduced the idea of the 'protest cycle', and a range of other concepts from the sociology of social movements. Briefly:

• a social movement (a diffuse group united by a cultural identity, opposition to the status quo and autonomy from the political sphere)
• forms in response to system blockage, i.e. being unable to get what they want through legitimate political routes
• it uses new and innovative tactics (in the seminar you came up with the idea of a mass 'smoke-in' to protest against cannabis being illegal)
• and puts forward new and modified frames (ways of 'framing' issues so as to make the movement's position more persuasive; an example would be comparing the dangers of using cannabis with those of using alcohol)
• and keeps pushing (while the political mainstream pushes back) until
• some of the new frames and tactics gets adopted;
• the movement then subsides

There are three really important points here, which can easily be overlooked. Firstly, while the movement is on the rise, it will attract both support and opposition. In particular, it will be opposed by the parties and institutions of the political mainstream - and the way that they will oppose it is to label it as extremist, unacceptable, criminal, violent etc. 'Extreme' is partly a position on the political spectrum, and partly a label applied by mainstream parties to discredit their rivals.

Secondly, in the penultimate phase only some of the new frames and tactics get adopted: some are rejected - and labelled as unacceptably extreme, violent etc. As Charles Tilly said, before strike action was legal in the USA it took a far wider range of forms than it did after it was legalised: legalising strikes meant legalising a certain way of taking strike action, and criminalising all the rest.

Thirdly, this isn't the only way a protest cycle can end; it can also end with all of the movement's frames and tactics being rejected, and the movement being repressed out of existence. In this situation, as I've argued, disappointed activists are far more likely to resort to violence than if the cycle had ended well. Moreover, in this situation everything the social movement had to offer has effectively been dismissed and labelled as 'extreme'. In hindsight, this creates the impression that the social movement genuinely was unacceptably extreme, and that its new tactics and frames never could have been adopted. Negative closure to a protest cycle both makes violence more likely and gives future historians a job of archaeology, digging out the more hopeful possibilities from beneath the dismissive labels that were applied to them.

This model of the relationship between protest cycles and violence isn't universally shared; some argue that activist minorities start using violent tactics because the success of a protest cycle has left them with nothing to do - or else that they do it just because they like using violent tactics. However, it is testable, to some extent: if violence is a response to system closure, opening the political system up a bit should lead to less violence.

Here's a recent news story which seems relevant:

EDL leader Tommy Robinson quits group (BBC News)

English Defence League leader and founder Tommy Robinson has left the group, saying he has concerns over the "dangers of far-right extremism". ... Mr Robinson said it was still his aim to "counter Islamist ideology", although "not with violence but with better, democratic ideas".


...
The EDL, formed in 2009, has organised marches and demonstrations in several cities across the UK, which have seen sometimes violent confrontations with anti-fascism campaigners. Mr Robinson's co-leader, Kevin Carroll, has also opted to leave. Their decision follows discussions with the Quilliam group, which describes itself as a "counter-extremism think tank".

 and a blog post commenting on it, with some interesting links:

Meet the new boss (Obsolete)

When the Quilliam Foundation offers to reinvent you as an completely legitimate political commentator, why on earth wouldn't you take them up on it? ... Quilliam will ignore all the evidence that makes clear you're still a thug who's read a few far-right blogs and books ... and instead present you as someone who merely needs "encouraging" in your "critique of Islamism".  Who wouldn't sign up when a government-funded think-tank simply decides to forget that you deliberately conflated Islamic extremism and Islam in general on innumerable occasions?

What do you think? Should the Quilliam foundation be blamed for giving a veneer of respectability to the English Defence League's Islamophobic ideas? Or should they be praised for bringing Robinson into the political mainstream and thus making violent anti-Muslim protest less likely? (Or both?)