A Crisis Within a Crisis: Social Movements, Extremism and the Pandemic in Brazil

• In Event: Civil Society and Subnational Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Americas

Abstract

Social movement scholars have demonstrated that movements engage in complex interpretative processes to define when social, economic and political conditions are ripe for mobilization and what kinds of action are most appropriate. While such approaches to understanding the relation between context and mobilization are well developed, we know little about how movements devise strategy during crises. Furthermore, the tendency of the social movement literature to see contextual changes in terms of a dichotomy between opportunities and threats is unsuited for understanding crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic, which involve radical uncertainty and rapid change and thus tremendous interpretative challenges.
To overcome these limitations, this paper combines social movement approaches with contemporary theories about ideational contestation during periods of crisis to analyze movement responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil. The pandemic arrived in that country the midst of a political crisis already brewing around the rise to power of right-wing extremism. For social movements opposed to President Bolsonaro, Covid-19 was thus a crisis within a crisis. As such, the experience of progressive movements in Brazil can be understood as an extreme case for examining how situations of rapid change and uncertainty can lead to changes in actors’ strategies and priorities.
Based on interviews with social movement leaders and on the analysis of documents, interviews, public (online) events and other materials, this paper explores how movement actors’ interpretations of the nature of the crisis affected their mobilization strategies. We argue that to deal with uncertainty, actors had to work with resources with which they were already familiar at the same time that they had to invent new ones. This inventive process occurred through three mechanisms of recombination: connecting the current crisis to existing social movement agendas (frame bridging); combining old and new organizational practices (practice bridging); and creating or activating new network connections (network bridging).

Authors

• Rebecca Neaera Abers, University of Brasilia

• Marisa Von Bulow, University of Brasilia