Marginalization, Power, and Mobilization

• In Event: 449 - Section on Peace, War, and Social Conflict Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03. Social Movements of Peace and War

Abstract

Attention to what makes nonviolent mobilization effective is growing. As scholars explore how “people-power” operates, however, they tend to articulate savvy strategies and favorable conditions in ways that fail to account for how different social actors arrest mobilizing power. Access to political opportunities and social and economic resources and the meaning and qualitative experience of cultural and ideological projects for liberation varies greatly across a stratified polity. In this project, I have developed a framework for studying marginalization and mobilization and I examine a theory of constitutive power that traces the development and success of mobilizing strategies to the qualitative ways in which different actors achieve different degrees of visibility or invisibility in a field of conflict.

Drawing on three case studies of women’s movements against state violence in Argentina, Serbia, and Liberia, I explore the gendered invisibility of women’s power in these three contexts from the earliest stages of mobilization, through the development of broad-based protest, into the current efforts of women activists to facilitate reconciliation, rectify political wrongs, and build structural forms of peace. And I discuss the empirical imperative to expand our conceptual frameworks for examining gendered forms of nonviolent power and social change.

Author

• Selina R. Gallo-Cruz, College of the Holy Cross