Mobilization Summer Update

Social Movement Scholar,

Welcome to the latest Mobilization update, where we're celebrating both new scholarship and community connections.

We're pleased to announce the publication of our latest issue, which examines contentious politics across diverse contexts and time periods. The collection spans pandemic-era altruism, urban belonging, democratic backsliding, and intergenerational de-escalation, offering both theoretical advances and empirical discoveries about the evolving dynamics of protest, repression, and political change.

On the community front, we extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who participated in the recent Mobilization-SDSU conference on Democracy, Autocracy, and Protest: Social Movements in Times of Crisis. The quality of presentations, discussions, and collaborative exchanges made our 2025 gathering both intellectually rigorous and genuinely inspiring. Energized by this success, we're already developing plans for our 2026 conference.

Finally, we encourage you to consider submitting your work to Mobilization. Join our community of internationally recognized scholars by contributing research that shapes our understanding of social movements, protest, and political change.

The newest articles in Mobilization

COVID, Compassion, and Altruistic Mobilization: Explaining Non-Black Participation in the Black Lives Matter Movement of 2020
Andreas Wimmer and Gerard Torrats-Espinosa 
Why did non-Black participation in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests surge to unprecedented levels? Wimmer and Torrats-Espinosa propose a novel socioemotional model, arguing that the suffering brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic primed many non-Black individuals to respond more compassionately to George Floyd’s murder. Combining insights from the psychology of compassion with theories of movement framing and emotional mobilization, the authors show how pandemic-induced empathy, when paired with frames of systemic racism and blame attribution, translated into large-scale altruistic protest participation. Drawing on both county-level and individual survey data, their findings challenge alternative explanations and highlight how collective trauma can widen moral boundaries and mobilize conscience constituents at scale. Read the article.

De-Escalation in a Peaceful Protest: The Role of Adults in Black Lives Matter
Anne Marie Baylouny and Anshu N. Chatterjee
Baylouny and Chatterjee develop a micro-level account of how nonviolence is enacted and preserved during protest. Through a novel dataset of BLM protest videos, they explore moments of near-violence and the interpersonal interventions that averted them. Their findings highlight the often-overlooked role of adults, who, especially in intergenerational settings, used appeals grounded in shared identity and calm authority to reduce tensions. This work expands the scope of protest analysis beyond police escalation, offering a grounded framework for understanding how protest participants themselves maintain the integrity of nonviolent movements. Read the article.

Inverted Mobilizations: Pro- and Anti-Immigrant Activism in Orange County
William Hollingshead
This study examines how resource advantages don't always translate into political victories. De Wilde, Nicholls, and Vermeulen analyze a decade of immigration politics in Orange County to reveal how anti-immigrant activists overcame organizational disadvantages by aligning with mobilized, risk-tolerant elected officials. By contrast, pro-immigrant campaigns, despite superior resources, faced institutional hesitation and symbolic-only support. The authors advance a new framework, movement inversion, to understand how partisan asymmetries and strategic alliances shape uneven policy outcomes between opposing movements. Read the article. 

Breaking Down Pillars of Support for Democratic Backsliding
Jonathan Pinckney and Claire Trilling
Why do some civil resistance campaigns succeed in stopping democratic decline while others fail? Pinckney and Trilling apply the “pillars of support” framework to democratic backsliding, expanding beyond authoritarian contexts. Drawing on global data and a case study of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, they find that nonviolent campaigns can protect democracy—but only if they shift the loyalty of key actors through quiet outreach. Once those pillars defect, their use of noncooperation—not public protest—proves most impactful. This research deepens our understanding of civic resistance in fragile democracies and offers practical insights for activists and reformers. Read the article. 

Cityspace, Belonging, and Urban Movements
Ipek Demirsu
Demirsu investigates how civil society actors succeed or fail in transforming marginalized urban peripheries into cohesive movement spaces. Comparing two stigmatized neighborhoods in northern Italy, the research examines why grassroots mobilization flourishes in some contexts but not others. In Veronetta, social actors built a unified movement by anchoring activism in the neighborhood's lived identity and routines. In contrast, San Siro's civic groups remained fragmented, unable to cultivate place-based belonging. These findings highlight the critical importance of local embeddedness in sustaining collective action and offer insights for understanding urban struggles as spatially grounded processes. Read the article. 

How Diffuse Movements Mobilize Novel Demands under Repression
Anna Milewski
Can a fragmented opposition organization help spark political transformation? In this study of East Germany’s 1989 Peaceful Revolution, Milewski shows that Neues Forum—a diffuse social movement organization—facilitated the surprising emergence of reunification demands. Despite repression and internal disagreements, the organization served as a critical forum for grassroots mobilization. Event history analysis reveals that early Neues Forum activity correlated with early adoption of the reunification demand across East German cities.  Read the article.