Mobilization Winter Update

Social Movement Scholar,

Welcome to our Winter 2026 issue of Mobilization. This issue features six new research articles and an invitation to join us in San Diego this June for our annual conference.

Save the date: The 9th Annual Mobilization-SDSU Conference, June 22-23, 2026. This year's theme is “Rethinking Our Field: The Future of Social Movement Research.” Join about 100 scholars in San Diego for two days of discussion, collaboration, and intellectual engagement on where our field is headed. We welcome graduate students and established researchers alike. Past participants frequently cite the conference as a highlight of their academic year. We hope you'll join us. Read our Call for Papers for more details.

Time to renew? Most subscriptions expired with the December issue. Mobilization has maintained affordable rates for over a decade, and your subscription includes four print issues, full online access to our archive, and, most importantly, support for independent, field-defining research in social movement studies. Renew or join today.

The newest articles in Mobilization

The Winter 2026 issue is here. From extreme protest repertoires in Korea to identity dilemmas in Norway's antiracist movement, this issue explores how activists navigate institutional constraints, respond to repression, and negotiate the relationship between identity and mobilization.

Contested Reform: Sexual Harassment Policy and a Mismatch between Structural Social Movement Demands and Individualized Concessions
Natalie Bourman-Karns, Chang Liu, and Rory McVeigh
Bourman-Karns, Liu, and McVeigh introduce the concept of "contested reform" to explain how social movement success can be undermined when structural demands are met with individualized concessions. Focusing on sexual harassment policy, they argue that rules prohibiting specific behaviors fail to dismantle workplace structures that systematically benefit men over women. Drawing on a large-scale experiment with nearly 2,000 respondents, the study demonstrates that while women apply a single standard of inappropriateness across all workplace interactions, men rate identical behaviors as less problematic unless the dyad involves a male authority figure and a female subordinate. These findings reveal how individualized policy remedies create space for privileged actors to interpret rules in ways that sustain their advantages. Read the article.

Deterrence or Defiance? How Severity and Selectivity Shape Protest Responses to Repression
Francisca Castro
How do different combinations of repressive tactics shape subsequent mobilization in democratic contexts? Castro addresses this question through analysis of Chile's 2019 Estallido Social, tracing how the severity and selectivity of police actions influenced protest dynamics. The study shows that selective high-severity tactics generated short-term mobilization rather than the deterrence predicted by existing frameworks, while low-severity tactics produced significant protest increases regardless of their targeting. Survey evidence reveals these effects operated partly through public attitudes toward police legitimacy. These findings challenge theoretical expectations developed primarily from authoritarian cases and demonstrate that citizens' normative expectations about appropriate police conduct fundamentally alter how repression affects contentious politics in democracies. Read the article.

Extreme Protests: Changing Protest Repertoires in Labor Movements in Neoliberal Korea
Yoonkyung Lee
Why have Korean labor activists routinely adopted extreme protest repertoires—sky protests, self-imprisonment, hunger strikes, and even protest suicides—in an era of institutionalized democracy and material affluence? Lee investigates this puzzle through protest data from 1999-2019 and interviews with labor activists, finding that extreme repertoires have become normalized within labor movements but not among other social movement actors. The analysis traces how workers perceive sharply constrained opportunities through their interactions with anti-labor state policies, hostile corporations, unsympathetic media, and distant civil society allies. Facing social abandonment and declining structural and associational power, activists innovate self-inflicting forms of resistance as corporeal critiques of neoliberal democracy. Read the article.

Trajectories of Outsiderness: A Resource Model of Political Participation in Anti-Establishment Movements
Camille Bedock, Bartolomeo Cappellina, Ciro Clemente De Falco, and Dario Tuorto
Comparing the Five Star Movement in Italy and the Yellow Vests in France, Bedock, Cappellina, De Falco, and Tuorto ask why individuals with diverse backgrounds join anti-establishment movements. Drawing on 72 qualitative interviews, the article develops a multidimensional conceptualization of outsiderness across four dimensions: socioeconomic resources, political and civic experience, anti-establishment attitudes, and preferred modes of participation. The analysis identifies four ideal-typical activist trajectories—conventional, marginal insiders, self-trained, and first-timers—that appear across both movements despite their contrasting levels of institutionalization. This comparative framework clarifies how different configurations of resources and experiences shape pathways into anti-establishment politics. Read the article.

"I'm Looking for the Weirdos:" South Asian Americans and the Relationship between Ethnoracial Identity and Activism
Naomi Joseph
Drawing on interviews with twenty-seven South Asian Americans, Joseph explores how ethnoracial identity both motivates and inhibits participation in social movements. The study identifies what it calls "the problem of the two perfects": SAAs interested in activism must navigate the hegemonic image of the politically apathetic, professionally successful South Asian achiever alongside the equally unattainable image of the perfectly committed activist. These seemingly disparate profiles reinforce each other by establishing impossible identity standards that discourage and discredit movement participation. The findings demonstrate how a strong sense of identity can inhibit rather than motivate activism when potential participants believe they cannot fulfill prescribed identity profiles. Read the article.

Constructions of Antiracist Identity after George Floyd: Identity Dilemmas in the Norwegian Antiracist Movement
Mette Andersson
Building on the identity dilemmas framework, Andersson analyzes how debates over collective identity in Norway's antiracist movement intensified following the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Using 54 in-depth interviews and fieldwork, the study identifies three dilemmas that emerged during this period: the genuine engagement dilemma (distinguishing committed antiracists from those using antiracism for branding), the difference-in-sameness dilemma (balancing unity across diverse ethnoracial groups), and the spokesperson dilemma (determining legitimate movement representation). The analysis shows how critical events that generate public attention to a movement's cause exacerbate existing tensions over collective identity, particularly when external media portrayals shape internal boundary-making processes. Read the article.

New book reviews, edited by Kelsy Kretschmer. This issue includes reviews spanning labor, environmentalism, sexuality, authoritarianism, and transnational movements:

• Clifford Bob reviews The Making of Leaderful Mobilization by Edmund W. Cheng and Samson Yuen, a comprehensive interpretation of Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement that proposes new ways of understanding decentralized protest coordination.

• Phil Brown reviews Sovereign Bodies, Sovereign Spaces by Maria John, a crossnational comparison of Indigenous health clinics in Seattle and Sydney, showing how health activism expanded notions of sovereignty.

• David Pellow reviews Decolonizing Environmentalism by Prakash Kashwan and Aseem Hasnain, finding a detailed critique of colonial logics in mainstream environmental advocacy alongside powerful stories of decolonial alternatives.

• Gregory P. Williams reviews Everyday Politics in Russia by Jeremy Morris, an ethnographic portrait of how ordinary Russians experience deindustrialization, material hardship, and political life.

• T. Gruebler reviews The Global Fight Against LGBTI Rights by Phillip M. Ayoub and Kristina Stoeckl, which maps transnational conservative networks and demonstrates how gender and sexuality are central to global politics.

• Eric Blanc reviews Labor against the Regime by Nadine Abdalla, one of the strongest single-country studies of worker contention in an authoritarian setting, tracing Egyptian labor mobilization from Mahalla to independent unionism.

• Stefan Vogler reviews By the Power Vested in Me by Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, a comparative study of how different forms of expertise shaped same-sex marriage debates in the U.S. and France.

• Jean-Pierre Reed reviews Revolutionary Emotions by Silvana Toska, an emotional theory of diffusion explaining how the Arab Spring spread across the Middle East.

The study of social movements depends on the invisible but essential labor of peer reviewers. We are deeply grateful to the scholars who reviewed manuscripts over the past year, whether for Mobilization or for other journals, offering rigorous, constructive feedback that strengthens both individual articles and the field as a whole. This service is central to our collective intellectual enterprise.