Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen Heft 32
Thorsten Bonacker / Lars Schmitt: Political protest between latent structures and manifest protest
Perspectives of sociological protest research considering the new peace movements
The authors give an overview about different paradigms of traditional and contemporary sociological
protest research. They argue that in spite of different research traditions in United
States and Europe, the approaches cannot be separated. Not only the common cognitive interest
of explaining the cleavage between latent conflict structures and manifest political protest,
but above all the requirements of changing societies ties up the different approaches.
They exemplify their thesis with an analysis of the new peace movements. In this context political
protest can be seen as rational acting (1), as an attempt to take advantage of political
opportunity structures (2), as a response to the crises of modernisation and structural strains
(3) as well as the result of a collective construction of protest topics (4). The analysis of peace
movements demonstrates that protest research has to take into account processes of transnationalisation
of protest topics and symbols on the one hand and the development of national
welfare states as well as the neo-liberal discourse of ‘personal responsibility’ on the other
hand. The authors conclude that it could be a fruitful way for future protest research to combine
constructivist approaches with discourse and habitus theories. This would allow to examine
the process of collective identity construction, that seems to be framed by the actors’ incorporated
structures (habitus) and by contemporary discourses that provide public interpretations
of the relationship between actor, state and globalisation.