I have been chipping away at an article for awhile now on terrorism as an organizational activity. Part of my argument is to understand terrorism as at times a social movement.
Part of the fun of this for me is to learn more about social movements which has always been a topic my interests bump up against, but something I never had time to formally study.
Reading Castells (who channels Alain Tourraine, apparently), Tilly, and Giddens, among others, brought the idea of social movements into my sphere of interest. Then I started reading and reading about the work done by institutional theorists like Haogreeva Rao and others about thinking about consumers as social movements. For example, his book, Market Rebels, makes the case that markets are at times created by consumers, not firms.
Today, in a fit of retroactive literature scanning, I decided to check what had been said about terrorism and social movement theory. Two interesting findings.
First, the wikipedia article cites Tilly and Tarrow (separately) defining social movements as inherently a featrue of pluralist, democratic societies. Moreover, Tilly’s repretoire does not include any violent acts. This surprised me. Terrorist organizations seem to operate in such societies and also, with Al Qaeda, at a global level. Moreover, they are also embedded in or linked to social movements and sets of social movement organizations. So, if a social movement is a an observable collective effort to resist or adopt social change, then terrorist organizations can be part of that definition, irrespective of their geographic location.
Second, I hopped over to google scholar to see what had been written about social movement theory and terrorism. Using those search terms, I found one article in Terrorism and Political Violence. Who knew there was sucha specialized journal? C. Gentry’s article is titled: ” THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENT THEORY AND TERRORISM STUDIES: THE ROLE OF LEADERSHIP, MEMBERSHIP, IDEOLOGY AND GENDER”. I am not even sure from the title if it is relevant. That was the first hit, none of the rest seemed any better. This struck me as very odd and made me wonder if I have stumbled onto a much larger claim than I realized initially:
Terrorist Organizing must be accounted for by social movement theory.
Now, I wonder about how to use my blog. I have never had anything like an active “readership” as far as i can tell. I would love to get some answers or responses to what I discuss here. But how? Should I email Brayden King or Fabio Rojas at OrgTheory.net and say, “Hey, please read this?”
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