[lbo-talk] insurgency, opposition, and tactical innovation

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Sun Nov 18 10:55:55 PST 2012


This is an old article by Doug McAdam, a sociologist of social movements, who I have often referred to on-list. McAdam argued in Freedom Summer, for instance, that while Freedom Summer may have, at times, felt like a failure, it was during this experiment that people learned organzing skills they took with them to ignite or contribute to other efforts such as free speech movement, women's liberation, and so forth.

In this article, from 1983, McAdam shows how tactical innovations among insurgents emerged only to be supressed by opponents. It's a pattern with which we are all familiar but is given a longer historical view here:

http://www.bsos.umd.edu/socy/vanneman/socy428/McAdam83.pdf

-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)



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