Would you like some structure with your momentum?

Over time, a gulf has emerged between two different approaches to creating social change.

Organizers in the labour movement and in community-based organizations typically focus on person-by-person recruitment, careful leadership development, and the creation of stable institutional bodies that can leverage the power of their members over time. As an organizing tradition, this approach can be described as one based on structure.

In contrast, broad-based revolts like those that rocked the world in 2011 were marked by unruly and widespread disobedience, undertaken outside the confines of any formal organization. This approach emphasizes the disruptive power of mass mobilizations that coalesce quickly, draw in participants not previously involved in organizing, and leave elites scrambling to adjust to a new political landscape. This tradition can be dubbed mass protest.

The challenge here is how to combine explosive short-term uprisings with long-term organizing to make movements more sustainable.

The divide between structure and mass protest or between long-term organization and disruptive uprisings, runs deep through social movement history. It’s not that one of these approaches is right and the other wrong; both have their strengths and weaknesses. The trick for organizers is to figure out how their strengths can be used in tandem — so that long-term organizing and outbreaks of widespread revolt build off one another.

Unfortunately, there’s often distrust in both directions that must first be overcome. Advocates of mass protest are wary of the transactional politics of structure-based organizing and the tactical accommodations with power-holders that such politics tend to promote. They wonder how even a long string of incremental victories will ever add up to any meaningful change in the rules of the game. Meanwhile, structure-based organizers are typically wary of movement mobilizations because disruptive power is hard to understand and even harder to direct. Can outbreaks of mass defiance really be intentionally triggered and magnified? If so, how, exactly?

Fortunately, the world of social movement thinking is now experiencing a renaissance on this front, with traditions of strategic nonviolence providing critical practical insights into how to orchestrate disruptive protest. It’s not just about ripe or unripe conditions over which organizers have little control, but about the skills organizers can bring to help shape mass mobilization. These skills include the ability to recognize when the terrain for protest is fertile, the talent for staging creative and provocative acts of civil disobedience, the capacity for intelligently escalating (see: PRINCIPLE: Escalate strategically) once a mobilization is under way, and the foresight to make sure that short-term cycles of disruption contribute to furthering longer-term goals.

Many new activists are drawn into politics through the energy of a mass mobilization but are disappointed when these movements suddenly decline, as they inevitably do. The challenge here is how to combine explosive short-term uprisings with long-term organizing to make movements more sustainable. Coming from the opposite perspective, veteran community organizers who have recently experienced the tremendous momentum that disruptive outbreaks can generate — even if much of it is fleeting — have been willing to reconsider their focus on organizations at the expense of movements.

A focus on mass protest need not deny the importance of building organizational structures, just as an appreciation of structure does not preclude support for widespread mobilization during periods of peak activity. An organizing model that integrates the two asks: What can organizers do to maximize the long-term impact of disruptive power?

Originally published in Beautiful Rising.