Studies on social movements in the Canary Islands: State of the matter
Research on social movements and collective action have registered a considerable increase in recent decades, both from the point of view of the number of published works, as in diversity and sophistication in research theories and methods. Thus, the issue of social movements has been constituted in “an autonomous sector of the theory and research of social sciences” (Melucci, 1999), calling a large set of diverse disciplines, which include not only political sociology not onlyor political science, but also history, anthropology, social psychology, social work, critical geography and political ecology. With all this, the quantity and quality of this field of research has not only improved, but has won in complexity and, therefore, it has enriched considerably.
Since the late nineties several emerging trends can be identified. On the one hand, there has been a geographical expansion of knowledge, which has overflowed the areas that had traditionally developed this type of studies-Western Europe and the United States-, incorporating the study of social movements in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa andLatin America. This overflow has, in the first place, an extension of the bases of the cases studied, a greater contextualization that considers a broader fan of historical variations, in economic, political, social and cultural terms. This variety of situations and experiences has evidenceas through comparative theoretical synthesis approaches (McAdam, McCarthy and Zald, 1999: 21-46).
Until very recent dates social movements, revolutions, ethnic mobilizations, protest cycles or democratization processes have been addressed as phenomena of different nature, which keep little relationship with each other. The triumphant vision of postpolitics (Mouffe, 2007) has reduced the field of political to speeches and the action that political parties and public representatives play in institutions and governments, linked to a specific purpose: the technocratic management of political power of political power. Meanwhile, the role that was granted to social movements was linked to a type of action that only circumstantially participated in politics to the extent that the protest developed, affecting the traditional anomalous, exclusive and reductionist vision of social movements. However, since the beginning of the 21st century, many of the parameters on which representative democracies were settled throughout the twentieth century have been substantially affected, leading us to a situation that many social and political analysts have called as post -democracy,insisting on the existence of various processes that have contributed to erode the political and institutional basis of liberal representative democracies (Rancière, 1996; Mouffe, 2003; Crouch, 2004).
In this context, social movements have been renewing their ways to represent the world and intervene in it, producing new mobilization cycles. As happened since the 1990s of the twentieth century with the new international struggle cycle (Negri and Hardt, 2004), around the movement for global justice that demanded a democracy from below and opposed neoliberal policies, since 2011 has beenExtended a wave of mobilizations and protest cycles that to some extent gave continuity to the previous cycle, also incorporating new elements. A new transnational mobilizations wave, which has had various impacts on each of its state and regional contexts (Castells, 2012). In this way, the protest cycle initiated by the Arab springs, we must place it as a new democratizing key exploration that has its origin in the new global movements since the mid -1990s of the twentieth century. In a context of technological impact, economic crisis and disaffection with institutional policy, different repolitization processes have been produced around social movements and new citizen networks that were generated or reactivating throughout the cycle at transnational scale, strongly burstingIn various scales and opening new political scenarios in state and/or regional areas. Thus, we have been able to observe how some substantive elements have varied, causing a widening of the spaces for participation and codecision on public policies and, although democratic political work is still strongly dominated by traditional democracy in a merely representative key and under the parametersFrom the old industrial society, the emergence of movementist logics has led in various socio -political formations, multiple and various social innovation and experimentation processes, which imply new forms of political action in democratizing key from below. This situation, to some extent novel, has meant an expansion of political opportunities for many social actors, expanding its possibilities of political incidence, while generating new elements of tension and friction in various social, political and cultural planes.
In addition, we have observed how social movements have multiplied and greatly expanded their discursive and representative platform in relation to society. To the already classic new social movements we must add, among many others, the appearance of urban territorial movements, ethnic movements, new feminisms and ecofeminisms, new community networks, diverse ecosocial movements, queer movements, as well as new union, educational and cultural experiencesthat illustrate a wide diversity of realities in very varied contexts, accounting for the wide and contradictory range of demands, forms of organization, repertoires of collective action, which is very difficult to continue fitting under the denomination of social movements, but to which we follownaming as such in the absence of greater understanding.
Consequently, collective action studies and social movements have suffered a huge impact. In an attempt to address and understand the complex social and political cartography of recent history, the research field far from consolidating a common theoretical framework, with a series of premises that nobody discusses, has opened to respond to these new emerging realitiesthat, at the same time, some of the theoretical and methodological parameters that have dominated in this area. Thus, some absence of theoretical dogmatism has been imposed that has resulted in a methodological pluralism (Klandermans and Staggenborg, 2002; Della Porta and Keating, 2013), in which they have dialogued different epistemological and methodological approaches, generating a diversity of approaches,to some extent eclectic, but beneficial when providing greater explanatory capacity to a wide and complex range of processes. The field of study has been impregnated by a relative pragmatism, by rather nuanced visions and an attitude of critical constructive dialogue (P. 315). Finally, at the same time that a generalized consensus has been imposed on the need to develop synthesis approaches that interrelate a large number of variables for a global explanation, it has also been concluded that this has a difficult application in concrete analysis, giving rise toa relative skepticism about the ability to establish a general model of interpretation of social movements from the case studies.
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