Gregory M. Maney

Harnessing and Challenging Hegemony: The U.S. Peace Movement after 9/11

This article examines how U.S. peace movement organizations (PMOs) sought discursively to overcome cultural and political obstacles to mass mobilization after September 11, 2001. Quantitative and qualitative methods are blended to analyze the official statements of nine U.S. PMOs. Three factors influencing framing are considered: the cultural context, the political context, and oppositional identities. The events of 9/11 presented discursive and emotional opportunities for PMOs to harness hegemony by drawing on resonant ideas, conforming to emotional norms, and linking strong emotions to opposing war and repression. Legitimated political closure in the aftermath of 9/11 also encouraged PMOs to harness hegemony by arguing that consensus for war and repression presented threats to civil liberties and democracy. Oppositional identities rooted in consciousness of structural inequalities encouraged PMOs to challenge hegemony, however, by highlighting the costs of war and repression of minority groups. This article advances our understanding of how interrelated cultural and political processes affect framing.

The Past s Promise: Lessons from Peace Processes in Northern Ireland and the Middle East*

Just as the Northern Ireland and Israeli–Palestinian peace processes appeared close to achieving lasting resolutions to conflict, both initiatives fell into crisis. This study combines power conflict and transaction cost approaches to analyze the strengths and the weaknesses of the Belfast Good Friday (BGF) and the Oslo peace processes. Dimensions that empower participants and increase certainty strengthen peace processes. Dimensions that are disempowering of participants and decrease certainty weaken peace processes. The two peace processes shared the strengths of including militant nationalists in negotiations and generating international pressure and support. Unlike the Oslo process, the BGF process benefited from greater constitutional certainty, minority safeguards, grass-roots legitimacy, effective responses to spoilers, and minority-supportive intervention by the US government. Unlike the BGF process, the Oslo process benefited from broad international participation in negotiations, leading to agreements that had clearly specified mechanisms for implementation. Shared weaknesses of the two processes included transgressing zero-sum game assumptions and identity boundaries, manipulation of popular fears by elites, and the marginal, if not negative, role played by civil society. In addition to pointing out ways that each peace process could benefit by appropriating the advantages of the other, the article offers several promising strategies for overcoming shared weaknesses, including challenging zero-sum assumptions, constructing more inclusive collective identities, grass-roots education regarding manipulative elites, strengthening non-sectarian segments of civil society, and breaking cycles of violence through reconciliation processes.

A Typology of Oppositional Knowledge: Democracy and the U.S. Peace Movement

Institutionally privileged political discourses not only legitimate the policy agendas of power-holders, but also de-legitimate dissent. Oppositional discourses are social movement responses to these cultural obstacles to mass mobilisation. Integrating discourse analysis and framing theory, we argue that the production of oppositional knowledge constitutes a long-term, counter-hegemonic project that connects macro-level discourses with meso and micro-level efforts at political persuasion, mobilisation, and change. Drawing examples from statements issued by U.S. peace movement organisations (PMOs) over fifteen years, we map the production of oppositional discourses across five conflict periods. Using qualitative data analysis and both inductive and deductive theorising, we develop a typology of the U.S. peace movements discourses on democracy. We show that four forms of oppositional knowledge were generated by PMOs to facilitate policy dialogue and accountability. Through their statements, peace movement organisations crafted a shared conception of democracy that is antithetical to military intervention abroad and political repression at home.

Pursuing Political Persuasion: War and Peace Frames in the United States after September 11th

Despite the prominence of framing analysis in social movement research, the ways that power-holders and challengers attempt to persuade the general public remain under-theorized. We develop a multidimensional typology of what content producers frequently anticipate will make their frames potent. Moreover, we argue that several contextual factors influence which of these dimensions are emphasized in frames. To assess these propositions, we conducted an analysis of statements issued by President Bush and 10 US peace movement organizations following the September 11th attacks. Both sides touched upon all dimensions. President Bushs statements took advantage of discursive and emotional opportunities in crafting messages supportive of war and repression. Illustrating their strategic nature, PMO statements either appropriated or rejected dominant discourses for any single dimension. While peace groups took advantage of emotional opportunities, oppositional cultures curtailed their use of discursive opportunities. Lacking democratic legitimacy and rational legal authority, peace groups devoted a higher proportion of text to establishing the empirical credibility and the moral authority of their claims. The study advances social movement theory by highlighting the interplay of culture, power, and agency in the production of public collective action frames.

Ideological Consistency and Contextual Adaptation U.S. Peace Movement Emotional Work Before and After 9/11

The authors examine how the U.S. peace movement responded to the Bush administration’s attempts to generate and capitalize on a heightened sense of threat after the 9/11 attacks. Longitudinal analysis of statements by U.S. peace movement organizations issued before and after 9/11 indicates that the movement’s discourse is both ideologically consistent and contextually adaptive. In each period, movement discourse highlighted the U.S. government as a source of threat and people living outside of the United States as the targets of that threat. Nonetheless, the movement’s discourse changed significantly in the exacerbated climate of fear in the first 4 months after the 9/11 attacks and then began to revert to pre-9/11 patterns during the Iraq War when the salience of threat declined. This research significantly advances knowledge of social movement discourse by establishing that ideological consistency and contextual adaptation are not mutually exclusive, by highlighting the contextual and dialogical factors that encourage certain types of movement responses to dominant discourses, and by explaining the role of emotional work in mobilizing dissent.

Transforming place and belonging through action research, community practice, and public policy: Comparing responses to NIMBYism

While solidifying class inequalities on a transnational basis, corporate globalization often disrupts power regimes locally. Such disruptions can generate site-specific contention across social differences that solidify the physical marginalization or exclusion of less powerful groups at the local level. In the United States one form of local contention that results from corporate globalization is strong, organized opposition to the presence of marginalized and vulnerable immigrant populations. This article focuses upon NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard) encountered in two cases where community organizations sought to create spaces and services for immigrants. The first section provides a multidimensional analytical framework centered around the concept of boundary contention. The second section lays out the methodological approach to the collaborative endeavor. The third section provides lessons learned for developing strategic practices that can assist organizations to reverse the disempowering dynamics of corporate globalization by either removing or expanding symbolic, relational, and physical boundaries in local contexts.

Blessing war and blessing peace: Religious discourses in the US during major conflict periods, 1990–2005

Political leaders often deploy religious symbols and language to legitimate their war polices while opponents use it to forestall or control war. We examine George W. Bushs religious discourse in the post-9/11 and Iraq War era and find that it was marked by binary thinking and the demonizing of a largely religious enemy. Our analysis of the statements of 15 US peace movement organizations after 9/11 further reveals that the US peace movement had three primary responses to Bushs religiously based discourse in support of war. First, they directly challenged his binaries and his demonizing of a broadly defined, religious enemy. Second, they harnessed the Presidents religious discourse to turn it against him and his policies. Third, they constructed oppositional knowledge by providing corrective information about Islam. By examining the movements discourses over a 15-year period that spans five major conflict periods, our analysis also shows a close relationship between the peace movements use of religious discourse and its identity-based talk. In addition, we found a close relationship between the movements religious discourses and its promotion of more costly forms of politics, i.e., extrainstitutional, protest-based politics. Thus, we also argue that the US peace movements religious discourses during major conflict periods are both strategic and driven by individual agency, are not only tactical but also expressive, and are intended to have both outward and inward effects.