Biographical Consequences of Activism

Literature on the consequences of social movements and protest activities addresses three types of consequences: political, biographical, and cultural (Bosi & Uba, Reference Bosi and Uba2009). To date, political consequences (that is mainly policy outcomes) have received the lion’s share, the biographical consequences of activism remaining dramatically under developed, except for three empirical domains that have been quite well explored, paving the way for future research (seeMcAdam Reference McAdam, Giugni, McAdam and Tilly1999; Fillieule Reference Fillieule and Fillieule2005, Reference Fillieule and Fillieule2009; Giugni 2007 for reviews).

A first flow of research deals with the study of black student activism in the civil rights and black power movements and of riot participants (Sears & McConahay, Reference Sears and McConahay1973; Gurin & Epps, Reference Gurin and Epps1975). It explores environmental influences as well as the impact of activism on political ideology and adult resocialization, suggesting that the riots themselves appeared to have resocialized not only the direct participants but those who only vicariously experienced them; a result that has recently been confirmed by studies on not-so-committed participants (Sherkat & Blocker, Reference Sherkat and Blocker1997; Van Dyke et al., Reference Van Dyke, McAdam and Wilhelm2000). But the value of this research lies primarily in analyzing how movements accomplish their socializing role, teaching young blacks to question the overall white system of domination through specific mechanisms and set ups like mass meeting, workshops, and citizen and freedom schools.

A second family of research, on the future of 1960s American activists, has addressed the question of the biographical consequences of social movement participation on the life course, based on a series of follow-up studies of former movement participants, suggesting that activism had a strong effect both on political attitudes and behaviors, as well as on personal lives of the subjects. Concerning the political life, former activists had continued to espouse leftist political attitudes; had continued to define themselves as “liberal” or “radical” in political orientation; and had remained active in contemporary movements or other forms of political activity. In terms of affective life-sphere, ex-activists had been concentrated in teaching or other “helping” professions; had lower incomes than their age peers; were more likely than their age peers to have divorced, married later, or remained single; and were more likely than their age peers to have experienced an episodic or nontraditional work history (Demerath et al., Reference Demerath, Marwell and Aiken1971; Jennings & Niemi, 1981; Marwell et al., Reference Marwell and Demerath1987; Fendrich & Lovoy, Reference Fendrich and Lovoy1988; McAdam, Reference McAdam1988; McAdam, Reference McAdam1989; Whalen & Flacks, Reference Whalen and Flacks1989). These elements allow Fendrich to analyze the ex-activists as a “generational unit,” in the Mannheimian sense, which McAdam confirms when he demonstrates that the risks associated with the Freedom Summer undoubtedly greatly contributed to making this experience “unforgettable” for participants. In other words, the eventual direction of trajectories must be related to the nature of the activist experience, the moral career of individuals very likely having been affected to some degree by the duration and intensity of their activism.

However, in addition to having a narrow focus on New Left highly committed activists of the 1960s, these studies suffer from methodological limitations (e.g. in the small number of subjects included, the lack of a control group of non-activists, and the lack of data collected before they participated in the movement) and are less interested in the very process by which movements act as socializing agents than by its long-term effects, as measured by statistical indicators (McAdam, Reference McAdam1988; Whalen & Flacks, Reference Whalen and Flacks1989 for notable exceptions).

A third and prolific direction stems from feminist research and deals with the development of a gender consciousness through the women’s movement (e.g. Sapiro, Reference Sapiro and Ichilov1989; Whittier, Reference Whittier1995; Klawiter, Reference Klawiter2008). The reason that this movement has served as an active agent of socialization is partly due to the fact that one of its central goals was to change women’s self-understanding: that is, to provide a social space in which women can consider and negotiate their social identity as women and its relationship to politics. Moreover, beyond the specific case of the women’s movement, feminist research suggests that all protest movements may operate like gender workplaces. As a matter of fact, activism can play a liberating role for women in permitting them to leave the domestic universe and acquire social skills previously inaccessible to them. This is the reason why, even in movements where women are kept in positions of subjugation, mere participation can foster emancipation (Blee, Reference Blee2008). Finally, it is clear that activism can generate profound and widespread socialization effects on individuals by transforming their sense of identity and politicizing the resulting social identification (McAdam, Reference McAdam, Giugni, McAdam and Tilly1999; Polletta & Jasper, Reference Polletta and Jasper2001), especially in situations where activism is repressed or criminalized as we shall see in the following section.

Political Socialization

Political socialization is more and more frequently defined as the gradual development of the individual’s own particular and idiosyncratic views of the political world, the process by which a given society’s norms and behavior are internalized (Sigel, Reference Sigel1989). This has three main theoretical consequences: primary and secondary socializations are equally important in the socializing process; it is not only family and school that are central instances of socialization but also many other institutions active in the life spheres of work, affective ties, voluntary work, and political engagements; political dimension is at play in all socialization process and doesn’t correspond to a specific domain of activity or designated institutions. However, scant attention has been paid to social movements. There are many reasons for this. As Sapiro (Reference Sapiro and Ichilov1989) states:

Four basic ideas about the ways political dispositions might vary with age or life stages could summarize most of the literature. The persistence model suggests that the residues of preadult learning persist through life, perhaps even hardening with time. Largely assumed rather than tested directly, this model faced strong critical reviews in the 1970s and 1980s, suggesting that “the primacy principle” had been overstated and that at best, the evidence for it, such as adult retrospective accounts of their own attitudes or longitudinal studies, had been quite indirect. Long-term longitudinal studies appeared, implying that partisan tendencies change more after the preadult years than the persistent view would allow (Jennings & Niemi, 1981). Those critics gave way to the lifelong openness model, which suggests that dispositions have an approximately uniform potential for change at all ages and at the end, that age is irrelevant for attitude change. Unfortunately, this model has been left largely unexplored so far. The first volume on adult socialization appeared only at the end of the 1980s (Sigel, Reference Sigel1989). This important series of studies examines the political effects of discontinuities within adulthood, such as entering the workplace, serving in the military, immigrating to a new country, participating in a social movement, getting married, or becoming a parent. Each of these cases incorporates three elements that potentially can affect political attitudes: crystallization of an individual’s own unique identity; assumption of new roles; and dealing with the unanticipated demands of adulthood. This trend of research has been particularly convincing in stressing the fact that neither childhood nor adolescence adequately prepare mature adults for all the contingencies with which they have to cope over their lifetimes. Hence the necessity to adopt a lifespan perspective that takes into account the impact that individual-level events as well as macro-level ones have on the maintenance, modification, or abandonment of values and orientations to which the individual may have subscribed at an earlier point in his or her life. However, the authors agree that all these specific discontinuities also occur most often in late adolescence and early adulthood, which means that the model here is quite close to a third view, the impressionable years model. Three propositions are behind this model: Youth experience political life as a “fresh encounter,” in Mannheim’s words ([1928] Reference Mannheim1952), that can seldom be replicated later; dispositions and attitudes that are subjected to strong information flows and, regularly practiced, should become stronger with age; the young may be especially open to influence because they are becoming more aware of the social and political world around them just at the life stage when they are seeking a sense of self and identity. Some important surveys support the formative years hypothesis, for example Jennings Reference Jennings2002, about the durability of protesters as a generation unit, but one should also think of Skocpol’s Reflections at Mid-Career by a Woman from the Sixties, concerning her own experience of belonging to a critical and optimist “Uppity Generation” (Skocpol: 1988).

In this book, we contend that dispositions, attitudes, and behavior change throughout life, especially during formative years (i.e. between fifteen and twenty-five), and that some, possibly much, of early learning is of limited consequence for adult political behavior. As a consequence, not only does participation into social movements depend on political socialization, but also has to be considered as having potentially socializing effects, which means that social movement organizations and protest events have to be studied as explicit and implicit socializing agents. We argue that the almost exclusive analytic concern with the institutional consequences of political commitment and subsequent neglect of its “independent psychological effects” (Zeitlin Reference Zeitlin1967: 241) is certainly one of the blind spots of contemporary political socialization and social movement research.

That is why we propose a fresh analysis of activist socialization from a comparative perspective, seeing it as a process of individual transformation, directly or indirectly stemming from involvement, and with immediate or deferred repercussions in all domains of social existence (subsequent political commitment, of course, but also professional and affective life). Beyond the explicit learning dispensed by activist organizations, or the socializing effects of exposure to political events, it is a matter of studying the ways in which political commitment affects all individual behaviors and perceptions, in other words of considering that all participation, “however sustained or intense, has secondary socializing effects” (Fillieule, Reference Fillieule and Fillieule2005: 39).

Political Participation, and Movement–Parties Interdependencies

People engage in politics in various ways, mainly by voting, signing petitions, forming political parties, joining unions, and participating in advocacy groups, social movements, and protests. So far, social scientists have conceptualized these forms of citizens’ engagement as two distinct phenomena (conventional versus nonconventional participation) leading to a peculiar split between research on formal or institutional political participation and social movements. As a result, and among other dead angles, research on movement–parties connections has remained quite rare until the turn of the twenty-first century. R. Goldstone’s edited book on States, Parties and Social Movements (Reference Goldstone2003) was among the first to attempt to mobilize comparative research “bridging institutionalized and noninstitutionalized politics.”Footnote ²

Party–movement relations can be explored as a complex game of strategic interactions (Schwartz, Reference Schwartz2010). Coordination exists in alliances, even mergers. More often ambiguity prevails in the “invasive” strategies by which movements try to colonize party structures, or parties coopt movement leaders and troops. These relations are also made of conflict when parties are the target of mobilizations – e.g. the 1968 Democrat convention in Chicago – when mud-slinging campaigns try to weaken an organization perceived as a threat, or to purge party or movement members suspected of connivance with the “enemy.”

The need for a relational approach, challenging the flaws of academic hyper-specialization is nicely illustrated in Raka Ray’s (Reference Ray1998) study on Bombay and Calcutta. Analyzing the political spaces of these two huge Indian cities as fields, she shows how the presence (in Calcutta with the Communist Party) or absence (in Bombay) of hegemonic political forces on the left can inhibit or frame the expression of women’s movements. In Calcutta they depend strongly on the economic support and ideological limitations of the Marxist hierarchy of legitimate social struggles, leaving themes such as the critique of patriarchy only to outsider social movement organizations, especially when they target local politicians. In Bombay, a more open field with a more balanced distribution of resources between political forces leaves more autonomy and space for critical expression to women’s movements. The lesson is crystal clear. Beyond micro-specializations (in party politics, social movements, and one may add interest groups), the understanding of political process needs a connecting approach, a global vision of the actors and repertoires of political action. Which brings us back again to one of the central statements of interactionist sociology, i.e. to always situate the phenomena under study in “interactional fields,” which can be defined as a mix of temporal process and social contexts.Footnote ³

Questioning the intricacies and dynamics of the movement–parties interdependencies has not only a theoretical dimension. The stake is also a better understanding of the current situation of democracies (Crouch, Reference Crouch2004; Hay, Reference Hay2004; Mastropaolo, Reference Mastropaolo2012). They may question the sociological closure of politicians’ recruitment among narrower and narrower “fishponds,” the trend toward earlier and earlier trajectories of investment of politics as a job market. The sociology of parties highlights how the age of cartel-parties is also a time of growing distancing between parties and civil society, replacing grassroots politics by monitoring devices (polls, surveys, focus groups), substituting the continuities between voluntary associations and parties with the “hydroponic” production of ideas and policy programs by think tanks and experts. A significant part of these changes and of their consequences could be explained by the dominant trend toward disconnection between social movements and ruling parties, in the structuration of contentious politics as an autonomous political space. The reasons as well as the strength of this divorce do vary from one country to another, according to institutional variables, party systems or resource allocation systems (for the US Case: Pacewicz, Reference Pacewicz2015). When parties are soft structures, when the bargaining opportunities are real, movements may keep a strategic interest in investing part of their resources, and in activists establishing something like a garrison inside party structures. Lisa Young’s comparison of the women’s movement’s strategies (Reference Young1996) in their interaction with parties in the United States and Canada is illuminating on this point. But the main trend is not dubious. The percentage of party members keeping a serious commitment in social movements and voluntary associations – those coined as “the party in the street” by Heaney and Rojas (Reference Heaney and Rojas2007) – is shrinking. This part of the party constituency, which was the seismograph transmitting to the party the moves and moods of the social world, is marginalized in the management of cartel-parties. The networks, skills, and legitimacy gained in protest politics and grassroots commitments are a resource of decreasing importance in party struggles. Hence, the potential for political innovation and imagination, the supply of grassroots leaders mirroring class diversity, and the legitimation and treatment of new social problems that were propelled by the conflictual cooperation between social movement and parties is often broken down. Exploring the birth of new parties and the renewal of political supply, Lucardie (Reference Lucardie2000) identified among the processes of party renewal two dynamics from without. “Prolocutors” (one can think of the Poujade movement in the France of the fifties) express unanswered claims in a pragmatic language; they plead for the representation of outsiders and neglected interests. “Prophets” push into the political field new issues and define new social problems (like the green movements of the seventies). Such sources of renewal have often come from the initial momentum of social movements, a situation less visible in most Western democracies today (the Spanish case, with Ciudadanos and Podemos expressing a rare counter-trend). The third and final part of our book contributes to this collection of case studies interested in understanding party–movement dynamics by focusing specifically on individual trajectories of people who circulate between different connected political arenas, which also function as various spaces offering at different moments in time opportunities and incentives, from the most symbolic to jobs and careers.

Studying Activism as a Process

While research is investigating and “following” the dynamics of events and mobilization, it pays less attention to following activists. Therefore, longitudinal studies focusing on the succession and variety of commitments to and disengagements from activism as a trajectory are highly stimulating. They suggest new puzzles, and produce data challenging both scientific common sense (e.g. how to explain that so many among the leaders of yesterday’s “new social movements” could be identified twenty years after among the upper crust of social democratic and green parties … a typically “old” structure) and journalistic common sense (e.g. all the activists and leaders of May '68 movement did not become wealthy, cynical, and politically conservative). We therefore aim at analyzing what have become the rank and file activists politically and socially in various countries. Did they follow trajectories that could be described as a slow or quick dissociation from their original radicalism? Did they shift from commitment to the quest of a successful career, of accomplishments in varied social spaces? Even for those of the activists who would have drifted far away from their youth’s commitments, how is the reconversion process working? Were the skills, know-how, and networks built in the activist years reinvested in professions, social ambitions, or other civic commitments? How can we analyze the specific effects of repression and specific experiences like the loss of close mates, prison, and torture?

Here the literature that more or less directly broaches the question of disengagement is of great help (Klandermans, Reference Klandermans1997; Fillieule, Reference Fillieule and Fillieule2005, Reference Fillieule, Agrikoliansky and Sommier2010). It emerges from social psychology, concerning the social functioning of small groups and sociability networks (e.g. Moss-Kanter, Reference Moss-Kanter1972; McPherson et al., Reference McPherson, Popielarz and Drobnic1992); the sociology of roles, in the Mertonian or interactionist tradition, especially in the literature on churches and cults, but also divorce and the professions (Vaughan, Reference Vaughan1986; Fuchs Ebaugh, Reference Fuchs-Ebaugh1988); and from life course sociology, especially when inspired by symbolic interactionism.Footnote ⁴ As a matter of fact, interactionist approaches, especially in the version articulated by Strauss (Reference Strauss1959) and Becker (Reference Becker1960 and Reference Becker1963), offers a powerful tool for studying activism diachronically. In such a model, activism is conceived as a long-lasting social activity articulated by phases of joining, commitment, and defection. The notion of career initially developed by Hughes casts the stages of access to and exercise of a profession as a series of objective changes of position and an associated series of subjective upheavals. As Becker stresses, quoting Hughes, the concept of career comes back to two dimensions:

This powerful concept allows us to focus on the process and permanent dialectic between individual history, social institutions, and, more generally, context. The outcome is less a case of predicting a state (activism, disengagement, and so on) than of rebuilding a sequence of steps, of changes in the individual’s behavior and perspectives, in order to understand the phenomenon.

As a consequence, and again following Becker’s recommendation, we argue that one must never reason exclusively in terms of “why” and shift to “how it happened,” in other words, to the chain of facts that result from specific contemporary causes and are reconfigured as events unfold. In terms of methodology, a process model implies three elements: move away from reasoning in terms of “independent” and “dependent” variables, in favor of a “thick description” of individual trajectories, in order to concentrate on the process by which people join political organizations or participate in protest campaigns, remain involved, and/or disengage. This does not mean that we must renounce to any causal explanation. But that this can be achieved only after an analysis of a series of mechanisms whose composition (in time and in space) produces observable effects; following this, move away from synchronic mechanisms toward diachronic variations with regard to context change, organizational transformations, and individual life course. In other words, move from “analysis of profiles to pathways, and from roots (as in root causes) to routes.” (Horgan, Reference Horgan2009: XXIII); focus research on the individual level – i.e. one’s life course and the justifications given for their actions – as a mean to investigate the complex interplay between micro, meso, and macro levels and to overcome the far too simplistic analytical distinction between instrumental, solidarity, or ideological motives.

Exposure to Political Events and Organizational Modeling

The interactionist framework offers a sociological conceptual toolkit to examine how activism can have a socializing effect on individuals. Two distinct main directions must be explored: exposure to political events and organizational modeling.

The study of the socializing effects of political events and communication about them is still underdeveloped (e.g. Neveu & Quéré, Reference Neveu and Quéré1996; Sewell, Reference Sewell1996; Tackett, Reference Tackett2006, Reference Tackett2015; Kapferer, Reference Kapferer, Meinert and Kapferer2015; Latté, Reference Latté2015; Pagis, Reference Pagis2018). Indeed, vivid political events should be important catalysts because they can have traumatic effects and stimulate heavy information flows. Events may have an impact at any age but, depending on one’s position in his or her life-cycle, the socializing effects will differ, from strengthening and substantiation for older people to conversion and alternation for youngsters. Also, a distinction should be made here between the effects of direct participation and the impact of political events on “engaged observers” and even “bystander publics.”

Secondary socialization within and by social movements has typically been neglected. The reasons for this blind spot are plural. One should mention again the structuralist orientation adopted by the sociology of social movements, even if, periodically, some authors underscored the imbalance between research on recruitment by movements and that studying the effect of the institution on militants (e.g. Keniston, Reference Keniston1968: 353–354; Killian, Reference Killian and Evans1973: 36; McAdam, Reference McAdam1989:123). The growing hyper-specialization and editorial inflation of social sciences should also be blamed. When more and more academics are “specialists of their speciality” more than social scientists, when reading one’s tribe’s journals and books is almost a full-time job, bridging research fields and importing concepts and results become difficult. Yet the tradition of research on communities, religious structures, and “total” (Goffman, Reference Goffman1961) or “greedy” (Coser, Reference Coser1974) institutions supplies a very rich legacy to make sense of the tools and institutional devices able to produce “patterns of undivided commitment” or at least a lasting influence on the membership (Moss-Kanter, Reference Moss-Kanter1972). It highlights also how and why organizations are able – or not – (Bennet, Reference Bennett1981) to safeguard critical cultures. Organizational socializations require close attention to make sense of how they can succeed (or not) engrossing social energies, channeling the human libido toward social goals and structuring dispositions that could have enduring expressions.

Actually, rare are the case studies perceiving social movements, as Goffman did with total institutions, as spaces of interaction having a substantial power of socialization (Flesher Fominaya, Reference Flesher-Fominaya2010; Beckwith, Reference Beckwith, Bosi, Giugni and Uba2016 for notable exceptions). Nonetheless, movements do not simply produce repertoires and impacts on policies and politics. They also produce (or fail to produce) activists. Borrowing this phrase from the Eliasian sociology, they produce lasting changes in the “We-I balance” of part of their members, injecting in the social world activists with strong dispositions for collective action and the construction of claims and causes, entrepreneurs of social changes.

As a consequence, much work is needed in order to build a comprehensive and solid theoretical model for the study of the multiple socializing effects of social movement organizations. Within the interactionist framework, Gerth and Wright Mills (Reference Gerth and Mills1954: 165–191) offer a strong sociological conceptual tool kit to examine the relationships between individuals and institutions. They define an institution as an organization with distinct hierarchical roles to which members must conform. The internalization of such roles occurs through secondary socialization, the strength of which needs to be studied – from conversion and alternation, in the sense used by Berger and Luckmann (Reference Berger and Luckmann1966), to strategic and limited adaptations – along with durability, from the viewpoint of biographical consequences in all spheres of life. This model places the Goffmanian notion of “moral career” at the center of the analysis of activism. It refers to the selection of people (to the incentives and barriers to joining, and the orientations of activities) and to organizational modeling, i.e. the multiple socializing effects of activism, themselves in part determined by organizational rules and modes of operation, understood as a set of constraints (status, proposed or reserved activities, leadership, and so on).

Organizations do a lot of work in socializing their members, understood as role taking, which allows individuals to identify the different roles they face and correctly fulfil their customary tasks. This secondary socialization can, at times, assume the form of explicit inculcations, the goal of which is to homogenize activists’ categories of thought and their way of acting within and in the name of the organization. However, know-how and activist wisdom also frequently amount to a “practical sense,” what Bourdieu refers to as “the anticipated adjustment to the requirements of a field, what the language of sports calls the ‘sense of the game’ (like ‘sense of place’, ‘the art of anticipation’, etc.), acquired over the course of a long dialectical process, often described as a ‘vocation’, by which ‘we make ourselves’ according to what is making us and we ‘choose’ that by which we are ‘chosen’” (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1980: 111–112). This process takes place outside of our conscious awareness.

If, then, an institution “leaves its mark” on social actors who are part of it “by modifying their external conduct as well as their private life” (Gerth & Wright Mills, Reference Gerth and Mills1954: 173), we need to examine both the content and the methods of the process of institutional socialization to understand activists’ life course. Three dimensions may be distinguished: the acquisition of “know-how” and “wisdom” (resources); a vision of the world (ideology); and the restructuring of sociability networks in relation to the construction of individual and collective identities (social networks and identities) (Fillieule, Reference Fillieule2010).Footnote ⁵

Opening the black box of organizational modeling would help to better single out which organizational characteristics determine what outcomes – here dispositions – their duration and strength (which could lead to typologies of different kinds of groupings). It would give a real sociological density to the notion of “militant habitus” by specifying the variety of its social production, structures, and effects. On this, Corrigall-Brown’s chapter offers to the reader very rich results and avenues for future research. The comparison of the differences of dispositions structured by the experience of the French '68 years and of the Moroccan years of struggle against the heavy-handed regime of Hassan II also supplies case studies inviting one to think of the variety of militant habitus.

Activism as a Tool for Change

Third, we also want to make sense of activism as a tool for social change, of micro-changes in culture, private lives, and work relations, which may be more important in the long term than the often imaginary promises of revolutions and insurrections. Many social movement studies are framed in a “heroic vision” (which probably also mirrors a male-gendered bias). Social movements sometimes look like medieval battles. Their analysts must be able to make sense of their strategic plans and tactical skills, to decipher the art and slyness of protesters in building networks and alliances, and tricking their opponents. If victory occurs, it is thus supposed to produce very visible outputs (budgets, policies, and new institutions or rights). Social movements may work like this. Yet, seeing only this dimension is, once more, forgetting that one of their major effects is to inject activists into most of the scenes and spaces of society,Footnote ⁶ and these activists are not simply mobilized during high-stakes battles. They have jobs, lifestyles, and low-key commitments to leisure or cultural activities. Bringing their critical dispositions, relational styles, and expertise acquired from past activism to these activities, they behave, in the silent logic of everyday lives, like micro-social change entrepreneurs as shown by Neveu in this volume. They inspire changes in organizational routines, and they shake hierarchical habits and redefine the functioning and goals of organizations, administrations, and even sometimes markets. This dimension has been studied at length by scholars working on “state feminism” and “inside agitators” (Eisenstein, Reference Eisenstein1996), for example by Katzenstein (Reference Katzenstein, Meyer and Tarrow1998) on the DACOWITS (Defense advisory board on women in the services) in America or by Banaznak (Reference Banaznak2010), who shows how by becoming “institutional activists” during the last forty years, feminist activists impulsed new political opportunities for policy changes in favor of women’s rights.

However, one must add to that rather optimistic view of activists’ lasting influence on social fabric the very fact that states are never unaware of those processes and may have a central role in coopting activists, as for example Bosi shows in his chapter on the effects of British counterterrorist policies and reintegration programs in Ireland. Another crystal clear example refers to the role government played in the aftermath of May '68 in facilitating conversion of “activist habitus” into the profession. There is a good deal of indicators showing that May '68 certainly did play a role of “whistle blower” for the state authorities. Hence, the number of new job opportunities created in welfare and control of marginal and lower classes in order to better prevent social unrest, as well as in the research and teaching institutions, offering free spaces for critical researchers and the emergence of a counter-expertise movement that would fuel social movements in the 1970s (Pollack Reference Pollak1982: 165–185 on '68ers; Spanou, Reference Spanou1991 on environmental movement constituencies). This last remark opens up an interesting question: To what extent did the emergence of counter-expertise and hybrid forums in the wake of May '68 contribute to the development of a new relationship to the State, what Foucault in La volonté de savoir calls “governmentality,” which we can define as a specific mode of association between power and knowledge (Foucault, Reference Foucault1976; 1994: 134–162 )?Footnote ⁷

Individuals In Context: Toward a Multi-Level Model of Analysis

Fourth, one of our central hypotheses is that one should not study individual trajectories without separating them from the contexts in which they take place. Following Wright Mills, we think that “Whatever else he may be, man is a social and historical actor who must be understood, if at all, in close an intricate interplay with social and historical structures” (Wright Mills, Reference Wright-Mills1959: 158).

This may sound like a trivial argument and of course much social movement research contends that “individuals do not become mobilized out of a political void” (Marsh, 1977: 22). Calls for multi-level approaches are more and more frequent in the literature. However, scholars often content themselves to make an analytical distinction between three series of factors of commitment or withdrawal at the macro, meso, and micro levels, without offering a convincing explanation of their joint occurrence over time, therefore missing the very point of understanding how “the context in which human lives are lived is central to the core of meaning in those lives” (Andrews, Reference Andrews1991: 13). What we need is a model able to think of the commitment process diachronically, within the totality of individual life stories (Becker, Reference Becker and Denzin1970), and that can help to contextualize individual engagements and exits synchronically at both organizational and macro levels, rejecting the scholastic opposition between agency and structure.Footnote ⁸

Activist trajectories are to be explained as well by idiosyncratic as by structural and contextual factors (i.e. the dialectic between dispositions and motives of the actors and their structural positions). Such an approach means that one should articulate micro (dispositions, primary socialization), meso (secondary socialization in protest groups and/or by exposure to political events), and macro (local and national economic, social and political contexts) levels of analysis. In other words, a multi-level approach to political commitment and disengagement. One can single out a certain number of characteristics that are at work in the complex web of interactions between individuals, organizations, and contexts. Let us summarize these characteristics.

At the macro level, there is the importance of specific contexts and the transformations in the structure of commitment and disengagement opportunities. The sociopolitical environment constrains organizational evolution at the meso level and shapes activists’ expectations at the micro level. These elements are particularly visible in a diachronic perspective when one considers the observable differences between cohorts or generations of activists. A range of characteristics can be listed here, including the state of the commitment offer, the nature of state intervention (or the lack of it) in the public policy domain addressed by the mobilized network, and the public image of the cause.

By varying the national contexts studied, Activists Forever offers a means to study the weight of different interconnected dimensions: the timing and the extent of economic crises; the geopolitical context, i.e. the weight of international issues, such as the influence of France’s May 1968 movement on Mexico,Footnote ⁹ Morocco,Footnote ¹⁰ and TurkeyFootnote ¹¹, of the Vietnam War or of decolonization’s wars in Turkey and Morocco, and of regional conflicts such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Also, while some countries studied share a common experience with authoritarian and semi-corporatist regimes, the dynamics of their democratic opening-up or closing vary, with three major patterns. In Poland and the Czech Republic, there was a transition and a process of democratic consolidation in the nineties. In Turkey, there was a period of democratic opening flanked by three coups marking an authoritarian closing up, and a slow normalization starting in the 1990s. In Mexico and Morocco, authoritarian and semi-corporatist regimes held on throughout the period despite numerous waves of protest. Finally, in the case of Morocco, there is the particular question of the role of the '68 generation in the revolutionary movement of 2011 (M20).

At the meso level of organizations, one must study at the national as well as the local level the extent of the development of the mobilized network (territorial spread and numerical growth, and therefore the extent of recruitment networks through people that know other people), the degree of homogeneity or heterogeneity of the group in terms of sociobiological and ideological characteristics (which also constrain the nature and range of acquaintance networks), and finally the degree of “openness” of the groupings studied (the voluntary recruitment policy, ways of integrating newcomers into the group, and so on). Here again, our book offers to compare different timing and extent of the repression of protest groups (harsh in Turkey and in MoroccoFootnote ¹²), with its repercussions for the paths to radicalization or deradicalization (the passage to terrorism of certain groups in Turkey notably), but also the existence of organized and powerful counter-movements (the nationalist extreme right in Turkey, and radical Islamic movements) or ethnic or religious cleavages (Turkey, Morocco). Consideration of all these organizational factors must be articulated to an analysis of the combination of the effects of protest events exposure and organizational modeling on the long-term commitment of individuals. This last point not only stresses the well-studied issue of collective incentives (be they positive or negative) that enhance or discourage individual participation, but also the great importance of institutional socialization and of its libidinal dimension.

At the micro level of the individual, we have the importance of ‘institutionalized changes’ and ‘biographical ruptures’ at different career stages. The pivotal nature of the plurality of life-spheres underlines that activist organizations are also comprised of individuals who are inserted in a variety of social space locations. Activists are thus permanently subject to the obligation to comply with different norms, rules, and logics which may potentially be in conflict. These different levels of experience may proceed simultaneously or successively; for the observer, the difficulty lies in studying the succession of events within each order of experience at the same time (the structure of each order) and the influence of each level on all the others. In such an approach, activist commitment is not a dependent variable to be explained but a variable co-varying with others.

From Shades of Red (or Blue) to Shades of Grey: The Ageing of Yesterday’s Activists

The common denominator of the chapters in this first part is about questioning the ageing process of activists, mostly, but not only, those from the sixties generation. The puzzle here is firstly the question of the abilities/opportunities/probabilities to remain a long distance activist. Could the experience of strong commitment be forgotten? Could it be lived as a moment of madness in the life course that would be forgotten when facing the “serious” challenges of having a family and children, of managing a career, of showing a respectable social facade? What kind of socialization, of habitus shaping remains (or not) during the life course? Which experiences of activism have the more lasting effects? Can one identify the long-term influence of activism through generational transmissions, but also in specific styles of role-adjustment in work relations, in the reinvestment of activist skills or know-how in new styles of claim-making, new commitments? What became of the generation of activists from the 1960s in a variety of political contexts? Here, classically, the unifying element throughout the chapters is the identification of a single activist generation, in a range of circumstances and with differing opportunities for action, depending on how the various national political spaces evolved.

One of the main focusses here is to correlate activists’ trajectories with a close attention to the effects of involvement in individuals’ various spheres of life, among which affective life (i.e. romance, reciprocal affection, family life, and children, but also strong relational ties with friends). Literature on American sixties activists shows that they were more likely than their age peers to have divorced, married later, or remained single and were less likely to have children as Flacks reminds us. But those results are based on statistical analyses that are unable to understand and even less explain how and when various experiences in diverse life spheres interact and combine, producing a given result in the sphere of engagement. Sociologists have great difficulties accounting for phenomena that literature is often better placed to capture (Jasper, 1999: 215). Only a biographical approach (be it individual biographies of ordinary activists or collective biographies, i.e. prosopographies) can bring some convincing answers here, as Auyero masterly demonstrates in his Contentious Lives (Reference Auyero2003).Footnote ¹³ In their chapter, Olivier and Tamayo illustrate that kind of approach by following the life course of two women whose commitment is rooted in different socialization processes, emerges at different points in time and space, but whose lives retrospectively appear as having followed a very similar life course along the years. Here, as well as in the biography of Peter studied by Pagis, the successive bifurcations of the two Sikh women studied by Gayer, or the life course of a PKK activist couple analyzed by Tejel in Part II, romantic encounters and more generally the affective life sphere of the activists seem to play a dramatically important role in the way commitments evolve over time.

Understanding how the activist experience particularly affects the professional paths chosen and how occupation can in turn orient commitment is a tricky question.Footnote ¹⁴ Existing research has mainly taken two routes:

A first bias, shared by the literature on commitment and the research on social mobility, has been to focus on downward trajectories, forgetting the upward ones. These interpretations, hastily subsumed under a single “model of loss of social position,” or more generally of “relative deprivation,” are based on a problematic causal explanation according to which the malaise generated by the drop in social status and more generally frustration would almost automatically give rise to activism. Now, without denying the existence of this type of thinking (Johsua, Reference Johsua2016), most empirical sociological research on political involvement suggests a slightly different picture, that is, the tendency of actors who are rising socially to become involved. As a matter of fact, mobility may be prior to, concomitant with, or subsequent to activist experiences, these different patterns producing very distinct sociobiographical paths.

Second of all, research has explored the various forms of conversion and importation into the professional sphere of activists’ know-how, aspirations, and self-images (e.g. McAdam, Reference McAdam1988; Whalen & Flacks Reference Whalen and Flacks1989; Bennani-Chraïbi & Fillieule, Reference Bennani-Chraibi and Fillieule2003; Tissot et al., Reference Tissot, Gaubert and Lechien2005; Neveu, Reference Neveu, Damamme, Gobille, Matonti and Pudal2008; Champy & Israël, Reference Champy and Israël2009; Pagis & Leclercq, Reference Leclercq and Pagis2011). In her chapter, Pagis depicts a range of professional conversions post-68 that extends from professional activism to a rejection of salaried employment, and includes the subversion of professional practices and the invention of new professions. She shows that this importation of anti-establishment dispositions into the professional sphere varies as a function of social origin, gender, and type of political involvement engaged in immediately after May '68.

Chapters in Part I also offer to study the effects of involvement in terms of social mobility, as well as the effects of social mobility in terms of involvement by pointing at three mechanisms that have recently been singled out by Leclercq and Pagis (Reference Leclercq and Pagis2011):

First, study of how and when trajectories of upward mobility constitute favorable soil for involvement. “The upwardly mobile,” in leaving their original social milieu, may find themselves confronted with contradictory injunctions leading to the double-bind phenomenon with regard to their class of origin, as well as their new milieu, resulting in serious tensions with respect to identity. Hence, “the upwardly mobile” are that much more disposed to believe in the possibility of social change since their trajectories “shake the foundations of the social order in weakening the borders between ‘them’ and ‘us’” (Mauger, Reference Mauger2006: 31) and their positions as outsiders encourage a critical perspective on society.

Second, while aspirations to upward mobility may exist prior to political involvement, it is not uncommon for them to appear because activism often goes with meeting people from upper classes (Vigna & Zancarini-Fournel, Reference Vigna and Zancarini-Fournel2009). The social heterogeneity of activist organizations, more or less strong, depending on the case and the contexts, combined with the social dimension of collective action, serves to decompartmentalize participants’ social networks and, thus, facilitates social mobility. Crossing these usually watertight borders between social milieus and socializing with young activists from the upper classes, thus, may have contributed to changing the social destinies of young working-class activists. Even if in recent research on the personal consequences of commitment, one of us has shown the rareness of such durable encounters for '68ers (Fillieule et al., Reference Fillieule, Béroud, Masclet, Sommier and Sombrero2018).

Third, activism may in certain circumstances lead to a drop in class status. In some situations, the price of activism is a limit to professional promotion, especially in Autoritarian contexts, as Hivert and Vairel exemplify in Part II. Contrary to the depiction of a “Generation 68,” unanimously opportunistic, moving upward, occupying socially recognized positions, an examination of an anonymous segment of this population reveals various points on their journeys where participants have descended the social class ladder because of their active participation in May '68 (Neveu, and Pagis, in this volumeFootnote ¹⁵). This reflection suggests that activism can generate frustration rather than result from it, when it produces aspirations not favored by actual objective conditions. Here, the opening up of theoretical possibilities does not coincide with real opportunities, and aspirations born of activist involvement remain unfulfilled.

Finally, by comparing the effect of various organizational contexts on subsequent experiences of participation, Corrigall-Brown demonstrates a cleavage between left-wing activists of the sixties who made career decisions on the basis of their ideological convictions and activists from the right whose career plans do not seem to have been changed for political reasons. A result all the more striking as the two groups show similar consistency in their ideological beliefs over time. What explains the different articulations between professional and activist life spheres is due to the changing forms of commitment by conservative activists over time, with a move from activism to what she calls “nominal activism,” church-based networks being here the main cement of continuance commitment through close ties.

Terrorist Violence, State Responses, and Activists’ Experiences

The four contributions of this second part are focused on case studies where activists had to face high levels of violence in the context of terrorism, armed struggle, and/or very strong repression from state authorities. How are these specific experiences of high-risk activism structuring specific trajectories and generational identities? How is it possible (or not) to move from armed struggle to “normal” politics and social life. What are the specific emotional dimensions – with their gendered variations – of these experiences of violence, death, and torture? How can state policies, political and military events but also private situations (pregnancies, immigration, deaths) work as turning points both in activists’ careers and micro-group solidarities?

If activism can generate profound and widespread socialization effects on individuals by transforming the sense of identity and politicizing the resulting social identification, this is especially true in situations where activism is repressed or criminalized and takes the form of commitment to violent modes of action (Della Porta, Reference Della Porta1995; Combes & Fillieule, Reference Combes and Fillieule2011). In a variety of contexts, the chapters examine forms of involvement and types of trajectories that are physically violent and clandestine. The objective here, beyond everything that “extreme” cases allow us to see more readily in studying routine situations, is to more clearly explain the factors in the trajectories followed that are associated with the contexts and events, on one hand, and, on the other, with the very shape of the militant groups and their ways of functioning.

Another peculiarity of this part of the book is to give significant space to the question of the violent repertoire of collective action, and to the experience of armed struggle. Except for a few notable exceptions, case studies targeting participants in so-called terrorist or resistance organizationsFootnote ¹⁶ have been rather uncommon (see Demetriou, Bosi, & Malthaner, Reference Bosi, Demetriou and Malthaner2014; Fillieule, Reference Fillieule, Della Porta and Diani2016 for a review). The number and range of organizations using violence has significantly expanded since the nineties, with armed organizations in the Indian subcontinent, radical Islamic groups, and micro-nationalist groups within Europe. The scale of this repertoire of violent actions creates new theoretical challenges for researchers. Is it possible to develop a lasting commitment to terrorism and, if so, how? What could the idea of “career” mean here? What social logic can slow down the spiral of violence, and how can ex-terrorists manage the process of a return to normality? And what could “normality” mean after the “high” of their experience? Could such trajectories combine with a return to party politics or to peaceful contentious politics? If so, how can these new commitments work and with what degree of legitimacy, resources, or particular skills?

One of the most striking results of chapters in Part II stems from their focus on the micro level of the temporal development of the relationships between repression and protest.Footnote ¹⁷ As a matter of fact, scant research has examined the succession of “micro-cohorts” (Whittier, Reference Whittier1997) of militants who join and leave organizations at various stages of repressive policies. Research on the trajectories of radicalization of revolutionary movements in the 1970s under the effect of repression stresses that radicalization more readily affects those who did not experience the initial phase but joined the movement later, at the peak of the cycle of mobilization. This seems to be corroborated by a rise in the levels of violence with the second or even third generation of militants (e.g. Della Porta, Reference Della Porta1995; Steinhoff & Zwerman, Reference Zwerman, Steinhoff, Davenport, Johnston and Mueller2005; Sommier, Reference Sommier2010).

Hivert and Vairel on Morocco, Tejel on the PKK, Gayer on Sikh militants, and Bosi on the IRA all show that, contrary to a homogenous vision of collectives, it is necessary to pay attention to two interconnected dimensions to understand the diversity of demobilizing effects of repression within a single movement: on one hand, the succession of militant generations in the center of the analysis of the internal dynamics of recruitment and selection, the transformations of collective identities, and the organizational and ideological changes that result; On the other hand, this ebb and flow of militants must be correlated with a historical period that includes a succession of repressive events. Traumatic episodes, such as the 1980s coup in Turkey or the massacre at Amritsar’s Golden Temple during Operation Bluestar in June 1984, constitute properly speaking socializing events, the weight and individual consequences of which depend, in fact, on earlier socializing events and the particular generation of activists. Furthermore, the specific forms the repression takes for a given cohort translate into a whole series of socializing effects that lay the foundation for generational phenomena. So, analysts often consider the experience of prison and torture crucial, as incubators of militancy, serving as intense forms of socialization, and indeed a manner of redefining identities (see Hivert and Vairel). Finally, the importance of the succession of militant generations in understanding the individual effects of repression also raises questions about transmission of the memory of struggles, which could be disrupted and facilitate withdrawal when repression decimates an entire generation, as Bennani-Chraïbi (Reference Bennani-Chraïbi, Bennani-Chraïbi and Fillieule2003) shows in the case of Morocco, even if Hivert and Vairel also show how “activist schemes” were notwithstanding, and under certain circumstances, transmitted through family socialization from the parents to their siblings, nurturing the contemporary M20 movement.Footnote ¹⁸

Biographical Trajectories in Times of Transition: Activists versus Politicians, Activists into Politicians?

Part III of the book explores three dimensions related to the conversion of activists from social movements to party politics.

The first dimension relates to the connecting spaces between social movements and party politics as being also venues for a complex collection of jobs and career opportunities, transforming activism into professions, recycling skills gained in activism into marketable abilities. The contributions of Gaxie (Reference Gaxie1977, Reference Gaxie2005) on this question are illuminating. They show that commitment is the source of a wide range of gratifications, and how the value of these gratifications is also a social construction depending of the political context, of the life-cycle of activists. Activism produces social capital. It can open opportunities of transformation of commitment into semi- or fully paid jobs. It teaches skills and knowhow that could be reinvested in jobs and professions. Activism is also the cradle of a complex libidinal economy made up not only of friendships and loves, of feelings of self-esteem, exhilaration, and exaltation, but also of moments of despair and blues (Jasper, 1999). Activism creates interactions where rank and file members meet famous people and move under the spotlights of media visibility. Gaxie’s approach also invites one to refrain from jumping to the analytical shortcut that reduces all these gratifications into comparable and convertible outputs. Which count unit should we use to translate the contribution of a love affair born in and from mobilization into something comparable with the proud feelings born from the dedication to something considered as a noble cause? And which count unit allows one to compare such emotional gratifications to the profits of an appointment as a paid employee of the SMO or member of the mayor’s staff. On which time-scale should one develop the accounting of individual activism outcomes? Some are instantly visible when an activist is employed as a paid member of the organization’s staff, or when she gains local celebrity in her city. But the cultural and social capital accumulated in the organization could produce its result 15 years later in the recruitment as project coordinator by an ex-comrade having developed a successful business; what is needed is a multi-scalar evaluation tool, a great wariness to reduce all the rewards of commitment into monetary equivalents.

What changes here with the possible bridging between SMOs and political parties? By the importance of their resources (money, patronage, policy developments) and their level of institutionalization, political parties, especially when they control power positions, expand and redefine the accessible gratifications of commitment. The very access to the space of political careers reorganizes the map of possible futures. This is clearly visible when yesterday activists or outlaws became important members of the government (the green Fisher in Germany, the ex-critical communist Kouchner in France, Lepper in Poland), or even heads of state (Havel in Hadjiisky’s contribution, Lula in Goirand’s). Accessing power positions also opens to yesterday’s activists the novel power of appointing their ex-struggle companions to the jobs and positions under their control, depending on the peculiarities of the local spoil system or patronage habits. Such recruiting power also means gaining control or influence on yesterday’s companions and peers. The development of connexions between social movements and parties also means, especially for activists coming from working-class backgrounds, opportunities of upward mobility that were unthinkable yesterday. Such situations are visible in the trajectories of the activists of the Brazilian PT, elected in local government or federal institutions, or in the topical story of the Polish peasant leader Lepper – studied by Pellen – round-tripping from agricultural unionism to parliament. But the limit of images such as “upward mobility” or “expansion” of the gratification system is its purely quantitative semantic. Bridging movements and parties, moving from street demonstrations or factory meetings to the parliament benches or the mayor’s office cannot be reduced to comparative adjective such as “higher” or “bigger.” One needs here a qualitative perception of what means changing activists into politicians. More than connecting two worlds of political participation, the process means a change in the rules of the game, the definition of (il)legitimate behaviors. Yesterday’s activists enter into a new ecosystem, a new configuration of interdependencies with new actors. Gaining the big black car with chauffeur, lunching with business leaders, or being called Mr. President by deferent ushers may be the experience of a symbolic revolution. Yesterday’s activists face new moral dilemmas, new challenges – among which is the Weberian opposition between an ethic of responsibility and the ethic of conviction. But they also enter in this new institutional and ethical space with dispositions, organizational styles (Cefaï, Carrel, Talpin, Eliasoph, & Lichterman, Reference Cefaï, Carrel, Talpin, Eliasoph and Lichterman2012).

A second track explored in Part III studies how the experience of such moves from activism toward politics or jobs sponsored by political godfathers is not always a happy one. Feelings and accusations of betrayal are usual, the practical reflexes and moral norms of the activist would not always fit with the rules of the political field.

What could appear to the academic gaze as an unexpected social escalator could be perceived by ex-activists as a threat, a challenge to their identity or integrity. As Neveu suggests in his contribution, the more protracted, the riskier, and the more able to shake one’s initial common sense are activists’ experiences, the longer they would remain active in habitus. Part of the answer to the puzzle of Tamayo and Olivier’s notion of “resonance,” of the long-term effect of movement socialization, could be found here. And “resonance” produces paradoxical effects – very visible in the case of Czech and Slovaks dissenters, but one could as well mention the soviet ones (Vaissié, Reference Vaissié1999). Sometimes the qualities and skills that had allowed people to stay at the vanguard of movement activism could suddenly become detrimental or out of tune in party politics. At least two styles of such dispositions could be mentioned here. The Czechoslovak case suggests the impact of what could be coined an aristocratic vision of politics. This aristocratic style of commitment has several origins. It comes from the high level of cultural capital and the habits of theoretical discussion shared in a group whose members are often coming from intellectual professions. But also from the strong desire to preserve moral integrity as a way of managing the harsh experience of downward social mobility. This kind of commitment does not develop cultures of compromise or the group discipline of those “voting in battalions.” If it prepares one for the management of a small group’s dissensus, it does not prepare one to seduce large audiences. It is not a school of populist rhetoric. This aristocratic vision of politics will transform yesterday’s heroes into misfits of the electoral competition.

Leaving the case of Eastern dissenters, a system of dispositions shared by a significant part of the Western generations of '68 was an “anti-institutional” mood (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1979). This mood was made of reluctance toward the old disciplinarian institutions (army, school, churches, family), of the exhilarating feeling of freedom and boundless opportunities produced by the access to more material and cultural consumptions, to higher education and sexual freedom. Parties were one of the targets of this critical perception. The fact that not much more than 5–10 percent of the “soixante-huitards” from Neveu and Pagis case studies became members of political parties is an interesting indicator here.

A different dimension of the awkwardness of the newcomers in party politics comes from the suspicion, loudly or sotto voce expressed, of their incompetence or illegitimacy. They are easily accused of not being serious or true politicians. In the best case they are perceived as amateurs or electoral accidents promising a quick disappearance. More often they are stigmatized as demagogues or barbarians spoiling the noble art of politics. The case of Lepper and his organization, Samoobrona, suggests how this criticisms can even be internalized and lead up to the suicidal tactic of recruiting more legitimate, more respectable candidates far from the initial rural constituency of the organization. No need to say that having both their own resources and no shared history or deep affective commitment with Samoobrona, those outsiders would rarely resist long the temptation of leaving the party who bought their social respectability with an MP seat, when another party overbids, offering them the position of junior minister.

If ex-movement activists can be accused of not being real “enough” politicians, the opposite criticism is even more common. Activists recycled into politicians – and the criticism could also be a self-criticism – are suspected of being traitors, selling out their cause for prebends or a good ranking on the election ballot. Moving into the official world of electoral politics, activists would forget their values and ideals. They would be entangled in the games and delights of the small world of politics whose very structure is made to disinhibit ambitions and ruthless careerism. The accusation of treason, of “récupération” to use the French phrase, is very powerful for at least three reasons. There is no shortage of empirical cases, in various countries, where ex-leaders of social movement became professional politicians, using the tricks and trades of the job, forgetting their initial commitments. The fear of betraying is also deeply present in the initial experience of the newcomers discovering the rules and habits of the new institutional world of party politics, the complexity of bargaining games often inevitable to progress in policy process. Such feelings of drift, of normative lag, are also endlessly reactivated by the simple process of cooptation among the movement ranks of new participants and partners in the political institutions under the control of the party born from a social movement. Goirand’s analysis of the trajectories of ex-activists and trade unionists propelled into politics by the Brazilian PT is here illuminating. Newcomers among the newcomers, these outsiders are in the best position to identify the changes, the possible gentrification of yesterday’s movement leadership. Expressing their surprise, gossiping on their leaders’ changes, sometimes fascinated by the promises of upward mobility that they discover, these new recruits keep on the agenda the difficult questions of what are treason and loyalty to the movement’s cause, to one’s individual integrity.

The lesson is clear. Moving from movement logic to party or government logic are not easy processes, nor the simple invention of an art of combining repertoires or reinvesting skills. More exactly, such art feeds feelings of illegitimacy and clumsiness, and suggests the fear of treason, or the concern of homelessness.

How to react to the labeling process that suggests that a background of movement activism is a badge of illegitimacy or something that would not fit with the serious job of politics? The Samoobrona case suggests that giving pledges to the institution, over-investing in institutional conformism may not be the best solution. Transforming the stigma into a pride may be a better strategy, as long as it is more than purely cosmetic (wearing blue jeans in the lobbies of the parliament does not produce alternative policies). How to experiment with the paradox of anti-institutional outsiders becoming insiders of the institution (party, local government)? Their heretical dispositions, even their mistrust of officialdom, may work as powerful tools to produce innovations and question the invisible “taken for granted” of routines. How to manage the varied combination of guilt, anxiety, and exhilaration that is often the experience of movement activists entering into the new world of institutional politics ?

The question of the strains or ease of a move toward party politics should be questioned by combining at least four variables. The first one has already been developed: To which degree and under which circumstances acquired dispositions can be reinvested in party politics? Social movements are also a space where activists can learn arts of bargaining and rhetoric skills. They gain know-how to organize campaigns, sometimes to manage the SMO “machine.” And such skills and dispositions could be transferred to party work. A second variable is the volume and structure of resources owned by individual activists: What is his/her level of education, social capital? To which degree are the resources linked to the activist moment open (or not) to individual appropriation? A third variable could be connected to the much-debated notion of political opportunity structures. The Moroccan case explored by Hivert and Vairel suggests how the relative opening of an authoritarian political system can redefine the costs, stigmas, and possible outputs opened by a move from movement activism to more partisan investment. Let’s finally mention here the existence of moments or cycles of openness and closure in the relation between parties and movements. The seventies and early eighties have been in many European countries moments of proactive action from parties to open their programs and leadership to the claims of actors from the so-called new social movements. A comparable process was visible later in the United States, later again in France, with the regard expressed by the Republican party or the UMP toward Christian movements such as the “moral majority” or the “manif pour tous” (Carnac, Reference Carnac2014).

Finally, the variety of the situations explored in this book invites one to wonder if it would be possible to identify something like ideal-typical trajectories and modes of investment of these blurred spaces between politics and activism, activism as a way of life (Valocchi, Reference Valocchi2013), and activism as a livelihood? A complete check-up of the variables ruling the experience of moves between social movement and partisan activism invites one to think in terms of trajectories (Kriesi, Reference Kriesi1993). Trajectories should be studied considering the nature of the move in the space of political participation. Shifting from a highly disruptive or radical social movement toward a government party would in most cases trigger an embarrassing reflexive work, a rationalization of one’s behavior, in the Weberian and Freudian meanings of this concept. Being coopted by a party to become a central actor of a policy program that applies a reform born from collective action is probably a smoother move.

Valochi (2012) also invites one to question trajectories as subjective experiences, whose nature depends on the social profile of their actors. The same intensity of commitment can be associated to very different structures of feelings and subjective perceptions. Among Vallochi’s typologies, one must mention the opposition between several patterns of activism’s perceptions and narrative expression. Middle-class activists often think of their experience as a “career” – thus a process of identity work, an exciting move through institutions and experiences. Such perceptions do not produce guilt or shame as the price of upward mobility linked to activism. They do not transform into moral dilemmas the shifts of militant energy from one cause or movement to another. Working-class activists experience more their stories as a “calling.” They are the voices and defenders of their communities. Their very identity is rooted in the feeling of “we-ness.” Such subjective perception would have a quite different connection to upward mobility, seen as the risk of selling out, of betraying one’s social origins. The contradictory perceptions and experiences of the Brazilian PT activists offer a mirror of this difference. Some enjoy the “learning process” of the new experience of institutional politics. Others are unhappy when they see the growing distance between party MPs or members of local governments and the rank and file activists, when they the think of the heroic time of struggles as fading away.

Another way to use trajectories could be questioning the traffic directions. An implicit assumption in most of the research is that the usual movement goes from social movement to political organizations. It is worth questioning the simplicity of such a vision. If they are less usual, the opposite moves, from party to social movement, are worth mapping. Such moves can translate the “invasive” strategies described by Schwartz (Reference Schwartz2010), when parties push some of their members to monitor or to take control of social movements. Such behavior has been common among European Communist or Leftist organizations. But Agrikoliansky’s study of the French “Ligue des droits de l’homme” (2002) also suggests that some party–movement trajectories could express the disillusions and hangovers born from party commitment.

Mapping the directions and meanings of movement–party and party–movement trajectories brings us finally back to the starting point of this development. Using an oversimplified framework, whose aim is more to suggest questions than to supply a satisfying description of changes in political participation, we suggest the metaphor of three generations, at least in many West European countries. The middle of the twentieth century would have been the moment of an almost organic connection between social movements on the one hand (students and workers unions, youth movements structured by Catholic churches in Southern Europe) and parties on the other. The seventies would have given a new significant momentum to such interconnections, the “new social movements” acting also as brokers of new social problems, some of their leaders investing in party politics. One of the major scientific and political stakes of the present moment would then be to understand what looks like a third generation, a growing disconnection and mistrust between parties and social movement. No doubt an exciting research field exists here. What is the reality of such disconnection? How to make sense of its contrasting levels of expression, according to political systems, ideological locations, and class locations? Is this situation a moment of transition in the invention of a “post-democracy”? Should one move from a theory of party-cartel to a theory of post-party politics? Could it be sociologically reasonable to believe that social movements could fill the void created by the crisis of party politics?