gary rivett - activism, mobilisation and political engagement- comparative historical perspectives

Editorial Introduction

Activism, Mobilisation andPolitical Engagement:

Comparative Historical Perspectives

GARY RIVETT*

Abstract This editorial introduction discusses and explains the broader researchcontext underpinning the essays, namely the Leverhulme Trust-funded ResearchNetwork, The Comparative History of Political Engagement in Western and AfricanSocieties. It provides a brief overview of the intellectual background to the networksagenda, and, in particular, argues that comparative sociological approaches to thestudy of political engagement have left it inadequately historicized. The introductionthen discusses the general theme of Activism, mobilization and Political Engage-ment, which all contributors to the international conference were asked to consider.It argues that these essays, when taken together, offer new comparative historicalperspectives for investigations into the history of political engagement, providinghighly suggestive points of departures for future research.

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This special issue of the Journal of Historical Sociology containsessays first delivered as papers at a two-day international work-shop at the University of Sheffield in June 2011. The workshopfocused on the theme of Activism, Mobilisation and PoliticalEngagement, and was the first of three such workshops, formingpart of the Leverhulme Trust-funded International ResearchNetwork, titled The Comparative History of Political Engagement inWestern and African Societies, c.1500c.2000.1 Eighteen paperswere presented by scholars from Britain, France, United States ofAmerica and South Africa. Six of those presentations are includedhere, representing the diversity of the contributions, ranging inhistorical period, geographical region, and topic. A specially com-missioned essay draws out the major themes of all six essays,making connections to the broader problematic of the researchnetwork.2 This introduction discusses the general aims of thenetwork, providing an overview of its intellectual agenda, beforeoutlining the specific theme that framed the workshop and servedto guide and unify the individual papers.

* Dr Gary Rivett is Lecturer in Early Modern History at York St JohnUniversity and may be contacted at [email protected]

Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 28 No. 1 March 2015DOI: 10.1111/johs.12063

2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Democratic Deficit?: Utopianism and Jeremiads

In 2001, in the UK, the Hansard Society commissioned a pamphleton e-democracy titled Bowling Together: Online Public Engagementin Policy Deliberation, which claimed that new relationshipsbetween citizens and institutions of governance must emerge if acrisis of democratic legitimacy and accountability is to be averted.3

For the authors, Stephen Colman and John Gtze, the reason wasa pervasive contemporary estrangement between representativesand those they represent, manifested in almost every westerncountry by falling voter turnout; lower levels of public participationin civic life; public cynicism towards political institutions andparties; and a collapse in once-strong political loyalties and attach-ments. For Colman and Gtze the internet, as an important infor-mation and communication technology and networking tool, wouldmake it easier for people to engage in political processes, therebyimproving links between elected officials and their constituents.Indeed, beneath all these positions rests an assumption and hope that digital democracy can re-engage a politically disenchantedelectorate in the democratic process.

Over a decade later, the issue remains open. On 15 January2013, the UKs Guardian newspaper asked: Avaaz: can onlinecampaigning reinvent politics?4 Prompted by the organisationsattempt to identify from its then 17 million-strong membership an agenda for the year ahead, the question addressed a criticalissue surrounding the nature of twenty-first-century democracies:can the Internet, and online activist organisations like Avaaz,connect people with politics, inform governmental decision-making, assert policy preferences, and influence how policy isconfronted, constructed and implemented? Avaaz, like similaronline activist organisations, uses petitions to raise and discussissues chosen by its members for the purposes of awareness pro-motion and launch challenges to specific policy plans. Whilstadvocates claim online-petitioning represents a dynamic anddirect approach to political participation, sceptics question howfar it constitutes a real intervention and whether it marks a sig-nificant shift in how politics is practiced, or merely indicates howspecific populist issues can attract attention at particular times,with few enduring consequences. As one critic noted several yearsago, if people are not interested in politics in toto, and do notwant to participate, then no amount of nudging towardse-democracy will encourage them to do so.5 Conversely, advocatespursue a vision of the Internet that allows for the creation ofonline, decentralised and non-hierarchical public forums (forexample, social media websites) where citizens can congregate,

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2014 John Wiley & Sons LtdJournal of Historical Sociology Vol. 28 No. 1 March 2015

connect and develop networks that offer opportunities to developpolitical movements. Political parties, governments and policythink tanks have not ignored the possibilities that online cam-paigning and social media pose for transforming traditional demo-cratic structures and processes. On the contrary, the UK, US,German and Australian governments, for example, have engagedwith the potential of the Internet, instituting extensivee-petitioning programmes. Some commentators have suggestedthat new communications technologies could strengthen currentmodels of representative democracy, thereby enriching the demo-cratic process.6

Colman and Gtzes critique of late-twentieth-century politicalengagement is indebted to Robert Putnams highly influentialBowling Alone.7 Putnam considered the extent to which levels ofcivic engagement in America had declined across the latter half ofthe twentieth century. He employed the concept of social capitalto explore how far connections and reciprocity between people hadweakened, and assessed whether participation in communityorganisations and political life had declined accordingly. At anational and local level there was, Putnam observed, a decline inthe involvement of people in conventional democratic practices:petitioning, campaigning, letter-writing, running for office, andmembership of political clubs. Bowling Alone identified a direct, ifmultiple set of links between the decline in social capital and civicengagement, and subsequent participation in politics. Whether hisfindings can be expanded to account for any perceived or actualdecline in political participation in other democracies is difficult todiscern. Nonetheless, as Colman and Gtze demonstrate, a similarset of observations about the health of democracies, and the asso-ciated fears it conjures for democratic legitimacy and accountabil-ity, exist elsewhere: it is undoubtedly the case that most developeddemocracies are experiencing a collapse of confidence in traditionalmodels of democratic governance.8

Contemporary discussions surrounding the potential ofe-democracy to increase levels of political engagement illustrate thesignificance of the general themes that animate this special issue.In so-called western states, which are held up as exemplars ofmodern democracy, there is an apparent crisis in the health ofpolitical society and the legitimacy of governments. Meanwhile, inthe so-called developing world, these models or variations onthem are deemed to have failed when they have not succeeded inmaintaining acceptable democratic standards as ordained byexternal, usually Western states. At the core of these problems is aconcern about the vibrancy of meaningful political engagement instates with democratic constitutions.

Activism, Mobilisation and Political Engagement 3


Political Engagement and Comparative Perspectives

Political engagement, on these terms, is assumed to be synony-mous with the existence of democratic constitutions, and its insti-tutions and practices. The Network explicitly challenges thisassumption. Political engagement has not always been cotermi-nous with the presence of democratically representative institu-tions. Early America, and Early Modern England and France allhad vibrant, deeply embedded sets of political engagement prac-tices that pre-date processes of democratisation. It is thereforeinstructive to think about modern democracy as merely one his-torically particular set of political and ideological arrangements inwhich specific processes of political engagement exist.

The focus on political engagement as our central analyticalcategory broadens out the contexts and practices that are availablefor study and comparison. The examples surrounding e-democracycited above discussed political engagement in normative demo-cratic terms: electoral campaigning, the ballot box, petitioning andso on. Moreover, these discussions are part of a wider debatedesigned to increase the health of democracies. We have no agendato question the validity of democratic constitutions as viablesystems of political governance. Nonetheless, we are scepticalabout the extent to which finding and assessing the nature andstrength of political engagement across time and space can only beunderstood within this framework. Furthermore, scholarly analy-ses of democratisation tend to circumscribe and legitimise a narrowrange of political activities, which may not account for the abun-dance of innovative politically-engaged practices that citizenscreate and perform some of which may not be produced withinformal democratic constitutions.9 The Network (and the authorsbelow) therefore employs an expansive conception of politicalengagement. Examining political engagement in terms of longerhistorical trajectories may provide new insights into the emergenceof modern democracies, and the societies and cultures from whichthey developed and continue to sustain them. For the Network itmeans asking: what are the historical conditions and processesthat foster political engagement?

Preferring political engagement to democracy as our principalcategory of analysis benefits our comparative agenda. Nominally,our six case study areas Britain, France, the USA, South Africa,Zimbabwe and Botswana have particular experiences withmodern democratic constitutions. The so-called western states areusually considered central to our understanding of how modern,advanced democracies have developed, with the paths to, and thesubsequent shape of, their democratic models identified as exem-

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plars for so-called developing countries to follow. Ostensibly,Britain, France, and the USA are considered stable democracies,albeit with moribund or low levels of political engagement. Africansocieties are, on the other hand, purportedly still in the early stagesof democratic development, with differing degrees of success. Zim-babwean democracy is often understood to have failed, whilstBotswana is its antithesis, with the apparent durability of demo-cratic institutions assured. The political and historical importanceof South Africa to the region ensures that its experiments withdemocracy are crucial to the advancement of the entire sub-continent. Statements of this kind are normative and generalising,founded on the analytical category of democracy.

Anchoring our comparative agenda to the concept of politicalengagement offers possibilities for trans-historical comparisonsthat are less constrained by narratives of modernisation anddemocratisation common in political and social science studies.Within a particularly influential strand of comparative historicalanalysis in the social sciences is an emphasis on identifying theorigins of modern nation states and the processes explaining theemergence of different political systems.10 Macroscopic analyses oflarge scale political and social shifts in the history of states arefrequently preoccupied with discerning patterns and forminggeneral theories of change that explain pre-determined substan-tially important outcomes.11 Despite the continued and increasingsensitivity to questions of causal analysis, a detailed attention tohistorical sequences and unfolding processes overtime, and anengagement in systematic and contextualised comparisons, com-parative historical analysis in this tradition remains constrained byessentially teleological theories of historical change.12 Amongstthese could be included historical institutionalism, path-dependency theory and rational choice theory.13

Whilst these studies deal with important questions, the narrow-ness of the research agenda to, in Theda Skopols formulation,develop, test, and refine explanatory hypotheses about events orstructures integral to macro-units such as nation states can resultin reductive and determinist approaches towards specific historicalcontexts.14 Indeed, it begs the question: how can we identify theprocesses and practice of politics that do not result in substan-tially important outcomes, but nonetheless contribute to a broaderculture of political engagement? Of course, Skocpols and othersaims and questions are quite different from our own. However, theypoint to a continued tendency in the fields of Political Science,Comparative Sociology, Developmental Studies and InternationalRelations to overlook the finer textures of local historical contextsand longer-term trajectories.



A further advantage to our focus upon political engagement isthe degree of parity it affords in historical comparisons betweendifferent Western states, and between these so-called advancedstates and developing ones, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. TheNetwork undertakes a comparative approach that illustrates afurther rejection of metanarratives surrounding modernisation anddemocratisation with their tendency to view the success or other-wise of African democracies in unfavourable lights. In PoliticalScience and Developmental Studies literature, the experiences andpractices of democracy in African societies are frequently assessedin negative terms when compared with Western democracies. Suchanalyses overlook important, historically- and culturally-specificforms of political engagement that, in fact, indicate highly sophis-ticated democratic cultures. We therefore argue that comparisonsbetween different practices of political engagement across all ourcase studies can be successfully achieved when value-ladennotions of democracy cease to be our central analytical category.

The Networks approach to comparative history facilitates thisaim, and marks a departure from conventional methods. Whilstsocial scientists and historians may differ in their approach tocomparative work, their intentions and aims are the same: to seekthe origins, causes and explanations for particular outcomes.15

Case study societies are subsequently chosen with an eye on poten-tial analogies, parallels or points of equivalence that can be drawnbetween the areas under study, with the aim of illuminating simi-larities or differences, or raising new questions that do not offerthemselves in isolated, or parochial studies. Critically, identifyingvariables and criteria for comparison between cases drawn frompreordained outcome can lead to the entrenchment of teleologicalassumptions into the analysis, in spite of careful rationales andexplanations for specific choices.16 Studies of democratization areparticularly susceptible to this framing, predicated, as they tend tobe, upon Western models of democracy. Questions that work fromsuch premises may pay insufficient attention to specific historicalexperiences.

Framing our comparison with a question about practice andprocess political engagement rather than a narrative democ-ratization leading to a particular democratic outcome, may revealsimilarities and differences between countries that have been over-looked. Our approach makes a virtue of, and appreciates, radicaldifferences between our case study societies: in time and space, intheir economies, social stratification, religious beliefs, politicalarrangements, and conceptions of gender.17 To be sure, each of thearticles below is a snapshot of vastly different societies taken atparticular historical moments. Our aim is partly to assess how we

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can understand a society through a particular practice that can beshown to have existed in all case study areas, and which wasfrequently detached from conceptions of democracy, as we nowunderstand it. In turn, we can investigate the cultural and otherfactors that underpin, or undermine, political engagement withoutrelying upon conventional variables for studying democracy. Theresults may depict incoherence between the cases and engenderdifficulties telling a unifying story that is mutually illuminating forevery case. That is to be expected when the lens of a dominant anddelimiting metanarrative is removed as the central analytical deter-minant. Indeed, we may discover that older stories of democracy,which drew connections between different democratic experiences,concealed more than they revealed.

By challenging the presumption that democracy or, at least, theprocess of its pursuit must exist for political engagement to occur,we aim to reveal and understand the history of political practicesthat are highly context-specific. Furthermore, this emphasis pro-duces insights into forgotten, or suppressed, forms of politicalengagements that had significance for historical subjects but aremissing from metanarratives of democratisation. The virtue of ourapproach is aptly described by the Africanist Frederick Cooper,who, in another, though related context, stated that,

[W]hat gets lost in narrating history as the triumph of freedom followed by failure touse that freedom is a sense of process. If we can, from our present-day vantagepoint, put ourselves in the position of different historical actors . . . we see momentsof divergent possibilities, or different configurations of power, that open up and shutdown. Just how wide were those possibilities? And how much did actions taken atany one of many conjunctures narrow trajectories and alternatives? In thinkingabout such questions, we can never distance ourselves entirely from our present,but we can imperfectly look at different people in their different presents imaginingtheir futures.18

The focus of the network is to lay the groundwork for a newcomparative agenda. It aims to problematise how we historicisesocieties and their political arrangements. The outcomes may notbe known but comparisons of the nature we propose can produceinsightful points of departures for reflecting upon the relationshipbetween political engagement and democratic constitutions ingeneral.

Activism and Mobilisation

The Network explores the central problematic through three mainthemes that, whilst explored through localised case studies,encourage more general discussions. Our first theme and that of



this issue Activism, mobilisation and political engagement asks:under what historical conditions has active political engagementbeen fostered in the countries under study, and what role didformal political institutions play at those moments? What relation-ship does active political engagement of this kind bear to formalconstitutional arrangements?

From early modern France and Britain to post-revolutionaryFrance, and from nineteenth- and twentieth-century USA, totwentieth- and twenty-first century sub-Saharan Africa, each of thefollowing essays identify specific forms of activism and modes ofmobilisation. Contributors examine how activists mobilised, orwere mobilised at the level of local, communal political engage-ment to confront national and, in one case, colonial and post-colonial, political institutions that had failed to adequately governin ways that aligned with their interests. To do so, activists oftendrew upon shared political or religious values, languages or framesto identify enemies or promote their calls for reform. The precisenature of these engagements differed. However, as MichaelBraddicks closing reflections suggest, they all demonstrate anabiding recourse to local, non-institutional forms of self-government or self-organisation to mobilise for action on collectiveproblems, whether formal democratic constitutions exist or not.

Taken together, the articles that follow are not to be viewed as acomprehensive attempt to chart a coherent historical trajectory ofdifferent practices of political engagement. They are individual, andin most instances, highly particular case studies. Like the largerNetwork from which they emerge, none of the articles seek to identifya general theory of political engagement. Nor is there any attempt todevelop new metanarratives that will replace those of modernisationor democratisation. Instead, they are highly instructive interven-tions that complicate our understanding of what should be consid-ered political engagement and how it might be studied. Theindividual attention to specific historical experiences of politics,within a comparative framework, offers a robust case for problematizing totalising and teleological macro-social and -politicalanalyses of democratisation. Furthermore, and finally, they alsodemonstrate an acute sense of the fecund inventiveness of activistsengaged in political struggles, and an important appreciation of howpeople experienced politics and power across time and space.

Notes

1 The Research Network is based in the Centre for the Study of Demo-cratic Culture at the University of Sheffield, UK. Alongside the PrincipalInvestigator, Michael Braddick, the network has partners at the Universit

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du Maine, Le Mans, France (Laurent Bourquin and Cdric Michon), and atthe University of Pretoria, South Africa (Alois Mlambo). Subsequent eventstook place in Le Mans (September 2012) and examined Writing, Commu-nication and Political Engagement, whilst a final event held in Pretoria(September 2013), focused upon Equality, Justice and Political Engage-ment. The Networks website, where details of each event are archived, canbe visited here: http://www.historyofpoliticalengagement.dept.shef.ac.uk.

2 Several of the other papers will be published elsewhere, with a selec-tion included in a planned end-of-network collection, tentatively titledThe Comparative History of Political Engagement in Western and AfricanSocieties.

3 Stephen Coleman and John Gtze, Bowling Together: Online PublicEngagement in Policy Deliberation (London, 2001), 4. For a list of similar,turn-of-the-century efforts to define the potential of e-democracy, see thetitles named on p. 7 of the report.

4 James Ball, Avaaz: Can online campaigning reinvent politics?,Guardian, 15 January 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/15/avaaz-online-campaigning-reinvent-politics? [accessed 15January 2013].

5 James Crabtree, Civic hacking: a new agenda for e-democracyoriginally published on 12 June 2007 at http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-85-1025.jsp. Republished in Tony Curzon Price (ed.),Open Web, Open Society?: Liberty, Democracy and the Net (London, 2010),146153.

6 For an early commentary on this possibility see: Peter Kollock andMarc A. Smith, Communities in Cyberspace, in Peter Kollock and Marc A.Smith (eds.), Communities in Cyberspace (New York, 1999), 325.

7 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of Ameri-can Community (New York, 2000). It should be noted that Putnams argu-ments and claims are far more subtle and considered than represented byColeman and Gtze. See especially chapter 9 and his discussion of impor-tant countercurrents.

8 Coleman and Gtze, Bowling Together, 4.9 For a recent discussion of formal and informal, highly specific context

see Steve Connelly, Constructing Legitimacy in the New Community Gov-ernance, in S. Griggs, A. Norval and H. Wagenaar (eds.) Decentred Gover-nance: Democracy, Conflict and Participation (Cambridge, forthcoming2014). See also Faranak Miraftab and Shana Wills, Insurgency and Spacesof Active Citizenship: The story of the Western Cape anti-eviction campaignin South Africa, Journal of Planning Education and Research, 25 (2000),200217, for a helpful, if slightly schematic way of thinking throughthis distinction is one between invited and invented spaces of citizenparticipation.

10 Seminal works include, of course, Barrington Moore Jr.,Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in theMaking of the Modern World (Boston, 1966); Charles Tilly, The Vende: ASociological Analysis of the Counterrevolution of 1793 (New York, 1967);Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London, 1974);idem., Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974); Theda SkocpolStates and Revolution: A Comparative Analysis of France, and China (Cam-bridge, 1979). For a critique of these approaches see William Sewell Jr.,Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005),81123.



11 James Mahoney and Dietrich Reuschemeyer, Comparative HistoricalAnalysis: Achievements and Agendas, in James Mahoney and DietrichReuschemeyer (eds.), Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences(Cambridge, 2003), 11.

12 Ibid., 1015.13 For an overview see: Sven Steinmo, Historical Institutionalism, in

Donatella Della Porta and Michael Keating (eds.), Approaches and Method-ologies in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 2008), 113138.

14 Skocpol, Social Revolutions, 36.15 For perspectives on this point see Marc Bloch, Toward a Comparative

History of European Societies, in Fredric C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma(eds.), Enterprise and Secular Change (Illnois, 1953), 494521; William H.Sewell, Jr. Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History, History andTheory, 6, 2 (1967), 208218. J. H. Elliot, History in the Making (NewHaven, 2012), 168196.

16 Elliott, History in the Making, 173.17 This list of potential differences between comparative units is

informed by Sewells analysis of Skocpols work. See Sewell, Logics ofHistory, 96.

18 Frederick Cooper, Possibility and Constraint: African Independencein Historical Perspective, Journal of African History, 49 (2008), 16796.

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gary rivett - activism, mobilisation and political engagement- comparative historical perspectives

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