How to Clarify the Interactions Between Social Movement and Its Opponents: A Case Study of Anti-Base Construction Movement in US-Occupied Okinawa.

This presentation clarifies a methodology that opens up one of the research possibilities of the interactions between the Social Movement and its opponents from the strategic perspective.

Social Movements define its opponent strategically in order to achieve its goal. However, internal strategic process of the opponents, such as the state, is often concealed or difficult to access due to the security reason. Therefore, the theory of the relational approach of Social Movement focusing on the strategic process has to be made and sophisticated through the empirical practices of SMs and archives of the state institutions in the past. This type of accumulation will contribute the relational approach that analyzes the ongoing SMs as well as the reassessment of the historical approach of the SM.

As a case that illuminates strategies of both Social Movement and state institutions, I focus on an anti-live firing base construction movement in Okinawa in the 1970 under the US military occupation. This movement emerged after the US-Japan agreement on reversion of Okinawa to mainland Japan in 1972. The case shows how the strategy of the movement split US military as a global network and the US military administration of Okinawa (United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyus) in two in terms of the responsive strategic process of those institutions. By tracing the internal strategies of both sides, I want to deepen the understandings of the mobilization and interaction process of the Social Movements and its opponents.

Literature

Edwards, Gemma, 2014, Social Movements and Protest, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jessop, Bob, 2008, State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Johnston, Hank, 2011, States & Social Movements, Cambridge: Polity Press.