Eight Years after 2001. Social Movements and Social Movement Studies in a Polarized World

Since 2010, citizens’ movements have risen in all regions of the world and shaken many regimes asking for democracy, social justice and dignity. Today, we have to acknowledge that democracy has not expanded as citizens (and researchers) wanted but that authoritarianism and conservatism is the dominant trend of the second part of the 2010s. What went wrong? Does it mean that social movements have lost their capacity to transform society?

In this paper, I sustain that social movements remain major actors of our time, but that epistemological biases and the double hermeneutic have led to overestimate the agency of progressive movements while underestimating conservative actors and the power of “movements from above”.