Temporality and Strategy In Social Movements In Turbulent Times

In a context marked by overlapping crises, social movements are facing strategic challenges and temporal dilemmas: how to act under conditions of urgency while pursuing long-term transformation; how to sustain mobilisation during periods of latency, exhaustion or repression; how to coordinate immediate demands with future-oriented projects; how to construct strategic horizons amid accelerating turbulent times.

This panel invites contributions that centre temporality and strategy in the analysis of collective action, opening a space for discussing how movements define priorities and goals and coordinate different dimensions of collective action to enact strategies within specific temporal conditions that shape the pace, direction and the change movements seek to achieve.

We welcome papers examining how different social movements and collective actors, including progressive and radical left movements, far-right and reactionary movements, grassroots organisations, trade unions and movement-parties, as well as hybrid and transnational forms of mobilisation, construct, negotiate and transform strategies over time.

Particular attention will be given to contributions engaging with one or more of the following:

• Strategic decision-making: coordination between tactics and strategy
• Strategic dilemmas: tensions between short-term action and long-term goals
• Strategy under repression, authoritarian turn, democratic backsliding
• Strategic relationships between movements, parties, institutional actors
• Strategic adaptation during periods of abeyance, latency, decline
• Digital strategies and new forms of mobilisation
• Past and Future in/of social movements: collective memory, prefigurations...
• Strategic transformations in social movements (e.g. climate, labour, feminist/queer, pro-Palestinian solidarity, far-right)
• Comparative and transnational approaches
• Methodological and theoretical challenges in studying temporality and strategy in social movements