[Peace-discuss] Is AWARE mesomobilized?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Without going into their institutional origins, this is the best 
account I've seen of the differences between ANSWER and UFPJ.  We used a 
flyer from the latter at our last demo and so should be aware of Alex 
Cockburn's comment <http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2677>:
	
"Both UFPJ and ANSWER had their successes. But across the four ensuing 
years, as the full ghastly futility and destructiveness of the war has 
become more and more manifest, the anti-war movement has got weaker. In 
late January 2007, United for Peace and Justice held a rally in 
Washington. It mustered a respectable number of people. It featured 
Hollywood stars like Sean Penn and 60s icons like Fonda and her 
erstwhile partner, Tom Hayden. But it was, alas, rather dreary, rather 
predictable ... An absence on the speakers’ platform at that January 
UFPJ rally gives us a significant clue to the weakness of the anti-war 
movement. Ralph Nader was not invited, even though he is a major 
political figure on the left, and a fierce critic of the war. Why was he 
not invited? Nader is still anathema to many Democrats because he ran as 
a third party candidate in 2000, and they blame him for drawing crucial 
votes from Al Gore, thus enabling Bush to win. Even though the war in 
Iraq is a bipartisan enterprise, even though Democrats in Congress have 
voted year after year to give Bush the money to fight that war, the 
mainstream anti-war movement, as represented by UFPJ, is captive to the 
Democratic Party."]

	Inside Higher Ed
	Sept. 19
	Mess o’ Mobilizations
	By Scott McLemee

A few months back, Intellectual Affairs reported on the work of a couple 
of social scientists who were studying the contemporary antiwar 
movement. They have been showing up at the national demonstrations over 
the past several years and – with the help of assistants instructed in a 
method of random sampling – conducting surveys of the participants. The 
data so harvested was then coded and fed into a computer, and the 
responses cross-correlated in order to find any patterns hidden in the data.

The methodology was all very orthodox and unremarkable, unlike some 
things we’ve discussed around here lately. But one of the researchers, 
Michael T. Heaney, an assistant professor of political science at the 
University of Florida, explained that the project involved a departure 
from some of norms of his field. Political scientists have tended to be 
interested in studying established institutions, rather than the more 
informal or fluid networks that sustain protest movements.

His collaborator, Fabio Rojas, is an assistant professor of sociology at 
Indiana University – so their effort to understand the polling results 
had the benefit of cross-disciplinary collaboration, and could draw on 
models from recent work on social movements and network analysis. 
Nowadays you can often spot a paper by a sociologist at five paces, just 
because of the spiderweb-like graphics. Those are the maps of social 
networks, with the strength of connection between the nodes indicated by 
more or less heavy lines.

Heaney and Rojas have kept on gathering their surveys and crunching 
their numbers, and they recently presented a new paper on their work at 
the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in 
Chicago. The title, “Coalition Dissolution and Network Dynamics in the 
American Antiwar Movement,” seems straightforward enough – and the 
abstract explains that their focus was on the rather difficult 
relationship between United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and Act Now to 
Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), the two main coalitions organizing 
national protests.

So far, so good. The topic is rather familiar to me – deriving, as it 
ultimately does, from certain important disagreements between the Judean 
People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. (See Monty Python, 
1979.) But my effort to follow the paper soon ran up against a single 
curious and unfamiliar term: “mesomobilization.”

You could decrypt this etymologically, if course, as “intermediate 
mobilization” or something of the sort. But doing so did not cause a 
concept to spring instantly to mind. And since they were addressing 
colleagues (all of whom probably had strong and definite ideas about 
mesomobilization) it wasn’t as if the authors had to define their terms. 
So I broke down and asked Heaney for a gloss.

“Mesomobilization,” he wrote back, “is the process through which social 
movement leaders mobilize other organizations to do the direct work of 
bringing individual participants to a protest. In that sense 
mesomobilization is one level ‘above’ micromobilization (i.e., bringing 
out the actual bodies).”

In other words, an organization (a labor union or whatever) does the 
micromobilizing when it gets its members and supporters to become 
involved in some activity (a demonstration, political campaign, etc.) A 
coalition enables different organizations to collaborate when they share 
a common agenda. This is “mesomobilizing” – that is, mediating and 
connecting the different activist cohorts.

That distinction corresponds to very different sorts of functions. 
“Micromobilizing groups play a critical role in contacting people and 
shaping they way they understand issues and the efficacy of political 
action,” as Heaney explained. But mesomobilizers – that is, coalitions – 
provide “an overall conceptual framework for events that links the 
demands and grievances of myriad groups together.” (The mesomobilizers 
also buy advertising and get the parade permits and so forth.) 
“Effective mesomobilization is necessary to make large-scale events 
possible,” says Heaney, “especially in highly decentralized fields, like 
peace and antiwar movements.”

The paper delivered at APSA looks at how relations between the two 
biggest antiwar mesomobilizers have affected participation in the 
national demonstrations. The differences between ANSWER and UFPJ are in 
part ideological. The rhetorical style of ANSWER normally runs to 
denunciations of American imperialism and its running dogs. (I 
exaggerate, but just barely.) UFPJ is by contrast the “moderate flank” 
of the antiwar movement, and not prone to tackling all injustice on the 
planet in the course of one protest. As Heaney and Rojas put it, UFPJ 
argues that “in order to build the broadest coalition possible, it 
should focus on the one issue about which the largest number of 
organizations can agree: ending the war in Iraq.”

The groups have a long, complicated history of mutual antagonism that in 
some ways actually predates even the present organizations. Comparable 
fault-lines emerged between similar coalitions organizing in 1990 and 
‘91 against the first Gulf War. But UFPJ and ANSWER did manage to 
mesomobilize together at various points between 2003 and 2005. This 
honeymoon has been over for a couple of years now, for reasons nobody 
can quite agree upon – even as public disapproval of president’s 
handling of the war rose from 53 percent in September 2005 (when the 
UFPJ-ANWER alliance ended) to 58 percnet in March 2007.

What this meant for Heaney and Rojas was that they had data from the 
different phases of the coalitions’ relationship. They had gathered 
surveys from people attending demonstrations that UFPJ and ANSWER 
organized together, and from people attending demonstrations the groups 
had scheduled in competition with each other. (They also interviewed 
leading members of each coalition and gathered material from their 
listservs.)

The researchers framed a few hypotheses about contrasts that would 
probably be reflected in their data set. “We expected that participants 
in the UFPJ demonstrations would have a stronger connection with 
mainstream political institutions and a weaker connection to the antiwar 
movement,” they write. “We expected, given ANSWER’s preference for 
outsider political tactics, that its participants would be more likely 
to have engaged in civil disobedience in the past, while UFPJ would be 
more likely to have engaged in civil disobedience in the past.”

They also anticipated finding significant demographic differences 
between each coalition’s constituency. “Given the relative prominence of 
women as leaders in UFPJ,” they say, “we expected that it would be more 
likely to attract women than would ANSWER. Given that ANSWER explicitly 
frames its identity as attempting to ‘end racism,’ we expected that 
individuals with non-white racial and ethnic backgrounds would be 
disproportionately drawn to ANSWER. Further, given the relatively 
radical orientation of ANSWER, we hypothesized that it would more 
greatly appeal to young people and the working class. In contrast, we 
expected UFPJ to appeal to individuals with higher incomes and college 
educations.”

These predictions were not, for the most part, all that 
counterintuitive. And so it is interesting to learn that very few of 
them squared with the data.

People who showed up at demonstrations under the influence of UFPJ’s 
mesomobilizing framework were “significantly more likely to say they 
considered themselves to be members of the Democratic Party (54.1 
percent) than ANSWER attendees (46.9 percent).” There might be a few 
Republicans mobilized by either coalition, but most non-Democrats in 
either case would probably identify as independents or supporters of 
third parties.And they tended to come for different reasons: 
“Participants at the ANSWER rally were significantly more likely to cite 
a policy-specific reason for their attendance (such as stopping the 
Israeli-Palestinian conflict), while participants at the UFPJ rally were 
more likely to cite a personal reason for their attendance (such as the 
death of a friend or a family member).”

But in terms of important distinctions, that was really about it. There 
was no difference in degree of political involvement, or experience with 
civil disobedience, or previous attendance at antiwar protests. Nor was 
there a demographic split: “Despite the stereotypes that many people 
have of the two coalitions,” write Rojas and Heaney, “they are equally 
likely to attract the participation of women and men, whites and 
non-whites, the young the old, those with and without college degrees, 
and people from various economic strata.”

The paper also considers how the parting of the ways between ANSWER and 
UFPJ influenced their mesomobilizing capacities — that is, what effect 
it had on the networks of organizations making up each coalition.

The various spider-webs of organizational interaction did change a bit. 
ANSWER began to work more closely with another coalition pledged to 
denouncing American imperialism and its running dogs. United for Peace 
and Justice came under stronger influence by MoveOn – a group “much more 
closely allied with the Democratic Party than either UFPJ or ANSWER” and 
taking “a more conservative approach to ending the war.” (Or not ending 
it, I suppose, though that is a topic for another day.)

The researchers conclude that the conflict between the groups has not 
really been the zero-sum game one might have expected – if only because 
public disapproval of the president has won a hearing for each of them.

“To some extent,” write Heaney and Rojas, “ANSWER and UFPJ are vying for 
the attention, energies, and resources of the same supporters. But to a 
larger extent, both groups are more urgently attempting to reach out to 
a mass public that has remained largely quiescent throughout the entire 
U.S.-Iraq conflict....If public opinion were trending in favor of the 
president, or even remaining stable, the conflict might have been more 
detrimental to the movement as its base of support shrank.”

Such are the points in the paper catching one layman’s eye, at least. 
You can read it for yourself here. Heaney and Rojas are discussing their 
work this week at Orgtheory – a group blog devoted to what Alexis de 
Tocqueville calls, in its epigraph, “the science of association.”

Scott McLemee writes Intellectual Affairs each week. Suggestions and 
ideas for future columns are welcome.
The original story and user comments can be viewed online at 
http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/19/mclemee.

© Copyright 2007 Inside Higher Ed