The World Says No to War: Demonstrations against the War on Iraq

11. Crossing Political Divides: Communication, Political Identification, and Protest Organization

11 Crossing Political Divides: Communication, Political Identification, and Protest Organization W. Lance Bennett, Terri E. Givens, and Christian Breunig The February 15 anti–Iraq War protests mobilized demonstrators from a wide variety of political backgrounds. For quite a few people, it was the first demonstration they had ever attended. Others were associated with single issues or social movements, most notably peace organizations and related protest activities. Large numbers of demonstrators had been involved in global social justice protests against organizations such as the World Trade Organization (Walgrave and Verhulst 2003; and see chapter 10 in this volume). Within this broad context, there were many demonstrators with complex political histories that crossed multiple issue and movement lines; these activists may have been instrumental in establishing both the scale and the speed with which the February 15 demonstrations occurred. Chapter 10 presented some evidence making this point, and the idea in this chapter is that by participating in multiple political networks, these complex activists expanded the diffusion paths by which information, coordination, and encouragement to participate were passed through large numbers of people. Conventional understandings of the diffusion of protest affiliations and repertoires of action suggest that the underlying protest diffusion mechanisms generally involve social relationships based on singular organizational or political identities. Diffusion along dominant identification paths results in mobilization that is typically bounded in scale along organization, ideology , or issue lines, often requiring brokerage mechanisms to bridge those lines of division (Tarrow and McAdam 2005; McAdam 1988). A new wrinkle in the idea of diffusion may be appearing in the form of individuals in various transnational protest contexts who display identifications with multiple issue 215 and movement networks, permitting diffusion at a fine-grained individual level across a broad spectrum of issue networks. For example, della Porta describes the movement for global justice as cohering at the individual level via “heterogeneous, multiply faceted identities that reflect social complexity ” with the result that an “identity shift from single-movement identity to multiple, tolerant identities has helped the movement in dealing with its heterogeneous bases” (2005, 186). This conception of activists with complex or flexible political identities helps resolve a conceptual dilemma concerning whether the complex array of issues and organizations that have appeared in globalization demonstrations (and that, in some countries, played important roles in the antiwar demonstrations studied here; see chapter 10) can be reasonably called a movement, or whether they are so fragmented that they might better be thought of as representing multiple movements. The concept of multiple identities suggests that such diverse, large-scale mobilizations may be less fragmented than the multiplicity of issues and organizations make them appear. The formation of multiple or complex identities may also explain how individuals and organizations within networks can readily “transpose” their objects of protest or solidarity without losing their local issues and roots (Tarrow and McAdam 2005). In the case of the February 15 protests, many of the diffusion paths for protest participation seem to have emerged from the transposition of global justice, or as we prefer to call it, the global social justice movement, into a vast antiwar network. Chapter 1 describes the role of global social justice activists in the European Social Forum and the World Social Forum in the early coordination and planning of the antiwar demonstrations. We propose in this chapter that some part of this networking capacity is related to the communication practices of particular types of activists. The basic idea is that activists with complex political identifications somehow communicate more broadly across different issue networks and are more likely than activists with single-issue or organizational identifications to build bridges across different issue communities. Our primary concern is to understand what communication practices enable this network-bridging to trigger mobilizations on the scale witnessed in these demonstrations. Identification, Communication, and Protest Organization To build and assess a model of complex political identification, communication practices, and the scale of protest mobilization, we define and explore several sets of related variables. First, we developed three separate measures of complex political identification, as stated here and explained more fully below: strength of affiliation with the global social justice movement, 216 w. lance bennett, terri e. givens, and christian breunig reported number of memberships in different kinds of organizations (including churches; human rights, peace, and labor...