The intellectual lineage behind the article’s argument deserves closer attention, because Touraine’s sociology of action was never merely an academic exercise. When Touraine developed his framework in the mid-1960s, French sociology was dominated by structural approaches that treated individuals as bearers of positions within systems rather than as actors capable of shaping history. Touraine’s insistence that workers define themselves through identity, opposition, and totality was a deliberate corrective: it located agency not in abstract structures but in the lived consciousness of people who recognize their adversaries and their shared historical project. Luzi’s revival of the ‘Soggetto’ concept taps directly into this tradition, suggesting that the analytical tools forged to understand industrial class conflict may still illuminate a post-industrial landscape dominated by cultural struggles rather than workplace disputes.

What makes the concept of the subject so demanding is that it sits at the intersection of two forces pulling in opposite directions. On one side stands the instrumental rationality described by Max Weber, the calculating logic of markets and bureaucracies that treats human beings as interchangeable units of labor and consumption. On the other side stands the system of identities, the web of meanings, memories, languages, and traditions through which people recognize themselves and one another. Luzi, drawing on scholars such as Bauman and Touraine, argues that decades of globalization organized around purely economic criteria have steadily privileged the first force over the second. The result is what she terms disintegrative individualism: a condition in which people are technically more connected than ever, yet progressively stripped of the collective frameworks that once gave their choices social significance.

This erosion is not simply a matter of nostalgia for lost community. The article’s conceptual scaffolding suggests a concrete social mechanism. When institutions recede and market forces take over the regulation of social life, the roles and norms that once structured experience begin to disappear, a process Touraine called desocialization. Desocialization is insidious precisely because it does not feel like oppression; it feels like freedom. Individuals appear liberated from constraining roles, yet they simultaneously lose the interpretive resources needed to orient themselves, evaluate institutions, and act collectively. Zygmunt Bauman’s account of de-modernization captures this double edge: the fracturing of identity across dimensions of being, memory, tradition, and skill is experienced as flexibility by some and as abandonment by others.

The historical material on the student movements of the 1960s provides an instructive mirror for the present. The article recounts how students from mass universities, often from modest backgrounds, pursued education as a ladder of social mobility only to discover that their degrees did not guarantee professional stability. Lacking the social capital to integrate into ruling elites, they came to understand that their individual fates were bound to broader social structures, and this recognition precipitated collective organization. The sequence matters: disadvantage was first experienced privately, then interpreted socially, and only then transformed into movement. This is the practical meaning of the subject in Touraine’s sense, the moment when isolated individuals recognize themselves as a social category with shared interests and a common adversary.

The movements that followed did not remain confined to their point of origin. University struggles internationalized rapidly, and their activists reached out to other marginalized groups, generating a wave of regionalist, feminist, and anti-nuclear mobilizations that crossed national borders. Scholars such as Alberto Melucci documented how these struggles announced new social problems that would gain full significance from the 1970s onward. The article’s point in rehearsing this history is not antiquarian. It establishes that movements grounded in cultural claims, rather than in wages and workplace control, have a demonstrated capacity to reshape political agendas, provided they can sustain a collective identity over time.

The definition of a social movement offered in the article is deliberately restrictive, and this restrictiveness carries analytical weight. A movement, following Touraine, is an organized collective conduct of a class actor struggling against a class adversary for the social direction of historicity within a concrete collectivity. Three elements are indispensable: an identity worth defending, an adversary against whom this identity is realized through conflict, and a shared vision of the whole that unites participants. The consequence is that a social movement cannot exist without a defined counter-movement; struggle is constitutive, not incidental. This criterion distinguishes genuine movements from mere protests, epidemics of outrage, or pressure groups that negotiate within existing power arrangements rather than contesting the direction of society itself.

The crisis of the classical labor movement, as the article describes it, illustrates what happens when these elements dissolve. The workers’ movement could once symbolize social conflict as a whole because industrial society organized nearly every dimension of life around production. As that configuration gave way, the movement disintegrated: some strands weakened, others radicalized into terrorism, and still others became institutionalized as lobbying organizations pursuing incremental gains. The article notes that this institutionalization, while producing concrete results, came at the cost of movement identity, since organizations embedded in negotiation gradually lost the conflictual stance that had defined them. The lesson is uncomfortable for contemporary activism: success within institutional channels can quietly extinguish the transformative ambition that made an organization a movement in the first place.

Against this backdrop, the new social movements of the late twentieth century appear both as heirs and as departures. They inherit the repertoire of collective action, the networks, protests, and claims-making forged in earlier struggles. But they depart from the industrial paradigm by organizing around sexuality, information, religion, nuclear energy, the environment, and gender, issues that are not reducible to the distribution of income. Theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Melucci observed that these movements operate primarily through the democratic formation of public opinion rather than through direct political confrontation. Their battleground is cultural: they contest which knowledge models, forms of production, and moral principles society should honor. This makes them well suited to an era in which domination works through meanings rather than through explicit coercion, but it also makes them vulnerable to the centrifugal forces of individualism.

It is here that Luzi’s proposal for the ‘Soggetto’ becomes most concrete. The term designates individuals upheld by rights and institutions, persons whose agency is not a purely private possession but a status conferred and guaranteed by a shared social order. This formulation runs against the grain of a certain libertarian imagination that sees rights as protections of the individual against society. In Luzi’s account, the relationship is reversed: rights and institutions are what make individuals capable of being subjects at all, because they provide the stable background of recognition without which identity collapses into solitude. A subject, in this sense, is not the atomized consumer of market ideology but a person embedded in guarantees that allow commitments, loyalties, and long-term projects to take shape.

The strategic corollary the article draws is that human rights advocacy can function as a framework for restoring meaning in society, provided it is deployed as more than a legal instrument. Rights discourse, on this reading, is powerful because it names the standardized and homogenized roles that socio-cultural drift imposes on people and offers a language in which those roles can be contested. It converts private disorientation into public claim. When movements frame their demands in terms of universal rights, they appeal to broader societal values rather than to narrow group interests, and this appeal is precisely what allows a social category, in Touraine’s phrase, to challenge any form of domination while addressing society as a whole.

The notion of complex interdependence, borrowed from the globalization literature, adds a final layer to the argument. Interdependence is usually discussed as an economic fact: supply chains, financial flows, and information networks bind distant populations together. Luzi’s contribution is to ask what this interdependence does to subject formation. In a densely interconnected world, the consequences of individual and collective choices are no longer locally contained, and no single actor controls the systems in which all are embedded. Disintegrative imperialism, the article’s term for domination that fragments rather than consolidates, thrives in this environment because isolated subjects cannot grasp, let alone contest, the totality that shapes their lives. Only subjects who understand their entanglement with others, who see their own fate in the fate of distant strangers, can assemble the shared vision that the totality principle requires.

For social theory, the article’s wager is that conceptual reconstruction is itself a form of intervention. Categories such as subject, movement, and adversary are not neutral descriptive tools; they shape what actors believe is possible. If people conceive of themselves as isolated consumers, collective action appears irrational, and the field is left to market forces and economic actors. If they conceive of themselves as subjects upheld by rights and linked through interdependence, then collaboration across movements becomes thinkable, and protest can mature into a durable project of societal transformation. The article thus closes a circle that Touraine opened six decades ago: sociology of action begins with the empirical observation that people struggle to define themselves, but it ends with the normative claim that such self-definition, when institutionalized in rights and articulated through movements, is the principal engine by which a society steers its own history.

The practical implications extend to anyone studying or participating in contemporary mobilizations around ecology, gender, or digital life. The article’s framework suggests asking a consistent set of questions of any emerging movement: Does it sustain a distinct identity over time? Has it identified an adversary that clarifies the stakes of its struggle? Does it articulate a vision of the whole rather than a list of grievances? Can it collaborate with other movements without dissolving into them? And does it anchor its claims in rights and institutions so that its gains survive the enthusiasm of the moment? Movements that answer these questions affirmatively are, in Luzi’s terms, animated by a genuine Soggetto, and it is precisely such movements, rather than episodic eruptions of discontent, that hold the capacity to counter desocialization and rebuild the shared meanings on which democratic societies depend.

Subject of Research: Sociological theory of the subject and new social movements

Article Title: Reflections on the concept of subject

Article References: Luzi, M. (2026). Reflections on the concept of subject. Frontiers in Sociology, 11, Article 1874290. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1874290

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2026.1874290

Keywords: sociology, social movements, subjectivity, Alain Touraine, Michel Wieviorka, human rights, individualism, collective identity, democracy, de-subjectivation, new social movements, sociological theory

The timing of the collection is deliberate. Earlier climate handbooks were largely written during a previous wave of climate activism in the 2000s and 2010s, and the field has shifted substantially since. Every chapter in the new volume was written within the last two years, which means the contributors write with full awareness of the current political context, including the persistence and spread of climate change denialism, as well as the arrival of newer technologies such as carbon capture and storage. The handbook effectively updates the study of climate action into the second quarter of the twenty-first century, treating denialism and technological change not as side issues but as defining conditions under which contemporary climate movements and institutions must operate.

Almeida, who previously published a solo book this year titled Climate Change and Civic Engagement, argues that what distinguishes the handbook is its emphasis on combining human-based solutions with emerging climate technologies rather than focusing on purely technical approaches. Climate change, he contends, will not be solved by clean energy alone. In his framing, readers need to comprehend the social and economic structures that sustain a fossil-fuel-based society and the human-based incentives necessary to transition to a green economy. That framing pushes questions of equity, labor and community benefit to the center of climate strategy rather than treating them as afterthoughts to deployment timelines and engineering roadmaps.

Those questions become concrete in the challenges Almeida poses for the coming transition. How, he asks, will the new generation of renewable energy systems and climate technologies benefit frontline communities without reproducing existing systems of stratification and inequality? What kinds of social safety nets can be envisioned by working with communities and workers in what he describes as the largest societal transformation since the Industrial Revolution? The handbook is structured to help readers pursue such questions, organizing its thirty-nine chapters around three major themes: the principal theoretical perspectives driving the field of climate action, institutional strategies such as renewable energy, reforestation, carbon capture and climate action planning, and grassroots action in the form of mobilized social movements.

A fourth layer of the book gives it an unusually broad geographic span. Regional chapters cover nearly every part of the globe, from Asia and Africa to Latin America, ensuring that the volume reads differently depending on whether it is picked up in Merced or Nairobi, as Almeida puts it. The contributing scholars affiliate with a striking array of international institutions, initiatives and organizations, including the Middle East Council on Global Affairs in Qatar, the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand, the LDC Universities’ Consortium on Climate Change based in Bangladesh and Uganda, the Centre for Climate and Resilience Research in Chile, and the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology in Spain.

The international roster extends further still. Contributors also come from the South Korean Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment, the Indian Council of Social Sciences Research, the Heidelberg University Center for the Environment in Germany, OGCI China Climate Investments, and the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute in Australia. This institutional diversity matters for the handbook’s purpose. Climate action planning in Qatar raises different challenges than reforestation in Chile or grassroots mobilization in India, and the volume’s structure allows readers to compare how theoretical frameworks, institutional strategies and movement tactics translate across radically different political and economic settings.

Among the chapters Almeida highlights is an account of 350.org, the organization that helped build the modern global climate movement years before Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future youth protests became household names. The chapter is written by three of the group’s founders, who first organized as students of author and activist Bill McKibben at Vermont’s Middlebury College in the mid-2000s before taking their organizing work international. Their insider perspective traces how a student-led initiative scaled into a transnational movement, offering a case study in how social movement infrastructure is built and sustained, a theme that runs through the handbook’s treatment of grassroots action.

Almeida co-authored the introductory chapter with current and former UC Merced graduate students, and that opening chapter classifies how different forms of climate change threats induce climate action. The classification provides an analytical scaffold for the volume, linking the nature and severity of climate threats to the types of responses they provoke, from institutional planning to street-level mobilization. The handbook itself grew out of Almeida’s own research trajectory. After completing his solo book, which focuses more narrowly on the United States and California, including a dedicated chapter on the San Joaquin Valley, he guided the Oxford collective volume through several rounds of review.

His solo work is grounded in a distinctive methodological tradition: implementing in-person representative surveys with community partners and the UC Merced Community and Labor Center on basic climate needs in thousands of households in disinvested census tracts throughout the region. That empirical grounding in frontline communities shapes the handbook’s orientation toward equity and participation. For UC Merced, the timing of both books fits a broader institutional push. In 2022, California Assembly Bill 179 directed roughly eighteen million dollars toward climate action research at the university, with approximately nine million awarded to UC Merced faculty through competitive grants, positioning the campus as a growing hub for climate social science.

The university’s location amplifies the stakes. UC Merced sits in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, a region marked by extreme heat, a large outdoor workforce and some of the state’s least developed climate action planning, a combination Almeida argues makes it a priority for exactly the kind of social science expertise the handbook collects. Colleagues have taken note of the volume’s significance. Gillian Wilson, UC Merced’s vice chancellor for research, innovation and economic development, said the edited volume highlights why the social sciences are indispensable for addressing planetary warming, from understanding human behavior to increasing public participation in climate action. Leo Arriola, dean of the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, called the handbook an essential public good, noting that it reminds readers technological innovation alone is not enough to address the climate crises already felt around the world, and that Almeida’s work provides insight into how people can work together and with their institutions to bring about lasting change.

Subject of Research: The social science of climate action, including movements, institutions and equity in the global energy transition

Article Title: 'Oxford Handbook of Climate Action' rounds up a world's worth of ideas and expertise

Article References: 'Oxford Handbook of Climate Action' rounds up a world's worth of ideas and expertise. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: climate action, Oxford Handbook of Climate Action, Paul Almeida, UC Merced, climate policy, social movements, carbon capture, renewable energy, climate justice, San Joaquin Valley, grassroots mobilization, climate change denialism

The research, conducted by Zuhriddin Juraev of Kokand University and Chonnam National University together with Makhfuzakhon Shamsieva, Boburmirzo Khursanaliyev and Shakhodatkhon Okhunjonova, offers a systematic comparison of eight post-Soviet states over the period from 2015 to 2019. Rather than relying on case narratives alone, the team assembled quantitative indicators for each country, including levels of urbanisation, female labour force participation and fertility, drawn from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators. To capture the dependent variable of interest, the authors coded feminist mobilisation on a zero-to-two ordinal scale, distinguishing between the absence of organised feminist advocacy, limited or episodic activity, and sustained movement presence. The coding decisions and derived data are documented in an appendix and compiled from open-access NGO registries, human rights reports and published sources.

The analytical result is striking in its consistency: the structural variables that modernisation theory treats as engines of feminist politics simply do not predict feminist mobilisation in this region. Countries with similar levels of urbanisation and female employment diverge sharply in the strength of their feminist movements, while some states with high economic participation of women show almost no organised feminist advocacy at all. The disconnect held across the 2015 to 2019 window, a period that included both economic growth and political tightening across much of the post-Soviet space. In statistical terms, neither modernisation nor economic participation emerged as a reliable predictor of feminist political outcomes, a finding that challenges decades of theorising that treats women’s paid work as a structural precondition for collective gender politics.

To explain this pattern, the authors turn to the concept of the moral economy, a framework with roots in the work of Karl Polanyi and later elaborated by scholars such as William Booth and Andrew Sayer. A moral economy, in this sense, is the set of shared normative expectations that governs how economic activity is valued and justified. In many post-Soviet societies, the study argues, women’s labour is embedded in a moral economy that frames work as duty rather than entitlement. Women work because the household needs the income, because socialist-era norms of the working mother persist, or because family obligation demands it, not because employment is understood as a basis for individual rights or political claims. Work performed as duty generates wages, but it does not generate the sense of grievance and entitlement from which feminist movements historically draw their energy.

This distinction between work as duty and work as entitlement carries significant theoretical weight. Classic accounts, including Inglehart and Norris’s work on gender equality and cultural change, have treated rising female employment as a solvent of traditional gender attitudes, gradually producing demands for political equality. The post-Soviet evidence suggests instead that the same observable behaviour, paid employment, can be sustained by very different normative logics in different societies. Nancy Fraser’s analysis of the contradictions between capitalism and care, along with scholarship on moral economies of care by Linda McDowell and colleagues, supports the idea that the political meaning of women’s work depends on the institutional and cultural framing that surrounds it. Where employment is framed as contribution to family survival, it may even reinforce rather than erode traditional gender expectations, leaving little discursive space for feminist claims-making.

The second mechanism the study identifies is political regulation. Drawing on the civil society literature, including the USAID Civil Society Organization Sustainability Index and Freedom House’s Nations in Transit reports, the authors document the administrative constraints under which women’s organisations operate across the region. Feminist advocacy is further constrained by state regulation and administrative repression, ranging from restrictive NGO registration regimes and burdensome reporting requirements to the surveillance and harassment of activists. Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow’s work on the political context of social movements underscores that movements do not arise simply because grievances exist; they require political opportunities, and in authoritarian or hybrid regimes those opportunities are systematically closed. The study’s two-mechanism framework therefore links moral economy and political regulation together, arguing that each suppresses feminist mobilisation through a distinct pathway: one by hollowing out the normative foundations of feminist claims, the other by criminalising or exhausting the organisational forms those claims would take.

The framework also engages a long-standing debate in postsocialist gender studies. Scholars such as Barbara Einhorn, Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, and Kristen Ghodsee have documented how the transition from state socialism reshaped gender regimes, with the privatisation of social care pushing responsibility for welfare back onto families and onto women in particular. Maxine Molyneux’s earlier work on family reform in socialist states highlighted how socialist governments mobilised women’s labour while carefully managing the political implications of women’s emancipation. The new study extends this lineage by arguing that the post-Soviet present should not be read as a transitional stage on the way to Western-style feminist politics. Instead, the authors treat the absence of organised feminist advocacy as an institutionally produced condition, a stable outcome generated by the interaction of moral economies and political regulation, rather than a delay in an expected developmental sequence.

The methodological choices reflect the difficult research environment in which such work is conducted. As Nicholas Koch has noted, field research in authoritarian contexts demands particular care, and the authors state that their study involved no interviews or human participants, relying entirely on publicly available secondary materials. In interpreting politically sensitive documents, they took care to avoid identifying specific individuals or organisations in ways that could not be verified through open sources, an approach designed to protect activists operating under repressive conditions. The quantitative indicators are publicly accessible, and the supplementary materials, including the coding of feminist mobilisation for each country, are available alongside the article, allowing other researchers to scrutinise and extend the analysis. The research received no specific external funding, and the authors declare no competing interests.

The implications extend well beyond the post-Soviet region. Recent scholarship on anti-gender politics, including work by Elżbieta Korolczuk, Agnieszka Graff and Johanna Kantola, and on authoritarian gender regimes by Sylvia Walby, suggests that feminist movements worldwide face intensifying state hostility and ideological contestation. If the post-Soviet case demonstrates that economic modernisation provides no automatic foundation for feminist politics, then activists, funders and policymakers who assume that development programmes will organically produce gender-equality movements may be operating on flawed premises. The study suggests instead that supporting feminist mobilisation requires attention to the moral framings that give women’s work its meaning, and to the political openings that allow grievance to become organisation. Where work is framed as duty and advocacy is framed as subversion, neither rising employment nor rising incomes will do the political work that theory once promised.

For the comparative politics of gender, the study’s contribution lies in its refusal to treat absent feminist movements as a puzzle to be explained by deficiency. By specifying two mechanisms, moral economy and political regulation, and by operationalising them across eight countries with transparent coding, the authors convert a regional anomaly into a testable framework with broader purchase. The finding that women’s labour force participation coexists with weak feminist mobilisation is not an exception to be managed but a signal that the relationship between economic structure and political consciousness is mediated by institutions, norms and state power. As debates over gender, authoritarianism and civil society intensify globally, the post-Soviet experience offers a sobering empirical lesson: the road from the workplace to the movement is neither short nor automatic, and it can be blocked at either end.

Subject of Research: The relationship between women's economic participation, moral economy, state regulation and feminist mobilisation in post-Soviet societies

Article Title: Beyond modernisation: moral economy and the limits of feminist mobilisation in post-Soviet societies

Article References: Juraev, Z., Shamsieva, M., Khursanaliyev, B., & Okhunjonova, S. (2026). Beyond modernisation: moral economy and the limits of feminist mobilisation in post-Soviet societies. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 451. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01740-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01740-x

Keywords: feminist mobilisation, post-Soviet societies, moral economy, modernisation theory, women's labour, gender politics, civil society, authoritarianism, social movements, political repression, comparative analysis, gender regimes

Murphy begins from a distinction that structures the entire argument. Some harms from American non-involvement are immediate and measurable, while others unfold over decades and may prove surprisingly modest in the long run. Averting the worst consequences of the climate crisis and preparing for the next pandemic fall squarely into the first category, where the absence of the United States government from global problem solving can have significant consequences. The United States remains one of the largest historical emitters of greenhouse gases and one of the most consequential funders of public health infrastructure, so its disengagement from these domains removes both material capacity and political weight from systems that depend on broad coordination. In these arenas, timing matters: delays in emissions reductions compound physically, and pandemic preparedness is only as strong as the weakest surveillance and response capacity in the chain.

The evidence for immediate, quantifiable harm comes in part from modelling studies published in the medical literature, which Murphy draws on to ground his argument. A mathematical modelling study of seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa, published in EClinicalMedicine, examined the impact of the freeze in funding for PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and projected increases in HIV deaths and infections as a direct result. A separate retrospective evaluation and forecasting analysis published in The Lancet assessed two decades of USAID interventions and projected the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030, finding that the programs slated for cuts had been associated with millions of averted deaths. These are not abstract governance questions. They are estimates of human lives, calculated with the standard tools of epidemiological modelling, and they illustrate precisely what Murphy means by dire immediate consequences even where the long-run architecture of global problem solving may endure.

Climate policy presents a parallel case with its own technical texture. Murphy cites the Rhodium Group’s Taking Stock 2025 analysis of United States energy and climate trends, which tracks how federal policy shifts alter the emissions trajectory of the world’s second-largest current emitter. When the American federal government relaxes domestic climate policy and steps back from international climate finance, the global emissions budget, a finite quantity of carbon that can be released before warming thresholds are crossed, absorbs the difference. Unlike some areas of governance, climate physics offers no institutional workaround: the atmosphere integrates emissions from all sources regardless of who is in office. This is why Murphy classifies climate among the domains where American non-involvement may have significant consequences rather than merely symbolic ones, and why parallel scholarship in the same journal examines whether global climate governance nonetheless remains resilient under the current administration.

Yet the article’s most counterintuitive claim concerns the domains where American withdrawal matters less than headlines suggest. Murphy argues that the long-run impact on global problem solving may be small in certain cases, even when immediate consequences are dire, and he offers economic inequality across countries as a likely example. Drawing on Branko Milanovic’s analysis of the three eras of global inequality from 1820 to 2020, Murphy situates present turbulence within long structural trends. The convergence of incomes between countries that defined the past three decades has been driven principally by economic growth in Asia, particularly China and India, rather than by American policy choices. A US government that turns inward may slow or complicate specific redistributive mechanisms, but it neither creates nor controls the deep forces reshaping the global income distribution. The immediate harms of cuts to development assistance are real, as the Lancet modelling demonstrates, but the underlying trajectory of between-country inequality is shaped by forces far larger than any single administration.

This leads to the article’s deeper historical claim, and the one Murphy identifies as the most important lesson for practitioners. Even if the US government becomes unimportant or an impediment to solving global and planetary problems for many years, the basic politics of their solution is likely to remain similar to what it has been since the mid-nineteenth century. Global governance, in Murphy’s telling, was never primarily the creature of great-power governments. From the international public unions of the 1800s through the technical standard-setting bodies documented in his earlier work on engineering rules since 1880, the machinery of global problem solving has been built and maintained by international epistemic communities, networks of scientists and experts, social movements, and civil servants at every level. Susan Strange’s famous critique of the Westfailure system, and the scholarship on non-hegemonic regimes collected under the title Cooperating Without America, both support the proposition that cooperation among other actors can proceed even when the hegemon abstains.

The historical record Murphy invokes is richer than the current moment might suggest. His references span the scholarship on how governments have repeatedly lost control over the proliferating structures of global governance, the role of emerging powers in disrupting and reshaping the World Trade Organization, and the work of what Thomas Weiss and colleagues have called the Third United Nations, the civil society organizations and advocacy networks that operate alongside and often in tension with member states. Recent historical scholarship on Pan-Africanism, including Howard French’s account of Kwame Nkrumah and the high tide of global Black solidarity, reminds readers that transformative global projects have often been driven by movements with no great-power sponsorship at all. Linda Gordon’s study of seven social movements that changed America makes the complementary domestic point: American politics itself has repeatedly been redirected from below rather than from the White House.

What does this mean concretely for the scientists, officials, and advocates now confronting an American government hostile to their work? Murphy’s answer, though framed in careful academic language, is essentially a call for persistence grounded in structural analysis. Members of international epistemic communities, social movements, and civil servants at all levels should remember that their work in global problem solving has always been just as important as that of the elected or self-appointed governments of even the most powerful countries. The technical standard-setters who keep the internet, aviation, and global trade interoperable do not require American federal participation to continue meeting. The epidemiologists who maintain disease surveillance networks, the climate scientists whose models inform every national assessment, and the statisticians who track global inequality all operate within institutions whose legitimacy and funding derive from far broader coalitions than Washington’s current disposition.

Murphy is careful not to minimize the danger. The article acknowledges commentary, including Paul Krugman’s argument that Trump is a symptom rather than the cause of declining American democracy, and it engages with assessments of how much damage a determined administration can inflict on institutions at home and abroad. The modelling studies on PEPFAR and USAID stand as evidence that the immediate human costs of withdrawal are severe and quantifiable. A widely discussed recent book on the collapse of large-scale societies, reviewed under the grim headline of a one-in-three chance of apocalypse, reflects the mood of existential concern that Murphy’s measured prose deliberately works against. His point is not that the situation is benign, but that despair is analytically unwarranted: the system of global problem solving has survived hostile hegemons, world wars, and the withdrawal of major powers before, and its resilience resides in actors that no single election can dismantle.

The article thus closes the loop between diagnosis and prescription. The differentiation of harms is the analytical core: climate and pandemic preparedness suffer significantly from American absence, inequality between countries follows its own long trajectory, and the politics of global problem solving remains fundamentally continuous with its nineteenth-century origins. For a readership of researchers and practitioners, the practical implication is to direct scarce attention toward the domains where American withdrawal does structural damage, while refusing the temptation to treat every global institution as hostage to Washington. The lesson Murphy draws from nearly two centuries of global governance is that the work has never depended on the goodwill of the powerful alone, and that the experts, movements, and public servants who built it retain, even now, the capacity to keep building.

Subject of Research: The impact of the Trump administration's policies on global governance and the resolution of planetary problems

Article Title: Global problems and Trump’s Republican Party government

Article References: Murphy, C. N. (2025). Global problems and Trump’s Republican Party government. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 393-400. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00127-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00127-7

Keywords: global governance, Trumpism, planetary crises, climate policy, pandemic preparedness, PEPFAR, USAID, economic inequality, epistemic communities, social movements, international institutions, US foreign policy

The study, published in the journal New Media & Society, was led by Dr Lisette Yip of Flinders’ College of Human Sciences and Culture, working with colleagues Emma Thomas, Hawa Muhammad Farid and Noor Tahir. The team set out to examine the role social media plays in expanding social movements, and specifically to test whether perceptions about the motives of online activists affect the willingness of others to participate. Their conclusion, drawn from three experiments, is blunt: perceptions of insincerity measurably dampen the persuasive power of online collective action, making bystanders less likely to sign petitions or take any other action for a cause.

The question the researchers posed is one that anyone who has scrolled through a politically charged feed will recognise. Social media is an important tool used by supporters of social movements to persuade others to participate, but people who engage in online collective action may be perceived as acting for self-serving reasons. As Dr Yip explains, these perceptions can greatly impact the effectiveness of collective action. If a user suspects that a poster is performing concern rather than feeling it, the post risks being dismissed as virtue signalling, and the opportunity to recruit a new supporter is lost before it ever materialises.

To investigate this, the researchers designed three experiments in which participants encountered social media content urging them to take action for a political cause. Some participants viewed individual posts, while others were shown an immersive social media feed designed to mimic the experience of scrolling through a real platform. Crucially, the activists in these scenarios varied in the motives they expressed. In one condition, the poster indicated acting out of genuine concern for the cause, what the researchers describe as autonomous motivation. In another, the poster indicated acting to avoid guilt and social disapproval, a pattern the researchers call controlled motivation. A baseline condition did not specify a motive at all, allowing the team to measure how unlabelled posts were judged.

The results followed a consistent pattern across the experiments. Participants who viewed posts expressing controlled motivation perceived the user as being less autonomously motivated, and that perception carried real consequences. These participants were less likely to socially identify as supporters of the cause, and less likely to take collective action themselves. In practical terms, the perception of external pressure or self-protection behind a post made viewers less willing to sign a petition or engage in any other behaviour on behalf of the movement. The motive attributed to the messenger, in other words, transferred to the audience’s own sense of whether the cause deserved their commitment.

This finding connects to a broader psychological framework in which motivation is understood along a spectrum from autonomous to controlled. Autonomous motivation reflects actions performed because they align with one’s own values and genuine interest, while controlled motivation reflects actions performed because of external pressure, guilt, shame, or the desire to avoid social disapproval. The Flinders experiments suggest that this distinction is not merely internal to the activist. It is read, inferred and judged by audiences, and those judgements shape whether a movement grows or stagnates. A post that signals obligation rather than conviction invites readers to conclude that the cause is one people support only under duress, which is a poor advertisement for joining.

The implications for organisers of social movements are significant. As Dr Yip notes, movements will be more effective at mobilising online support when they are seen to come from autonomous motives. Her advice to activists and to anyone hoping to convince peers to support a cause is to consider the underlying motives conveyed in their messages, and to seek to foster genuine concern among their audiences so that those audiences, too, can become effective advocates. In this view, persuasion online is not simply a matter of broadcasting information widely. It is a matter of modelling the kind of motivation that others will find credible and want to adopt for themselves.

That said, the research does not suggest that motive-driven scepticism renders online activism worthless. The study indicates that social media posts may help raise awareness about social issues regardless of the motives behind them. A post from an externally pressured activist can still inform people that a problem exists. What it cannot do as effectively is convert that awareness into participation. The advocates who are perceived as being externally motivated are less effective than those who are perceived as sincere, which means awareness and mobilisation, though related, are not the same achievement. Movements that measure success by impressions alone may be overestimating their reach into actual engagement.

The findings also speak to a familiar cultural anxiety about online discourse: the accusation of virtue signalling. The title of the paper, ‘Are they virtue-signalling or sincere? The impact of perceived motives on the effectiveness of online collective action’, places that accusation at the centre of the analysis rather than treating it as background noise. The experiments suggest the accusation is not merely rhetorical. When bystanders judge a poster to be signalling virtue rather than expressing conviction, the persuasive chain breaks. Because social movements depend on chains of influence, in which one convinced supporter recruits another, a single perceived insincerity can have outsized effects as it propagates through networks of friends, followers and their followers in turn.

For the study of collective action in the digital era, the work adds an important layer to existing models of why people join movements. Traditional accounts have emphasised factors such as grievance, efficacy, identity and network exposure. This research highlights the inference of motive as a distinct and consequential variable, one that operates in the space between the activist’s message and the bystander’s decision. The method of research was data and statistical analysis of the experimental responses, and the paper appeared in New Media & Society on 5 September 2026. As platforms continue to mediate how causes are promoted and contested, the lesson for activists is clear: audiences are not only reading what is posted, they are reading why, and their willingness to act follows that reading closely.

Subject of Research: How perceived motives of online activists influence bystanders' willingness to participate in collective action

Article Title: Perceptions steer our scrutiny of online activists

Article References: Perceptions steer our scrutiny of online activists. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: social media, collective action, online activism, perceived motives, social movements, Flinders University, New Media and Society, mobilisation, virtue signalling, autonomous motivation, petition signing, digital persuasion

The research tackles two questions that have long puzzled scholars of collective action. First, what psychologically differentiates people who participate in protest from those who share their opposition to democratic backsliding but remain on the sidelines? Second, why do some individuals participate more frequently or persistently than others once they have decided to act? These questions matter because democratic backsliding, the gradual dismantling of democratic institutions by elected leaders, has become one of the defining political phenomena of the past decade, and mass mobilization has repeatedly proven to be one of the few forces capable of halting it.

To answer these questions, Shultziner proposes what he calls a self-evaluative framework for collective action and inaction. The framework rests on three psychological pillars. The first is the perceived threat to one’s self-concept, the sense that the political situation endangers who you believe yourself to be and the values that define you. The second comprises self-esteem mechanisms, specifically the drive to avoid negative self-evaluations, such as the shame of standing by while one’s country slides toward autocracy, and the drive to maintain positive self-worth by acting in accordance with one’s moral identity. The third is efficacy perception, the classic belief that one’s actions can actually make a difference.

The empirical foundation of the study is unusually robust. It combines two studies conducted during a period of intense democratic crisis in Israel, where a sweeping judicial overhaul proposed in 2023 triggered one of the largest sustained protest movements in the country’s history. The first was an online survey of 1,135 respondents that directly compared protesters with non-protesters who opposed the government’s plan. The second was a field study of 1,514 participants that examined which psychological factors were associated with the duration and intensity of protest participation over time. This dual design allowed the researcher to test not only what pushes people into the streets in the first place, but what keeps them there.

The findings are nuanced and, in places, surprising. Comparing protesters to non-protesters, the study found that three factors consistently distinguished the two groups: the perceived threat to their self-concept, the role that protest occupied as a domain of self-esteem in their lives, and their perceptions of efficacy. People who saw the political crisis as an existential challenge to their identity, who experienced demonstrating as an expression of who they are, and who believed their participation mattered were significantly more likely to have joined the protests.

But when the analysis turned to participation intensity, how often and how persistently people protested, a different picture emerged. Perceived threat to the self-concept and self-esteem mechanisms were associated with how much people participated, yet efficacy perceptions were not. In other words, believing that the protest would succeed helped explain whether someone showed up at all, but it did not explain why some people returned dozens of times while others came once or twice. The people who sustained their involvement over months were those for whom protest had become tied to their sense of self-worth, a way of avoiding the corrosive feeling of complicity and of affirming their identity as people who stand up for democracy.

This dissociation between the predictors of participation and the predictors of persistence is among the study’s most consequential contributions. Much of the existing literature, including influential social identity models of collective action, treats participation as a relatively uniform outcome predicted by identity, grievance, and efficacy. The new findings suggest instead that getting people through the door and keeping them engaged are governed by partly distinct psychological processes. Movements that want to sustain momentum through long struggles against democratic erosion, the study implies, cannot rely solely on convincing supporters that victory is possible. They must also offer participants a domain in which their self-esteem is invested, a place where showing up feels like being one’s true self.

The theoretical stakes of this argument are considerable. Social identity theory and its descendants, such as the integrative social identity model of collective action, locate the engine of protest in identification with a group: people act collectively when their group identity is salient, when they perceive injustice against the group, and when they believe collective action is efficacious. Shultziner’s self-evaluative framework shifts the analytical focus from the group to the self. Threat here is not only or primarily a threat to the group’s status or existence, but a threat to the individual’s self-concept, and the motivational payoff of action is not only group advancement but the protection and enhancement of personal self-worth. The framework draws on long-standing psychological theory about self-discrepancy, self-affirmation, and the functions of self-esteem, applying these individual-level mechanisms to the collective arena.

The study’s context gives its findings particular weight. Israel’s 2023 protest movement against the judicial overhaul was remarkable for its scale, duration, and social breadth, drawing in sectors of society, including reserve military officers and high-tech workers, that rarely engage in mass protest. Surveys cited in the research indicate that a large majority of opponents to the legislation never attended a demonstration, making the country a natural laboratory for the protester-versus-non-protester comparison. The field study, conducted at protest sites, captured the variation in commitment among those who did attend, from occasional participants to those present at nearly every weekly demonstration. The research received ethics approval from the Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College and was funded by the institution, and the author reports no conflicts of interest.

Beyond its academic contributions, the study carries practical implications for anyone concerned with the defense of democracy. If self-esteem mechanisms sustain long-term participation, then movements under democratic backsliding should think carefully about how they frame participation: not merely as a strategic instrument with uncertain payoffs, but as a moral expression of personal identity whose psychological rewards are immediate and intrinsic, regardless of the political outcome. The research also helps explain a well-documented puzzle in civic engagement, the persistent gap between intention and behavior, by suggesting that many opponents of backsliding lack the self-conceptual stakes that convert private disapproval into public action. Understanding those stakes, the study argues, offers a unified way to comprehend both why people act and why they keep acting, and it opens a promising line of inquiry into the psychological foundations of democratic resilience at a moment when those foundations are being tested around the world.

Subject of Research: Psychological mechanisms of self-esteem and self-concept threat in collective action participation during democratic backsliding

Article Title: Self-evaluative framework for collective action and inaction: self-esteem mechanisms and participation intensity under democratic backsliding

Article References: Shultziner, D. (2026). Self-evaluative framework for collective action and inaction: self-esteem mechanisms and participation intensity under democratic backsliding. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1517. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10072-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10072-1

Keywords: collective action, democratic backsliding, self-esteem, protest, social movements, political psychology, self-concept, efficacy, social identity, participation intensity, Current Psychology, Israel protests

Timothy Werner, professor of business, government, and society and Wade T. and Bettye C. Nowlin Centennial Professor of Business Administration at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, has given this playbook a name: organizational repression. The term is borrowed deliberately from political science, where researchers have long studied how governments anticipate, disrupt, and escalate against political dissent. Werner’s contribution, developed with Natalie Holzaepfel and Olga Hawn of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is to argue that companies deploy an analogous set of strategies against stakeholder activism, and that these strategies are far more alike, and far more widespread, than previous scholarship has recognized.

Stakeholders, in this framework, are non-shareholder groups with an interest in a company’s conduct: employees seeking better conditions, activists demanding environmental accountability, communities affected by operations. Past research has generally assumed that firms treat such groups with a kind of grudging respect. Companies might resist stakeholder pressure, the literature suggested, but they might also collaborate with it or simply ignore it. What Werner and his colleagues wanted to show was something more unsettling: that firms can act to undermine the very ability of stakeholders to organize in the first place, before any negotiation, boycott, or campaign even begins.

The theoretical architecture of the paper, published in the Academy of Management Review, maps corporate tactics onto the three phases that social movements typically pass through. The first is emergence, the stage at which individuals privately notice a grievance but have not yet connected with others who share it. The second is coalescence, when people begin to organize, communicate, and identify as a group. The third is formalization, when the movement acquires structure, formal membership, and alliances with outside organizations. For each phase, the researchers identify matching corporate strategies designed to prevent or discourage the movement from advancing to the next one.

At the emergence stage, the goal is to stop collective action before it starts by convincing people there is nothing worth mobilizing over. The paper points to Exxon Mobil, which began funding research downplaying climate change as early as the 1970s, years before the company became a target of activist campaigns. By shaping the information environment and the perceived legitimacy of a grievance, a firm can prevent the grievance from ever crystallizing into a shared cause. A second strategy at this stage is reputational: cultivating a public image of being unreceptive to activism, so that potential organizers conclude that mobilization would be pointless before they ever attempt it.

Once a movement begins to coalesce, the corporate calculus shifts toward making participation costly. Here companies target the individuals most likely to join. When Delta Air Lines faced a unionization push among flight attendants in 2024, it offered a carrot: a 5 percent pay raise, but only for nonunion workers. The message was that loyalty to the company, not to a collective, would be rewarded. Other firms have reached for sticks instead, including demotions, schedule changes engineered to conflict with organizing meetings, and implicit threats to fire known organizers. The Amazon case in Virginia illustrates the same logic, combining surveillance with messaging designed to make association itself feel risky.

If a movement nonetheless achieves full formalization, recruiting members and forming alliances with outside groups, the most effective corporate response changes again, toward fracturing the coalition itself. The pipeline company Energy Transfer, facing protests over its Dakota Access Pipeline, allegedly hired private security firms to disrupt activist networks. It also pursued litigation against protest groups, ultimately winning a judgment of more than $600 million from Greenpeace. Lawsuits of this kind, often described by critics as strategic suits against public participation, can drain resources and attention from a movement even when the underlying dispute remains unresolved.

Werner is careful to emphasize what the theory does and does not claim. The researchers pass no ethical judgment on organizational repression, and they take no stance on whether repression is good or bad. Their claim is analytical rather than moral: that these tactics constitute a systematic, coherent, and underexplored set of behaviors that deserve rigorous empirical study in their own right, rather than being treated as scattered anecdotes about particular companies or industries. Framing union-busting, greenwashing, surveillance, and litigation as instances of a single strategic umbrella, they argue, allows scholars to see patterns that case-by-case analysis obscures.

The theory also carries an important caveat: organizational repression is not guaranteed to work. A company that moves too aggressively may trigger a backlash that strengthens the very movement it was trying to suppress, drawing public sympathy, media scrutiny, or regulatory attention to the grievance. The effectiveness of any given tactic therefore depends on context, on how visible the repression is, and on how stakeholders and observers respond. This contingency is precisely why the authors argue that systematic measurement is needed, rather than assumptions in either direction about how firms behave or how stakeholders fare.

The researchers’ next step is to test the framework empirically, drawing on data sources such as whistleblower reports, lawsuits, and leaked corporate documents to assess how often, and how effectively, companies actually deploy these tactics in practice. If the theory holds, it could reshape how scholars and policymakers think about the balance of power between corporations and the people they affect, moving the conversation from isolated scandals toward a structural understanding of how dissent is managed before it can gain momentum.

Subject of Research: How companies systematically repress collective action by stakeholders such as employees, activists, and communities

Article Title: How companies quietly undercut dissent

Article References: How companies quietly undercut dissent. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: organizational repression, stakeholder activism, corporate strategy, union-busting, social movements, labor relations, greenwashing, Academy of Management Review, corporate surveillance, strategic litigation, collective action, business ethics