Social Movements: Nature, Types, Theories, Indian Movements and Citizenship

This chapter answers Section XH6.7, “Social Movements”, of the Humanities and Social Sciences (XH) paper — one of the eight sections of XH6 Sociology, which is one of the six optional sections a candidate chooses at the time of application. It sets out what a social movement is and how it differs from a crowd, a fad or a pressure group; the standard typology of reform, rebellion, revival, revolution, insurrection and counter-movement, and the two-way link between movements and social change; the four theories the syllabus names — structural-functional, Marxist, resource mobilization (McCarthy and Zald) and new social movements (Touraine, Melucci); the peasant, labour, Dalit, women’s and environmental movements of India read through their social basis, leadership, ideology and action; and the relationship of movements to the state, civil society, globalization and citizenship.

1. Nature, definitions and characteristics

A social movement is a sustained, organised collective effort by a number of people to bring about, or to resist, change in society, pursued largely outside established institutional channels. It is not a single act but collective action by many; it has continuity and some organisation, unlike a one-off riot or a passing craze; it is oriented to change — promoting it or opposing it; and it rests on a shared ideology that names a grievance, a goal and an adversary. Herbert Blumer called movements “collective enterprises to establish a new order of life”, arising out of unrest, while Rudolf Heberle stressed that the defining commitment is to change the social order, backed by group consciousness, an ideology and some organisation.

  • Collective action by a number of people acting together, not an individual grievance pursued alone.
  • Organisation and continuity over time — leaders, cadres, resources and a division of labour — which set a movement apart from a crowd, a panic or a fad.
  • A change orientation: a goal of altering, or of defending against the alteration of, some part of the social order.
  • An ideology that defines the grievance, the goal and the opponent and legitimises the action, and a collective identity, a sense of a shared cause among participants.
  • A repertoire of action — petitions, marches, strikes, satyagraha, boycotts, at times sabotage — lying partly outside routine institutional politics.
⚠️ A movement is not a crowd and not a pressure group
A crowd, a riot, a panic, a fashion and public opinion are all collective behaviour, but they lack the organisation, continuity and ideology of a movement. A pressure group works within institutional channels to defend an existing interest rather than to change the order. A movement may create or use organisations, but it is wider than any single one of them.

2. Types of social movements and social change

Movements are classified by the direction and depth of the change they seek. Scope runs from limited, piecemeal reform to the total transformation of a social order; stance runs from promoting change to restoring the past or resisting change altogether.

The standard typology
TypeWhat it seeksIllustration
ReformLimited, specific change within the existing order and its rulesCampaigns against untouchability or dowry
RevolutionFundamental, often rapid transformation of the whole political and social orderOverthrow of a regime together with its class structure
RebellionOpen defiance of those in authority, without a worked-out plan to replace the whole orderA revolt against a ruler or a landlord
Revival (revitalisation)A return to, or purification of, a tradition or past way of life felt to be lostReligious revival or back-to-tradition movements
InsurrectionAn armed, usually localised uprising against the government or authorityAn armed seizure of power in a region
Counter-movementMobilisation that arises to oppose and reverse the gains of another movementResistance to a reform a prior movement had won

Movements stand in a two-way relation to social change. They are agents of it: a reform movement alters law and custom within the system, a revolutionary movement replaces the system itself. But they are also products of change — industrialisation, urbanisation, new communications and rising expectations create the grievances and the networks that make movements possible. Not every movement pushes change forward: revivalist movements seek to restore a lost order and counter-movements mobilise to defend the status quo, so a movement can be a brake on change as much as an engine of it. David Aberle sorted movements on two axes — the locus of change (the individual or the whole society) and its amount (partial or total) — giving alternative, redemptive, reformative and transformative movements.

3. Structural-functional and Marxist theories

The structural-functional approach treats a movement as a symptom of strain in a social system that is normally in equilibrium. When rapid change outruns the system’s capacity to integrate people, norms weaken (Durkheim’s anomie) and the tension is expressed as collective behaviour. Neil Smelser’s value-added theory (1962) is the classic statement: six conditions must combine in sequence — structural conduciveness, structural strain, a generalised belief naming the trouble, a precipitating event, mobilisation of participants, and the operation of social control. A related strand explains revolt by relative deprivation, a felt gap between what people expect and what they get (Ted Gurr), a gap that can widen sharply when a spell of rising fortunes is suddenly reversed (James Davies’s J-curve).

The Marxist account rejects the picture of an equilibrium merely disturbed by strain. Movements, above all the labour movement, express the structural conflict of classes built into the capitalist mode of production. The exploitation of wage labour and the extraction of surplus value generate objective class interests; as workers move from a class-in-itself (a mere economic category) to a class-for-itself (conscious and organised), spontaneous protest can become a revolutionary movement aimed not at reform but at transforming the relations of production. Ideology here is class consciousness pitted against the ruling ideas of the ruling class. Antonio Gramsci added that the dominant class rules partly by hegemony — consent won in civil society — so a counter-hegemonic movement must contest ideas and culture, not the state alone.

🎯 Why the two accounts disagree
The functionalist sees a movement as a breakdown to be re-integrated and asks what strain produced it; the Marxist sees it as the rational pursuit of real class interests and asks whose interests it serves. The first tends to treat protest as abnormal, the second as the normal motor of history.

4. Resource mobilization and new social movements

By the 1970s the strain theories looked inadequate: grievances are more or less constant, yet movements rise and fall, so grievance alone cannot explain when a movement appears. Resource mobilization theory, stated by John McCarthy and Mayer Zald (1977), shifts the question from why people are aggrieved to how they organise. Movements are made less by discontent than by the resources — money, labour, time, skills, leadership, media access, legitimacy — that can be mobilised, and by the social movement organisations (SMOs) that gather and deploy them. Participants are treated as rational actors, so outside support, professional organisers and the free-rider problem (Mancur Olson’s puzzle of why a rational individual would pay toward a collective good others get free) become central. A later strand, political process theory (Charles Tilly, Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow), adds the political opportunity structure: a movement grows when the wider political system opens openings for it.

New social movements (NSM) theory arose in Europe to explain the movements that spread after the 1960s — ecological, feminist, peace, student and civil-rights movements — which did not fit the class-and-redistribution mould. For Alain Touraine, the central conflict of post-industrial (programmed) society is no longer over the ownership of production but over historicity, a society’s capacity to produce itself, and the new movements are the key actors contesting it. Alberto Melucci shifted attention to collective identity: in complex societies movements work less to seize the state than to produce new meanings, codes and identities in everyday life, so their networks and symbolic challenges matter as much as their visible protests. The hallmarks writers give NSMs are a concern with identity, culture, quality of life and autonomy rather than wages; a base in the new middle class rather than a single class; loose, participatory, network forms rather than bureaucratic parties; and action in civil society rather than the capture of state power.

⚠️ Different questions, not rival answers
Resource mobilization asks how a movement organises; new social movement theory asks what it is now about. The common slip is to credit resource mobilization theory with the turn to identity and culture — that is the new social movements’ contribution — or to treat new social movements as merely a European relabelling of resource mobilization.

5. Social movements in India: basis, leadership, ideology, action

Indian movements are read through four questions — their social basis (who takes part), their leadership, their ideology and their actions (the repertoire they use). The five the syllabus names cut across the colonial and post-colonial periods.

The five movements at a glance
MovementSocial basis and leadershipIdeologyCharacteristic actions
PeasantTenants, sharecroppers and small cultivators; early revolts local, later led by the Kisan Sabhas and, from the late 1970s, by farmers’ unionsFrom anti-landlord and anti-colonial demands to the post-Green-Revolution agenda of prices and the rural–urban divideIndigo Revolt (1859–60), Champaran (1917), Bardoli (1928), Tebhaga (1946), Telangana (1946–51); later the BKU and Shetkari Sanghatana
LabourIndustrial wage workers in mills, mines and factories; trade-union leaders, often linked to nationalist and left partiesTrade unionism and, in its left wing, class struggle and socialismUnionisation, strikes and collective bargaining; the AITUC (1920) and later federations
DalitFormerly untouchable castes; Jotirao Phule and B.R. Ambedkar, later the Dalit PanthersAnnihilation of caste, self-respect, equality and conversion away from caste HinduismSatyashodhak Samaj (1873), Mahad Satyagraha (1927), the 1956 conversion to Buddhism, Panther militancy (1972)
Women’sMiddle-class reformers first, then a broad autonomous movement; reformers, the AIWC (1927), the 1970s–80s groupsFrom social reform (sati, widow remarriage, education) to rights, equality, autonomy and the question of violence and the bodyLegal reform, the anti-dowry and anti-rape campaigns, SEWA’s organising of poor women
EnvironmentalForest and river communities, often women and adivasis; Bahuguna, Bhatt, Patkar and othersLivelihood and ecology set against displacing ‘development’; the environmentalism of the poorChipko (1973), Appiko (1983), the Narmada Bachao Andolan (from the mid-1980s)

Two long debates run through these. The first is over the peasantry: whether India’s agrarian struggles are best read, with A.R. Desai’s Marxist approach, as class conflict — D.N. Dhanagare’s ‘Peasant Movements in India, 1920–1950’ is the standard sociological survey of these struggles — against readings that give caste and community equal weight. The second is over ecology: Ramachandra Guha, with Joan Martínez-Alier, argues that Indian environmentalism is largely an ‘environmentalism of the poor’, a defence of livelihood by those a large project would dispossess, rather than the wilderness-protection concern of the affluent West.

ℹ️ Use the four lenses together
The same event reads differently by social basis: Chipko is at once an environmental, a women’s and a livelihood movement, and the Dalit and women’s movements both began as elite-led reform and later turned to autonomous, bottom-up assertion. Basis, leadership, ideology and action are meant to be used together, not to sort a movement into a single box.

6. Movements, civil society, globalization and citizenship

A movement acts in the space between the state and the individual that is called civil society — the sphere of voluntary associations, unions, NGOs, the press and public debate. Its relationship with the state is ambivalent: movements press demands on the state, are repressed or accommodated by it, and may be partly absorbed into it when their leaders enter government or their cause becomes law. Following Gramsci, civil society is the terrain on which hegemony is both built and contested; following Habermas’s idea of the public sphere, movements are how a healthy civil society renews public debate and checks the state and the market.

Globalization has changed both the targets and the tools of movements, and the debate over it runs two ways. On one side, global trade rules, multinational capital and international agencies become new adversaries beyond the reach of any single state, so movements scale up into transnational networks — the alter-globalization movement’s slogan that ‘another world is possible’, global campaigns on debt, climate and human rights, helped by cheap communication and social media. On the other, critics note that globalization can fragment older class solidarities, that well-funded international NGOs may crowd out or tame grassroots struggles (‘NGO-isation’), and that a transnational campaign can be disconnected from the people it claims to speak for.

Movements are also struggles over citizenship — who belongs to the political community and what membership entitles them to. T.H. Marshall traced an expanding citizenship in three instalments: civil rights (liberty, property, justice), political rights (the vote and office) and social rights (welfare, education, security), each won in turn. Many movements are, in effect, demands to extend this citizenship — the labour movement for social rights, the Dalit and women’s movements for the substance of the civil and political equality that formal law promised but society withheld. Globalization and migration have reopened the question, raising claims to cultural and group-differentiated rights and to the rights of those who live and work across borders, so citizenship is contested terrain rather than a settled status.

Key takeaways

  • A social movement is sustained, organised collective action, carried by an ideology and a collective identity, to promote or resist change largely outside institutional channels — which distinguishes it from a crowd, a fad or a pressure group.
  • The types run reform, rebellion, revival, revolution, insurrection and counter-movement. Movements both drive change and (revivalist, counter) resist it, and are themselves products of change; Aberle sorts them by locus (individual or society) and amount (partial or total).
  • Structural-functional theory sees movements as responses to strain and anomie (Smelser’s six-step value-added model; relative deprivation, Gurr); Marxist theory sees them as class conflict over surplus value, from class-in-itself to class-for-itself, with Gramsci’s hegemony contested in civil society.
  • Resource mobilization theory (McCarthy and Zald) explains how movements organise resources through SMOs run by rational actors, with the free-rider problem and political opportunity central; new social movements theory (Touraine’s historicity, Melucci’s collective identity) explains identity-, culture- and autonomy-based movements of post-industrial society.
  • India’s peasant, labour, Dalit, women’s and environmental movements are read by social basis, leadership, ideology and action — from the Indigo Revolt, AITUC, Phule and Ambedkar and nineteenth-century reform to Chipko and the Narmada Bachao Andolan — and Guha (with Martínez-Alier) reads Indian environmentalism as largely an ‘environmentalism of the poor’.
  • Movements act in civil society between state and individual (Gramsci; Habermas’s public sphere); globalization scales them up into transnational networks but can fragment and ‘NGO-ise’ them; and many are struggles to extend Marshall’s civil, political and social citizenship.

Practice questions (16)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

  1. Which single feature most clearly separates a social movement from a passing fashion or a one-off riot?

    1. A large number of people are involved at the same moment in a public place
    2. Sustained and organised collective action carried by a shared ideology over time
    3. A strong emotional reaction shared by everyone who happens to be present
    4. The deliberate use of force against both property and the public authorities during the event
    Show answer

    Answer: B — Sustained and organised collective action carried by a shared ideology over time

    A movement has continuity, organisation and an ideology, which a riot, a panic or a fashion lacks even when many people take part. Sheer numbers, shared emotion and the use of force can all occur in a crowd that is not a movement at all, so none of them is the defining mark.

  2. A chamber of commerce lobbies ministers through formal consultations to keep an existing tax concession for its member firms. On the standard sociological distinction, why is this a pressure group rather than a social movement?

    1. It has fewer members than a social movement would normally need to be effective
    2. It represents businesses, and social movements can only be formed by the poor
    3. It works within institutional channels to defend an existing interest rather than to change the social order
    4. It uses only peaceful and lawful methods, whereas a social movement is obliged to rely on disruptive protest
    Show answer

    Answer: C — It works within institutional channels to defend an existing interest rather than to change the social order

    A pressure group operates inside routine institutional politics to protect or advance a settled interest; a movement is change-oriented and works substantially outside such channels. Numbers, the class of the members and whether the methods are peaceful or disruptive do not draw the line — movements can be large or small, rich or poor, peaceful or disruptive.

  3. A movement that calls on people to return to a purified version of an older tradition believed to have been lost is best classified as which type?

    1. Revolutionary, because it wants to transform the whole social order at once
    2. Reform, because it seeks only a small adjustment within the current rules
    3. Insurrection, because it plans an armed uprising against the government
    4. Revival, because it seeks a return to a past way of life felt to be lost
    Show answer

    Answer: D — Revival, because it seeks a return to a past way of life felt to be lost

    A revival or revitalisation movement looks backward, seeking to restore or purify a tradition held to have decayed. A revolution seeks total forward transformation, a reform a limited change within the system, and an insurrection is an armed uprising — none of which captures a return to the past.

  4. After a long campaign wins a law reserving seats in local councils for women, an organised group forms specifically to agitate for the repeal of that reservation. This second group is an example of a:

    1. Counter-movement, because it mobilises to oppose and reverse what an earlier movement won
    2. Revival movement, because it wishes to restore a tradition from the distant past
    3. Revolutionary movement, because it wants to overthrow the entire political order
    4. Reform movement, because it seeks a gradual and progressive improvement in the existing law through accepted means
    Show answer

    Answer: A — Counter-movement, because it mobilises to oppose and reverse what an earlier movement won

    A counter-movement arises in direct response to another movement, to resist or undo the change it achieved. It is defined by its opposition to a prior movement, not by a wish to restore an ancient tradition (revival), to overthrow the order (revolution) or to improve the law (reform).

  5. Two episodes are described. In the first, a region’s cultivators take up arms and seize local administrative offices and police posts to drive out an administration, but they announce no plan to remake the wider social or economic order. In the second, an organised movement topples the government and abolishes the landholding class and the property relations on which it rested. On the standard typology, how are the two best labelled?

    1. The first a reform movement and the second a counter-movement
    2. The first an insurrection and the second a revolution
    3. The first a revolution and the second an insurrection
    4. Both are revivals, since each looks back to an older order
    Show answer

    Answer: B — The first an insurrection and the second a revolution

    The first is an armed, localised uprising against authority with no programme to transform the whole order — an insurrection. The second achieves a fundamental transformation of the political order and its underlying property relations — a revolution. The depth of structural change is the discriminator: a revolution remakes the order, an insurrection seizes power without necessarily doing so.

  6. Which of the following statements about the relationship between social movements and social change are correct?

    1. Movements can be products of change as well as agents of it, since industrialisation and new communications create the grievances and networks that make them possible
    2. Every social movement by definition promotes change, so no movement can defend the status quo or seek to restore an earlier order
    3. Revivalist and counter-movements can act as a brake on change rather than as an engine of it
    4. Aberle distinguished movements by the locus of the change sought (the individual or the whole society) and its amount (partial or total)
    Show answer

    Answer: A — Movements can be products of change as well as agents of it, since industrialisation and new communications create the grievances and networks that make them possible; C — Revivalist and counter-movements can act as a brake on change rather than as an engine of it; D — Aberle distinguished movements by the locus of the change sought (the individual or the whole society) and its amount (partial or total)

    Movements are both products and agents of change; revivalist and counter-movements can resist change; and Aberle’s scheme uses the two axes of locus and amount. The claim that every movement promotes change is false: counter-movements and revivalist movements mobilise precisely to defend the status quo or restore the past.

  7. Resource mobilization theory, which explains movements by the resources and organisations they can marshal rather than by grievance alone, is most closely associated with which authors?

    1. Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci
    2. John McCarthy and Mayer Zald
    3. Neil Smelser and Ted Gurr
    4. Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci
    Show answer

    Answer: B — John McCarthy and Mayer Zald

    Resource mobilization theory was set out by McCarthy and Zald. Touraine and Melucci are the theorists of new social movements; Smelser and Gurr belong to the strain and relative-deprivation tradition; and Marx and Gramsci to the Marxist account.

  8. A study argues that a wave of protest broke out because rapid industrial change weakened established norms and produced a shared sense that something had gone wrong, which a precipitating incident then ignited. Which theoretical tradition does this explanation belong to?

    1. Resource mobilization theory, which centres on organisations and resources
    2. New social movements theory, which centres on identity and culture
    3. The structural-functional strain tradition, as in Smelser’s value-added model
    4. Political process theory, which centres on the political opportunity structure
    Show answer

    Answer: C — The structural-functional strain tradition, as in Smelser’s value-added model

    Weakened norms (anomie), structural strain, a generalised belief and a precipitating event are the vocabulary of the structural-functional strain tradition, of which Smelser’s value-added model is the classic form. Resource mobilization and political process theory would instead point to resources, organisations and opportunities; new social movement theory to identity and culture.

  9. Critics of the strain theories pointed out that grievances in a society are fairly constant, yet movements clearly rise in some periods and fade in others. Which theoretical move was made in direct response to this specific objection?

    1. Shifting the question from why people are aggrieved to how they mobilise resources, as in resource mobilization theory
    2. Explaining movements entirely by the level of anomie and normative breakdown present in the society at a given moment
    3. Arguing that movements are simply the expression of a class-in-itself becoming a conscious and organised class-for-itself
    4. Treating every movement as a backward-looking attempt to restore a lost tradition or an older social order
    Show answer

    Answer: A — Shifting the question from why people are aggrieved to how they mobilise resources, as in resource mobilization theory

    If grievance is roughly constant it cannot explain timing, so resource mobilization theory moved the question to how resources and organisations are assembled — which does vary over time and can account for a movement’s rise and fall. Appealing to anomie is the very strain account under attack; the class-formation and revival answers address different questions entirely.

  10. In resource mobilization theory, treating participants as rational actors makes a certain difficulty central to explaining why people join at all. Which difficulty, and why does it arise?

    1. The problem of anomie, because rational actors lose their shared norms and become disoriented when society changes quickly
    2. The free-rider problem, because a rational individual can enjoy a collective good won by a movement without bearing the cost of joining
    3. The problem of false consciousness, because rational actors are blinded to their real interests by the ruling ideology
    4. The problem of historicity, because rational actors lack the capacity to produce and direct their own society
    Show answer

    Answer: B — The free-rider problem, because a rational individual can enjoy a collective good won by a movement without bearing the cost of joining

    If a movement’s success yields a collective good that non-participants also enjoy, a purely rational individual is tempted to let others bear the cost — the free-rider problem (Olson). This is why resource mobilization theory stresses selective incentives, organisation and outside support. Anomie and false consciousness belong to other traditions, and historicity is Touraine’s concept, not a problem of rational action.

  11. According to the theorists of new social movements, which features typically characterise such movements?

    1. A concern with identity, culture, autonomy and quality of life rather than only with wages and redistribution
    2. A base in the new middle class and other cross-class constituencies rather than in a single economic class
    3. A strict bureaucratic party structure with paid officials, aimed at capturing control of the state
    4. Loose, participatory network forms and action located mainly in civil society
    Show answer

    Answer: A — A concern with identity, culture, autonomy and quality of life rather than only with wages and redistribution; B — A base in the new middle class and other cross-class constituencies rather than in a single economic class; D — Loose, participatory network forms and action located mainly in civil society

    New social movements are described by their theorists (Touraine, Melucci and others) as identity- and culture-oriented, based in the new middle class, loosely networked and acting in civil society. A tight bureaucratic party aimed at seizing the state is the old, class-based model that NSM theory was framed against, so it is the odd one out.

  12. The Satyashodhak Samaj founded in 1873 and the later demand for the annihilation of caste and self-respect are landmarks of which movement in India?

    1. The labour movement
    2. The environmental movement
    3. The Dalit movement
    4. The peasant movement
    Show answer

    Answer: C — The Dalit movement

    Jotirao Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) and, later, Ambedkar’s call for the annihilation of caste and for self-respect are central to the Dalit movement. The labour, environmental and peasant movements have their own distinct lineages — trade unions, forest and river struggles, and agrarian revolts respectively.

  13. Ramachandra Guha, writing with Joan Martínez-Alier, describes much of environmentalism in India as an ‘environmentalism of the poor’. On their reading, what chiefly drives movements such as Chipko and the Narmada Bachao Andolan?

    1. A defence of the livelihoods and resources of communities that a large project would dispossess
    2. A desire of affluent city-dwellers to set aside pristine wilderness for recreation
    3. A revivalist wish to restore an ancient religious relationship with nature for its own sake
    4. A purely scientific concern with global biodiversity data gathered by expert agencies
    Show answer

    Answer: A — A defence of the livelihoods and resources of communities that a large project would dispossess

    Their point is that Indian environmental struggles are typically waged by forest, hill and river communities defending the livelihood and resources that displacing projects threaten — an environmentalism of the poor, which they contrast with the wilderness-protection, recreation-centred environmentalism of the affluent West.

  14. Which of the following pairings of an Indian movement with one of its features are correct?

    1. The Tebhaga movement (1946) was a sharecroppers’ and peasants’ struggle in Bengal
    2. The AITUC, founded in 1920, belongs to the Indian labour movement
    3. The Dalit Panthers, formed in 1972, were a militant assertion within the Dalit movement
    4. SEWA was founded to organise large industrial factory owners into an employers’ federation
    Show answer

    Answer: A — The Tebhaga movement (1946) was a sharecroppers’ and peasants’ struggle in Bengal; B — The AITUC, founded in 1920, belongs to the Indian labour movement; C — The Dalit Panthers, formed in 1972, were a militant assertion within the Dalit movement

    Tebhaga (1946) was a Bengal sharecropper and peasant struggle, the AITUC (1920) is a landmark of the labour movement, and the Dalit Panthers (1972) were a militant turn in the Dalit movement. The SEWA pairing is false: SEWA organises poor self-employed and informal women workers, not factory owners.

  15. In T.H. Marshall’s account of the development of citizenship, which three elements unfold, in his ordering, over successive periods?

    1. National, regional and local rights
    2. Economic, cultural and environmental rights
    3. Legal, religious and linguistic rights
    4. Civil, political and social rights
    Show answer

    Answer: D — Civil, political and social rights

    Marshall traced citizenship as civil rights (liberty, property, justice), then political rights (the vote and office), then social rights (welfare, education, security), each consolidated in a successive period. The other triads are not his scheme, though later writers have argued for adding cultural and group-differentiated rights.

  16. A commentator claims that globalization has had opposite effects on social movements at the same time. Which statement best captures this two-sided assessment?

    1. It has let movements scale up into transnational networks, yet also fragments older class solidarities and can let funded NGOs crowd out grassroots struggles
    2. It has uniformly strengthened every single social movement in every country, bringing clear gains to all of them and creating no significant drawbacks whatsoever for any of them
    3. It has brought every social movement to an end by removing all sources of grievance from contemporary society
    4. It has confined all movements strictly within national borders and severed every cross-border link between them
    Show answer

    Answer: A — It has let movements scale up into transnational networks, yet also fragments older class solidarities and can let funded NGOs crowd out grassroots struggles

    A genuinely two-sided view notes both the gain — transnational networks and global campaigns — and the loss — fragmented class solidarities and the risk of NGO-isation. The other options are one-sided or simply false: globalization neither removes all grievances nor seals movements inside national borders, and it does not benefit every movement without cost.