The Importance of Micro-level Effects on Social Movement Outcomes

Abstract

Social movement scholarship has found that social movement organizations (SMOs) rarely have much effect on issues related to war and the military. This article examines how one Israeli women’s human rights organization, MachsomWatch (MW), succeeded at providing direct aid to Palestinians, intervening with the military and established media standing. This article explains that MW was most successful when it maintained a nonthreatening insider disposition that drew on distinctly particularistic cultural norms in interactions with the soldiers in ways that emphasized their commonality with the soldiers due to their shared ethnic, religious, and national origins. This analysis suggests that it is productive for movement scholars to think of movement targets as agentic actors who are networked together in ways that may sometimes be permeable to certain groups of activists. This article argues that thinking of both political opportunity structures and targets at the micro level may provide significant insight into understanding social movement outcomes.