1 A snap-shot of movements. Assessing social movement diversity through cam- paign analysis? Simon Teune (Social Science Research Center Berlin) Paper prepared for the workshop “Campaign analysis in a globalizing world”, Evangelische Akademie Tutzing, 27-29 April 2007 Introduction: The diversity of social movements The notion “social movement” suggests unity where there is a very complex set of actors and actions. The tacit assumption of “a movement” is considered problematic by most scholars using the term. Social movements bring together activists with very different political and strategic preferences that are pre-structured by local, national, and transnational trajectories. According to perceived commonalities these actors collaborate in different networks that are partly coordinating for common mobilisations. If these episodes of mobilisation are sustained, they are an evidence to assume a social movement. Obviously, a movement is not only characterised by unity as visible in joint mobilisations but also by the opposite: differentiation. The distinction between a radical and a moderate movement sector is only the most evident. Differences of size, territorial range, organisational profile or access to resources do also play a role when political groups dissociate from a movement sector or align with another. For good reasons, namely to reduce complexity, these differences are usually downplayed when social movements are referred to in scientific discourse. When scholars use the term “social movement”, two kinds of approaches to this phenome- non prevail. Assertions about a movement either go back to the fine-grained analy- sis of a few organisations allegedly representative of it or they have a very general character. The impact of a movement or its interactions with adversaries, audiences and the state, for instance, are commonly seen with a bird’s eye view. By contrast, contributions that refer to a movement with the explicit aim to portray its diversity and explain the differences between actors are hard to find. Without putting the aforementioned approaches to understand a social movement into question, I argue that a cross section of a social movement at a given point of time deepens our un- derstanding of the dynamics of alliance and delineation within a movement, it re- veals the variety of motives for political engagement, and it allows for a differentia- tion of concepts of the political among the activists. It goes without saying that so- cial movement research cannot include the full spectre of actors and perspectives involved in a movement, but taking the most visible part of a movement for the movement as such distorts the lens of scientific analysis. Social movement scholars who resign themselves to such a perspective risk reproducing the public image of a movement, paying attention to those actors that are already considered most impor- tant and marginalising others. In this paper, I will discuss the suitability of campaign analysis for grasping the diversity of social movements. The question raised is: Are campaigns a reason- able unit of analysis if the aim is to provide a snapshot that maps the breadth of a given social movement and the diversity of actors that are involved? To answer this question, I will refer to the concept of a movement campaign and suggest some amendments of too strict a definition. Finally, I will refer to my PhD project to give an example of how a campaign analysis might be designed to understand the diver- sity of the global justice movement.