Abstract
This edited volume on social movements in Central and Eastern Europe successfully achieves three goals. First, it updates the empirical scholarship on post-communist mobilization. Several case studies, such as Kerstin Jacobsson’s on Polish animal-rights activists, trace contentious action from state socialism up to recent years, and thus go beyond the highly mobilized era of the early 1990s. Second, the book offers a sophisticated critical take on the common perspective that donor dependence has driven the region’s social movement groups to professionalization and disconnected them from their local constituencies. The varied repertoires of actions depicted in the case studies effectively repudiate the assumed dichotomy between activism and professional advocacy/service provision. Moreover, even if some movement groups, such as Czech gay-rights activists (Conor O’Dwyer), tended to opt for less provocative strategies, they did so to work within the state mechanism and not in order to please foreign donors, the supposed main culprits in the NGO-ization thesis. Third, the book challenges the perspective emphasizing the comparative weakness of post-communist civil society by employing a broad definition of contentious action and focusing on strategies ranging from litigation to street protests. Several chapters document how active civic groups successfully mobilize for and against a range of issues such as infilling in Moscow (Aleh Ivanou) and the re-establishment of a state fund system for Czech single mothers (Renata E. Hryciuk and Elżbieta Korolczuk).
A strength of Beyond NGO-ization is that its core analytical themes, expertly argued by the editors (NGO-ization, civil society weakness/strength, and communist legacies), consistently frame each empirical study, while the chapter authors skillfully engage with distinct social movement research streams that focus on framing (e.g., adapting to the discourse of neoliberalism), political opportunity structures (e.g., elections and policy mechanisms), and resource mobilization (e.g., tax donations and cultural resources). Therefore, the volume will be stimulating reading even for students of social movements without an interest in Eastern Europe. For instance, Katalin Fábián’s study on the Hungarian home-birth movement contributes to the scholarship on transnational advocacy networks by pointing to a modified boomerang effect. Several chapters also discuss transactional activism, a form of activism focused on networking that is distinctive to the region but still potentially illuminating for generalist social movement scholars. They may also find those case studies intriguing that discuss less frequently studied subjects such as conservative movements (Russian anti-immigrant groups by Nikolay Zakharov and non-feminist women’s organizations by Steven Saxonberg) and mothers as activists (Fábián, Hryciuk and Korolczuk). Researchers of post-communist nonprofit organizations will also gain new insights on the cultural, legal, and financial environment of nonprofits, the varieties of their organizational structures, and the unique nature of some government-nonprofit relationships.
While the book discusses a surprising range of movement tactics, it covers a more limited array of issues, countries, and research methods, which may be considered either a strength or a weakness. A seemingly disproportionate share of the ten empirical chapters (three) discuss mothering and mothers’ rights in Hungary (Fábián and Saxonberg), Poland (Hryciuk and Korolczuk), and the Czech Republic (Saxonberg). This allows the reader to assess comparatively the impact of domestic opportunity structures and dominant discourses. However, only one of these studies linked its analysis to another chapter and thus encouraged a cross-case comparison. While class, gender, ethnicity, and race were all represented in the selected cases, a chapter on the post-communist Occupy movements and their take on challenging global capitalism, corporations, and inequality would have been a fascinating addition.
The ten chapters cover seven of the twenty-two Central and Eastern European countries (Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine), but some of the case studies are comparative and thus roughly a third of the volume focuses on the Czech Republic, leaving the Baltic states unrepresented. An advantage of this editorial strategy is that it allows a deeper insight into how the political system, for instance, in Russia, shapes and is shaped by social movements employing strikingly different tactics. The case of a small neighborhood group with a penchant for internal democracy and largely peaceful tactics in Moscow (Ivanou) set in contrast with the city’s violent riots against labor migrants and their rationalization (Zakharov) left me deliciously baffled about the state of Russian civil society. It was especially interesting to read a case of uncivil society and equally enthralling to learn about social movement failures among several analyses of movement effectiveness. Adam Fagan and Indraneel Sircar explain the challenge of mobilizing around the post-materialist issue of river basin management in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a country organized along ethnic-nationalist lines. Their case study and Philipp Kuntz’s study of protest failure in Serbia and Ukraine were also distinctive because they framed their analysis in comparison to other Eastern European countries as opposed to a Western ideal.
Finally, most chapters in the volume use the case study methodology and manage to offer a solid description of the admirably rich data they drew on. When interviews are quoted, they enhance the analysis and the cross-cultural palette of the cases. Ondřej Císař is the only one to deviate from this mold, but as editors Jacobsson and Saxonberg point out, his protest event analysis of five modes of political activism corroborates the volume’s core argument that the tactics employed by Central and Eastern European social movement groups range widely from membership-based participation to radical activism. Thus civil society is neither homogeneously weak, nor are all social movements pacified into nonprofits in Central and Eastern Europe. This book, one of the finest editorial products, will be of particular appeal to students of nonprofits, social movements, and social change.