Beyond social movements: thoughts on the 2010’s Brazilian literature

Abstract

This paper seeks to develop a critical analysis of the Brazilian literature on social movements produced during the last decade. To achieve this objective, we have systematically revised the articles presented at the research committee (RC) dedicated to this issue at the Annual Meetings of Anpocs between 2014 and 2018. The results suggest that, by critically dialoguing with the political process tradition, the papers presented at this RC have constructed and adapted conceptual and theoretical models that substantiated innovative and movement transversal analysis. However, the articles tended to adopt a “movement-centric” bias in their object definitions and the promise of a “relational approach” has been mostly limited to the analysis of the relations between social movements and political institutions. To overcome this gap, we argue that the effective incorporation of the analytical turn from social movements to episodes of contentions proposed by the contentious politics approach is beneficial for the Brazilian social movement field of study, since it enables our analysis to move beyond social movements.