Evaluating Social Movement Impacts: Comparative Lessons from the Labor Movement in Turkey

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Some social movements bring in quick, radical political and social changes while others get incorporated into existing systems or subjected to harsh repression. This book examines why social movements elicit different policy responses and their varying impact on the societies in which they occur. It also seeks to understand why seemingly inconsequential movements can nonetheless have enduring effects. These issues are explored through the comparative historical analysis of four labor movements, in the UK and the U.S. in the late 1800s -early 1900s, in Japan from 1945 to 1960, and in Turkey during the mid to late 1900s, which is the book's primary case study. Turkey's labor movement, although often seen as a failure, greatly influenced state-society relations and contemporary Turkish politics. This significant study offers a new framework of analysis by focusing on social movement impacts rather than successes or failures. This leads to having to reconsider the enduring effects of repressed or failed movements. By doing so, it will help researchers study the likely impact of social movements in today's politics.

Reviews

The book is highly readable and insightful indeed, a must-read and highly recommended for scholars, graduates and those interested in social and labour movements, as well as those interested in Turkish political history. -- Nikos Christofis, Leiden University * Political Studies Review Volume 13, Issue 2 *
An elegant and extremely important contribution to the study of social movements and why they matter, even when they appear to fail. Mello deftly links theories on labor activism, state-society relations, and collective identity to offer us an original, startlingly compelling, and very widely applicable approach to evaluating movement impacts. -- Nicole F. Watts, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, San Francisco State University, US, and co-editor (with Elise Massicard) of Breaking Up the Party: Negotiating Political Power in Turkey (2012)
Brian Mello has crafted an original study that is accessible and informative as well as provocative. He uses the comparative histories of labor movements to understand how national political identities evolve, and ingeniously compares two cases of labor history that already well-known to Western scholars with two cases with which most Western scholars are fairly ignorant. The result is a refreshing comparative social-movement study that exposes the reader to new information while exploring the on-going debate about when and how movements matter. -- Cyrus Zirakzadeh, Professor of Political Science, University of Connecticut, US, and author of Social Movements in Politics (2006)
In the best tradition of comparative analysis, Dr. Mellos book examines several labor movements and their impacts on different political systems. In all his case studies, the author convincingly demonstrates the very significant impact that even unsuccessful labor movements had in shaping politics and society in their respective contexts. In Turkey, for example, observers generally view the labor movement as a failurebut Dr. Mello shows how the very struggles that Turkish labor movements evoked ended up shaping social discourse and politics for decades to come. Even Kurdish nationalism in Turkey has its roots in the Turkish labor movement and the states response to the movement. Through analytical concepts such as 'alternative collective subjectivities,' Dr. Mello shows us how and why this occurred, in perceptive prose that I think readers will greatly appreciate. -- David Romano, Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics, Missouri State University, and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement.

Author Bio

Brian Mello is Associate Professor of Political Science at Muhlenberg College, USA. His research focuses primarily on politics in the Middle East. He has published articles that focus on self-determination as a human right in the journal Social Theory and Practice and on the emergence of radical labor activism in Turkey in the journal Social Movement Studies