Institutional dialogue can function as a tool to co-opt and defuse social movements.

Evidence

The Movimento Passe Livre knew that Haddad and the Workers’ Party (PT) had developed a robust set of mechanisms for interacting with social movements. Haddad would want a dialogue to incorporate, co-opt, and converse—or, as Vegetable put it, to “put us in meetings, that would lead to a series of meetings, that would create a committee, that would discuss future committees, and then eventually create an agenda based on future negotiations.” They chose to deny that possibility and turn their backs on City Hall. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 360

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the established literature on co-optation of protest movements and prefigurative strategy debates. — connects to: Dialogue is inherently a political act with world-making purpose; Discourses exercise constitutive power that constrains political decisions and shapes policy paths. — Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence:…, 976; Dialogic interactions create open, critical, constructive spaces for negotiating differing ideas toward consensus — ‘Dialogic scaffolding’: Enhancing learning and understanding in collaborative contexts

Broader Connections

• Dialogue is inherently a political act with world-making purpose #expands (0.78)
• Discourses exercise constitutive power that constrains political decisions and shapes policy paths. #expands (0.72) — Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence, 976