Scholars know little about why new activist interests emerge

Evidence

We may know ‘a great deal about the conditions in which people mobilize on behalf of long-standing interests, but we still know relatively little about why certain areas of social life-race relations, say, or nuclear policy, or university curricula-suddenly generate new or newly conflicting interests’. We also ‘know very little about where activists’ beliefs about what is instrumental come from and how those beliefs eliminate options as well as opening them up’. Indeed, we have little insight into ‘what persuades people to participate in collective action before movement organizations with strategic recruiting pitches have been established’. Like countless others, no doubt, I sometimes engage in collective action, volunteering my time and strengthening my commitments, pursuing particular vectors that may be explored by way of statistics and other instruments of measure. One would have to expect that some shared elements of background (race, class, gender and religion, education and profession too) are likely to be found in common among my fellow anti-antisemites, but these would not seriously account, not in a satisfactory and reflective manner, for the nature of the struggle I have joined. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1197

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to social movement theory and collective-action puzzles familiar from Olson and Milgrom’s collective action work.
• QUESTION: The author quotes claims about gaps in movement scholarship but doesn’t resolve them—what actually explains sudden new activist interests?