The June protests and the purposeful alternative: a theoretical argument

Abstract

This piece presents a new typology to make sense of social movements, relying on the motivesbehind the struggle. From this perspective, we distinguish between groups that mobilizein reaction to an exogenous event, and those presenting purposeful alternatives. We furtherdevelop the notion of purposeful alternatives, which offers a means of addressing some recurrentdeficiencies of what is called the political-process literature on contentious politics: thecapacity to predict, the differentiation of groups and the objective definition of interests. Weargue that, despite its considerable influence, especially in the English-speaking world, politicalprocess theory is insufficient and incapable of accounting for social phenomena such as theJune 2013 protests in Brazil, in which heterogeneous actors mobilized around a proposal forinstitutional transformation, the “free pass.”