Understanding Social Movements: How Collective Action Drives Systemic Change
060. What Makes a Movement? The Deeper Forces Behind Real Social Change
When we talk about creating social change, it’s easy to focus on specific campaigns, policies, or organisations. These are, of course, vital components of any change-making effort, yet they rarely tell the whole story. Real transformation—the kind that reshapes societies, cultures, and power structures—does not emerge from a single project or piece of legislation. It arises when people organise collectively, connect their efforts, and create an enduring force that transcends individual actions. That force is what we call a social movement.
Defining Social Movements
A social movement is more than a campaign or a protest. It is a collective effort of people who share a vision for change, often emerging from shared experiences of injustice or exclusion. Movements are driven from within communities rather than imposed from outside; they are led by those most affected by the issues they seek to address.
Historical examples make this clear. The Civil Rights Movement in the United States was led by Black organisers and activists demanding racial justice. The #MeToo movement was spearheaded by women with lived experience of sexual violence. Both illustrate a crucial principle—movements draw their legitimacy and power from those at the centre of the struggle.
At their heart, movements are about power. They seek not only to challenge visible forms of domination—governments, laws, corporations—but also to transform the invisible cultural and psychological forces that normalise inequality. This dual focus distinguishes movements from campaigns. A campaign targets a specific policy or institution; a movement aims to shift the moral, cultural, and relational foundations of society.
Movements, Campaigns, and Ecosystems of Change
Movements can be thought of as the undercurrent that carries campaigns forward. Campaigns may win specific victories—a new law, a corporate commitment, or an institutional reform—but movements sustain the moral and cultural energy that makes such victories possible.
In that sense, movements are living systems: diverse, decentralised, and adaptive. Within any given movement, there are organisers, educators, storytellers, artists, researchers, and citizens, each playing distinct but interdependent roles. Together, these actors form a movement ecology—a dynamic ecosystem that learns, experiments, and evolves.
How Movements Create Deep Change
Movements work on multiple levels to drive transformation. Four principles, in particular, define how they operate:
Shifting worldviews: Movements reframe what people believe is normal or possible, expanding our moral imagination. The disability rights movement, for example, did more than secure legislative protections; it fundamentally reshaped how society understands ability, access, and inclusion.
Redistributing power: Movements are grassroots by nature. They amplify the voices of those historically marginalised and show that power grows through collective action.
Building alternatives: While resistance to harm is essential, lasting change requires creation. Movements build new models of governance, community, and economy that demonstrate another way of living.
Influencing institutions: Over time, movements push governments, businesses, and cultural institutions to adopt new norms. Policy change often codifies the cultural shifts that movements initiate.
Movements as Complex Systems
Unlike organisations, which often operate within structured hierarchies, movements are complex and emergent. Their progress is rarely linear. Small actions can trigger large-scale change once conditions align—a reminder that social transformation is often unpredictable.
Relationships form the core of this complexity. Movements endure because of trust, belonging, and solidarity, not because of rigid procedures or strategic plans. Their decentralised nature—with leadership distributed across communities and contexts—makes them resilient and adaptive to change.
Lessons from History
History offers many examples of movements that have reshaped moral and political landscapes:
The Abolition Movement (18th–19th centuries): The campaign to abolish the transatlantic slave trade was a slow, moral awakening that spanned decades. Through boycotts, petitions, and storytelling, abolitionists redefined the moral order of Western society, proving that sustained moral persuasion can achieve systemic change.
The Civil Rights Movement (1950s–1970s): This movement combined grassroots mobilisation, nonviolent resistance, and narrative power to expose the contradictions of American democracy. It demonstrated that legislative reform must be grounded in cultural and moral transformation.
Fridays for Future (2018–present): Emerging from a single student strike, this youth-led movement illustrates the power of decentralised, digital organising. It reframed climate change from a technical issue into a moral and intergenerational emergency.
While each movement arose in a unique context, they share common traits: moral imagination, distributed leadership, patience, narrative power, and strong relational networks.
Why Movements Fail
Not all movements succeed. Some, like Occupy Wall Street, ignite global attention but fade quickly without the infrastructure or strategy to sustain themselves. Others, like the Equal Rights Amendment campaign in the United States, show that even well-funded movements can falter when cultural resistance is underestimated. The lesson is clear: enduring transformation requires both moral vision and political craft.
The Role of Individuals and Organisations
Every person has a role to play in sustaining movements. Individuals can tell stories that humanise complex issues, build relationships across differences, model alternatives in their daily lives, and stay committed through the inevitable ebbs and flows of collective action.
Organisations, meanwhile, can amplify marginalised voices, provide infrastructure and resources, connect grassroots energy with institutional influence, and preserve the collective memory of movements across generations. Their role is not to control movements but to enable them—to nurture conditions in which collective power can flourish.
Social movements are the engines of deep, systemic change. They are not merely vehicles for protest but ecosystems of moral and cultural renewal. They teach us that transformation requires more than policy or programmatic intervention; it requires imagination, persistence, and solidarity.
By understanding how movements emerge, evolve, and endure, we can better locate our own work—whether as individuals or within organisations—within the broader story of social transformation. Change begins not in isolation, but when our many efforts intertwine into something larger—something capable of shifting the world itself.