Fragmentation of Interests: Internal Conflicts and Social Movements’ Performance in Russia

Abstract

This paper analyzes the interrelation of conflicts within local urban social movements and their general progress. Although internal conflicts predictably weaken the positions of social movements, some scholars observe an ambiguous influence of internal discordance upon the activists’ performance and goal achievement. In its analysis of conflictual relations within urban social movements, the paper relies on scholars’ earlier findings on how clashes and collisions between activists can explain their overall progress. Furthermore, it uses N. Fligstein’s and McAdam’s theory of fields as the primary framework. Each social movement that gets shaped around a local city-planning issue is thus considered a strategic action field, i.e., an arena that emerges because collective actors come together to strive for some good or, more specifically, some strategic advantage to be gained in and through interaction with other groups. Incumbents hold dominant positions in the field, while their opponents, called challengers, seek to revise the existing rules of the field’s organization and of profit distribution and/or to reach a more advantageous position in the field, which makes a source of internal conflicts.

The research embraces nine cases of urban local conflicts from four Russian million-plus cities that unfolded between 2012 and 2020 and a series of expert interviews about the trajectories of urban development in these cities. The author concludes that the city-protecting movements under study that experienced internal conflicts could be successful and unsuccessful in implementing their goals. A more ‘radical’ flank in the fields of urban social movements was present in all cases, both the ones that resulted in a complete/partial victory of the activists and the ones that ended in their defeat: either due to the required investment of state resources or for other reasons such as (not) upscaling the conflict from the local level to the city-wide level, (not) resorting to more ‘radical’ methods of public policy, (not) avoiding the side effect of establishing a coalition with a strong ally, etc. Conflicts within the fields of urban social movements do not exist in the public space. Hence, more moderate wings in urban initiative groups cannot use them to attract state actors’ attention. Thus, the effect of ‘fragmentation with a radical flank’ (‘radical flank effect’) is not significant for ‘strong” actors since it is not even visible to them.