Social Movement Emergence Among Asian Americans

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Social movements are essentially collective actions by disadvantaged, and often minority groups taken to empower themselves and push for change on political and social issues. What differentiates social movements from interest groups is that social movements are a more organic and less structured approach, “Interest groups have letterhead (and headquarters and executive directors). Social movements don’t.” To summarize Sidney Tarrow’s definition from Power in Movement, social movements are collective challenges based on common purposes and social solidarities in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities. It can be seen as people from within excluded groups, collectively attempting to mobilize political leverage to make changes to the current situation and advance common interests through nontraditional means. It is important to recognize that along with the significant demographic changes, comes with the increasing role that ethnoracial minorities will play in reshaping the politics in the United States, in terms of political participation, legislative representation, political opinions, which in the long run, will affect the political landscape and policies.

In the book, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, Doug McAdam introduces the political process model of social movement emergence, which he presents as “an alternative to the classical resource mobilization perspectives”. McAdam proposes that the political process model can be used to explain the emergence of social movements. The model suggests that social movements result from a combination of factors, stemming from broad socioeconomic processes.

In this paper, I will analyze the prospects for the successful emergence ...

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