Social movements relation to social conflicts ( 500+ words): Social conflict presupposes the existence of two or more individuals or groups like castes,communities and classes in a situation of opposing claims and contestation about certain issues,goals and objectives.Examples are the cases of peasant uprisings against the erstwhile class of zamindars in the country side for ownership and control of land , the protests and strikes in the industry by the workers for the demand of increase in wage, bonus and better conditions including the demand for the share in decision making process against the capitalists and also one can take the case of farmers strikes against the state for the demand of cheaper cost of electricity and chemical manure or for the sale of their agricultural produce such as grains and vegetables. On the other hand, Social movements are expressions of the very same conflicts. Both social movements and social conflicts are not a homogeneous phenomena. Social movements generally emerge as a response to some collectively shared social issues, questions and challenges in a situation of conflict. The nature of social issues and conflicts in a complex society like India vary by regions castes, classes, communities and by territorial groups like tribes, peasants and urban communities. For example, sea-shore fishermen of Kerala may have type of issues and conflicts entirely different from those of the mountain people of Himalaya in Uttarkand. (As an adversarial concept, conflict always involves the elements of struggle, strife and active effort of one group to exclude or cancel the claim of another group over some values, object or goal. Conflicts vary from a mild disapproval to a brutal physical assault and killing. Lewis Coser defines conflict as “struggle in which the aim is to gain objectives and simultaneously neutralize, injure or eliminate rivals”. According to Alain Touriane all social conflicts have a. organized actors b.Valued or desired stakes c.Tussles and competition among the actors to achieve those stakes.)-> DO NOT USE All social conflicts do not give rise to social movements but all social movements arise as a result of social conflicts since social conflicts provides all the prerequisites required for the social movements. Conflicts can be for the sake of competitive pursuit of collective interest, reconstruction of social, cultural or political identity, a political force, the defense of the status and privilege, social control of main cultural pattern, creation of a new social order.It can also national conflicts or the conflict of neo-communitarian-ism.As we can see, the types of social conflicts are easy to identify and classify . On the other hand its not easy to give water tight classifications for the social movements. The same movement can be categorized differently depending on the theoretical or ideological preference of the scholar.Durkheim classifies movements into different types based on the principles of resemblance and difference’. While it is easy to identify tribal uprisings as tribal movements or womens protests against gender discrimination as womens movement,it is difficult to separate reformative, restorative and revivalist move movements from other type of social movements including the tribal and womens movements. Kathleen Gough classifies just the peasant movements itself into 5 types in India which are restorative rebellion, religious movements, social banditry, terrorist vengeance and mass insurrection. Thus from the above discussion we get a fair idea about how social movements are related very closely to social conflicts.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 07:57:23 +0000
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