7 - The Rise of Hybrid Social Movements

Summary

Chapter 7 brings together the previous two chapters by showing how the ultimate outcome of support from bureaucrats was a new type of social movement in Brazil. In contrast to the urban labor movements of the 20th Century, Brazil’s AIDS movement was a diverse movement that cut across class, ethnic, and geographic cleavages. In contrast to the protest-based social movements that mobilized at the start of the 21st Century, the AIDS movement employed a hybrid strategy for influencing policy, relying in equal measure on inside collaboration with government policymakers and contentious behavior. This pattern of demand-making among AIDS associations in Brazil does not fit existing models of corporatism, pluralism, or social movements—neither in the basic attributes of the organizations that have mobilized nor in the strategies they employ to influence policy. Brazil’s AIDS movement represents instead a new form of civic organization and mobilization in Latin America, in which social movements are sustained by their connections to the state, even while they make aggressive demands on the state.