The Life Cycle of Land-based Social Movements: The Community Capitals Framework
and Social Movement Research
ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on issues of land and conflict. By placing land at the center of social
conflict, I draw on a common thread that connects an array of social movements referred
to as land-based social movements. In an attempt to add to discussions on social
movement emergence, mobilization, and outcomes, I introduce the Community Capitals
Framework (CCF) (Flora and Flora 2008) as an analytical tool for organizing and
explaining land-based social movements. I derive a number of hypotheses that relate to
the life cycle of land-based social movements. Finally, the implications of introducing
CCF to the study of land-based social movements is discussed.
INTRODUCTION
Land offers access to natural resources, supports the built environment, influences
important human skills, and helps shape the social and cultural identities that emerge
from place. Land and those who control its resources, landscape, and meanings possess
both power and influence in the social world. As a result, the ability to define and control
land is linked to many forms of contentious politics such as social revolutions, war, civic
unrest, genocide and mass killing, strikes, protests, and social movements (McAdam,
Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). For this paper, I focus on social movements that emerge in
response to contentious land issues such as competition for scarce resources, conflict over
the right to define land, or threat of losing or changing the actually landscape.
Because of the pivotal role land plays in social life and the extent to which it is
tied to social conflict, it should have a central place in studies of social movemetn
research. Today, within the United States, between Federal land designations and state
and local land designations, every one of the 3.2 billion acres of the US has a land
classification and an owner. Approximately 60 percent is privately owned, nearly 37
percent is owned by federal, state, and local governments (the largest of which, 28
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