Blackwell Reference Online

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An alliance is “a close association for a common objective” or “for mutual benefit,” synonymous with the idea of a league, a confederacy, or a union (Friend & Guralnik 1960). One will find research on alliances between business organizations and between clients and therapists in psychotherapy. Here the focus is on alliances in social movements. Despite the importance of alliances in the success of any social movement, there is no tradition of focused research on the topic. For example, in social science research in the US, it is touched on in now classic social movement studies such as Ted Gurr's Why Men Rebel (1970), Anthony Oberschall's Social Conflict and Social Movements (1973), and Francis Piven and R. Cloward's Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (1977). Ralf Dahrendorf in Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1954) explored the idea of alliances only briefly while explaining why conflict has not happened as Karl Marx predicted in the post-World War II period. One central objective of this work is to present the underlying processes and principles by which social movements mobilize, are sustained, and then demobilize. A variety of theoretical perspectives emerged out of efforts to follow up on these studies and present even clearer ideas of social movements which could also assist in our understanding of alliances. For example, social ... log in or subscribe to read full text