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This is: Key Lessons From Social Movement History, published by Jamie_Harris on the effective altruism forum.
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In this post I summarize key strategic implications from Sentience Institute's five completed social movement case studies and several additional case studies by other researchers, looking for correlations and convergent findings across the different movements and contexts. From this evidence, I argue that the farmed animal movement should take steps to avoid unintended consequences from incremental tactics; use a more diverse range of institutional tactics; use fewer individual diet change tactics, primarily as a complement to institutional tactics; explore opportunities to bypass public opinion; and focus less on issue salience. I also argue that the nascent movements to protect the interests of future sentient beings (e.g. artificial sentience) should focus first on building a credible, professional movement but subsequently invest in a broader range of social movement tactics when promising opportunities arise.
INTRODUCTION
Sentience Institute has now published five social movement case studies. This post provides a summary of the strategic implications from this work so far.
The main goal of these case studies is to glean strategic insights for social movements encouraging moral circle expansion (MCE), especially the farmed animal movement and the nascent movements to protect the interests of future sentient beings (e.g. artificial sentience). Other social movements, including the broader effective altruism movement, may also benefit.
We have argued:
Individual historical cases can therefore provide inspiration for potential tactics and perhaps build our intuition, but we should not place much weight on strategic knowledge gained from a single case, because causal relationships may not replicate in different contexts and may seem to work in contradictory ways. Note, however, that weak evidence can still be useful and should not be disregarded as it is often all we have available.
Even if we are not very confident about individual hypothesized causal relationships, we may be able to place significant weight on the strategic knowledge gleaned from history if we see that certain correlations reliably replicate across different movements and across different contexts.
In this post, I identify correlations and convergent findings across the different movements and contexts that SI has studied so far.
METHODOLOGY
The movements we have studied so far are:
The British antislavery movement
The US anti-abortion movement
The US anti-death penalty movement (including brief discussion of Europe)
The US prisoners' rights movement
The international Fair Trade movement
We have a separate post discussing methodological considerations such as why we have chosen to focus on these particular case studies. Our research on this topic is incomplete, so I also draw on similar reports by other researchers associated with the effective altruism community:
Animal Charity Evaluators’ case studies of childrens’ rights (UK, Sweden, and New Zealand) and environmentalism (US and Europe).
Mauricio Baker’s case studies of and , both with a broad international focus.
Włodzimierz Gogłoza’s case study of the US antislavery movement.
To identify big-picture trends, I assigned scores to each movement[1] for a number of different variables:
Success — whether the movement encouraged institutional changes, change to individuals’ behavior, change in public opinion, or acceptance by targeted institutions. Where I refer to “successful social change,” I am referring to the average of these four submetrics.
My rough impression of the proportion of resources spent by each movement on various tactics.
The position taken by each movement on other strategic tradeoffs, e.g. confrontation vs....
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