My Research

In my dissertation, I explore the relationship between social movements and democratic change by thinking beyond the traditional focus on state institutions. My project aims to answer three central questions: (A) Why do social movements evolve internally the way they do? (B) How do they contribute to social and political change? (C) How do the internal dynamics of these movements affect participants and their relationships with formal political institutions?

To address these questions, I adopt an interpretivist and multi-scaled comparative approach. My case studies focus on two distinct movements: the Okupa Cuba Casa Refugio (Okupa) movement in Mexico City, a micro-level movement protesting government inaction on violence, and the Anti-CAA/NRC protests at Shaheen Bagh, New Delhi, a meso-level movement opposing discriminatory citizenship laws in India.

The Okupa Cuba movement emerged in 2020 in response to the Mexican government’s failure to address pervasive violence. A group of women protested the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) for its inaction on the cases of their missing and killed family members. They took over the CNDH building in Mexico City, transforming it into a shelter for victims of violence. They created horizontal, leaderless structures, mutual aid systems, and communal decision-making processes, demonstrating grassroots efforts to establish democratic spaces in the face of state apathy. The Shaheen Bagh protest in New Delhi was a response to the Indian government’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC), which threatened to disenfranchise Muslim citizens. Led primarily by Muslim women, this movement created an ecosystem that provided community kitchens, libraries, daycare centers, and other essential services.

Through my comparative case study, I demonstrate how movements build self-sustaining ecosystems, providing care and support for marginalized communities. Using assemblage, I show how these movements create assemblages of welfare, collective security, and communal decision-making. These protest sites, in turn, offer an alternative form of democratic governance that challenges the state’s monopoly on safety and security. In this sense, these movements also fundamentally transform people’s relationships with formal democratic processes like elections, voting, etc.

Through my project, I advance the literature on social movements by focusing on their internal dynamics and the broader impacts on movement participants, beyond measurable policy outcomes. I critique traditional social movement theories that often define success based on policy change or institutional impact, and instead, I explore how movements can foster social and political transformations within communities directly. By creating alternative systems, such as mutual aid networks, movement participants meet their needs independently of the state while simultaneously enacting democratic values. My research highlights the potential of social movements to reshape state-society relations and demonstrate new forms of political power.