From the collective obligations of social movements to the individual obligations of their members

This paper explores the implications of Zeynep Tufekci’s capacities approach to social movements, which explains the strength of social movements in terms of their capacities. Tufekci emphasises that the capacities of contemporary social movements largely depend upon their uses of new digital technologies and of social media in particular. We show that Tufekci’s approach has important implications for the structure of social movements, whether and what obligations they can have and for how these obligations are distributed to their members. In exploring these implications, we develop a tripartite taxonomy of social movements. Each type of social movement in the taxonomy corresponds to different types of groups: social campaigns, social struggles and social agitations. We show that all three types of social movements can bear obligations by virtue of their capacities. Finally, we argue that a surprising upshot of the obligations of social movements is that members of oppressed groups can have obligations to resist their own oppression by virtue of being members of social movements.