Deadlines as drivers of action: How temporal discontinuity shapes movements

If social movements represent collective efforts to achieve certain goals, deadlines may feature on their horizon as temporal boundaries for what constitutes successful action. While climate movements are most commonly associated with imaginaries of ‘running out of time’, they in fact only represent one variation of such a ‘now or never’ temporal register. That is, they represent a particularly global one that imagines planetary tipping points that, once crossed, spell the end of current civilizations, humanity or even life on earth. Other movements have likewise imagined points of no return, but at different (social or spatial) scales. Groups campaigning against violence or disease, such as the HIV/AIDS movement are, among other things, concerned with individual points of no return in the form of death or irreparable health impairments. Others are concerned about the point of no return for one’s own group, such as struggles against structural racism or cultural genocide that worry about the disappearance of their culture or community (note: AIDS activists worried that AIDS was purposefully being ignored to eradicate the gay community). Still others are concerned about irreversible changes on behalf of others, such as campaigners protecting particular species. Following my recently-developed problem-centered approach, this paper explores, comparatively, the temporal nature of these problems, the ‘objective’ conditions for success that they introduce, how these are perceived subjectively, and the strategic, organizational and emotional responses that they trigger. Moreover, the approach considers how these problem features shape the sociomaterial context that movement actors must navigate. The first aim of this paper is to provide a general reflection on the impact of objective and subjective notions of running out of time on social movements. The second aim is to compare the impact of various problems’ temporality. I will discuss various characteristics of such deadlines and their impact. First, I will discuss whether the nature of the problem being addressed is natural or social, as these introduce different dynamics of structure and agency. This will presumably affect the type of strategic responses these problems trigger. Relatedly, I will discuss whether problems are understood in primarily ideological or scientific terms. Second, I will consider the scale of the problem, understood in both objective and subjective terms. For instance, the more global imaginaries of no return are, the more prone they may be to fatalism (‘there is not planet-B’), whereas deadlines at ‘lower’ scales leave room for maneuvering in the form of e.g. coalition building. Combining these two dimensions, I will explore the working hypothesis that while movements facing the danger of ‘running out of time’ share particular emotional, strategic and organizational challenges, the climate movement is unique in facing a problem governed by unnegotiable laws of physics and that has planetary ramifications, introducing unique strategic dilemmas. To conduct this analysis, I draw on scientific and grey literature on the temporality of various movements, paying particular attention to studies engaging with deadlines.