Lederach

Social change that depends heavily on the magnetic attraction of shared opposition creates social energy that can generate large numbers in discrete time frames but has difficulty sustaining the longer term change. social movements rise and fall as visible moments rather than as sustained processes. This seems related to two important observations about how change happens.

First, social movements find that it is easier, and in many cases more popular, to articulate to what they are opposed rather than what they wish to build. Change is seen linear: Raise awareness first, then promote action by increased numbers of people to stop something, and finally, once that thing is stopped, develop action to build something different. Awareness and action have at times gone together and created extraordinary moments of change -- from local communities of civil and human rights, to nations overthrowing oppressive regimes. It has rather consistently been during the third part of the theory --developing action to build something-- where we run into difficulties and where the change processes seem to collapse.

Second, framing the process as one that must create like-minded communities produces a narrow view of change wherein little thought or work is given to the broader nature of who and what will need to change and how they will be engaged in such a process. In other words, the very way  the issues and process are framed undermines the fundamental web of understanding that change must strategically build linkages and coordination with and across not-like-minded and not-like-situated relational spaces. Unlike a linear change theory, the web approach suggests that multiple processes at different levels and social spaces take place at the same time. The web approach does not think in terms of us versus them, but rather about the nature of the change sought and how multiple sets of interdependent processes will link people and places to move the whole of the system toward those changes. In pragmatic terms the web approach asks early and often: Who has to find a way to be connected to whom?

Nonetheless, there is a certain truth to the frame of reference that convincing large numbers of people to get on board with an idea is the key to social change. Awareness of information and the willingness to act on what one believes are indeed part and parcel of the larger challenge of how societies as a whole change and move toward new ways of relating and organizing their lives together. in settings of protracted conflict and violence, movement away from fear, division, and violence toward new modalities of interaction requires awareness, action, and broad processes of change. In this sense, numbers are important. However, it is equally important for us to look deeper at how we think this shift happens. Numbers count. But experience in settings of deep division suggests that what lies invisible behind the numbers counts more. In social change it is not necessarily the amount of participants that authenticates a social shift. It is the quality of the platform that sustains the shifting process that matters. Ironically, the focus on numbers has created a misunderstanding and misapplication of the concept of critical mass.