The Quest for New Identity in New Social Movements

What makes people join a social movement? For some, it’s anger over an injustice. For others, it’s hope for a better future. But there is a deeper force at work in New Social Movements (NSMs) – one that goes beyond politics and economics. It is the search for identity. Who am I? Who are we? What do we stand for? These are not abstract philosophical questions. In the context of NSMs, they are the very foundation on which collective action is built and sustained.

Why identity matters in new social movements 🔗

Traditional social movements – labour strikes, anti-colonial struggles, peasant uprisings – were largely organised around material grievances. People came together because they shared economic hardship or political oppression. NSMs, which gained prominence globally from the 1960s and in India from the 1970s onwards, shifted this focus significantly. As Jürgen Habermas observed, NSMs represent a “new politics” concerned with quality of life, individual self-realisation, and human rights – in contrast to the “old politics” of economic and military security.

This shift means that the glue holding an NSM together is no longer just shared deprivation – it is shared identity. A common sense of who participants are and what values they hold becomes the source of unity, commitment, and purpose. Identity, in this context, does more than describe a group. It motivates action, defines goals, and gives the movement its moral direction.

How NSMs construct new identities 🔗

Alain Touraine, one of the most influential theorists in this field, argued that NSMs are collective actions aimed at implementing central cultural values. For Touraine, movements are not just protests – they are arenas where participants actively shape a new cultural understanding of themselves and their society. Alongside Touraine, Alberto Melucci emphasised that NSMs create what he called “submerged networks” – informal spaces where new collective identities are quietly forged through shared experience and dialogue, often invisible to the wider public until they surface in visible protest.

This identity-building process involves several key elements:

• Redefining old labels: NSMs often begin by rejecting degrading or externally imposed identities. For example, the Dalit movement in India replaced the derogatory term “untouchable” with the self-chosen word “Dalit,” meaning “oppressed” – a term that carries dignity and political consciousness.
• Generating new shared meaning: Participants in NSMs develop a collective understanding of their situation, their rights, and their aspirations. According to Melucci, NSMs fight for the right to realise their own identity, including their personal creativity, emotional life, and interpersonal experience.
• Building solidarity across diversity: Identity in NSMs does not flatten differences – it creates an umbrella under which diverse individuals find common ground. The women’s movement in India, for instance, brought together women from different castes, regions, and classes around a shared feminist identity.

The role of values and culture in identity formation 🔗

NSMs concentrate on cultural innovations, the development of new lifestyles, and the transformation of identities – not merely on winning concessions from the state. This cultural turn is fundamental. By centring values such as dignity, ecological responsibility, gender equality, and caste justice, NSMs define what kind of society participants want to live in. The movement becomes as much about how to live as it is about legal rights.

In India, this is powerfully illustrated by the environmental movement. The Chipko Movement of the 1970s, where communities – largely women – embraced trees to prevent deforestation in the Himalayas, was not simply about trees. It was a statement about who these communities were: stewards of the forest, not its exploiters. Their collective identity as forest-dwellers with custodial responsibilities over nature was both the engine and the outcome of the movement. Cultural practices, songs, and local knowledge all became part of a living identity that distinguished them from the state’s vision of “development.”

Similarly, the Narmada Bachao Andolan challenged not just a dam project but an entire development paradigm that ignored ecological and human costs. The movement created a new identity for displaced communities: not passive victims of progress, but rights-bearing citizens with a legitimate cultural and spiritual relationship to their land and river.

Empowerment and the personal dimension of identity 🔗

One of the distinctive features of NSMs is the way they connect individual empowerment to collective action. The slogan “the personal is political,” which emerged from feminist movements, captures this precisely. NSM theorists argue that choices about how people live, relate to others, and understand themselves carry political significance. Personal transformation and collective transformation reinforce each other.

This is especially visible in the Dalit movement. Identity formation for Dalits has been a complex process shaped by centuries of dehumanisation under caste hierarchy. Social movements led by figures like B.R. Ambedkar encouraged Dalits to move from being “objects of history” to “subjects of history” – to see themselves as agents capable of demanding rights and reshaping society. This shift in self-perception is itself an act of empowerment. When Dalits adopted a new name, new symbols, and new cultural expressions, they were not just changing labels; they were asserting a new consciousness.

The concept of Bahujan – popularised by Kanshi Ram and the Bahujan Samaj Party – extended this further by building a broader identity encompassing Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, and religious minorities to forge political solidarity among numerically significant but structurally oppressed groups. This was identity formation deployed explicitly as a tool of empowerment and political mobilisation.

Intersectionality and the complexity of new identities 🔗

NSMs in India have also revealed that identity is rarely singular. The emergence of Dalit feminism is a compelling example. Mainstream Indian feminism, historically dominated by upper-caste perspectives, failed to adequately represent the experiences of Dalit women, who faced oppression on two fronts: gender and caste. Dalit feminism emerged to articulate an identity that acknowledged this double marginalisation, insisting that the two forms of oppression could not be separated.

Dalit women came to recognise their identity as one “forged in multiple struggles.” This was not a fragmentation of the movement but an enrichment of it – a more honest account of who participants actually were. By naming their intersectional identity, Dalit feminist movements created a more inclusive and nuanced sense of solidarity than either the Dalit movement or the mainstream women’s movement had achieved individually.

The LGBTQ+ movement in India tells a similar story. It has blended legal activism – such as the challenge to Section 377 – with cultural assertion through pride parades, films, and online discourse, building a visible and self-affirming identity in a society that long denied its existence. Here again, identity is not just a byproduct of the movement – it is its central goal.

Identity as a source of unity and belonging 🔗

Across all these examples, a consistent pattern emerges: shared identity creates belonging, and belonging sustains movements. When participants in an NSM share not just grievances but a sense of who they are and what they value, the movement becomes more than a temporary coalition. It becomes a community.

Collective mobilisation, organisation, ideology, interest articulation, leadership, and identity formation are all essential elements that distinguish genuine social movements from short-lived protests. Without identity, a movement may win a battle but cannot sustain the long-term cultural transformation it seeks. With identity, it creates a legacy – changing not just laws or policies, but the way people understand themselves and their place in society.

The process of identity formation in contemporary movements is marked by contextuality, fluidity, hybridity, and plurality. Identities in NSMs are not fixed blueprints handed down from leaders. They are continually constructed and reconstructed through participation, debate, cultural expression, and lived experience. This makes them resilient – capable of adapting to new contexts while retaining their core values.

From old identities to new ones: a transformative process 🔗

It is worth emphasising that NSMs do not simply invent identities from nothing. They transform existing ones. The farmer-activist of the Narmada Bachao Andolan was still a farmer – but now also a citizen-defender of ecological rights. The Dalit intellectual trained in Ambedkar’s philosophy was still a person of a specific caste – but now also a conscious political agent refusing the stigma attached to that caste. The woman in a feminist movement was still a woman – but now also a bearer of rights who refused to accept patriarchal definitions of her role.

This transformation – of inherited identities into chosen, empowered identities – is precisely what makes NSMs more than protest movements. Touraine developed an action-theoretical analysis of the identity formation process that actors go through as members of social movements, showing how participation reshapes the self. People do not just join movements; they are changed by them. And that changed self – more confident, more connected, more conscious – carries the values of the movement into everyday life long after the protests have ended.

What do you think? In a society as diverse as India – with its overlapping identities of caste, gender, religion, region, and class – how do New Social Movements decide which identity to foreground in order to build the broadest possible solidarity? And when a movement’s identity becomes more fixed over time, does it risk excluding new voices that don’t fit the original mould?

References

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