Social justice movements are seen as a reaction against normative order. They seek to negotiate with, or disrupt norm, laws and institutions. They are usually in response to inequality in distribution of rights, capital or power. These include but are not limited to the feminist movement, LGBT+ movement, the environmental movement. In recent times, the trend in these social justice movements is to become increasingly horizontal in their organization i.e no maintenance of hierarchy within the movement. Is this trend desirable though?
Value of a leader
There are quite a few important questions to be asked when it comes to the value of a leader and how that interacts with the movement.
Often people who form a part of are of rather diverse backgrounds, most likely there is not much uniting them, besides the vision for the movement, and even that idea can vary. In this context, is it important to have an organizer or a leader who is able to decide priorities that a movement has most proximate to it and pursue those?
Following from the first idea, without the presence of a leader to unite the movement, is there a risk of fracturing within the movement in the long term, due to varied goals of different communities who are its part?
Do movements have a risk of going out of control and becoming something that it is not and was never intended upon becoming, since there is no figurehead to hold accountable for decisions taken by the movement?
In the status quo, we are socially conditioned to believe that leaders are indeed necessary and a hierarchy is inevitable. Right from when we were at school, the student council was made to look incredibly appealing to buy into, class monitors would be assigned and given responsibilities over the entire class etc. All of this is important to prove that a need for a leader, even if not particularly necessitated by circumstance, was always warranted by society. In that case, does the dearth of a leader come off as something difficult to buy into and hence impede more people from joining the movement? Also, do we people within the movement too feel the need for a leader?
Efficiency of having a leader
The questions asked above pose important frames to think about.
The first two questions specifically talk about a uniting figure - note however, that even with leadership, often movements have to make trade-offs, in what they want they want to pursue now and what they can pursue later on, which might not sit well with quite a few people within the movement, hence the likelihood of fracturing exists inexclusive to the existence of a leader.
In terms of accountability, which the third question addresses, members of a movement have an incentive to preserve the movement sustainably i.e to ensure that the protests do not blow out of proportion. This comes from the simple incentive to self-preserve, the vast majority of people are unlikely to want to get into arms fights with the State- their lives can get endangered. Such an incentive is more natural to a movement anyways, without the need for a leader.
Lastly, in terms of optics,
(i) The kind of people who opt into social movements anyway are people who want change, not many people join in because of a certain leader.
(ii) Even if people join in, charmed by the charisma of the leader of the movement, the notion is actually problematic for the movement because the moment the leader is not in power, or the moment the leader does something that wasn’t promised, people are likely to feel disillusioned. This allows for a greater avenue of fracturing in the movement.
(iii) Optics can also work in a reverse manner, these days among young people, who form the strength of the movement, the trend is to oppose centralized leadership. This means that the presence of a leader can actually repel people who form a major chunk of the movement.
Additionally, in today’s day and age, it is more preferable to remain leaderless- According to Carne Ross, the Executive Director of the Independent Diplomat, “Technology has enabled leaderlessness in a way that was never possible before. Technology means you don’t need a leader to disseminate strategy. The strategy disseminates horizontally”
Presence of a leader can actually make the movement vulnerable.
When leaders become figureheads, authorities have a clear idea of who to ‘get rid off’ as a threat. When the stalwart of the movement is harmed, or even bought off, the internal stability of a movement gets endangered. Therefore, conversely, when a movement is leaderless, it becomes harder to suppress.
To conclude, social movements in their very nature are against concentration of power. Having a leader is likely to project forth the same. All harms of not having leaders get mitigated and are actually outframed by the idea that having a leader can actively threaten the stability of the movement. Horizontal organization in movements has been a force that has helped people feel more represented, which is the most important component there is to social movements.
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