Opportunity, Honor, and Action in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 19431

@article{Einwohner2003OpportunityHA,
  title={Opportunity, Honor, and Action in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 19431},
  author={Rachel L. Einwohner},
  journal={American Journal of Sociology},
  year={2003},
  volume={109},
  pages={650 - 675}
}
Macrolevel theories of social movement emergence posit that political opportunity “opens the door” for collective action. This article uses the case of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to show that collective action need not always require opportunity. Warsaw Jews’ armed resistance was a response not to opportunity but to a lack thereof. Equally important was a strong sense of honor among the ghetto fighters: the hopelessness of their situation helped construct a motivational frame that equated… 
View on U Chicago Press
116 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
1
Background Citations
23
Methods Citations
1
Results Citations
2

116 Citations

Armed activism as the enactment of a collective identity: the case of the Provisional IRA between 1969 and 1972
Abstract This paper argues that micro-mobilization into armed activism is strongly motivated by the enactment of an identity that people already have prior to their mobilization as a way to strongly…
Threat, Resistance, and Collective Action
How and why do movements transition from everyday resistance to overt collective action? This article examines this question taking repressive environments and threat as an important case in point.…
Leadership, Authority, and Collective Action
This article examines leadership and its role in the emergence of collective action with a comparison of resistance activities in two Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe. In the Warsaw Ghetto,…
Threat Assessment and Collective-Action Emergence: Death-Camp and Ghetto Resistance During the Holocaust
Recent work in the field of social movements has argued for the importance of threat as a factor that explains the emergence of collective action. However, threat remains poorly specified and…
Threat, Resistance, and Collective Action: The Cases
How and why do movements transition from everyday resistance to overt collective action? This article examines this question taking repressive environments and threat as an impor tant case in point.…
“Are You One of Those Women?” Within-Movement Conflict, Radical Flank Effects, and Social Movement Political Outcomes
Studies of social movement outcomes rarely consider the impact of conflict between groups within movements on the ability of movement actors to achieve their political goals. In this examination of…
Cycles of Repression and Tactical Innovation: The Evolution of Environmental Dissidence in Communist Czechoslovakia
Temporal analyses of social movement mobilization provide insight into how repression shapes social movement tactics and in turn, how social movements affect state response. We use the case of…
Opportunity and threat behind the Iron Curtain: The failed diffusion of human rights activism in Romania
Research has highlighted the importance of diffusion processes for the emergence and spread of collective action, yet less attention has been paid to cases where diffusion fails to lead to successful…
Violence, Resistance, and Rescue during the Holocaust
What do different forms of anti-Semitic violence during World War II teach us about the comparative study of political violence? In this essay, we review three recent political science books about…
Identity Work and Collective Action in a Repressive Context: Jewish Resistance on the “Aryan Side” of the Warsaw Ghetto
Research on social movements has found that activists often deploy their identity strategically, putting forth certain images of themselves in order to best achieve their goals. However, such work…
...
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 86 REFERENCES
Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Framing political opportunity
The concept of political opportunity structure is in trouble, in danger of becoming a sponge that soaks up virtually every aspect of the social movement environment – political institutions and…
Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: States and opportunities: The political structuring of social movements
In a 1991 article, John McCarthy, David Britt, and Mark Wolfson begin with an assertion that is often acknowledged in the social movement field but seldom receives the attention it deserves. They…
Movements, Countermovements, and the Structure of Political Opportunity
Movement-countermovement interaction is an ongoing feature of contemporary social movements and, indeed, of contemporary politics. Yet the interplay of contending movements is understudied and…
People power and political opportunities : Social movement mobilization and outcomes in the Philippines and Burma
This study assesses the relevance of the political opportunity framework for social movements in non-democratic contexts by applying it to two people power movements that occurred in the Philippines…
Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970
In this classic work of sociology, Doug McAdam presents a political-process model that explains the rise and decline of the black protest movement in the United States. Moving from theoretical…
Honor, Status, and Aggression in Economic Exchange*
The concept of honor links reputation and self-esteem with interaction in social groups and provides a promising way to approach questions about the release of aggression in economic exchange. While…
"YOU COULD BE THE HUNDREDTH MONKEY": Collective Action Frames and Vocabularies of Motive Within the Nuclear Disarmament Movement
Building on recent developments by social constructionists, this paper seeks to advance theoretical and empirical understanding of micromobilization processes associated with social movement…
High‐Risk Collective Action: Defending Human Rights in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina1
  • M. Loveman
  • Political Science
    American Journal of Sociology
  • 1998
Under what conditions will individuals risk their lives to resist repressive states? This question is addressed through comparative analysis of the emergence of human rights organizations under…
THREAT (AND OPPORTUNITY): POPULAR ACTION AND STATE RESPONSE IN THE DYNAMICS OF CONTENTIOUS ACTION
As compared with the fiercely repressive 1970s, the 1980s opened more opportunities to South Africa's black activists. International support for their cause was rising, black educational enrollment…
A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
In 1943, against utterly hopeless odds, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up to defy the Nazi horror machine that had set out to exterminate them. One of the leaders of the Jewish Fighting…
...
...