Tuesday, April 15, 2014

9


The overarching strategy I chose from chapter 14 of Persuasion and Social Movements is the strategy of coercive persuasion.  This strategy forces the target to comply with the institute to and to halt the movement. This strategy uses threats to accomplish because they have both the means to fulfill these threats and the will to fulfill them. This strategy is pursued in 6 ways, through expulsion, restrictive legislation and polices, harassment, use of surrogates, infiltration, and through arrests and use of courts.

Through the use of expulsion people are in danger of being fire, exported, suspended from school, excommunicated, or to be dishonorably discharged. Through restricted legislation laws are created to suppress the social movement. Because of harassment the institution intimidates protesters because the institution demonstrates that they are the ones that hold all the power.  Institutions use surrogates to create competing social movements to counteract the “undesired” social movement. Institutions infiltrate social movements to gather information on the protest groups in order to inhibit the movement from the outside in. Finally the institutions make arrests and take parties of the social movement to court, which can tie up the leaders of social movements for years.


The pictures from this website are a collection of images from the civil rights movement. The pictures depict a multitude of individuals being arrested during their protests. These circumstances are an example of the strategy of coercive persuasion. The institution made arrests in order to attempt to inhibit the continuation of the movement. As noted from the letter from Birmingham that we read earlier in the semester they even arrested some of the movements notable leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. Although ultimately history tells us that the institution was unsuccessful at stopping the movement, the arrests did make it more difficult for them. 

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