Making Sense of Communication Repertoires in the German Global Justice Movements Paper to be presented in the Marie Curie Conference and Training Series European Protest Movements since the Cold War: The Rise of a (Trans-)national Civil Society and the Tr

This paper outlines a research project that aims at understanding the diversity of the German global justice movements by looking at the communication repertoires single groups resort to. It is argued that the way political groups relate to external environments – within and beyond the movements – mirrors their perception of political reality and helps to position them in a contentious political field. Starting from an interactionist notion of ideology, the proposed project seeks to overcome a functionalist bias in the research of social movements that has privileged the analysis of instrumental practices and, in this vein, actors that primarily follow this logic of action. By contrast, an overview of the actual breadth of communication repertoires will bring communication strategies to the surface which have been more or less neglected so far