From Disruptive Action to Political Lobbying: Causes and Consequences of the Institutionalization of Forms of Contention in a Protest Campaign

The aim of the paper is to analyze the causes of the gradual institutionalization of tactics and strategies of the antimilitaristic protest campaign Arms, or Human Rights? [Zbraně, nebo lidská práva?] in the period 1997–2007. The campaign’s collective action evolved from an episodic contentious collective action to sustained interaction with opponents under the auspices of a newly formed social movement organization Nesehnutí and the campaign’s forms of contention progressed from radical, disruptive actions against opponents to political lobbying and negotiations with political actors and allies within the political establishment. The analysis of interaction between the campaign’s internal dynamics and its external conditions will clarify how the campaign’s active appropriation of the European Union Code of Conduct on Arms Exports and its politically binding criteria opened to the actors in the campaign an institutional access to negotiations of their claims with political actors and how the institutional access influenced interactive and communicative processes among the actors within the campaign and brought on the change in the campaign’s forms of contention. Apart from analysis of written documents, the research relies on data collected by means of participant-observation from April 2005 to May 2007