Maggie Corser and writer Derek Seidman delve into the power of movement research and its ongoing impact on campaign strategy throughout movement history
We’re living through an intensification of crises around inequality, democracy, climate, and militarism. There is a lot at stake when it comes to building stronger movements. In the past, power research has provided critical – even indispensable – support for movements and campaigns, helping to shape strategy and educate and empower the base.
Moreover, while a lot has stayed the same in approaching movement research, things have also evolved. Today, we have access to sources, new technologies, and new modes of communication that past researchers could only dream about. With all this, the potential impact of research for campaigns – research efforts that are already happening and could be expanded wider and deeper throughout our movements – has only heightened.
We sought to identify key principles and lessons, as well as the nitty-gritty research methods from past liberation efforts that can guide us today. From the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and antiwar and student movements to the 1960s, to more contemporary worker unionization fights like Justice for Janitors in the 1980s and 1990s, we believe these historical case studies offer incredible insights and practical lessons for organizers and researchers alike.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the 1960s
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was one of the most impactful civil rights organizations of the 1960s, leading the fight to dismantle Jim Crow segregationist policies through nonviolent civil disobedience, large scale voter registration, and leadership development. But while SNCC’s grassroots organizing is well-known, SNCC also had a sophisticated and well-resourced research department to advance its organizing work.
SNCC’s research department formed in 1962 with a clear mandate: to produce strategic research “directly or indirectly, related to field requests, or staff training and education.” It produced work that bolstered on-the-ground efforts in numerous ways. Detailed statistical profiles on demographics, poverty rates, and voter registration helped organizers better understand the communities they were organizing within. Power maps and opposition and corporate target research fine-tuned SNCC’s grasp on who they were up against.
SNCC researchers also supported popular education, contributing to curriculum and leaflets with compelling facts and figures, and they copiously documented the realities of violence facing local communities. They helped forge viable campaign demands, like when SNCC research director Jack Minnis closely reviewed 12 volumes of the Alabama Code of Law to identify an obscure statute that allowed SNCC to form a new, independent political party in Lowndes County, Alabama.
Crucially, research was not a top-down process in SNCC. Organizers and researchers worked together in close collaboration toward a common cause. The demands and urgencies of organizers shaped research agendas, and researchers contributed to organizing efforts. Within SNCC, its research and organizing arms operated as a single unit with constant interaction.
“Who Rules Columbia?” and 1960s Campus Protest Movements
The campus antiwar movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s produced a wave of case studies of university power, but none were more influential than “Who Rules Columbia?,” a 34-page pamphlet published during the 1968 Columbia University uprising against the school’s ties to war and racism.
“Who Rules Columbia?” was a power research tour de force that mapped out the university’s close connections to the wider corporate power structure and the war machine. It showed how Columbia, through its investments and board of trustees, was interlocked with the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and real estate interests. It offered the student movement a powerful analysis of how the American university was a critical component within a larger system of corporate domination.
Though produced nearly six decades ago, the research process behind “Who Rules Columbia?” mirrors our own today. Researchers worked collaboratively, mining news reports, property records, and university documents. They produced research prose, but also network maps that provided a visual picture of the composition of the heights of power at Columbia.
“Who Rules Columbia?” left a tremendous legacy for the movement. Today, campus organizers across the U.S. pushing for divestment from Israeli atrocities against Palestinians have explicitly drawn inspiration and even benefited from direct mentorship from the pamphlet’s original authors.
Whether you’re taking on the presence of fossil fuel interests or private prison profiteers at your college, or building coalitions between students and community members to support campus workers, you benefit from the legacy of “Who Rules Columbia?” and its analysis of the corporate university.
Researchers against the War Machine: NARMIC and the Antiwar Movement
During the U.S. war on Vietnam, power research directly supported the antiwar movement, with one organization playing a particularly critical role. National Action/Research on the Military-Industrial Complex (NARMIC), founded in 1969, functioned as the “research arm” of the U.S. peace movement, and for over a decade it assisted mass movements against war and militarism.
NARMIC’s small circle of researchers dug into obscure Pentagon sources to expose to a wider movement audience the weapons systems that the U.S. military was using against the Vietnamese people. Even more, they mapped out the major corporate war profiteers benefitting from the massive weapons contracts.
Examples of NARMIC’s impactful work include its yearly lists of the top 100 defense contractors in the U.S., its “Movement Guide to Stockholders Meetings,” and “Automated Air War” handbook that surveyed the different weapons and aircrafts used in the aerial war against Vietnam. NARMIC also turned “Automated Air War” into an innovative slideshow with a script that organizers across the nation could use in public events.
NARMIC’s support for the antiwar movement was not abstract. Localities would regularly call the group’s headquarters for advice on nearby weapons profiteers to protest. NARMIC researchers constantly educated the wider public through talks at everywhere from churches to campus.
Through all this, NARMIC transformed a moral critique of the war to include a deeper awareness of the living and breathing corporations that were arming, perpetuating, and profiting from the war. Researchers today — with the American Service Friends Committee, for example, who NARMIC was connected to – still draw on NARMIC’s inspiring example.
The SEIU Justice for Janitors Campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s
In the 1980s, commercial real estate owners increasingly subcontracted out their cleaning services to non-union janitorial companies in order to cut costs and maximize profits. Some unions in places like Los Angeles lost 75% of their membership during this time. The workers, who were largely immigrant women and men, many undocumented, worked for contractors rather than the building owners directly. They faced enormous precarity, poverty wages, and unfair labor practices. Unionization attempts frequently failed in the face of union busting.
In response, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) decided to pilot new approaches. Rather than target individual subcontractors or buildings, the union shifted the fight to the commercial real estate industry. Launched in in Denver in 1986 and LA in 1988, Justice for Janitors (J4J) developed an innovative organizing model that secured vital protections for people in janitorial services. The campaign developed a sophisticated and highly effective approach — indeed, some might say a blueprint — to strategic research that shaped how strategic corporate research is employed to this day.
First, they used industry mapping that was designed to understand the market in each geography. Through a mix of intensive desk research and field intel, they identified the building owners, building managers, and cleaning contractors across thousands of buildings — no easy task given the opaque and fissured nature of the sector. They also compiled profiles on corporate leadership, major competitors, shareholders, real estate operations, upcoming development projects, and any known worker safety or other legal violations.
Second, they used power structure analysis that helped identify key players and sources of leverage. The rapidly changing nature of the commercial real estate industry meant that power mapping was essential to winning. J4J researchers profiled CEOs and conducted opposition research on their business connections, political contributions, tax subsidies, and philanthropic giving.
Lessons and Legacies for Today
What lessons can, today, draw from this rich history of movement power research?
First, research plays a critical role in supporting and shaping movement strategy and tactics.
While this may be apparent to some, it’s worth restating. Across all the case studies we reviewed, researchers and research centers offered crucial support to field operations, local campaigns, and street protests. Power can be opaque, and it’s not always, or even often, apparent to organizers who to target and how. Mapping out power structures helps guide strategy, identify points of leverage, and expand the surface area of attack.
Moreover, strategic research should be conducted at the outset as a foundational part of a campaign — not just an afterthought — in order to identify the best targets and sources of leverage.
J4J organizer Jono Shaffer drilled down his key organizing principles as such: “Principle one is you can’t win if you fight the wrong target. And principle two is, you can’t win if you hit the right target in the wrong place […] And so research is essential to identifying the right targets.” In other words, research helps identify where targets are most vulnerable and then campaigns can tailor tactics and demands to maximize impact.
Second, power research educates and emboldens and draws from the base.
It gives organizers and rank-and-file activists a fuller picture of what they’re up against and where they might locate paths toward progress or even victory. Lists, visual maps, and illustrations, especially, make even complex power structures more accessible. Research helped cohere organizations around shared analysis.
Even better, movements can democratize the research process. Through trainings, how-to guides, and facilitation, activists, workers, and community members can collectively map out power structures themselves, and this can be empowering.
This also means community and worker intel is vital. As SNCC staffer Jesse Harris told Howard Zinn in 1965: “…[w]e went around from communities, finding out, doing – in other words we were doing research – finding out why people wouldn’t register to vote, and why they haven’t tried to go down and participate. Why did the local power structure refuse to let people go down and register?“
Third, the history of movement research shows the importance of creative and collaborative research processes where research and organizing intentionally go hand in hand.
Organizers, workers, and communities must directly inform movement research agendas, and experienced researchers can support by providing data and findings that open up strategic and tactical paths that are not necessarily apparent. Communication and collaboration, and a division of labor within projects, generates research that is often more than the sum of its parts.
Moreover, to ensure strategic research is applied helpfully, it’s critical to have researchers, organizers, and communicators, and community members all involved in strategy from the start. NARMIC regularly met with an advisory committee of antiwar groups to hammer out research ideas. The SNCC Research Department needed forensic researchers to support some of its most critical campaigns, but those researchers relied heavily on group strategists and field organizers to guide research goals.
And while desk research was vital for Justice for Janitors campaigns, sometimes they would find the most impactful information in the field – for example, when a J4J organizer passed a construction site with a “coming soon” promotional sign listing Wells Fargo advisors and key pension fund investors like the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, which J4J then successfully engaged to bring the owner to the table.
Finally, it’s critical to find mediums to communicate research clearly and accessible to the public.
Noel Day, who drafted the Freedom School curriculum that SNCC helped organize, once said: “Research needs to be intensive; what are the facts, how do they relate to the needs of the community, what is the best method of attack and why, etc.” But he also said that “Interpretation should be simple and clear.“
While analysis done by researchers in the case studies we examined was rigorous and detailed, the movements also found effective ways to communicate research to a wider audience. NARMIC produced visual slideshows on weapons’ systems. The authors of “Who Rules Columbia?” made visual maps of the campus power structure. SNCC put together educational “picture-stories” to support the campaign to build the Lowndes County Freedom Party. J4J researchers determined that for a “penny per square foot” you could give janitors living wages and health insurance, and this simple data point became a banner demand across J4J campaigns.
Continuing the Movement Research Tradition
In our current moment – and likely, for the foreseeable future — we will see no shortage of crises generating protest and resistance movements that call for all hands on deck.
It’s vital that we carry with us a deep sense of the indispensability of research for movements, past, present and future – something that we can all better understand by looking at our own movement histories.
For resources on movement research and power-mapping, see:
- LittleSis’s Map the Power Toolkit and Power Research Trainings
- For further reading on the case studies discussed in this article, see: