Date of Award

Summer 8-22-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D. in International Studies

Organizational Unit

Josef Korbel School of International Studies

First Advisor

Marie Berry

Second Advisor

Deborah Avant

Third Advisor

Rebecca Galemba

Fourth Advisor

Milli Lake

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Keywords

Democracy, Gender, India, Mexico, Social movements

Abstract

Why do social movements create extensive internal structures as part of their repertoires, often unrelated to their stated demands? And how do these internal structures transform participants’ political subjectivities, particularly in flawed democracies? This dissertation argues that social movements contribute to democratic life not only through claims directed outward at political institutions, but by simultaneously reorganizing democratic practice from within and transforming participants’ subjectivities toward the state. Movements build internal structures because sustained collective action exposes deep-rooted needs that participants’ formal demands do not capture, and because the same collective action that exposes these needs also makes meeting them possible.

Drawing on 109 semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and sustained community engagement across two women-led movements—the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests at Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi, India (2019–2020) and the Okupa Cuba occupation in Mexico City, Mexico (2020–2022)—I trace how participants are transformed from democracy-seeking political subjects into democracy-creating ones. I argue that this transformation unfolds through three overlapping mechanisms: political recognition, through which participants collectively name structural harm in welfare, security, and public space; political substitution, through which movements build infrastructures that address these harms; and political consolidation, through which these structures and the political orientations they produce are absorbed into participants’ daily lives both within and beyond the movement.

This dynamic is most likely to take shape in flawed democracies, where formal democratic procedures coexist with persistent state violence, exclusion, and neglect, and where primary participants come from communities with histories of state-targeted harm. Sustained mobilization is the necessary condition; historical marginalization and flawed democratic context determine the depth and comprehensiveness of the transformation.

Three papers trace this transformation empirically across three arenas of governance traditionally understood as the province of the state: welfare, security, and public space. Together, they demonstrate that the transformation from democracy-seeking to democracy-creating is not confined to any single domain of governance but runs consistently across all three—and that for participants who were never likely to win formal concessions from their states, the democratic life they built inside their movements was the outcome that mattered most.

Copyright Date

8-2026

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Sinduja Raja

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

266 pgs

File Size

1.2 MB

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Available for download on Sunday, September 24, 2028



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