This chapter is about theory of activism. You probably won't find much practical advice here, but you will learn the basic terminology about activism and other related concepts.
🧠 This is a background chapter: At Activist Handbook, we focus on writing a practical guides for activists. Sometimes, theory is useful in explaining the emergence of the practices we write about in further chapters.
- Want to take action now? Skip this chapter. We encourage you to explore our various other chapters, which can be found in the left sidebar.
- Want to improve your understanding of activism? This is the right place to start.
¶ What is a ‘theory of change’?
This section has not been written yet.
¶ The Activist Handbook theory
¶ About activism
To understand better what we mean with activism and why we are interested in it, we recommend you to read the following articles:
¶ About demonstrations
¶ Theoretical concepts
As an activist, there are probably lots of things that you would like to change. These theoretic concepts will help you understand better how different phenomena are connected.
We discuss terms that are frequently used in the context of change-making and investigate their meaning:
- Dignity of life
- Democracy
- Ecology
- Justice
- Power
- Intersectionality
- Environmental activism and religions
- Overton window
- Performative activism
¶ Improve this page
¶ Focus
When improving this page, focus on the following:
- Find a way to structure this chapter
- Discuss ‘theory of change' in general, and our perspective on it. We already have an article on theory of change, which should be integrated with this chapter.
¶ Questions activist may have
- What is activism?
- What do theoretical concepts such as participatory democracy, peer to peer education etc mean?
- How do activists understand justice and equality?
- What are ethics?
¶ Search keywords
People look up the following topics on Google:
| Keywords | Monthly global searches* | Relevancy |
|---|---|---|
| activist theory | 210 | high |
| theory of change | 30K | medium |
| change theories | 20.5K | low |
| overton window | 47.8K | low |
| activism definition | 8.3K | medium |
| examples of activism | 1K | high |
| why is activism important | 950 | high |
| performative activism | 9.7K | medium |
| effective protests in history | 140 | high |
| successful activism examples | 10 | high |
| are protests effective in promoting social change | 20 | high |
| what motivates people to struggle for change | 620 | high |
| what does it take to be an activist | 90 | high |
| how to be an activist from home | ||
| what is a human rights activist | ||
| how to be a civil rights activist | ||
| how to be an activist on social media |
*According to Semrush