ABSTRACT
While social movements are typically conceived as struggles between authorities and challengers, only analytic convenience justifies classifying all participants cleanly on one side or the other. The involvement of third parties with tenuous or partial loyalties to related causes, emergent schisms among challenging groups, and the myriad motives that define individuals’ engagement in contention all but ensure that uncertain or duplicitous allegiances shape at least some participants’ orientation to the collective struggle. Often, policing agencies – and sometimes the groups that challenge them – formalize this “gray area” of dual, contradictory, or fraudulent orientations by deploying agents to infiltrate competing parties.
