Trigger events
Most simply, trigger events are moments of social movement activity that quickly change the political landscape and attract more participation and attention than anyone thought possible.
More, from the Momentum training participant guide:
Trigger events are the opportune moments of escalation for the movement.
They can be completely outside the control or influence of the movement (as with the police murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson) or they can be completely created by the movement (Occupy Wall Street’s Days of Action, Gandhi’s Salt March, etc.).
A trigger event is an opportunity to amplify the demands of the movement through escalation. It is important to understand that strategic preparation for trigger events outside of the movement’s influence and strategic coordination of trigger events entirely within the control of the movement are both essential to building enough momentum to win.
From the Resistance Guide (p41, available online at the link):
Large-scale game changing protests are known as trigger events. These are the engine for the resistance. They fill our ranks with people who want to help create change. They dramatize injustice and speak to core values. They give even those who keep to the sidelines a stronger connection to the message. We call it game change because trigger events can cause such a dramatic culture shift that the entire political playing field is rearranged.
On the origins of the term, from an article by Mark and Paul Engler in Waging Nonviolence:
In his book Doing Democracy, Bill Moyer, a long-time social movement trainer and theorist of the nonviolent direct action tradition in the United States, describes the concept of a “trigger event.” A trigger is a “highly publicized, shocking incident” that “dramatically reveals a critical social problem to the public in a vivid way.” These events, Moyer argues, are an essential part of the cycle of every social movement. They create vital windows in which activists can rally mass participation and sharply increase public support for a cause.
How to assess trigger events
A key point to understand: trigger events can be labelled as trigger events in hindsight (or sometimes, as they are happening), as determined by their impact on shifting the "common sense"/culture/political terrain of the time. It is not necessarily possible to predict that X protest or X announcement will be a trigger event.
Some symptoms of trigger events, in comparison to 'usual' or previous circumstances:
- Rapid, exponential increase in active support & passive support, including...
- Drastically increased participation in movement activity
- Increased media attention
Moments of the whirlwind
A moment of the whirlwind is a period of time in which multiple trigger events are popping off, building off of each other to further shift the political landscape and open pathways for transformation.
Check out this article in Waging Nonviolence by Mark and Paul Engler for more – From the Berlin Wall to today - Lessons on harnessing the moment of the whirlwind. The Englers trace the origin of the term "moment of the whirlwind" to one of the founders of modern community organizing, Saul Alinsky:
Interestingly, Alinsky himself was more open to extraordinary potential of peak moments than many of his ideological descendents. Seeing the rush of civil rights activity that followed the 1961 Freedom Rides in the segregated South, Alinsky and his protégé Nicholas von Hoffman dubbed it a “moment of the whirlwind.” The two agreed on the need to temporarily set aside their normal organizing methodologies in order to tap into the energy of the extraordinary uprising [...] when a whirlwind truly begins churning, it is not the result of one incident. Rather, it is the product of multiple, compounding crises — many of which are the result of deliberate effort.
How movements create trigger events
Movements can often plan to create trigger events by planning bold, dramatic action that captures attention through increasing escalation (disruptiveness and sacrifice) and powerful symbolic demands that resonate with common values.
An example of Black Lives Matter from the Resistance Guide (p42, available online at the link):
In 2013, activists created #BlackLivesMatter in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin. The following year, the #BlackLivesMatter movement organized mass protests in response to the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Polarized by the protests, few could ignore the issue of racial justice in policing. In this case, the horrific killings prompted trigger events in the form of game-changing protest actions.
And an example from the same guide on making a trigger event out of the 2016 election:
Considered this way, the movement built a trigger event out of Trump’s victory. The day after the 2016 election, more than 350 protests broke out in cities large and small across the United States. Within five days, activists announced plans for a Women’s March that would take place immediately after the inauguration. This march turned out to be the largest protest in U.S. history, with more than 4.2 million participants in more than 600 cities, and forced a brand new presidency into an unprecedented defensive crouch.
The study of civil resistance shows us that many trigger events with the largest impacts were "less accidental than they first appear" – continued, from the Englers in Waging Nonviolence:
Civil resistance works when groups are willing to seize an opportunity and escalate — rallying the power of mass participation and personal sacrifice in order to produce ever more ambitious acts of resistance. Before Rosa Parks, there had been previous arrests on Jim Crow buses, but civil rights groups consciously chose to make Parks’ arrest into a test case for segregation, in part because she was a committed activist herself. In other instances, from the Salt March, to Birmingham, to Occupy, movements created their own trigger events, using disruptive actions to make headlines, prompt a reaction from authorities, and begin a cycle in which new participants could join in to ever-larger actions.