narratives@war. Zu den politischen Ideologien der Neuen Sozialen Bewegungen anhand der Beispiele Frauen- & Free Software-Bewegung

Over the course of the last three decades the numbers of volunteers in civic projects have steadily increased. While organization and participation in groups dealing with social issues are by no means new, the soaring numbers of volunteers from all walks of life and the elevated levels of political self-awareness are a more recent phenomenon. Academia came to term these groups New Social Movements. Despite a plethora of research being done on these groups, comparably little thougth is given to their political philosophies in a comparative manner. This thesis sets out to draw a first sketch of a previously uncharted area: the political ideologies New Social Movements are founded upon. French philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard proclaimed the end of the Grand Stories, that had wrapped around every political discourse since Antiquity. According to his analysis, these meta-narratives were replaced by a multitude of little stories or narratives. This assertion serves as a base camp from which the journey to the ideologies of the New Social Movements is being conducted. As proxies for all Movements, two remarkably different ones were analyzed: the feminist movement and free software communities. These were chosen deliberately to cover diverse fields and thus provide results that are generalizable to a greater population of movements. By means of critical analysis of scholarly literature and experience reports of activists, three main narratives are identified that are at work in both movements. A libertarian, an anarchist and a communitarian narrative shape not only the intra-movement discourse but also the way people that subscribe to either one of them organize. To systematically describe the workings of the narratives, central aspects of movemental organizing are identified and their traces in the narratives reported. There are surprising similarities between both movements and across narratives, showing the anarchist narrative to be most similar across the movements.