Abstract
This article contributes to the literature on law and social movements by analyzing legal mobilization against both state and non-state targets. It focuses on the campaign of the U’wa indigenous people in Colombia as a theory-generating study to explain why changes in campaign targets can promote variations in the areas of law that social movements mobilize, the arenas or venues where they choose to mobilize, and the forms of legal mobilization they deploy. It shows that state and corporate targets provide different opportunities for legal mobilization because they operate within different fields of political, social, and economic life, each with their own field frames, defined as internal sets of norms and values.
Activists have different ways of interacting with field frames. They can use human rights or environmental frames to target corporations. But this strategy may not always work since corporations are not necessarily vulnerable to attacks within human rights or environmental fields. Alternatively, as this Article shows, activists can also target corporations by subverting corporate field frames, using corporate norms, values, and institutions for their own purposes.
Importantly, however, this article also illustrates how the counter-hegemonic use of field frames is a two-way street, used by both activists and corporations. Corporations also interact within activists’ fields, subverting human rights or environmental norms in order to block activists from using certain venues, and co-opting their potential allies.