Some Refugees Welcome? Frame Disputes between Micro-Cohorts in the Refugee Solidarity Movement

Abstract

The transformation of social movement collective identity—the members shared under-standing of the movement’s purpose, goals and means—is a central concern of move-ment scholars. A main driver of such transformations is disputes over framing the movements’ purpose, which arise due to the entrance of new micro-cohorts of activists with different views than those of the veteran cohorts. This paper provides unique in-sight into the rarely studied process of such frame disputes by studying the entrance in-to the refugee solidarity movement of a new micro-cohort of activists mobilized in re-sponse to the 2022 war in Ukraine. While united in the endeavor to assist the victims of the war in Ukraine, veteran activists and newcomer activists strongly disagree on whether other groups of refugees should be entitled to the same relatively high level of help offered to the Ukrainian refugees. Online ethnography of movement activity on the social media of Facebook allows us to access the framing disputes as they unfold. While major ideological differences exist between the veteran and newcomer cohorts, frame disputes are rare. Rather than the expected clash between cohorts, we find that the contentious and humanitarian practices were compartmentalized into different Facebook fora.