SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: CONCEPTUAL TOOLS

Social protest as a political participation mechanism is paramount for the natural rights advocacy, which despite of its regulation; it remains widely spread within the contemporary world order. Exploring through the certainties of the subject, this study underpins a general approach to the epistemological field at its most outstanding expression: social movements and the extensive academic tradition that outlines them, with the aim of summarizing and providing conceptual tools for it analysis, to whom its study may interest. With this aim, we can trace back the path of these phenomena, in chronological order, from the last decades of the 19th century to the present, as well as the evolution of the theoretical issues, which have stablished the connotations of these very phenomena, adopting contributions from the American and European schools as well as Latin American ones.