Framing, Political Opportunities, and Civic Mobilization in The Eastern European Revolutions: A Case Study of Poland's Freedom and Peace Movement

Scholarship on the revolutions of 1989 has failed to take into account the role social movements played in civic mobilization in the late communist period. This is in part due to shortcomings in the theory of political opportunities as applied to repressive regimes. Through a case study of the Freedom and Peace movement, prominent in Poland between 1985 and 1989, this article shows how such a movement needed to create its own opportunities. Its emergence and ability to mobilize cannot be explained within the widely accepted model of political opportunity structures. Attention is directed instead to three movement strategies: exploiting opportunities within the underground opposition; reframing state repression as a motivation for activism; and choosing issues, such as resistance to the draft and environmental protest, which exposed weaknesses in the communist regime and thus lowered the perceived risks of participation.