When a Movement Turns Inward: A New Theory of Power Inside Collective Struggle

Political struggles are usually told as stories of unity — a movement standing together against a state, a regime, or an established order. A new research outcome from the Asia-Pacific Social Innovation Research Institute (APSIRI), authored by Edmore Ntini of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, turns that assumption on its head. It argues that struggles are not only directed outward; they are themselves fields of power, generating internal hierarchies, exclusions, and authority long before any external victory is won.

The paper develops what the author calls Internal Contestation Theory. Rather than treating internal disagreement as fragmentation, dysfunction, or a temporary distraction from the “real” fight, the theory takes internal power seriously as a permanent feature of collective action. Within any struggle, participants compete over four scarce and consequential goods: legitimacy, resources, voice, and future authority. Who gets to speak for the movement, who controls its means, whose claims count as authentic, and who will hold power afterwards — these are political questions settled inside the struggle, not only outside it.

The theory traces how this internal contestation unfolds as a sequence: actors first capture legitimacy and symbolic centrality, then establish gatekeeping practices, regulate whose voices are heard, convert resources into influence, and finally consolidate the rules that will govern what comes next. Through these mechanisms, a shared project of collective action quietly hardens into structured hierarchies that shape representation and decision-making — and that often persist well after a movement formally succeeds or dissolves.

The contribution is deliberately conceptual rather than a commentary on any particular movement. Its value lies in offering a portable framework: a way to analyse how power is organised, accumulated, and exercised within collective projects of every kind, and to understand why internal dynamics so often prefigure the governance that follows. By reframing struggle as a field of internal power rather than a story of moral unity, the work reopens long-standing questions about representation and democratic futures.

This research reflects APSIRI’s commitment to rigorous, interdisciplinary inquiry that bridges political sociology, contentious politics, and the study of institutions — advancing knowledge that helps us understand how power actually works within the collective efforts that shape social change.