Acting Upon Time: Strategic Temporality of Radical Social Movements

This article addresses the growing yet fragmented temporal turn within social movement studies by advancing a temporally centred framework for understanding how contemporary radical movements construct and enact strategy under conditions of crisis and historical blockage. While existing scholarship has increasingly examined temporal dimensions such as memory, anticipation, prefiguration, or protest rhythms, these approaches have often remained analytically separated. As a result, social movement theory still lacks an integrated framework for examining how movements strategically act upon time and articulate different temporal dimensions in their political praxis. Drawing on debates in temporality and social movement studies, the article develops the concept of strategic temporality, understood as the relational configuration through which movements mediate between structural conditions and collective agency by coordinating narratives, emotions, and tactics across temporal horizons. The analytical operationalisation of this framework is through a qualitative comparative analysis of two contemporary radical movements in Spain: Movimiento Socialista and Futuro Vegetal. Through this comparison, the article reconstructs a series of temporally mediated mechanisms by which movements diagnose crises (temporal misalignment), position themselves within historical time (time-positioning), and coordinate collective action (coordination of narratives, emotions, and tactics), conforming the strategic temporality. This temporally centred framework integrates debates on temporality and social movements, and on their temporal and collective agency, into a broader relational understanding of how movements organise their strategy over time. In doing so, it also contributes to wider discussions on the relationship between structure and agency by conceptualising temporality as a mediating field through which movements negotiate historical conditions and political possibilities. By approaching collective action through temporality, this article ultimately seeks to contribute to a more relational and temporally sensitive understanding of how movements attempt to enact their strategies within an increasingly unstable capitalist timescape.