Bio: (1936-) American sociologist. Anthony Oberschall received his PhPh.D.n sociology from Columbia University. He was a professor at Yale, Vanderbilt University, and the University of North Carolina. During his career, he dealt with various topics in the field of political sociology: nationalism and racism, ethnic cleansing, as well as the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Oberschall is one of the main proponents of the "resource mobilization theory" applied to the study of social movements. He developed this approach in his book Social Conflicts and Social Movements (1973) and believes that the ideas and beliefs that social movements use when they are trying to fight for something through public protests already exist in the wider culture. If collective protests are centrally organized, then the mobilization of participants is very similar to the mobilization of soldiers within the army; and the management of protests is similar to a military organization. The key to a successful protest is the possession of the most important resources: organizational resources, money, skills, time, access to the media, and access to centers of power. Oberschall views the protests and their organizers and participants in the context of the logic of rational choice developed by the Neoclassical School of Economics. He believes that this model best explains the strategies and tactics of social movements and that the main unit of their analysis should be a group, not individual members.

Oberschall classifies social movements into two dimensions. One dimension concerns the relationship within the collectivities, so he identifies three types of movements: ‘‘communal’’, ‘‘associational’’, and ‘‘weakly [organized] or unorganized’’. The second dimension refers to two types of relations with other collectives and segments of society, and these relations can be "vertical" or "horizontal". A strong vertical connection, such as that between different classes, can positively or negatively affect the success of mobilization, depending on the type, that is, the goal of a social movement. Vertical connectivity has a bad effect on class-based movements but is favorable on movements based on ethnicity. Oberschall introduces the term "block recruitment" which means that it is easier to mobilize an entire existing group or groups (block) into a new social movement than to mobilize individuals to join the movement.

Main works

Empirical Social Research in Germany, 1848–1914 (1965);

The Establishment of Empirical Sociology (1972);

Social Conflict and Social Movements (1973);

African Businessmen and Development in Zambia (1979);

Social Movements: Ideologies, Interests, and Identities (1993);

Conflict and Peacebuilding in Divided Societies: Responses to Ethnic Violence (2007).