Breaking down the question
This twenty-mark question has two explicit demands. First, highlight the prerequisites of a social movement — that is, the conditions and ingredients without which sustained collective action cannot arise. Second, bring out the differences between a social movement and a revolution. The verbs matter: highlight asks you to identify and explain the enabling conditions, while bring out the differences asks for a comparative treatment that distinguishes two forms of collective action that overlap but are not identical.
The examiner is probing whether you can move beyond a loose everyday sense of protest to a precise sociological vocabulary. A social movement is an organised, sustained collective effort to bring about or resist change. A revolution is a more radical phenomenon involving the rapid and often forcible transformation of the state and the social order. Your answer should treat the movement first, establish its prerequisites, and then use a set of clear axes to separate movement from revolution.
How to approach it
Open with a working definition of a social movement, then devote the first main section to its prerequisites: shared discontent and relative deprivation, an ideology, leadership and organisation, resources and communication, an enabling political opportunity, and a degree of collective identity. Draw on Smelser's value-added conditions and Gurr's relative deprivation to give these theoretical weight.
Then pivot to the comparison. Set out the differences along clear dimensions — scope, means, speed, relationship to the state, and outcome — rather than listing random contrasts. Conclude by noting the connection between the two, since revolutions often grow out of movements. You can anchor the discussion in your notes on protest movements and revolution.
Model answer
A social movement is a sustained and organised collective effort by a body of people who share a grievance and act together to promote or resist change in society. It is more enduring than a riot or a crowd and more purposive than a passing fashion, and it stands outside routine institutional politics.
Several prerequisites must be present for such a movement to emerge and survive. The first is a shared sense of discontent. Ted Gurr's concept of relative deprivation captures this well — people mobilise not from absolute misery but from a felt gap between what they believe they are entitled to and what they actually receive. Second, a movement requires an ideology: a set of ideas that names the grievance, identifies its cause, offers a vision of a better arrangement and justifies action. Third, it needs leadership and organisation to convert diffuse discontent into coordinated activity, articulate demands and sustain morale through setbacks. Fourth, following resource-mobilisation theory, a movement depends on resources — money, members, networks, media access and communication — without which even deeply felt grievances remain dormant. Fifth, a favourable political opportunity, such as divisions among elites or a loosening of repression, helps a movement gain traction. Finally, a collective identity and a sense of solidarity bind participants and make sacrifice possible. Neil Smelser's value-added model usefully synthesises several of these into a sequence of conditions — structural conduciveness, strain, a generalised belief, precipitating factors, mobilisation and the operation of social control — that together determine whether collective behaviour crystallises into a movement.
The differences between a social movement and a revolution can be drawn along several axes. In scope, a social movement often pursues a specific or limited change — a reform, a right, a policy, a cultural shift — and many movements are content to work within the existing order. A revolution aims at a fundamental transformation of the entire social and political structure, above all a change in state power and class relations. In means, movements typically employ a range of largely non-institutional but not necessarily violent methods — petitions, demonstrations, civil disobedience — whereas revolutions usually involve the forcible seizure of power and frequently large-scale violence. In pace, movements unfold gradually and may persist for decades, while revolutions bring rapid and often abrupt change. In their relationship to the state, a movement pressures, negotiates with or reforms the existing authority, whereas a revolution seeks to overthrow and replace it. In outcome, a successful movement secures particular gains within the system, while a successful revolution reconstitutes the system itself. Theda Skocpol's structural analysis reminds us that genuine social revolutions are rare, requiring a coincidence of state breakdown and class upheaval that ordinary movements do not produce.
The two forms are nonetheless connected. Revolutions frequently begin as social movements that radicalise when reform is blocked and repression hardens, so the movement can be seen as the broader genus and the revolution as its most far-reaching species. A reform movement that meets an immovable state may escalate towards revolutionary aims, while a revolution, once victorious, often institutionalises itself and gives rise to new movements in turn.
In sum, the prerequisites of a movement — grievance, ideology, leadership, organisation, resources and opportunity — are the raw materials of all collective mobilisation, but the movement and the revolution differ in ambition, method, speed and their fundamental stance towards the existing order.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner has divided the marks between the two tasks, so an answer that lavishes attention on prerequisites and then offers only a thin contrast — or vice versa — will be capped. The strongest responses treat both halves with equal seriousness and, crucially, organise the comparison along explicit dimensions rather than as a scattered list. Bringing in Gurr on relative deprivation, resource-mobilisation theory and Smelser's conditions demonstrates theoretical range in the first part, while Skocpol's structural account of revolution lends authority to the second. Candidates who close by linking movement and revolution — noting that revolutions often emerge from radicalised movements — show the synthetic judgement that top scripts display, rather than leaving the two phenomena as unrelated boxes.