Episode 7

Bonus: What Makes Social Movements Win (The Context)

Published on: 21st October, 2025

This week’s episode is from our friends at The Context podcast.

Deva Woodly joins host Alex Lovit to discuss the importance of social movements for American democracy and the role they can play at this precarious moment in American political history. We need these networks of trust and coordinated action to push the country away from authoritarianism and toward a democracy that works for everyone.

Deva Woodly is a scholar of social movements. She is a professor of political science at Brown University and a research fellow at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.

Subscribe to The Context here: https://pod.link/1726934311

Learn more about the Charles F Kettering Foundation here: https://kettering.org

 Disrupting Peace is a production of The World Peace Foundation. The show is produced by Bridget Conley and Emily Shaw. Engineering by Jacob Winik and Aja Simpson. Marketing and Social media by Kaelen Song. Show artwork by Simon Fung.

 Special thanks to Jeremy Helton, Lisa Avery, B. Arneson, and Alex de Waal, and the team from the Tufts Digital Design Studio, including Kimberly Lynn Forero-Arnias, and Miles Donovan.

 Find out more about the World Peace Foundation at worldpeacefoundation.org. Follow us on Bluesky at worldpeacefdtn.bsky.social, and on Instagram and TikTok at @worldpeacefdtn.

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About the Podcast

Disrupting Peace
Disrupting Peace explores why peace hasn’t worked, and how it still could. In each episode, Bridget Conley, research director at the World Peace Foundation, speaks with a researcher specializing in one obstacle to peace, and an activist who’s changing systems from the ground up. Together they explore what worked, what didn’t, and why we shouldn’t give up.

About your host

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Bridget Conley

Bridget Conley is Research Director at the World Peace Foundation (WPF) and an Associate Research Professor at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. She leads WPF’s research programs on atrocity response and incarceration. She works closely with the Executive Director on project development, fundraising and strategic vision for WPF. Currently, her primary research focus concerns the implications of American mass incarceration for local, national and international policies.