Meso-level Leaders as Brokers of Horizontal and Vertical Linkages in Feminist Networked Social Movements

Decentralized networks have emerged as the key organizing principle of digital activism over the last decade. What is missing in this focus on horizontal connections is how grassroots movements can make vertical connections with power structures to influence policy changes. By comparing two cases of feminist networked social movements from South Korea, I examine instances of horizontal-to-vertical brokerage and conditions that enable such brokerage through the lens of leadership. I propose the concept of meso-level leadership to elaborate how networked feminist leaders could facilitate grassroots representation in mainstream legislative agenda-setting by forming relationships with actors across a broad organizational and institutional spectrum. Finally, I explore the implications of networked leadership on creator-centric and algorithmically clustered platforms like TikTok, where these platforms’ emphasis on individual visibility and virality poses challenges to the emergence of meso-level leadership.