New Social Movements: the Case of Azerbaijan Province of Iran

Defects and imperfections of classic theories of social movements in explaining the new movements were impelling the social and political scholars to set up new models and theories for exploring them. The paper contains the conceptual explanation of social movements and their differences with the kinship vocabularies such as political parties and sectarians and so on; briefly description of Smelser''s collective behavior, Charles Taylor''s resource mobilization and political process theory and the last extendedly examines the differences of the old and new social movements. So as follows of the latter, the strategic goals of new social movements are going to affect public opinion and public attitudes, but in return for the old ones were searching to seize the political power. With these theoretical views, examining the unrest of the Azerbaijan of Iran in May 2006 is shown that the main causes in this public protest were ethnic identification, correcting of the improper portrait on the ethnic groups and cultural claims.