Art Did What Policy Couldn’t.
On BTS, ARMY, and the Quiet Proof That Art Activism Is the Most Underestimated Force in Social Change
There is a question nobody asks about BTS.
Not the question about whether K-pop is real music. Not the question about whether their fans are delusional. Not even the question about whether an artist from Seoul, South Korea, can have anything meaningful to say to a teenager in São Paulo, Lagos, or Paris. Those questions get asked constantly, loudly, by people who have already decided the answer.
The question nobody asks is simpler and more devastating: what exactly is the relationship between BTS and ARMY, and why does it keep producing outcomes that organized institutions, with far more resources and authority, have failed to produce?
A fandom matched a million-dollar donation to Black Lives Matter in 24 hours, with no central coordination. A fandom built a 50-language mental health NGO that lobbied a government into reopening a public service it had abandoned during a pandemic. A fandom responded to a surge of anti-Asian violence not with hashtags alone but with translated resources, documented evidence, and sustained educational campaigns. A fandom got invited to the United Nations.
None of this was BTS. None of this was ARMY. All of this was the relationship between them. And that relationship is the most underestimated social movement engine of the 21st century.
The movement does not live in BTS. It does not live in ARMY. It lives in the space between them, in what the art makes possible, and what the community does with that possibility.
Most analysis of BTS and activism makes one of two errors. Either it credits BTS, the artists, the institution, or the carefully managed public image, with producing social change. Or it credits ARMY, the fans, the community, the grassroots energy, with doing things despite their association with a commercial pop product. Both framings miss the point entirely.
BTS, taken alone, is a group of artists with an unusually sophisticated understanding of how music can carry meaning. They write about self-acceptance, mental health, social injustice, and the weight of being young in a world that doesn’t slow down for you. They do this with genuine craft and, importantly, with documented personal honesty. RM’s public conversation about his own anxiety is not marketing. It is the kind of vulnerable disclosure that produces what psychologists Green and Brock (2000) call narrative transportation: the state of being so emotionally absorbed in a story that your defenses lower, your attitudes shift, and you become genuinely open to a different way of seeing.
ARMY, taken alone, is a globally diverse community organized around shared values rather than shared identity. Not one race, not one class, not one geography. Porta and Diani (2006) call this a New Social Movement, one whose power comes from collective belief rather than collective grievance. Jenkins (2006) calls it participatory culture, fans as active producers of meaning, not passive consumers of content. Bennett and Segerberg (2013) call its organizing logic connective action, millions of individuals making personal choices that aggregate, without central command, into a collective political force.
But here is what none of these frameworks fully captures: the relationship between them is not additive. It is generative. BTS does not simply inspire ARMY to act. ARMY does not simply amplify what BTS says. What happens between them is a continuous loop: the art creates the emotional conditions, the community converts those conditions into action, the action deepens the community’s identity, and that deeper identity makes the community more receptive to the next wave of art. Round and round, accumulating force.
Stephen Duncombe (2023) comes closest to naming this with his concept of dreampolitik, the idea that the most powerful activism does not argue for a better world; it makes a better world feel emotionally real before asking anyone to build it. BTS’s music is a dream. The Army’s organization is the politics. Neither is the movement. The movement is what happens when the dream and the politics find each other.
BTS does not simply inspire ARMY to act. ARMY does not simply amplify what BTS says. What happens between them is generative, a continuous loop that accumulates force with every revolution.
Gramsci called this a war of position: the long cultural struggle to shift public consciousness before political power can shift. What BTS and ARMY discovered, without reading Gramsci, without a strategic plan, without a manifesto, is that the war of position is most effective when the artist and the community are fighting it together, each making the other more capable than they would be alone.
You know the voice. It shows up in op-eds, in dinner conversations, in the barely suppressed eye-rolls of people who consider themselves serious. It says: K-pop fans are hysterical. Parasocial. They are, let us be honest, mostly teenage girls, which tells you everything you need to know.
This is not an observation. It is, in Gramsci’s terms, hegemony at work, the process by which the dominant culture’s biases present themselves as common sense. The ‘hysterical fan’ is a category that has been applied, across decades and genres, to delegitimize organized communities of young women before their organizing can be evaluated. It was applied to Beatlemania. It was applied to One Direction fans who coordinated charity campaigns. It is applied to ARMY.
The contempt has a cost that goes beyond rudeness. When the BTS-ARMY relationship is dismissed as fandom hysteria, what actually gets dismissed is: a mental health infrastructure that filled government gaps during a pandemic; a donation mobilization model that moved a million dollars in 24 hours without a single organizational command; an educational response to anti-Asian violence that produced translated, documented resources in dozens of languages; a sustained UNICEF partnership that raised nearly three million dollars for child wellbeing by embedding philanthropy inside the act of buying music.
The skeptics did not just miss all of this. Their dismissal actively delayed its recognition.
Every year that ARMY’s organizing was treated as fan behavior rather than civil society was a year that the model went unstudied, unreplicated, and unsupported.
The contempt was not merely wrong. It was expensive.
And here is the final indignity: the skeptics are still asking whether BTS and ARMY deserve to be taken seriously. They are asking this while the receipts pile up. While the UN invitation sits in the archive. While the government services that ARMY lobbied back into existence continue to answer phones.
The question has already been answered. The question now is, why does it take so long to ask?
I want to be careful here because the academic work on fan activism and social movements is genuinely valuable, and I am going to use it throughout this essay. But there is a pattern that needs to be named honestly.
Henry Jenkins published Convergence Culture in 2006. Bennett and Segerberg published The Logic of Connective Action in 2013. Novak-Leonard and Skaggs published their study on artists as community change agents in 2017. The peer-reviewed paper specifically documenting ARMY Help Center as a social movement organization arrived in 2023, five years after AHC was founded.
Theory has been chasing practice. The frameworks were built to describe something that was already happening. And the lag is not innocent: it reflects which communities we treat as worthy of serious study, whose organizing we consider legible as politics, and whose emotional investment we read as civic participation versus mere enthusiasm.
The most consequential grassroots mental health organization to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, one that demonstrably influenced government policy, went half a decade without academic documentation. Meanwhile, the literature on social media misinformation, on bot networks, and on algorithmic radicalization grew rapidly and received significant institutional support. We study the pathologies of digital culture with urgency. We study its civic possibilities with delay.
We study the pathologies of digital culture with urgency. We study its civic possibilities with delay. And we study the organizing of young women of color last of all.
What the academic literature eventually confirmed was that the BTS-ARMY relationship constitutes a textbook case of connective action, narrative transportation, counter-hegemonic framing, and New Social Movement organization, which ARMY had already demonstrated in practice. The theory caught up. It always does. The question is what we miss in the gap.
CASE 1. LOVE MYSELF: WHEN THE ART AND THE ACTIVISM BECAME THE SAME THING
In 2017, BTS and Big Hit Entertainment launched the LOVE MYSELF campaign in partnership with UNICEF. The premise was structurally different from any celebrity charity partnership that had come before it: proceeds from album sales and merchandise went directly to UNICEF’s child wellbeing programs. This meant that every fan who bought the music was participating in the philanthropy, whether they consciously intended to or not. The art and the activism were financially fused.
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But the deeper significance is what this revealed about the relationship. BTS did not announce a cause and ask ARMY to donate. They embedded the cause inside the artistic product itself, inside the Love Yourself album series, which had spent two years making self-acceptance feel emotionally real to millions of listeners before the campaign was even named. By the time UNICEF was invoked, ARMY had already been living inside the values the campaign represented. The ask was not to please care about this. It was you who already did.
The result: nearly three million dollars raised. BTS at the UN General Assembly. UNICEF’s Executive Director credited the artists with delivering a public mental health message — you are not alone — that governments were struggling to communicate during the pandemic. An artist performing a public health function that institutions were failing to perform. Not because BTS decided to be activists. Because the relationship between the art and the community had been building that capacity for years.
The ask was not ‘please care about this.’ It was ‘you already do.’ BTS had spent two years making the values emotionally real before the campaign had a name.
CASE 2. BLACK LIVES MATTER: CONNECTIVE ACTION AT ITS PUREST
In June 2020, BTS released a statement on Black Lives Matter and donated one million dollars to the movement. Within 24 hours, ARMY had matched the donation. No organizational command. No fundraising infrastructure. No membership drive. Fans saw the statement, made individual decisions, and created a collective outcome that moved a million dollars in a single day.
This is what Bennett and Segerberg mean by connective action, and it is worth pausing on how different it is from everything we expect social movements to look like. Traditional collective action requires organizational infrastructure: someone coordinates, someone communicates, someone manages the money, and someone decides who counts as a member. All of that takes time, resources, and the inevitable friction of institutional politics.
ARMY had none of that infrastructure at this moment. What it had instead was something the infrastructure is supposed to produce: a shared moral framework, cultivated over years by the relationship with the art, that made individual fans capable of recognizing a moment and responding to it without being told how. BTS had spent years making racial justice, self-respect, and collective care feel like personal values rather than organizational positions. When the moment came, ARMY did not need to be mobilized. They were already moved.
The BLM match is the purest expression of what the BTS-ARMY relationship produces: not followers executing a leader’s vision, but a community acting from internalized values that the art helped form. The movement did not live in BTS’s statement. It lived in what that statement activated in people who had been preparing, without knowing it, for years.
ARMY did not need to be mobilized. They were already moved. The art had been preparing them for this moment for years without anyone knowing it was preparation.
CASE 3. STOP ASIAN HATE
When anti-Asian hate crimes surged in 2021, BTS released a statement. RM’s words, “we stand against racial discrimination,” became a rallying point. But what ARMY did with that rallying point is what distinguishes this case from celebrity endorsement.
ARMY did not simply retweet. They created documentation campaigns. They translated resources into dozens of languages. They organized fundraising. They produced detailed historical and contextual education about anti-Asian racism, its roots, its forms, and its specific manifestations in different countries. They became, in the language of Novak-Leonard and Skaggs, educators, a role that emerged organically from survey respondents when asked to describe what artists do in their communities, and one that the researchers noted needed to be added to future indicators.
This educating instinct had already appeared in the Jimin shirt incident, when a controversy over a T-shirt referencing Korean national memory prompted ARMY to produce detailed historical documents explaining the context of Korean colonial history and the symbolism of the garment. Not defense. Not dismissal. Research. Documentation. Education.
What Stop Asian Hate reveals is that the BTS–ARMY relationship produces a community with an unusually high capacity for epistemic activism, the kind of organizing that doesn’t just raise money or sign petitions but changes what people know and how they understand it. This is Snow and Benford’s frame theory in action: the movement winning not just hearts but minds, shifting the very terms on which an issue is understood. And it works because the relationship between BTS and ARMY had already been established, through years of music and mutual engagement, that understanding deeply is an act of love.
BTS and ARMY are not a K-pop group with an unusually engaged fanbase. They are a social movement, one that operates through the relationship between artist and community rather than through the organizational structures we expect social movements to use. That relationship has produced: a UNICEF partnership that raised millions and gave artists a diplomatic platform; a spontaneous million-dollar BLM donation match with no central coordination; a multilingual educational response to anti-Asian violence that went far beyond what any single organization planned; and a non-governmental mental health organization that filled government gaps, won policy changes, and earned UN recognition.
Every outcome is downstream of the same source: art that made values feel real, and a community that was moved enough by those values to act on them. The art did not cause the activism. The community did not produce the art. The relationship between them, a continuous, generative, accumulating force over the years, is what produced everything.
Gramsci called this the war of position. Duncombe called it dreampolitik. Bennett and Segerberg called it connective action. Jenkins called it participatory culture. Novak-Leonard called it the paradigm shift. They were all describing the same thing from different angles: the moment when art stops being something people consume and starts being something people live inside, and from which they build.
BTS made something people live inside. ARMY built from it. And the things they built together, through the relationship, are more durable, more consequential, and more instructive than anything the institutions that dismissed them have managed to produce.
The art did not cause the activism. The community did not produce the art. The relationship between them, a continuous, generative, accumulating force over the years, is what produced everything.
The paradigm did not shift because policymakers read the right papers. It shifted because millions of people felt, through music, through fandom, through the particular intimacy of artists who shared their struggles before they asked anything of their audience, what it means to be genuinely cared for. And then they built institutions out of that feeling.
That is what art activism looks like when it works. Not a campaign. Not a donation. Not a statement. A relationship, sustained over years, that makes a community capable of things no single institution planned for.
Sources & Further Reading
Putri, A.N. & Kresnawati, E. (2023). ARMY Help Center as a social movement organization for BTS fans in improving mental health.
Novak-Leonard, J.L. & Skaggs, R. (2017). Artists in Their Communities. National Endowment for the Arts.
Duncombe, S. (2023). Aeffect: The Affect and Effect of Artistic Activism. Fordham University Press.
Bennett, W.L. & Segerberg, A. (2013). The Logic of Connective Action. Cambridge University Press.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture. New York University Press.
Green, M.C. & Brock, T.C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5).
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers.
Burstein, P. (2003). The impact of public opinion on public policy. Political Research Quarterly, 56(1).
Snow, D.A. & Benford, R.D. (1988). Ideology, frame resonance, and participant mobilization. International Social Movement Research, 1.
Porta, D. & Diani, M. (2006). Social Movements: An Introduction. Blackwell.
