Here is one of the first books to assert that mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece, Argentina, and the United States share an agenda-to raise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalist movements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatory democracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today. Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensive interviews with movement participants in Spain, Venezuela, Japan, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is both one of the most expansive portraits of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, and organizational forms championed by the new movements, and an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy from ancient Athens to Athens today. The new movements put forward the idea that liberal democracy is not democratic, nor was it ever.

In the vast literature on the Vietnam War, much has been written about the antiwar movement and its influence on U.S. policy and politics. In this book, Sandra Scanlon shifts attention to those Americans who supported the war and explores the war's impact on the burgeoning conservative political movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. Believing the Vietnam War to be a just and necessary cause, the pro-war movement pushed for more direct American military intervention in Southeast Asia throughout the Kennedy administration, lobbied for intensified bombing during the Johnson years, and offered coherent, if divided, endorsements of Nixon's policies of phased withdrawal. Although its political wing was dominated by individuals and organizations associated with Barry Goldwater's presidential bids, the movement incorporated a broad range of interests and groups united by a shared antipathy to the New Deal order and liberal Cold War ideology. Appealing to patriotism, conservative leaders initially rallied popular support in favor of total victory and later endorsed Nixon's call for "peace with honor." Yet as the war dragged on with no clear end in sight, internal divisions eroded the confidence of pro-war conservatives in achieving their aims and forced them to reevaluate the political viability of their hardline Cold War rhetoric. Conservatives still managed to make use of grassroots patriotic campaigns to marshal support for the war, particularly among white ethnic workers opposed to the antiwar movement. Yet in so doing, Scanlon concludes, they altered the nature and direction of the conservative agenda in both foreign and domestic policy for years to come.

_______ 'A history book that should be read by all' - Stylist. Set against the background of the campaign for women to win the vote, this is a story of the ordinary people effecting extraordinary change. 1913: the last long summer before the war. The country is gripped by suffragette fever. These impassioned crusaders have their admirers; some agree with their aims if not their forceful methods, while others are aghast at the thought of giving any female a vote. Meanwhile, hundreds of women are stepping out on to the streets of Britain. They are the suffragists: non-militant campaigners for the vote, on an astonishing six-week protest march they call the Great Pilgrimage. Rich and poor, young and old, they defy convention, risking jobs, family relationships and even their lives to persuade the country to listen to them. Fresh and original, full of vivid detail and moments of high drama, Hearts and Minds is both funny and incredibly moving, important and wonderfully entertaining.

In November 1999, fifty-thousand anti-globalization activists converged on Seattle to shut down the World Trade Organization's Ministerial Meeting. Using innovative and network-based strategies, the protesters left police flummoxed, desperately searching for ways to control the crowds in Seattle and the emerging anti-corporate globalization movement. Faced with these network-based tactics, law enforcement agencies transformed their policing and social control mechanisms to manage this new threat.In ""Policing Dissent"", sociologist Luis A. Fernandez provides a firsthand account of the changing nature of control efforts employed by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies when confronted with mass activism. Based on ethnographic research, and using an incisive, cutting-edge theoretical framework, Fernandez maps the use of legal, physical, and psychological approaches.""Policing Dissent"" also offers readers the richness of experiential detail and engaging stories often lacking in studies of police practices and social movements. This book does not merely seek to explain the causal relationship between repression and mobilization. Rather, it shows how social control strategies act on the mind and body of protesters.

"Raskin's biography of Abbie Hoffman pleases precisely because it does not evade the ambiguities of that wild time. For a cynical age, Raskin evokes some of its innocent pleasures: great rock-and-roll, movements against injustices, exuberant sex."--Jonathan Rieder, "New York Times Book Review

"As much a corrective to a New Left history of the time as a biography of Abbie Hoffman, the wildest of the wildmen...Raskin's book is arranged like a series of filmed calender pages; behind the pages stand descriptions as vivid as movies of the formative influences moving with lightning speed across those few amazing years while Abbie, and the rhetoric inside him, grew apace."--Vivian Gornick, "The Nation

"Hoffman remains one of the most vivid figures in an era that specialized in them...It would be very hard to read his life's story and not be affected by it."--Jonathan Yardley, "Washington Post

"The book takes [Hoffman], his w ritings, and his politics seriously...Well-researched, well-reported, well-illustrated, and scrupulously documented."--Bruce McCabe, "Boston Globe

"Not only a biography of an individual...but a fully rounded portrait of that era...Hoffman remains an utterly fascinating American icon, one of the most important performance-art patriots of our time."--Bernard Weiner, "San Francisco Chronicle

Vigilantes operate in the shadows rather than the bright lights of mainstream political consensus. They have arisen at many times in different regions of the world as defenders, often by force, of their view of the good life against those they see to be its enemies. Recent reports of their activities in Britain, Ireland, mainland Europe, Africa, and America have appeared in the press. Yet they have been relatively little studied outside the United States, where they hold a special if at times romanticized position in the nationa s history. It may be that their common involvement in the defence of power, property and other "bourgeois" interests has been less attractive to scholars than the more radical activities of bandits and revolutionaries. Nonetheless, it is surprising that their often independent stance towards the State has not received more attention from both critical and friendly analysts of that institution. The book explores the "frontier" conditions in which vigilantism emerges as a solution, full of ambiguities, to problems of perceived disorder which official instruments of law and order do not handle to the vigilantea s satisfaction. Contemporary and historical case material -- from Africa, North and South America, the Philippines, Europe and Britain -- is examined within an analytic and comparative framework, as are the often fuzzy boundaries between vigilantism and other forms of "informal sector" activity, such as state death squads, mafia, and banditry. This book will be of value to undergraduates and graduates in anthropology, political sociology, criminology and history. It will also provide stimulating reading for all who are interested in issues of law and order.

Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink examine a type of pressure group that has been largely ignored by political analysts: networks of activists that coalesce and operate across national frontiers. Their targets may be international organizations or the policies of particular states. Historical examples of such transborder alliances include anti-slavery and woman suffrage campaigns. In the past two decades, transnational activism has had a significant impact in human rights, especially in Latin America, and advocacy networks have strongly influenced environmental politics as well. The authors also examine the emergence of an international campaign around violence against women.

The conventions of the nation-state have shaped our contemporary understanding of the process and politics of social movements. Keck and Sikkink sketch for the first time the dynamics of emergence, strategies, and impact of activists from different nationalities working together on particular issues. This eagerly awaited work will alter the way scholars conceptualize the making of international society and the practice of international politics.

Christina Kelley Gilmartin rewrites the history of gender politics in the 1920s with this compelling assessment of the impact of feminist ideals on the Chinese Communist Party during its formative years. For the first time, Gilmartin reveals the extent to which revolutionaries in the 1920s were committed to women's emancipation and the radical political efforts that were made to overcome women's subordination and to transform gender relations. Women activists whose experiences and achievements have been previously ignored are brought to life in this study, which illustrates how the Party functioned not only as a political organization but as a subculture for women as well. We learn about the intersection of the personal and political lives of male communists and how this affected their beliefs about women's emancipation. Gilmartin depicts with thorough and incisive scholarship how the Party formulated an ideological challenge to traditional gender relations while it also preserved aspects of those relationships in its organization.

In the past 15 years, UK anti-militarist activists have auctioned off a tank outside an arms fair, superglued themselves to Lockheed Martin's central London offices and stopped a battleship with a canoe. They have also challenged militarism in many other everyday ways. This book explores why anti-militarists resist, considers the politics of different tactics and examines the tensions and debates within the movement. As it explores the multifaceted, imaginative and highly subversive world of anti-militarism, the book also makes two overarching arguments. First, that anti-militarists can help us to understand militarism in new and useful ways. And secondly, that the methods and ideas used by anti-militarists can be a potent force for radical political change.

Europe might appear like a continent pulling itself apart. Ten years of economic and political crises have pitted North versus South, East versus West, citizens versus institutions. And yet, these years have also shown a hidden vitality of Europeans acting across borders, with civil society and social movements showing that alternatives to the status quo already exist. This book is at once a narrative of the experience of activism and a manifesto for change. Through analysing the ways in which neoliberalism, nationalism and borders intertwine, Marsili and Milanese - co-founders of European Alternatives - argue that we are in the middle of a great global transformation, by which we have all become citizens of nowhere. Ultimately, they argue that only by organising in a new transnational political party will the citizens of nowhere be able to struggle effectively for the utopian agency to transform the world.

Songs of Social Protest is a comprehensive companion guide to music and social protest globally. Bringing together scholars from a range of fields, it explores a wide range of examples of, and contexts for, songs and their performance that have been deployed as part of local, regional and global social protest movements, both in historical and contemporary times. Topics covered include: Aesthetics Authenticity African American Music Anti-capitalism Community & Collective Movements Counter-hegemonic Discourses Critical Pedagogy Folk Music Identity Memory Performance Popular Culture By placing historical approaches alongside cutting-edge ethnography, philosophical excursions alongside socio-political and economic perspectives, and cultural context alongside detailed, musicological, textual, and performance analysis, Songs of Social Protest offers a dynamic resource for scholars and students exploring song and singing as a form of protest.

Articulating Dissent analyses the new communicative strategies of coalition protest movements and how these impact on a mainstream media unaccustomed to fractured articulations of dissent. Pollyanna Ruiz shows how coalition protest movements against austerity, war and globalisation build upon the communicative strategies of older single issue campaigns such as the anti-criminal justice bill protests and the women's peace movement. She argues that such protest groups are dismissed in the mainstream for not articulating a 'unified position' and explores the way in which contemporary protesters stemming from different traditions maintain solidarity. Articulating Dissent investigates the ways in which this diversity, inherent to coalition protest, affects the movement of ideas from the political margins to the mainstream. In doing so this book offers an insightful and original analysis of the protest coalition as a developing political form.

China has become a land of protests, though the Chinese state possesses considerable administrative capacity. In this volume, Manfred Elfstrom and Yao Li provide an overview of Chinese contentious politics. They dig deep into major forms of social conflict, explore structural explanations for why protest occurs in China, and describe the ways in which various organizations and framings of issues by citizens affect how protests play out. Shifting to where grassroots activism ultimately leads, Elfstrom and Li survey China's coercive and conciliatory institutions for maintaining social control, document and explain patterns in the state's handling of different types of resistance, and examine the social and political impact of unrest. This work not only contributes to a deeper understanding of contentious politics and governance in China, but also provides insights for studies of social movements and authoritarian politics in general.

In 2014, the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan grabbed international attention as citizen protesters demanded the Taiwan government withdraw its free-trade agreement with China. In that same year, in Hong Kong, the Umbrella Movement sustained 79 days of demonstrations, protests that demanded genuine universal suffrage in electing Hong Kong's chief executive. It too, became an international incident before it collapsed. Both of these student-led movements featured large-scale and intense participation and had deep and far-reaching consequences. But how did two massive and disruptive protests take place in culturally conservative societies? And how did the two "occupy"-style protests against Chinese influences on local politics arrive at such strikingly divergent results? Challenging Beijing's Mandate of Heaven aims to make sense of the origins, processes, and outcomes of these eventful protests in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Ming-sho Ho compares the dynamics of the two movements, from the existing networks of activists that preceded protest, to the perceived threats that ignited the movements, to the government strategies with which they contended, and to the nature of their coordination. Moreover, he contextualizes these protests in a period of global prominence for student, occupy, and anti-globalization protests and situates them within social movement studies.

In the late 1980s, after a decade spent engaged in more routine interest-group politics, thousands of lesbians and gay men responded to the AIDS crisis by defiantly and dramatically taking to the streets. But by the early 1990s, the organization they founded, ACT UP, was no more--even as the AIDS epidemic raged on. Weaving together interviews with activists, extensive research, and reflections on the author's time as a member of the organization, "Moving Politics" is the first book to chronicle the rise and fall of ACT UP, highlighting a key factor in its trajectory: emotion.

Surprisingly overlooked by many scholars of social movements, emotion, Gould argues, plays a fundamental role in political activism. From anger to hope, pride to shame, and solidarity to despair, feelings played a significant part in ACT UP's provocative style of protest, which included raucous demonstrations, die-ins, and other kinds of street theater. Detailing the movement's public triumphs and private setbacks, "Moving Politics" is the definitive account of ACT UP's origin, development, and decline as well as a searching look at the role of emotion in contentious politics.

How successful are social movements and left parties at achieving social and political change? How, if at all, can movements and parties work together to challenge existing hierarchies? Is the political left witnessing a revival in contemporary politics? This book highlights some of the key achievements of left parties and protest movements in their goal of challenging different types of inequality - and considers the ways in which their challenge to authority and power could be intensified. It combines new theoretical ideas with rich empirical detail on the debates and concrete activities undertaken by left parties and protest movements over a broad historical period, from the early European labour movement to the recent anti-austerity global protests. The book will offer unique insight into the broad history and theory of emancipatory politics; as well as making an important contribution to ongoing debates between left-leaning academics, researchers and activists.

Six years after the Marikana massacre we have still seen minimal change for mine workers and mining communities. Although much has been written about how little has been done, few have looked into how, in 2012, such tragedy was even possible. Lonmin Platinum Mine and the events of 16 August are a microcosm of the mining sector and how things can go wrong when society leaves everything to government and “big business”.

Business As Usual After Marikana is a comprehensive analysis of mining in South Africa. Written by respected academics and practitioners in the field, it looks into the history, policies and business practices that brought us to this point.

Translated from the German Zum Beispiel: BASF – Uber Konzernmacht und Menschenrechte, it also examines how bigger global companies like BASF were directly or indirectly responsible, and yet nothing is done to keep them accountable.

TV portraits of the Miners' strike of 1984/5 stressed the violence of the pickets and responsible policing. This book challenges those images, looks at the impact of the strike on participants, and reflects on ongoing controversies and community pride.The book is organised into three parts. In early chapters participants look back. So, Peter Smith speaks of his honest determination not to become a 'professional sacked miner' and Sian James tells of her excitement and pride at her community's defence of a valued way of life. Political controversies are examined: Was the strike the result of careful planning (on the part of the Thatcher Government, and/or the NUM)? How and why were striking miners, at Orgreave in June 1984, injured, arrested and vilified? Why were miners determined not to be 'constitutionalized' or balloted out of their jobs? How did the BBC and ITV misrepresent police action and show miners as 'out of control'? Why did miners in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and elsewhere support, or oppose, the strike? The final section examines enduring issues especially the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign.Is a more critical assessment of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher long overdue? Why is miners' history and heritage - as seen in the Durham Miners' Gala - so fondly celebrated?

Athena Athanasiou departs from recent discussions of mourning, including in the work of Judith Butler, by raising an altogether original question which both challenges and extends the current orthodoxy: what would it be like to mourn the dead of the enemy? She draws on a wide range of philosophical and political theories to develop a new notion of agonistic democracy. Through an ethnographic account of the urban feminist and antinationalist movement Women in Black of Belgrade, Serbia {Zene u Crnom), she suggests that we can understand their desire for the political as a means to refigure political life beyond sovereign accounts of subjectivity and agency.

This is the first English translation of an important document in the history of the black presence in Germany and Europe: the autobiography of Theodor Michael. Theodor Michael is among the few surviving members of the first generation of 'Afro-Germans': Born in Germany in 1925 to a Cameroonian father and a German mother, he grew up in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic. As a child and teenager he worked in circuses and films and experienced the tightening knot of racial discrimination under the Nazis in the years before the Second World War. He survived the war as a forced labourer, founding a family and making a career as a journalist and actor in post-war West Germany. Since the 1980s he has become an important spokesman for the black German consciousness movement, acting as a human link between the first black German community of the inter-war period, the pan-Africanism of the 1950s and 1960s, and new generations of Germans of African descent. Theodor Michael's life story is a classic account of coming to consciousness of a man who understands himself as both black and German; accordingly, it illuminates key aspects of modern German social history as well as of the post-war history of the African diaspora. The text has been translated by Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies at the University of Liverpool and an internationally acknowledged expert in Black German studies. It is accompanied by a translator's preface, explanatory notes, a chronology of historical events and a guide to further reading, so that the book will be accessible and useful both for general readers and for undergraduate students.

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed following the First World War, the feudal system which had survived untouched in much of Anatolia began to change. Kemal Ataturk's task of building a nation 'from the people up' meant that the peasantry, by far Turkey's largest ethnographic group, became an important symbol of social cohesion. Here, Sinan Yildirmaz analyses the history of modern Turkey through the material culture of this peasantry - their speeches, social club documents, art and diaries - and reveals a rich social and political life which flowered after the Second World War. Politics and the Peasantry in Post-War Turkey is the first history to show how the changing peasantry laid the foundations for the modern Turkish state, and will be essential reading for students and scholars of the Ottoman Empire and of the History of Modern Turkey.

This study explores the nature and circumstances of India's social unrest in the 1980s. The author provides an analysis of the widespread corruption among politicians and in most strata of the government machinery, the blatant discrepancy between legislation ostensibly designed to protect minorities and their actual treatments by higher castes, the administration and the jurisdiction at the time.

In The Dark With My Dress On Fire is the remarkable life story of Blanche La Guma, a South African woman who dedicated her life to ending apartheid through her various roles as professional nurse, wife and mother, and underground Communist activist.

Born into a poor, working-class coloured family in Cape Town, Blanche met her future husband, the novelist Alex La Guma, while training as a nurse-midwife in the early 1950s. Together they fought apartheid at great personal risk before continuing the struggle in exile in London and Havana, Cuba.

Harassed, banned, and imprisoned in solitary confinement for her political convictions, Blanche worked as a nurse-midwife in poor black communities on the Cape Flats. With Alex constantly detained or under house arrest, she was the family’s only breadwinner, a role she would continue throughout their life together. When Blanche was not working, visiting her husband in prison, or protecting their two young sons Eugene and Barto from harassment by the security police, she met secretly at night with fellow anti-apartheid Communists. As a young nurse she led the fight against “nursing apartheid” in Cape Town and she provided safe houses for anti-apartheid leaders such as Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki.

Forced into exile with her family in 1966, Blanche continued her struggle for justice in London, advocating for better maternal care in a large urban hospital and managing a Soviet Union publications office. When Alex was called to Havana, Cuba, in 1978 as chief representative of the African National Congress (ANC) in the Caribbean, she joined him as a full partner, which included their mentoring of ANC students sent to Cuba after the 1976 Soweto Uprising. Her story provides a rare first-hand account of life as a South African in Fidel Castro’s Cuba until Alex’s death by heart attack in 1985.

Told vividly, passionately, and at times humorously, In the Dark with My Dress on Fire is a compelling account of Blanche La Guma’s struggle against apartheid on three continents. It’s the story of a courageous woman who paid dearly for her commitments yet returned with dignity to a free and democratic South Africa.

Since the 1940s, Marxist thought has blossomed in Nigeria. The history of 'Naija Marxism' is also that of the country's labour movement, its feminist movement, its social thought and political economy. It has been the mainstay of party politics in the case of illegal Marxist party formations and legal anti-feudalist forces and in the NGO sector. Long gone are the days when Marxism meant imported pamphlets and a disconnected ideology. Drawn from years of research in Nigeria and elsewhere, Naija Marxisms breaks new ground in tracing the historical trajectories that leftist movements underwent since the 1940s, whilst arguing that Marxism is alive and well in Nigeria. The book brings together Nigeria's pre-eminent radical thinkers, from Usman Tar and Edwin Madunagu, who are currently espousing a Marxian political economy and providing a class-based approach in the country's mainstream media channels, to the international reach of key Nigerian Marxists, such as Mokwugo Okoye, Ikenna Nzimiro and Eskor Toyo.

From the Arab uprisings to the indignados movement and the global Occupy sit-ins, recent protests and civil unrest have sparked new debates about political organisation, media representation and the nature of contemporary citizenship. But is there anything new about these occupations of public space? How are these protests legitimised or undermined by the intense mediation of streets and squares? And how are these different from expressions of dissent in other contexts, including those of ethnic minorities in the New Orleans mardi gras and survivors of natural disaster in the Philippines? This book challenges the notion of a 'disappearance of public space' by reconsidering the significance of physical space and embodiment in the conduct and consequences of protest events. Looking at a range of assemblies-sustained and fleeting, spectacular and ordinary-this volume illuminates how square and street politics and their mediation become vehicles for new ideas of community, citizenship and public life.