Can an individual act of suicide be socially significant, or does it present too many imponderable features? This book examines suicide like no other. Unconcerned with the individual dispositions that lead a person to commit such an act, Usurping Suicide focuses on the reception suicides have produced - their political, social and cultural implications. How does a particular act of suicide enable a collective significance to be attached to it? And what contextual circumstances predispose a politicised public response? From Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation during regime change in Tunisia to Dimitris Christoulas's public shooting at a time of increased political upheaval in Greece, and beyond - this remarkable work examines how the individuality of the act of suicide poses a disturbing symbolic conundrum for the dominant liberal order.

Can an individual act of suicide be socially significant, or does it present too many imponderable features? This book examines suicide like no other. Unconcerned with the individual dispositions that lead a person to commit such an act, Usurping Suicide focuses on the reception suicides have produced - their political, social and cultural implications. How does a particular act of suicide enable a collective significance to be attached to it? And what contextual circumstances predispose a politicised public response? From Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation during regime change in Tunisia to Dimitris Christoulas's public shooting at a time of increased political upheaval in Greece, and beyond - this remarkable work examines how the individuality of the act of suicide poses a disturbing symbolic conundrum for the dominant liberal order.

The start of the twenty-first century has been marked by global demands for economic justice. From the pink tide and Arab spring to Occupy and anti-austerity, the last twenty years have witnessed the birth of a new type of mass mobilisation. Where Are The Unions? compares, for the first time, the challenges faced by movements in Latin America, the Arab world and Europe. Workers' strikes and protests were a critical part of these events, yet their role has been significantly underestimated in many of the subsequent narratives. This book focuses on the complex interactions between organised workers, the unemployed, self-employed, youth, students and the state, and critically assesses the concept of the 'precariat'. With contributions from across four continents, this is the most comprehensive look at the global context of mass mobilisation in the twenty-first century.

This is an account of the life and times of Te Whiti o Rongomai set against the politics and Crown policies of the nineteenth century. It traces the forces that shaped his life’s journey from Ng?motu, where he was born, to his settling at Parihaka and his evolving sense of the injustices and disempowerment M?ori experienced and his response to these. The book discusses the struggles Te Whiti had, as understood by some of his living relatives, against native policy of the time, and it gives insights into the motivations of Te Whiti and his actions. It explores the community at Parihaka, its resistance and the consequences of this and looks at M?ori and government actions and responses up to the present day.

Throughout history, innovations in media have had a profound impact on protest and dissent. But while these recent developments in social media have been the subject of intense scholarly attention, there has been little consideration of the wider historical role of media technologies in protest. Drawing on the work of key theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Raymond Williams, Crisis and Critique provides a historical analysis of media practices within the context of major economic crises. Through richly detailed case studies of the movements which emerged during three different economic crises - the unemployed workers' movement of the Great Depression, the rent strike movement of the early 1970s and the Occupy Wall Street protests which followed the recession of 2007 - Kaun provides an in-depth analysis of the cultural, economic and social consequences of media technologies, and their role in shaping and facilitating resistance to capitalism.

The attention paid to protest groups and social movements has rarely been higher, be it the Occupy movement, austerity protests, or student demonstrations. These formations are under continual scrutiny by academics, the press and politicians who are all attempting to interpret and understand protest groups, their tactics, demands, and their wider influence on society. Protest Campaigns, Media and Political Opportunities takes an in-depth look at three different protest groups including a community campaign, environmental direct action activists, and a mass demonstration. It offers a broad perspective of each group through a comprehensive combination of insider stories from activists, the authors own involvement with one group, newspaper coverage, each group's social media, websites and leaflets, and government documents. This wealth of material is pieced together to provide compelling narratives for each group's campaign, from the inception of their protest messages and actions, through media coverage, and into political discourse. This book provides a vibrant contribution to debates around the communication and protest tactics employed by protest groups and the significance news media has on advancing their campaigns.

In this ground-breaking and much-needed book, Stellan Vinthagen provides the first major systematic attempt to develop a theory of nonviolent action since Gene Sharp's seminal The Politics of Nonviolent Action in 1973. Employing a rich collection of historical and contemporary social movements from various parts of the world as examples - from the civil rights movement in America to anti-Apartheid protestors in South Africa to Gandhi and his followers in India - and addressing core theoretical issues concerning nonviolent action in an innovative, penetrating way, Vinthagen argues for a repertoire of nonviolence that combines resistance and construction. Contrary to earlier research, this repertoire - consisting of dialogue facilitation, normative regulation, power breaking and utopian enactment - is shown to be both multidimensional and contradictory, creating difficult contradictions within nonviolence, while simultaneously providing its creative and transformative force. An important contribution in the field, A Theory of Nonviolent Action is essential for anyone involved with nonviolent action who wants to think about what they are doing.

This is a thoughtful and sensitive analysis of the history and significance of non-violent civil resistance in the Palestinian national movement. It shows how the thread of unarmed struggle has run through the history of Palestinian liberation, from the establishment of the Israeli state, through the Nakba and to the present day. Set in this historical context, the book draws upon personal conversations and living history in order to focus on the contemporary movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. By analysing this under-emphasised dimension of the Palestinian struggle, the authors argue that today, the popular resistance movement, especially in the West Bank, is the most significant form of struggle against the ongoing occupation. They also address the international dimensions of the struggle, focusing in particular on the BDS campaign, the role of Israeli and international solidarity activists, and the changing forms of engagement developed by international agencies seeking to work on the roots of the conflict.

"One of the best analyses of the impact of Tiananmen throughout China in the years since 1989." -The New York Times Book Review On June 4, 1989, People's Liberation Army soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians in Beijing, killing untold hundreds of people. A quarter-century later, this defining event remains buried in China's modern history, successfully expunged from collective memory. In The People's Republic of Amnesia, NPR correspondent Louisa Lim offers a much-needed response to the silence surrounding the events of June 4th, charting how deeply they affected China at the time and in the 25 years since.

From Athens to New York, recent mass movements around the world have challenged austerity and authoritarianism with expressions of real democracy. For more than forty years, Murray Bookchin developed these democratic aspirations into a new left politics based on popular assemblies, influencing a wide range of political thinkers and social movements. With a foreword by the best-selling author of The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin, The Next Revolution brings together Bookchin's essays on freedom and direct democracy for the first time, offering a bold political vision that can move us from protest to social transformation. A pioneering voice in the ecology and anarchist movements, he is the author of The Ecology of Freedom and Post-Scarcity Anarchism among many other books.

The Zapatistas of Chiapas and the Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST) of Brazil are often celebrated as shining examples in the global struggle against neoliberalism. But what have these movements achieved for their members in more than two decades of resistance and can any of these achievements realistically contribute to the rise of a viable alternative? Through a perfect balance of grassroots testimonies, participative observation and consideration of key debates in development studies, agrarian political economy, historical sociology and critical political economy, Land and Freedom compares, for the first time, the Zapatista and MST movements. Casting a spotlight on their resistance to globalizing market forces, Vergara-Camus gets to the heart of how these movements organize themselves and how territorial control, politicization and empowerment of their membership and the decommodification of social relations are key to understanding their radical development potential.

From Tahrir Square to Occupy, from the Red Shirts in Thailand to the Teachers in Oaxaca, protest camps are a highly visible feature of social movements' activism across the world. They are spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state. Drawing on over fifty different protest camps from around the world over the past fifty years, this book offers a ground-breaking and detailed investigation into protest camps from a global perspective - a story that, until now, has remained untold. Taking the reader on a journey across different cultural, political and geographical landscapes of protest, and drawing on a wealth of original interview material, the authors demonstrate that protest camps are unique spaces in which activists can enact radical and often experiential forms of democratic politics.

What should we make of the culture of the protest movements of the 21st century? From the Arab Spring to the 'indignados' protests in Spain and the Occupy movement, Paolo Gerbaudo examines the relationship between the rise of social media and the emergence of new forms of protest. Gerbaudo argues that activists' use of Twitter and Facebook does not fit with the image of a 'cyberspace' detached from physical reality. Instead, social media is used as part of a project of re-appropriation of public space, which involves the assembling of different groups around 'occupied' places such as Cairo's Tahrir Square or New York's Zuccotti Park. An exciting and invigorating journey through the new politics of dissent, Tweets and the Streets points both to the creative possibilities and to the risks of political evanescence which new media brings to the contemporary protest experience.

"McCaffrey's outstanding analysis movingly narrates the community's longstanding anguish and accurately situates the Vieques movement in the larger context of U.S. military policy in the Caribbean and Puerto Rico's unresolved status quandary. Those interested in understanding the Vieques crisis will find Military Power and Popular Protest an indispensible work." --Amilcar Antonio Barreto, author of Vieques, the Navy, and Puerto Rican Politics Residents of Vieques, a small island just off the east coast of Puerto Rico, live wedged between an ammunition depot and live bombing range for the U.S. Navy. Since the 1940s when the navy expropriated over two-thirds of the island, residents have struggled to make a life amid the thundering of bombs and the rumbling of weaponry fire. Like the army's base in Okinawa, Japan, the facility has drawn vociferous protests from residents who challenged U.S. security interests overseas. In 1999, when a local civilian employee of the base was killed by a stray bomb, Vieques again erupted in protests that have mobilized tens of thousands of individuals and have transformed this tiny Caribbean island into the setting for an international cause celebre. Katherine T. McCaffrey gives a complete analysis of the troubled relationship between the U.S. Navy and island residents. She explores such topics as the history of U.S. naval involvement in Vieques; a grassroots mobilization--led by fisherman--that began in the 1970s; how the navy promised to improve the lives of the island residents--and failed; and the present-day emergence of a revitalized political activism that has effectively challenged naval hegemony. Military bases overseas act as lightning rods for anti-American sentiment, thus threatening his country's image and interests abroad. By analyzing this particular, conflicted relationship, the book also explores important lessons about colonialism and postcolonialism and the relationship of the United States to the countries in which it maintains military bases. Katherine T. McCaffrey is an assistant professor of anthropology at Montclair State University, New Jersey.

After the siege ended at Wounded Knee, the real battle had yet to be fought. The 1973 standoff in South Dakota between Oglala Lakota Indians and federal lawmen led to the criminal prosecution of American Indian Movement leaders Dennis Banks and Russell Means. The ten-month trial had all the earmarks of a political tribunal; with the defense led by William Kunstler and the prosecution backed by the Nixon administration, it became a media battle for public opinion. This first book-length study of the Wounded Knee trials demonstrates the impact that legal institutions and the media have on political dissent. It also shows how the dissenters as defendants can influence these institutions and the surrounding political and cultural climate. AIM and its attorneys successfully turned the courtroom into a political forum on the history of U.S.-Indian relations but were often frustrated in telling their story by the need to observe legal procedures--and by the media's stereotyping them as Indian warriors or sixties militants. John Sayer draws on court records, news reports, and interviews with participants to show how the defense, and ultimately the prosecution, had to respond continually to legal constraints, media coverage, and political events taking place outside the courtroom. Although Banks and Means and most of the other protesters were acquitted, Sayer notes that the confinement of AIM protests to the courtroom robbed the movement of considerable momentum. Ghost Dancing the Law shows how legal proceedings can effectively quell dissent and represents both a critical chapter in the struggle of Native Americans and an important milestone at the crossroads of law and politics.

Originally published in 1969, The Rise of Massive Resistance was the first scholarly work to deal decisively with the politics of southern resistance to public school integration. Today, it remains one of the most important books on the subject. For this thirtieth anniversary edition, Numan Bartley has included a new preface in which he reflects on his reasons for writing the book and why it has stood the test of time.

Bartley gives a step-by-step account of opposition to school desegregation in each southern state during the 1950s and clarifies the attitudes underlying massive resistance by examining the roles played by such southern leaders as James F. Byrnes, Harry Flood Byrd, James O. Eastland, Orval E. Faubus, Claude Pepper, Estes Kefauver, Richard B. Russell, Herman Talmadge, "Big Jim" Folsom, and Earl K. Long. He also closely analyzes the attitudes of the Eisenhower administration and national leaders toward the South and explores the activities of the Citizens' Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and other local groups that emerged to defend "the southern way of life". His closing "Critical Essay on Authorities" still forms an excellent guide to primary and secondary sources on opposition to Brown v. Board of Education.

Why has there been an increase in domestic, workplace, and community violence, and how can we prevent it? This book, one in a series sponsored by the National Mental Health Association, helps the reader explore, with the talented contributors, the foundations of violence as well as methods to reduce the incidence of violent behavior in families, workplaces, and communities. The first section provides an overview of this topic and covers: child abuse and neglect from an ecological perspective with a close look at those qualities that place some children at higher risk of abuse; the causes of spousal abuse and interventions to reduce the incidence of this behavior; workplace violence from a definitional, demographic, and theoretical perspective; and, ways to identify the causes of community violence using a public health model. The second section examines environmental factors for violence, including television violence and its impact on youth; stereotypes and its relationships to racial, ethnic, and religious hatred and violence; and, mental illness and violence, particularly how the mentally ill are more often the victim rather than the aggressor. The book concludes with a section that discusses efforts to reduce violent behavior in families, youth, and communities. This book will provide a useful resource to graduate students, to practitioners, and program developers who want a comprehensive overview of violent behavior and who want to identify programs that work to reduce violent behavior in specific settings from families to workplace to communities.

On August 7, 1970, a revolt by Black prisoners in a Marin County courthouse stunned the nation. In its aftermath, Angela Davis, an African American activist-scholar who had campaigned vigorously for prisoners' rights, was placed on the FBI's "ten most wanted list." Captured in New York City two months later, she was charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. Her trial, chronicled in this "compelling tale" (Publishers Weekly), brought strong public indictment. The Morning Breaks is a riveting firsthand account of Davis's ordeal and her ultimate triumph, written by an activist in the student, civil rights, and antiwar movements who was intimately involved in the struggle for her release.

First published in 1975, and praised by The Nation for its "graphic narrative of Davis's] legal and public fight," The Morning Breaks remains relevant today as the nation contends with the political fallout of the Sixties and the grim consequences of institutional racism. For this edition, Bettina Aptheker has provided an introduction that revisits crucial events of the late 1960s and early 1970s and puts Davis's case into the context of that time and our own from the killings at Kent State and Jackson State to the politics of the prison system today. This book gives a first-hand account of the worldwide movement for Angela Davis's freedom and of her trial. It offers a unique historical perspective on the case and its continuing significance in the contemporary political landscape."

The struggle for civil rights among black Americans has moved into the voting booth. How such a shift came about--and what it means--is revealed in this timely reflection on black presidential politics in recent years.

Since 1984, largely as a result of Jesse Jackson's presidential bid, blacks have been galvanized politically. Drawing on a substantial national survey of black voters, Katherine Tate shows how this process manifested itself at the polls in 1984 and 1988. In an analysis of the black presidential vote by region, income, age, and gender, she is able to identify unique aspects of the black experience as they shape political behavior, and to answer long-standing questions about that behavior. How, for instance, does the rise of conservatism among blacks influence their voting patterns? Is class more powerful than race in determining voting? And what is the value of the notion of a black political party?

In the 1990s, Tate suggests, black organizations will continue to stress civil rights over economic development for one clear, compelling reason: Republican resistance to addressing black needs. In this, and in the friction engendered by affirmative action, she finds an explanation for the slackening of black voting. Tate does not, however, see blacks abandoning the political game. Instead, she predicts their continued search for leaders who prefer the ballot box to other kinds of protest, and for men and women who can deliver political programs of racial equality.

Unique in its focus on the black electorate, this study illuminates a little understood and tremendously significant aspect of American politics. It will benefit those who wish to understand better the subtle interplay of race and politics, at the voting booth and beyond.

No one will soon forget the image, blazed across the airwaves, of armed Korean Americans taking to the rooftops as their businesses went up in flames during the Los Angeles riots. Why Korean Americans? What stoked the wrath the riots unleashed against them? "Blue Dreams" is the first book to make sense of these questions, to show how Korean Americans, variously depicted as immigrant seekers after the American dream or as racist merchants exploiting African Americans, emerged at the crossroads of conflicting social reflections in the aftermath of the 1992 riots.

The situation of Los Angeles's Korean Americans touches on some of the most vexing issues facing American society today: ethnic conflict, urban poverty, immigration, multiculturalism, and ideological polarization. Combining interviews and deft socio-historical analysis, "Blue Dreams" gives these problems a human face and at the same time clarifies the historical, political, and economic factors that render them so complex. In the lives and voices of Korean Americans, the authors locate a profound challenge to cherished assumptions about the United States and its minorities.

Why did Koreans come to the United States? Why did they set up shop in poor inner-city neighborhoods? Are they in conflict with African Americans? These are among the many difficult questions the authors answer as they probe the transnational roots and diversity of Los Angeles's Korean Americans. Their work finally shows us in sharp relief and moving detail a community that, despite the blinding media focus brought to bear during the riots, has nonetheless remained largely silent and effectively invisible. An important corrective to the formulaicaccounts that have pitted Korean Americans against African Americans, "Blue Dreams" places the Korean American story squarely at the center of national debates over race, class, culture, and community.

Welcome to the social and environmental devastation that is Britain in 1996. Welcome to interchangeable political parties and their chattering media jesters pulling together to make Johnny Rotten's dream come true: no future. But despite their best efforts, fear, cynicism and the National Lottery aren't the whole story. Protest hasn't disappeared during the last twenty years, and nor have solidarity and imagination. They have simply taken new forms; they have moved out and moved on. More and more people, young people especially, are making a virtue of necessity and living outside Britain's rotting institutional fabric. Travelers, tribes, ravers or squatters, direct-action protesters of every kind, DIYers. This book is the first attempt to write their history, to explore and to celebrate their endlessly creative senselessness. George McKay looks back at the hippies of the sixties and punks of the seventies, and shows how their legacies have been transformed into what he calls cultures of resistance. His journey through the undergrounds of the last two decades take us from the Windsor Free Festival of 1972 to the Castlemorton Free Rave Megaparty exactly twenty years later, from the anarchopunk band Crass via Teepee Valley and Glastonbury to today's ever-intensifying anti-road protests, and to the widespread opposition to the Criminal Justice Act. Drawing on fanzines and free papers, record lyrics, interviews and diaries, Senseless Acts of Beauty gives a vivid, insider account of countercultures, networks and movements that until now have remained largely unrecorded. At the same time, George McKay analyzes their effects, and gives his own answers to the questions they pose: what are their politics, their aspirations, their consequences? One thing is certain, he argues: if there is resistance anywhere in Britain today, then it is here, in the beat-up buses, beleaguered squats and tree-top barricades, that we should start to look for it.

Between 1750 and 1840 ordinary British people abandoned such time-honored forms of protest as collective seizures of grain, the sacking of buildings, public humiliation, and physical abuse in favor of marches, petition drives, public meetings, and other sanctioned routines of social movement politics. The change created - perhaps for the first time anywhere - mass participation in national politics. Charles Tilly is the first to address the depth and significance of the transmutations in popular collective action during this period. As he unravels the story of thousands of popular struggles and their consequences, he illuminates the dynamic relationships among an industrializing, capitalizing, proletarianizing economy; a war-making, growing, increasingly interventionist state; and the internal history of contention that spawned such political entrepreneurs as Francis Place and Henry Hunt. Tilly's research rests on a catalog of more than 8,000 "contentious gatherings" described in British periodicals, plus ample documentation from British archives and historical monographs. The author elucidates four distinct phases in the transformation to mass political participation, and identifies the forms and occasions for collective action that characterized and dominated each. He provides rich descriptions not only of a wide variety of popular protests but also of such influential figures as John Wilkes, Lord George Gordon, William Cobbett, and Daniel O'Connell. This engaging study offers a vivid picture of Great Britain during a pivotal era.

This book is a significant contribution to the expanding study of social movements. The essays consider some of the manifold ways in which people join together in popular movements to pursue visions of a different and more just society. They examine the impact of such movements, both on ordinary citizens swept along by demands for change, and on conventional institutions caught in the crossfire between radical protest and the pursuit of more mundane goals. They cast a new light on seemingly familiar themes: participation as a learning experience, the critical ingenuity of leadership but also its failures of judgment and internal divisions and the ever-changing nature of protest in the face of relentless social change. Above all, these essays succeed in capturing the essential vitality and creativity of ideas and language expressed by citizens as they struggle to reinvent their lives and times.

The Assault on Labor details the 1986 Independent Federation of Flight Attendants (IFFA) strike against Trans World Airlines (TWA), one of the most dramatic instances of the heightened labor conflict in the 1980s. Using extensive court, union, and company documents, The Assault on Labor shows how the expanded use of permanent replacements in labor disputes has fundamentally altered workers' legal right to strike. Set within one of the biggest corporate raids of the time, it was a strike of a predominantly female labor force that garnered respect throughout the labor movement for its solidarity and determination. Faced with the permanent replacement of over 5000 strikers, IFFA waged a three year struggle to return all workers to the line, mobilizing political, economic, and legal actions to secure their jobs and survive as a union. Despite critical successes in the courts in the aftermath of the strike, the Supreme Court would render a decision that further strengthened permanent replacements. Since the 1980s, labor's major form of protest, the right to strike, has all but disappeared.

'We can say without fear of being contradicted by history, that June 16, 1976 heralded the beginning of the end of the centuries-old white rule in this country.' Nelson Mandela Originally banned on publication by the apartheid government, Year of Fire, Year of Ash is an eye-opening account of how, in June 1976, 20,000 school students faced down the tanks and guns of a vicious racist regime, in a revolt that galvanized the black working-class and became a pivotal turning point for the anti-apartheid movement. More than this, the book overturns much of the conventional logic that served to explain the event at the time, showing it was not simply a student protest, but part of a wider uprising. Released in this new edition to mark the fortieth anniversary, Year of Fire, Year of Ash provides an unparalleled insight into the origins and events of the uprising, from its antecedents in the 1920s to its role in inspiring global solidarity against apartheid. As South Africa experiences a new wave of popular discontent, and as new forms of black consciousness come to the fore in movements around the world, Baruch Hirson's book provides a timely reminder of the Soweto revolt's continued significance to struggles against oppression today.