This collection of original essays looks at a topic of growing interest and debate in feminist and historical circles: the social regulation of women through law during the 19th and 20th centuries, and the resistance which emerged in response. The collection refutes the notion of women oppressed during the 19th century, unable to act in opposition to the law. When issues of motherhood and women's sexuality became areas of public policy, women began to negotiate the law, as case studies from Europe and the USA show. This book should be of interest to students of women's studies, sociology of law, and social policy.

Within a framework of analysis and background by the four editors, this book presents a view from the grassroots of the 1989 student and mass movement in China and its tragic consequences. Here are the core eyewitness and participant accounts expressed through wall posters, students speeches, movement declarations, handbills, and other documents. In their introductions to the material, the editors address the political economy of the democracy movement, the evolving concept of democracy during the movement, the movement's contribution to China becoming a civil society, and the changing view of the Chinese Communist Party by students, intellectuals, workers and others, as the crisis unfolded.

John Lilburne (1615-1657), or 'Freeborn John' as he was called by the London crowd, was an important political agitator during the English Revolution. He was one of the leading figures in the Levellers, the short-lived but highly influential radical sect that called for law reform, religious tolerance, extended suffrage, the rights of freeborn Englishmen, and a new form of government that was answerable to the people and underpinned by a written constitution. This edited book assesses the legacy of Lilburne and the Levellers 400 years after his birth, and features contributions by leading historians. They examine the life of Lilburne, who was often imprisoned and even tortured for his beliefs, and his role as an inspirational figure even in contemporary politics. They also assess his writings that fearlessly exposed the hypocrisy and self-serving corruption of those in power - whether King Charles I or Oliver Cromwell. They look at his contribution to political ideas, his role as a revolutionary leader, his personal and political relations with his wife Elizabeth, his exile in the Netherlands, his late decision to become a Quaker, and his reputation after his death. This collection will be of enormous interest to academics, researchers, and readers with an interest in the English Civil War, seventeenth-century history, and the contemporary legacy of radical political tradition.

In the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen incident, Yin Jiagi has emerged as a leading Chinese dissident and theorist of the Democracy Movement. This collection of essays documents his views on a range of subjects, crucial to China's future.

The mass protests that erupted in China during the spring of 1989 were not confined to Beijing and Shanghai. Cities and towns across the great breadth of China were engulfed by demonstrations, which differed regionally in content and tone: the complaints and protest actions in prosperous Fuijan Province on the south China coast were somewhat different from those in Manchuria or inland Xi'an or the country towns of Hunan. The variety of the reactions is a barometer of the political and economic climate in contemporary China. In this book, Western China specialists who were on the spot that spring describe and analyze the upsurges of protest that erupted around them.

In a time of renewed interest in insurrectionary movements, urban protest, and anti-austerity indignation, the idea of resistance is regaining its relevance in social theory. De-Pathologizing Resistance re-examines resistance as a concept that can aid social analysis, highlighting the dangers of pathologising resistance as illogical and abnormal, or exoticising it in romanticised but patronising terms. Taking a de-pathologising and de-exoticising perspective, this book brings together insights from older and newer studies, the intellectual biographies of its contributing authors, and case studies of resistance in diverse settings, such as Egypt, Greece, Israel, and Mexico. From feminist studies to plaza occupations and anti-systemic uprisings, there is an emerging need to connect the analysis of contemporary protest movements under a broader theoretical re-examination. The idea of resistance-with all of its contradictions and its dynamism-provides such a challenging opportunity. This book was originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.

In an effort to make sense of war beyond the battlefield in studying the wars that were captured under the rubric of the "War on Terror", this special issue book seeks to explore the complex spatial relationships between war and the spaces that one is not used to thinking of as the battlefield. It focuses on the conflicts that still animate the spaces and places where violence has been launched and that the war has not left untouched. In focusing on war beyond the battlefield, it is not that the battlefield as the place where war is waged has gone in smoke or has borne out of importance, it is rather the case that the battlefield has been dis-placed, re-designed, re-shaped and rethought through new spatializing practices of warfare. These new spaces of war - new in the sense that they are not traditionally thought of as spaces where war takes place or is brought to - are television screens, cellular phones and bandwidth, George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, videogames, popular culture sites, news media, blogs, and so on. These spaces of war beyond the battlefield are crucial to understanding what goes on the battlefield, in Iraq, Afghanistan, or in other fronts of the War on Terror (such as the homeland) - to understand how terror has globally been waged beyond the battlefield. This book was originally published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

Peasant rebellions are uncommon. "Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance" explores peasants' foot dragging, feigned ingorance, false compliance, manipulation, flight, slander, theft, arson, sabotage, and similar prosaic forms of struggle. These kinds of resistance stop well short of collective defiance, a strategy usually suicidal for the subordinate. The central argument about peasant resistance is presented in the opening chapter by James Scott in which he summarizes and extends the thesis of his book on Malaysia's peasantry, "Weapons of the Weak". Scott's ideas are employed and refined in the ensuing seven country studies of peasant resistance: Poland, India, Egypt, Colombia, China, Nicaragua and Zimbabwe.

A vivid and entertaining guide to the events and locations of the Easter 1916 Rising. Defying all the odds 1600 men, women and children went out on 24 April, Easter Monday, 1916 to fight for an independent Ireland. The battle raged for six days and resulted in the destruction of many parts of Dublin city. The bloody executions of the leaders by the British after the Rising awakened a generation to the cause of Irish freedom. Vividly illustrated, this book takes you through the battle-torn streets of Dublin. Hear the sounds, smell the gunpowser and meet the main players, as the complexities of this dramatic episode in Irish history are explained in an accessible and concise fashion.

When the protests are over, a guide to creating long-lasting social change beyond the barricades From the Women's March in D.C. to #BlackLivesMatter rallies across the country, there has been a rising wave of protests and social activism. These events have been an important part of the battle to combat racism, authoritarianism, and xenophobia in Trump's America. However, the struggle for social justice continues long after the posters and megaphones have been packed away. After the protests are heard, how can we continue to work toward lasting change? This book is an invaluable resource for anyone invested in the fight for social justice. Welch highlights examples of social justice work accomplished at the institutional level. From the worlds of social enterprise, impact investing, and sustainable business, After the Protests Are Heard describes the work being done to promote responsible business practices and healthy, cooperative communities. The book also illuminates how colleges and universities educate students to strive toward social justice on campuses across the country, such as the Engaged Scholarship movement, which fosters interactions between faculty and students and local and global communities. In each of these instances, activists work from within institutions to transform practices and structures to foster justice and equality. After the Protests Are Heard confronts the difficult reality that social change is often followed by spikes in violence and authoritarianism. It offers important insights into how the nation might more fully acknowledge the brutal costs of racism and the historical drivers of racial injustice, and how people of all races can contain such violence in the present and prevent its resurgence in the future. For many members of the social justice community, the real work begins when the protests end. After the Protests Are Heard is a must-read for everyone interested in social justice and activism - from the barricades and campuses to the breakrooms and cubicles.

This book provides unique and detailed perspectives on different aspects of dissent, protest and disputes and how these have, in turn, continued to pose challenges in Africa. The contributors argue that, dissent, protest and most forms of disputes in Africa are the result of daily challenges that its people have faced and continue to encounter to this day. These challenges include, amongst others, demands for transparency, good governance and accountability; waves of instability that have created insecurity in most parts of the continent, an unsustainable level of youth unemployment, rapid population growth, a continent-wide healthcare and poverty crises and numerous environmental challenges.

The chapters elevate the debates on dissent, protest and disputes/conflict in Africa by adding new ideas and introducing new and useful interpretations. The book’s strength lies in the contributors’ ability to conflate colonial and postcolonial tendencies to show how challenges of the past are not so different from those of today, while also presenting important historical issues from various scholarly perspectives.

Dissent, Protest and Dispute in Africa will be of interest for students and scholars of African history, politics, and culture as well as those interested in social movements and civil society.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Dissent, Protest and Dispute Africa, Emmanuel M. Mbah and Toyin Falola

2. The Music of Heaven, the Music of Earth, and the Music of Brats: Tuareg Islam, the Devil, and Musical Performance, Susan J. Rasmussen

3. Finding Social Change Backstage and Behind the Scenes in South African Theatre, Nathanael Vlachos

4. Soccer and Political (Ex)pression in Africa: The Case of Cameroon, Alain Lawo-Sukam

5. "Child Labor Resistance in Southern Nigeria, 1916 – 1938", Adam Paddock

6. M’Fam Goes Home: African Soldiers in the Gabon Campaign of 1940, Mark Reeves

7. "Disgraceful Disturbances": TANU, the Tanganyikan Rifles, and the 1964 Mutiny, Charles Thomas

8. The Role of Ethnicity in Political Formation in Kenya: 1963-2007, Tade O. Okediji and Wahutu J. Siguru

9. Land, Boundaries, Chiefs and Wars, Toyin Falola

10. Borders and boundaries within Ethiopia: dilemmas of group identity, representation and agency, Alexander Meckelburg

11. Rural Agrarian Land Conflicts in Postcolonial Nigeria’s Central Region, Sati Fwatshak

12. The Evolution of the Mungiki Militia in Kenya, 1990 to 2010, Felix Kiruthu

13. Refugee-Warriors and Other People’s Wars in Post-Colonial Africa: The Experience of Rwandese and South African Military Exiles (1960-94), Tim Stapleton

14. Oiling the Guns and Gunning for Oil: The Youth and Niger Delta Oil Conflicts in Nigeria, Christian C. Madubuko

This book explores the transformation of Brazil and Argentina into two of the world's largest producers of genetically modified (GM) crops. Systematically comparing their stories in order to explain their paths, differences, ruptures and changes, the author reveals that the emergence of the two nations as leading producers of GM crops cannot be explained by technological superiority of biotechnology; rather, their trajectories are the results of political struggles surrounding agrarian development, in which social movements and the rural poor contested the advancement of biotechnologically-based agrarian models, but have been silenced, ignored, or demobilized by a network of actors in favour of GM crops. Based on rich interview and media material collected amongst activists, the author highlights the importance of political struggles over GM crops not only to debates on agrarian futures and food security, but also as illustrations of the challenges faced by contemporary democracies. An international comparative study, this book raises the question of how social mobilization and rights claims can counter the systemic imperatives of global capitalism and political interests, at a time when regional governments are reliant on commodity booms, whilst globally, governments are obliged to introduce programmes of austerity. As such it will appeal to scholars of sociology, political science and geography with interests in social movements, development, globalization, inequality and political economy.

While most western democracies have renounced the death penalty, capital punishment enjoys vast and growing support in the United States. A significant and vocal minority, however, continues to oppose it. Against Capital Punishment is the first full account of anti-death penalty activism in America during the years since the ten-year moratorium on executions ended.

Building on in-depth interviews with movement leaders and the records of key abolitionist organizations, this work traces the struggle against the pro-death penalty backlash that has steadily gained momentum since the 1970s. It reviews the conservative turn in the courts which, over the last two decades, has forced death penalty opponents to rely less on the litigation strategies that once served them well. It describes their efforts to mount a broad-based educational and political assault on what they see as the most cruel, racist, ineffective, and expensive manifestation of a criminal justice system gone wrong.

Despite the efforts of death-penalty opponents, executions in the United States are on the increase. Against Capital Punishment diagnoses the reasons for the failure to mobilize widespread opposition to executions, and assesses the prospects for opposition to capital punishment in the future of the United States.

Transitional justice studies typically focuses on how nations remember, face and deal with histories of past violence. This book, however, shifts the frame from national discourses of transitional justice onto local memory actors who attempt to engage with these broader systems of meaning from below. The case study is based on the memory struggles of individuals and groups who are attempting to gain access to the discourses and benefits associated with dominant memory identities of 'victim' and 'veteran' in the context of post-transition South Africa. They share a common history of squatter resistance in the Western Cape in the 1980s and a common struggle for inclusion in dominant memory frameworks. The main theme of this book is the politics of memory, as it relates to the conversation between national and local memory. Integrated within this theme is the further theme of alternative histories and counter-memories of struggle from below. In focusing on counter memories of violence and transition this book aims to tell a different version of South African liberation history in relation to the dominant narrative. It analyses local memory actors' attempts to bring their lived histories into conversation with national discourses of reconciliation and the national liberation struggle. In doing so it unpacks a memory paradox occurring within these narratives, which highlights the politics of inclusion and exclusion within the frames of transitional justice knowledge. On the one hand this alternate story exposes the paradox between local and national memory while on the other hand it brings into focus the local experience of the intersection between international transitional justice discourses and national transition politics. This book will be of local and international interest to scholars and students in the field of transitional justice, memory politics, national liberation struggle and South African historiography. It will also be of interest to a broader South Africa public, as it offers a deeper understanding of South Africa's history, which challenges taken for granted transitional justice frames of knowledge.

A National Endowment for Democracy Notable Book of 2022 Protest has been a key method of political claim-making in Jordan from the late Ottoman period to the present day. More than moments of rupture within normal-time politics, protests have been central to challenging state power, as well as reproducing it—and the spatial dynamics of protests play a central role in the construction of both state and society. With this book, Jillian Schwedler considers how space and geography influence protests and repression, and, in challenging conventional narratives of Hashemite state-making, offers the first in-depth study of rebellion in Jordan. Based on twenty-five years of field research, Protesting Jordan examines protests as they are situated in the built environment, bringing together considerations of networks, spatial imaginaries, space and place-making, and political geographies at local, national, regional, and global scales. Schwedler considers the impact of time and temporality in the lifecycles of individual movements. Through a mixed interpretive methodology, this book illuminates the geographies of power and dissent and the spatial practices of protest and repression, highlighting the political stakes of competing narratives about Jordan's past, present, and future.

Eric Hobsbawm claimed that the international May Day, which dates back to a proclamation in 1889 by the Second International, 'is perhaps the most ambitious of labour rituals'. The first international May Day demonstrations in 1890 were widely celebrated across Europe and became the one day each year when organized labour could present its goals to the public, an eight-hour workday being the first concrete demand, shortly followed by those for improved working conditions, universal suffrage, peace among nations, and international solidarity. The May Day ritual celebration was the self-assertion and self-definition of the new labour class through class organization. Thus, it was trade unions and social democratic and socialist parties throughout Europe which took the initiative and have sustained May Day as a labour ritual to this day. Part I of this theoretically-informed volume explores how May Day demonstrations have evolved and taken different trajectories in different political contexts. Part II focuses on May Day rituals today. By comparing demonstration level data of over 2000 questionnaires from six countries, including Belgium, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK, the reader is able to gain a thorough understanding of how participants are bestowing meaning on May Day rituals. By concluding with reflections on the future of the May Day ritual in Western Europe, this ground-breaking book provides a detailed analysis of its evolution as a protest event.

An account of the events of the Iranian Tobacco protest of 1891 to 1892. This book examines the developments which led to this sudden outburst of opposition, traces the course of events in each city and notes the importance of the protest for the creation of the Iranian opposition movemnent.

In 1983-as France struggled with race-based crimes, police brutality, and public unrest-youths from Venissieux (working-class suburbs of Lyon) led the March for Equality and Against Racism, the first national demonstration of its type in France. As Abdellali Hajjat reveals, the historic March for Equality and Against Racism symbolized for many the experience of the children of postcolonial immigrants. Inspired by the May '68 protests, these young immigrants stood against racist crimes, for equality before the law and the police, and for basic rights such as the right to work and housing. Hajjat also considers the divisions that arose from the march and offers fresh insight into the paradoxes and intricacies of movements pushing toward sweeping social change. Translated into English for the first time, The Wretched of France contemplates the protest's lasting significance in France as well as its impact within the context of larger and comparable movements for civil rights, particularly in the US.

What is the relationship between economic crises and protest behaviour? Does the experience of austerity, or economic hardship more broadly defined, create a greater potential for protest? With protest movements and events such as the Indignados and the Occupy Movement receiving a great deal of attention in the media and in the popular imaginary in recent times, this path-breaking book offers a rigorously-researched, evidence-based set of chapters on the relationship between austerity and protest. In so doing, it provides a thorough overview of different theories, mechanisms, patterns and trends which will contextualize more recent developments, and provide a pivotal point of reference on the relationship between these two variables. More specifically, this book will speak to three crucial, long-standing debates in scholarship in political sociology, social movement studies, and related fields: The effects of economic hardship on protest and social movements. The role of grievances and opportunities in social movement theory. The distinction between 'old' and 'new' movements. The chapters in this book engage with these three key debates and challenge commonly held views of political sociologists and social movement scholars on all three counts, thus allowing us to advance study in the field.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Moscow and St. Petersburg among the political opposition's youth group Oborona (Defence), this ground-breaking work brings forward a multifaceted and colourful image of the life of political opposition activists in a restricted political environment. Existing studies on youth political activism in Russia have mainly dealt with the pro-Kremlin youth movements, such as Nashi, while youth opposition activism has been studied very little. Lyytikainen contributes to this gap by showing how youth are also actively organizing against the current government and how Russian oppositional youth activist practices are diverse and constantly evolving. Theoretically this book contributes to discussions on activist identities, as well as to an understanding of social movements and protest by analysing political protests as social performances. The research illustrates how Soviet continuities and liberal ideas are entangled in Russian political activism to create new post-socialist political identities and practices. It also questions the idea of Russian democratization being tied to its totalitarian past, and that of western-type liberal democracy being the goal of this process. Instead, the book proposes that Russian political culture should be analysed on its own, and as an entanglement of various interacting systems of thought.

Winner of the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing Award 2021 In 2016, a United Nations report found the UK government culpable for 'grave and systematic violations' of disabled people's rights. Since then, driven by the Tory government's obsessive drive to slash public spending whilst scapegoating the most disadvantaged in society, the situation for disabled people in Britain has continued to deteriorate. Punitive welfare regimes, the removal of essential support and services, and an ideological regime that seeks to deny disability has resulted in a situation described by the UN as a 'human catastrophe'. In this searing account, Ellen Clifford - an activist who has been at the heart of resistance against the war on disabled people - reveals precisely how and why this state of affairs has come about. From spineless political opposition to self-interested disability charities, rightwing ideological myopia to the media demonization of benefits claimants, a shocking picture emerges of how the government of the fifth-richest country in the world has been able to marginalize disabled people with near-impunity. Even so, and despite austerity biting ever deeper, the fightback has begun, with a vibrant movement of disabled activists and their supporters determined to hold the government to account - the slogan 'Nothing About Us Without Us' has never been so apt. As this book so powerfully demonstrates, if Britain is to stand any chance of being a just and equitable society, their battle is one we should all be fighting.

Loud and proud is an ethnographic study of grassroots activists in the English Defence League (EDL). Setting the findings within contemporary debates on race and racism, Islamophobia, social movements and the far right, the author draws on interviews, informal conversations and extensive observation at EDL events to explore and explain the gap between the public image of the movement as a violent Islamophobic and racist organisation and individual activists' understanding of it as 'one big family'. Presenting them neither as duped by a charismatic leader nor working class anti-heroes, this book introduces EDL activists as individuals with real lives whose diverse trajectories in and out of activism are embedded in personal life stories. The book will be of value to those researching or studying in the disciplines of sociology, political science and anthropology as well as those with an interest in contemporary political issues and the populist and radical right. -- .

The Arab uprisings of 2011 have sparked much scholarly discussion with regards to democratisation, the resilience of authoritarian rule, mobilisation patterns, and the relationship between secularism and Islam, all under the assumption that politics has changed for good in North Africa and the Middle East. While acknowledging the post-2011 transformations taking place in the region, this book brings to the forefront an understudied, yet crucial, aspect related to the uprisings, namely the interplay between continuity and change. Challenging simplified representations built around the positions that either 'all has changed' or 'nothing has changed', the in-depth case studies in this volume demonstrate how elements both of continuity, and rupture with the past, are present in the post-uprising landscapes of Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. Public policy, contentious politics, the process of institution making and re-making, and the relations of power connecting national and international economies are at the core of the comparative investigations included in the book. The volume makes an important contribution to the study of North African politics, and to the study of political change and stability, by contrasting the different trajectories of the uprisings, and by offering theoretical reflections on their meaning, consequences and scope. This book was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.

Over the period December 2011-July 2013, a tidal wave of mass protests swept through the Russian capital and engulfed scores of cities and regions. These demonstrations came as a great shock to the Russian political establishment. After decades of passive acceptance of the status quo, it appeared that civil society was at last awakening. The protests came in the wake of the "Arab Spring" revolts which toppled authoritarian dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. However, by the end of 2013 the number of mass protests in Russia, and their size, had declined precipitously. President Putin, on returning to office in 2012, had quickly regained the upper hand over the protestors. This book examines the reasons for the rise and fall of the mass protests in the Russian Federation. Internationally renowned experts in the field of Russian politics from Russia and the UK provide important new insights into the nature of the mass opposition movement (the "non-systemic opposition"), its strengths and its weaknesses. A key novel aspect of the study is its focus on the national and regional dimensions of the protest movement, and its class and ethnic dimensions. This book was published as a special issue of Europe-Asia Studies.

Many of the most successful and recognizable protest movements in the world make use of branding techniques, even when they simultaneously reject the general concepts of branding. Branded Protest dives into this antithesis. It researches the power of branding and the influence it has on current protest movements and gives iconic examples of unique branding-efforts that support protests. We are all exposed to branding: from a torn sheet of cardboard scrawled with handwriting to slick corporate advertising campaigns. Here, we take up the term branding to assess the visualization of iconic protest movements, and to identify the unique tools used to attract the general public and activate people to join in. Branding has become a means to unify a movement and to give protest a visual identity. For Branded Protest we spoke with organizers of protest movements around the world, to identify the particular techniques that help movements deliver a unique and clear message.