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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > General
This book brings together the voices of people from five continents who live, work, and research on the front lines of climate resistance and renewal. The many contributors to this volume explore the impacts of extreme weather events in Africa, the Caribbean and on Pacific islands, experiences of life-long defenders of the land and forests in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and eastern Canada, and efforts to halt the expansion of fossil-fuel infrastructure from North America to South Africa. They offer various perspectives on how a just transition toward a fossil-free economy can take shape, as they share efforts to protect water resources, better feed their communities, and implement new approaches to urban policy and energy democracy. Climate Justice and Community Renewal uniquely highlights the accounts of people who are directly engaged in local climate struggles and community renewal efforts, including on-the-ground land defenders, community organizers, leaders of international campaigns, agroecologists, activist-scholars, and many others. It will appeal to students, researchers, activists, and all who appreciate the need for a truly justice-centered response to escalating climate disruptions.
This book presents a theoretical framework to study dissident ethnic movements' imagination of world politics, with a special focus on the PKK as a case study. Dissident ethnic movements are not only a challenge to the existing hegemonic power, but they also produce an alternative closed society based on different ethnic imagination. Instead of taking the armed PKK movement as a pure resistant, this book approaches contemporary Kurdish nationalism led by the PKK as a counter-hegemonic with a narrative that entails the emergence of a new kind of identity and sense of belonging, through which the PKK has been able to exercise its power. This book is an attempt to go beyond resistance-oriented approach, unveiling the two faces of the PKK's representation of world politics: its transformative effect on the Kurds, and its exclusionary function towards traditional and alternative Kurdish subjects/institutions.
*A Times, Financial Times, Observer and Nature Book of the Year* We still have time to change the world. From Greta Thunberg, the world's leading climate activist, comes the essential handbook for making it happen. You might think it's an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, at a scale and speed never seen, against all the odds. There is hope - but only if we listen to the science before it's too late. In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts - geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders - to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild's strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried? We are alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. Together, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now.
Few figures in modern German history are as central to the public memory of radical protest than Ulrike Meinhof, but she was only the most prominent of the countless German women-and militant male feminists-who supported and joined in revolutionary actions from the 1960s onward. Sisters in Arms gives a bracing account of how feminist ideas were enacted by West German leftist organizations from the infamous Red Army Faction to less well-known groups such as the Red Zora. It analyzes their confrontational and violent tactics in challenging the abortion ban, opposing violence against women, and campaigning for solidarity with Third World women workers. Though these groups often diverged ideologically and tactically, they all demonstrated the potency of militant feminism within postwar protest movements.
Between 1963 and 1972 America experienced over 750 urban revolts. Considered collectively, they comprise what Peter Levy terms a 'Great Uprising'. Levy examines these uprisings over the arc of the entire decade, in various cities across America. He challenges both conservative and liberal interpretations, emphasizing that these riots must be placed within historical context to be properly understood. By focusing on three specific cities as case studies - Cambridge and Baltimore, Maryland, and York, Pennsylvania - Levy demonstrates the impact which these uprisings had on millions of ordinary Americans. He shows how conservatives profited politically by constructing a misleading narrative of their causes, and also suggests that the riots did not represent a sharp break or rupture from the civil rights movement. Finally, Levy presents a cautionary tale by challenging us to consider if the conditions that produced this 'Great Uprising' are still predominant in American culture today.
Since the fall of the former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, female activists have faced the problem of how to transform the spirit of the uprising into long-lasting reform of the political and social landscape. In Women and the Egyptian Revolution, Nermin Allam tells the story of the 2011 uprising from the perspective of the women who participated, based on extensive interviews with female protestors and activists. The book offers an oral history of women's engagement in this important historical juncture; it situates women's experience within the socio-economic flows, political trajectories, and historical contours of Egypt. Allam develops a critical vocabulary that captures women's activism and agency by looking both backwards to Egypt's gender history and forwards to the outcomes and future possibilities for women's rights. An important contribution to the under-researched topic of women's engagement in political struggles in the Middle East and North Africa, this book will have a wide-ranging impact on its field and beyond.
This is a pictorial record of the Chartist Movement. Photography
was in its infancy in those years and the only photographic record
of a Chartist gathering is of the last of the great meetings in
April 1848. Pictures of the Chartists themselves as they appeared
in those years are all from wood or metal engravings mostly
published by Chartist newspapers. An introduction provides a
background to the pictures and their captions.
After more than twenty years of democracy in South Africa, the history of the liberation struggle is losing relevance in the national consciousness as the country grapples with the pressing challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment. Nevertheless, the liberation struggle spawned many heroes and heroines, some whose contributions have been captured in autobiographies, biographies, book chapters, books and journal articles. There are many more heroes and heroines that are mere footnotes in the vast historiography of the liberation struggle - whose recollections and reflections are recorded in the words of the authors and their names acknowledged as sources in footnotes. The names of a larger number are not mentioned and do not feature even as footnotes in any publication on the history of the struggle. The book The other side of freedom: Stories of hope and loss in South African Liberation Struggle 1950-1994 presents a compilation of 26 profiles of a diverse selection of activists and leaders in the liberation struggle, framed between an introduction, a brief chronological account of the liberation struggle between 1950 and 1994, and a conclusive analysis of the autobiographical accounts as well as their legacy. The chapters present a better and fuller portrait of several unsung heroes and heroines of the South African liberation struggle by penetrating beyond the deeds, ideals, sacrifices, glory and greatness to examine individual human beings who are still living, and their recollections of others who have passed on.
In Foreign Native, political commentator and author RW Johnson looks back with affection and humour on his life in Africa. From schooldays in Durban to later years as an Oxford don, director of the Helen Suzman Foundation and formidable political commentator, Johnson has produced an entertaining and occasionally eye-popping memoir brimming with history, anecdote and insight. Johnson charts his evolution from enthusiastic, left-leaning Africanist to political realist, relating episodes that influenced his intellectual worldview, including time spent among the exiled liberation movements in London during the 1960s, a sojourn in newly independent Guinea and more recent forays into Zimbabwe. There are wonderful stories, some hilarious, others filled with pathos, about the multitude of characters that he met along the way. Perceptive, critical and full of verve, Foreign Native is leavened with a deep humanity that is a pleasure to read.
Human rights organizations have grown exponentially across the globe, particularly in the global South, and the term human rights is now common parlance among politicians and civil society activists. As international donors pour money into global human rights promotion, some governments, scholars, activists, and other critics fear a subtle, Western-led campaign for political, economic, and cultural domination. While debates about human rights are waged in elite circles, what do publics in the global South think about human rights ideas and the organizations that promote them? Drawing on large-scale public opinion surveys and interview with human rights practioners in India, Mexico, Morocco, and Nigeria, Taking Root finds that most people are in fact broadly supportive of human rights discourse, trust local human rights groups, and do not view human rights as a tool of foreign powers. Pro-human rights constituencies also tend to be highly skeptical of the U.S. government, multinational corporations, and their own governments. However, this general public support for human rights isn't grounded in strong commitments of public engagement, money, or local ties to the human rights sector. Publics in the global South do donate to charitable causes and organizations, but rarely give to local rights groups. Rights organizations instead seek aid from foreign sources, an increasingly untenable strategy as foreign aid to civil society declines. The book also describes the complex relations between religiosity and support for human rights as faith communities, worldviews, and traditions strongly influence the public's views of human rights, but often in contradictory ways. As the most informative and comprehensive account available of public perceptions of human rights across several regions of the world, Taking Root will challenge a number of accepted truths held by human rights supporters and skeptics alike.
When Vicente Fox was elected Mexico's president in 2000, the world's most enduring twentieth-century authoritarian regime finally came to an end. In this book Paul Haber explains how urban popular movements contributed to such a historic transition. In the 1960s Mexico's urban poor, effectively incorporated into institutionalized forms of clientelism and cooptation, were perceived as passive and acquiescent. Their situation changed during the 1970s, Haber shows, as popular movements--led largely by young people inspired by the revolutionary ideals of Mexico's 1960s student movement--took the first steps toward mobilizing the urban poor in what would develop into the full-scale political protests of the 1980s. When Mexico's economic crisis came in the early 1980s, urban popular movements were in a position to play a major role in the growing democratic opposition. Haber, using a creative blend of ethnography and policy analysis, traces this history on a national level and with detailed reference to two key organizations, the Comite de Defensa Popular of Durango and the Asamblea de Barrios of Mexico City. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many of Mexico's most important social leaders saw new opportunities in electoral politics, and the transformation from social movement to party politics began. Haber's study closely follows the urban dimensions of this history and spells out its implications not only for the urban poor but also for Mexico's nascent democracy.
In the spring of 2006, millions of Latinos across the country participated in the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history. In this timely and highly anticipated book, Chris Zepeda-Millan analyzes the background, course, and impacts of this unprecedented wave of protests, highlighting their unique local, national, and demographic dynamics. He finds that because of the particular ways the issue of immigrant illegality was racialized, federally proposed anti-immigrant legislation (H.R. 4437) helped transform Latinos' sense of latent group membership into the racial group consciousness that incited their engagement in large-scale collective action. Zepeda-Millan shows how nativist policy threats against disenfranchised undocumented immigrants can provoke a political backlash - on the streets and at the ballot box - from not only 'people without papers', but also naturalized and US-born citizens. Latino Mass Mobilization is an important intervention into contemporary debates regarding immigration policy, social movements, and racial politics in the United States.
[An] engrossing literary debut...Writing in Adolfo's voice gives this suspenseful narrative candor and immediacy. - Kirkus Reviews Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger's Life is "worthy of the best spy novels" and tells the story of Sarah Kaminsky's father, "the genius-forger who committed his know-how and convictions to serve the French Resistance during World War II, saving thousands of Jewish families, and many others over the course of 30 years for various causes around the world." - TED.com A detailed and touching story traversing a century in clandestine shadow crossings, where Adolfo's skill meant life...or death. - Liberation, France Riveting. - Haaretz, Israel Technical prowess, creativity, and self-denial drive the plot in the incredibly lucky life of Adolfo Kaminsky narrated in this exciting historical document. - Elle Magazine, France; 2010 Reader's Choice Award Undoubtedly one of the most captivating books of the season. - Paris Today A pointed, sober biography ...of one of the world's best forgers. - Der Spiegel If made into a film, the life of Adolfo Kaminsky would have the ingredients of suspense thriller, war movie, historical tragedy, intimate drama, romantic comedy and scenes of terror. - O Globo, Brazil A thrilling book. - la Repubblica Federal, Italy Kaminsky has lived, in the shadows, the brightest hours of the Resistance. - Le Monde Best-selling author Sarah Kaminsky takes readers through her father Adolfo Kaminsky's perilous and clandestine career as a real-life forger for the French Resistance, the FLN, and numerous other freedom movements of the twentieth century. Recruited as a young Jewish teenager for his knowledge of dyes, Kaminsky became the primary forger for the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Then, as a professional photographer, Kaminsky spent the next twenty-five years clandestinely producing thousands of counterfeit documents for immigrants, exiles, underground political operatives, and pacifists across the globe. Kaminsky kept his past cloaked in secrecy well into his eighties, until his daughter convinced him to share the details of the life-threatening work he did on behalf of people fighting for justice and peace throughout the world.
In 2015, sixty million people were displaced by violent conflict globally - the highest since World War II. National and international policy prevents the displaced from working or moving freely outside the camps set up to 'temporarily' house them. This policy has left the displaced with no right to work and move while they remain displaced for years, if not decades. Based on data on all 61 protracted displacement crises worldwide, fieldwork in seven conflict zones around the world, and in-depth interviews with over 170 humanitarian aid workers, government officials and refugees, this book systematically details the barriers to effective advocacy at every level of governance and shows that failure is the norm. Unlike many academic monographs, it goes further and proposes an alternative way forward that capitalizes on social entrepreneurship, crowd-funding and micro-finance to improve the lives of those that have been forced to flee their homes to find safety.
For the first time in a decade, leaders and citizens across the political spectrum are celebrating dissent. The reappearance of dissent in town hall meetings and on street corners brings new promise for improved democratic life and citizen participation. But this promise cannot be fulfilled if schools do not cultivate the skills necessary for our citizens to engage in political dissent. Indeed, this book reveals troubling practices in schools, resulting from the testing atmosphere and the hidden curriculum, that omit or suppress students ability to dissent and voice ideas that stand in opposition to the status quo. In this exciting book, Stitzlein investigates the historical and philosophical foundations of dissent in the work of the American Founders and the pragmatist philosophers who followed them. She examines the ways in which dissent is understood as a negative right and then proposes instead that dissent should be seen as a positive right. This book calls for a realignment of curriculum and the practices of schooling with both a guiding vision and a realistic interpretation of democracy as it is currently invoked in the era of Tea Party protests."
Nearly four decades since the onset of the third wave, political parties remain weak in Latin America: parties have collapsed in much of the region, and most new party-building efforts have failed. Why do some new parties succeed while most fail? This book challenges the widespread belief that democracy and elections naturally give rise to strong parties and argues that successful party-building is more likely to occur under conditions of intense conflict than under routine democracy. Periods of revolution, civil war, populist mobilization, or authoritarian repression crystallize partisan attachments, create incentives for organization-building, and generate a 'higher cause' that attracts committed activists. Empirically rich chapters cover diverse cases from across Latin America, including both successful and failed cases.
Beginning from the First People, through the influx of European settlers and the slave trade from Africa, to the modern era, this book presents and discusses documents that reflect pivotal moments in the LGBT rights movement in North America. While most would think of the modern Gay Rights Movement as beginning in the 1960s, in reality, the issue of nonheterosexual human behavior within society and the campaign to achieve equality and acceptance have existed far earlier. Beginning with the First People in the Americas and their acceptance of tribal members who did not conform to gender and sexual binary roles, to the expansion west and establishment of the United States as a Republic, to the contentious struggles for equality in the 20th and 21st centuries, this reference traces the development of the Gay Rights Movement through the examination of primary source materials related to the incremental changes toward making America safe for all people. These documents enable readers to reflect on pivotal moments in the LGBT rights and sexual equality movement in the past up to the achievement of marriage equality. A modern chronology traces key events in the Gay Rights Movement across the last 70 years, such as those during the World War II era, the formation of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in the 1950s, to the Stonewall Riot in New York in the late 1960s, the elimination of the category of homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973, the judgment in 2003 by the U.S. Supreme Court that laws criminalizing sodomy are unconstitutional, and the legalization of same-sex marriage in all U.S. states in 2015. Provides a concise yet comprehensive review of the LGBTQ rights movement from the earliest days of human society in what would become the United States to the present Highlights primary document resources that embrace and reflect the diversity found in the LGBTQ community Documents how the Gay Rights Movement emerged within an era of widespread antigay persecution, when it would seem that an uprising to achieve equality be least likely
Ronnie Kasrils's memoir reflects on compelling questions as to what turned a white youngster from a modest background into a lifelong revolutionary of note. A tiny minority who abandoned a life of privilege were the antithesis of conventionality and toeing the line. What made those such as Kasrils break all the rules and confront white power with such courage, unbridled spirit and yearning for the truth? This is a challenging and fascinating conundrum but Kasrils will claim he is no aberration of history. The answers to that question, which unravel through twenty years, will beguile readers as he peers back with endearing frankness into the origins and experiences of his formative years. A Yeoville-born boykie with Yiddish roots; heartfelt empathy for the underdog; an instinctive rejection of authoritarianism in school and wider society were influences informing his adult life as revolutionary activist. With a remarkable memory and flair for the written and spoken word the narrative revels in the social, sexual and political awakening of a roguish boy's adventures with girls, rock music, bohemian culture and leaping across the colour barrier. Kasrils's tadpoles of the memoir's title represent the submerged often illusive tracts of memory he searches for as he delves into the mystery of his metamorphosis. This stylistic element adds to the creativity of this fourth memoir.
In 1811 England was on the brink of economic collapse and revolution. The veteran poet and campaigner Anna Letitia Barbauld published a prophecy of the British nation reduced to ruins by its refusal to end the interminable war with France, titled Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. Combining ground-breaking historical research with incisive textual analysis, this new study dispels the myth surrounding the hostile reception of the poem and takes a striking episode in Romantic-era culture as the basis for exploring poetry as a medium of political protest. Clery examines the issues at stake, from the nature of patriotism to the threat to public credit, and throws new light on the views and activities of a wide range of writers, including radical, loyalist and dissenting journalists, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Barbauld herself. Putting a woman writer at the centre of the enquiry opens up a revised perspective on the politics of Romanticism.
Various legal approaches have been taken internationally to improve global access to essential medicines for people in developing countries. This book focuses on the millions of people suffering from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Beginning with the AIDS campaign for antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, Sharifah Sekalala argues that a soft law approach is more effective than hard law by critiquing the current TRIPS flexibilities within the World Trade Organization. She then considers how soft law has also been instrumental in the fight against malaria and tuberculosis. Using these compelling case studies, this book explores lawmaking on global health and analyses the viability of current global health financing trends within new and traditional organisations such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, UNITAID and The Global Fund. This book is essential reading for legal, development, policy and health scholars, activists and policymakers working across political economy, policy studies and global health studies.
This book is an interdisciplinary collection of essays on Le Groupe d'information sur les prisons (The Prisons Information Group, or GIP). The GIP was a radical activist group, extant between 1970 and 1973, in which Michel Foucault was heavily involved. It aimed to facilitate the circulation of information about living conditions in French prisons and, over time, it catalyzed several revolts and instigated minor reforms. In Foucault's words, the GIP sought to identify what was 'intolerable' about the prison system and then to produce 'an active intolerance' of that same intolerable reality. To do this, the GIP 'gave prisoners the floor,' so as to hear from them about what to resist and how. The essays collected here explore the GIP's resources both for Foucault studies and for prison activism today.
Patrick van Rensburg (1931-2017) was an anti-apartheid activist and self-made 'alternative educationist' whose work received international recognition with the Right Livelihood Award in 1981. Born in KwaZulu-Natal into what he described as a 'very ordinary South African family that believed in the virtue of racism', Van Rensburg became a self-styled rebel who tirelessly pursued his own vision of a brighter future for emerging societies in post-colonial southern Africa. His emotional and intellectual struggle against his upbringing and cultural roots led him to reject his life of white privilege in South Africa. Determined to prevent the emergence of a privileged black elite in post-colonial society, he devoted his life to implementing an alternative, egalitarian approach to education, focusing on quality and functional schooling for the majority. Rewarded with the internationally prestigious Right Livelihood Award for his unique contribution to education, he saw this work as a 'necessary tool of development'. Exiled from South Africa in 1960 because of his involvement in the London boycott campaign that gave birth to the Anti-Apartheid Movement, Van Rensburg moved to Botswana (then Bechuanaland). There he founded cooperatives, provided vocational training and was among the earliest educationists to espouse the discipline of development studies. Perhaps his best-known legacy is the Swaneng Hill School, which he founded to provide an educational home for primary school 'dropouts' through a curriculum that combined theory and practice, and academic and manual labour. He involved his pupils in building their school, running it, providing their own food, and making their own equipment and furniture. Van Rensburg was an innovative and charismatic visionary who captured the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century, and whose work and vision still have resonance for debates in educational policy today.
Student Revolt in 1968 examines the origins, course and dissolution of student protest at three universities in the 1960s - the Freie Universitat Berlin in West Germany, the campus of Nanterre in France, and the Faculty of Sociology at Trento in Italy. It traces how student revolts over space, speech, sociology and cultural democratisation catalysed a dynamic protest movement within universities in the mid-1960s that expanded dramatically beyond the University in 1968. Differing visions of democratisation - mass access to education, the dissolution of high culture, the democratic control of the university - clashed and competed in a radical revaluation of the meaning of university education and democratic culture. The study also evaluates the most ambitious experiments in higher education in the 1960s - the 'Critical Universities' of West Berlin and Trento - which sought to establish democratic control of higher education before dissolving in the politics of social revolution, and offers a new and clear-sighted perspective on the 1960s
'Riveting; as fresh and relevant today as it was almost 50 years ago. The words fire off the page with humour, anger and eloquence' Guardian A powerful and commanding account of the life of trailblazing political activist Angela Davis Edited by Toni Morrison and first published in 1974, An Autobiography is a classic of the Black Liberation era which resonates just as powerfully today. It is reissued now with a new introduction by Davis, for a new audience inspired and galvanised by her ongoing activism and her extraordinary example. In the book, she describes her journey from a childhood on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, Alabama, to one of the most significant political trials of the century: from her political activity in a New York high school to her work with the U.S. Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, and the Soledad Brothers; and from the faculty of the Philosophy Department at UCLA to the FBI's list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. Told with warmth, brilliance, humour, and conviction, it is an unforgettable account of a life committed to radical change. |
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