In the summer of 1980, the eyes of the world turned to the Gdansk shipyard in Poland which suddenly became the nexus of a strike wave that paralyzed the entire country. The Gdansk strike was orchestrated by the members of an underground free trade union that came to be known as Solidarnosc [Solidarity]. Despite fears of a violent response from the communist authorities, the strikes spread to more than 800 sites around the country and involved over a million workers, mobilizing its working population. Faced with crippling strikes and with the eyes of the world on them, the communist regime signed landmark accords formally recognizing Solidarity as the first free trade union in a communist country. The union registered nearly ten million members, making it the world's largest union to date. In a widespread and inspiring demonstration of nonviolent protest, Solidarity managed to bring about real and powerful changes that contributed to the end of the Cold War. Solidarity:The Great Workers Strike of 1980 tells the story of this pivotal period in Poland's history from the perspective of those who lived it. Through unique personal interviews with the individuals who helped breathe life into the Solidarity movement, Michael Szporer brings home the momentous impact these events had on the people involved and subsequent history that changed the face of Europe. This movement, which began as a strike, had major consequences that no one could have foreseen at the start. In this book, the individuals who shaped history speak with their own voices about the strike that changed the course of history.

Martin Luther King Jr exercised a tremendous degree of influence in a movement that between 1955 and 1965 successfully dismantled a system of legalised racial segregation and disfranchisement entrenched for over sixty years in the United States. How did King, who came from a subordinated group within American society, help effect this change? What background, characteristics, abilities and ideas enabled him to do this? Why was King so important in shaping the civil rights movement?

John A. Kirk looks at the sources of King's power in the black community and its relationship to wider American society, focusing particularly on the role of the black church, the philosophy of nonviolence and issues of leadership, whilst paying due attention to the voices of King's critics and detractors and to the limitations of his power. He locates King firmly within the context of other leaders and organisations, voices and opinions, and tactics and ideologies, which made up the movement as a whole.

Fifty years after the Montgomery bus boycott, which launched King's movement leadership, this book moves beyond the all-too-often oversimplified story of King's life and times to provide an innovative analytical framework for understanding the role played by one of the United States' most important historical figures.

John A. Kirk is senior lecturer in US History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has written extensively on the history of the civil rights movement, including "Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940 1970" (2002) which won the 2003 J. G. Ragsdale Book Award.""

This volume introduces and compares different concepts of culture in social movement research. It assesses their advantages and shortcomings, drawing links to anthropology, discourse analysis, sociology of emotions, narration, spatial theory, and others. Each contribution's approach is illustrated with recent cases of mobilization.

This book presents a comparative analysis of the organizing trajectories of indigenous women's movements in Peru, Mexico, and Bolivia. The authors' innovative research reveals how the articulation of gender and ethnicity is central to shape indigenous women's discourses. It explores the political contexts and internal dynamics of indigenous movements, to show that they created different opportunities for women to organize and voice specific demands. This, in turn, led to various forms of organizational autonomy for women involved in indigenous movements. The trajectories vary from the creation of autonomous spaces within mixed-gender organizations to the creation of independent organizations. Another pattern is that of women's organizations maintaining an affiliation to a male-dominated mixed-gender organization, or what the authors call "gender parallelism". This book illustrates how, in the last two decades, indigenous women have challenged various forms of exclusion through different strategies, transforming indigenous movements' organizations and collective identities.

Black Radical reclaims William Monroe Trotter (1872-1934) as a seminal figure whose prophetic yet ultimately tragic-and all too often forgotten-life offers a link from Frederick Douglass to Black Lives Matter. Kerri K. Greenidge renders the drama of turn-of-the-century America, showing how Trotter, a Harvard graduate, a newspaperman and an activist, galvanized black working-class citizens to wield their political power despite the virulent racism of post-Reconstruction America. Situating his story in the broader history of liberal New England to "satisfying" (Casey Cep, The New Yorker) effect, this magnificent biography will endure as the definitive account of Trotter's life, without which we cannot begin to understand the trajectory of black radicalism in America.

ulian Steward Award 2006 Runner-Up In this highly readable account . . . Checker has written a fine book. Assigned to students interested in urbanism, science and technology studies, race relations in the United States, environment, or social movements, the book is sure to spark thoughtful conversation. -American Anthropologist Melissa Checker's absorbing story is a portrait of America. Polluted Promises showcases the complex links between toxic waste and race, and the hope-filled journeys of environmental activists who are wise, strong, and spiritual in their fight against toxic waste--and for their lives. Checker is doing public anthropology for social justice. -Carol Stack, author of All Our Kin I hope that (this book) doesn't get pidgeonholed as a dry, academic treatise, because it is anything but that. It is a wonderfully written account of the struggles by the residents of Hyde Park, a neighborhood in Augusta, Georgia, to undo decades of...environmental racism. -In Brief A very rich, organized, and theoretically interesting ethnographic case study of environmental activism. Checker beautifully recounts how the issues of race emerged and were manipulated in social organizing against environmental poisoning. -George E. Marcus, author of Ethnography through Thick and Thin Polluted Promises is a substantial accomplishment. It grounds the notion of environmental justice wonderfully in practical terms, in the theoretically sophisticated and empathetic examination of Hyde Park. -Adolph Reed, Jr., author of Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene A sweeping and brilliant account of a struggle for environmental justice. With clarity and honesty, Checker adroitly exploits the interconnection of race, environment, and civil rights. This is an authoritative and courageous book that should be essential reading for everyone interested in environmental justice. -Bunyan Bryant, editor of Environmental Justice: Issues, Policies, and Solutions Over the past two decades, environmental racism has become the rallying cry for many communities as they discover the contaminations of toxic chemicals and industrial waste in their own backyards. Living next door to factories and industrial sites for years, the people in these communities often have record health problems and debilitating medical conditions. Melissa Checker tells the story of one such neighborhood, Hyde Park, in Augusta, Georgia, and the tenacious activism of its two hundred African American families. This community, at one time surrounded by nine polluting industries, is struggling to make their voices heard and their community safe again. Polluted Promises shows that even in the post-civil rights era, race and class are still key factors in determining the politics of pollution. Melissa Checker teaches in the Department of Urban Studies, Queens College/CUNY. She is co-editor of Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life. She is donating all of her proceeds from this book to the Hyde and Aragon Park Improvement Committee.

Political scientists have long wondered whether civic participation can have spillover effects - that is, whether civic participation in one particular domain of public life can lead to more participation in other areas. This book argues that participation can indeed be generative. New participants in participatory governance initiatives can acquire new skills, apply them to new areas of their lives, and join new organizations, even in very poor regions. The evidence is based on a large survey - among the broadest in its class - of participants in community-managed schools (CMS) in rural Honduras and Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, together with case studies and historical institutional analysis. This study is thus more optimistic about the promise of participation than other studies. While it recognizes that participatory arenas are often constrained by features of program design, local context, and national political problems, this book shows that participation is not a dead-end affair. Participation can breed new and unexpected forms of civicness, even in the most unlikely settings.

Afro-Caribbean personalities coupled with trade unions and organizations provided the ideology and leadership to empower the working class and also hastened the end of colonialism in the Anglophone Caribbean.

This book explores the alleged uniqueness of the European experience, and investigates its ties to a long history of LGBT and queer movements in the region. These movements, the book argues, were inspired by specific ideas about Europe, which they sought to realize on the ground through activism.

If societies have only memories of war, of cruelty, of violence, then why are we called humankind? This book marks a new trajectory in Memory Studies by examining cultural memories of nonviolent struggles from ten countries. The book reminds us of the enduring cultural scripts for human agency, solidarity, resilience and human kindness.

Ruth was four years old when her father was arrested for high treason and her world was turned upside-down. She grew up in constant fear of Special Branch policemen knocking on the door to arrest her mother or father, prominent South African communist. Ruth learned how to keep her mouth shut, to look out for microphones in the walls and to beware of friends who could betray her trust.

At fourteen, Ruth left South Africa, clutching her teddy bear in one hand and her drawings in the other. A plan to England carried her into exile, a new world where she struggled to reconstruct a life fractured by fear.

With an artist’s eye for detail and colour, Ruth recalls her life with unflinching honesty: the Treason Trial; her struggle to conform; Friern Barnet Asylum for the ‘hopeless insane’; LSD, protests, and free love in London, art school and motherhood; communes and camping- all steps in a journey that finally brought her home to South Africa on the brink of change.

Heart- wrenchingly sad one minute, bursting with life and vigour the next, seamed throughout by strength and courage, girl on the edge allows us to look deep into one woman’s life and travel with her to the brink and back again.

Gender is not a 'security issue', but it tells us a lot about how, why and when certain subjects are written as security concerns. Thirteen case studies on violent subjects, reason, and emotion demonstrate different ways in which we understand political violence, security, resistance, power, and agency, and how we make sense of gender.

Drawing on extensive research in her native Ecuador, Amalia Pallares examines the South American Indian movement in the Ecuadorian Andes and explains its shift from class politics to racial politics in the late twentieth century. Pallares uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore the reasons why indigenous Ecuadorians have bypassed their shared class status with other peasant groups and movements in favor of a political identity based on their unique ethnicity as Indians.

In the 1960s and 1970s, land reform and the modernization of economic and political structures in Ecuador led to changes in the sense of self and community held by South American Indian activists. Pallares recounts how a campesinista (peasant-based) identification developed into an indianista (Indian-based) form of personal and communal self-definition. Ethnic identity was no longer conceived as a subset of class identity--a change that shifted the Indians' ideological focus from local struggles to pan-ethnic resistance.

In the process, indigenous peoples created a positive Indian self-definition and a pan-ethnic Indian movement. They also reconceived their political identity, their cultural structures, and the relationship between their social movement and the state. Through this new sense of themselves, they sought to confront racism and obtain political autonomy.

As governments actively collect and analyse more information about their populations than ever before, citizens struggle to defend their privacy and determine which state secrets are legitimate and which are not. Jurisdictional complexity, the inability of representatives to gain access to relevant information, citizens' relative lack of expertise, and the partisanship that exists between different government agencies make oversight difficult. Secrets and Democracy considers afresh the role that secrets play within liberal democracies and the impact this has on the public's 'right to know, ' the individual's 'right to privacy, ' and the government's penchant for secrecy and data collection. Now, perhaps more than ever, secrecy (and the disclosure of secrets) is in the public eye thanks to the phenomenon of WikiLeaks. However, this book places WikiLeaks in the context of centuries-old discussion of the necessity of secrecy, as well as contemporary debate concerning the relative merits of privacy, openness, transparency, and accountabilit

Surveying all referendums around the world since 1793, Dr Qvortrup and contributors provide a thorough account of why and when citizens have been asked to vote on policy issues. Referendums Around the World is essential reading for political scientists and others interested in direct democracy as well as representative government.

This book is available open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The so-called Arab Spring challenged conventional wisdom and certainties about the Arab world where its effects continue to be felt as well as in the diaspora. This book provides an original contribution to current social and cultural theory on Arab social movements by giving a fuller historical and critical treatment of contemporary artistic and cultural production from the region and beyond. Thematically structured and covering culture, media, politics, and literary studies, the book uses a range of theoretical material that engages readers in three key ways. First, it adopts a critical standpoint with respect to the term "Arab Spring," recognizing the multiple interpretations and varied geographical, historical, and political realities of the term. Second, its focus on carefully selected case studies - namely, Egypt, Tunis, Syria, and Yemen - adds depth to analysis of the cultural, literary and artistic dimensions that operate fluidly across the Arab world. Third, it presents a methodological case study for the growing community of researchers involved in interdisciplinary education. Together, the contributors to the book show how the interplay of politics, culture, and media across varied locations has and continues to shape emergent Arab social forms and a region on the cusp of historical and cultural change.

One of the truisms in American politics has been that "divisive" primaries hurt the party's prospects of winning the presidency in the general election. However, traditional definitions of divisive primaries focus too much on candidate behavior and not enough on the actual divisions and fractures within a party. The Invisible Hands of Political Parties in Presidential Elections proposes a new measure of party cohesion that instead looks at individual donors who are willing to contribute to multiple candidates during the early stages of the presidential primaries. The authors of this collection reveal how these preprimary donor networks can serve as an accurate barometer of party unity, providing a significant perspective on the changing roles of political parties in American government today.

The clash between Communism and Islam in the Soviet Union pitted two socio-political systems against one another, each proclaiming ultimate truth. This study examines the first decades of the struggle in Central Asia (1917-1941), where an ancient religious tradition faced an aggressive form of secular modernity. The Soviets attempted to break down Muslim culture and remold it on Marxist-Leninist lines. Central Asians played complex roles in this effort, both defending and attacking Islam, but mostly trying to survive. Despite Stalin's totalitarian aims, the Soviet regime in Central Asia was often weak even into the 1930s, and by 1941 the opposing systems had reached a standoff.

The Communist Party pursued the destruction of Islam in stages, which reflected the development of Soviet political strength. The party developed propaganda that both attacked Islam and extolled the new Soviet culture. However, the entire process was plagued by inefficiency, ignorance, and disobedience. By 1941, the Communists had inflicted tremendous damage, but customs such as circumcision, brideprice, and polygyny had merely gone underground. Central Asians had not exchanged the fundamental identity of Muslim for Marxist-Leninist. Keller utilizes documents from Moscow and Tashkent, including the now-closed former Communist Party Archive of Uzbekistan.

Against conventional views of the unchallenged hegemony of a modernizing monarchy, this book argues that power was continuously contested in Riza Shah's Iran. Cronin excavates the successive challenges to Riza Shah's regime posed by a range of subaltern social groups and seeks to restore to these groups a sense of their historical agency.

Europe and the European Union are unavoidable, if ambiguous, political references in the post-Yugoslav space. This volume interrogates the forms and implications of the increasingly potent symbolic nexus that has developed between non-heterosexual sexualities, LGBT activism(s) and Europeanisation(s) in all of the Yugoslav successor states. Contributors to this book show how the long EU accession process disseminates discursive tools employed in LGBT activist struggles for human rights and equality. This creates a linkage between "Europeanness" and "gay emancipation" which elevates certain forms of gay activist engagement and perhaps also non-heterosexuality, more generally, to a measure of democracy, progress and modernity. At the same time, it relegates practices of intolerance to the LGBT community to the status of non-European primitivist Other who is inevitably positioned in the patriarchal past that should be left behind. >

From the 494 B.C. plebeians' march out of Rome to gain improved status, to Gandhi's nonviolent campaigns in India, to the liberation of Poland and the Baltic nations, and the revolutions in North Africa, nonviolent struggles have played pivotal roles in world events for centuries. Sharp'sDictionary of Power and Struggle is a groundbreaking reference work on this topic by the "godfather of nonviolent resistance." In nearly 1,000 entries, the Dictionary defines those ideologies, political systems, strategies, methods, and concepts that form the core of nonviolent action as it has occurred throughout history and across the globe, providing much-needed clarification of language that is often mired in confusion. Entries discuss everything from militarization to censorship, guerrilla theater, pacifism, secret agents, and protest songs. In addition, the dictionary features a foreword by Sir Adam Roberts, President of the British Academy; an introduction by Gene Sharp; an essay on power and realism; case studies of conflicts in Serbia and Tunisia; and a guide for further reading. Sharp's Dictionary of Power and Struggle is an invaluable resource for activists, educators and anyone else curious about nonviolent alternatives to both passivity and violent conflict.
"Gene Sharp is perhaps the most influential proponent of nonviolent action alive."--The Progressive
"Sharp has had broad influence on international events over the past two decades, helping to advance a global democratic awakening."--The Wall Street Journal
" Sharp's] work has served as the template for taking on authoritarian regimes from Burma to Belgrade."--The Christian Science Monitor

Since World War II, abortion policies have remained remarkably varied across European nations, with struggles over abortion rights at the forefront of national politics. This volume analyses European abortion governance and explores how social movements, political groups, and individuals use protests and resistance to influence abortion policy. Drawing on case studies from Italy, Spain, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the European Union, it analyses the strategies and discourses of groups seeking to liberalise or restrict reproductive rights. It also illuminates the ways that reproductive rights politics intersect with demographic anxieties, as well as the rising nationalisms and xenophobia related to austerity policies, mass migration and the recent terrorist attacks in Europe.

Examining the complex nature of state apologies for past injustices, this title probes the various functions they fulfil within contemporary democracies. Cutting-edge theoretical and empirical research and insightful philosophical analyses are supplemented by real-life case studies, providing a normative and balanced account of states saying 'sorry'.